Part of the Family?. Sheila Bapat

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СКАЧАТЬ of age; [or] the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.⁴¹

      The TVPA mandates that the State Department provide workers with a pamphlet explaining their rights and available resources in the event of exploitation. The law also gives consular officers discretion to evaluate whether a worker will face abuse in a given situation, and requires the State Department to record workers’ arrivals and departures from the United States as well as allegations of abuse.⁴² Along with the federal trafficking law, most states have enacted anti-trafficking legislation of their own, with New Jersey, Washington, California, New Mexico, and New York among the states with the most robust policies in place.⁴³

      To ensure they receive the legal protections of anti-trafficking legislation, domestic workers need the support and advocacy of community organizers and direct services providers. The power of the direct services model is best illustrated by the track record of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a think tank that offers case management services for victims of trafficking. From 1997 to 2010, IPS assisted hundreds of trafficking victims, all of whom were domestic workers serving within the homes of diplomats.⁴⁴ Most of the workers were African, Southeast Asian, or South Asian immigrants—some of the most underserved, under-resourced, and under-networked of the domestic worker population. With funding from the Department of Health and Human Services authorized by the TVPA—as well as money from private foundations—IPS was able to connect workers to food, shelter, health care, and legal services for a thirteen-year period before staff departures in 2010 began to limit the group’s ability to provide these services. By that time, other social work agencies had begun taking on this work. “We were running a social services agency out of a think tank,” says Tiffany Williams, advocacy director of IPS’s Break the Chain campaign, “but we had to: we were their only lifeline to the outside world.”

      Expanded direct services and advocacy networks on behalf of domestic workers and trafficked victims have helped more and more domestic workers to become aware of their rights and to bring cases against their abusive employers. Rocio Avila, an attorney with the Golden Gate University School of Law’s Women’s Employment Rights Clinic, represents domestic workers who sue for fair wages and overtime. Avila believes that these expanding resources, all with a presence on the Internet, enable more domestic workers to connect with advocates who can help them. Grassroots groups like the South Bay Coalition to End Human Trafficking (SBCEHT), for example, organize communities of domestic workers to inform them of their rights and the resources available to them. Along with SBCEHT, groups such as Mujeres Unidas y Activas and Filipino Advocates for Justice work in conjunction with law enforcement and legal services to aid trafficking victims. SBCEHT was able to connect Zoraida Pena Canal, an abused domestic worker, with Avila. “The power of the Internet, along with the potent domestic worker movement, actually connected this trafficking victim to social services and then to me,” Avila says. “It’s an ecosystem of law enforcement, advocates, social services providers, and physicians who help victims.”⁴⁵ SBCEHT has a hotline for trafficking victims to access help as well. The National Domestic Workers Alliance, though primarily focused on ensuring labor protections for privately employed domestic workers, in 2013 began a campaign focused on addressing human trafficking.⁴⁶

      Since advocates for trafficked domestic workers must work closely with law enforcement, there are groups whose purpose is to bridge the gap between domestic workers and the legal establishment. The Freedom Network, a national conglomeration of organizations, advocates, scholars, and attorneys, has long been an organizing force to aid trafficking victims. Ivy Suriyopas of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, who co-chairs the Freedom Network, says, “We crowd-source our knowledge and make vital connections; we rapidly respond to problems that we see,” adding, “Domestic workers always walk through our doors. They work in homes, isolated; they are often the only employee in the entire household. They often have limited education or English; maybe they are vulnerable because of their immigration status. All of those factors can leave workers vulnerable, and in the wrong employer’s household, it could lead to a trafficking situation.”

      In the context of legal services, a trafficking victim usually requires multiple types of advocacy—in particular, an immigration lawyer familiar with the T or U visa process. (A U visa enables victims of trafficking to remain in the United States legally while they pursue claims against their abusive employers, while a T visa permits human trafficking victims to remain in the country if they agree to testify against their employers.) In addition, the victim may pursue a civil case, which is the piece of the puzzle that Rocio Avila handles. “If they get deported, they can’t pursue the criminal or civil matter,” she says. “The federal trafficking statute is to ensure that the victim cooperates with law enforcement to be able to bring the perpetrator to justice.”

      To seek help, a worker first must escape his or her abusive employer with the assistance of an acquaintance or through connecting with a community organizer from an organization like SBCEHT. In Pena Canal’s case, the employer, a successful real estate executive, brought Pena Canal to California from Peru to serve as a nanny and housekeeper. She kept Pena Canal working around the clock for no pay for two years. “No one expected this successful woman who worked in real estate would do this,” says Avila. “But Pena Canal ended up confiding in parents at the school where she picked up the kids she cared for. The janitor at the school helped her, got the school secretary involved, and in a couple of months they built trust with her to convince her that she should leave.” Before doing so, one of the parents at the school went online and found Domestic Workers United in New York; workers there told her to call Avila in San Francisco. Ultimately, Pena Canal was awarded over $600,000 for compensatory damages and emotional distress, and her abusive employer was sentenced to sixty months in prison. “The process of convincing the court of the above was itself a product of community lawyering and grassroots advocacy at its best,” Avila says. “There is no way we could have prevailed if hadn’t been for the groundbreaking work of the many individuals behind the domestic worker movement both in New York and in California, whom I used as my experts to educate the court and advocate for dignity for my client.”

      Despite the increased efforts of advocates and activists, many domestic workers still do not know their rights, or that the treatment they are receiving at the hands of abusive employers is a crime. Avila has observed that even workers whose cases do not rise to a trafficking charge live in fear of retaliation. “For the live-in nannies and housekeepers, the abuse I see is rampant. Employers are getting away with not even paying minimum wage. Most of my clients don’t complain, out of fear: fear that their employer will turn against them, accuse them of stealing, call the cops. My clients live at the beck and call of their employers. I had one client whose employer would ring a bell, call her when they wanted an apple, water, tea. That doesn’t always give rise to trafficking, but her situation is very bad, exploitative, devoid of dignity, not sustainable.” Avila says that employers often tell her clients things like, “I can’t pay you right now. If you leave, I will contact ICE and have you deported, and terrible things will happen to you.”

      To make matters even more challenging for trafficking victims, some of the resources meant to assist them were for years restricted by a contract between the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB). In 2006, HHS signed a contract with NCCB making the organization an intermediary between funding for TVPA and the organizations serving trafficked victims. However, NCCB did not allow advocates like IPS to provide any information about contraception or abortion.⁴⁷ “I had to tell the women who came to me during intake that contraception and abortion services would not be provided,” recalls Tiffany Williams of the IPS. “During goal planning with the women who came to me, I had to state that we can’t cover that information, the relationship between HHS and NCCB mandated that. Looking back on those interviews I wonder if I could have phrased it in another way so as not to preempt care these women could have received.”⁴⁸

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