DEHUMANISED: Commemorating the 2023 World Day Against Trafficking in Persons (July 30), a UN Office on Drug and Crime official describes ordeals experienced by African women recruited to jobs in the Middle East…

By Maxwell Matewere

Imagine selling your store and your belongings to pay to travel to Dubai for the opportunity of your life. A simple cleaning job, but the earnings promised would make leaving your rural home and family worth it. Imagine travelling 4 800km to a place you don’t know and whose language you don’t speak.

Easy enough, you’ll tell me, many of us have done it before.

Fine. Now imagine landing, meeting your sponsor who asks you for your passport, takes it, tucks it away and tells you that you’re heading to Oman now, because the agent you’d trusted sold you to the man you just met, and the cost of your freedom was R92 000. You have no idea where Oman is. And that is just the beginning of your nightmare…

Still easy enough? Didn’t think so. This is the experience suffered by women trafficked to the Middle East on false promises, those that could be retrieved and saved – thanks to the outstanding efforts of the Malawi Ministry of Homeland Security’s (MOHS) Trafficking in Persons’ desk and the years of commitment by Kondwani Kamanga personifying this year’s World Day Against Trafficking in Persons moto: “Leave no one behind”.

Relating his experiences, Kamanga says: “Just last week on Thursday, a young girl approached our office asking for a certification for employment to travel to Dubai. I asked her if she had a contract of employment. She did not. She said she wanted to find work there, that she had a cousin working there. When I asked her what her cousin did, she could not say. When I asked her how long she had been in Dubai, she said six years. I asked her if her cousin had ever returned in the past six years. She had not. When I asked why, she couldn’t answer.

“I told her, you are lucky that we have met. As the Ministry of Homeland Security, it is our mandate to provide safety and security for our citizens. If you had a job contract, we could have verified through our embassy whether the employer really exists. We would have linked you with our mission in that particular country, in case you have any problems.

“I showed her pictures to understand the gravity of the risks she was taking. This is what young women such as yourself are going through, who travel to the Middle East without proper employment or contracts. This young girl was physically abused, promised to work as a receptionist, but ended up cleaning bathrooms and homes for a dozen families every day from 3am to 12am. This young girl did the same and was sexually abused by four men every day. This young girl was denied medical treatment by her owner and died of her injuries”.

After listening to the shocking story, Kamanga says the job-seeker decided to stay in Malawi. The harrowing experiences summarised above are only the tip of the iceberg uncovered by the ministry.

Kamanga adds: “The girls are recruited through Facebook and social media platforms, so we used the same approach to identify local victims. We started a WhatsApp Group after noticing cries for help on Facebook. We asked girls to spread the word and add other people they knew were in the same situation. The problem is, many of them don’t realise they’ve been trafficked and enslaved. They think of it as: my boss is doing this to me. My boss is not treating me right. They have no identification, so no legal recourse locally. They don’t understand their reality and the help they need and are entitled to.

“I travelled with a delegation to Oman. We had identified 60 girls. When we met with our Omani counterparts, they told us there were 376 Malawi citizens in Oman. Seven men working in the commercial sector and 369 women as ‘domestic workers’. They had entered on a tourist visa.”

The Middle East is an attractive destination for young Africans, young African women especially, perceived through social media and popular culture as a modern Eldorado. Many never return, and many return severely scarred, both physically and mentally.

“The Ministry put standard operating procedures in place to support returnees. We have them screened for mental health issues and psychological trauma, as well as medical treatment for injuries or physical abuse, but this is not enough. We work with local communities, and civil society to support local reintegration,” he says.

“We had a young woman who had borrowed a lot of money to travel, and when she returned to her village, she had to hide from her creditors for a week. When our inspectors came to visit, he found out and we put measures in place to protect her further.

They were vulnerable, that’s why they were preyed on so easily. But, many of them have sold everything in order to travel. So, when they return, they are scarred; have nothing left and are even more vulnerable than before.”

“When I started working at the Trafficking in Persons Focal Point four years ago, I did not realise the scale of the problem. But, also that it is not only an international issue; but an African issue as well. The level of awareness is very low in Africa”, Kamanga laments.

TRAFFICKING: SURVIVORS SUE HOTEL GROUPS

PAY-BACK: Assisted by lawyers, victims are increasingly suing to hold hotel chains liable for abuse on their properties…

By Bernice Yeung

Some of the United States’ best-known hotel franchises have served as the backdrop to sex-trafficking crimes for decades, a new investigation by The New Yorker and Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program has revealed.

As part of Trafficking Inc., The New Yorker and Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program have uncovered how franchised hotels have historically been a common site of human-trafficking crimes in the United States. Now, a novel legal strategy is seeking to help survivors hold these hotel corporations legally accountable for sex-abuse crimes committed on their premises.

Trafficking Inc is a global investigative collaboration led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists exposing the networks of companies and people that draw profit from various forms of human trafficking around the world.

Last Sunday (July 30) was the World Day Against Trafficking in Persons. This year, the United Nation’s theme for the day is “Reach every victim of trafficking, leave no one behind.”

In a 2018 Polaris Survivor Survey cited in the article, more than 60 per cent of sex-trafficking victims said they were forced to sell sex from hotels.

“We focus not enough on how human trafficking intersects with the legitimate economy,” Louise Shelley, director of George Mason University’s Terrorism, Transnational Crime, and Corruption Centre, said. “This is one of the key points in the supply chain where it does.”

One survivor, who went by the first name Anastasia, told The New Yorker and the Investigative Reporting Program how her trafficker, a drug dealer named Fredrick Brown, cycled her through hotels in four different states along the East Coast over roughly six months in 2013.

Mostly, though, she said she was kept at a Howard Johnson hotel in Pennsylvania, where the general manager, Faizal Bhimani, offered rooms to Brown in exchange for sex with Anastasia and others. At times, including when the police were in the area, Bhimani referred Brown to the nearby Pocono Plaza Inn, which shared an owner.

Years after Anastasia escaped captivity, she cooperated with a federal criminal sex-trafficking investigation. She and seven other women testified they had been forced to sell sex at the Howard Johnson. Both Bhimani and the company that owned the two hotels were convicted of aiding and abetting sex trafficking.

“This was open and notorious,” a federal prosecutor said at trial. “This was obvious, and this was constant.”

Anastasia is currently preparing with a lawyer, Steven Babin, to file a separate lawsuit against Wyndham Hotels — the hotel corporation behind the Howard Johnson brand.

Wyndham cut ties with the franchised hotel where Anastasia was trafficked the same year as the trial. In a written statement, Wyndham said it condemns human trafficking and could not comment on litigation.

The case is among a wave of similar litigation over the past decade targeting hotel corporations that profit from franchised properties where sex-trafficking crimes occur.

“Thinking about it as who is in the position to most affect what’s happening and who’s benefiting the most from it — all signs point to these corporations,” said Babin, who has filed a third of human-trafficking lawsuits against hotel corporations in the US.

The lawsuits fall under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which was expanded in 2008 to allow survivors to sue anyone who benefits from an enterprise they knew — or could have known — was enabling trafficking. The hotel industry has broadly taken a public stance against trafficking. But the franchise model makes it difficult to take a proactive approach against trafficking.

Franchises have historically emphasised the independent ownership of their hotels to insulate corporations from liability issues related to safety issues or crime. Disclosure documents reviewed by Yeung from 10 major franchisers showed none had updated their contracts to explicitly cite trafficking as a basis for terminating a franchise agreement.