I’m sitting in a climate summit rn and I really need to remind people that agricultural trafficking is a bigger issue than sex trafficking AND sexual assault happens to trafficking victims in EVERY field to the point that it’s kind of disingenuous to call it/focus on ‘sex trafficking’ the way it’s disingenuous to complain about sex work being ‘exploitative’ or the source of sex trafficking as if hotel workers, restaurant workers and so on aren’t known to be exposed to extremely high amounts of sexual harassment and assault.
anyway apparently some 70% of the children trafficked into child labor in the US are in the agricultural fields to put veggies on shelves and houseplants in home depot.
just something to think about.
I also want to remind you that the vast majority of farm workers are Black and Indigenous. Like down here it’s mostly Mexican & Haitian workers.
Working the fields for pennies a unit with no breaks, in the heat.
This is the legacy of slavery. This culture forces people who know the land to feed them, and gives them NOTHING in return.
They did it with Africans and Indigenous people up and down the east coast and into the Caribbean and they’re STILL doing it.
For those who don’t know the context behind what OP’s saying, I recommend this interview with a long-time researcher and consultant on human trafficking. A relevant quote:
What we should have done [instead of separating “sex trafficking” from other forms of trafficking] was talk about forced labour, including forced sexual services, slavery-like practices and servitude. We should have used concepts that describe the living and working conditions in which people find themselves. These are concepts that are defined in international human rights law, and they’re kind of neutral. But at that time we weren’t aware of all that, so we ended up falling back on the 19th-century Victorian concept of trafficking with its focus on the purity and victimhood of women and the protection of national borders. In doing so, we unwittingly imported a highly biased concept, dividing women into innocent victims in need of rescue and guilty ones who can be abused with impunity, but also with racist and nationalistic overtones.
There are an estimated 146,000 domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates. Sadly, research shows that a staggering percentage of them are exploited by their employers.
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