|
Abstract
|
For everyone engaged in efforts to stop the exploitation and harm associated with human trafficking, it always sounds helpful to know how many people are being exploited in particular places and where they come from. Finding out should help us assess whether efforts to cut down these numbers are effective or not.
However, too many of the attempts to measure prevalence over the past two decades have generated data that is meaningless or misleading. A preoccupation with estimating the total number of victims in a whole country or region (or the world as a whole), rather than in a specific sector of the economy or affecting a specific social group, has meant that the predicament of groups of people who are known to have endured near-slavery for decades is being drowned out. This happens when the prevalence of all forms of exploitation (or all cases of 'modern slavery') is estimated at once. Huge inaccuracies creep in when cases of forced marriage are included as well (rather than trafficking for forced marriage), or everyone involved in sex work is counted, rather than focusing on those who are tricked or forced into prostitution to make money for others. The result has been that some patterns of long-term exploitation which it should be a priority to denounce are instead being neglected.
Paraguay is an example that is not known to the world as a hotbed of human trafficking or slavery (albeit a byword for every kind of abuse under the Stroessner dictatorship). Perhaps it should be. The indigenous Enxet in Paraguay's Chaco region, where the economy is dominated by cattle ranches owned by non-indigenous people of European descent, have been exploited in near-slavery for decades. The Enxet number approximately 16,000, several thousand of whom live on ranches and have been in servitude for many years and still are today.1 However, readers of the US State Department's annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report and the Global Slavery Index (GSI)2 in 2016 could be excused for not being aware of this pattern, amidst estimates that 26,800 Paraguayans are in modern slavery. This GSI estimate was based on an assumption that Paraguay had similar characteristics to other countries where 0.404 per cent of the population were reckoned to be in 'modern slavery'. It made no attempt to differentiate between people exploited for years on end and those exploited for shorter periods. The TIP report noted in 2014 and 2015 that children involved in ranching are 'vulnerable to trafficking', but without noting that they were part of entire families in debt bondage. Its 2016 edition contains no reference to this long-term pattern of near-slavery. My concern is that the focus on national prevalence of human trafficking means that an entrenched pattern of exploitation is ignored.
Language: en |