On Tuesday, Bradley University held a lecture in the Neumiller Lecture hall on Rethinking Human Trafficking. This topic is not often discussed on a college campus, but potential dangers and signs are prominent on college campuses. The lecture was held by Dr. Julietta Hua, the author of Trafficking Women’s Rights and a professor at the San Francisco State University.
The lecture focuses on human trafficking and its rise with our society, how many of the victims go unnoticed and one of the biggest cases of human trafficking which deals with Foxconn Technology Group, a Taiwan based company that is the largest producer of electronic components. Many of the employees were committing suicide due to poor work conditions and poor treatment.
Dr. Julietta says, “I was struck at the anti-sex trafficking campaigns circulating at the time seemed to trade on the moral panic incited by stories of aberrant sex and sexualities, yet there was no sense of panic around a story of 2 dozen young workers all jumping to their deaths while at work.”
Dr. Hua says that race plays a role with those who are recruited in human trafficking and for those who will get news coverage, “It’s always a factor… because we have pre-existing racial expectations and stereotypes a lot of times brown and black women who are harmed or exploited are not recognized as victims even when they say they are.” Most are seen as prostitutes and for other races because of these racial expectations are seen as more helpless and vulnerable.
During the lecture, we were also informed about ways we can help bring awareness to many human trafficking causes and how to buy products linked to “slave-free” companies and industries.
Slavery footprint dot org allows you to take a lifestyle quiz to see “how many slaves work for you. The quiz is one part of a larger anti-trafficking non-profit based in San Francisco, which tries to draw attention to “human slavery” by addressing individual consumers and businesses (their other arm is madeinafreeworld – for businesses that want to find slave-free supply chains).
Fae Chubin, the Assistant Professor of Sociology here at Bradley University had this to say about human trafficking, “Its a system that makes profits off of exploiting people their labor and their bodies in so many ways. Human trafficking is very much linked and connected to the global world and a global economy that profits off exploitation.”
Professor Chubin follows that up by saying, “Human trafficking is complex and there are no easy steps but the first one we can take is to value human life more than our own consumption and comfort.”
This quote stuck with because shows that we sometimes value the things around us such as gadgets and other material things rather than those who are forced to make them and give them very little thought or what they might go through.
In the end, there are millions of innocent victims being exploited and used for free labor and sex and its up to as to look for the visible and non-visible signs of those who might be facing these issues and find a way to help them.