Over the past few years, a growing number of Jewish social justice groups have developed a keen interest in the issue of human trafficking, an issue that has become more prominent due to increasing attention by the Bush Administration and the U.S. Congress, the media, international development and human rights groups, and other religiously affiliated groups, particularly evangelical Christians. 
Human trafficking is in effect a modern form of slavery. The United Nations defines trafficking as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat, or use of force or other forms of coercion…[to achieve] control over another person for the purpose of exploitation.”*

Trafficking in persons takes many forms. The U.S. State Department, in its annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, defines nine “severe” forms of trafficking in persons, including forced and bonded labor, debt bondage, involuntary servitude among migrant laborers, involuntary domestic servitude, sex trafficking, and various forms of exploitation of children for labor, soldiering, or commercial sex. Trafficking is different from (though in some circumstances it may be related to) “people smuggling,” which occurs when persons voluntarily pay others to ferry them across a border, such as in the case of the well-known “coyotes” that operate between Mexico and the U.S.
Individuals and communities are vulnerable to trafficking and subsequent enslavement because they already live in conditions of economic and social marginalization so desperate that they are subject to and willing to believe promises made by traffickers of a better life elsewhere, irrespective of the lack of evidence for these promises or the trustworthiness of their credentials.

Such examples include an impoverished Filipina, seeking to provide a better life for her family, who is convinced to travel to the Middle East on the promise of good pay, only to be trapped involuntarily as a domestic servant far away from home and with no one to secure her rights. Or a wife so conditioned by social mores of marital subservience that she is in effect trafficked into prostitution by her own husband. Or children sold into slavery by parents in India (or Thailand or Vietnam) desperate to feed their family through the sale of one girl or boy to a “businessman.” (These parents are given a false promise that s/he will be well-cared for and able to send money back home, when in reality that child is forced to work in factories under slavelike conditions.) Or, as in a story recounted by an AJWS grantee, a woman sold by her parents for a “temporary marriage” to an Arab Sheikh visiting India on business; she is taken as his wife to another city, then in a matter of weeks is abandoned, divorced by a man she never knew but unable to return to her original home.

Human trafficking is a “Jewish” issue because it resonates within the Jewish community, linking us to our own long history of enslavement and oppression, of being forced to act in accord with the wishes and intentions of persons with greater power. This issue is relevant both at home and abroad; trafficking plagues both the U.S. and Israel (see essay by Rahel Gershuni) as well as countries in the more “distant” developing world. Questions have been raised, for example, as to whether some of the workers embroiled in the recent controversy surrounding abusive labor practices at Iowa-based Agriprocessors, the largest kosher meat processing plant in the U.S., are victims of trafficking, contradicting the very principle of kashrut.

We are linked to modern trafficking and slavery by our history of slavery and challenged — through the obligations of tikkun olam and pidyon shivuyim (freeing of slaves) — to act on behalf of others enslaved, whether they are “strangers” or members of our own community. The mandate to remember our slavery in Egypt, recounted in the Pesach story, teaches that there is little worse for human beings than being denied control over their own lives.  These obligations and the tenets of Jewish law and practice make trafficking an issue the Jewish community should not ignore.

As horrific as the realities of trafficking may be, there is no simple solution to this highly complex problem. Trafficking has become a politically charged issue; the definitions of trafficking and strategies to eradicate it are often highly contested, and some strategies are more clearly linked to other political agendas than to the real needs of trafficked persons.

How big is the problem? Data cited by the U.S. Department of State put the number of persons trafficked across national borders annually at 800,000 (a figure not including the millions trafficked within their own countries). These data, however, are highly contested. A 2006 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report criticized the Department of State’s methods of collecting data and questioned its conclusions, as have many independent researchers. In fact, conducting research on trafficking is challenging at best — definitions lack consistency, the lack of standardized data collection techniques are few, and accurate data collection and documentation of such underground criminal activity is difficult.

Data collection is also compromised when police and other government authorities are themselves complicit in trafficking and, for the right amount of “under the table” payment, look the other way. And in a political climate where an “illegal immigrant” is subject to summary deportation, victims of trafficking are more likely to hide than to reveal their situation, so reporting is difficult. Although it’s clear that those accused of trafficking in the U.S. should be prosecuted, it remains unclear whether trafficked persons have any rights in their country of residence. Do they receive healthcare and needed social services without retribution? Or are they deported irrespective of their wishes to desperate circumstances in their own countries?

Laws and policies based solely on “victimhood” and those that “blame the victim,” also make the problem harder to solve. Trafficked persons are victims of a crime, and they must be seen as individuals with basic human rights and with the agency to make decisions for themselves. In some settings, for example, and under current U.S. law, all commercial sex workers are defined as “victims of trafficking” irrespective of why or how they came to be engaged in sex work and whether or not they choose to leave sex work of their own volition. More globally, policies that identify all sex workers as victims of trafficking have justified “rescue and rehabilitation” strategies in countries such as India, Thailand, and Vietnam, even though human rights advocates report that some such rescue attempts effectively incarcerate women in rehabilitation camps, taking away their rights to freedom of movement, ties with their children and community, and any form of agency to make choices about their fate. 
Because trafficking has its roots in economic and social deprivation, it is critical to understand and address both the symptoms and the root causes of the problem. Effective strategies require understanding vulnerability to trafficking in the same way we have come to understand other issues of global concern. Gender-based violence, for example, is at once a legal and a public health problem, but also one rooted in deeply-held social mores governing power relations and gender roles in society and in the economic disparities between women and men. Setting up shelters and legal clinics for victims of gender-based violence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for addressing this problem. We must go further. Likewise, creating legal frameworks and rescuing trafficking victims in tandem with human rights principles are necessary but not sufficient steps toward ending this problem.

The obligation to act on behalf of others who are enslaved is not in question. But how we, as Jews, act — based on which definition and evidence of the problem we are trying to solve and in whose name — is still unclear. Our obligation to tikkun olam requires us to challenge our assumptions and understand and address these issues in their totality in the historic struggle for freedom from slavery.

*United Nations, 2000, Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.

How democratic governments undergo change is an elusive question. As a rule, governments are slow-moving, heavy entities, somewhat akin to elephants. They take their time to recognize new phenomena and to react to them. On the other hand, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can be compared to mice, scurrying close to the ground with ears finely attuned to every change, and equipped with the speed to react almost instantly.

On a daily basis, a slow pace may not be such a bad idea. None of us would feel comfortable if governments leapt into action at the barest hint of change. But what factors coalesce to make governments change? What creates a situation where governments creatively address new problems?

 Let’s look at how the Israeli government, as a living laboratory for social change, transformed its policies regarding the trafficking of persons. In this case, change occurred when pressures built from within and also from outside the government, and when people with knowledge and power insisted that government officials not retreat to an ineffective comfort zone.

Trafficking to Israel began in the 1990s when young women from the former Soviet Union were brought to Israel for the purpose of prostitution. When trafficking began, government agencies did not identify it as a new phenomenon, but rather classified the victims into known categories — as illegal entrants or foreign prostitutes.

Government reaction followed these classifications. Women were either deported or, on occasion, indicted for illegal entry or allied offences; they were not encouraged to tell their stories or to remain in Israel for testimony. Even when law enforcement was considered, it tended to be weak and halting, as a result of the ambivalence that characterized enforcement of prostitution offences in Israel.1 (footnotes on page 4)
Gradually trafficking was recognized as a new phenomenon, requiring different modes of enforcement, and the trafficked women were viewed as victims rather than as criminals or prostitutes.

The change was a function of internal and external pressures. Internally, the growth of the phenomenon and its severity were felt in police fieldwork. During the heyday of trafficking, 3,000 women a year were trafficked.2 They were bought and sold in public auctions, imprisoned in brothels, held in debt bondage, and their passports detained.3 This was beyond the previous scope of prostitution offences, leading to new police guidelines and the formation of an inter-ministerial committee to study the subject. The committee’s recommendations encompassed a wide range of multidisciplinary tools to address trafficking, including establishing shelters for trafficked women, heightening police enforcement, and establishing legislation to promote closing of brothels.
Externally, several nongovernmental organizations heightened public and government awareness. In addition, the 2001 U.S. Department Report on the status of trafficking in various countries documented that Israel was not conforming to the minimal standards or taking adequate measures to combat the problem. This sent shockwaves throughout the country and proved a potent agent for change.

And, finally, the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee on Trafficking in Women provided an additional and forceful push, highlighting the issue, inviting key government spokesmen to account for their efforts, and promoting legislation that reclassified trafficking beyond the old categories of prostitution. It is instructive that this legislation was not initiated by government, but rather by a private member of Parliament.  The change in awareness sparked a series of comprehensive steps designed to address trafficking in a focused manner.  Among the most important steps were the following preventive measures:

• Heightened monitoring of borders
• Increased coordination among government agencies and NGOs
• National plans to address trafficking
• Ratification of international treaties
• Public information brochures distributed in countries of origin to warn women of the dangers of trafficking

In addition, several measures were proposed that address law enforcement issues. For example, legislation to criminalize trafficking for purposes beyond prostitution — including slavery, forced labor, and removal of organs — was enacted, which also established provisions to prosecute Israeli citizens who have committed trafficking offences abroad. Provisions to facilitate forfeiture of assets of crime, to establish a trafficking fund, to mandate minimum sentences, to accord protections for victims during the criminal procedure, and to give victims the right to legal aid were also established.
Among the measures to protect victims of trafficking are:

• a shelter for up to 50 victims of trafficking who will receive medical and psychosocial assistance and job retraining
• free legal aid for civil or administrative claims arising from the trafficking
• visas and work permits to trafficking victims for a period of one year for the purposes of rehabilitation
• waiving offences integral to the trafficking crime such as illegal entry
• assessing risk for victims if returned to their countries of origin
• compensating victims in criminal cases or civil suits

Today police estimate there are no more than a few hundred victims of trafficking for prostitution in Israel. In addition, the patterns of criminal activity have changed and victims are rarely held under inhuman conditions, as in the past. However, slavery and forced labor still occur, especially in the foreign-worker community, as does trafficking for organ removal.

Despite the progress, inertia continues to present a problem, and activists must remain vigilant to ensure that government agencies do not revert to old classifications, as when trafficking victims began returning to Israel and police indicted them for illegal entry, though policy had been formulated not to prosecute victims for crimes integral to the trafficking.

Israel has made great strides in its battle against trafficking through pooling the resources of the government and NGOs. While NGOs were the pioneers who first recognized the phenomenon and worked with the victims, government intervention has been essential in monitoring borders, vigorously prosecuting traffickers, allocating resources for legal aid, and various policy decisions, including visas and work permits for victims.

One of the most valuable lessons learned from this social experiment was how to foster cooperative work between the government and NGOs through pooling experience and information, and making use of the advantages of each body. In order to do so, it was necessary to overcome prejudices on both sides and in the words of an NGO activist in Moldova: “learn how to shake hands without a clenched fist.”

In her faded jeans, a black blazer, flats, and delicate earrings, Tanya looks more like the school teacher she was trained to be than a woman who lived through six years of hell as a trafficked woman in Spain. Until now, she has not shared her story publicly because the Russian press has insensitively portrayed the experiences of trafficked women in sexually charged ways and exposed their identities in the communities where they are being repatriated.

The collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 initially resulted in a dramatic economic decline for many people living in the region. For example, in Tanya’s city, just hours outside of Moscow, people were laid off from government-owned factories and others began receiving their salaries very sporadically. With the government and economy in transition, social services to the needy dried up. Russians living in small cities with shuttered factories and no natural resources began a long period of trying to figure out how their economy would shift to sustain their communities.

When Tanya’s father died, she realized that she could not realistically support herself and her mother. She heard that a local job placement agency was sending women to Spain and that the agency would advance all of her expenses. Tanya was told that she would be a hostess in a bar and would be responsible for encouraging patrons to buy drinks. She would receive 50 percent of the purchases and the bar, the other 50 percent. She was promised inexpensive housing and was assured that no sex was involved. In return, she had to repay the $1700 advanced for her expenses, plus 50 percent interest in two months — a total of $2850. The agency’s representative confidently told her that she would make enough to repay the debt on schedule and then would be free to keep all future earnings or, set off on her own.

Upon arriving in Spain, the agency took Tanya’s passport as “a precaution to ensure repayment of her debt.” When Tanya expressed concern, she was told that she could return home, but “How would she repay her debt?” The promised apartment had a kitchen, bathroom, and two bedrooms. Twenty women lived in the apartment, sleeping in shifts on bunk beds and under the constant supervision of a guard. The guard escorted the women daily to the bar and occasionally to the supermarket for supplies. The women received only 20 percent of the money from the drinks they sold.

Despite the difficult situation, Tanya forged ahead until the agency announced that the bar had been sold and would be re-opening as a strip club. The women were given the option to repay their debt within two days or remain as strippers and prostitutes. Tanya nervously shared her situation with one of her regular customers at the bar and he offered to pay her debt and set her up in an apartment. Tanya’s savior was initially kind to her and indicated that he would eventually marry her. Over the next months, Tanya’s Spanish improved and she realized that this man was married and, moreover, he was increasingly isolating her. Without much money or a work visa, she was trapped. She asked to return to Russia. At this point, he began beating her and keeping her locked in the apartment. 

Over the next two years, Tanya used every opportunity to get to a phone to contact the Russian embassy and the Spanish police. In each instance, she was given little assistance and treated with complete disdain. Her abuser learned of her attempts, escalated the beatings, and tightened security. Finally, she was able to get access to a phone and reached her mother in Russia. She told her mother where she was being held and asked her to send help.

Tanya’s mother, a traditional Russian Orthodox woman from a provincial region, could not understand what had happened. She had no idea whom to ask for help and she was petrified that if she was indiscreet, her daughter would never be able to return to their community because her reputation would be so damaged. Fortunately, one of her friends knew that the Jewish community had organized an interfaith response to trafficking. 

Project Kesher’s commitment to the issue of trafficking emerged when women in the organization’s network began informally studying Jewish texts as a basis for community activism. In 1998, their study of “pidyon shivuyim,” the freeing of captives, came face-to-face with articles in the New York Times highlighting trafficking in women globally and particularly in Israel. According to the Israel Women’s Network, approximately 3,000 women in Israel were in the trafficking pipeline, a large percentage from the former Soviet Union. While Israel is not one of the largest recipients of trafficked women, it remains one of the most visible. By addressing the issue of trafficking, the women in Project Kesher’s network aligned their Jewish identity and activism. They began to organize anti-trafficking activities in their communities and to demonstrate that Jews who had embraced their religious identity could remain in this region and share their Jewish values in a way that helped Jews and non-Jews alike.

Project Kesher connected Tanya’s mother with an officer in her local police department, who formally requested that the Spanish police raid the apartment where Tanya was being held. While prosecuting her abuser would have been ideal, it was agreed that the Spanish police could move faster and more safely if they arrested Tanya for being in Spain on a visa violation and sent her back to Russia.

Today, Tanya lives with her mother. With a very high unemployment rate in her city and outdated teaching credentials, she does not anticipate achieving financial self-sufficiency in the near future. Using a small grant for vocational training, she is studying to be a baker, a low-paying job that does not draw on her strengths. She has been invited to participate in the next ORT KesherNet vocational computer training program in her community. She has received some medical care but no counseling. In the meanwhile, she has been getting discreetly involved in anti-trafficking activism to help save other women and to regain her sense of self. Considering that there are more than 400,000 Russian women who are currently being trafficked, she counts herself fortunate to be among the couple of thousand who have been reunited with their families.

In 1999, the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act was a startling achievement in a time of deep hostility to the poor, to immigrants, and to women engaged in non-reproductive, non-marital sex.  In passing the TVPA, Congress voted to provide welfare benefits and residency permits to a small class of abused and undocumented immigrants, including those engaged in prostitution.  The passage of this law was all the more remarkable because it came directly on the heels of two massive “reform” measures that dramatically cut benefits to most poor Americans and legal immigrants. 
                                                                        
Why were individuals, historically defined as criminals at risk of detention, discipline, and deportation redefined as victims deserving public support?  Two key elements in the TVPA may help explain this shift.  First, while the law covers severely abused and exploited undocumented immigrants engaged in all fields of work, it was inaccurately presented as primarily a response to “sexual slavery.”   And, as an immigration measure, it offered conventional assurances of enhanced policing of U.S. borders, this time on the grounds that less porous borders would help protect would-be slaves who might otherwise be forced to enter the U.S. against their will. 

While the TVPA may be part of an effort to restrict immigration, it is unusual in that it also offers material assistance to qualified victims regardless of their immigration status.  Because of this provision, anti-immigration forces within Congress insisted that restrictions were needed to “prevent hundreds of thousands of people claiming to be trafficking victims… [leading] to a massive amnesty for illegal aliens.” The law relies on a problematic distinction between violated innocents — vulnerable women and children forced from the safety of their homelands into gross sexual exploitation — and guilty illegal economic migrants, mostly men. But most trafficking victims are also economic migrants.  Their victimization often involves high debts, coercion, and abusive working conditions; misrepresenting trafficking victims as entirely passive objects obscures the complexities of the problems and the best strategies to assist them.

As Dutch anti-trafficking activist Marjan Wijers has argued, there are two ways to combat trafficking in women.  On the one hand, Wijers points out, there are measures like the TVPA that rely on “restrictive immigration policies, more penalization and stronger and more effective prosecution.  Repressive strategies have a strong tendency to end up working against women instead of in their favor… On the other hand, there are strategies that aim to strengthen the rights of women involved, as women, as female migrants, as female migrant workers, as female migrant sex workers.”  

In the United States, the focus on enhanced policing and punitive approaches to combating trafficking continues to predominate.  During the years since the passage of the TVPA, the number of border patrol agents has more than doubled and miles of new concrete-filled steel barriers, flood lights and infrared surveillance systems have been installed.  The number of prosecutions against traffickers remains small (in total a few hundred) but is steadily increasing.  

Whether these measures have actually helped to stem the flow of trafficking victims and other undocumented immigrants is doubtful.  What is clear is that these new measures have increased the risks and costs of trying to cross the border.  Ironically this may have increased the likelihood that migrants will rely on smugglers and thereby find themselves in debt-bondage or other conditions of gross exploitation.  These measures have also resulted in increasing fatalities as those attempting to enter the U.S. are forced to seek out more dangerous and remote routes to avoid detection.  Over the past decade alone, more than 3,000 people have died attempting to cross the border, a number more than ten times that of those who died trying to cross the Berlin Wall during its entire 30 year history.   

It is also disturbing that provisions of the TVPA directly  intended to assist and empower victims remain under-utilized.  Despite the fact that the law authorizes the federal government to award up to 5,000 special residency permits – so-called T-visas – each year to trafficking victims, in the first four years of the program, a total of only 500 were awarded. 

The Justice Department has taken the position that community activists and law enforcement don’t know where to look, or what to ask, in order to locate victims eligible for benefits under the law.  But instead it may be that the image of the appropriate victim has simply been too narrowly drawn.  Even though most of the identified victims of trafficking under the TVPA have not been in the sex sector but rather in domestic, agricultural and sweatshop work, anti-sex-trafficking continues to be the primary focus of the federal Office to Monitor and Control Trafficking.   In order for truly effective strategies to be put into place, trafficking must be seen in the context of migration and labor exploitation, not limited to the realm of sexual abuse.  Sadly, strategies that would truly strengthen rights of women, undocumented migrants, and sex workers appear remote in early 21st century America. 

Residents of a rent-stabilized apartment building in the Bronx were recently shocked to receive rent increases of up to 16 percent, far above the currently permitted increase of 4.5 percent. The landlord justified this increase by pointing to major work recently done on the building’s crumbling façade; according to NYC law, rent increases may be higher when significant capital improvements, beyond ordinary repair, are made to a building. 
Debates between landlords and tenants about the responsibilities of each are hardly new. Joseph Caro, the 16th-century author of the Shulhan Arukh, summarizes the landlord’s responsibilities as follows: “One who rents a house to another is obligated to construct doors and to fix broken windows, to reinforce the roof, to fix broken ceiling beams, and to install a bolt and a lock…[and for] all things that are the work of an craftsperson and that are essential to the habitation of homes and courtyards.” (Hoshen Mishpat 314:1)

In a gloss on this text, Rabbi Moshe Isserles, a contemporary of Caro, adds that the landlord remains responsible for such repairs even if the tenant agrees to rent the home as is. While a desperate tenant might agree to live in an apartment with a leaking roof, this tenant’s consent does not excuse the landlord from protecting the health and wellbeing of the tenant.

Tenants of the Bronx apartment building suspect that the landlord wants “to get us out and rent the apartment to people who can pay more.” But some have no place else to go. This fear brings to mind a talmudic concern about evicting tenants who are likely to become homeless as a result. In general, the rabbis of the Talmud insist that a landlord give tenants sufficient notice before eviction, and may not evict tenants during the winter, when housing is hard to find. (Bava Metzia 101b) Landlords also may not raise the rent as a backhanded way of evicting a tenant during the winter.

In other cases, Jewish law favors the landlord over the tenant. If the price of maintaining the property rises, the landlord may raise rents, even during the winter. A landlord who loses his or her own home, or who wishes to give a house to a newly married child, has some additional leeway to evict tenants. Jewish housing law worries about the safety and well-being of the tenant but it does not demand that the landlord become homeless or suffer financial ruin for the tenant’s sake.

In the case of the Bronx apartment building, the city ordered the landlord to repair the façade after a section of the building fell, seriously injuring a child. This incident demonstrates that repair to the façade falls under the Jewish category of work necessary for the safe habitation of the building. While the landlord may raise rents in accordance with ordinary cost increases, such as higher prices for heating oil, maintenance work, or property taxes, the landlord may not hold the tenant financially responsible for making the building safe for habitation. Nor may the landlord use rent increases to provoke residents to move, especially in a case in which some residents may find themselves, in the words of Maimonides, “abandoned on the street” as a result.

As the U.S. experiences a recession, landlords may become less willing to make expensive repairs and more likely to pass these costs onto tenants. Tenants may become increasingly nervous about the possibility of losing their homes without another place to go. Jewish law reminds us to work toward housing practices in which landlords do not experience financial ruin, and in which tenants can feel safe and secure in their homes.