Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster
May 26, 2011
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-rachel-kahntroster/building-bridges-of-freed_b_865969.html
What do a minister, a rabbi and a nun have in common? In the case of myself, Reverend David Schilling of the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility and Sister Estrella Castalone of Talitha Kum, it is the fierce desire to see an end to modern slavery. David's organization harnesses the power of socially responsible investing and shareholder resolutions to demand that corporations eliminate slavery from their supply chains. Sister Estrella heads an international coalition of orders of religious women who fight trafficking and bring comfort and support to its survivors. And Rabbis for Human Rights-North America is the moral conscience of the American Jewish community, mobilizing our members to speak out against this largely invisible human rights atrocity.
Last week, thanks to the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See and St. Thomas University, we spoke together in Rome to ask how faith communities, government, non-profits and the business sector can work together to end slavery. "Building Bridges of Freedom: Public-Private Partnerships to End Modern Slavery" brought together leaders from all these constituencies to share knowledge, promote best practices, and to stratigize about coalitions to fight human trafficking and modern slavery. We were challenged: How can faith communities do more than just provide services to victims? What corporations are leaders for transparency in supply chains and what legislation is needed to ensure that others follow? How do we engage the human rights community at large to focus more on the problem of slavery? How can we work together to be most effective in a time when resources are stretched?
Let's not use euphemisms when talking about the problem. Not slave-like conditions, not low wages or lack of benefits, but slavery. Slavery may be illegal everywhere, including for nearly 150 years here in the United States, but it flourishes. More than 800,000 to 2 million people are trafficked across borders each year, including nearly 20,000 to the United States. Add to this number the millions of people held as forced prostitution, child soldiers, indentured domestic servants and debt laborers within their own countries, and estimates of the number of modern slaves rises to a range of 12 million to 27 million people -- and some of the activists I have spoken with think these estimates are conservative. There are more people enslaved today than at any other point in human history. And human life is cheap: You can easily buy another person for $50 to $100, a price point that makes it more effective to buy a new person than to heal a sick one. As Ambassador Luis CdeBaca said, "Human trafficking is not a crime of movement, but of exploitation."
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