Human trafficking called a ‘war crime’

CdeBaca said one of the biggest advances in his cause has occurred in recent years, when leaders in law enforcement stopped seeing human trafficking as such and instead began to treat it as a crime.

“This morning, I had a coffee. I put on a cotton shirt,” he said. The ambassador was frustrated that he didn’t know whether the coffee came from a plantation in South America that keeps slaves, or whether the cotton was picked by children in Central Asia.

“I don’t think any of us knows what we have done in the last four hours that impacts the slavery world,” he said.

The most damning example can be found in most people’s pockets or purses, he said.

“Women are being stolen from villages; they are being raped en masse; and then they are being put to work in what we euphemistically call ‘artisanal mining,’” he said.

These women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are enslaved and handed shovels or tin cans in order to harvest tantalum, a rare element that is used in mobile phones, he said.

“It is a war crime, and we need to think of it as a war crime,” he said.

He also hopes that the current “sexy” portrayals of prostitution in television and on film will go the way of depicting smoking on screen, making perpetrators into pariahs instead of studs.

Getting Involved

If you suspect someone may be a victim of human trafficking, call (888) 3737-888 or visit www.acf.hhs.gov/trafficking.