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| Anti-Slavery Group SMS Honored with Freedom Award | | By GREG HEFFERNAN | | | indiawest.com | October 26, 2009 03:51:00 PM |
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LOS ANGELES — The Bovard Auditorium at USC saw Anuradha Talwar and “Daisy” Modal of Shramajivee Mahila Samity of India inspire the audience with rousing shouts as they were honored by Free the Slaves, an international anti-slavery
organization.
 SMS was presented with the Harriet Tubman Award at Free the Slaves’ annual Freedom Awards event here Oct. 13. Free the Slaves is the world’s preeminent nongovernmental group lobbying against the modern practice of slavery around the world.
“We need new laws and political will,” said Talwar defiantly, “and the only way we will get this is from pressure from people like you. So we organize and pressurize those who will not make these laws.”
“The second thing I’d like to say to all of you is that slavery is not ‘out there.’ It’s very much here (in America) in the products that we use; even the things that we consume have elements of slavery in them. And we all need to be conscious of it,” she said emphatically, encouraging the audience to symbolically join their movement with a chant, “We will fight” and “We will win.”
The Bovard Theater, filled with celebrities and sports stars from around Hollywood, including Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, resounded with loud shouts of affirmation.
Founded in 1990, SMS has for nearly two decades been promoting the rights of rural working women in India with 28,000 members from 850 villages in West Bengal.
According to Free the Slaves, SMS was honored this year because: “It takes courage to go undercover and stand face-to-face with a trafficker. But that’s how the women of Shramajivee Mahila Samity track missing villagers who’ve been sold into slavery. Posing as homeowners wanting to hire a maid, SMS activists expose the shadowy world of domestic slavery. SMS rescues women trapped as house slaves, alerts police to traffickers posing as a legitimate labor recruiters, and teaches entire villages how to prevent traffickers from exploiting poor families.”
Talwar and Modal told India-West that many workers travel to West Bengal from other regions such as Chhattisgarh looking for work, which also draws slave traffickers to the state. SMS members often risk their lives trying to track villagers who have been sold into slavery.
Dramatic undercover footage was shown during the evening, demonstrating how SMS exposes human slavery operations. “We had to remove one woman from the area because she was being threatened,” said Talwar, adding that being stalked or followed by traffickers is often very frightening and risky for women working with SMS.
“Our Supreme Court in India says that bondage or slavery is any situation when people are paid anything but the minimum wage, because the minimum wage is what we need to survive,” said Talwar. “If that is a universal definition, then it is obvious America is filled with bonded labor as well.”
The number of women in India’s labor force is rapidly rising, though their wages are often 60 percent less than that for men. Brick kilns are notorious areas of child and female slave labor in West Bengal, said Talwar. She also spoke of poor families marrying off their daughters when they are told no dowry is necessary, only to later discover the girl has been sold to a slave trafficker.
Peggy Callahan, co-founder of Free the Slaves and a critically acclaimed television documentary producer on modern slavery (having traveled to India many times), told India-West, “Every time I interview these people that are still enslaved or who have come to freedom, to share their stories — which always gives them nightmares — even when these people have done these horrendous things to them, they still have faith in people. They still believe if they share their story with me and I share their story with others, that people will care and people will help.”
Free the Slaves is one of the world’s leading anti-slavery organizations and is the U.S. sister organization of Anti-Slavery International, the world’s oldest human rights organization. With the current state of the global economy, anti-slavery activists caution about rising human trafficking and human slavery opportunities. Nearly 14,000 slaves are year are trafficked in the U.S. with $90 being the average price for a human slave, according to the group. |
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