Angry Planet - Turning QAnon QAnoff

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

Please blame Jason Fields for that headline.Human trafficking and modern slavery are at the top of the news in the United States in the form of the QAnon conspiracy theory. It links together Democrats, child sex trafficking and a pizza place about a mile from my house.The pizza at Comet Ping Pong is just OK, but don’t ask to see the basement. There isn’t one.QAnon is one of the more whacko things going on in this country. Today we’re going to talk about the reality of human trafficking and how it actually works.We’re joined by Kieran Guilbert who covers human trafficking and modern slavery for the Thomson Reuters foundation. I worked for Kieran and learned a lot from him.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. There are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know, we don't know. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been cut out in this country almost within clinical, and when it is near completion, people talk about intervention.

You don't get freedom to people. Freedom has never faith-guided people. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. Human trafficking in modern slavery at the top of the news in the United States, in the form of the Q&ONN conspiracy.

It links together. Democrats, child sex trafficking, and a pizza place about a mile from my house. The pizza at Comet Pingpong is just okay, and they don't have a backroom in the basement, but QAnon has lingered on. It's one of the most wacko things that we've got going on. We even have members of Congress who believe in it. Today we're going to talk about the reality of human trafficking, though, and how it actually works. We're joined by Kieran Gilbert, who covers human trafficking and modern slavery for the Thompson Reuters Foundation. I worked for Kieran and learned a lot from him. So thank you so much for joining us. Pleasure. Thanks having me on Jason. Thanks, Matthew.

Can we start with the basics, the absolute basics? When we say human trafficking, modern slavery, what do we mean? So it's a difficult one to define quite simply because human trafficking is the, I would say, is the older, more established crime. And then human trafficking is based on three things. that's the act, the means and the exploitation. So the acts could be recruiting someone or transferring them and harboring them. The means is how you do that. So it can be through coercion, through fraud or through deception. And then the exploitation is the form of abuse.

So that can be sexual exploitation or that can be forced labor. Now, what kind of complicates the picture slightly is you have this modern slavery as this umbrella term, which has really gained in popularity over the past, I would say, about decade. And it's a bit of an umbrella term. Under a modern slavery, you have forced labor, you have debt bondage, very popular in countries such as India, where people are trapped in exploitation by debts. That can be debts they take from a money lender, or that can be debts that have gone through generations of families. So it also is linked to descent-based slavery. In a nutshell, though, I would say that if I'm, and I would get some criticism from this,

from some academics and activists, but just in terms of a simple definition that everyone can get behind, The idea of mon slavery is the exploitation of another individual for gain. That can be monetary gain. That can be good of, I would say, you know, personal gain. But that's in a nutshell, the exploitation of another individual, yeah, for personal profit or gain. And this is actually a widespread problem. This is not isolated to one part of the world. It's not, and many products are involved.

Is that right? Yeah, that's certainly true. And obviously, the globalization in recent decades and the shifting of industry, industry to Southeast Asia has massively seen this become a problem whereby, now many of the products that we take for granted in the West, whether that's the clothes we buy, the smartphones, the laptops, the food we buy. There's a real risk that at the very end of these supply chains, based in countries like India, Thailand, Malaysia, that there's exploitation happening there. And it's complicated. These supply chains are extremely vast. If you take your T-shirt, for example, there can be 16 or 17

steps to the supply chain behind a T-shirt. That goes all the way from the picking of the cotton in the first place to the spinning of that yarn and then it's processed into fabric and that fabric is probably transported from one country to another where it's then stitched into the T-shirt and then of course you have the transportation from that factory to the logistics factory before it hits the shell. Problem is that most companies only have visibility or knowledge of Tier 1 suppliers and that means in a 15-tier supply chain that you know, major brands can really only be confident say that they know what's going on in their first tier suppliers in the first factory. They don't really know what's going on at the very bottom

of those chains. It's very difficult to find out because of the nature now of subcontracting. Audits just aren't up to scratch. So in essence, it means that we as consumers really are relying on the promises of these brands. And the reality is that although brands make the right noises, they have very limited knowledge themselves. And a lot of them are scared to look because they don't want the answers. It's a bit of a Pandora's box for them. The harder they look, the more likely they are to find problems, and then they have to, you know, respond to those problems. And that can mean uncomfortable conversations with local governments, with local NGOs, with shareholders, with consumers. So there are a lot of brands. I think what's really

interesting for me is that a few years ago I went to a conference and I spoke to a major supermarket, the CEO, sorry, of a major supermarket. And he said, on modern slavery, most brands like to stay in the safety of the pack. No one wants to be left behind. Very few brands want to come out and take leadership because then your name is going to be in the headline headlines with mon slavery, even if it's a positive development that you are looking deeper into your supply chain and introducing policies that better protect workers. Most companies want to stay in the safety of the pack. They don't want the bad press, but they don't want any press. So I think that's the state of play where we are with how brands see the problem. Can you give us an idea of the scale?

I remember when I was working for you that we were talking about some huge, numbers, I think people don't have any idea about. Yeah, the issue of numbers is really thorny. Without getting too into the weeds, it was in the early 2000s, an academic called Kevin Bales, an American academic who's been based in Britain for a long time. He took a real interest in this issue and wrote one of the first academic books in this issue called Disposable People. He has faced some criticism since then for his methodology or lack thereof. But apparently, and this is rumor, what happened was that he had some conversations with some activists and some business leaders. And a man called Andrew Forrest, who's a mining magnate in Australia,

set up an organisation called the Walk Free Foundation dedicated to tackling modern slavery. And Bill Gates apparently said to Forrest, you need to quantify this issue, because if you can't put a number on the number of modern slaves worldwide, then you aren't going to get the funding of the interest behind it. What's been interesting since is that the numbers that have been produced have been based on extremely patchy methodologies. So we have a global figure that says that 40.3 million people worldwide are modern slaves, which is an interesting figure because that includes victims of forced marriage, which hasn't always been seen as modern slavery, and that has an uneasy place in this number. But if we just focus on the 25 million, which is victims of

human trafficking, leaving forced marriage to a side, there's 20 million victims of forced labor and five million victims of sex trafficking. Now, the huge concerns about this figure, how it was calculated, because it's based on surveys in about 54 countries. So it's been a number that's been extrapolated from 54 to 193 or so countries. And there's concerns about what was included and what wasn't included. But that's basically a massive underestimate. So it's fair to say that there are tens and tens of millions of victims worldwide. And that there's such a, again, because modern slavery is an umbrella term, these are really different issues we're talking about. So the problem is of that number, although it does give the public a sense of the fact that this is evasive,

this is happening around you, it's not a faraway problem. is that it's a bit simplistic in of itself, I think, in terms to try to tackle the problem. And because the methodology is not particularly strong, I think a lot of decisions and academics work in space would say that with recent estimates, when the number fluctuates, that doesn't necessarily, or doesn't at all, I should say, show signs of progress or setbacks in the kind of global drafts tackle the issue. So I suppose we don't know, unfortunately, whether we're making progress or not. I would argue that maybe before coronavirus, we're moving in the right direction and that COVID-19,

like so many human rights issues, has just put a spanner in the works. And money-wise, we're talking about billions of dollars. Yeah, again, it's not an estimate and undoubtedly an underestimate, but the United Nations International Labor Organization, or ILO estimates this is the crime that generates $150 billion a year. That's for traffickers. We can also talk about the benefit to companies and the private sales. sector and state-sponsored schemes, which wouldn't be counted in that number. And that might be

moving a bit more away from the worst forms, or the most egregious forms of human trafficking and into the kind of more grey area of labour exploitation. And this idea, there's this continuum of abuses that you need to really also look at smaller labour abuses of vulnerabilities to exploitation if you're serious about preventing human trafficking. The idea that if you, if labour abuses go unchecked, which can be anything from late payments to unpaid overtime to terms that change after the contract sign. If you don't tackle these kind of issues that it can lead to situations whereby people are exploited more severely or fall into situations of one slavery because they have been denied their money and it had

to take out loans elsewhere or migrate into more risky jobs, so to speak. Where are the hotbeds? Where's most of the activity? It's mainly based, I would say, across Asia. I think in real numbers, India would be believed to be home to the biggest proportion of modern slaves. And like I mentioned at the start, we'd be looking at a lot of countries in Asia and Southeast Asia, which are manufacturing hubs that can be Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Malaysia, China, of course. But it's happening in every country. I think what's been interesting is just noticing the shift in perception now from people in the US and people in Britain, named two countries. Australia as well, the idea that this isn't happening just overseas. It's happening around us

and we're taking it for granted. One, one kind of big push from recently is in the UK has been to get the public to think about car washes and nail salons. People will go and get their car washed for five to ten pounds, ten to fifteen dollars, and not think about it, not think about why that's so cheap because there are Eastern European men mainly working these car washes who are probably getting paid a fraction of the minimum wage or are working 12, 14, 14 hour days, having their documents withheld, being forced to live in squalid conditions. And it's the same with the Vietnamese women often in hair and nail salons in the UK. So it's also just trying to get the public to realize that it's not a distant problem that

they don't have to worry about. And it's huge in food production too, right? Yeah. In particular, in 2015, the Associated Press did a massive series of investigations into modern slavery in the Thai seafin industry. so a lot of Southeast Asian migrants, Burmese and Indonesian migrants in particular, the working in seafood production in Thailand. Now, that was fascinating because that had real impact in terms of,

I think, some of the most impressive impact to date of journalism when it comes to one's slavery issues. And that really forced the government to reform working policies. It really pressured big brands to actually invest more in their supply chain in Thailand to take this issue seriously. I think what's a little bit sad to see those, it just seems that that's good for anyone who's working in the type of seafood industry that standards have been raised, albeit not by much, I would argue. But the issue is that it's just so easy for production to shift elsewhere. And we see that in so many countries, and I think to speculate, you're going to see that more now in Africa, that production will slowly, but surely shift from Asian nations to African nations as they develop as manufacturing hubs.

We have a correspondent in Ethiopia. Ethiopia doesn't have a minimum wage. So there are Ethiopian garment workers who are earning a dollar a tour day if they're fortunate. And they have no legal recourse to demand or expect more. And I think that's the depressing thing is that as one country or industry cleans up its act, the problem very quickly shift elsewhere. We're going to pause here for a break. You're listening to Angry Planet. We'll be right back. All right. Welcome back. You are listening to Angry Planet. doesn't seem that any country, developed countries aren't immune, not necessarily to huge swaths of, no, I'm going to take it back because in the United States, we have a serious issue with agriculture, with people, many reports of people picking crops where their papers are withheld, and that they're making tiny fractions of what an American would make. That counts in the problem, too, right? Yeah, yeah. And I'm not sure I'm crystal clear in this book because I read something

briefly a few weeks ago or months ago, but I know the HS2 visa in the US, which is for temporary agriculture workers, that there's talk of a, whether it's confirmed or just being proposed, there was talk of a real terms pay freeze for the next few years on that visa. And of course, that means that although it might not seem like a big deal, as inflation, you know, inflation increases in the next few years, anyone on that visa is then going to really struggle to. to make ends meet and then they will be then pressured to work longer hours or perhaps to do other risky work to supplement their income. And it just shows, again, in so many countries now that the lack of standards or rights for foreign workers compared to local workers and how that really

drives so many, I would say, foreign workers, any given country into the shadows, especially in countries like Britain and the US at the moment, or say at the moment, for the time this goes out, we might be under a Biden administration. Let's say under Trump in, under the revolution. Republicans in the US and Conservative government in the UK, what's bizarre about these nations is you have, US and UK have been very vocal on anti-trafficking efforts in recent years. Trump particularly made it a headline issue, really, but it's at odds with anti-immigration policy. I think the consensus would be in the anti-trafficking movement. You cannot lead on anti-trafficking. You cannot really be serious for anti-trafficking if you're also anti-immigration. Because the problem is, if you're studying out from an anti-immigration

starts, then you are going to drive victims of trafficking into the shadows. They are going to be afraid to come forward and speak out if they fear that they'll be criminalized, that they believe that they will be detained or deported or won't be granted in the US as a T visa, a humanitarian visa, victims of trafficking in the UK. There is also an avenue to remain in both countries for seeing those numbers go down because there is this well-founded fear. So, you know, this is something I've challenged the US Anti-Trafficking Ambassador on. I've challenged you. I've challenged you. UK politicians on. But it's interesting because the public just hears the rhetoric, which is we are doing everything to fight trafficking. And what's really fascinating to go back to Q&On a little bit is that

you very much have this really entrenched and outdated narrative with trafficking of the bad guys, the villains, this idea that there are the bad guys of the traffickers and the helpless victims. Well, it's much more nuanced and insidious than that. And the reason that politicians in the US and the UK painting like this, it takes, it shifts away the blame from them. It says, it says, these are bad guys who are going to do this no matter what. And it shifts any attention away from the immigration policies that actually fuel trafficking. And it gives this very simplistic black and white narrative is that people can get behind and is hard to challenge. It also kind of takes agency away from the victims. You know, many victims of trafficking by definition, you know, although that they are being exploited for many of them, for many Eastern

Europeans in the UK or Mexicans or Central Americans in the US. Yeah, we might, we or a law enforcement official might say they are victims of slavery, they're being exploited. But for them to earn a few dollars or pounds a day is better than nothing at home. A lot of them don't want to be rescued. They don't see themselves as victims. The agency is often taken away from them. And I think that's a real frustration in the space that victims are often spoken for and over. And we don't often get their perspective. It's a really, really complicated issue. And I know that law enforcement officers often struggle with this because they, by the law, by the letter of the law, want to go and by the standards of the US, the UK, want to go

and help these, you know, victims in inverted comments. But it's really difficult. It's really difficult then what happens next in terms of support for them, getting them to get involved in investigations, prosecutions, and your next steps in terms of whether they have the right to remain in the country or whether they are locked up or sent home. So a big part of this is, is sex trafficking. I think, so we said earlier, it could be five million people, something that's very rough numbers as we talked about. But in some ways, that's the headline story. That's the part that people find most fascinating. What you were just saying about people who are willing participants, does that count in that industry as well? That's a great question. I think

it's complicated. I think what's fascinating about sex trafficking, and we've seen this particularly, I would argue in the US is that sex trafficking is such a bipartisan issue. And the US has long focus on sex trafficking because it's less contentious than labor trafficking. When you come down to issues of labor exploitation and labor rights and you very quickly get into this partisan world of regulation and globalization and trade tariffs and you can't really get Republicans and Democrats around a table, I would say, easily on labor trafficking, although it's the bigger problem. You know, there's this background to sex trafficking that it's, I think the problem is, there's still a lot of morality wrapped up with the issue of sex trafficking, a lot of organizations worldwide. Yes, in the

US, in the UK, in Thailand, India, a lot of organizations that tackle sex trafficking have a religious affiliation or background, which muddies the waters, because there's this whole idea of the savior complex. There's this idea that they're saving women in sex trafficking from the sin of sex. And we've seen this a lot recently with Exodus, this organization that has been, you know, instrumental in pressuring Pornhub to change its policies. So it's a murky issue because essentially, yes, of course sex trafficking is a huge problem, but it's such a nuanced issue. And I think the worry is that you have willing sex workers, in many cases, autonomous free sex workers who get swept up in these anti-trafficking rays or

operations or they get mislabeled. And also you have the problem that victims of sex trafficking, yeah, they're often rescue and rehabilitation is often through a religious lens, which isn't going to be appropriate in many cases. So I think it's a muddy picture, it's a cloudy picture. I would argue compared to labour trafficking, though, I would say there's probably less, maybe it's a little clearer as to who's the victim, you know, or to that question, identity of a victim, but it's still such a grey and murky area. And I just think one of the main problems is that everybody in from government to law enforcement, to organizations that have an agenda or funding,

you know, funding to do a certain job that they want to paint this or see it as a more black and white issue. And that doesn't help anybody from public, from informing the public to supporting victims to changing kind of the landscape or reducing vulnerabilities that drive people in situations and in policies that keep them trapped there. That is,

it's fascinating. to hear the nuance because I think the biggest issue around Q&ON is this incredible myth that poor little blonde white children are kidnapped from their families and forced into sex trafficking or into sexual slavery and that somehow this is a large problem we had a case one case of Elizabeth's smart in Utah and just this belief that's actually widespread. Can you talk a little bit about how widespread is it? I think that's the thing. I think that this, and I think films like taken have not helped.

I think a lot of anti-trafficking activists say that film is one of the biggest stains on the anti-trafficking movement because people love Liam Niece and a good action film and they see his daughter in Paris be taken off the streets. And people believe that just, yes, of course, that happens in isolated incidents. But sex trafficking is not kidnapping of people off the street. It's not kidnapping of kids off the street. In so many cases, sex trafficking is perpetrated by an individual that's known to the victim. And again, it's often a case of women being offered jobs abroad.

There's a big issue with Nigerian women being sex traffic to Europe. They go to Libya and then are taken to Italy. And, you know, these are young women who aren't particularly, well-educated or trained in a particular job and they get told there will be a cleaner abroad, a hairdresser. They arrive in the West and they're told they have to pay off huge debts of $20 to $30,000 at the very least and they are forced then into sex work. You will also have other situations and I think this is increasingly the case in many contexts

where women will know that they're going abroad to do sex work. So I would say 15, 20 years ago they would believe they were doing a different job. and it would be tricked or duped. Now, in many cases, they will know. What they won't know is the debt aspect, the fact that they are being told that their journey will, they're told that the fee, let's say, the recruitment field, the fee for the travel and the accommodation will be a few

thousand dollars and that may take a year to pay off or a relatively short amount of time. They arrive in the destination country or, let's say, even internally in one country from region to region, and they then told they owe an amount 10 times that and which will take 20 or 30 years to pay off. And then, of course, there will be threats. If you leave us, you're undocumented in this country.

We'll tell the authorities. If you go to the police, they will arrest you. They will send you home empty-handed, and you will be a failure back home. Or we're from your village. We're from your town. We have people who know your family. We're watching your family right now.

So it just comes back to why I said at the start of this call. It's that fraud and deception, but it's also the coercion. It's this element of control that means that, the situations can so swiftly change, you know, and there's a lot of conflation in the media are really guilty of this between, you know, smuggling and trafficking. So the difference is that smuggling is, by definition, illegal crossing of borders. So the way to explain it is that smuggling is a crime against the state, whereas trafficking is the kind of the coercion or

exploitation of someone from getting, is a trafficking against the individual. So trafficking can happen internally. Someone would be trafficked from New York to California, for example. But the problem is that what often happens is that people who are smuggled become victims of trafficking along the way. So again, it just goes back to this idea that victims of trafficking are not helpless, uninformed people in many cases, or even in most cases, they're people who have no options at home. Either they are, they may have the full picture or they may be misled, but what happens is often then the nature of kind of the control and the coercion once they arrive in their destination. And that's where then often the exploitation, the shift, let's say, from smuggling to trafficking can occur.

Why do you think there's a lot of nuance and there's a lot of actual crimes going on here? Why do you think that all this stuff gets conflated and blown into these weird conspiracy theories? To be honest, Q and on I can barely make sense of. I think it's older than Q&Non. You're like, I remember this stuff from when I was a kid, from the satanic panic in the 1980s. Yeah, I think, I think, yeah, I suppose that I can just speak to really the UK. I think there was moral panic in Britain in early to mid-90s about paedophilia, which is a separate issue, but this, it all comes down to this idea of the sexual exploitation of or someone of people who are vulnerable. And I think what happens is I think it's hard to argue against sex trafficking.

No one is publicly supporting sex trafficking. So I think what that means is that when a politician or a leader or someone with authority or clout or standing, that could be an NGO, a think tank, a university, when they present a position on sex trafficking, it's very hard to challenge that. Even if it's based on flawed data stereotypes assumptions, I think. for so long. And I think that's the problem. Therefore, it's much difficult, more difficult to challenge claims about sex trafficking compared to assertions, say, about labor trafficking. It's been presented as more of a black-mite issue. And I think then it's taken on life

of its own to an extent where it went from, I don't know, fears, public fears in the 90s that were probably played up by the media to Pizza Gate all the way now to this Q&On and Save the Children hashtag. How do you, if you're an average person, How do you fall into slavery? Is it, I'm going to feel and just guess that in the United States, it's not going to happen, or it's unlikely to happen. But around the world, what's the most common way people fall into it? I think it's fair to say, the majority of victims of modern slavery are migrants.

It's when you leave one country for another, because in the vast study of cases, then you are entering that country illegally, you are undocumented. So it's, and it goes back to this question of debt bondage. I think as soon as you are, oh, a middleman, a labor broker, a recruiter, as soon as you are in someone's debt, that really leaves the conditions right. And it's, again, it's question of changing terms. It's being promised. We see this a lot in Gulf nations in Qatar, with the building stadiums for the Soccer World Cup, which is due to take place next year. It's when, it's when people arrive in a given country already tens of thousand dollars in debt. And they get told that they will be paid five. far more than they would be at home, but they get there and the pay is nothing.

It's 14, 16 hours a day for a dollar, an hour at best. And then they're in a really difficult position because, like I said, if they go to the authorities, they risk being locked up or deported. And I think the problem is that it's not modern slavery, but it all fits into the same narrative. When I was the West Africa correspondent for the Tom Soroswriters Foundation a few years ago, and I covered the economic migration of young men from Senegal to Europe. What was fascinating is that many of the West African nations surrounding Senegal had issues

with drought or with conflict extremism, repression of certain ethnic groups or political supporters. Senegal was a stable, peaceful democracy. Senegal didn't really have any massive push factor compared to these other nations, yet the number of young Senegalese men going to Libya and getting these boats, these dangerous boats to Italy, where they would end up working awful jobs for long, Lopé. It's this whole idea that you have these communities where there are so few options and the state isn't helping. And it becomes this vicious cycle and this kind of narrative of you can only succeed abroad. And I think you have that in so many countries now in Africa

and South and Central America across Southeast Asia where although the odds are really not in your favor and although I think more and more of the stories are coming home in many of these parts of the world, the picture is not Rosie that you believe you have to believe you're going going to be different or either you believe you'll be a rare success or you might get lucky with a fair employer or maybe you'll find a route to scissors and ship or a visa in that country or more and more so that okay it's going to be tough out there i'm going to get paid very little i'm going to get overworked in some cases like i'm going to be treated like a modern slave as we might say in the west but again that's preferable to nothing at home or being considered a failure so i think there's often

this narrative for communities which are heavily dependent on remittances, that if you don't go to migrate, then you're seen as a loser, as a failure. And again, I think that traps many migrants abroad in situations of exploitation because, again, they don't want to go home empty-handed and be dismissed as a failure. So they will suck it up, so to speak, as awful as the conditions might be. Karen, thank you so much for joining us and giving us some of the reality of the situation tearing away some of the myths. A pleasure to join you guys. Thanks so much.

Yeah, I think it's a bit of a lonely task at times, but I think that's one of the things we provide ourselves on the Thompson Foundation is just trying to challenge these myths and misconceptions and just give the context and the nuances and explain the story behind modern slavery and human trafficking rather than just focusing on these worst forms of abuses. So hopefully we can continue to do that because we have a really cool team of reporters around the world who tell these really important and reported stories. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners. Angry Planet is me. Matthew Galt,

Kevin Nodell and Jason Fields. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, please subscribe to our substack at Angry Planet Pod. There you get a weekly newsletter in two bonus episodes a month for just $9. Again, that's at Angry Planetpod.com. The most recent is a collective freakout with Jason Stanley. We talked about fascism and what we think might have. into the Trump movement now that Trump is gone. Check it out. Again, it's angryplanetpod.com. We will be back next week for another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe. Until then.