SOMALI YOUTH FOR PEACE: Like rubbish thrown away

Monday, June 18, 2012

Like rubbish thrown away

http://www.theage.com.au/
June 18, 2012

OPINION

Every year millions of people in our region are trafficked into slavery. Kate Kennedy helps pick up the pieces.

[WHO] Kate Kennedy, campaigner against slavery and human trafficking
[WHAT] Hagar Australia restores the lives of abused women and children in our region
[HOW] Through rescue, medical and legal support, education and finance

THERE is no nice, gentle way to say this. Close your eyes, if you will, and think of a woman or child you cherish being raped or otherwise brutalised or sold into sexual or other forms of slavery. Such severe, heartbreaking abuses of human rights are rampant in our region. The United Nations estimates 27 million people live in slavery right now, which is double the total number of people trafficked to America from Africa in the entire 19th century, a time when this pernicious trade is considered to have been particularly rife.

Each year this number is growing by 2.5 million, half of which are children. As many as 60 per cent of today's slaves are in our region, many of them trapped in brothels. The average price of a human being is $90. The total annual revenue is estimated at $32 billion, making it the second-biggest illegal market in the world, not far behind trade in illicit drugs.

The depravity can appear overwhelming, but today's guest in The Zone is helping do something about it, case by case, tragedy by tragedy.

Kate Kennedy is chief executive of Hagar Australia, which is part of a global organisation with the sole purpose, as set out on its website, of ''restoring the lives and hopes of woman and children devastated by human trafficking, domestic violence, rape and sexual exploitation''.

After taking on the role in February, Kennedy, a mother of two in her early 40s, toured the region - territory familiar to her from her earlier job as World Vision Australia's strategic director.

''World Vision actually funded Hagar over a number of years. And it used to just kill me - the individual plight and the suffering. You'd see it with poverty; I saw that all the time and you would go in and put in those essential cornerstones like birthing units and immunisation, but there was something about the plight of people who had suffered at the level that they had, the Hagar clients, that just completely unpackaged me in way and I feel compelled to do this work.

''Our clients have often been raped, have been relocated to different countries, so have no community, or are severely traumatised due to severe exploitation. They may have been trafficked when they are very young, so there is often no chance of reintegration back into a community because they don't know where they are from; they have no economic or community backdrop that will support them for their future. And pretty consistently there is a really deep level of trauma that comes from the combination of human rights abuses.''

The issues are raw and an understandable response can be to think of them in the abstract. But the statistics are a compilation of individual stories, some of which are told on Hagar's website, such as that of Cambodian girl Oun. ''When I was six years old I was raped by a man in our community. He threatened to kill me if I screamed. I was not strong enough to get him off me. He raped me three times that night. He then tried to kill me by dropping me twice to the ground from a statue. When I didn't die, he took me to the lake nearby and held me under the water. I was weak and became unconscious. He thought that I had died and so took me and discarded my lifeless body in the funeral monument. I could not find any words that could express my pain and suffering at this time. I did not feel like a human or even an animal, I just felt like rubbish thrown away.''

She was found three days later by police and relatives. Her parents, both heavy drinkers, rejected her, not even visiting her in hospital. She was referred to Hagar. ''I had a safe loving home to live in and I received much-needed education. Now I don't cry any more or suffer the fear that I did after the abuse. I am not looking back but looking forward to a bright, safe and prosperous future.''

Although some victims end up in Australia, Hagar is increasing its activities here primarily because we are one of the most influential and economically powerful nations in our region.

Kennedy is seeking to increase public awareness of the issues, and to help the Australian government build on efforts to get other governments to fight such abuses. It has developed curriculum programs, available through the website below, for primary and secondary schools. It wants students here to know, for example, that there are 246 million child labourers in the world, 73 million of whom are younger than 10. As many as 22,000 children die each year in work-related accidents. The largest number of working children - 127 million - are in the Asia-Pacific region.

Thailand has cracked down on exploitation, responding in part to pressure from a tourism industry concussed by a global revulsion at ''sex tourism''. But the human traffickers just seek out easier markets.

Kennedy recounts a recent case in Cambodia in which a Russian paedophile used 20 children under 10 in a ''sex party'' where they were raped and abused. He bribed his way through the legal system, was given a royal pardon and escaped the country. She wants the Australian government to put pressure on Cambodia and help its leaders establish a robust legal system. The number of trafficking cases being reported in Cambodia is rising, but the number of prosecutions is falling.

There are further complexities - in countries that enforce laws against the illicit drug trade, criminals move into the human trade. Traffickers switch market from one to the other.

Hagar was set up in 1994. The name is from a Bible story (Genesis 16, 21): Hagar was the first recorded slave. The organisation uses a case-management, individualised model like that of Australia's child-protection system, and has developed its trauma treatment program with Johns Hopkins University in the US. Hagar has done intense, one-on-one work with 15,000 clients, and has been involved in helping a further 120,000 in concert with other organisations.

''We get a call from the police if a paedophile ring has just been broken. A case manager would go and collect those boys. The immediate things are always clothing and medical checks. There is a lot of trauma involved. Some paedophiles convince the young boys that they are their children.''

The next step is to provide education, done through an intensive program to give numeracy and literacy to people who often have had no tuition. Hagar is seeing more and more of its clients moving into tertiary education.

''We're also seeing a really lovely thing 18 years into the program, where we have got a real demand for university scholarships. We currently have three students in medical school, and we have got another 12 women who were rescued nearly 10 years ago. They were very young girls at the time. They were rescued in a notorious brothel raid, and half of them now want to go to university.''

Should you wish to help, donations can be made through the Hagar website; the cost of basic education is $49 a month.

Sometimes the help offered is of a more practical, economic nature; many of the girls who are pregnant or have babies are given vocational training. Hagar owns, or is affiliated with, 42 businesses, including Cambodia's biggest catering company.

The final step for a Hagar client is independence. ''If you want to go back to your village, if you know where you're from, we'll give you that thousand dollars to build your house or we'll buy that sewing machine.''

Hagar is stitching lives back together. There are many reasons why these lives have been ripped apart: poverty, natural disaster and the readiness of some people to treat others as a commodity.

How does Kennedy explain such people? ''It is so tricky. I have never fallen for the black/white, evil/good scenario. I do think that we are an accumulation of the things that happen to us, and you can see people who have become numb to things they inflict on others. There is a point of no return for some people, where they are in denial about how they live and how they impact on others.''

Hagar's tragedy is that it need exist at all. It will be around a long time and Kate Kennedy needs all the help she can get.