Shooting Stars Magazine / Human Trafficking
Shooting Stars Magazine (http://shootingstarsmag.blogspot.com/2008/01/authors-write.html) recently asked me about my thoughts on an important aspect of my book, human trafficking.
Here’s what I said:
One of the issues that my book addresses is human trafficking and the misconception that people have regarding the likelihood of this illegal activity occurring in their towns or neighborhoods. People as commodities—this is hardly a new idea. But I think that people, particularly in the United States, don’t realize that human slavery is still very much in existence.
The trafficking of women and children accounts for the third largest criminal industry, outranked only by weapons and drugs. One statistic I saw estimated that 50,000 people are trafficking into the U. S. each year for sexual slavery, but as horrible as that number is, it doesn’t begin to account for the amount of people trafficked world-wide. Many individuals who are victims of slavery end up in prostitution, yet there are others who are sold for house or farming labor, too.
I can’t think of a more sorrowful existence and it enrages me to know that these so-called businessmen who enslave people for profit have so little regard for human life.
As I mentioned, there does exist some serious misconceptions about slavery in America. Many people go about their lives assuming that it is a problem that only exists in the poorest nations. True, impoverished countries are often where criminals find potential slaves, but you must ask yourself: Who pays for their services? With the United Nations claiming that trafficking is a $7 billion dollar a year enterprise with an estimated 900, 000 victims trafficked across global borders annually, developed countries need to recognize their part in enabling this illegal activity.
I live in Connecticut and, prior to writing Death at Deacon Pond, I had learned about three incidents of slavery that influenced me in the process of writing the book. The first was in an area very close to where I grew up. It was a massage parlor in this plain building. Police raided the business one night and discovered several foreign women, all forced into prostitution. The second was a young woman who spoke at the University of Connecticut about how her family sold her—not once, but twice—into domestic and sexual slavery. And the third involved a group of men who were being forced to work at a tree farm in the northwestern part of the state.
They’d been trafficked into the state under false pretenses and then forced to work 18 hours a day, with little food and ridiculously low wages. These three cases really got me thinking how slavery exists, silently most times, right under our noses, but that once you hear about and once you see it, you can’t pretend anymore that it isn’t there. Trafficking happens. It is happening right now and I, for one, see no difference and feel no less about a young Vietnamese girl sold by her poor family than I do if it were a child I knew, snatched from my own neighborhood.
Even though I only touch upon this important issue in Death at Deacon Pond, I can’t deny that I was intensely motivated by my belief that we all deserve the right to freedom, the right to make choices for ourselves and our bodies. In my small way, when I found my main character, Kerri, discovering a trafficking ring in her small town, I hoped to give readers something to think about. I hoped that they would follow Kerri into that dark cellar and see trafficking for what it is, a crime of stealth and imprisonment and terror. I believe that it is apparent in the moment that Kerri bursts out of the cellar, temporarily blinded by the light, but then able to see. Because that’s how I see the grip of slavery, as a force that can only be paled by the power of our actions, by our willingness to open our eyes, by the force of our hope and by the strength of our conviction to stand up in the face of adversity.
“For those of us who are in position to do something to combat human slavery, however small our contribution, neutrality is a sin.”——-Inspector General Joseph E. Schmitz, Department of Defense
