It’s important to understand both the push and pull factors in human trafficking. 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 how push and pull factors can lead to human trafficking.

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Transcript

Dave: Sandie on the last episode, number 31, we talked about your trip to Zambia last month and all of the experiences you had. We talked about Zambia and trafficking in that part of the world. If you missed that episode, you may want to go back and listen to episode 31 because some of what we’re going to talk about today is going to be a continuation of that conversation. But don’t worry if you didn’t listen to that one already because we’re going to be talking about some new things too and you can always go back later and pick that up as well. But I thought, Sandie we kind of transitioned from our conversation just about Zambia on the last episode to now starting to look at some of the factors around trafficking and educating ourselves more effectively that really came out during your interview last time. One of the things we’ve talked about on previous episodes is the push factors and the pull factors in trafficking. So before we jump in to that, could you just remind us all about what are push and pull factors and why is that language used?

Sandie: We say push factors because we want to identify what makes a victim vulnerable? What are the issues that push them closer to the edge? When I was in Zambia, my class was just desperate to understand why is this happening to our kids? The children in our communities, what makes them so vulnerable to this? Because we look at the law of supply and demand, there’s a demand and we know the sellers go look for a supply. If you think about this in terms of agriculture, when we have a demand for more tomatoes, then we go to the farmers and we don’t look for fruit that’s not ripe, we look for the fruit that’s just really ready to pick. Well push factors create that low hanging fruit that’s just ready, easily accessible by the supplier. And some of those push factors are very disturbing in a country with low socioeconomic circumstances. So you’re going to find the really obvious things like poverty that is a push factor. You’ll see the fact that there’s unemployment, there’s nowhere to find a job, access to education. But some of the more personal and individual push factors, we don’t often think of here in the U.S. We’ve talked about things like child sexual abuse becomes push factor. But whether you’re a girl or a boy in a cultural setting in Africa is a huge issue. For instance, if a parent has to make a choice about buying shoes for one of their children, they have the money to buy one pair of shoes. They’re going to buy shoes, according to the people I talked to there, for the boy. And their logic is, he needs to go to school, and he has to have shoes to go to school, because he needs an education. She’s going to get married so she doesn’t need an education. So gender becomes a push factor. And in fact, there’s a report that comes out every year. I think the UN does it, the State of the World’s Children Report.  And this idea of gender as a push factor is related to literacy rates. Fewer girls have the same level of education. Many of them are competing primary school, but they don’t go on to complete elementary and very few complete secondary school. So if you can imagine, Dave, that your son Luke, his highest level of education would be 3rd grade. Can you imagine his chance in life to compete?

Dave: It’s scary to think about. I often think about him when we’re talking about these stories because it’s just incredible to imagine that he’d be in any of these situations and yet unfortunately, so many of the children in the world are in these situations all the time. It’s just really hard to get one’s head around. That’s one of the reasons I’m so glad we’re talking about the issue so we can educate people who ultimately can make a difference for the world’s children.

Sandie: One of the definitions of HT is child marriage. This is because the adult male purchases a child to marry. This becomes a trafficking issue. So when you look at the State of the World Children Report and children, girls under the age of 15, 9 out of 100 are already married. This becomes a family practice to reduce the number of mouths to feed around the table and it also provides an income because there’s a bride price that’s paid.

Dave: Like a dowry?

Sandie: Yeah and the stories that I was told didn’t make this like a huge price. One story from a village that one of the teachers told me: a father sold his daughter and found out later if he had asked for a little bit more, he would have gotten enough to buy a bigger television than the one he actually purchased. And the other aspect of gender being a push factor is expectations for violence. When they interviewed adolescents between the age of 10 and 18 for this report, 55 of the boys said its okay for husbands to beat their wives.

Dave: 55 out of…?

Sandie: 100. But here’s the startling thing, 61 girls out of 100 said its okay for husbands to beat their wives. So this idea of being a girl as a push factor, it just totally raises your risk of being trafficked. Then if you’re an orphan because of HIV/AIDS or some other circumstance, that pushes you closer to the edge as well. If you’re running away from some kind of abuse and you’re on your own, you’re living on the street, if your mother is a widow; she has no resources that increase your risk, and if you’re  are an ethnic minority. And it’s difficult for us when we look at another country to identify who are the ethnic minorities. But when this issue was raised in the classroom, you could see the knowing looks and the hands going up in the class, “Oh yes. We have this ethnic group and they’re always marginalized in our community.” So this becomes something that just pushes you closer to the edge. We did a little exercise in class. We had a young man stand in the front of the class and a young girl. We began to go through these exercises and we created this role playing idea so that each one of these push factors would appropriately, literally push the person towards the line, close to where the trafficker was standing. And the boy hardly moved at all. The girl though, it didn’t take very long before she was really literally on the edge. And the trafficker, his only goal was to make money. He was going to be the supplier for the demand. And we’ll spend another day looking at what demand looks like on the continent of Africa. But he was just ready to reach out as soon as she got close enough, as soon as her need to find another way because she had no options behind her, he was ready. And that’s what push factors are. You don’t have to be a really wily, clever trafficker if the push factors put her so close to the edge, she’ll just fall, there’s a tipping point.

Dave: That’s one of the things I remember we talked about in episode 31, that because of the socioeconomic situation, because...