Women's forum fighting human trafficking with focus on human rights

Sex crimes instantly get our attention.

So it might seem counterintuitive that someone fighting human trafficking would want to divert our gaze from the most headline-grabbing aspect of that foul practice.But that is Liezl Tomas Rebugio's intent.

She wants us to move from headlines to human rights, and the abuse of those rights that leads to trafficking — in other words, to get to the root of the problem.

Tomas Rebugio is the anti-trafficking-project director for the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum, which introduced its anti-trafficking agenda Monday in Seattle, where Rebugio works and where the idea originated.

Seattle has been an active city for the anti-trafficking movement partly because Asian women here have been so active. Velma Veloria, a former state representative, is credited with leading Washington to enact the first state anti-trafficking law (2003).

In a presentation Monday evening at the Yesler Community Center, Tomas Rebugio said 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year.

Some estimate 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked into the United States annually, 80 percent of them women and girls.

Trafficking is recruiting, harboring, transporting or using a person for labor or services through the use of force, fraud or coercion.

Beyond sex, victims are trafficked for domestic servitude, agriculture, sweatshops, hotel work and arranged marriages.

The same causes and cures apply in all of those cases.

The forum's 51-page agenda opens with the sensational case of a mail-order bride from the Philippines who was gunned down along with two friends in the King County Courthouse 13 years ago by the man who brought her to the United States.

Timothy Blackwell, a lonely man who had trouble meeting women, thought a Filipina would make the perfect, undemanding wife. Susana Blackwell, more than 20 years younger, wanted out of her village.

The National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum (www.napawf.org) argues for remedies for the conditions that underlie trafficking, including poverty, which reduces options in less-developed countries, and stereotypes of Asian women as docile and sexualized that make them a commodity.

So the group is focusing on the impact of the economic gap between developed and less-developed countries, gender oppression, racial stereotypes and immigration laws.

They want voters to consider the effect of U.S. policies on universal human rights. The group has a good role model in Martin Luther King Jr.

Friday will be the 40th anniversary of his death in Memphis, where he'd gone to help garbagemen win a measure of economic and social justice. His advocacy expanded to include stands against war and economic injustice and in favor of expanding and protecting human rights.

If NAPAWF can take the energy generated by sensational cases and direct it toward improving human rights, it will have done us all a service.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.