← Migrant Odyssey
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Foreign.
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Much of the world is focused on punishing or protecting those powerful individuals who consorted with Jeffrey Epstein, the man who presided over the abuse, sexual exploitation and trafficking of women and children for financial and political gains. It has once again, as we do with so many ills, refused to look at the causes. Even worse, it seems to have lost sight of the organizations who, with meagre funding and very often hostile resistance from governments and legislators, have been waging a lonely war against the roots of this vile trade for many years. The US government, far from stepping in to help, has deliberately crippled that fight. The administration cut staffing to the State Department's office to monitor and combat trafficking in persons by over 70%. That's 1,353 employees to be exact, laid off. It's unclear how this year's cuts of 27% in Britain's overall aid budget will affect the UK Human Trafficking Centre, but it certainly won't help it. And while the UN General assembly reaffirmed its resolve late last year to end human trafficking, calling it one of humanity's gravest crimes, a report from The Self Same UN published in October 2025 found that one in three women's rights groups globally have had to suspend or shut down programs aimed at ending gender based violence, presumably mostly because of funding currently, and this is an underestimate because so much of trafficking is hidden in plain sight. Around 50 million human beings are being trafficked or enslaved around the world and over 70% of those are are women and girls. There is a legal international framework which was created to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking called the Palermo protocol, adopted in 2000 and put into force in 2003, it's been ratified by 178 countries who are legally obliged, legally obliged to both punish traffickers and and protect the survivors. How you do that by cutting back funds is a mystery. But the Protocol was and is a massive step forward. And it was largely those NGOs championing women's and children's rights that created the awareness and pressure to bring this international framework to the table. One such ngo, the that was hugely influential in negotiating and actually shaping the dialogue around the Protocol is a tiny organization staffed by four people in New York with less than $1 million in funding and which refuses to this day to accept any money from any government. And this is the Coalition Against Trafficking in women. Founded in 1988. It is one of the oldest international organizations devoted relentlessly, I might say, to ending the trafficking and exploitation of women and girls. This extraordinary body draws its board of Directors from around a dozen countries. They include Ruchila Gupta, whom I interviewed last year, and. And Gloria Steinem, its executive director. Taina Bien Eme is my very welcome guest today. If there is a living example of devotion to a cause, Taina is it. She has been an advocate for women and Girls for over 30 years, is a founding member and past exec director of Equality now, and has led the coalition since 2014. What I particularly loved about Taina is her capacity to rigorously analyze, strategize, and advocate while retaining deep compassion for the women and girls she's trying to protect. It's a rare and a precious quality. Have a listen. Taina Bien Emi, welcome to Migrant Odyssey. It's lovely to see you.
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It really is wonderful to see you, Stephen. Thank you for having me.
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So, first question, which is, how does somebody end up running the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women? What got you there? What's your backstory?
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So, a long, long journey. Very long journey. Gosh. In a nutshell. So I am based in New York City. I was born in New York City of Haitian immigrant parents, but they came with their own story, especially my mother, who was always very ardent feminist. And my grandmother was a suffragette, or suffragist, as people like to call them. So from the time I could articulate a sentence, it was clear to me that I had a responsibility to ensure that boys and girls would be equal, women and men would be equal, or at least to. To realize, like, what was happening. And it took me a while because, you know, in many global south societies and even global north societies, it's very segregated, right? Men are doing something outside the kitchen and women are in the kitchen. So I think my education started around the kitchen table, thinking that the women surrounding me were. Were queens and owners of the planet. And then once adolescence came, I started understanding the stories around me, whether it was sexual harassment at work or. Or domestic violence and other forms of. Of violence and discrimination against women and girls. And so I. I started activism very early on. And then fast forward to many years after law school. I met this woman in a law firm where I worked on Wall street named Jessica Neuwirth. And she had just come from Amnesty international. This is 1992, at a time when the concept of women's rights as human rights was not yet coined. That happened in 1993 at a UN conference in Vienna. And I think the concept of women's rights as human rights is still something that we struggle with. You know, what is equality?
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Can I just interrupt it?
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Yeah.
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The concept of women's rights as human rights was only kind in 1993, but yet we were talking about those of us, and you're much younger, but those of us old fogies like me, we were talking about it and faced with it in the 70s, 60s, but it
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was actually as human rights.
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Yeah, well, certainly we talked about it as. As a human right. Am I. Am I wrong? Am I looking at it the wrong way?
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I think the way I saw it and the way I lived it is that I came from sort of the feminist movement. Right. I'm a second waiver, certainly at my coming of age was watching women protest for their rights to be equal to own property, to have credit cards, to be admitted to various schools, et cetera. But the human rights framework, if you look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted after World War II in 1948, it developed this human rights movement that looked at human rights in a very narrow way in that. Yes, I mean, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I recommend all of your listeners to read it. It's a magnificent aspirational document that really is the first international codification of what it means to be human. That your dignity is inherent, that your right to equality and a life free from violence is inherent. But the movement itself excluded from its legal framework and advocacy framework anything that happened to women and girls because they were born female. Issues such as female genital mutilation, child marriage, sexual exploitation, sexual violence, sexual harassment, the list goes on. Harmful cultural practices were considered outside of that framework and were considered as things that happen to women and girls because of religion, tradition, culture. And so it was only, and obviously there was this massive movement to say, no, these are human rights violations. It may not be that the state itself is perpetuating these human rights violations like political prisoners that are unfairly imprisoned or right to expression or to religion, et cetera, which were state sanctioned. But states every government has an affirmative obligation to protect all of its citizens. And therefore it is government's responsibility to ensure that you have laws and policies and cultural change so that women can live a life free from violence in the home, in the community, at the state level, et cetera. Again, so she came from Amnesty International where they. At. At the time they refused. I mean, I remember we started a campaign against female genital mutilation in the mid-90s, and they absolutely refused to help us, saying, it's not a human rights violation, it's a cultural religious phenomenon. So we have moved forward a lot since that time, but it's still a difficult concept for us to fully grasp. Right. We don't really know what equality tastes like or looks like or how we should apply it. So at the time we. And so I'm a founding board member of Equality now, which is a global human rights organization that focuses on all these forms of violence and discrimination against women and girls. And we didn't really know how to deal with the issue of human trafficking and sex trafficking in particular. We knew it existed. There are already many, many stories, but it's such a complex issue. And Again, this is 1992, when there are no laws against human trafficking per se. You have the Palermo Protocol, the UN Trafficking Protocol was passed in 2000, the US laws against trafficking, the Trafficking Victims Protection act, also 2000. And then there are a number of prostitution laws across Europe that were enacted late 90s, early 2000s. So how to deal with the issue of sexual exploitation and sex trafficking at the time? And so we based our work from the work of the Coalition Against Trafficking in women, which was 4 years old at the time. So the coalition was formed in 88. And what makes us unique, or at the time them unique, was that it looked at the trafficking in women and girls as forms of gender based violence and discrimination. So in other words, these happen because there are causes and consequences of sex and gender inequality and abuse of power and abuse of vulnerability. So that's how I started the work. And so because it was so complex, when you talk about human trafficking, you're talking about government corruption, you're talking about organized criminal networks, you're talking about a population that is hidden in plain sight and that we see them but we don't recognize them. And so we looked at it as a market, especially the sex trades, that is the end destination of sex trafficking. And so like every market, you have supply, demand and the incentive for profit. And as a tiny organization with limited resources and which wanted maximum impact, we started focusing on demand. And so we did. We launched a campaign against a sex tour operator in Queens, New York called Big Apple Oriental Tours, looking at it from the demand side. So, and this is pre Internet, mind you, this is how old we are where Newsweek or Businessweek had an article about the top 25 sex tour operators in the United States. So a sex tour operator, now that the Internet is a whole different ballgame. But then they were like travel agencies and so forth. $2,000 for 14 nights or however nights, how many nights you want to spend in the Philippines or Cambodia, you can have all see sex and son you wanted. And so we launched a campaign against Big Apple Oriental Tours on the basis that it violated the New York penal code, that you can't solicit or profit from prostitution. And it took us seven years to get a successful investigation concluded. So there was a civil suit against Begapol Oriental Tours and then a criminal suit against its owners. And now, of course, it's a whole different ballgame, because anybody could be a sex door operator if you have access to the Internet. But that's how I started the work. And then, of course, we recognized that there was already a very developed movement, including within or especially within the UN membership, that said, we are dealing with this phenomenon of organized criminal networks that are trading in human beings for sexual exploitation, for labor, for servitude, for slavery, et cetera. We need to define what human trafficking is and make sure that governments have the tool. And so that's how the protocol came into play. And so we were involved in those negotiations and then also with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. So that's that in a nutshell. And I haven't stopped ever since. So.
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So in. Interesting. So is. Is this right, that the two spearheads that you actually focused on was one that the. The entire trafficking network, if you like, is gender based for a start, and you focus specifically at that stage on the demand. Is. Is your focus on the demand still, you know, much more than anything else. And how does that. How does that tie in with how you view legislation of, for example, decriminalizing the whole sex trade? And then I want to talk about the trafficking as well later on.
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Well, to. Just to give your listeners a background of what the definition of human trafficking is. So human trafficking is a phenomenon that has existed from time immemorial. It's mentioned in the Bible. This country, the United States and others across the Americas were built on human trafficking. So it is. It's a highly, highly lucrative form of crime that has existed for. For a very. For a very, very long time. And the question is, how do you prevent it? How do you combat it, and how do you. I mean, again, now with the Internet challenges and the, you know, technology industry, the challenges are different and complex and a lot more arduous. But at the time back in 2000, there, there was a debate around prevention. You know, do you focus on demand? And again, if you look at the definition of the Polemo Protocol, which the full title may be interesting to use the full title, because it's the protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children. So there was already a recognition that women and Children were particularly vulnerable to human trafficking. And trafficking is very, very gendered. So if you look at labor versus sex trafficking, the majority of people who are trafficked for labor are men and obviously children. The majority of people who are trafficked for sexual exploitation are women and girls. And of course there are men and boys and children actually are. Girls are the fastest growing group of detected sex trafficking. So according to the United nations, The rate is 32% versus 7% boys, 32% girls have detected sex trafficking victims. So significant, significant emphasis on the fact that human trafficking is a gendered crime. Now of course you can be trafficked for both. So there are many individuals who are initially trafficked for labor and then wind up being sexually exploited. So there, there's also that, that, that gray area you're describing.
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Slavery, aren't you? That's what you're describing. In many ways it is slavery in, in the sense that if, even if we look at the, the slave trade of the, you know, the 16th, 17th century as well, that was trafficking and tell me if I'm wrong, but that was trafficking on a mass industrial scale for labor. But then of course, then the sexual trafficking happened and exploitation happened during that time as well, didn't it? I mean that, so that, so when we talk about prostitution or trafficking being the oldest trade in the world, actually slavery is the oldest trait in the world.
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Actually midwifery or farming are the oldest professions in the world. So you know, sexual exploitation, prostitution are the oldest forms of oppression and the oldest among the oldest forms of sexual violence. So yes, you are right, which leads me to just a side point on terminology. So because human trafficking is so complex and kind of difficult for the average person to understand exactly what it is, what are the mechanisms, how can we address it? There is this term modern slavery or modern day slavery that is sort of a catch all, easy reference to the concept of human trafficking. The problem from our perspective with the term, other than that, it's a shortcut to explaining what human trafficking is. But from a professional level, even from a government level, if you describe human trafficking as modern day slavery, you will have an even more difficult time in detecting it because as I mentioned, it's something that is hidden in plain sight. So our imagination of what slavery is is someone who is tied to a radiator or to fence or who is in somebody's basement. So this, this notion of, of lack of freedom at a very visceral physical level, that is not what human trafficking looks like. You don't know if the person who's doing your nails has been trafficked for labor, or the person who picks up your plate in a restaurant or the fruit grower in the farm next door. Similarly, when we talk about the sex trade, and the sex trade is, is a multibillion dollar global industry that includes all forms of sexual exploitation, from street prostitution to illicit massage parlors, brothels, escort services, only fans, et cetera, then looking at that in terms of slavery makes it complicated because, because the concepts, the system of prostitution is so ingrained in our culture, it's so accepted that you will not see that the person is in fact in a form of sexual slavery because you will put all the emphasis on her and I'll use her just for our purposes here. Although again, men and boys and others are sexually exploited. So it's whether or not she's 18, whether or not she enjoys it, whether or not this is what she wants to do, we should leave her alone. There's no recognition or acknowledgement that it's an entire system of procurers and traffickers and third party exploiters and more importantly the demand, the sex buyers, who are 99% of which are men, who want that sexual access for money. And so whether we're talking about Hollywood or you know, social platforms, social media platforms, Instagram, TikTok, whatever, it's, it's, it makes it very difficult to talk about sex trafficking in terms of slavery because then you don't see, you don't, you don't see the pain, you don't see the exploitation. And then the other point is, is in the definition of human trafficking, the Palermo definition, which is the internationally recognized definition, you have different forms of exploitation. So that's very, very important. So you can be specifically trafficked for the exploitation of forced labor, sexual exploitation, or the exploitation of prostitution, slavery, or forms or forms of slavery, servitude or forms of servitude and organ removal. So slavery is just one form of the exploitation. It doesn't cover all of the forms of exploitation.
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Light bulb did go off mind in my head then that. And I realize now why you were so careful about, about the definition. Because for me, of course trafficking, if you like, or exploitation is a form of slavery because you're doing, you're, you're exploiting a human being, a human quote unquote asset for money. You're dealing with a much more complex issue than that. Yeah, no, I, I get it. Thank you for, for enlightening. We're talking about trafficking. So what is, what is actual trafficking? Because when we talk about you Know, Jeffrey Epstein, for example, you know, guilty of trafficking across it. Does it have to cross a border? Does it have to. Is it. Does it. Is. Why is it called trafficking? Stupid question, but indulge me, please.
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No, it's interesting, you know the etymology of the word. I never really looked into it. There was the 1949 convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and the Exploitation of Prostitution of Others. So there were a number of conventions before the 2000 UN Trafficking Protocol or the Palmer Protocol that did use that term from a legal perspective. But what the Palermo Protocol has done, as I mentioned, is give us the definition of trafficking. So, yes, people think that when you're talking about trafficking, you're talking about overseas. Someone was transported from one place to another. That is not the definition. There is no requirement of transportation. You could be born in one building in the South Bronx or in Leeds, never leave that building. And to be trafficked for either sex or labor. What the polemic does is that it gives you a string of verbs. It's anyone who entices, transports, coerces, uses force, deceives, et cetera. And then there are means through which you do all that. And the main ones are, yes, there's force and coercion, but abuse of power and abuse of vulnerability are key means. And traffickers can smell vulnerability in a second. And so that is really the definition. So anyone who entices someone or deceives someone, the classic case in sex trafficking would be the lover boy situation, right? You recognize a person's vulnerability, you groom them, you shower them with love, and then at one point, point, it's okay, and in exchange for the roses and the meals and the jeans that I purchased, now it's time for you to do this. And by then, the traumatic bonding is established. Or it could be a neighbor or an auntie from your village. And then you have the abuse of fear. So fear of your life and then of the life of your family. With debt bondage, although debt bondage is not specifically listed in the definition, is definitely a means to keep someone in a position of exploitation. Debt bondage is significant. That never leaves. And then also, the very important part of the definition of the polemic protocol is that consent to one's exploitation is irrelevant. And so let's say you are a young woman from Ukraine and you see an ad to be, I don't know, a dancer in the strip club in any given northern city. You may know that this could be a house of prostitution, but you can dance. It's fine. You need the money, you're in desperate circumstances. This looks like a viable labor agency. The fact that you signed the contract, you get to that destination and then you are brutally exploited and violated and all the rest, you did not consent to that. So consent is irrelevant. So those are important concepts. So you have the Polymer Protocol and which is the, you know, member states. Most of the member states have ratified it. But then each government needs to enact its own federal laws or national laws on trafficking. And so that's when all hell breaks loose, for lack of a better term, because there are very few governments whose national laws meet the international standards of the Plymouth protocol. So the U.S. law, for instance, the U.S. federal law on trafficking, does not meet the international standards of the Polemic Protocol. It's very, very difficult to prosecute traffickers because the definition of trafficking under, especially sex trafficking under the Trafficking Victims Protection act is bifurcated in that you have the criminal provision which requires prosecutors to prove force, fraud and coercion. And if we go back to the example of the Ukrainian women, there was no force involved. And so how do you prove that in a court of law? Now, the actual definition of sex trafficking in the US law does follow more or less the Polemo Protocol, but it's not the provision that educates prosecutors in getting successful prosecutions. And we saw that in the P. Diddy case, you know, the Sean Combs case, where from my perspective, it was clear that the prosecutors could not prove sex trafficking because it was difficult for them for whatever reason. I mean, I haven't spoken to these prosecutors, but whether it was cultural understanding or legal understanding that he was someone who obtained, who solicited, who patronized his victims, in this case his girlfriends, and therefore he was in fact guilty of sex trafficking. But the jury couldn't see it because I think again, the jury saw that these women had so called agency, that it was just a bad case of domestic violence. They couldn't see the traumatic bond, they couldn't see the abuse of vulnerability that was constant and just the violent, violent forms of exploitation. So we have a very long way to go. And again, in legal history, these laws are very young. The Playmore Protocol is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. So there's a lot of room for improvement.
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Yeah, yeah, Interesting. When you were talking about the cases, of course, again, going back to assumptions, aren't we? The assumptions, the socialized assumptions of juries, the assumptions, the prosecutors. Is there also a particular, I don't know, prejudice within legislators that are reluctant to, to accept the idea that consent in cases of unbalanced power, if you like, is simply not relevant.
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Well, legislators are a product of the culture. I mean, they grew up in the same culture we did. It's a culture that sexualizes, objectifies, commodifies, especially women and girls from a very, very young age. Now, of course, it's exponentially worse. Yes, there is that conditioning around. We're just going to focus on whether or not she consented or not. So I think the conversations around, I mean, what gives me hope, because there's a lot to despair on, but what gives me hope is one that there's a global survivor led movement now, survivors of prostitution and sex trafficking and sexual exploitation who are actually describing what happened to them and what sex buyers have done to them. Like most survivors will tell you that sex buyers were far more violent and dehumanizing than their traffickers were, with whom they often have, you know, emotional relationships. Very often traffickers are the fathers of their children, et cetera. So it is, it's this, it's sort of the same conversations we had 50 years ago. Like if I go back to my mother's kitchen table around domestic violence, where it was just a bad marriage, especially within the religious context, right? So till death do you part. Maybe you should make the pasta a little less mushy, iron his shirts a little faster. We've moved beyond that. And it took literally 4,000, 5,000 years for our legislators and policy makers to recognize domestic violence as a crime of abuse, as a crime where there is a perpetrator and a victim, and sort of what should be the, the socio cultural measures that we need to take in addition to legal measures around this. The same with sexual harassment. We saw it with the MeToo movement where it was basically expected that there could be unwanted encounters at the job. And if you wanted to keep your job, then you dealt with it. And now we're starting to recognize that, no, this is unacceptable. You have to treat people as human beings, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that is where we are now in terms of prostitution. We're not there yet because it's still couched within the, within a fake understanding of this is just sex and people have sexual desire and why not exercise them as you wish? And that's why the whole concept of prostitution is quote, unquote, sex work not a term we use. Prostitution is neither sex nor work. It really is a form of male violence against women. And where we're very hopeful, at least I'm very hopeful that the survivors themselves are telling us and will continue to tell us until their megaphones are big enough that they can be more at the center of decision making rather than at the margins to exactly explain to people that what you're seeing or understanding or being told, you're engaging in cognitive dissonance. And again, going back to the Sean P. Diddy case, after four days of witnessing Cassie Ventura, the key witness in the case, and her describing just the unimaginable sadism that he subjected her to, that included primarily acts of prostitution with male escorts who probably were themselves sex trafficked at some level. We don't know all of their life's journeys, but most likely they were probably also sex trafficked children or boys who then wind up in the sex trade. But it was very jarring to hear her testimony and then to be faced with a juror's verdict because you could see this was cognitive dissonance. You see something, you hear something, and yet culture tells you, no, she wanted it. She would have left if she hadn't. And so the blame shifts from the perpetrator to the victim. And that is something that is very, very common in the history of women's and girls rights.
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B
And your organization is independent, non governmental, and I remember you telling me does not accept any funds from government or state. Or any state funding, correct?
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That is correct.
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B
So it has a tiny budget, from what I could see under a million dollars. Is that correct?
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Yes, we're very, very small.
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B
How do you keep going?
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Well, I have a remarkable and mighty staff. There are only four of us and then we have a small office in the Philippines and we had an office in Mexico representing the Latin American Caribbean region. Tragically, the executive director passed away this year. So we're trying to rebuild our office there in Latin America. But I think one of the ways we can celebrate the impacts that we've had is that we add value to the work that is being done on the ground. So we have, by definition or by name, we build coalitions with survivor led networks and organizations, other national grassroots groups around the world who are working on these issues. And so we collect our very meager forces to hold governments accountable to the laws that they have enacted. But more specifically, we promote a model that is known as the. It has many names right now the main name is the equality model, but it was called the Swedish model for 10 years from 1999 to 2008. And so going back to the notion of prevention of sex trafficking in particular, and looking at it from a gender equality perspective, the Swedes got it right. So after 20 years of women's rights advocacy, the Swedish government finally recognized that if you look at the sex trade or the system of prostitution, and, you know, I always say if a Martian came down on Earth and saw a cartoon of what prostitution was, and on one side of the paper, you'd have mostly men, if not all men, and then on the other side, globally, you'd see women and women and women and girls. So the Martian would recognize that this. We're talking about a sex inequality situation or a gender inequality situation. And I think that's what the Swedish government recognized as well. And so said, the people who are being bought and sold actually need services. They don't need arrest or incarceration. But if we want to stop this, excuse me, this global industry from proliferating and expanding the sex trade, we need to focus on the demand. And so the law that they passed was a ban on the purchase of sex. And so the men. I don't think there's one sex buyer in Sweden or in any other country that has passed this model that is in jail, but they are fined. And more important than the criminal provision against the sex buyers is the cultural narrative that shifted with this law. So before the law was enacted In Sweden, around 80% of the population believed it was perfectly acceptable for one human being to purchase another one for sexual acts. Now, 25 years later, it's the opposite, the exact reverse, where people feel that not only is it unacceptable, but that it's something barrier to gender equality. And I've spoken with Swedish men who say they would rather be caught driving under the influence than being caught in a brothel. So you have that normative change that is kind of a push toward what does equality mean for women if you're going to create a marketplace for them on which they are bought. And so, like on any auction block, because that's what it is. And so eight jurisdictions have followed suit in Sweden, so Iceland, Norway, Canada, France, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Israel, and the US State of Maine. And we are working on a similar law in New York State. Very, very difficult. We've been at it for seven years, and it's still an enormous challenge. And there are some other efforts in Scotland, for instance, who also want to pass this law. So it was known as the Swedish model, the Nordic model. The French call it the abolitionist model. A number of Americans call it the survivor model. So many names. But the purpose and the results have been, so far, pretty successful, especially in France, which has the strong law of its kind. And so there's been Even a few years ago there, the government reported a 54% increase in the successful prosecutions of traffickers and exploiters. Over 10,000 men have been apprehended and fined for purchasing sexual acts. And that money goes into services for victims and survivors.
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B
The survivor leadership, which is one of your tenets as well, isn't it? And of course, our mutual friend Ruchira Gupta talks about her whole campaign that she founded was having these survivors not only talking, but creating new models.
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A
Yes. No, that's exactly for their future.
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B
How strong is that and how much more can be done? Where do you see that going? Apart from raising awareness, does it also do more in terms of making sure that future generations don't fall into the same exploitative traps?
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A
If that's possible, yes. We are currently working with an amazing survivor leader in Colombia. Her name is Claudia Quintero, who is, who is organizing. She's just one of many who are organizing survivors in her country and throughout the Latin American Caribbean region. So that's an example. The US Survivor movement is increasing by. And they're having significant influence within legislation. We're seeing it with the Epstein survivors who are, who were very successful in getting the Epstein Transparency act passed. And so they, it's. It's very. We, we cannot underestimate the courage that survivors have in order to, to show their faces, say their names and they may or may not share their stories. But, but just to have the public recognize what happened to them. You know, stigma is inherent to prostitution. A lot of people think, well, if you legalize it or decriminalize it, the stigma will be removed. It doesn't. We know in countries that have legalized the system of prostitution, whether it's Germany, the Netherlands or decriminalize it in New Zealand, like, the stigma is still there. Women don't register and say, oh, I'm working. Been providing sexual acts to strangers all day long. So all that to say is that there is. The survivors who are the most brilliant among them have come to the surface and the most courageous and it is going to be very effective. It is already effective and it's going to continue to grow. I think there is this burning desire to stop being at the margins of decision making and going to the center. And most of them, like us, are working in difficult financial or resources situations. So it really is just a labor of love and conviction to tell the truth.
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B
And at the risk of ending on a negative note, you do have in the US under this current administration, the stripping of the office for demolishing Combat trafficking in persons being stripped down to I believe one third of its staff since January.
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A
Yes, 70%. 70% of the staff was removed.
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B
And that's just one aspect, isn't it? I mean, the other aspect, of course, is that the entire attitude, it appears, seems to have sort of taken 10 steps back. Am I exaggerating it? Is there a real, a real backward movement, if you like, in the United States against trafficking and the exploitation of, of women?
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A
I think that with the purge within the State Department, in particular trafficking in person's office, it's a good day for traffickers and it's also a good day for governments who would rather not answer to the United States in terms of meeting the minimum standards to combat that human trafficking. So, you know, again, I'm old enough to know that history fluctuates and so sometimes you're on the bad side of the pendulum. This is a particularly bad side of the pendulum, but I don't think it's sustainable. I think that hopefully if this regime ends and then beyond the US it's also the role of the US within the United Nations. So they have disinvested in the Sustainable Development Goals which, which has many targets that deal with human trafficking and other things, climate change, gender justice, a number of other very, very important components, hunger, et cetera. But I think this US administration has particularly focused on disinvesting in gender equality and climate change. But the work doesn't stop. I mean, if we had to rely on our governments and rely on funds to do our work, we wouldn't have achieved anything. And so the work continues.
- [49:57]
B
One of the things that I've been reflecting on recently is the importance of. And one of the least used words I think is tenderness. And I define tenderness as the recognition of others vulnerability from one's own vulnerability, if you like. And it strikes me that part of the, what you have retained, what large NGOs and bureaucracies tend not to have, is this tenderness towards the others. And it probably, and it comes, I think, from recognizing your own, your own vulnerability as a human being. So I find that enormously refreshing. I find that enormously tender.
- [50:52]
A
That's so kind. That is the most kind observation I have heard all week. No, thank you. And never seen that. It definitely makes us nimble. And I think it's important when you are dealing with such atrocities to stay nimble and not bureaucratic. So it has its pros and cons. But you know, I am of African descent and so this is a long haul. So that's the other thing. We rest on the shoulders of so many who struggled and whose names we'll never know. But we are small cogs in the very big historical wheel. But you have to believe that, yes, justice and equality will one day matter for everyone, not just for a few.
- [51:51]
B
My guest today was Taina Bien emi, Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. If you enjoyed or valued the podcast, please like us, review us, or recommend us. In the meantime, I'm Stephen Barden. This has been another episode of Migrant Odyssey. My guest today was Taina Bien.