Throughout California, many of the workers in elderly care facilities face inhumane conditions, wage theft, and abuse form their employers. Despite efforts from the state, many of these crimes go unpunished and workers are left with few options.
I've traveled from New England to New York to Thailand to Vietnam to China’s southeast border to expose human trafficking routes and venues, and to bring attention to sex and labor exploitation. The Forum at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Tuesday took a closer look at this modern slave trade and its impact on public health worldwide, including in cities and rural communities across the USA.
India's low-lying Sundarbans are rife with human trafficking as the effects of climate change leave families poor and vulnerable. But a new program from Save the Children India is helping kids band together to ward off traffickers, while also getting them to stay in school. Even if it means they also learn to roll cigarettes to support their families.
Critics believed the upgrade from tier three to tier two was a political decision to facilitate Malaysia’s participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive free trade deal being aggressively pushed by President Barack Obama.
Several thousand migrants and refugees stranded at sea in the Indian Ocean have been granted temporary shelter by the governments of Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. The people have endured horrendous conditions.
Despite the clear and growing dangers of crossing the Mediterranean Sea in search of refuge in Europe, the stream of migrants is only getting bigger. The people making the journey say it's better to take a deadly chance than die slowly in civil wars or along the dangerous routes away from home.
Myanmar's Rohingya Muslim population is one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. They can’t vote. They have no rights. And they aren’t recognized as citizens in their own country. Their desperate situation has attracted the attention of human traffickers, who prey on the vulnerability of people like “Abdul” whose 14-year-old daughter is now being held captive.
Shukri Alassouli, a 33-year-old man from Gaza, was trying to find a better life for his young family in Europe. But their journey across the Mediterranean in smugglers' boats turned into what the UN called the deadliest accident of its kind, killing hundreds and losing Shukri's wife, daughter and young son at sea.
Under pressure by the US government and American evangelicals, the Thai government has stepped up raids to rescue sex trafficking victims. The trouble is, many of the "rescued" sex workers may not have been trafficked in the first place.
After encountering first-hand trafficked victims on the streets of Nepal as a public health officer, Matt Friedman dedicated the next 20 years to anti-trafficking activism and fundraising.
Every year tens of thousands of girls in India are sold into a life of violence and abuse. Many are sold to be brides. That has a lot to do with gender imbalances and the widespread practice of aborting female fetuses in northern India.