A life unlived
Was it the heat radiating off the aluminum roof of the makeshift tea stall, or the sight of the large kettle on the coal-burning stove? Or was it the blinding sun reflecting off the yellow soil? Yet, maybe it was the stillness of the hot and humid air all around. I don't know why we stopped there, but I remember feeling despondent as if all life-energy had suddenly vanished. The sight of the hot tea didn't help.
I saw him as he swept up pieces of the shattered tea cup on the steel tray, his head down, eyes carefully avoiding looking up at the loud voice hurling down a bundle of emotions. It was almost as if drool and emotions were competing to escape from the burly man’s mouth…just about as much as this boy must want to.
Shriveled and with adrenaline pumping, he must have been afraid...but somehow that is not how I remember it. Yes, he didn’t look afraid. He looked resigned. The faded black t-shirt almost matched his sunbaked, expressionless face. His eyes, as dead as the ash in the stove. It was as if nothing could change in his life…it was written.
Soon, he was rushing out cups of tea as if nothing had happened. The smoldering metal roof offered no reprieve.
Slavery is not a savagery confined to the crumbling yellow pages of history books; it continues to sashay around the world, albeit veiled in a different cloak this time around.
For me, the word “slavery” immediately conjured images of the pre-Civil War era, and as a result I ignorantly didn’t recognize that slavery still exists today in the form of human trafficking - the use of force, fraud, or coercion to exploit a person for profit. By one reliable account, over 40 million people across the world have been trafficked with hundreds of thousands of victims in the United States alone.
Human trafficking is a complex issue. It is oftentimes difficult to identify trafficking, as at its very core, it is a hidden crime that can take on different forms.
Perpetrators use psychological, emotional, economic, and social vulnerabilities to exploit and manipulate victims and at times, even the victims fail to realize that they are being taken advantage of. They work openly in public places, at restaurants and in salons. We walk by them, speak with them, but mostly don’t realize what they are going through.
Traffickers coerce and manipulate victims into running high risk errands that have increased chances of police exposure leaving the victims to take the fall every time. The victims pay the price for committing crimes they were forced to commit, while the trafficker goes scot-free.
Victims of sex trafficking are arrested and interrogated for information. Authorities don’t always treat them as the victim and the media less so. It is sad when instead of being taken to a rehabilitation facility, they are treated like criminal delinquents. Minus the right support structure, the cycle repeats, or becomes another sad statistic in someone’s research.
Cyntoia Brown was 16 years old when in 2004, she killed a man. She was sentenced to life in prison for killing a man who solicited her for sex. Despite being a minor, she was charged with a life sentence, denying her claims of self-defense and ignoring the fact that she was trafficked. She thought fate was finally coming around when the “U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that mandatory ‘life sentences without parole’ for juvenile offenders are not constitutional”, but…Tennessee prosecutors successfully argued that Brown would technically become eligible for parole ‘after 51 years, in 2055’” so was eligible to serve her sentence out regardless of the Supreme Court ruling.
15 years of struggle and a successful social media campaign finally made her a free woman in 2019. Alas, not many of these stories grab national attention, remaining unheard of and ignored realities of human trafficking survivors in the United States.
Criminalizing survivors of human trafficking is not the way forward. Prosecutors and judges, even when presented with strong mitigating evidence of coercion or self-defense, still find it difficult for the law to consider the complexities and ground realities of trafficking, or the agony suffered by human trafficking survivors.
Yes, there are laws to protect trafficking victims. The Supreme Court ruled mandatory “life” sentences to be unconstitutional for juveniles, but as in the case of the Cyntoia Brown, creative lawyers found a way around the letter of the law, to guarantee she spent “most of her life” in prison nonetheless.
What happens when Lady Justice, blindfolded as she currently stands, metes out punishment to victims instead of the perpetrators?
If those behind bars are created just as equal as others, isn’t it time we paid a little more attention to the “spirit of the law” and helped rebuild the human spirit.
Because every life is worth it, because no spirit must be caged and no life has to be ill-fated.
No…”Nothing is written” (– Peter O’Toole, Lawrence of Arabia)
