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Fr. Jean

2018 (Narrative date)

There are an estimated 328,000 people living in conditions of slavery in Kenya (GSI 2018). Men, women and children are subjected to exploitation amounting to modern slavery in forced labour and sex trafficking. Children are often subjected to forced labour in domestic service, agriculture, fishing, cattle herding, street vending and begging. They are also victims of commercial sexual exploitation throughout the country, in khat cultivation areas, near gold mines and along the highway and Lake Victoria. Moreover, those residing in Kenya's largest refugee camp Dadaab are often vulnerable. Men and women are often lured by employment agencies offering attractive job opportunities, then find themselves trapped in domestic servitude, massage parlors and brothels or forced manual labour.

Fr Jean was kidnapped as a teenager and trafficked in his home country of Kenya.

I am a board member of an organisation called HAART that works against human trafficking. The issue of human trafficking for me is a very important one, myself as, as a teenager I have been trafficked. This happened when I was in secondary school and one night, the traffickers came in the night and then they kidnapped all of us. We stayed there for about 3 months but because the conditions were so inhuman, though there was that death threat, we tried by all means to escape from them.

Now the concrete steps that can be done are exactly what now I am involved in, with this organisation HAART. That was founded by Mr Radoslaw Malinowski. That is working in Kenya trying to re-implement the 4 P’s against human trafficking. TO promote the awareness, to protect those who were trafficked and also to involve in the kind of er influencing those who make the policies, the government and the different organisation. To raise awareness about this evil, this scourge of a kind of threat against really human dignity. A very degrading kind of practice tha tis gaining momentum, er in Africa in different, in different countries.

 

Narrative courtesy of Migrants & Refugees