Modern slavery of women is underreported in Brazil – 7/2/2023 – Training

Modern slavery of women is underreported in Brazil. In the last 20 years, 2,488 were rescued from conditions similar to slavery, according to the Division of Inspection for the Eradication of Slave Labor (Detrae) of the Ministry of Labor. The number is 5% of the total number of rescued workers in the historical series.

“When we consolidated the data, this caught our attention. We concluded that domestic slave labor and sexual slavery are invisible”, says Lys Sobral Cardoso, coordinator of the National Commission for the Eradication of Slave Labor (Conatrae) of the Public Ministry of Labor (MPT) .

Detrae started in 1995, but the first record of rescue of domestic slave labor is from 2017. Sexual slavery only appears in 2019.

“I didn’t realize that it was slave labor. I was dominated by the minds of the bosses, I thought it was normal”, says Luara*, 22.

She was enticed in October 2022, in the interior of Ceará, to prostitute herself in a bar in the Federal District with the promise of high wages. The deal was to have the ticket paid for by the recruiters and discounted after the sex work, with a guarantee of lunch. None of that happened.

Since arriving in Brasilia, Luara has not received payment or food. He borrowed transfer money from his family to buy food as the debt mounted. She was fined for dirt in the house, towel left on the bed and for not doing the dishes.

The bar owner and manager threatened Luara and another girl with weapons. They could only leave to go to the bakery.

Thanks to an anonymous tip, Luara was rescued by Detrae after a month, on the day she agreed to run away with her colleague. The recruiters were arrested for the crime of being reduced to a condition analogous to that of a slave.

Prejudice, the idea that the man is the breadwinner of the family and the invisibility of housework help to explain the small proportion of women rescued, according to Detrae auditor Jamile Virgílio.

“When you think about the profile of the enslaved person, it is always a man with low education, black or brown, but why not look at women? Because they are being subjected to slave labor in the most invisible areas, a mirror of what happens in the labor market” , it says.

Sex work is not recognized as work by society or by the Judiciary. Domestic work, on the other hand, gained specific and expanded legislation in 2003, with the PEC for domestic workers.

Since 2021, there has been an increase in complaints involving domestic servants as victims, due to what auditors call the “Magdalene effect”. With the repercussion generated by the story of Madalena Gordiano, rescued two years ago, the complaints went from 5, in 2020, to 31, in 2021.

The more the Ministry of Labor carries out rescues, the more complaints it receives.

Joana* was 15 years old and living in the interior of Bahia when her cousin announced a job as a housekeeper in Salvador. Once there, she discovered that, in addition to housework, she would take care of four women between 50 and 60 years old.

She worked full-time at the house for 32 years. She never received remuneration.

The first person to advise her on labor rights was a young woman hired to cook lunch at the old people’s home. Afterwards, a neighbor found out that Joana was not being paid and advised her to contact the Labor Public Prosecutor’s Office. Joana was rescued in April 2021. The process continues in court.

Maurício Krepsky, head of Detrae until June 16, says that auditors have difficulty rescuing women from domestic and sexual slavery.

According to him, the Ministry of Labor has a small staff to cover all activities. An action to rescue a female worker could free 50 men from rural slavery.

“What we consider a rescued worker is what the inspection reaches. The disclosure of official data is only for rescued workers, it does not lend itself to giving an overview of slave labor in Brazil”, he says.

Still according to Krepsky, there is no way to reliably estimate underreporting. For him, better coverage of sexual and domestic exploitation would not have much of an impact on the gender balance.

“Depending on the location, there are 200 workers in wineries, but you don’t find 200 women in a brothel”, says the auditor.

Worldwide, sexual exploitation is one of the main forms of modern slavery. In 2021, according to the International Organization of work (ILO), 54% of rescued people were women. When sex work and forced marriage are excluded, they represented 32% of the total.

In the United States and Europe, the fight against modern slavery began with the trafficking of people for sex work. Brazil followed a reverse order. Here, the fight against slave labor began within a labor economic logic.

The crimes of human trafficking and sexual exploitation in the country are not the responsibility of the Ministry of Labor, but of the Ministry of Justice.

Fernanda Rangel, a researcher at UFRRJ (Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), studies the underreporting of enslaved women in the country. According to her, the United States and Europe have improved in recognizing cases of slave labor beyond sexual, while Brazil needs to do the opposite.

“We publicize a lot what labor exploitation is. We have to train our society to identify possible cases of sexual exploitation”, he says.

In May, Police Chief Victor Farias, from Recife (PE), was participating in an action by the Civil Police and the Federal Highway Police against the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents when he came across a case of sexual slave labor.

Slavery was only perceived in addition to prostitution because a labor prosecutor participated in the action.

“It’s a situation we’re not used to,” says the delegate. In Brazil, prostitution is not a crime, but profiting from someone else’s prostitution is.

In that action, 15 women who lived in a house of prostitution were freed. Born in the interior of Pernambuco and with no family in the capital, they were in a situation of slave labor due to debt.

According to labor auditor Jamile Virgílio, cis or trans victims face stigma, which makes it difficult to report sexual exploitation.

“The slavery of the trans woman is the closest thing to what we see in movies, where people are threatened, brutally physically abused and don’t have any kind of social support outside that place”, she says.

In an operation carried out by the Detrae mobile group in Uberlândia (MG) in 2022, eight trans women were rescued from a boarding house run by a gang. Debt slavery was based on the financing of aesthetic procedures.

Jamile says that after the escape of one of the women from Uberlândia, the explorer terrorized those who remained, showing a bloody silicone prosthesis, saying that she had torn it from the body of the fugitive.

Coverage of sexual slavery and human trafficking by the Ministry of Labor in Brazil is in its infancy, according to auditors.

In the latest plan to combat human trafficking, the Ministry of Justice included the need to cross-reference data with the Labor Ministry. According to Marina Bernardes, coordinator of the Ministry of Justice’s Policy and National Plans to Combat Trafficking in Persons, even data on trafficking is reduced and spread across different public bodies.

Bernardes says the next step is to unify the understandings of judges and prosecutors on human trafficking and slave labor.

*Names have been changed at the request of the interviewees.