By Ambriah Underwood
Trafficking is an issue that can affect anyone, anywhere, said a panelist on May 3 at the University of Maryland during a discussion about how forced labor and trafficking currently take shape.
The Saul I. Stern Professorship of Civic Engagement hosted its annual symposium, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Emerging Labor Policy Issues,” where guest speakers talked about trafficking on a local and global scale.
Fan Yang, an international relations officer at the Department of Labor, talked about the type of victim targeted for trafficking: “They’re not isolated to poor countries or to poor people.”
Yang, whose work specifically focuses on child labor, forced labor and human trafficking, said her role focuses on the fair treatment of workers throughout the world.
She said she wanted to note “what’s being done to combat this as well as what you can do.”
One of her suggestions to fight forced labor and trafficking was to research the products people are consuming and/or using, and the type of practices that their companies employ when it comes to production.
For example, Yang said Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire produce around 60 percent of cocoa consumed around the world and use practices such as child labor and forced labor.
“But that doesn’t mean that all cocoa is [made through forced labor],” added Yang.
While that means that many people have eaten cocoa products that come from labor practices that don’t meet international standards, the panelists also mentioned that often, child laborers help support their families and not working under these conditions doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be any better off.
Kimberly Mehlman, an adjunct faculty member in the criminology department of George Mason University, said when confronting issues of trafficking and child labor it’s important to be careful
“We don’t push those populations into more dangerous forms of exploitation,” she said.
Many times, children working in developing countries come from families of a lower economic status, which makes them vulnerable. This susceptibility could also lead to children becoming victims of child labor trafficking, said Mehlman.
Ambiguous definitions of human trafficking, Mehlman said, are a part of the problem.
“There is a huge gulf between what that definition looks like on paper and in practice,” Mehlman said. She added that the definition is “really vague and we need to get more specific.”
Tawni Alston, a public policy graduate student at this university, said that people “tend to focus on sex trafficking” without expanding their notions of the issue to include child labor and forced labor.
As a member of Graduate Women in Public Policy, one of the event’s sponsors, Alston said they wanted to use this event to start a conversation.
Trafficking takes place everywhere from airports and nail salons to domestic workspaces and agricultural industries, said Mehlman, calling it “a clandestine crime.”
“We really don’t know how often this happens or how many victims there are,” Mehlman said.
However, Yang pointed to her role in the Department of Labor as a source of hope for progressing past the issue. She cited strengthening the legal institutions of countries trying to prevent the practices of trafficking and forced labor as a way of combating the issue.
By empowering governments to fight against the matter, Yang said, “More students are spending their day in school because they’re not [working] in the field.”