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"I think a lot of people perhaps have gotten a one-sided understanding of this issue of trafficking. They see it as coercive prostitution, or just see prostitution as synonymous with trafficking, which is really not the case.
More than anything else in my 10 plus years of experience working on this issue, and living in Southeast Asia, my colleagues and I have seen that trafficking really is about a lack of economic opportunity, and it's not so much about sexual slavery or forced prostitution."
--Christina Arnold, Prevent Human Trafficking
Christina Arnold is the Founder of Prevent Human Trafficking, a DC-based nonprofit working to prevent human trafficking, particularly in Southeast Asia. I interviewed Christina for the Big Vision Podcast last month. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Christina Arnold: My name is Christina Arnold, and I'm the founder of Prevent Human Trafficking, formerly Project Hope International. We work primarily in the Washington, DC area and in Southeast Asia to promote programs that are addressing the root causes of human trafficking, and to provide sustainable alternatives to trafficking.
We have financed many micro-credit loans for women and men who want to start their own businesses as an alternative way to make a living for their families so that they're not circumstantially forced to take work that would be degrading or demeaning to them.
We do a lot of education here in the Washington, DC area, actually all over the United States. We lecture, and we're also trainers with the US Attorney's Office, so we've given trainings to police on how to identify victims of trafficking.
We have an annual study tour that we do every year to Southeast Asia for scholars, researchers, academics, students, funders, you name it, who would like to get outside of the bubble of the United States and see firsthand the circumstances that people endure, and where people are at, and what this looks like on the ground, especially in some of the very at risk areas along the Thai-Burma border, the border with Laos, and also in Vietnam and Cambodia.
Britt Bravo: On your website, you have several videos and on one of them you said that the reason that Prevent Human Trafficking exists is to help people come to terms with the real facts on trafficking and the larger, bigger issues around this issue.
CA: Right.
BB: What are the real facts?
CA: I think a lot of people perhaps have gotten a one-sided understanding of this issue of trafficking. They see it as coercive prostitution, or just see prostitution as synonymous with trafficking, which is really not the case.
More than anything else in my 10 plus years of experience working on this issue, and living in Southeast Asia, my colleagues and I have seen that trafficking really is about a lack of economic opportunity, and it's not so much about sexual slavery or forced prostitution.
I would say that the majority of the cases are people who've been displaced by war or political conflict, especially in Southeast Asia, and they were forced to get into a kind of work. Many times they arrange their own transport. They agreed to be smuggled. They pay a smuggler to take them across the border to get them work, and then are tricked along the way and wind up in the fishing industry, wind up in very exploitative situations as domestic workers in people's homes, or factories, things like that.
A lot more airtime has been given to sex slavery, especially here in the United States, and researchers have found that a lot of this talk is unsubstantiated by research. There is actually a great piece by a professor at George Washington University, Ronald Weitzer. He wrote a brilliant piece about the moral crusade of this issue, and that's not to say that it's not to be taken seriously. I think that we need to look at the root causes for why people wind up in exploitative situations, no matter what they are, and to say that someone who is a victim of labor exploitation and trafficking deserves equal voice with someone who has had a different experience.
I think now more research is being done to point to some of the assumptions that have been made about the human trafficking "industry", if you will, to separate out the myths from the facts, and to give people a
