Transcriber: Esther Alvarez de Prado Reviewer: Raquel Alvarado
Imagine, imagine that a mother
has to give her young child
away to somebody, a total stranger
who is going to take this child away, far away
and she may never see him again.
Or imagine a father who is going to have to sell
his underage teenage daughter
twelve years, fourteen years old
and marry her off to a 70 year old person
in another continent,
and he may never see her again.
And the tragedy of that is that,
even if she was in trouble and needed help
and asks for his help
he's unable to take her back.
This is part of what we call modern-day slavery.
And slavery exists, it exists now.
In the age of wonderment,
that is my question, that in the 21st century
why are we allowing slavery to exist?
It exists in a big way.
There are at least 27 million slaves in this world today
27 million.
That's far more than the slaves
that were transported out of Africa over a period of 400 years
east and west.
It's a fastest growing organized crime in the world right now.
It is even ahead of drugs.
Drugs get consumed and that's done.
Human beings are being sold, and resold, and resold
It fetches 32 billion dollars a year in revenue.
The problem with this is it goes under the name of "human trafficking".
And "human trafficking" does not do justice
to the kind of brutal, dehumanizing things that slavery brings with it.
And we don't see it, it's a hidden crime.
For all you know,
you may be sitting amongst people who have been trafficked before
and you would not even know it.
I am a journalist and I tell stories.
And I've been telling stories of death and destruction, and stuff in the past,
with some of the major American networks.
Beirut, Bosnia, Somalia, Baghdad, the works.
Everything was fine, because that's when I was getting my thrills,
my adrenaline, ups, highs, lows, excitement, all of that.
But then, in 1995
this is what happened to me.
This was in Sarajevo in 1995
when a 500-pound bomb hit our office
TV station, that's me, coming out of there.
This bomb wounded 36 people, killed one person
and damaged my eye.
In fact I lost the vision in my eye for a while.
But thanks to the doctors in Sarajevo and at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore
they got it fixed, so this eye is good.
But symbolically what happened? This fixed eye
started seeing life in a very different way.
Instead of death and destruction
I started to feel that I should
tell the stories of people in the world
who normally do not have a voice.
Whose voices are unheard
because they don't matter, they're poor,
marginalized, people don't care about them
they don't have the power.
And these are stories of people
little people fighting big battles
and sometimes even winning them.
So as part of this I got into
the question of human trafficking because of the UN
and starting looking into it and I was horrified.
When you say human trafficking I thought, it is a sex trade,
illegal immigrants, illegal smuggling of people.
It isn't any of that, it isn't about Russian pole dancers
no, it is a lot more horrible than that.
So we co-produced, with the help of an organization
called "End Human Trafficking Now",
a six-part series for the BBC on human trafficking around the world.
We cannot even begin to start to tell you the stories
because they are so horrific
but in these clips you might just get an idea
of what goes on.
(Video) (Boy) I usually go to the beach to ask for money.
Sometimes at home we have nothing. This is how we get food.
(Narrator) James' father thought their money problems were over.
(Man) After he started going to the beach
he got used to seeing the white people.
The first days he came and said that there is a white man
who likes him and will help us at home.
I said to him, 'This is good news,
at least we won't have any worries anymore.
(Boy) He gave me 500 shillings (7$) and did bad things to me.
He raped me.
(Woman) You say you are going to provide a boy? (Man) Yes.
(W) And a girl? (M) Yeah.
(W) Which class?
(M) The girl? Is in class seven.
(W) The girl who is in class seven is ten years old. Or 11?
(M) Ten years.
(W) And the boy is nine? (M) The boy is ten years.
The one who I'm going to bring to you is my cousin.
(W) Your cousin? (M) Yeah.
I got him from [his] home because he is learning from me
(W) Uh huh. So you are providing some shelter for him?
(Narrator) The girl you are listening to is the friend of an underage bride
who was sold by her father for 900 USD.
Her father said, "Baby, don't make a fuss our family needs the money [900$]..."
He said, "I have no job, your mum is sick."
(Narrator) The 14-year-old was too afraid to make the call herself.
My friend was then sexually abused at her husband's house.
She got pregnant... but the baby died.
Now she's on the street.
Her husband has asked for his money back but her family has spent it.
It's a tragedy.
(Man) He said give me your child. I will make him work.
I did not like it but I had no choice.
12 small children plus 18 older children all slept in one room.
We woke up at 9 o'clock and sat down and worked until 12 o'clock midnight.
He did not pay us wages but gave us food and 50 Rupees [US $1] every Sunday.
(Woman) She beat me.
Sometimes I lost my mind.
I didn't see her coming.
She pushed me...
and said...
'You have to be dead, dead, dead.'
It was the third floor upstairs.
When I was in the air
I [rotated] myself, because I thought then I'm going to fall like this
I will break my head.
So I [rotated] myself, I don't know how.
I come like this.
(Narrator) How many people have you managed to convict
of human trafficking in Mexico?
[Congresswoman Rosi Orozco Head of Human Trafficking Unit of Mexico]
One.
Faridoun Hemani: These are some of the stories we found
as we went worldwide covering human trafficking.
The tragedy is that you see in so many instances
the first boy that we saw, James, seven years old, he was raped
that tourist who took him in and imprisoned him in a hotel room
went off scot-free.
He was the powerful one.
The police even didn't want to know about him.
You look at how easy it is to buy and sell
children, ten years old
and usually from a position of trust.
So many people are sold into slavery
by people in whom they have placed trust.
Here we saw what happened.
A guy who's got a girl and a boy cousins, and he's selling them
very happy, very happy to sell them
to our undercover camera operators.
We look at the boy in India.
We had our crews cover some raids
where the police actually freed some of these kids.
And then kids like that when they go back to their parents
what happens?
The parents are unhappy that the kids have come back home.
Because now, they have to feed one more mouth
and they have lost one source of income.
So the kids are nowhere.
You look at the girl in Egypt,
I've said about her before,
so heavily abused not even by her husband,
but by somebody else
and cannot come back home.
And this lady in Kenia, that we interviewed
her story is quite amazing
but the fact that she is even alive
when she was sold into slavery under false pretenses to Saudi Arabia.
She thought she was going as a nanny
she turned out to be a domestic slave.
She got sold from one family to another
then another woman started making her short skirts and things like that
to get her ready to go into prostitution. She resisted.
As a result that owner, and I won't say employer -
it was the owner -
pushed her off the third floor balcony.
And as she is falling, you can imagine what's going through her mind?
She's trying to tell us and she is saying,
I look down and I say how do I rotate myself
what do I do, how do I stop my head getting crushed?
So in that ten seconds that it takes
to go from the third floor balcony down
and there was a swimming pool at the bottom
she decided if I fall like this I will save my life.
And she did.
She fell this way, broke both her hands, we found her in Kenia.
And she was one of the luckier ones.
Her owner, went scot-free.
Because the owner pretended to the police that this woman
was trying to run away,
she packed all the clothes in bags and put them out there.
So when the police came she said she fell when she was trying to run away.
There were two or three other Kenian women
at that time, that actually came back in coffins.
And the families could do nothing about it they were powerless.
Now, if you think for a moment that
this happens just in Asia, in India, in places like that
it doesn't.
Much closer to home we saw this lady
from the Human Trafficking Unit in Mexico.
Two years ago,
tens of thousands of people being trafficked
and how many were convicted?
One.
There has to be something that can be done.
But even closer than that,
here, at home, in Texas.
Now, I love Texas, I've been here many times before,
I've had the benefit of the generosity of a lot of Texans
hearts as big as everything else in Texas.
But, Houston, we have a problem.
We have a problem because Texas
has got the largest number of trafficked people in the US.
25% of trafficked people in the US are here.
Houston airport provides the hub for the majority
of the people coming into the US,
18,000 people trafficked into the country.
The I-10 corridor from El Paso to Houston
is the largest corridor for human trafficking.
30,000 people transit in and out of the US
but it's not just people from outside.
There are a quarter of a million minors, mostly girls, who are trafficked
into prostitution in the US.
Quarter of a million.
We're not talking about Kenians, Sri Lankans, Philippinas, anything
we're talking about Americans,
domestic human trafficking.
And what happens, some of these are just simple disputes where people leave home.
Girls leave home, have a row with their parents.
And somebody befriends them, becomes a boyfriend, makes them feel good.
And the next thing they know is they are trapped into prostitution
and they cannot get out.
So if you look at the strip-clubs, or if you look at the truck stops
and see all these women,
the majority of them don't want to be there
but they don't have a choice.
Now, one of the examples
of how people get trafficked in is again
it's on the question of trust.
This is in a poor village in Zambia.
The young boy whose face is circled
is a boy by the name of Given Kachepa.
His family, like everyone else, has got dreams and hopes for their children.
What happens is a priest, from Texas goes out to Zambia
and he talks to the family.
This boy, together with others, [has] a gift from God.
They can sing.
They are in the a capella voice choir.
And that is supposed to be his ticket to America
and out of poverty.
So the priest comes out and tells the parents
and other parents like them,
why don't you bring your kids over,
send your kids over, I'll take them.
We will go and sing in choirs all over churches,
we'll raise money we will educate your boys,
we will feed your boys
we will send money back to you and you can build schools
and ensure that the kids get an education.
And who can say no to a priest?
If you cannot trust a priest, whom can you trust?
And the same story is repeated, not just the church.
In West Africa
people hand over their kids to koranic teachers
or in India you'll find them in Hindu temples
in Thailand you'll find them in Buddhist temples
it's everywhere, you just have to look
the problem is that it's hidden, you have to look.
So the family says yes
and, the kids come here
and they start singing in Texas.
And the priest delivers.
He delivers the church choir singing
the fund raising, all of that.
But not one penny goes out to the kids
or to the people at home.
There is in many cases not even medical care
even TB was a problem, it went untreated.
The kids worked seven, eight, nine hours a day
no breaks, no nothing, they were not allowed to complain
because if they complained, there was manipulation used.
The priest would say, "I would send you back home
and tell your parents you were disobedient or disrespectful."
And that couldn't happen because the parents
would have a hard time accepting that this was your ticket to freedom
to everything, to your future and you blew it by being disrespectful.
So in that way the kids were forced
to work incredible hours,
no breaks, no nothing.
Thankfully that ended in about two years.
Thankfully that ended and for Given Kachepa
he was very lucky.
There was a guardian angel in the form of Sandy Shepperd,
a lady from Dallas who took him in.
She even took in the other kids first and then helped either find homes
or find safe passages back for them.
But she kept Given here and gave him every opportunity
before even adequate human trafficking laws were in place.
She fought the system and made sure that he had a safe home here.
And that is a lucky thing and a good thing.
Because he's now here in the United States and safe.
But it isn't safe for everybody.
A lot of the kids that went back
because they couldn't cope with all of this
when there was alcoholism or drugs or violence,
they just could not cope.
And not all stories can be success stories like Given.
They cannot be because we have to do something about it
otherwise they will not all be successful stories.
So, what can we do? Very quickly.
We can make a difference.
We can ask the right questions, ask people who make our garments
are these garments using forced labor?
They will listen to you, the brand names will listen to you.
They want your money, they will listen.
Ask the chocolate manufacturers
is this slave-labor, child-labor from West Africa?
Ask your gadget makers, your electronic gadgets,
is this slave-free labor?
Ask them and they will listen.
You can call hotlines that are set up.
Call them, if there's a doubt about anything, ask.
And get your law-enforcement authorities to really take action
and not treat the victims as the perpetrators
but the traffickers.
And all of this can make a difference.
All of us can really make a difference.
If you think you cannot make a difference
that's wrong.
To the world, you may be a person
but to a person you may be the world.
And you can make that difference.
And now what I want to show you is
this gentleman here.
He previously was trafficked into the US
he's a third year student of dentistry in Dallas
and he is none other than our Given Kachepa
that we talked about, in the States here, now.
That is a success story.
(Applause)
(Woman) We are today honored and graced
with the presence of the man himself.
Mr. Given Katchepa and Sandy Shepperd.
Please put your hand together to welcome them.
(Applause)
You met Sandy who is your second mom
and what sense of hope did she provide you?
Because I realize that you were betrayed by adults
when you were a child,
so what sense of hope did Sandy provide for you at that point?
Given Kachepa: She gave me a lot of hope
because I grew up without anything.
I lost my mom in 1992 and then I lost my dad in 1994.
And then I got in this trafficking situation
and I was in it for two years
and then when she came into the picture
it gave me hope that I could try to do something
out of my life
because there's a lot of poverty in Africa
and just to think that I could go to school
and try to learn and become something and eventually in the future
I might be able to go back home to my country
and be able to help the people that are still suffering on a daily basis
even to this day, I mean, trafficking is happening everywhere.
There's 27 million slaves around the world today
and if we are not doing anything to try to combat it
then it's going to continue the only way we do that is
by spreading the word and making sure that
the public understand that this is happening
and then we can resolve the issue.
I'm not happy about being known as a modern-day slave
but if I can do it to help one more person
then I'm willing to stand up on a stage like this and tell my story.
(Woman) And your being here is doing exactly that. Thank you Given.