A Reporter at Large: The Countertraffickers: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker Un lunghiiiiiissimo articolo del New Yorker sul mercato degli schiavi di oggi, visto dagli occhi di Stella Rutaru, una giovanissima moldava che aiuta le sue connazionali a tornare in patria. Pieno di informazioni, avvincente, toccante e piuttosto triste. Io amo questa rivista.
There are roughly two hundred million migrants today—migrants being defined as people living outside their homelands. The reasons for this are globalization, and wars, and new border freedoms, and, above all, disparities in economic opportunity. Along the nether edge of the huge movement of people, human trafficking thrives.
Migrant smuggling is different from trafficking. Migrants pay smugglers to deliver them, illegally, to their destinations. The line into trafficking is crossed when coercion and fraud are used. (This line is not always clear, and many migrants endure varying degrees of mistreatment.) Trafficking can start with a kidnapping. More commonly, it starts with a broken agreement about a job promised, conditions of work, or one’s true destination. Most victims suffer some combination of threats, violence, forced labor, and effective imprisonment. The commercial sex industry, according to the International Labor Organization, absorbs slightly less than half of all trafficked labor worldwide. Construction, agriculture, domestic service, hazardous industries, armed conflict, and begging are some of the other frequent sites of extreme, illegal exploitation.
