August 15, 2019
A brief, clear introduction to the tragedy of human trafficking in the 21st century. A 10th-generation Parisian who lives in London, Villa brings a welcome global perspective to her overview of present-day slavery and how readers can fight it. She has served for more than a decade as CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which promotes human rights, and she draws heavily on that experience as she describes the brutal fates of the estimated 40 million people worldwide who are "forced to work, through fraud or threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence." Roughly 30 percent of the victims are trafficked for sex while 70 percent are trapped in involuntary labor. She includes oral histories of three survivors, two of whom suggest the range of forms modern slavery takes: Deependra Giri, an educated Nepalese man who signed a two-year contract for an office job in Qatar only to have to surrender his passport when he arrived, which meant he couldn't leave when his employer paid a fraction of the agreed-upon salary; and Marcela Loaiza, a dancer in Colombia lured to Tokyo by a con man who promised to make her famous but whose associates demanded, once she got to Japan, that she pay them $50,000 by working as a prostitute and threatened harm to her family if she didn't comply. Some of the crimes Villa describes, like sex trafficking, have garnered wide attention, but other shadowy practices are less well known. These include the Kafala, or sponsorship, system in place in the Persian Gulf region, which allows employers to confiscate migrant workers' passports and deny them exit permits until the company says they can leave. In the most useful parts of the book, Villa instructs readers on what they can do to support anti-slavery efforts, including donating to groups like the Human Trafficking Legal Center, which provides free lawyers for victims. Villa's use of real names and photos of survivors lends credibility to stories that might otherwise be too shocking to believe. A vital guide for teachers, nonprofits, and others seeking to understand the global fight against slavery.
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October 1, 2019
Villa, founder of the global anti slavery organization Trust Conference, makes it clear that slavery exists not only in West Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Southeast Asia, but also in the United States. Enslavement takes many forms: sex trafficking, debt peonage, forced domestic labor, and child labor, and all involve deception, exploitation, and threats of violence. Villa use the experiences of several survivors to explain how slavery can hide in plain sight: an American woman forced into prostitution by her boyfriend; a Colombian woman tricked into working as an escort in Japan; and a well-educated, multilingual Nepalese accountant lured into an abusive work environment in Qatar. Villa is a passionate advocate for slavery victims, but her analysis can be muddled and her data questionable, and she doesn't distinguish between voluntary sex work and sexual slavery. She correctly cites poverty as a root cause, but has a rather naive faith in the power of "increasing awareness." Still, Villa's worthy read-alike to Anne Elizabeth Moore's Threadbare: Clothes, Sex, and Trafficking (2016) is a powerful, eye-opening look at human exploitation and our complicity as consumers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)