To deprive a man of his natural liberty and to deny to him the ordinary amenities of life is worse than starving the body; it is starvation of the soul.
—Mahatma Gandhi
WHAT IS DEBT BONDAGE?
DEBT BONDAGE, OR bonded labor, is the most extensive form of slavery in the world today. South Asia is without question the home of debt bondage, with roughly 80 percent of the world’s debt bondage slaves living in the region. In Bonded Labor,1 I explored the myriad industries in which bonded laborers in South Asia can be found, as well as the reasons debt bondage remains entrenched in South Asia: immense poverty, the caste system, economic and legal legacies of the British colonial period, corruption, social apathy, and lack of access to formal credit markets. Following Bonded Labor, I explored the issue more deeply in relation to a specific industry in Tainted Carpets: Slavery and Child Labor in India’s Hand-Made Carpet Sector.2 This study was the largest single firsthand investigation of slavery and child labor conducted at the time, and it detailed a shocking prevalence of slavelike exploitation in India’s handmade carpet industry. I also traced slave-made carpets from the point of production in India to the point of retail sale at major retailers in the United States. Debt bondage proved to be highly prevalent in this sector, similar to other sectors in India’s informal economy. The results of the study show that at least 28 percent of workers in India’s carpet sector are in debt bondage and that an alarming 99.9 percent of these individuals belong to minority castes and ethnic groups. Eighty percent of the loans taken out by bonded laborers were to meet essential needs of food, water, and cooking oil. The average size of these loans was $85, a modest sum that ensnared entire families in years of debt bondage.3
Many of the same conditions that give rise to bonded labor in South Asia exist in debt bondage cases outside of this region. Although the caste system of South Asia is central to the persistence of bonded labor in these countries, similar class and caste dynamics often operate in debt bondage cases with local populations elsewhere in the world. However, it is vital to note that most of the victims of debt bondage in the Middle East or East Asia are low-caste migrants from South Asia. The forces that have made South Asia home to debt bondage extend beyond the region’s borders into informal economic sectors around the world. It is a most regrettable export that brings shame and indignity to the region. Beyond the South Asians exported into debt bondage abroad, the phenomenon typically ensnares other disenfranchised, dispossessed, and minority ethnic communities. As in South Asia, poverty, lack of access to formal credit markets, lack of reasonable alternative sources of income and security, and population displacement are central to debt bondage cases across the globe.
Another vital element to understand about debt bondage beyond South Asia is that the phenomenon is heavily driven by transnational labor migration. Most of the cases of debt bondage I documented outside of South Asia also would be considered labor trafficking, while many such cases in South Asia are also cases either of labor migration or trafficking. These are most often scenarios of seasonal migration from rural villages to urban worksites that might be in another region in the same country. Many cases of debt bondage outside of South Asia do not involve transnational migration, but the majority of the cases I documented did. In every case, the bondage was initiated by up-front fees or other expenses associated with facilitating the migration or the work opportunity in the destination country. This tryst between bondage and migration shows no signs of abating, with rapid increases in labor migration reaching 244 million labor migrants in 2015, which is a 41 percent increase over the 173 million labor migrants in 2000.4
The definition of debt bondage under international law is slightly different from the definition under the laws of countries in South Asia, most of which are derived from India’s Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act of 1976. Article 1 of the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery defines debt bondage as:
The status or condition arising from a pledge by a debtor of his personal services or of those of a person under his control as security for a debt, if the value of those services as reasonably assessed is not applied towards the liquidation of the debt or the length and nature of those services are not respectively limited and defined.
Under this definition, an exchange of credit for pledged labor becomes debt bondage if the laborer is exploited in such a way that the value of his or her labor unreasonably exceeds the value of the credit.
Under India’s Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, bonded labor is defined as a system of forced or partly forced labor in which an individual takes an advance in exchange for his or any dependant’s pledged labor or service and is confined to a specific geographic area, or cannot work for someone else, or is not allowed to sell his labor or goods at market value. India’s bonded labor definition covers more of the nuanced scenarios in which debt bondage exploitation can take place beyond an unreasonable asymmetry between the value of credit and labor; however, the basic mechanisms of the exploitation are similar. Physical, verbal, and sexual abuses are common in all cases. Creditors almost always manipulate the debts, restrain workers, confiscate identity documents and work permits, and perpetuate systems of wage deductions from overstated debts that leave individuals with little or no actual income for years or more. As in India, attempts in other countries to enact laws or policies to prevent debt bondage are easily circumvented by recruiters, brokers, and employers. In many destination countries, the relevant laws for migrant workers promote debt bondage by legitimizing systems of wage deductions to repay up-front fees that are almost always overstated.
I found a large number of cases of debt bondage among migrant worker communities in numerous sectors around the world, including agriculture, logging, iron smelting, seafood, mining (common and rare earth minerals), garment making, dairy farming, cocoa, palm oil, domestic work, construction, and commercial sex. The most exemplary of these sectors are the last three. Domestic work, construction, and commercial sex encapsulate all of the salient characteristics of debt bondage beyond South Asia.
DEBT BONDAGE AND DOMESTIC WORK
Preying on Those Who Serve
When I was a child, my parents took us to Bombay each summer to visit our extended family. These are the fondest memories of my life, and to this day I feel most at home in India. However, one facet of life in India always left me uncomfortable—servants. In the United States, I had to clean up after myself and do house chores. My parents cooked our meals, did the grocery shopping, and fixed the toilet when it broke. In India, servants do this work. If I started to wash my dishes, my grandmother would tell me to stop. If the toilet broke, the servant was called to fix it. If we needed milk, the servant was sent to the market to buy it. Our servants were darker skinned than we were, and they lived in a separate part of the home with a separate kitchen and bathroom. I could play with the servant’s children, but only up to age ten or eleven. After that, it was no longer proper.
I never felt comfortable having another human being serve me, clean up after me, or do my chores. My family has always promoted equality and social justice, especially in India, and our servants were treated with respect and generosity … but they were still servants. It was clear to everyone that they were beneath us, not because they were not equal as human beings but because they served us. I understand the arguments that in a country such as India with immense poverty and a severe lack of employment opportunities for the poor, providing shelter and a stable wage to a family in exchange for domestic work when they would almost certainly be in a worse condition otherwise is a reasonable arrangement. The children especially were better off because we made sure to send them to school, an opportunity they would be very unlikely to have in other circumstances. Because many aspects of the arrangement are welfare-enhancing for the servant family, this system is allowed to persist with an air of legitimacy. Nevertheless, when one human being serves another, inequality is inherent to the relationship. This inequality burrows into the consciousness of a society and, despite all best intentions, disassociates the equality of being between those with servants and those who serve. This is the exact mind-set that those who exploit servants in debt bondage or slavelike conditions use to justify their treatment. In Haiti, the Restavek (from “reste avec” or “to live with”) system5 of debt bondage for child domestic servitude is driven by caste and poverty dynamics that are nearly identical to the Kamaliri system6 of Nepal. In both cases, upper class/caste homeowners explained to me that the system is a beneficent way of providing room, board, and security for a downtrodden and pitiful low-caste child. “We give them a good life” and “Their alternative would be worse” and “We are doing them a service” were justifications I heard time and again in these and other countries in which I documented the debt bondage exploitation of servants.
Around the world, most upper-middle-class and upper-class households have domestic workers to some degree, a majority of whom are labor migrants. In the United States, the migrant domestic workers are primarily from south of the border, along with smaller numbers from Asia and Africa. Similarly, most upper-middle-class and upper-class households in western European nations have one or more domestic workers who have migrated from eastern Europe, Asia, or Africa.7 In the United States and western Europe, the typical model is for domestic workers to visit the home of their employers one or more days a week. They tend not to live with those they serve, allowing the arrangement to maintain the semblance of an employer–employee relationship, with the home being the workplace. However, in countries where servants are more likely to live with those they serve, the dynamic can devolve into a more subordinating and potentially exploitative relationship. This is especially the case because the servant is isolated from his or her social networks, and freedom of movement and employment can be completely restricted. They have no place to go and no option to work elsewhere if they are mistreated. Exacerbating the cycle of exploitation, those who mistreat them are rarely, if ever, held accountable.8 Of all the regions I documented, these dynamics were most prevalent in South Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia. I uncovered dozens of cases of debt bondage–based domestic servitude in the Middle East and East Asia. Upper-middle-class and upper-class households in China, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and South Korea are commonly served by the impoverished underclass women and girls of India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Interestingly, the construction sectors of these same destination countries are similarly served by the impoverished underclass men of the same origin countries. The negative consequences of this en masse traffic of the women and men of these poor Asian nations into bondage and servitude abroad cannot be overstated. Indeed, the origin and destination countries listed here represent the most heavily concentrated flow of debt bondage and forced labor exploited transnational migrant workers in the world.
As upper-middle-class and upper-class homes have increased their share of global wealth in the past few decades, the poor have largely become poorer from a purchasing power parity standpoint. A lack of consistent wage-earning opportunities in their home countries catalyzes immense flows of labor migrants for the purpose of securing remittance income from wealthy nations for their families back home. Table 6.1 shows just how large these flows are.
TABLE 6.1 Remittance Income from Primary Migrant Labor–Sending Nations
| COUNTRY |
2015 TOTAL REMITTANCES ($B) |
AS A PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL GDP |
| India |
68.9 |
3.4 |
| Philippines |
28.8 |
9.6 |
| Pakistan |
19.3 |
7.0 |
| Bangladesh |
15.4 |
8.7 |
| Vietnam |
13.2 |
6.2 |
| Nepal |
7.0 |
29.2 |
| Sri Lanka |
7.0 |
8.9 |
| World |
581.6 |
|
Remittances provide crucial sources of income for the poor in Asia, constituting a significant proportion of national GDP in many Asian countries. This is particularly true in Nepal, where remittances account for almost 30 percent of the country’s economy; without these remittances, the nation would probably collapse. A bourgeoning industry of recruiters, placement agencies, and brokers provide migrant work opportunities for the poor of Asia, including domestic work. Estimates of the number of migrant domestic workers in the world vary from 50 million to 100 million.9 The variance is largely due to definitional nuances10 because of the informal nature of many domestic servant relationships and the difficulty in gathering data because the work takes place inside a residence. The sector is heavily gendered, with 83 percent of domestic workers globally being female.11 Within the context of migration for domestic work, debt bondage has become a primary tool many recruiters use to ensnare women and girls in conditions of slavery. A young woman named A. Tamang from Nepal told me her story:
I took the offer from a recruiter who came to our village. She said she can arrange domestic work in Dubai. First, I had to do the training in Kathmandu. The agency charged me ten lakh rupees [$1,000] for the training course and certificate. They also charged for medical clearance, passport and visa, and other fees that I did not understand. I did not have money to pay them, so they told me they will take one-half deduction from my wages in Dubai. The wage they promised was NR 1,400 [$14] per day. After four months I flew to Dubai. A man met me with a sign for the agency and took me from the airport. The air in Dubai made my eyes burn because I was not used to that climate. The agent took me to the home of an Arab family. They took my documents and showed me the work I will do. I worked every day from the morning until midnight. I did the cleaning, cooking, laundry, toilets, and massage. If I made the owners unhappy they shouted at me. Sometimes they hit me. The family was rich, but they were very filthy. Even though I am poor, at least we have a clean home.
After some weeks the agent came to the home and gave me bank papers. I did not understand the writing. He said I had to sign the papers for the loan from the agency for my fees. He said I must repay the bank for these fees from my wages for three years. I did not understand what was happening. After eight months the family gave me my first wage of seventy dihram [$27] each week. After three years the agency sent me back to Nepal. In that time, I only left the home twice when I was sick and went to hospital. I complained to the agency that I received so little wages in Dubai, but they said they cannot help me.
Although typical, A. Tamang’s story is not the most exploitative case of debt bondage in the migrant domestic servant sector that I documented. The worst cases involve sexual exploitation and torture by the “employing” family, severe deprivation of food and sleep, and other abuses. Worse still are cases in which the young women never work as domestic workers but are instead sold into forced prostitution upon arrival in the destination country, as happened with Joyce from the Philippines:
I completed my training at a center near my village to the best of my ability. I was very dedicated and wanted to help my family. I flew with four women to Singapore. When we arrived, a man took us in a van. He did not speak to us. He took us to a small building that had a drawing of two young girls on the front window like a comic. The girls were smiling and I thought this might be a school. I asked if we were going to work in a school but the man did not respond. He took us to the back of the building where we met two other men and a woman named Min. Min gave us tea and told us she was the owner of this club. She said we had to be with clients to pay the fees of our training and then we can work for housecleaning. She said it was not difficult work and we would like it. She said if we stayed with her after our debt we could send more money to our families than in housekeeping.
I told Min I would never do this work. She said I had no choice and it would be better if I did not protest. I felt dizzy and thought I was going to be sick. When I woke up, I was in a bed. I felt pain everywhere. I screamed. I knew what happened to me. Min told me I was going to be okay. She brought me food and tried to console me. I asked her how could she do this to another woman? She said she was trying to help me and I should be grateful.
Min let me speak to my parents once a month to tell them I was okay. As long as I did not upset her, she treated me with kindness. She gave us alcohol and pain medicine to help us be with the clients. I think maybe after six or seven months, she said I could go for housecleaning. I wanted to return home, but I needed to earn money for my family, so I worked in the house of a Singapore family for two years. When my mother became very ill, I returned home to take care of her.
Joyce and A. Tamang tell stories that are common to the dozens of cases I have documented of debt bondage servitude in the global domestic worker industry. In almost every case, the women sign up with a recruitment agency that organizes their training and migration to a wealthier country, and also arranges for them to work in a home. Instead of paying the agency fees up-front for travel and work overseas, the women agree to an advance by the agency for these expenses, which they are told they can repay over time through wage deductions. The arrangement becomes debt bondage when the repayment period far exceeds the actual value of the fees/loan, when identity documents are confiscated, and when the worker is forced to toil excessively and under harsh conditions, with little or no pay at the end of her employment. Contract terms for workers are often switched upon arrival in the destination country, with lower wages and worse conditions than were promised prior to their departure. When verbal, physical, and sexual abuses are added as a means of coercing work, the exploitation worsens. After some period, the worker may be sold to another family or may be sent home with just a fraction of the wages promised. In all cases, it is a corrosive journey that leaves the migrant domestic worker, as well as her family, much worse off than before.
The destructive nature of many migrant domestic worker experiences are facilitated and exacerbated by the fact that they remain the least protected category of workers under labor legislation in most countries, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. Table 6.2 shows just how exposed domestic workers are in these regions.
TABLE 6.2 Legal Protections of Domestic Workers in the Middle East and Asia
| PERCENT OF COUNTRIES IN WHICH DOMESTIC WORKERS … |
MIDDLE EAST |
ASIA |
| Are excluded from labor legislation |
99 |
61 |
| Have no limitation on work hours per week |
100 |
99 |
| Are excluded from paid leave laws |
99 |
97 |
| Are excluded from minimum wage laws |
99 |
88 |
Source: Data from ILO (2013).
The lack of legal protections for domestic workers in the Middle East and Asia leaves them heavily exposed to abuse and exploitation and serves as a powerful incentive for agencies and wealthy families to arrange for poor women to travel to these regions where they can be exploited in domestic servitude with little or no legal consequence. The countries in these regions should be held accountable for the purposeful and unjustifiable lack of protection of domestic workers. There is no reason equal protection under the law should not be afforded to all domestic workers save to facilitate their servitude, particularly for isolated migrants who are trapped in the jaws of debt bondage.
A Closer Look at Up-Front Fees
Debt bondage in the migrant domestic worker sector is almost always initiated via up-front fees. Despite regulatory efforts in some countries to eliminate these fees, recruiters continue to use them to ensnare servants in debt bondage. Depending on the country of origin, typical fees vary (see table 6.3).
TABLE 6.3 Migrant Domestic Worker Up-Front Fees
| TYPE |
RESPONSIBLE PARTY |
| Agency placement |
Worker |
| Passport and visa |
Worker |
| Police clearance |
Worker |
| Birth certificate |
Worker |
| Medical check |
Worker |
| Training |
Worker |
| Room and board |
|
| Instructor |
|
| Handbook/materials |
|
| Rent for training tools |
|
| Competency test |
|
| Training Co-fee |
|
| Contract verification |
Employer, shifted to worker |
| Work visa |
Employer, shifted to worker |
| Residence permit |
Employer, shifted to worker |
| Insurance |
Employer, shifted to worker |
| Airfare and taxes |
Employer, shifted to worker |
In all the cases, the domestic worker is responsible for the fees associated with her placement with a family by the agency, and also for her passport and visa, police clearance, and securing her birth certificate. In the worst debt bondage cases I documented, the worker was overcharged two or three times the actual costs of these expenses. Additional fees were completely fabricated to inflate the worker’s debts, such as a “mobilization fee,” an “entrance fee,” or “service fees.” The worker was responsible for the fees associated with her training and certification to be a domestic worker in the destination country, including room and board during the training, the instructor fees, materials, and so on. To obviate the semblance of charging exorbitant fees, many agencies advance the fees as a loan from a bank in the destination country, which must then be repaid through deductions from the worker’s wages. This mechanism of bank loans for fees is increasingly used by recruitment agencies because they tend to be viewed by governments as private economic arrangements as opposed to up-front fees for employment, which fall outside the parameters of most laws that prohibit the assessment of up-front fees to migrant workers.
Other expenses are supposed to be paid by the employing family, such as contract verification in their country, the work visa, travel expenses, residence permits, and insurance for the domestic worker. In the most exploitative cases, the employing family sends these sums to the agency, and the agency pockets the funds and adds the expenses to the worker’s up-front debt. The totality of the fees in the cases I documented depended on the country of origin and typically ranged from $1,500 to $4,000. This is a substantial sum when one considers that the per capita incomes in most of the countries from which the domestic workers migrate might be just a few hundred dollars per year. In the most severe debt bondage cases I documented, the fees assessed to the worker were $5,000 or more, which the worker was never able to work off. To make matters worse, agencies almost always add to the fees even after the worker is placed in a household. They charge bogus fees for permit renewals, new health checks, or placement of the worker in another family in the destination country, even in cases of physical and sexual abuse in the first household. As in traditional South Asian bonded labor, the debts are created and exacerbated by the exploiter to ensnare vulnerable, isolated women in servitude for years on end.
I attempted to speak with personnel at fifteen different domestic worker recruitment agencies across South Asia and East Asia linked to cases of debt bondage that I documented. None of them were willing to speak with me. Unfortunately, at this stage in my research, a simple Internet search of my name revealed exactly the kind of research I do and why I might be interested in speaking with the agencies. In two cases, I tried using a false identity when requesting meetings, but both times when I arrived at the office a security guard asked to see my ID, which of course did not match the name I had given. I tried phone conversations as well, but to no avail. The agencies varied in size and levels of formality, and all of them worked with subcontractors who operated at the village level to recruit domestic workers. I managed to have a few meetings with more legitimate agencies that were not associated with exploitative cases, and they were largely what I expected—full disclosure of recruitment practices, reasonable fee assessments, efforts at monitoring and protection, and a genuine desire to find work for women in need. Some of the most effective efforts by agencies and governments to protect migrant domestic worker populations that I investigated were in the Philippines.
Thousands of women migrate each year from the Philippines to be domestic workers around the world, and the country’s recruitment agency sector is highly regulated. Recruitment agencies must first be licensed through the Philippines Overseas Employment Administration, which maintains strict controls and conducts regular audits to help minimize abuses. An official named Mary from the POEA informed me that her administration “is committed to protecting women from the Philippines who travel abroad for work. If women from our country cannot find gainful employment here, we are obligated to ensure they have a safe experience abroad.” Mary described some of the efforts the Philippines undertakes to protect migrant workers. First, migrant domestic workers must undergo a mandatory Pre-Departure Education Programme provided by the government. This program includes classes on local languages, culture familiarization, and even stress management. Workers must also undertake a Pre-Departure Orientation Seminar specifically tailored for individuals migrating to Hong Kong or the Middle East because these areas are known to have the highest potential for exploitation. Workers receive information about their contracts, health and safety guidelines, airport procedures, local emergency contacts, and other essential information to help keep them protected. Philippine migrant domestic workers still suffer debt bondage and other abuses, but I documented far fewer cases from the Philippines than from other nations in Asia. I believe the lower number of cases I uncovered is correlated to better regulation and preparation in the home country, and better connections and safety systems in destination countries. Higher education levels and literacy rates among Philippine domestic workers when compared to those from Asian nations also play a crucial role in reduced exploitation levels.12 The Philippines offers a good model for migrant domestic worker protection and empowerment that other sending countries should adopt.
Meeting a Recruiter
Despite my lack of success in speaking with recruitment agencies linked to the debt bondage cases I documented, I was able to meet with numerous individuals in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Nepal who recruit women into transnational migration for domestic work. These are the men and women who initiate the debt bondage process, operating beyond the scope of regulatory enforcement or oversight. Of all the subcontractors I met, my time with Ashish was the most elucidating.
I met Ashish in the Sindhupalchok district of Nepal, a mountainous region northeast of Kathmandu that stretches all the way to the border with China. Ashish told me he had been working as a recruiter for construction, domestic work, and a few other sectors for more than a decade, covering scores of villages in Sindhupalchok and Dolakha districts. “I am from this area, and I know these people well,” Ashish told me. “It is easy for me to speak with them and explain the work opportunities.”
Ashish told to me that different agencies focus on different types of jobs and that most of his efforts in the last two years were focused on recruiting domestic workers for the Middle East. “Nepali people are desperate to leave this country,” Ashish said. “Even I worked in construction in Abu Dhabi for five years before I returned to Nepal and started this work.”
I asked Ashish about his recruitment practices. He explained that he recruited workers for the domestic worker agencies in Kathmandu and received a payment for each woman he sent. He also received an additional fee for each woman who completed her training. “I keep track of all the women I bring to the agencies. I speak to their families, and I encourage them to complete their training responsibly,” Ashish told me. “This benefits both of us.”
I asked Ashish about agencies that charge excessive fees or engage in fraudulent practices to exploit domestic workers. I was surprised by his answer. “This happens all the time! You must assume this is the case … but I do not have anything to do with it.”
Ashish explained that corrupt agencies pop up and are shut down regularly. They reopen using a different name, or they just operate illegally and transfer workers they have recruited to licensed agencies for a fee. “The government cannot keep track of the agencies,” Ashish said.
I asked Ashish if he would help me arrange conversations with some of the agencies in Kathmandu, but he declined. “If I take you to them, they will not work with me. You understand.”
Ashish was willing, however, to allow me to accompany him on some of his recruiting trips to the villages in exchange for a small fee. I spent three days with Ashish hiking through Sindhupalchok district. We visited a total of six villages, two per day. The people were isolated and destitute; many appeared ill and malnourished. Most had been made aware through NGO campaigns of the risks of foreign migration, but as a villager named J. Gopal explained, “See our condition here. We cannot live like this. We must take our chances.” J. Gopal had already worked as a migrant laborer in construction in India and Bangladesh, receiving a fraction of his promised wages, but it was enough to keep his family (barely) fed and sheltered. He and the other villagers knew that the outcome of labor migration was likely to be exploitative, but they also hoped they would be lucky enough to earn sufficient income to help their families scrape by on something that might loosely be called a human existence.
I watched Ashish gather the women of the villages, always in the presence of the men, and talk about the opportunities to work abroad as a domestic worker. He described the training and the fees, he talked about what life was like in some of the destination countries such as Oman and Dubai, and he showed photos of the glimmering cities, the glitzy malls, and the elegant homes in which they would work. He played two audio recordings from his smartphone of other Nepalese women who described the process, how happy they were, and how much money they were making. He explained the up-front loan process in vague terms and spoke about wage deductions for the first year, but he promised the deductions would not last any longer if the women worked hard. In his notepad, Ashish wrote down the names, ages, husband’s or father’s name, and the village name of the women who were interested. He secured a total of forty-seven names during the three days I spent with him.
“Only ten or fifteen of these women will come to Kathmandu and start the training, and of those, only half will complete the training and be placed in a foreign home,” Ashish said. I asked why so few who signed up would actually undertake the training, and Ashish said there were many reasons: men may not allow it, they may fall ill or become pregnant, or they may take another offer for work.
During my time with Ashish, I was conflicted about how much I should try to tell the women about the risks of the exploitative debt bondage situations that often occur in relation to the up-front fees he described. I wanted to warn them to keep their documents and a mobile phones in their possession at all times, to know how to contact local authorities should anything happen to them, and that it was okay for them to reject an exploitative situation and return home rather than persist out of a sense of shame or guilt in the hope that things may one day get better. On the other hand, some of these women could end up in good circumstances that would provide vital income for their families, and if I scared them off with too many cautionary tales, I might end up doing more harm than good. It was difficult to find time to talk with the women without Ashish present, but he did take calls on his phone from time to time, and on two occasions he took a nap in the village, which gave me a little time with some of the women he had been recruiting. I tried to temper the dream world Ashish had portrayed and provided a few suggestions for how to keep safe and avoid debt bondage. I can only hope that some of these suggestions proved helpful. More than giving cautionary pointers, I ended up responding to numerous questions the young women had for me. They were more informed about migration and the world in general than their isolated circumstances might lead one to believe. Many of the women had been to Kathmandu for various reasons, although none with whom I spoke had ever left the country. One young woman I met on my last day with Ashish made a lasting impression. Laxmi was bright, curious, and strong-willed. She spoke with remarkable clarity about her circumstances and the life she aspired to achieve:
I do not want to leave my parents, but what are my options? I will not go to India for prostitution, and there is no work in Nepal. If I stay, I will have to marry, and then what kind of life will I have? I want to earn money so I can take my parents to a better home and we can live on our own terms. Most people in Nepal must live on terms they do not want. We are no different from anyone else. We want to live by our determining. If I must go abroad for domestic work in order to have this life, I will do it. But I am not a fool and no one will take advantage of me. Please give me your email, Siddharth, and in five years I will write to you. I will tell you that I am at university. I will be a doctor, so I can help people like us who are always sick. I promise you. You will see!
The vigor with which Laxmi described her aspirations was inspiring. She felt like a beacon of hope in a land otherwise interred with the corpses of countless crushed dreams. Most people in her circumstances had resigned themselves to a bleak and brief survival, but Laxmi seemed undimmed by the darkness around her. Her cheer and determination lifted my spirits, and for that I was deeply grateful. I knew the odds were stacked against her, but I also knew it would take more than penury and negative experiences to extinguish her spark.
I gave Laxmi my email address and told her she must contact me any time and I would do whatever I could to help. She asked if I could give her a blessing, but I said that I was not important enough to do so. She insisted, so we settled on a hug and my best wishes that all good things would come to her. It has been seven years since I met Laxmi. I never heard from her, and I never managed to return to her village to see what became of her. I pray, now and again, that Laxmi is at university studying medicine and that she is simply too busy, happy, and thriving to remember me.
A Look at the Domestic Worker Numbers
During the course of my research, I documented 209 individuals exploited in debt bondage conditions in the domestic worker sector in countries outside of South Asia. However, a majority of the victims I documented (~70 percent) originated from South Asia. Here are some of the key findings from these cases:
• 96 percent females
• $71.35 per month ($2.46 per day; $0.18 per hour): average wage13
• 21.4 years: average age when first entered debt bondage
• 16 cases of children under the age of eighteen years
• 51 workers from India, 40 from Nepal, 37 from Bangladesh, 22 from the Philippines, 19 from Sri Lanka, 10 from Indonesia, 7 from Laos, and 23 from other countries (Africa and Latin America)
• $2,840: average initial debt
• 98 percent of cases belonged to minority ethnic or caste communities
• 94 percent of cases had passports and work permits confiscated on arrival
• 69 percent of cases had additional fees added after work started
• 63 percent of cases had contract terms changed on arrival
• 21 percent of cases were forced to transfer their up-front fee debts to a loan from a local bank
As awareness of levels of migrant domestic worker abuse continues to grow, many governments, NGOs, and unions are working assiduously to improve protections for these workers. Unfortunately, enforcement and oversight remain inconsistent. The exclusion of domestic workers from most labor laws, especially in Asia and the Middle East, is particularly problematic. Perhaps the most effective organization working to help protect migrant domestic workers is the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF). The mission of IDWF is to empower domestic workers, inform them of their rights, promote dignified working conditions, campaign against excessive recruiter fees, and help keep domestic workers in destination countries protected and connected. In addition, IDWF has campaigned assiduously for countries to ratify the ILO Convention on Decent Work for Domestic Workers (No. 189) of 2011. This convention mandates that domestic workers receive protections equivalent to those of other workers, including maximum working hours, minimum wages, overtime compensation, daily and weekly rest periods, social security, and maternity leave. The convention also calls for adequate protection of domestic workers against violence and abuse, and perhaps most important, it calls for the regulation of recruitment agencies and up-front fees specifically to help eliminate debt bondage. To be effective, this regulation will need to work down to the level of local recruiters such as Ashish.
Despite the efforts of IDWF, other NGOs, and new international conventions that focus on protecting migrant domestic workers, millions still fall between the regulatory and oversight cracks of unlicensed agencies, unscrupulous recruiters, and apathy among those who are served (including their governments) to uphold the rights, dignity, and equality of those who serve. This apathy is the soil in which all forms of slavery take root.
DEBT BONDAGE AND CONSTRUCTION
As with domestic servants, severe labor exploitation and debt bondage in the global construction sector is highly linked to labor migration. Overstated fees, unfair wage deductions, and an insufficiency of protections, rights, and connections in destination countries conspire to consign countless migrant construction workers to debt bondage exploitation, or worse. Indeed, every year thousands of migrant construction workers suffer serious injury or perish due to poor safety standards, harsh working conditions, and other abuses. As with domestic work, migrant construction workers in debt bondage are concentrated primarily in Asia and the Middle East. In addition to these regions, I have documented cases in the United States involving migrants from south of the border, in several western European countries involving migrants from eastern and central Europe, and even in Africa involving migrants from the western and northern nations of the continent. Around the world, major cities are being built, developed, or expanded on the backs of cheap, expendable laborers and slaves. Construction is second only to agriculture in terms of global employment numbers, with 180 million construction workers in 2015 toiling on projects worth $8.5 trillion, growing to an estimated 210 million workers by 2020 who will toil on projects worth $10.3 trillion.14 These immense projects pull millions of poor labor migrants into travel abroad in the hope of securing income opportunities15 and results in the largest up-front recruiter fees of any migrant worker sector I documented. The fees typically range from $4,000 to $15,000, which represent a lifetime of income (or debt) for most construction migrants. The heaviest flow of migrants in construction work is from India, Nepal, and Bangladesh to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Malaysia, and Singapore. To be sure, the meteoric construction boom in the Middle East across the last two decades has been heavily supported by cheap and exploited migrant labor from South Asia.16 In many of these countries, informality is the norm with construction work, leading to a lack of protection, safety, and a plethora of exploitative practices.17 The severe abuses that have come to typify many construction projects in the Middle East in particular have been highlighted in the media, most recently with the 2022 World Cup facilities in Qatar.18 However, the two countries that provided me with the most interesting case studies of debt bondage in the construction sectors are Singapore and Malaysia. Not only do these neighboring nations have high levels of trafficked construction workers from South Asia, but they also offer very different responses to the issue.
Singapore: Debt Bondage in the Land of Law and Order
Singapore prides itself in being a land of law and order. It is without question a remarkably efficient, affluent, and energetic nation. To achieve these ends, the government can be somewhat autocratic, which unquestionably depresses freedoms for average citizens. Nevertheless, the orderliness and reliability of this remarkable city-state is something to behold. For example, in an effort to contain street congestion, the government levies a tax on the purchase of automobiles that is three or four times the purchase price of the car. This means only the rich can afford a car and most people must take public transportation. Traffic jams in Singapore are highly uncommon because there are simply not enough cars on the road to cause one. This kind of a policy would never work in most countries, however. Here is another example: in food courts at packed malls, finding seating can be a challenge. One simply leaves a tissue or a handkerchief on a table to signal that you have reserved it while you and your friends disperse to purchase your meals. The table will be left alone until you return. Try that anywhere else and, well, forget it. Everyday life in Singapore is a curious experiment in efficiency and order at the expense of personal freedoms. The nation is a well-oiled machine with law and order enforced at every turn, and one would not expect to find substantial issues of slavery within its borders.
Slavery, however, is exactly what I found during my trips to Singapore. The first trip I took was in 2011 on behalf of the U.S. Department of State as an emissary to help raise awareness of human trafficking, especially in government circles. When I first met with government officials in Singapore, they were in a state of understandable denial that human trafficking was any sort of problem in the country. They conceded there could be isolated cases, but they felt the larger problem they faced related to migrants who did not honor the terms of their contracts and tried to game the system. My first task was to conduct research to get a better sense of exactly what was going on in the country vis-à-vis slavery and human trafficking.
I focused on construction sites, shipyards, and the city’s red-light area, Gaylong. I documented numerous cases of sex trafficking in Gaylong, particularly at clubs that specialized in minors, and the country’s construction and shipyard sectors revealed dozens of cases of trafficked debt bondage slaves from India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Conducting interviews onsite was challenging; most of the workers were understandably reluctant to be seen speaking to anyone other than their bosses. There was almost always a foreman or other guards at the sites. Although I managed to find a few quiet and unmonitored places for interviews, most of the cases I documented were at shelters with the help of local NGOs. One NGO in particular, Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), arranged interviews with several former construction workers the organization was assisting.
Each of the migrants I documented took out substantial loans to secure work positions in Singapore. The loans covered a training program and certification course, travel and visas, medical checks, and work contracts in construction upon arrival. The itemization of the expenses was similar to what I had documented in the domestic servant cases. In aggregate, the loans for South Asians in Singapore’s construction sector ranged from $6,000 to $10,000. If the worker’s family owned land, many recruiters pressured the workers to sell their land to pay some or all of the up-front fees. Most migrants did not have land, so their fees were taken as loans. Upon arrival in Singapore, many of the workers were told that the company that sponsored them did not secure the proper work permits, and they were sent back home penniless, landless, and with a lifetime of debt from the up-front fees. Others were employed as contracted but were told they would have to repay debts from wage deductions that were far in excess of the loans they took. Most of the migrant construction workers were promised wages in Singapore that started at $600 to $800 per month, but the individuals I documented only received a fraction of this sum, if anything at all. As with all debt bondage cases, the deductions were highly skewed against the worker, with excessive and previously undisclosed deductions for room, board, daily transport, new permits and fees, and other expenses. The migrant worker policies of the Singapore government do not help matters. Foreign workers can migrate to Singapore under one of three visas: (1) Employment Pass (192,300 visas in 2016), (2) S Pass (179,700 visas in 2016), or a Work Permit (992,700 total visas with 315,500 visas in construction in 2016).19 The first type of visa is for professionals such as lawyers and bankers, the second type is for midlevel skilled staff, and the third type is for semiskilled labor such as domestic workers and construction workers (two-year permits, from approved countries only). The Singapore government charges the sponsoring employer of foreign construction workers a levy of $300 to $950 per worker, depending on the kind of work they will perform and their country of origin, and a security bond of $5,000 per worker, which is forfeited if the worker violates any of the provisions of the work permit: they cannot bring family members with them, they must receive approval from the Ministry of Manpower before marrying a Singapore citizen, and they cannot get pregnant or give birth to a child in Singapore, among others. In almost every case of debt bondage I documented in Singapore’s construction sector, these expenses were passed on to the worker as part of his wage deductions even though doing so is against the law. After these and other deductions are forced on the migrant workers, they are left with little or no monthly wage. They persevere in the hope of receiving a full wage one day, but in numerous cases the construction companies employing the migrant workers had them arrested for petty offenses around the time they had recouped their expenses. Unable to pay the fines, the workers were deported. A man named Alam from Bangladesh, who was facing deportation after nine months of unpaid work, explained:
I sold 1.5 bigha of land to pay half the fee of three lakh taka [~$4,300] to come to Singapore and work in construction. This was all the land my family had. The other half I took on loan. When I arrived, I went to a dormitory. More than 300 other workers lived there. It was very crowded, and we were locked inside every night. At four in the morning the company took us in a truck to the city. We worked all day until the night. Then they took us to the dormitory. I was supposed to earn $700 each month, but after nine months I was not paid any wage. The company said I must still repay my loan. They said they deducted $200 from my wage for living in the dorm and $150 for food each month. When I complained, they abused me. Then I was arrested for spitting and fined $400. I did not have money to pay this fine, so they said I will be deported. I am trying to get some of my wages before they send me back to Bangladesh. If I knew they would not pay me, I would not have come here. Now my family has no land and no money. I do not know how we will survive.
Alam’s story was typical of the kinds of callous and opportunistic exploitation of impoverished migrant workers I documented in Singapore’s construction sector. Data from the Ministry of Manpower in Singapore shows that there are around 1.4 million foreign workers in Singapore, representing roughly 40 percent of the country’s workforce.20 There is no reliable data on the number of irregular migrants in the country, but thousands can be found in construction, shipyard work, and domestic work. To this day, no one knows just how many of these regular and irregular migrant workers are being exploited in debt bondage and slavery.
One particular facet of the situation faced by the migrant workers in Singapore that I was curious to explore relates to housing. Finding accommodations for 1.4 million or more foreign workers in a country of 5.5 million people is no small task. Every one of the foreign construction workers I documented in Singapore told me he lived in numerous dormitories or barracks scattered around the outskirts of the city. I found the largest barracks north of Singapore not far from the Straits of Johor, which separates Singapore from mainland Malaysia. A few barracks were also located on islands in the Straits, just off the coast. I documented several of these barracks, which ranged in size from a few hundred to a few thousand beds. Though cramped and not very clean, they were among the most livable migrant/trafficked worker barracks I have seen. They had kitchen facilities, televisions, and nearby markets. Guards patrolled the areas to maintain order and security. Some of the barracks were locked at night, but most were not. I spoke to several workers at the barracks at night, and most did not have major complaints about the living conditions. They felt constrained and crowded, but otherwise the facilities were not as filthy and unpleasant as others in which they had lived. Rafiq spent three years working in construction in Dubai before coming to Singapore. “The barracks in Dubai were very bad,” Rafiq told me. “They were so dirty and the toilets were always broken. The fans were always broken. There was no place to eat except in the dirt. Here the conditions are better.”
In Dubai, Rafiq was only paid about 20 percent of his promised wages before he was deported. So far in Singapore he had only received about 30 percent of his promised wages; the remainder, he was told, was going toward repayment of the loan he took to secure the job.
When I visited the worker barracks in Singapore, I also learned that labor recruiters from Malaysia often visit with promises of better work and wages in their country. They claim they can arrange passage to Malaysia by boat across the Straits of Johor. Some workers take the offers, but most do not because they hope they will eventually be paid their full wages in Singapore.
I wanted to spend a few nights in or near the barracks to get a better sense of the living conditions and to document more cases, but the guards did not permit me to do so. Nevertheless, the evidence of debt bondage and labor trafficking that I gathered from Singapore’s construction sector, along with the cases I documented at the shipyards and in the red-light area, led me to conclude that the country has a systemic problem with slavery and human trafficking. Once I completed my research, I had to present it in a way that might motivate a change in perception by the government yet not seem so severe that I would be dismissed as a troublemaker rather than an ally hoping to help address the issues.
I held a few meetings with various ministries in the Singapore government to discuss my impressions of debt bondage and labor trafficking in the migrant worker community. I was told by colleagues at the U.S. Mission in Singapore that these meetings played an important role in acceptance by the government that the country had real issues that needed to be addressed. Six months later, the government of Singapore invited me to speak at the launch of the country’s first National Plan of Action (NPA) to combat human trafficking, with a focus on construction and domestic work. The NPA included a commitment to draft a law against human trafficking, to improve victim assistance and protection, to tackle excessive up-front fees and unjust wage deductions in the migrant worker community, and to research the prevalence of various forms of human trafficking more diligently. I spoke at the launch of the NPA in March of 2012, and modest progress on the plan has been made in Singapore since.
Singapore’s economy is highly dependent on a substantial migrant workforce, and most people in the country look the other way as far as debt bondage and labor exploitation are concerned. The same is true of most of the other nations in the world that receive large numbers of migrant workers; they are either heavily reliant on these workers because they lack the labor base in their countries to meet employment needs, or they have become too dependent on the lower wages and higher profits provided by exploitable foreign workers. I have not returned to Singapore since 2012, but I know that more comprehensive research must be done to document the prevalence rates of debt bondage and labor trafficking in key migrant worker sectors and the up-front fees and wage deductions that lead to much of this exploitation. I suspect not much has changed with regard to these issues in the last few years. It also is possible that additional government focus could lead to unintended negative consequences for migrant workers, such as higher levels of deportation or new policies that could have an adverse impact on migrant worker communities. I hope I am wrong and that this land of law and order will cast a more compassionate eye on the human rights costs of its growth, development, and efficiency. The same can be said for most of the developed world.
Malaysia: More Awareness, More Bondage
Around the time I was working to promote acceptance of human trafficking as a problem in Singapore, neighboring Malaysia already had a high level of awareness of this issue. Paradoxically, this elevated awareness seemed to make the problem worse. Even though Malaysia already had a law criminalizing human trafficking, and even though the government had undertaken numerous efforts to address the offense, my research indicated that the levels of labor trafficking and debt bondage in Malaysia’s construction sector were greater than in Singapore. As with Singapore, Malaysia has a robust construction sector, which has been growing 6 percent per year since 1990 and is perceived as the bedrock of the nation’s aspirations to become a developed economy.21 The government estimates that 1.1 million of the country’s 2.1 million foreign workers toil in the construction sector, with an additional 1.5 million to 2 million unregistered workers filling out the country’s labor market needs.22 Foreign-born individuals represent an astounding 70 percent of the Malaysian workforce,23 and South Asians in particular have been taking on heavy debt loads to migrate to Malaysia for construction work for decades,24 often finding servitude, exploitation, and bondage instead.
I received my first indication that Malaysia was ahead of Singapore (and many other countries) in terms of general awareness of human trafficking before I even arrived in the country. As my plane to Kuala Lumpur entered its final descent, the air hostess came on the intercom system to inform passengers that they should ensure their seatbelts were fastened, tray tables stowed, and seats placed in their upright position. She spoke about landing cards and immigration procedures, and then she said, “Please be advised, Malaysia has strict laws against drug and human trafficking.” It was the first time I had heard an announcement of this kind in any of the dozens of countries I had visited.
As I queued for immigration at the airport, I saw several posters on pillars with the picture of a mother and an infant with the tag line, “Human trafficking is a crime” and an instruction to dial “999” with information about any incident of human trafficking. After the plane announcement and the airport posters, I expected to uncover only isolated cases of slavery. The truth was otherwise.
I visited several construction sites in Kuala Lumpur and saw thousands of South Asian workers. I documented several of these workers onsite, at shelters, and in their barracks. The conditions in all cases were worse than in Singapore; impoverished South Asians toiled in severe debt bondage trying to work off the loans they took to secure construction jobs. They lived in subhuman conditions in the barracks, were paid a fraction of their promised wages, and most were ultimately discarded or deported once their usefulness expired. Safety standards lagged what I had seen in Singapore, and numerous workers I met or who were described to me had suffered injuries that ranged from serious gashes to broken bones to death. One worker, Mustafa, temporarily residing at a prisonlike shelter for human trafficking victims, told me the following story:
I am from Khulna district in Bangladesh. Many recruiters come to our villages. They promise they can arrange work in construction in other countries for very good wages. First, we have to pay a fee of four lakh taka [$5,000] for training and documents. I did not have these funds, so I took a loan. They said my wages will be deducted to repay the loan.
After some months they gave us the documents and the agents arranged travel by ship to Kuala Lumpur. The ship left from Mongla port. More than thirty of us were put inside a container in the bottom of the ship. It was dark, but we were provided torches. We were only allowed out of the container in the late night for maybe one hour for toilet. Otherwise, we had to stay inside the container. It was very hot, and the smell was very bad. We tried to wait for toilet when we are allowed outside, but if we had to use toilet inside we could only use a bucket. Most of us became very sick. I was vomiting. There were two children, and they were crying every day. I thought we were going to die. I think it was maybe nine days to come to Kuala Lumpur.
The boss took us to dormitories. Mine had maybe three hundred men. We slept on mats on the ground. Each morning they took us to the construction site by bus. My work was with cement. If we did not work hard enough, the bosses would beat us. We had to ask permission to urinate, or they would beat us. They gave us only two meals of rice and daal each day, then took us back to the dormitory. I did this kind of work for eight months, and I did not receive any wages. The government is going to deport me because I do not have proper papers. They say I must return by ship.
When I heard Mustafa’s story, I could not help but be struck by its similarities to another slave narrative I had read, this one from a more than two centuries earlier, the story of Olaudah Equaino.
Olaudah Equaino was born in the Benin Empire in present-day Nigeria, sold to a slave ship at Badagry, and enslaved in the Americas before eventually purchasing his freedom and recounting his life story in the extraordinary book, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equaino, 1789. Equaino became a pivotal figure in the British abolitionist movement of the late eighteenth century, and his book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the brutal and dehumanizing realities of the Atlantic slave trade. In his book, Equaino describes in extraordinary language his first encounter with European slave traders:
The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled and tossed up to see if I were found by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions too differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke (which was very different from any I had ever heard), united to confirm me in this belief. Indeed such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment, that, if ten thousand worlds had been my own I would have freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country….
At last, when the ship we were in had got in all her cargo, they made ready with many fearful noises, and we were all put under deck, so that we could not see how they managed the vessel. But this disappointment was the least of my sorrow. The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells…. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.
Separated by centuries, Equaino and Mustafa tell shockingly similar tales. Both were trafficked by sea into slavery in a far away land. Both were treated as subhumans and crammed like animals in a ship bound for servitude. Although these similarities represent a disheartening measure of how little progress has been made in ridding the world of slavery, there are also some interesting differences between their tales. First, there was no ruse involved in Equaino’s ordeal. He was simply bought, trafficked, sold, and enslaved. Because slavery is no longer legal or morally acceptable, Mustafa was tricked with false employment terms that traded on his impoverishment and lack of alternatives. Second, Mustafa’s transport was quicker and much less expensive than Equiano’s. The time and cost of transportation have dropped by more than 90 percent from the late 1700s to the present day, making it much quicker and cheaper to get slaves from the point of origin to the point of exploitation. Third, Mustafa’s duration of servitude was much shorter—less than one year compared to thirteen years for Equaino. This shortened duration of slavery is primarily a function of the greater amount of time and expense required to secure a slave in the past; today slaves are quite easy and cheap to acquire. In the modern context, exploiting a slave for a year or less still provides a robust return on investment, and replacement slaves can be easily procured. Fourth, Equaino had to purchase his freedom, but Mustafa was simply deported due to a lack of proper documentation. Equaino returned home a free man with no debt and was able to contribute to the British abolitionist movement, whereas Mustafa will return home buried in debt and most likely consigned to scraping out a meager existence through low-wage labor or eventually be trafficked and exploited again. Understanding that Equaino’s outcome is a one-of-a-kind rarity because most slaves in the eighteenth century died as slaves, a more appropriate comparison would be that of a lifetime of servitude in the Old World compared to a lifetime of repeated episodes of servitude interspersed with periods of grinding poverty today. Although slaves today are still trafficked by sea (though more often through other means), just as they were in the past, they have become much less expensive and much more expendable than in previous centuries. Had Mustafa been able to secure a better alternative to the construction offer, or had the authorities in Malaysia protected and empowered him rather than detained him for deportation, he would have benefited from a vastly enhanced outcome. These two points of intervention—the provision of reasonable alternatives and the sustained empowerment of the survivor regardless of his migration status—are the fundamental areas of deficiency in current responses to slavery in almost every corner of the globe.
I documented numerous cases of debt bondage in Malaysia’s construction sector similar to Mustafa’s. The persistent theme involved up-front fees taken as loans that ensnared the individuals in debt bondage. Contractors and construction companies illegally charged the workers for the fees associated with their visas, permits, levies, and security bonds, as in Singapore. For its foreign workers, Malaysia provides “Visit Passes” for twelve-month periods of work in four sectors: manufacturing, plantations, agriculture and services, and construction, only from a preapproved list of other Asian nations. Sponsoring employers must fill out a battery of applications, conduct medical checks, produce the relevant training certificates, and pay a levy per worker by sector ($462.50 for construction) and a security bond between $62.50 and $375.00 depending on the worker’s country of origin.25 Approved workers must undergo additional checks and verifications within twenty-four hours of arrival in Malaysia, and once approved, they receive a color-coded ID card that they must wear at all times (gray for construction). The Visit Passes can be extended one year at a time for a fee that was illegally passed on to the foreign workers in most of the debt bondage cases I documented. In short, every conceivable expense is forced onto the workers and deducted from their wages, leaving them with minimal income to show for their backbreaking work as they build the future of Malaysia.
I visited the worker barracks in which the construction migrants lived and found the conditions markedly worse than in Singapore. They were more crowded, filthy, and depressing. I visited six barracks in total, and in each of them the workers were locked inside at night, even on the weekends. The barracks were in varying degrees of disrepair, and the stench of sweat and refuse was overpowering. When I asked the people living in the barracks about the conditions, their answers depressed me further. “At least we have toilets and hot water,” a worker from Bangladesh told me. He did not have these luxuries back home.
I could find little that was minimally acceptable about the barracks I visited outside of Kuala Lumpur, even though they provided luxuries such as toilets and hot water, which many of the workers did not have in their home villages. I saw bed bugs in almost every bunk I inspected, along with mold, rusted nails, grime, dust, and other filth and, of course, the heat was stifling. Only the fatigue borne of a fourteen-hour workday spent in backbreaking construction work would allow a man to sleep in these conditions. The barracks were pitiful, and the government-run shelters for victims of human trafficking were not much better.
The government of Malaysia operates a system of shelters for victims of human trafficking as mandated by the country’s human trafficking law. In the two shelters I visited, occupants were kept locked inside at all times, although at least the sleeping areas and bathrooms were cleaner than in the barracks. The shelters were drab, depressing, and crowded. They felt more like prisons than homes of freedom and empowerment. A 2010 amendment to Malaysia’s Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2007 helped me understand the true intention behind these shelters. The amendment was designed, in my opinion, to make it much easier for Malaysia to wash its hands of almost any victim of human trafficking identified within its borders. Section 26(B)(a) of this amendment created a new offense called “aggravated offense of smuggling of migrants,” which was described as follows: “In committing the aforesaid offence, the person intends that the smuggled migrant will be exploited after entry into the receiving country or transit country whether by the person himself or by another person.”
In other words, if an individual smuggles someone into Malaysia with the intention of exploiting him or her, this is not human trafficking but aggravated smuggling, even though this act is the textbook definition of human trafficking under international law. A human trafficking victim triggers certain positive obligations of a state to protect and empower the victim, including potential regularization of their migration status, but a victim of aggravated smuggling simply can be held in a shelter until he or she is deported. This is exactly what was happening in the prisonlike government shelters in Malaysia; people who should be clearly identified as victims of human trafficking were being held captive until the state was able to arrange for their deportation. Some smuggled migrants were also in the shelters, for which the appropriate legal response might be deportation, but the conflation of trafficking with smuggling and the deficient nature of the government shelters made the government’s intentions clear, Beyond the tragic revictimization of the trafficking victims, this myopic approach to the crime allows traffickers to go almost entirely unpunished. Despite all the awareness, the laws, and the appearances of a robust and reasoned response to human trafficking, Malaysia’s handling of slavery offenses appeared to be making matters worse. Before leaving, I decided to share my thoughts with government officials.
The main government complex for Malaysia is in Putrajaya, about 20 kilometers south of Kuala Lumpur. I arranged meetings with the National Anti-Trafficking-in-Persons Secretariat, the Minister of the Interior, the Attorney General, the Malaysian Bar Council, and the Council for Anti-Trafficking-in-Persons (MAPO) to explore the chasm between aspiration and reality vis-à-vis Malaysia’s antitrafficking efforts, especially as they related to the system of debt bondage that seemed embedded in its migrant construction worker population. I was received respectfully by everyone I met and was afforded candid conversations. The Minister of the Interior and the Attorney General seemed genuinely concerned about human trafficking, and more important, about the suffering of trafficking victims. The team at MAPO outlined their efforts to tackle all forms of human trafficking and identified a lack of transnational cooperation with prevention and investigations of trafficking offenses as barriers to their efforts. I probed the issue of debt bondage among the country’s migrant workforce with every official I met, and I always received reasonable responses. I was assured the government was aware of the problem of excessive wage deductions and would be elevating efforts to prevent the abuses. Most government officials pointed fingers to the governments of origin countries in South Asia and East Asia as not doing more to protect their citizens from being exploited through excessive up-front fees. I explained that the finger-pointing only benefited the exploiters, which received grudging agreement. I also took officials to task over the conflation of smuggling and trafficking in the 2010 amendment to Malaysia’s antitrafficking law and the prisonlike conditions at the government shelters I visited, and our perceptions diverged in predictable ways. Officials saw no major problem with the 2010 amendment. They claimed the procedures at the shelters were meant to keep victims safe, and the country was doing everything it could to protect individuals who were identified as victims of human trafficking, forced labor, debt bondage, or child labor. The crux of the issue was the term “identified”—those I identified as victims were clearly falling through the definitional cracks, and the country generally appeared to be looking the other way when it came to debt bondage exploitation of migrants in the name of economic growth, just like Singapore.
Because several government officials in Malaysia pointed fingers at the governments of origin nations for not doing more to protect their migrants and help them avoid the excessive up-front fees that lead to debt bondage, I arranged meetings with consular officials in Malaysia from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, and the Philippines. They (gently) pointed their fingers back at Malaysia for “maintaining an environment that promotes human trafficking,” as the consular official from Sri Lanka explained. The official from Bangladesh told me, “They need the workers, so the construction companies and palm oil companies recruit from my country. These recruiters charge excessive fees and exploit the workers. We try to promote safe migration, but once our citizens are on their soil, there is little we can do to help them. The recruiters make fairy tale promises that any person from the lower economic rungs would be tempted to accept.”
Although it is reasonable to critique the governments of these sending countries for not doing more to provide security and economic opportunity for their citizens, I believe destination countries do not really want them to do so because they depend on the exploitable, expendable low-wage workforce these countries can provide. This is the unspoken agreement between developing and developed economies: keep enough of your citizens poor and lacking opportunity so we can recruit them for cheap labor and you will benefit by taxing their remittance income and being relieved of the burden of having to try and find employment for them. Much of the world is being built under the onerous terms of this tacit agreement. Caught in the middle, the vulnerable and downtrodden are recruited and exploited in debt bondage and slavery in a self-perpetuating system that seems increasingly embedded in the logic of the global economy.
Although most of my government interactions left me dissatisfied with their efforts to address the problem of migrant worker exploitation, I had one illuminating conversation with an opposition MP in Malaysia who, under condition of anonymity, told me a very different story from that of the ruling party officials I met. He was an intense, charismatic man who saw his country with very different eyes. He told me at a hotel coffee shop in Kuala Lumpur:
The government profits from the human trafficking industry directly. They take kickbacks from the construction companies and the plantation companies from the wages they are supposed to pay the migrant workers, so long as the government looks the other way. Also, the police are corrupt. They allow trafficking in persons to take place. The contractors bribe them, and they do not bring charges if a worker complains his wage is being denied, or that he is living in squalor, or he is forced to repay a fraudulent debt and the boss says he still owes money. The government does not care about the migrants so long as they come here to work and leave without causing problems. The government claims there are no Malaysians to do this work and this is why they must bring in the migrants. The truth is, no one would stand for Malaysians being treated this way, but they do not mind if Bangladeshis or Nepalis are treated like this.
The opposition MP spoke passionately as he decried a system of rampant corruption and racism that he felt led to the exploitation of millions of South Asians and East Asians trafficked to his country and forced into servitude. “What can be done?” I asked. The opposition MP sighed, “Not many of us are willing to speak out against the government. It is difficult to enact social change when people live in fear of punishment for expressing themselves in ways that do not appease those in power. You can do this, though. You can let people know what is happening here. This will help.”
I thanked the opposition MP for his courage in speaking with me, and I promised him I would write about the research I had done in his country in the hope that this might play some small role in helping his cause.
Before I left Malaysia, I spent some time researching the country’s palm oil sector because it also operates on high levels of human trafficking and debt bondage.26 Malaysia exports more palm oil than any other country in the world (around 45 percent of the world supply), and I documented sixty-five cases of labor trafficking, debt bondage, and slavery on four plantations. Every one of these cases followed a model of recruitment and exploitation similar to what I saw in the country’s construction sector. The men were from the same origin nations, were recruited with lavish promises of high wages and good working conditions, were forced to carry heavy debt loads for up-front fees, and were routinely exploited in debt bondage through excessive wage deductions relating to room and board, permits and fees, and other unjust expenses. They worked excessively long hours, and because they were hidden deep in plantations, they suffered more physical abuse, injuries, and illnesses than the construction workers. They were a captive and largely invisible population of debt bondage slaves, following the tortured footsteps of the generations of plantation slaves in Malaysia who came before them. The horrible history of this exploitation was poignantly described to me by A. Navamykandan.
Navamykandan is head of Malaysia’s National Union of Plantation Workers (NUPW), and he is descended from rubber and palm oil plantation workers who were trafficked to Malaysia by the British East India Trading Company during the nineteenth century. To say the plight of these workers is a matter close to his heart would be an understatement. “The plantation companies make the claim that there are no Malaysians to do the work,” Navamykandan explained, “then they traffic mostly South Asians to work in the plantations in debt bondage. This has been going on since the beginning.”
Navamykandan described the history of South Asian slaves who were trafficked to Malaysian plantations since colonial times and how, in his mind, little save the identity of the traffickers has changed. The NUPW works diligently to advocate for the rights of Malaysia’s plantation workers, especially decent working conditions, fair wages, and the elimination of excessive recruiter fees, but Navamykandan told me they face substantial challenges from the government. Land grabs and evictions of peasants have been all too common, and there are few if any consequences for plantation companies that traffic South Asians for debt bondage in the palm oil sector. I asked Navamykandan if he felt conditions were better or worse now compared to the time when his ancestors were trafficked to Malaysia by the British. “They are much worse,” he said. “People have no value today. That is how I feel about this question.”
For many of the same reasons that conditions for someone like Mustafa might be considered worse than for Equaino, conditions for people in Malaysia’s palm oil sector today might be considered worse than during the time when Navamykandan’s ancestors were first trafficked. The large capital investment and time it took to traffic a worker from South Asia to Malaysia in the nineteenth century would have necessitated a greater investment in the basic “well-being” of the indentured worker to ensure his productivity for as long as possible, whereas workers today take out loans to pay their own way by plane or ship to Malaysia and can be brutally exploited, then deported and replaced at minimal cost by a new slave. Despite the abolition of slavery and all the advancements in human rights in the past two centuries, the plight of many trafficked debt bondage slaves who are exploited in the same plantations as their forefathers have in some ways only worsened. True, the theoretical equality of all human life that is now codified in international law and our collective moral systems is an incalculable improvement over centuries ago, but this theory crumbles against the reality of human beings as expendable cogs in a global economic machine that transforms their bondage into economic growth for the elites whose human rights and welfare unquestionably matter more. One class chews, while the other is chewed. One class serves, while the other is served. The chewed up servants of the world are no better off than they were centuries ago, perhaps even worse off.
A Look at the Construction Worker Numbers
During my research, I documented 445 cases of individuals exploited in debt bondage conditions in the construction sector of countries outside of South Asia. However, a majority of the victims I documented (~80 percent) originated from South Asia. Some of the other key findings from these cases include:
• 100 percent males
• $186.80 per month ($7.18 per day; $0.57 per hour): average wage27
• 22.2 years: average age at time debt bondage began
• 21 cases of children under the age of eighteen years
• 127 workers from India, 71 from Bangladesh, 69 from Nepal, 48 from Pakistan, 42 from Sri Lanka, 32 from Indonesia, 11 from Cambodia, and 45 from other countries (Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America)
• $4,922: average initial debt
• 97 percent of cases belonged to minority ethnic or caste communities
• 92 percent of cases had passports and work permits confiscated on arrival
• 83 percent of cases had additional fees added after work started
• 68 percent of cases had contract terms changed on arrival
• 26 percent of cases were forced to transfer their up-front fee debts to a loan from a local bank
The extent and pervasiveness of debt bondage in the global construction industry is unparalleled in any other sector I have researched. Add the broader spectrum of labor exploitation that seems inherent to the sector, especially in the Middle East and Asia (harsh working conditions, lack of safety measures, excessive hours, etc.), and much of the world is being built on the backs of human misery. The profits generated through this misery run in the billions of dollars per year. The only sector that would consistently surpass construction on a per slave profit basis is sex trafficking, and debt bondage is highly prevalent in this sector as well.
DEBT BONDAGE AND COMMERCIAL SEX IN THE UNITED STATES
I have documented sex trafficking cases involving debt bondage in dozens of countries around the world, including in the United States. Despite the fact that sex trafficking has garnered extensive attention in the United States only in recent years, the trafficking of women and children to and within the country for forced prostitution goes back at least a few centuries.28 The cases of debt bondage–based sex slavery I documented in the United States manifest every salient element of the phenomenon, as well as some unique elements that arise due to the relationship between the foster care system and domestic sex trafficking. The U.S. model of debt bondage for transnational commercial sex migrants is similar to that of other countries: credit is taken by the victim to gain passage to the United States or for an alleged work opportunity, and upon arrival the young woman is forced into prostitution to work off her debt. Manipulations of the amount of the advance, deductions for living expenses, and other ploys are used to extend the duration of debt repayment. The promise of one day discharging the debt to pursue the original job offer (say, as a domestic worker) or to remain in prostitution as a means of earning income further ensnares the victim in the hope she will one day achieve a more favorable position.
A young girl named Maria at a shelter near San Diego told me a story that encapsulates the essence of debt bondage in the transnational commercial sex sector. In fact, she reminded me of the first child sex slave I met in Bombay fourteen years earlier—petite, soft-spoken, emptiness in her eyes. She was from a small town in the Tamaulipas state of Mexico, seventeen years old, and had been recruited to leave her home with the promise of a job working as a cleaning lady in office buildings in the United States. This is what she told me:
I traveled with the recruiter from my home to Ciudad Miguel Aleman. The recruiter left me there in a small house with more than sixty people who wanted to cross the border. Those people were from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. There were also some men from Nepal. They locked us in the house, and the coyotes told us we had to pay $800 to the cartel or they cannot take us. I did not have the money, so they said I could repay the fee once I was working.
The cartel soldiers came sometimes and took some of the men from the home, and we never saw them again. They threatened to kill us and raped the women. After I think two months, the coyotes took us across the border. It was the middle of the day. They sent us with some other men on the U.S. side. These men took us to a house. Eventually, they took me and two other girls from El Salvador to San Diego.
In San Diego, they locked me inside a house like a brothel and the men in that house raped me for two weeks. I tried to protest, but they raped me until I was unconscious. After that, they forced me to take customers at night. They said I owed them $2,000 and I can repay this at a rate of $10 per customer and then I was free to go. I thought this means I will have to be with two hundred men, but after the first week the pimp gave me an account slip. He deducted $200 that week for my rent, $200 for food, and $100 for clothes. They also deducted for condoms and medicine I needed for pain. My debt had only been reduced by $70. I told the pimp this was not fair, but he said it was the price of coming to America. I cried that night and wanted to kill myself.
I was in that brothel for almost one year before I escaped. Sometimes I had to be with four or five men in a night, sometimes it was twenty. They forced me to do unnatural things. The pimp would beat me if I did not please the customers. I had a broken rib once, but it did not matter how much pain I felt, the pimp forced me to be with customers. When I became pregnant, they made me have an abortion, even though it was against my beliefs.
Every day I prayed someone would help me. No one did, so I had to help myself. Where I am from, we all dream to come to America, but I did not know it was such a bad place.
I have documented dozens of young women just like Maria who traveled to the United States from around the globe: Central and South America, eastern Europe, Africa, and East Asia. Indeed, transnational victims of sex trafficking in the United States hail from dozens of countries, and in a majority of cases organized crime is involved with their recruitment, trafficking, and forced prostitution.29 I have also documented dozens of American citizens—usually runaway teens or girls who aged out of the foster care system—who were trafficked into forced prostitution across the country. In most cases, both domestic and transnational, these young women were compelled to work off a debt under highly unfavorable terms before being “freed.” The hope of potential freedom was used to exploit them until they escaped, or until there was nothing left to exploit. Most of the young women were promised work in hospitality, restaurants, domestic work, or as nannies. Some were told they would work in “entertainment,” however, the entertainment was portrayed in far more favorable terms than in reality. For example, the women were told they could decide whether they did or did not want to transact for commercial sex, and if they did so, they could decide with whom, but on arrival they were violently coerced to be with any and all men who purchased them.
Maria’s brothel was run by the Sinaloa cartel just outside of San Diego. I highlight her case because she was one of only four sex trafficking victims I met who was given a weekly statement of her debits and credits. Maria told me that this weekly sheet motivated her to persist until she attained her freedom, and that it had the same effect on the other young women in the brothel. Maria kept the first sheet she ever received and showed it to me. She told me the moment she received it she realized it would take her years to repay her debt. Although debt bondage slaves rarely have any sense of the arithmetic of their debt repayments, let alone formal weekly statements, Maria’s captors saw fit to provide a detailed statement of their accounts, ostensibly to motivate her to “work” harder or with less resistance. Maria told me that two girls in the house worked off their debts, and in both cases the girls stayed on and kept working under a new arrangement in which they were paid one-third of each transaction, given free room, but had to pay for their food and clothes. I asked if they were allowed to leave the house, and Maria said, “Only on the day they returned to Mexico.”
Another sophisticated model of debt bondage in the commercial sex sector in the United States that I documented involves the Russian mafia. The mafia brings Russian women to the United States on various kinds of visas (usually J, Q, or B-2), and most are told they will work in dance clubs. They are assured they will not have to engage in prostitution unless they want to but that doing so will help them work off their debts more quickly. Those debts are usually $10,000 or more, typically the purported cost of arranging documents, travel, and the work opportunity. Upon arrival, the journeys often take a dark turn. Here is what Katya, a young woman from Moscow, told me:
I heard about agents who arrange work in New York. You can find their phone numbers on the Internet. One agent, Rovnik, said he could prepare my visa and plane tickets for New York. He said I would live in a nice apartment with other girls just like me. He said I could have my own bedroom. I knew I would have to dance in clubs, but he said the girls can make $1,000 in a night. My father cannot make this amount in one month! I came to New York filled with so much hope, but my hope was crushed. I lived in Brighton Beach, and I had to dance every night in a club there. The pimps forced me to do prostitution or they said they would have me deported. The men who came to those clubs were horrible. They only wanted to do cruel acts. The club owner was named Sergey. He said I had to repay him $15,000. They took almost all my tips from dancing and all the money from the clients. I tried to keep count of my debt, but most nights I went unconscious from alcohol. Rovnik kept one promise to me. I had my own bedroom. There was a camera in the bedroom for the Internet. I had to strip in the room and take clients there two nights each week. I know they made money from that camera, but I don’t know how much. If I protested, they whipped me like an animal and denied me food. I arrived in New York in December 2010, and I escaped from Sergey in March 2012. For me to stay in this country, they said I must agree to cooperate with the police to investigate Sergey. I can never do this. Who will protect my family? I will return to Russia soon. I was a fool to think I could earn $1,000 every day and live like a princess in America.
Stories like Katya’s are common in the Russian sex trafficking circuit. Almost every victim I met accepted an offer to travel to the United States for work in dance clubs, with the promise of a glitzy life and bountiful income after they had discharged their debts. Even though there is increased awareness of these ruses in Russia, young women continue to accept offers in the hope that their fate will be better. To be fair, in every case I documented, the alternative for these young women in Russia was worse, or at least perceived to be worse. Unique to the young women I met from Russia was the vision of romance and the extravagant lifestyle they expected to have in America. “America is where we can find a rich man to give us glamour,” another victim named Alisa told me. The story of the beautiful Russian woman who marries an investment banker, shops at Tiffany’s, and socializes seven nights a week has been marketed well in Russia.
I found similar models of debt bondage in the commercial sex sector in Chinese and Thai massage parlors, East European apartment brothels, West African street prostitutes, and U.S. domestic victims of sex trafficking at various settings in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Oakland, Atlanta, Seattle, Boston, San Diego, and McCallen, Texas. Approximately 64 percent (twenty-nine of forty-five cases) of these U.S. domestic sex trafficking victims were recruited into sex trafficking while they were in the foster care system or within six months of aging out. Most of my U.S. domestic sex trafficking research was done after the publication of Sex Trafficking, and I can say unequivocally that the foster care system is a major source of domestic sex trafficking victims in the United States. Inadequate protection for U.S. foster care children after they age out is a key driver of sex trafficking, along with abuses and a lack of monitoring and care while they are in the system. Children age out of the foster care system between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, depending on state law. Many states offer transitional protection for a few years, but to qualify the children must have a steady job or have completed high school, a bar too high for many former foster care children to meet. The laws are in constant flux, and transitional foster care protections often are cut during times of budget constraints. Stephanie, a young woman I met at a halfway house in Riverside, California, told me her story:
My mom was a mess. I don’t know who my dad is, but I’m sure he’s a jerk. I was in three foster homes before I aged out. That was 2012. My caseworker made a transition plan with me. She told me about Assembly Bill 12 and how that could help me ’til I was twenty, but I didn’t qualify. I didn’t have a job, you know. She didn’t really care though. She was doing her job. “Yeah, I told Stephanie about her options.” Check.
There’s places on Facebook where girls like me hook up. I got in with a group. They were cool. We looked out for each other. I met this pimp Sean. I needed the money. I’m not proud of it. Sean said he would take care of me. I guess he did. I had food and a crib. It was bad though. I was with a lot of creeps. I wanted to stop, but Sean didn’t let me. He said I owed him. He kept most of the money, but like I said I had food and a crib.
It was like that about two years. Sean beat me down pretty bad one night. I knew that man was going to kill me. I was too afraid to run though. Cops saved me I guess. They arrested me. I told the judge what happened. She sent me here. Sean don’t know I’m at this home. He texts me all the time though, but I don’t respond. I got another couple weeks before I got to leave. I don’t know what’s next. Not many options for us, you know. I look back and I realize the system don’t protect girls like me. They may try, but they don’t. They don’t want to admit there’s girls like me ’cause what does that say about them? I know plenty of girls out of foster care end up with pimps, all messed up on drugs. People don’t realize, we’re people, too.
Stephanie was exploited in sex trafficking after she aged out of the foster care system, but a little more than one-third of the U.S. foster care sex trafficking cases I documented involved a minor who was recruited while still in the system. Many foster care homes provide loving and safe environments, but others can be almost as abusive as the homes from which the child is meant to be protected. Traffickers prey on vulnerable and abused foster care children, and debt bondage is often used as a way to ensnare them. Case workers are supposed to provide a safety mechanism to assist with transition and ensure that the children are on a secure path, but most are underpaid, overworked, and crushed with far too many cases for them to monitor each one adequately. The U.S. foster care system is desperately in need of added resources to extend protections for children once they age out. In addition, a significant increase in the number of caseworkers is needed, so they have sufficient time to invest in each case. Beyond the foster care system, sex traffickers in the United States prey on a broad population of vulnerable teens, be they runaways or children from abusive homes.30 Protections must be enhanced, and law enforcement personnel need more training to identify the indicators that a young woman may be working in prostitution as a result of recruitment and coercion when she was still a child.31
Assessing the precise number of sex trafficking cases I have documented that involve debt bondage is more challenging than in other sectors I have researched, such as construction and domestic work. The first few years that I documented these cases I did not include a full set of questions relating to debt bondage. In addition, many of the victims in sex trafficking have very little sense of their initial or subsequent debt levels. Some are given a clear sense, like Maria, but most are just told they have a debt to work off without being given any details because the recruitment channels are more informal than in the construction or domestic worker sectors, which have established and regulated recruiting processes involving predeparture training, work permits, medical checks, and work contracts. Prostitution is not a formal or legal work sector in most of the countries in which I have documented sex trafficking, or if prostitution is legal, coercion, pimping, and the exploitation of minors is not. Nonetheless, I am confident that between 60 and 75 percent of the sex trafficking cases I documented, including in the United States, involved debt bondage. The debts in the cases for which I was able to obtain reliable data ranged from roughly $1,000 to $40,000. These figures represent a significant variance, with the low end being regional sex trafficking victims in Latin America and Asia, and the high end being Nigerians trafficked to Europe. To be sure, most cases of Nigerian sex trafficking victims I described in chapter 2 also would be considered cases of debt bondage, and these victims have the highest levels of debt of any slaves I have encountered. Sex trafficking victims in general who are ensnared in debt bondage have in fact the highest levels of debt of any sector of slavery I have documented. The manner in which they are forced to repay these debts is utterly debasing and should bring shame to each and every man who purchases them, for it is their avid consumption of women and children that makes the immense debts possible, and all the destruction that goes with it.
May 26 and 28, 2016
In Sex Trafficking,32 I describe an anguishing encounter with Sunee, a trafficked sex slave in Los Angeles, whom I last saw on April 26, 2006. She was a Thai girl at a massage parlor near the intersection of Hollywood and Western boulevards. She had been trafficked from her home village of Fang, Thailand, with the promise that she would work as a waitress and send money home to provide life-saving medicine for her father. Upon arrival in Los Angeles, she was told she had to work off a debt of $20,000 through prostitution at a massage parlor; if she did not cooperate, the man who trafficked her from her village, Aran, would make her parents suffer. If she did cooperate, she was told her father would be sent enough money to buy the medicines he needed. Sunee made the only choice a child could—she endured around eight counts per day of rape to save her parents. When I offered to help her leave the massage parlor, she declined. I wrestled with the question of whether to work with a local NGO to rescue her against her will, but I did not take action for fear of the unintended negative consequences against her parents. My choice has always haunted me.
My inability to assist Sunee, a slave being exploited not fifteen miles from my home in Los Angeles, left me in a dark quandary over the purpose of my antislavery efforts. Had I met Sunee some years later, perhaps when I had more powerful relationships with which to assist her, would I have made a different choice? Maybe, maybe not. The theoretical clarity of the right and wrong course of action in slavery cases is almost always clouded by the complexities of real-world consequences. Sunee was desperate to stay in servitude because it was the only way she could save her parents. Who was I to decide otherwise?
About ten years later, I revisited Sunee’s massage parlor. I knew she would be long gone, if for no other reason than she would be too old to entice men to purchase a teenager for sex. Nevertheless, I took two trips to her massage parlor on May 26 and May 28, 2016. If I found another slave, perhaps I might be able to redeem the choice I had made with Sunee.
The waiting room of the massage parlor still smelled like lemongrass. The proprietor during Sunee’s time, Chuvit, was no longer there. A woman named Malee had taken his place. She showed me a menu of massages and prices, then led me to a back area to pick which girl would massage me. Five young Thai girls in ethnic trousers and white tee shirts stood before me. None were Sunee. I picked the one who looked the youngest, and she led me to a massage room. The rooms had mattresses on the floor with fresh sheets. As before, I was given a pair of loose fitting cotton pants and a shirt to wear. The young girl, Dao, entered and gave me the sixty-minute Thai massage that I had ordered. Unlike Sunee, she did not ask if I wanted to have sex with her. I spoke with Dao during most of the massage to learn more about her. She told me she was from the northern hill tribe region of Thailand, not far from Chiang Rai. She had arrived in Los Angeles with a few other girls from nearby villages two years earlier. She worked at the parlor to send money to her family, which consisted of two younger brothers in school and her mother. I asked if she had paid her own way to Los Angeles, but she said her family took a loan for the flight and travel documents. She thought it was around $5,000, but when she arrived she was told it was $15,000. She had since been working off the debt at the parlor, but she was not sure how much debt remained. She said that Malee showed her a Western Union receipt each month for $500 that she sent to her mother. She also received petty cash for expenses, but no sort of regular wage based on her hours of work. Her overall compensation seemed very low given that she worked around twelve hours a day, six days a week.
I returned to the massage parlor two days later. Malee remembered me and greeted me warmly. If I was going to return often, she told me I should buy a massage package, which would give me a 10 percent discount. I told her I would think about it. I went through the same routine of picking a girl. Dao was there again, but this time I picked Isra. She gave me the massage, and did not solicit for sex. Her English was not as good as Dao’s, but we still managed to have an informative conversation. She too was a hill tribe girl who worked to send money to her family. Isra confirmed that she and the other girls each worked six days a week, around twelve hours a day. She also told me that they all lived in a nearby apartment, which was owned by the massage parlor. They did not go anywhere aside from the apartment and the parlor. Isra was the youngest of three siblings and had been at the parlor for seven months. Like Dao, she had a debt relating to her transport and papers, and like Dao, she was not sure of the overall arithmetic of her remaining debt. She was also told upon arrival that her debt was $15,000, and she received the same Western Union slip each month from Malee showing a transfer to her family of $500, plus some petty cash for her expenses. Isra said she felt proud when she received the slip because she knew she was helping her family.
After my two visits to Sunee’s massage parlor without any indication that there were sex slaves inside, I wondered if the parlor still offered these services. Perhaps they had gone more underground (only offering sex at night) or only made offers to “insider” customers who knew how to ask for a different set of girls from which to choose, or perhaps the parlor had been busted some time ago for prostitution and was now under new ownership that restricted the services to massages. I was not able to secure full case histories from Dao and Isra, but all indications were that they were working in exploitative debt bondage conditions for the parlor. They toiled day and night with excessive wage deductions they did not fully understand to help their families survive. The $500 sent by the parlor to their families plus petty cash each month was less than one-fourth of what I estimated their monthly wages should be. They appeared to have no freedom of movement or employment, and as near as I could tell their debt levels far exceeded the actual costs of arranging their transport and work in Los Angeles. As with Sunee, Dao and Isra preferred these debt bondage conditions to freedom because freedom would not help their families achieve a better life.
After these two encounters, I faced a similar dilemma to that of helping Sunee—should I intervene in a scenario that I was certain amounted to bondage and servitude, even if doing so would likely cause material harm to the families of the people I was trying to help? What of the pride Isra felt in being able to provide a better life for her family? I knew that Dao and Isra would likely not qualify as victims of “severe forms of trafficking” under the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act because child sexual exploitation did not appear to be involved in their cases. They would therefore probably not have access to the full protections under the law, including regularized migration status, and in all likelihood they would be deported, which would cause harm to their families. I consulted colleagues at a local antitrafficking NGO about the cases, and they promised to investigate further. This referral was the only step I took. A few weeks later, my colleagues told me they discretely provided their contact information to some of the young women at the parlor, but that no one had contacted them yet. I was agonized once again by my inability to intervene in a case of human trafficking that was right around the corner. Debt bondage and servitude persisted not 15 miles from my home, and I could do very little about it without taking unjustifiable risks. Even if these children were to be “freed” and returned home, they probably would be trafficked again before too long out of their need to support their families.
Freedom is not a one-time event. It is not a box to be ticked or a moment to be congratulated. It is a fragile, precious condition that must be supported and protected for a full human life. The failure to provide true freedom to all classes, genders, and communities in the world remains the great failure of contemporary civilization. No amount of antislavery advocacy, research, rhetoric, or activism will end slavery until we appreciate that its antonym—freedom—must be vigorously preserved through tremendous sacrifice and an unrelenting campaign to exterminate all of its assailants, including poverty, gender and ethnic biases, corruption, greed, or the appalling truth that for most people in the world, servitude often provides more security than does freedom. Freedom for the underclass of humanity remains a shadow, a mythical creature adorned in splendors that mocks, evades, and slips like dust through the fingers of those who dare to grasp at it. Until we truly understand freedom, we cannot abolish slavery. If we cannot abolish slavery, freedom has no meaning.
