Matt Friedman | Modern Slavery Is Getting Worse

This podcast has returned to modern slavery three times now. Lisa Kristine showed us its face through her photography. Bruce Ladebu described what it actually takes to pull children out. And Matthew Friedman, in Episode 76, gave us the architecture: thirty-five years working across Nepal, Bangladesh, Thailand, the UN, and eventually the Mekong Club. 

That first episode opened with the story of an 11-year-old Nepalese girl in a Mumbai brothel who ran across the room, wrapped herself around Matt, and begged him to save her. He couldn't, that day. He came back with police and she was gone. 

This second conversation picks up in a deglobalising world. The USAID cuts have gutted sixty years of global anti-trafficking infrastructure. The $400 million available to address modern slavery has been halved. HIV clinics, maternal health programs, girls' education initiatives are all gone. And as Matt makes clear, the line from those cuts to a new trafficking victim is not abstract. It runs through hospitals, through debt, through desperation.

This episode also goes somewhere I'm afraid I didn't communicate that well, the points of cultural judgement and critique. There's a story of a sixteen-year-old Bangladeshi girl, rescued after two weeks in a brothel, who was turned away at her own front door by a father who loved her because the shame she carried would make her siblings unmarriageable. That story sits at the centre of the hardest question in this conversation: when the cultural machinery enabling trafficking runs this deep, what can the outside world actually do about it? It's a delicate subject, I regret not treating it as such. 

$238 billion modern slavery generates annually flows through the same offshore plumbing this podcast has covered with Oliver Bullough and John Christensen. Matt explains how banks are already tracking it and how the Mekong Club is working with Interpol, crypto companies, and social media platforms to find it and cut it off.

It's a pleasure to welcome Matt Friedman back to the podcast. 

Resources

Walk Free Foundation's Global Slavery Index - https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/
U.S. Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report - https://www.state.gov/trafficking-in-persons-report/
Makon Club - Anti-Human Trafficking Organization - https://makonclub.org/
USAID Human Trafficking Programs - https://www.usaid.gov/what-we-do/gender-equality-and-womens-empowerment/human-trafficking
Interpol Human Trafficking Unit - https://www.interpol.int/en/How-we-work/Operations/Operation-Scorpion

Chapters

00:00 The Impact of Deglobalization on Modern Slavery
02:50 Statistics and Resources in the Fight Against Modern Slavery
05:54 Consequences of USAID Cuts on Global Health and Safety
08:38 Understanding Human Trafficking and Legal Responses
11:40 Cultural Attitudes and Enforcement Challenges
14:12 The Role of Vulnerability in Exploitation
17:23 Identifying the Most Egregious Examples of Modern Slavery
20:02 Cultural Change and the Role of Awareness
23:22 Internal vs. External Approaches to Addressing Modern Slavery
33:12 The Impact of Fiction on Awareness
36:24 Taking Responsibility: Individual Actions Against Human Trafficking
38:27 Creating Compelling Content: The Role of Film in Activism
40:47 Cultural Sensitivity in Addressing Trafficking
43:28 The Urgency of Addressing Human Trafficking
50:08 Financial Institutions and Their Role in Combatting Trafficking
57:47 The Power of Business in Addressing Human Trafficking
59:52 Finding Hope: The Starfish Parable

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So through Trump's trade war and many of the other policies that has enacted, Elon Musk and Doge, they've ushered in quite a big wave of deglobalization. We were just saying before off air how devastating that has been, not only to the energy markets that you've just spoken about, but as well uh particularly to your area of expertise. So how has this deep globalization affected modern slavery?

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Well, let's just talk about some statistics. It's estimated that the profits generated from modern slavery are around $238 billion a year. The amount of money that was available to fight this up until January of this year was uh or last year was about 400 million US dollars. With the USAID cuts, it's down to about 220 million. So the number of people in modern slavery globally is about 50 million people. Last year the world helped about 110,000 of them. And the reason for that is that the uh criminals have extensive profits, and the amount of money available to fight this is actually quite low. It's 0.13%, and that's before the cuts. And so we're not even in the game now. We're not even hitting 1% of the victims uh out there. 110,000 out of 50 million is a drop in the bucket. So, you know, at a time when people are talking about uh human trafficking, the whole Epstein thing is based on human trafficking, you know, and everybody's asking, well, why is it being addressed and why isn't it being done? It's partly because the world has never really cared about sex trafficking victims, or they have never really cared about migrants who are in forced labor circumstances. And the the proof of that is the fact that there's very few resources in order to address this globally at any given time. And it's a lot less now because of what happened with Doge and USAID. And I'll just add to that, beyond human trafficking, you had uh literally tens of thousands of people that were getting HIVAIDS uh treatment. They don't get that anymore. You have maternal mortality clinics that don't have the medicines or the supplies anymore. You have child survival programs, you have immunization programs, you have girls' education programs. All of those have stopped. You're literally going to see probably millions of people perish as a result of this decision to uh eliminate a system and procedure that had been in place for something like 60 or 70 years in an arbitrary attempt to try to reduce costs when in fact it was less than one percent of the U.S. budget to be able to do so much good around the world.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Have you seen any other countries lift to try and fill that gap, or was the U.S.'s contribution just so significant that it's inconceivable they'll be matched?

SPEAKER_01 2:50

It's uh the U.S. government's contribution was, as you say, so high that it's very difficult for other countries to come in. But at the same time, there's a lot of distractions. You have the Ukraine war, you have the uh the situation between Israel and Gaza that was a distraction. You have in in the UK Brexit. In the United States, you have the the entire kind of political disruption that you see. So because of all of these distractions, uh, there's not a lot of countries or donor agencies that are stepping up to say, okay, well, we're going to try to fill the gaps. As a result of that, you see literally tens of thousands of NGOs that existed that don't exist anymore. You see government and programs that existed that don't exist anymore. You see clients and customers and people who are seeking services that have no place to go. So, you know, basically what we've done is created a much more vulnerable world in terms of health and safety and even socioeconomic circumstances. Because if you have to use a large proportion of the money that you earn in order to pay for a disease that you could have got it and treated at a at a local clinic for free, and now you have to pay for it, that has a significant impact on vulnerability. And one of the things that we used to do when I was working in Thailand to identify human trafficking victims is simply go to hospitals because that's where a lot of people are desperate. And as a result of that, they need to borrow money, and that borrowing of money uh leads to the vulnerability of human trafficking.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

Yeah, you told that story last time on the podcast, uh, this sort of archetypal idea of intergenerational debt and how particularly in some countries it can become so desperate that, you know, maybe a child will be triaged off to get the rest of the family out of that debt. Exactly. Yeah. You mentioned that the tens of thousands of NGOs that are being shut down because they've lost their funding, and then as well the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of HIV um positive people who can only no longer get their treatment. In the short years since Doge enacted that cut, what's some of the tangible changes you've seen on the ground?

SPEAKER_01 5:00

Well, you see entire health systems within governments that have collapsed because they were reliant on contributions, bilateral contributions from the U.S. government. You see communicable diseases, uh infectious diseases going up simply because, for example, condoms aren't available for uh sexually transmitted infection prevention. You're seeing situations where malaria drugs and immunization and tuberculosis drugs are not available. As I mentioned, HIV AIDS drugs are not available. The training that's required to get kind of public health people working in the field is no longer being provided. The subsidies in order to get the medicines from the capital to the health centers is no longer there. Add to that, uh, there were many girls' education programs that basically funded allowing women and girls to have access to education that doesn't exist. Literacy programs for just adults are no longer in place. Agriculture programs that were put in place in order to increase the efficiency, to reduce the socioeconomic uh uh vulnerability of poor people, to give them more options to be able to make momentum are no longer in place. And the list goes on and on and on and on. Now, once again, the world is really distracted with a lot of things, but eventually, whether it's a year from now or two years from now, you'll have reports that will document the impact of this uh these decisions being made uh related to uh things like uh USAID, WHO, or various other programs that are out there that acted as a means of protecting people from the vulnerabilities that exist within their daily life. They're just not there anymore.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

In in that sort of list that you mentioned there, there are a lot of consequences that I would suspect aren't explicitly regarding the exploitation of modern slavery. And some of those can be explicable through just poor functioning institutions, poor capital markets, low grades of investment, low quality education, and so forth, which are all very important. But I just want to make sure that specifically the most egregious examples of modern slavery are the consequences that we're going to be talking about here, because I do worry, I don't know if that's the right word, but yeah, as you know, I mean I've interviewed yourself and about five other activists within modern slavery. When the giant statistics are thrown around, 50 million people, or the fact that because the USAID because of the cuts to USAID, there are all of these consequential second, third, and fourth order effects. A lay person who's just coming across all of this for the first time, they're gonna have a whole bunch of really decent arguments for why actually, yes, USAID should have been cut. It was an absurd waste. What is the what is the US's interest in another country and so forth? And so just to expel all of those arguments straight away, just focus in on the modern slavery. Sorry if that was a lot. I just hopefully it helped in the right.

SPEAKER_01 8:09

I totally totally understand what you're saying. Okay, so let's just break it down. Okay, so the US government provided something like $170 million annually globally related to human trafficking. What would this be used for? A certain percentage would be used for awareness raising to help educate communities about what it is that exists in another country if you migrate there in terms of vulnerability. It's called safe migration training. What it does is it goes to these vulnerable communities and offers them the in information and insight to help them to protect themselves from the vulnerability that exists. It could be a face-to-face presentation where somebody gets in front of a big crowd. It could be a movie, it could be a public education campaign, it could be any number of things. One of the things that we used to do are soap operas. Ten hours of drama that kind of reflect the vulnerability using storytelling, it's a very effective way to sensitize people. The second would be just basic the legal response. The U.S. government money was often used to train law enforcement. This includes the police, the prosecutions, the judges, and to, in some cases, offer NGO support to move a case forward. So if you have a poor, vulnerable person going after a rich trafficker, oftentimes it's an unfair advantage because it's the poor person against the rich person in terms of the resources. And so money was used to allow for legal support organizations to offer assistance in those cases to move them forward. And why these cases are important is to demonstrate that the legal system can work on behalf of a person who's been trafficked to encourage more people to step up and move into that space. You have the scenario where let's say that raids and rescues are going to take place. There's brothels, there's 15, 14-year-old girls who are. U.S. government was spending a lot of money supporting the infrastructure, the shelters themselves. And the shelters do a variety of things. They basically take care of the health issues, the psychosocial issues, they stabilize the person, and then they help to get that person back to their old community if they can, or to a job that will allow them to sustain themselves. All of those services require a certain amount of kind of education and resources in order to be able to pull it off. Going in and helping countries to identify what the issue is, to enact legislation, to then get them to put in place systems and procedures to allow for the repatriation of victims that are cross-border, all of these things cost money. And in the absence of having this supported money that's offered to a lot of the countries that the U.S. government was supporting, then you have this void and everything kind of just falls apart. And so at a time, again, when human trafficking vulnerability is going up and the numbers are going up, you're seeing a reduction in the amount of resources to be able to put in the systems and procedures that would not only prevent but also address the needs of trafficking victims in these locations.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

Regarding, you mentioned there that a lot of the money might be going towards education for the actual enforcement to be taking place and then also the legal protections. There are no countries that, at least in Southeast Asia, where slavery is legal. So why is there such a gaping problem with the actual enforcement of the laws that exist when it is such a well-known issue? And you can provide a statistic that as much as 50 million people around the world are in some type of uh modern slavery. So the enforcement question.

SPEAKER_01 12:13

Okay, so there's there's two sides to this. One is let's talk about sex trafficking. Sex trafficking, you have women and girls that are tricked and deceived and forced into having sex against their will in a variety of scenarios. It could be a brothel, it could be a massage house, it could be on the street, et cetera, et cetera. Part of the reason why there isn't more action related to that is that prostitution has been around for a long time, and it's been illegal from almost the beginning of time. But there's almost this like symbiotic relationship that exists between law enforcement and the sex industry that has existed for a long time. So there's a certain percentage of police that just say, well, why are we doing this? This is just kind of something that's always been here. You know, it's part of a society, and maybe it's illegal, but you know, uh, you know, it keeps the the Johns who are going to the women in prostitution from raping our girls. There's a lot of justifications that are offered to identify why this isn't an important thing. Another thing is women and girls are not valued in a lot of culture. They're just kind of like almost written off. Well, it's just girls, it's just women, you know, it's not a big deal. They're in that situation, why should we bother? So that's kind of the prostitution side of it. The forced labor side, and this is the larger number, you know, there's about 75% of what we're dealing with are in forced labor, where a person is forced into a situation where they lose control of whether or not they're working in a particular situation. Law enforcement doesn't necessarily see that as their mandate to address it. This is a labor issue. Labor inspectors should go off and do this type of thing. And in all the countries that I've ever worked in, the number of labor inspectors is relatively small relative to the number of businesses that have this type of vulnerability. So part of it is, again, simply the fact that countries that have not invested enough in their law enforcement or in their labor inspectors to accommodate the need within these countries to really make a significant difference. The largest number in terms of modern slavery would be India. It's something like 18 million out of the 30. And it's partly because there's a lot of forced marriages that falls into the category of modern slavery, and you have a caste system that, by virtue of culture, it puts people into various categories and so forth. So in terms of sheer numbers, that would be one. Uh China would be second, they're about 3 million, but you're dealing with both of those countries, 1.4 billion. So you know, the per capita amount isn't as much as, let's say, North Korea or Sudan, or, you know, even places like uh Iran was identified as a particular area and so forth, where the per capita, the percentage of people within slavery basically is relatively high relative to the overall population. Now, Walk Free, an organization in Australia, has an inventory of every country in the world in terms of the estimate of the actual number of human trafficking cases along with the per capita. And so you can go on to their website. I think the last time they updated this was uh 2023. But if you look at that and you put in any country, you put walk-free, the country name, and then statistics related to human trafficking, you'll get the per capita number, you'll get the actual number, you'll get the uh rating of whether or not the the government is actually doing things to address the issue of modern slavery as a score. You know, so they have the A category, B, C, D, whatever, and that allows you to get a general sense of what's happening or not happening in a country. The U.S. government also has the trafficking in persons report that comes out annually. If you put State Department, you have a TIP report, then you are able to see how countries are rated in terms of whether Tier 1, they're doing everything that they should be doing, tier two, they're doing okay, but you know, they're they they have some improvements that they can do. Tier two watch means that they've dropped down to a level of concern that they may get down to tier three, which would be identified as you're not doing enough. And actually you're sanctioned by the U.S. government if you fall into that category.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: But just on some of those statistics there, because you mentioned India 18 million, North Korea, China three million. I really want to separate the sort of not excusable, but at least some of the cultural roots for some of this type of whether it's forced marriage or whether it's uh working too long hours or being underpaid because you may be culturally within India are from one of the lower castes, and therefore your economic up economic opportunities are actually just so low. Or you're in North Korea, and the real problem there is that it's a nuclear-armed dictatorship. So effecting change there is going to be really tough. I think what I'd what I what I wanted to hear from you in the answer to the Rose Gallery question is for the particular, the most egregious examples of modern slavery, the the the the slave labor, the brick kilns in Pakistan, the myriad sexual trafficking that's happening across the world. So for these most horrific, hellish examples of behavior which we think is just a memory of history, but is in fact happening right now, which are the worst countries?

SPEAKER_01 17:38

If we are saying that there are 50 million people in modern slavery and the world is helping 110,000 of them, every country has issues associated with it. So it's not as if there's a particular country that I can point to to say, you know, they it's estimated that they have 50 bil uh 50,000 people there, and as a result of what they're doing, they've gotten it down to 25,000. It's just not like that. The point that I'm really trying to make here is that all the countries in the world are close to doing nothing relative to the overall size of things. Having said that, let's just dive a little bit deeper into certain things. Countries where girls are not valued much, and these would be places in South Asia. I would include Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and India, you know, it's easy to basically spoil a girl because once you even rape her, she's no longer good to the family or to the community, and if if anyone knows about it. So it's pretty easy to get them into a brothel situation because once they're there and it's known to the family, they're not going to be taken back. And I may have mentioned this in last time I spoke to you, where there was a girl who was walking down the street. She was 16 years old, she was pulled into a van. She was brought to Calcutta, she was used for two weeks. We rescued her, got her back to Bangladesh. Didn't think the family knew this when we got to the community where the family was. There's the father, the mother, all the brothers and sisters. There's me, there's the NGO worker and the victim. And the father says, You can't come home. And you could see the father loved his daughter and he wanted to run up and hug her, but he said, You brought shame to the family. And the girl was saying over and over again, Father, I didn't do anything wrong. This was not my fault. He said, It doesn't matter. You know, you are in this situation where shame has been brought to you. It could be karma, it could be something else. You can't come home. Your brothers and sisters aren't going to get married. So when cultures basically look at a girl to the extent at which she has very little value, then the possibility of using a lot of girls in this situation is very easy. You know, another situation is where you have this acceptance that, uh, you know, boys will be boys and men will be men, and prostitution is just a part of the system and the procedure. And, you know, so if it happens and girls are in it, well, you know, they're probably better off because they come from some other country. You know, what girl wakes up when she's 15-year-old and says, when I grow up, I want to be a prostitute. Nobody does. You know, it's awful to have men groping at you and being used over and over, maybe 20 times in a in a scenario. Who wants that? Nobody wants that. But nobody's really stopping to think about the feelings of the girl in that situation. And men who go to these girls will say, Well, I don't know what you're talking about. She seems happy and she's laughing and so forth because she's a great actress. If it doesn't get enough clients, something bad happens to her at the end of the process. So there's this assumption that these girls are oversexed and they want these guys and they're fawning over them and they're having fun. It's just not the case. Now, on the forced labor side, if you have large agriculture programs, if you have large fishing programs, and if you have large manufacturing programs, and I'll use Thailand as an example, and you have this large group of migrants that are coming in from Myanmar because of the Civil War, from Cambodia because of poverty, you have Lao, all these people feeding in there. You have a pool of two or three hundred thousand people who are desperately looking for work. That offers the opportunity of you basically exploiting people because you can. And if a person says no to your offer, then you go to the next person. Somebody will eventually say yes because there are some people who will work just so that they can have a lunch, you know, because they have no or a place to stay and so forth. And so the vulnerability that exists within any location that has large refugee or migrant populations results in the possibility of exploitation taking place. So if the ability to exploit is there and the systems and procedures to protect that don't exist, then you have a ripe scenario. Scenario for trafficking taking off. So the scenario that allows for a lack of enforcement, a lack of insight, a lack of caring for the government, a lack of systems and procedures in place, with large work for which people are looking for big profits for which you have vulnerable people, whether internally or coming from the outside, all of those scenarios lead to the possibility of exploitation taking place.

SPEAKER_00 22:27

On the exploited labor question, I can see why the lack of opportunity an individual might have and the utter desperation for them to earn some type of living might end them up into a situation like that. You know, you can sort of you can rationalize how that might end up becoming. But that example you gave of the Bangladeshi girl who was dragged off the street and then her family wouldn't return her to it in such a globalized world where everyone has a phone, how are these cultural practices not gone? How do they still persist? And is it not worth us judging those cultural practices and actually saying out loud that is beyond barbaric and worth our contempt? And therefore, not only us, two people on a podcast, but diplomatically, via corporations, they can actually make a moral judgment on that type of cultural practice.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

Let me give you a concrete example of what I'm talking about here. I was in Bangladesh. I was in a the old part of Dhaka, which is a very kind of traditional location. And I'm a pretty big guy. And I saw this guy fifteen feet from me beating his wife to death. Literally beating her. And you know, my inclination was I'm gonna step in, I'm gonna stop it. I had four men come and stand in front of me and say, if you want to die today, you will intervene with what's happening there. That is his wife. He has the right to do whatever he wants to her, including killing her. And if you integrate into this particular scenario, you're going against our customs and our traditions. Now, if those customs and traditions are so extreme to allow for that particular scenario to play out the way it did, imagine how hard it is over time to change that. So I totally agree with you. I mean, in the West, if you have a sex trafficking victim, for example, there's a lot of compassion and sympathy among a lot of people. Not everybody, but among a lot of people. And people will go and do what they can to support that particular individual. But in much of the rest of the world, you have scenarios where that doesn't exist. Maybe in principle, you feel sympathetic to the girl prior to her entering into that scenario. But once she's there, she's spoiled. And it's the same kind of thing you see in the Middle East where if a girl gets raped, the the brother sometimes uh kills her for bringing shame to the family, even though she didn't do anything wrong. But the shame is still there, and the shame stays until it's resolved somehow. So these traditions that we're talking about, uh, you know, for and and it could have been like, for example, in the United States or in Europe, it was similar traditions up until a particular point and then it changed. The question is, how did our traditions change to where we are now versus where we find it in other parts of the world? And I don't have an answer to that. Maybe we have to talk to anthropologists or sociologists or psychologists to get them to help us to understand what's required for that type of change to take place. Now, let me give you another example. So in India, about 16, 17 years ago, there was a sensational rape case. There was a girl, she was a medical student, she was on a bus, she was raped, and it eventually resulted in her death. For whatever reason, that resulted in a ground of literally millions of women marching and protesting and standing up, and that whole protest lasted for almost six or eight months, and it resulted in significant changes. Now, what we really need are for those types of events to take place that go viral like that, that result in something significantly happening. And I I'm still waiting for that in the sex trafficking realm. What is going to be that one defining case that all of a sudden the world is attracted to this, they're they're brought to it, they feel a need to get involved, to express themselves, to put pressure. It hasn't happened yet. And it's needed. It's it's what's going to make the difference because if you have a society that accepts that if a woman is used in prostitution, even if it's against her will, that she's you used up and she's worthless, you know, what do you it's so easy to make a sex trafficking victim, rape her and then put her in a brothel. That's it. And that's that's how easy it is in certain local. I mean, I don't want to say that it's just India. It's it's countries all over the world that have this system, including in the United States, where you know, if a rape take place takes place in the United States, oftentimes it's almost like the victim is the is the problem, not the not the rapist. And look at the whole Epstein thing that we're dealing with now. All those men are being protected. You know, there's 1,200 uh sex trafficking victims within that network, and there's no cases against anyone. What does that say?

SPEAKER_00 27:21

I don't know. Uh but to your point of the 2010 rape case in India with the medical student on the bus and it resulting in six to eight months of protests, that's a lot of attention from the West. Did attitudes within India change? Because that's really what Okay.

SPEAKER_01 27:39

Basically what happened was, you know, the uh authorities came out and like poo-pooed it and said, Yeah, we'll make some changes and you know these guys uh, you know, we'll sort it out. And they said nothing doing. They said, you know, that's not enough. We want to see the case goes through. We want to see the court uh situations uh change. We want to see the laws change. And what you saw was a significant increase in prosecutions related to rape cases that followed that. So it was it was almost like it was like this and then it went to another level and it's here. That doesn't mean that maybe it should be up here in terms of but you had this this correction that took place, and those corrections are an extremely important part of the process.

SPEAKER_00 28:24

And for India, who is already one of the global economies and could be within 10 to 15 years a top three global economy, it's maybe more consequential for them because there's more international eyes on them necessarily, but for Pakistan and Bangladesh and Nepal and Cambodia and the Philippines, where all of these similar practices are happening. Is is there is there a role for for shame, public shame of the countries of saying this is happening within your state, we know about it, what the hell is being done? Almost trying to force the hand of some type of cultural change. I know this is very wishy-washy and kind of impossible and whatever, but it just feels like if it's a cultural attitude which allows it to happen at such scale, because if a hate if a rape happens in America or a rape happens in Sweden or in Australia, it's down to a seriously bad individual and they suffer the consequences of that. It is not accepted and uh happening so frequently at such scale. The stories you give in your books are just unbelievable. It's again and again and again. The same lack of interest or care or empathy or emotion. It's it's it's it's unbearable. I don't know what to make of it.

SPEAKER_01 29:41

Okay, so I you know, the naming and shaming of a country results in resentment within the country. Who are you to judge us? You know, we have our own ways of doing things.

SPEAKER_00 29:52

I find that But we can But but Matt, we can make we can make a better argument. We can turn around and say you don't understand us. It's like, yeah, we don't understand you. The same way we made these sort of moral arguments against terrorism organizations. Like they're internally saying these guys are wrong, they don't get us at all, but we've made a pretty compelling argument from the outside that is swaying sufficient enough people that might otherwise be swayed to their argument.

SPEAKER_01 30:17

I I would almost say it's better from the inside. So let me give you an example. Uh when I was living and working in Nepal, we funded a film called Chameli. Chameley was a two and a half hour drama that looked at sex trafficking. And it went from, you know, the girl being in the village and then how she was tricked, then she ended up getting to the brothel and what happened to her, and then she got out and so forth. That was one of the longest running films in Kathmandu history. It ran for 78 days and it was sold out every day. Now, what happened was a certain percentage of the people who we interviewed who came out of that film said, wow, I wish I hadn't seen that film. Had no idea this happened to our girls. This is awful. This is terrible. And if I was the one going off to the brothel, you know, I thought that they were coming after me because I was handsome and everything else. I had no idea that they had to act like this and so forth. You ruined it for me. And so maybe out of a hundred men, ten of them would walk away saying, Well, this is wrong. Now, that's that's one way of doing it. When we do these soap operas, it's the same type of thing. So you see the playing out of a situation, you see the girl being in a situation and how troubled she is and how how awful it is for her. And and compassionate people within those countries see it not from the standpoint of seeing a statistic or newspaper article. They're witnessing some type of an activity taking place, and they start feeling it. They start to like say, well, I saw that film and oh my gosh, wow, look what happened to these people. I never really kind of thought how this plays out in terms of the real world. Here's a 15-year-old girl being used by 20 guys, and wow, she's one of our girls, and you know, that type of thing. And so finding a way of doing it internally. When I was at in USAID, when I worked for USAID, we would have high-level government officials that would come to the country, and I was asked to show them around. I would take them to the slums, I would take them to the health centers, I would take them to the brothels, I would take them to these particular locations. And so maybe they had a notional sense of what was happening. But the moment they're sitting there in a room, seeing a bunch of 12, 14, 17-year-old people sitting there and then being able to observe that or to see the poverty that exists or see the lack of water and everything, that changes people's perspective perspective. So finding a way of sensitizing people through the experience is a great way to change things internally, because those people then become the champions within the country to move the process of changing traditions and cultures forward.

SPEAKER_00 33:00

It makes me think of a statistic you must have heard, but more money and work was done for ocean conservation than anything that had come before it after Finding Nemo came out.

SPEAKER_01 33:12

I I think I think it's a uh it's a good idea.

SPEAKER_00 33:15

Fiction actually drives Yeah, sorry, go on.

SPEAKER_01 33:18

No, I mean, oh look at the Inconvenience Truth film that Al Gore did. That was a watershed film because what it did is it basically made a case for the fact that the world was going down a path that didn't we didn't want to go to. And then it said to the audience, it's not about you if you're an adult, if you're in your 40s or 50s. This isn't about you. It's about your kids. Do you care about your kids? Do you care about them enough to understand that you are contributing to the problem? And as a result of that, you need to be part of the solution. That film, more than anything else, woke people up to the fact that there is a relevance to this. Now, part of the problem with human trafficking is, well, girls in brothels has nothing to do with me other than the fact that, well, I feel sad that they have to be in this situation because there's no direct relationship. I would argue that any girls in the world that are forced into that, the world collectively has a responsibility to address them. And so we should have that. But when it comes to forced labor, a certain percentage of what we eat and buy and have in our hands and on our body in terms of clothes are made by people who are in modern slavery type circumstances. So we as human beings are contributing to the problem. And so, like the inconvenience truth, we should take responsibility for the fact that we should be part of the solution. And just a simple example. If you're buying from a branded company, go on their website to see whether or not they have a policy related to human trafficking. A lot of companies do, and if they do, congratulate them. Companies like to hear that. If they don't, you say, listen, I like your products. I would feel better if basically you had some type of policy procedure. You can do it in a very positive way. Companies respond to that. It's very simple. If you see an article online related to human trafficking, put it on Facebook, put it on Instagram, put it on LinkedIn, share the information. That raises awareness. You know, volunteer. You know, I may have said this before. I, you know, I had a nine-year-old who saw me in a documentary who basically said she wanted to volunteer. I said, you're nine years old. She said, so what? I said, you're nine years old. What could you possibly offer? She said, I can find anything on the internet. So I gave her some assignments and I had some second-year Ivy League uh law students who couldn't find it. She found it in two days because that was her inherent gift. So applying what you have to offer to volunteerism results in the possibility of you benefiting and then the world becoming a better place. And just even in this dire situation where very few organizations have the resources that it need, go online, Google, you know, in your community, human trafficking, NGOs, look at their website, skip a couple of meals, take that money, donate it to them. Even small amounts can be super helpful to these organizations. So there are things that people can do. Lay people. These are just a few of them.

SPEAKER_00 36:23

Have you been able to finance uh that movie you made in Nepal for a Bangladeshi, a Filipino, an Indonesian audience?

SPEAKER_01 36:30

It's interesting that you said that, because we put it into Bangla and we showed it in, because I went from Nepal to Bangladesh, and we showed it in Bangladesh, and it had exactly the same impact. That, you know, to do soap operas and movies relative to what you would have to pay in the West, I think I paid uh maybe 180,000 U.S. for a full-length film. And you know, what was interesting is to make the brothels, they had there was a Catholic school that had a series of buildings, and we repurposed those buildings to be brothels uh because they had a look that was very similar to what we would have found. And so we got a hundred extras from the southern part of Nepal, brought them up to Kathmandu, and did the filming of that particular scene, you know, in Kathmandu in the capital, as if it was in Mumbai and in Bombay.

SPEAKER_00 37:22

Because even uh one of the great ironies of poverty is that it most people have a telephone, a mobile phone, access to one if they don't own one directly for themselves, and ubiquitous access to the internet across a lot of different places. You know, even in the most underdeveloped parts of Indonesia or somewhere I might go, I'm like, what the hell is there's a phone? Anyway, uh so because of this access, because YouTube is free, they might not have a Netflix password themselves, but they'll be able to torrent it somewhere online illegally. Like the the whole world is consuming ungodly amounts of content. It's not just Westerners. So for you as one of the sort of most visible activists in this field, is there is there room or at least an argument to make internally that you know what, so much of our resources, uh whether we get a few corporate partnerships and sponsors from some of the companies they're already working with, this might actually be the most worthwhile spend of our dollars. And just produce as much information, not information rather, fictional dramatized content that is delivering that same message that you gave in the Kathmandu film, partnering up with someone like a Netflix or someone like a HBO. People who will are desperate for that positive affirmation that you can deliver them as someone who is representing the change for what is the most horrific cultural issue that we face. I can't think of anything that would be more horrific.

SPEAKER_01 38:44

Yeah, I mean, so uh we're trying to move a film in the United States called Stolen Lives Forward, and it's based on a sex trafficking scenario, and it plays out with a number of young people moving forward. We uh the the screenplay has been written by some Academy Award-nominated people, Grammy Award nominated people. The screenplay exists. It has elements of the type of scenario you see with Epstein and the fact that young girls are being used by influential people and so forth. And so we're trying to pitch that and trying to move it forward. And uh Sean McNamara, who did the movie Reagan, is interested in directing it, but we have to raise the money and so forth. And so that type of film I think would make a big difference. I I don't remember exactly the name of the other film that was out about a year ago, uh, The Power for $14 million. I think it made $280 million and it became a big phenomenon. And it and it a lot of people thought it would bomb and it didn't. And so the point that that film I'm making about is that like there's an appetite for people to understand what human trafficking is and sex trafficking is. So that the script is there, it's it's very well written and it's ready to go, and it's all we just need is the the funding to be able to move that forward. You know, so that that's that's an example of of like something like that. If it was out there, I think at this particular time with what all the interest because of Epstein, it would it would fly to the top.

SPEAKER_00 40:18

Can I suggest something though? And forgive me if this is confrontational, but is the association with Epstein going to affect any crowd in Bangladesh or India who are already themselves so uneducated and so culturally far from what a Western perspective of what might be a morality is, where they would reject their daughter for having shamed the family because she was taken and raped by somebody else. My instinct is that this young boy in this family with that type of with that type of setting around him and influences around him might admire someone who is on a private jet and has a lot of power and influence and has a private island and so forth. And therefore, associating it with that person at all is actually a mistake because awareness of sex trafficking in the West, uh in Western countries, you know, the the jury is out. We're not okay with it. It seems to me the real problem here is that, given the examples you gave in Bangladesh and in Nepal and India, is that they are okay with it. And therefore, separation from Jeffrey Epstein is something that's hyper-localized, exactly like a Kathmandu example, might in fact be better at getting that message.

SPEAKER_01 41:29

Okay, so I mean, I I totally agree with what you just said. I don't, I don't so if you're going to influence Bangladeshis, you have a Bangladeshi film. If you're going to influence people from Thailand, you have a Thai film. The reason for the film that we're talking about is more mainstream sex trafficking to sensitize Americans to the fact that there's a lot of 12, 13, 14-year-old young people that end up in the sex industry because they're trafficked. And that has two potential impacts. Number one, to bring it home because everyone thinks that this is a problem that happens elsewhere. So to help them to understand that. Number one, number two, if that message got home and all of a sudden people are saying, well, wait a minute, we're talking about people that could be in our own communities. We have to make changes, we have to get behind this, we have to kind of move our local communities and our state communities and our federal communities forward in order to be able to address this, that then results in changes in the United States related to sex trafficking because there's a lot of sex trafficking victims in the U.S. This is the biggest economy in the world. The third part of that is assuming you were able to move that forward, maybe the pressure to reinstate some of the support that the U.S. government provides overseas related to this topic could be put in place in order to address developing that film in Bangladesh or Nepal in order to sensitize those communities. The money doesn't exist right now for that to happen. But it could, again, if there was this general sense of what we're dealing with here, is so terrible. Now, I I often say to audiences, close your eyes. Imagine somebody you know, a girl who's 13 years old, and imagine in your mind that she has to be with 10 or 12 people every day. You try to imagine that, and then you multiply that times 6.3 million, and you tell me that this isn't an issue that the world should be addressing. It should be on the top of our list. You know, it's just one of those things that, you know, absolutely has to be addressed. And and as a practitioner who's been doing this for 35 years, it just breaks my heart. I mean, my depression used to be because I would be forced to listen to those cases and listen to the pain and suffering of those people. But just like an ambulance driver eventually gets used to seeing the disaster that they are in front of and the death in the carnage, I got used to that. My big problem now is imagining that there's 50 million. People out there, and we're helping less than 1%, and it's been that way for 20 years, and we haven't been able to change that. What's wrong with our world? What is wrong with our world that we haven't been able to wake up to the fact that we have this scenario? I don't get it. I don't understand it. If somebody needs to explain that to me, I don't get it.

SPEAKER_00 44:19

I don't get it either. And this is maybe the energy that I was trying to summon early with some of these questions about naming and shaming, because it is so unbelievably hellish and disastrous. Truly the the worst possible thing you could imagine. And I w whether it be political leaders, influential celebrities, I don't know. But just why is it not more commonly known? Like when Australia plays the Pakistani cricket team, you know, it's not just front and center. Well, you know what? It's great they came over here. That country is a fucking hellhole. This is what's happening there. This is what's happening there. And not to be afraid of the backlash that comes at you after it. Well, how can you say that? That's racist, whatever. Okay, sure. And then obviously it requires a sophisticated level of communication to be able to make that sort of claim claim and then defend it sufficiently so that you are actually delivering the message which is at its core, which is that in this country, say, take Pakistan as an example, there is 300,000 human trafficking victims there right now. It's very well accepted and it's very well common. Here's a story about a young woman who was dragged off the road, raped, and then her family rejected her, and so she was left to a life of destitution and ended up in a brothel and was used 20 times a day. This is happening under the eyes of a Pakistani government, and this is happening at a scale that means it's not just in a few bad apples, which might be the case if it was in a country like Australia. We can take a moral stance here and say this is absolutely wrong. And like if enough people can make those claims and it becomes much more well known, who knows? It's not like you're gonna solve the issue straight away, but at least from the West in a very short media cycle, it might be able to get a little bit more attention. Do you know what I'm trying to say there?

SPEAKER_01 46:01

I I mean I I understand what you're saying.

SPEAKER_00 46:03

Uh you know, and no, but maybe it's not anyway. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:06

No, it's just okay, so despite the fact that I react the way I react, I'm I'm an optimist. I feel like someday, somehow, something is going to happen that results in there being a watershed having been reached where, like that rape case in India, there is this systemic re uh this approach to people just saying enough is enough, and then it rising to a particular level. And if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be able to continue after all these years. I just and that's why I do 150 presentations, and that's why I do all these podcasts. I'm just waiting for the day when, you know, somehow the right combination of people come to the conclusion that this is what needs to happen, and then they either take responsibility internally or as you say, from the external side putting pressure and so forth, for us to be able to have whatever changes and dialogue and and remedies that are going to be able to make some type of a difference. I uh it's 6.3 million is the is the Okay, so like, you know, where is the responsibility? And this is where we have to kind of forget that I'm from Pakistan and you're from Australia and somebody else is from someplace else. This is human beings in the world saying that human beings should not be treated that way. They should not be treated that way. That full stop, that's it. If we start from that as the premise, how do we then go back from there to say, what can we do in Pakistan? What can we do in uh Bangladesh? What can we do in Thailand? What can we do in the United States, and then put some systems and procedures in place to be able to address this?

SPEAKER_00 47:47

Aaron Powell This is my frustration is that you know, I've come to that conclusion. I think the West has broadly come to that conclusion. We might not give it as much attention as we should, but we do agree. This is absolutely abhorrent. It's wrong. It cannot go forward. But you've given examples of the cultures being different within some of the countries where they are accepting it. And therefore, it's for us to say over the top of that, well, you're wrong. Your culture is wrong. It should be changed, it should be adjusted. Here is a good reason for it. Or maybe here is economic pressure before we see some type of change.

SPEAKER_01 48:21

Yeah, I I I mean, I again I'm going to go back to the fact that I have worked in 43 countries. I've worked with governments in 43 countries, I've lived and immersed myself in cultures. The cultures that I've worked in do not take kindly to people outside coming in and doing these things. So if you accept the fact that the change has to come from inside, the question is how do you affect identifying those people who come to the same conclusion that you do internally to incentivize them enough to take the stand to move forward to address this? And that's why I've always found the uh dramatic media to be the means to an end because many of these cultures are used to storytelling. They don't like the documentary format. They don't like the person standing and telling them what they should do. They want to see the mother and the father and the sons and the daughters and how it plays out. And because you can look look at it from multiple languages, you can influence the heart of these particular individuals. People in South Asia are very passionate and they're very justice-oriented when the right message is put in front of them and they understand, based on that message, what can be done. So in those movies, you build in the solution, you show the NGO and show how they're able to address it, or you show a protest that results in some type of action taking place. So you're modeling the behavior that's consistent with their culture to help them to understand the direction that they need to go in in order to make those changes. And I think that's really if if I had a bunch of money and I was doing prevention, that's the direction I would go in.

SPEAKER_00 50:08

Yep. Yep. Well said, Matt. Do you have time for just one quick more one? Sure, sure. So I got into modern slave, or at least it got onto my radar, because of the main topic which I cover in the podcast, which is financial secrecy. And underneath that is the world of offshore plumbing and money laundering and so forth. Tomorrow I'm going to be interviewing Oliver Bolo again. Um something you said really stood out because I'm like preparing for these two interviews simultaneously. And it's firstly that modern slavery generates approximately $238 billion in annual profit as well, that you say, which means it's not accounting for all the revenues. This is an exorbitant amount of money, of which the great majority is surely benefiting from the offshore plumbing system. And you've also said that financial institutions are uniquely positioned to detect trafficking. So what's being done from this angle to address this?

SPEAKER_01 51:06

Yeah, I work with a lot of financial institutions, uh, both banks and financial transaction companies and so forth. A lot of people don't realize that they have these analysts that are in those companies that basically look at transaction histories and patterns in order to determine the extent to which there's uh possible nefarious things taking place. So they develop what's called a typology. What the typology does is basically identifies the various steps of a criminal activity and then looks at the uh the various transactions under that, and then they analyze that to determine if there are patterns within their clientele to determine whether or not they are supporting criminal activities. Why do they do that? Because if a legitimate bank has any of that $236 billion in it, it's money laundering. They get fined. There was a bank in Australia that was fined $1.3 billion Australian dollars because they allowed for some trafficking activities to take place. So they are incentivized to be able to address this. So let me give you a specific example. This is in the United States. There was a nail salon chain, and that chain had hours from 9 in the morning till 9 o'clock at night. It was run by a Vietnamese group, and an accountant found that there were transactions taking place at 2, 3, 4 o'clock in the morning, all around 200 U.S. dollars. When they look it looked into it, they came to realize there was a sex trafficking ring being used at night in the same infrastructure. So the typology and red flag indicators in this particular case would be a particular type of business, transactions after hours of around $200. You package that together and you run it against your big data, you can see whether you see other patterns out there that could be things that you would look into to ensure that you are not supporting these types of activities. And that system and procedure and approach is used by banks on a daily basis. They're always looking for potential criminal activity to protect themselves. But by doing that, they're also making the world a better place. And so I go to these analysts all the time and I say, you guys are heroes. You know, sitting there and you're analyzing and you're identifying possibilities. You write what are called suspicious transaction reports that are given off to the government. And a certain percentage of those reports might result in a door being kicked in and a girl being pulled out of a brothel. By you doing your job to protect those organizations, it's heroic. You're protecting your company, but you're also making the world a better place. And a lot of people don't realize that even in manufacturing, you have people within the sustainability offices that will do anything and everything they can to ensure that within their supply chain, forced labor and child labor doesn't exist. Because it's a reputational risk and it will affect their business. So these people are in-house focusing on these activities that are NGO-like, going out and doing the good work. And that type of system and procedure within the private sector is what makes uh the world a better place.

SPEAKER_00 54:16

And it's great that there is the regulation in place that enforces those incentives from the banks. Oliver Bullock does write in his book about the suspicious activity reports. It's the same problem we started off with with a lack of funding for USAID. Basically, there is lopsided balance between the amount of resources that can be given to following up those specific suspicious activity reports, and then uh the criminals on the other end being able to skirt around it. Because especially in Southeast Asia, I would imagine that the main use is actually just cash. You know, sending pallets of cash illegally uh abroad. It gives an amazing statistic that there's more large denomination bills ever in history running throughout our economy. Yet even for yourself in Southeast Asia, I imagine you pay with everything on your phone, which means why is there more large denomination bills circulating throughout our economy? It is simply pretty much all to do with these illicit activities that you're talking about here, and therefore the scale made possible of these criminal organizations.

SPEAKER_01 55:18

Well, I mean, we're working with Interpol, the Makeon Club, the organization that I'm working with, on the issue of human trafficking into scam centers and the scams themselves. There's about 350,000 young professional people who have been trafficked into Myanmar, Cambodia, and Lao, horse to scam 14, 15 hours a day. If they don't, you know, a certain amount of uh, you know, torturing and beatings and tasering takes place. And so what we're doing is bringing the banks, the financial transaction companies, the crypto companies, the social media companies together to see if there's a way of using technology, using social media, using AI in order to identify how the private sector is inadvertently supporting these scam centers. Because if these centers are being built, there's brick and mortar and electronics and software and electricity and water that has to go into these facilities. So you can identify where local businesses are and help those businesses to understand that you are in fact supporting something that is uh nefarious. And that sensitization in this day and age where companies want to make sure that they are doing right by the world, this would disincentivize them to be able to address this. For example, our notorious scam center is called KK Park. It's in Myanmar, it's right across the border from Thailand. They get their Wi-Fi from Starlink. You know, and so we would then go to the private sector company that provides that and make a case that if you turn that off, the scam center can't work. And so what we try to do is to incentivize the private sector to understand that this is a business risk, but at the same time, when they take action to encourage them to feel good about the fact that the action that they're taking helps these people because we show them what happens to these individuals in this particular case. And there's all these videos that show the beatings and the tortures. When a private company sees this and they realize that they may have any association with that, they from a personal level and from a business level, they say, nothing doing. You know, if if we are involved in any way, we got to make sure that we're not involved. So just sensitizing companies to that is a good way of helping to get the private sector involved. And the thing about the private sector is the moment they re- uh identify a vulnerability, they will address it because they're trying to protect their business. Businesses cannot thrive on taking advantage of people if the world knows that. So they will do everything to protect their reputation because there are three things that they're looking for growth, prestige, and profits. And all of those are compromised when they are associated with some type of a human trafficking type scenario. And a lot of these countries don't even know about this issue until we get in front of them.

SPEAKER_00 58:15

Yeah, it seems like the incentives are totally aligned there. And for say, take the pig butchering scams as an example, uh, they are different to the localized human trafficking, which we've spoken about at the podcast, because it requires a whole bunch of tech infrastructure, which is inevitably going to be American or European technology most of the time. And therefore, having whether it be the Zoom call they do or the telecommunications company that they work with or all these different things actually embedding in those organizations, which is the whole purpose of the Mekon Club, is it not?

SPEAKER_01 58:49

Yeah. Yeah. Well, the Mekon Club works with companies in a positive, supportive way to help them to address any vulnerability related to human trafficking. So we we do it from a pro-business standpoint. We recognize that the businesses want to do the right thing, and we give them the tools and the means and the trainings and the consultation to help them to meet that end.

SPEAKER_00 59:12

And perhaps to finish, Matt, unless there's anything else you want to talk about.

SPEAKER_01 59:16

No, that's here.

SPEAKER_00 59:17

For those who missed the first appearance you made on this podcast, I'd like you to finish with a starfish story.

SPEAKER_01 59:24

Okay, so in the past, uh, as I said, I would get overwhelmed by victim testimonials and meeting people and seeing what happened to them and so forth. And I eventually got to a point where I desensitized myself. But the one thing that really brings me a sense of depression and sadness and uh a lack of enthusiasm is the fact that there's fifty million people in modern slavery and we're helping less than one percent. And so to overcome that, we uh tell ourselves the starfish parable. And so the way the story goes, there's a 10-kilometer beach, and the father and son are walking down the beach, and the father kind of leans down and takes a starfish that's been beached and throws it in the water, and then walks another couple of feet, sees another one, picks it up, throws it in. For a kilometer, he's picking up these starfish and throwing them into the water. The son looks at the dad and says, Dad, you know, this beach is ten kilometers long. You can't possibly save all those starfish. What difference does it make? Father looks to the son and says, Well, to every starfish that gets back into the water, it makes all the difference in the world. So the point is that as human trafficking practitioners, every success that we have, when we hay help somebody, when we prevent somebody from being trafficked, when we, you know, go after a case and put a criminal, we give ourselves some recognition and we value and we celebrate those small things because if we didn't, we would be overwhelmed with the big picture. And so we do what we can with what we have. And that's basically the moral of that particular parable.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:01

Matthew, thank you so much for being generous with your time once again.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:05

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.