In March a small team from the General Assembly’s Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP), including Ronald Kernaghan, co-chair of ACSWP and a professor at Fuller Seminary, and Chris Iosso, coordinator of ACSWP, visited three anti-trafficking sites in Bangkok, Thailand. In addition to these site visits, the team consulted with representatives of two organizations that study and advocate the protection of women and children from sexual exploitation.
Trafficking, according to the Web site Stop the Traffik (www.stopthetraffik.org), is “to be deceived or taken against your will, bought, sold and transported into slavery for sexual exploitation, sweat shops, child brides, circuses, sacrificial worship, forced begging, sale of human organs, farm labour, domestic servitude.” An estimated 2-4 million men, women, and children are trafficked across international borders and within their own countries annually.
The 2008 General Assembly took two actions related to human trafficking. It approved an overture from the Presbytery of Plains and Peaks. This overture urged church support for the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 2000. It also called for resources for congregations and presbyteries.
The second act, proposed by the Advocacy Committee for Women’s Concerns (ACWC), was to urge the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP) to regularly include trafficking of persons in its human rights updates as well as to begin to gather data on initiatives that are responding to the issues of human trafficking.
The March trip was a part of fulfilling the request to ACSWP.
“We made this part of our trip,” said Kernaghan, “because of the GA’s action asking our Committee to include trafficking in our regular Human Rights Update. We are also aware that the United Nations is moving to consider trafficking with a human rights approach, concerned with the rights of individuals who may become undocumented foreign nationals in a given country.”
Members of the team first visited the Thailand office of WorldVision, a Christian development and aid organization. WorldVision has partnered with the UN on issues of human trafficking as well as co-sponsoring conferences and reports. Working with the UN Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking in the Greater Mekong Sub-region (UNIAP), WorldVision helped develop “best practice” guidelines and legislation for tourism and trafficking for an area of 260 million people, with well-established transit patterns for work migration.
The ACSWP team also visited a program called New Beginnings, which provides English classes and counseling as part of its outreach in a sex tourism district. Co-directed by a Thai woman and an American woman, this program supports the education and training of up to 20 resident women up to the point of self-sufficiency.
Bonita Thompson, the U.S. co-director, noted, “two of the women are here partly because older sisters have taken on the burden of sending more money home to their families. They do not want their younger sisters to have to do what they do.” Many of these women, the team learned, are from Northern, rural rice farms and are not educated past 12 years of age.
“What was most inspiring,” according to Kernaghan, “was our visit to the Well of the Gospel Church, a new church development of the Church of Christ in Thailand. There we worshiped in a joyful and growing recently-chartered congregation that includes many women who have gotten new lives and have been baptized.” The women showed committee members a jewelry and clothing workshop that helps provide economic support.
Iosso noted that trafficking includes many forms of exploited labor and modern-day slavery in addition to prostitution. He points out that many of the issues surrounding human trafficking are by-products of the wider issue of globalization.
“Fueled by the now-chastened consumerism of the West, and perhaps accelerated by new and more accessible media and communication, people in poorer countries hope for a better life elsewhere, and are sometimes hoodwinked into virtual slavery, whether in agricultural labor, mining, sweatshops, or prostitution,” explains Iosso. “In harsher cases, children of poor families are sold by desperate parents to pitiless traffickers—these children become the most expendable of commodities,” he continues.
“The good news is that international bodies, particularly the United Nations and UNESCO have begun to develop codes of conduct and moral standards to prevent the exploitation of children,” says Iosso.
ACSWP will report its findings to the 219th General Assembly in 2010.
