Liezl Tomas Rebugio is the Anti-Trafficking Project Director for the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum.

Human trafficking is one of the worst forms of exploitation and human rights violations. It’s become a multi-billion dollar industry with profits that rival the illegal drugs and arms trade. Trafficked persons are forced into various types of labor that include domestic servitude, servile marriage, sex work, sweatshop labor, and agricultural work. This is an important issue to NAPAWF, because 80% of trafficked persons globally are women and girls and two-thirds of persons trafficked into the U.S. are from East Asia and the Pacific Islands.

Nowadays, we hear a lot about human trafficking. But we don’t hear a lot about the intersection between human trafficking and other social justice struggles, particularly reproductive justice. NAPAWF believes that reproductive justice is achieved when all women and girls have the means and ability to make well-informed decisions about their bodies, their health, their families and their communities. With this in mind, reproductive justice plays a role in ending violence against women, economic justice, immigrant rights, and more. Allied organizations like Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice and SisterSong also talk how reproductive justice is connected with other human rights issues.

Some advocates refer to these human right violations as “Reproductive Oppression,� which is a means to control women’s reproductive lives and exploit their bodies and labor as a tool to oppress them based on their race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and immigration status.

The trafficking of women and girls is the quintessential example of reproductive oppression. “Get your laws off my body� was a slogan used in the 1970’s during the women’s movement. But how does that apply to trafficked women and girls whose bodies are not treated as their own, but are treated as commodities?

The garment industry is an area where trafficking flourishes. The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands has a garment manufacturing industry worth one billion dollars. Over 30 garment factories employ more than 10,000 workers, many of who are from China, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Bangladesh. The women often work up to 20 hours a day and are forced to meet stringent production quotas. They are underpaid and sometimes not paid at all. Trafficked women may also be subjected to forced abortions and required to take birth control pills.

Women and girls trafficked into sex work are vulnerable to contracting sexually transmitted infections, especially when they are stripped from their power to negotiate safe sex. However, some women and girls are required to use condoms. And this may be the only “care� they receive. So when reproductive health issues arise, for example if women develop ovarian cysts, they are prohibited from receiving treatment.

Human trafficking is an extremely complicated issue and can’t be fully addressed in isolation from other struggles it is inherently connected with, particularly reproductive justice.

In fact, this summer NAPAWF will release an anti-trafficking action agenda that expands anti-trafficking discourse to include other human rights struggles and its disproportionate impact on API women and girls. Stay tuned to hear more about it!

2 Comments

May 17, 2007 8:01 PM

[0+]  Mina said:

Thanks for the post! I will definitely stay tuned.

The BBC's been covering slavery* a lot lately because of the UK anniversary:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/world/slavery/default.stm
but doesn't have much info on what one can do to help stop it.

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May 17, 2007 8:06 PM

[0+]  Mina said:

Oops, forgot the footnote

* Someday maybe we can call it slavery instead of "human trafficking" too (I've heard some people get confused when the term includes local slavery) without having the conversation get bogged down by the "there's been no slavery since 1865!!!" crowd. Seems like the UK's already there.

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