Eleanor Huntington
Staff Writer
ON MONDAY, November 5th, Notre Dame undergraduates and law students had the opportunity to attend an engaging panel discussion on international human slavery in the courtroom of Notre Dame’s Law School. Speakers at “Bought and Sold: Human Trafficking and Bonded Labor in the U.S.” included “Katya,” a survivor of human trafficking, Prof. Bridgette Carr of the Law School, Senior Special Agent Angus Lowe of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Katie Dunn, current junior and former participant in both a Summer Service Learning Program and an International Summer Service Learning Program, both through the Center for Social Concerns. Each spoke in turn of their experiences prosecuting criminals and of their efforts to provide safety for the victims of modern-day slavery.
The panel introduced the problem of human trafficking through the eyes of undergraduate Katie Dunn. Dunn recalled her friendship with a fellow volunteer working at the Missionaries of Charity in Memphis, Tennessee, the summer after her freshman year. Only at the end of her two-month project did Dunn’s friend talk about her past as a slave laborer before running away to the mission. The following summer, Dunn worked with young Thai boys through the Center for Social Concerns’ International Summer Service Learning Program. Dunn recalled how the boys, victims of child laborer exploitation, bore the same look of fear that her friend from the mission had possessed the summer before. This state of rampant exploitation and terrorism is all too common in today’s America, Dunn said. Her remarks challenged the largely undergraduate audience to become actively involved in combating this ugly reality.
The main focus of the event was Katya’s story of her nightmarish two year enslavement following what was to be a summer study program in America. Bridgette Carr, an ND grad and current Clinical Professor of Law at the Law School, personalized Katya’s experience by asking the audience how many of them planned to participate in a study abroad program. She then asked the many who had raised their hands to imagine the following scenario: After disembarking from the plane, you are greeted by your fellow countrymen, the only ones who speak your language. They proceed to tell you that instead of having the summer experience you originally planned, you must give them all of your identification, travel to an unknown state, and work for them for an undisclosed period of time to repay them the $12,000 you “owe” them. This is precisely what happened to Katya when she arrived in America at the age of 19.
During her captivity, Katya was treated as an animal. She was forced to work twelve hour days, six days a week at a strip club without seeing any of the money she made. Her captors kept her in constant fear not just for her own life, but for the life of her mother back in Ukraine. As Prof. Carr emphasized, these men were in human trafficking as a business. “Alex,” one of the men who enslaved Katya, learned the business from his father, who ran strip clubs with trafficked women in Greece. Traffickers are highly skilled psychological manipulators, adept at keeping their captives in constant state of fear. When Katya was trying to plan her escape she had no idea who she could trust, as the only people she new in America were her captors. She did not even know the address of where she was being kept.
In a country where much lip service is paid to promoting human rights, it is deeply disturbing that human slavery is still an issue in the United States one hundred and forty-two years after the establishment of the Thirteenth Amendment.
The unfortunate reality of situations like Katya’s is that fixing the problem requires a complex solution, one that will require coordinated international and domestic efforts. Prof. Carr and Agent Lowe closed the panel with both a denunciation of establishments such as strip clubs which demean the human person and with a standing ovation for Katya’s courage in breaking out of slavery and telling her story to a painfully oblivious world. As the panelists all noted, without the demand for “entertainment” such as strip clubs, pornography, and prostitution, there would be no economic motive for people to enslave other human beings into these fields. At the root of this problem, as is the case with many modern-day social injustices, the dignity of the human person is subjugated to the disordered financial desires of another.
Contact Eleanor at ehunting@nd.edu.
|
