Unfortunately, human trafficking reaches nearly every place on the planet in some way. Sandra Morgan, the Director of the Global Center for Women & Justice and Dave Stachowiak, one of the Center’s board members, discuss Sandie’s recent trip to Zambia and the efforts being made by humanitarians in that county to end human trafficking. Sandie and Dave also explain how Zambia is an origin, transit, and destination country.

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Transcript

Dave: Sandie, today were going to talk about your recent trip abroad and how the center is working to end HT and how we’re continually working to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in the global conversation of ending HT. So I’m so glad you are just back from your trip and can share some of these tools and resources and experiences that you’ve had.

Sandie: Thank you. I just got back from Zambia. And I have to tell you honestly, when they called and asked me to come and do training on counter HT, I had to look on the Africa continent map to make sure I actually knew where Zambia was.

Dave: I would have too. In fact, I meant to do that before we stared the show here. I know it’s in southern Africa and I think it’s on the eastern coast, is it?

Sandie:  No. It’s really pretty central.

Dave: Oh okay. See, it goes to show you my geography. And it’s pretty embarrassing because I took a class on African history in college and one of the things we had to do was an entire map of the continent of Africa. I speak for myself here but I think I can lump a lot of us as Americans into this bucket. We are very poor with African geography, most of us.

Sandie: I understand that. It’s there in the southern third of the continent of Africa and on the northwest side, the border is with the DR Congo which is very problematic and is one of the aspects of trafficking there and in the northeast they are bounded by Tanzania and east Malawi and then southeast Mozambique and then southern Zimbabwe and then Namibia and on the west, west Angola. One of the things that people often remember about Zambia is that is where the city of Livingston is located, on the very southern border and the famous Victoria Falls.

Dave: Oh interesting. I did not know that.

Sandie: But I was not here as a tourist, so I didn’t go see the falls.

Dave: Actually, we were talking about Zambia before we started recording today. One of the things that you mentioned to me was Zambia, from a standpoint of HT, is an origin country, a transit country, and a destination country. And this is language that a lot of folks who do work to end HT utilize. I was wondering if you could explain what you mean by those 3 things.

Sandie: Well when we say origin country it means that it’s a source of victims and there’s a reason. There’s a reason they’re more vulnerable. A lot of the trafficking I learned about from the local people, these were first hand reports, was trafficking from rural to urban. So the poverty and the lack of knowledge in the rural areas made these families much more vulnerable to trafficking tricks. That’s what my friends call them, the tricks of the traffickers. And they wanted to know, what is the profile of a trafficker? What we began to understand is you couldn’t say, “Well a trafficker is a big guy with body guards around him.” No, sometimes a trafficker was a grandma or an aunt or an uncle or a young cousin. So there wasn’t a profile. So origin is, it’s a source country. Transit, and I just told you all the countries around Zambia, and Zambia has what they call porous borders which would indicate that there are places on the border where it’s pretty easily accessible to just walk across. So from these other countries that are also origin countries going south to a destination, most likely South Africa, either to fly out to another continent, I have case studies of victims who have gone to Ireland from South Africa but they were originally from Zambia. And I’ll tell you a story a little later on about a Zambian boy who was trafficked here to the US. So origin is a source country. Transit country just means it’s like a highway to take people through. Destination is usually trafficking that is going to work in the urban areas, a lot domestic servitude and a lot of commercial sexual exploitation. And then of course, because the copper belt is on the northwest area of Zambia, trafficking in the mines and that can involve internal trafficking but it can also involve trafficking from outside. There are cases already on record of young men and even women and children that have been trafficked from as far away as Bangladesh and China to work in those mines.

Dave: You mentioned, one of those things, both here and when we were talking earlier of the vulnerability that is there in Zambia. Why so vulnerable? What is it about the culture and situation that is so vulnerable?

Sandie: Well I think partly it is about poverty but it’s also about lack of knowledge. People don’t understand the risks. So if you go to a family in a rural area where there are no resources, the idea of an education is very well communicated to people. So if you’re in a rural area where there is no school for your children and an aunt type person comes and says, you know, “Let me take your kids to the city and they can go to school and  I’ll take care of them. They can just do some chores in exchange for living here.” Parents are like, “Oh, yes. I want my kids to have an education.”  And off they go and then we find them in some sort of horrific slave like conditions or they’re actually sold to a brothel or to some other work industry in hotels and restaurants working 7 days a week and not getting an education.

Dave: Wow. Just an incredible number of factors that come together here that really do cause a difficult situation there. I want to ask you in a moment what you were doing there because our job as the GCWJ is to study the issues, be a voice, but ultimately to be able to make a difference and I know that’s part of what you were doing. But before I ask you that, I want to remind our listening audience that if you have questions or comments for us about anything that we’re speaking about, here on this episode, either about Zambia specifically for Sandie or on any of the topics that would be applicable for trafficking anywhere in the globe we’re here to help answer and respond to those so we can help you study the issues effectively. So there’s 2 ways to reach out to us. One way would be to leave us a message at the GCWJ here at VU and our phone number is 714.966.6361. So that is the best number to reach us at. Probably even easier though is just to send us an email. And our email address is [email protected] and the GCWJ is global center for women and justice and Sandie is the director of that center here on campus. Sandie, we’ve talked about the challenges Zambia is experiencing in relation to trafficking. What brought you there?

Sandie: Well I worked here in OC with the Sisters of Saint Joseph and have been an educator going out to predominantly their health care professio...