Thank you to everyone who has helped us reach over $11,000 in donations for our end of year appeal! We still have work to do and a $20,000 goal to reach.
In our world today, young people face a multitude of risks, known and unknown. Keeping children and youth safe from violence and exploitation is critical to the health of our communities and our world.
In partnership with IOFA, you can:
We invite you to help build a safer world for all of us.
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Youth. Their Rights. Our Responsibility.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Urgent End of Year Appeal - We're More Than Half Way There!
Monday, December 10, 2012
Global Human Trafficking: How Migrants Are Impacted
Migrant
women are at an increased risk for becoming targets of human trafficking
perpetrators. It is estimated that 27 million people are trafficked for labor
and sex trafficking globally. Women
comprise 80-98% of those who are sexually exploited across the world. United
Nations reports that of those who are trafficked, 95% experienced physical and/or sexual abuse
while being trafficked. Migrant women who lack support structures in their destination country and come with low
funds, can find themselves coerced into being trafficked. Whether they came
under the guise of a job or continued education, or met a trafficker who
befriended them with one goal in mind, migrant women can find themselves in a
triple bind. They are poor, female, and undocumented while being trafficked in
a foreign country. The Inter Press Agency (IPS)states that “migrant women who get involved in the commercial sex
trade face multiple challenges. These include “insecurity in relation to the
immigration status (such as) the potential breach of immigration law on top of
prostitution-related law; criminalisation by the state; isolation and lack of
friends; disorientation from the constant movements around brothels in
different towns; vulnerability to extortion and blackmail; control by pimps and
advertisers and lack of medical care (apart from certain clinics for sexually
transmitted diseases).”
Not only do these women suffer
the dehumanizing treatment of being victims of trafficking, they also
lack access to health and medical care. As a result, many women attain a
variety of illnesses that go untreated and further erode trafficking victims
lives. Migrant families also face job discrimination whether they enter a new
country through legalized routes, as asylum seekers, or as undocumented
families. Women, who are still globally denied basic human rights, face extreme
barriers to finding work in a new country and can fall into stereotypical
gender roles which pay low and demand long hours (IPS). Thirty-two percent of
trafficking victims are forced into
economic exploitation, over half of this population is female. Global profits
for human trafficking is around 32 billion dollars and climbing. Worldwide,
prostitution is an act which women and girls, due to severely oppressive
factors, can become imprisoned.
Migrant men also face
great circumstances and make up a large number of those found in the forced
labor market. The Solidarity Network writes that migrant is a person who leaves
a country in pursuit of work. In North America, there are 18 million migrant
workers. The migrant worker population, which usually consists of domestic workers, construction
workers, contract laborers, low-skilled service sector workers, agricultural
workers, and export production factory workers. Often, those who possess these
jobs have left countries to find the work in which they are engaging. The need
for work, puts this group in a precarious position and makes them vulnerable to
being exploited through lowered wages, unlawful working hours, and other forms
of abuse. Here too, a lack of proper documentation gives traffickers further
power over the lives of migrant families. To be a migrant family, asylum
seeker, or refugee in a new country is to be presented with unique problems.
Those seeking the ability to provide for family members, those needing an
economic boost, or those fleeing prosecution should not be subjected to further
disempowerment, discrimination, or undue hardship. What can be done to aid
migrant families and keep them from getting lost in human trafficking circles?
Give us your ideas and feedback.
Sherie Shields
Task Force Intern IOFA
The U.S. Lags Behind in Ratification of Human Rights Convention
Happy International Human Rights Day! December 10 was chosen
to honor the day when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. According to the UDHR, human rights
are indivisible and inalienable, and encompass three categories: 1) civil and
political rights, 2) economic, social, and cultural rights, and 3) rights that
extend beyond the confines of a country and an urge for all countries who have
signed the UDHR to mutually safeguard these rights for each other.
Eleanor Roosevelt and the UDHR
This morning, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, released
a press
statement celebrating the important of human rights and also reiterating
the United States’ priority commitment to protect human rights for both its
citizens and those abroad. “Human rights
cannot be disconnected from other priorities,” she wrote. The U.S. is no
doubt in a privileged position, with both political power and technical
knowledge that allows it to contribute to far-reaching human rights work. Our
nation seems to excel in the open discussions of many human rights issues and
does not have as serious of human rights violations as some other countries.
Isn’t it uncanny then, that the U.S. has not ratified the Convention on the
Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the
Rights of the Child (CRC)?
The U.S. is among one of seven countries who have yet to
ratify the CEDAW, placing it alongside Iran, Nauru, Palau, Somalia, Sudan, and
Tonga. It is also the other country besides Somalia who has not ratified the CRC
to this day, although it has ratified two provisions: 1) prohibiting the
involvement of children in armed conflicts, and 2) prohibiting the sale,
prostitution, and pornography of children.
Both the CEDAW and CRC are crucial in protecting the
freedoms of children. The CEDAW promotes equality for women in the legal system,
in political and public life, in access to education, in the right to equal
pay, in the right to enter marriage, in the right to maternity leave. It
protects women from discrimination linked to parental responsibilities and
places women on the equal footing as men to enjoy human rights. The CRC
protects children from neglect, abuse, exploitation, sexual abuse, underage
labor, and deprivation of a national identity, healthcare, and education. It
even calls for pre-and post-natal care for mothers, and seeks to ensure that
children have adequate living standards that are conducive to their physical,
mental, spiritual, moral, and social development.
There are several
reasons for why the U.S. has not reached ratification of both of these
long-overdue treaties. Opposition to the CEDAW comes from the contentious
debate on women’s rights in the U.S. with regards to family planning,
reproductive rights, and gender equality. Some of the same individuals and
organizations that protest adoption of the CRC fear that parental rights to
raise children at each parent’s discretion and traditional family structures
will be undermined. However, the CRC does emphasize the importance of family
involvement and guidance in nurturing the child.
It has been 31 years since the CEDAW and 12 years since the
CRC went into force. The women and children of the U.S. have been waiting to
have their rights. The people of the U.S. have a responsibility to recognize
them and do them justice by serving them as equal human beings.
Esther Liew
AATOP program development intern
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