The practice of sexual slavery in India and around the world has been near the center of human rights issues at the highest levels of government around the world since the release of the U.S. State Department's 2011 Trafficking in Persons Report on June 27.
On Thursday, two men on bicycles with eyes on a $100,000 prize to be added to the fight against human trafficking stopped in Mountain Home.
Matthew Fredericks, 26, of Princeton, N.J., grandson to Baxter County's own Charlotte Fredericks, was here with cycling mate Jonut "Johnny" Birtalan, 26, of London, England. The pair set out from a California beach on June 7 with cash donations and matching pledges totaling about $65,000, intent on raising more money from publicity stops along the way.
The riders — accompanied by Fredericks' father, Richard, senior pastor for the Damascus Road Community Church, Damascus, Md. — stopped to visit other Fredericks relatives, including Fredericks' aunt, Bonnie Fischer, and a cousin, Jason Callahan, and to tell about their work.
A Maryland mortgage lender has pledged matching funds up to $35,000 that could put the effort at its goal of $100,000.
Fredericks said achieving the $100,000 goal will pay for construction of a second shelter or "Dream Center" serving the region of Calcutta, India. The planned shelter is capable of giving work, food, shelter and education to up to 150 Indian children, most likely girls 8-14 years old.
"The traffickers who supply an industry based on pedophilia lure children to Calcutta with the promise of jobs, food and shelter and money enough to take care of themselves and to send home," said Fredericks. "The only way out for many of these children is to escape or to be dumped when they become ill — or otherwise used up."
Drawing from research by Kevin Bales, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Free the Slaves organization, and personal observations from one of the most heavily "hunted" child slave regions of India, Fredericks believes some 10 million people around the world are in debtor bondage and another 7 million, mostly children, are captive in sexual bondage.
Challenge accepted
Fredericks said he was challenged to look into the issue of human slave trafficking by a professor as a student at Wake Forest University. In 2006, a professor asserted that an estimated 26 million people worldwide were in some way slaves.
"I did not believe her and she challenged me to research the question," Fredericks said.
The outcome of the research took Fredericks to Calcutta and later to the village of Nabrangpur, Orissa, where he gathered information for a research paper. He was a visiting student at Queen Mary University in London where he shared his research and met Johnny Birtalan, a recent graduate and an analyst at Chevron in the UK. Fredericks, a student at Princeton Theological Seminary, and Birtalan now collaborate with a nonprofit — Good News India — to raise the money to build the Dream Centers for Nabrangpur children.
To raise the money, Frederick and Birtalan intend to bike across the U.S. from California to Yorktown, Va.
"We ask local businesses, churches, family and friends to sponsor us," Fredericks said.
Sponsors may pledge a dollar or cent amount per mile for the 3,000-mile bike ride.
Improved rating
U.S. State Department's 2011 Trafficking in Persons Report showed India had improved a rating for trafficking humans measured in three tiers including a "watch list" threshold between tiers 2 and 3. India's new Tier Level 2 is the first time the nation had been taken off the watch list since the U.S. State Department began the TIP survey in 2004.
Still, researchers found India a source, destination, and transit country for men, women and children subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking.
The forced labor of millions of its citizens constitutes India's largest trafficking problem; men, women and children in debt bondage are forced to work in industries such as brick kilns, rice mills, agriculture and embroidery factories, the report says. A common characteristic of bonded labor is the use of physical and, in many instances, sexual violence — including rape — as coercive tools, in addition to debt, to maintain these victims' labor.
Ninety percent of trafficking in India is internal, and those from India's most disadvantaged social economic strata including the lowest castes are particularly vulnerable to forced or bonded labor and sex trafficking, the report says. Children also are subjected to forced labor as factory workers, domestic servants, beggars, agricultural workers, and, to a lesser extent, in some areas of rural Uttar Pradesh, as carpet weavers.
Criteria for the rating includes national performance in areas of prosecution, protection and prevention.
The report noted improvement in the number of cases of human trafficking prosecuted in India but uneven enforcement of national law prohibiting human trafficking and inadequate protection for all cases of sexual bondage in the nation's Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act.
The report also noted uneven progress in its efforts to protect victims of human trafficking. While rescuing hundreds of bonded labor camps in Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, immigration officials performed poorly in identifying victims of trafficking among vulnerable populations, such as children at work sites, females in prostitution or members from the disadvantaged social economic strata in rural industries.
Improvements in efforts to prevent sexual slavery were noted in the Government of Orissa where leaders issued a notification abolishing the bartan system, a form of bonded labor.
More information about the effort and Good News India may be found on the Internet at:
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