Michael Short: Kate Kennedy, welcome to The Zone.
Kate Kennedy: Thank you for having me.
MS: Thank you very much for your time. You have recently taken on the CEO role in Australia at Hagar, a wonderful organisation that strives to restore the lives of women and children who have survived trafficking and human rights abuse. Can we please start with an overview of Hagar?
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KK: Hagar has been going since 1994, and our purpose is singular; we work to restore the lives of women and children who have suffered from slavery and severe human rights abuse.
MS: What sort of abuses beyond slavery would you be looking at?
KK: We are a specialist agency; we work with people who we say experience 20 out of 25 of the human right trauma indicators. We interface very well with other international development agencies because we are able to take the hardest, long term cases. Our clients have often been raped, have been relocated to different countries so have no community, or are severely traumatised due to severe exploitation.
They may have been trafficked when they are very young, so there is often no chance of reintegration back into a community because they don't know where they are from; they have no economic or community backdrop that will support them for their future. And pretty consistently there is a really deep level of trauma that comes from the combination of human rights abuses.
MS: Let's have a look at the size and the scope, Kate, of the issue. What are some of the key numbers, please? The extent of human trafficking is staggering.
KK: Yes, it really is. The United Nations estimates that 27 million people live in slavery in 2012. The number of people trafficked each year is about 2.5 million. Half are children, and what I find most shocking is very recent estimates by the UN that 60% of that trafficking, 60% of that human trade, is happening in Southeast Asia, our region, and the number is growing. Now, just to put those figures in context: 27 million people is double the amount of transatlantic slavery that happened in the entire 1800s from Africa to America.
MS: What sort of money is involved?
KK: That's a really good question. The current estimate is that it is a $32 billion trade. It is the second-largest illegal trade globally, sitting just below drugs. We see an inverse relationship with the drug trade; when drug enforcement is in place in a country, drug trafficking tends to decrease and people swap what they traffic, and they move into the human trade.
MS: How is the organisation funded, Kate?
KK: It has been going since 1994, and the majority of funding has been consistently from development agencies or governments: the US government, through the forms of the US Department of Justice and USAID; the Australian government through its AusAID budget has been a very consistent funder.
Hagar has been in a really unique position because it has received, if you like, sub-contracted services from other international development agencies. We have worked consistently for International Women's Development Agency, Red Cross and World Vision amongst others.
MS: So that is a fee-for-service model within the structure?
KK: That is exactly right.
MS: Why is it expanding in Australia?
KK: For a few reasons. One, because we have been the only based in the less-developed world and we have never sought to have a conversation with the first world, and we feel that it's time to change that. When you've got a trajectory of slavery going up in a particular region, we feel that we have got to have a different kind of response, a more mature response and conversation with the Australian public.
Our hope is to further engage the Australian government. Our hope is to further engage the Australian public, to see the numbers going down, to see the trend going down.
MS: What do you actually do? How is it actually operating? What is an example of how you work, and what are you doing here?
KK: We have a case-management model that resembles the child protection system in Australia more than it does any other community development model. That means it is individualised.
We would get a call from, let's just say, the police if a paedophile ring has just been broken. We would get a call from the police that there are one or two or three young boys who are waiting at a police station. A case manager would go and collect those boys. The immediate things are always clothing and medical checks. So this is the way our program service delivery model works in Cambodia, Afghanistan and Vietnam. We would run those clients through medical, legal and other needs.
There is a lot of trauma involved. Some of paedophiles convince the young boys that they are their children. We have had a fairly consistent pattern with boys that have experienced paedophilia, who come out of those environments and then you've got to do trauma counselling. That can takes months on end.
We have developed a program with Johns Hopkins University to specially treat the severity of trauma that we deal with through the slavery and human rights abuse such. So that is the first module. We call that recovery. That is the first block of our program. After people have moved through that, the legal framework, the medical and trauma, they then go into a transition program. The nature of that transition really depends on how old they are.
If they are young, they move into what we call the catch-up school, because there is generally a great gap with their curriculum. The catch-up school has been developed so you can go in any age. You might be 14, but going into grade 1.
The second characteristic of the catch-up school is that they do two to three years in one year. They go to school from 8am to 5pm in a day, and the hope is that they come out after two years with basic numerously, literacy and English, depending on the country, but English is in Vietnam and Cambodia.
If they are older or are cases like where you’ve got a 13-year-old girl who has come in pregnant, she was traded as young girl and she's done five years in a brothel, often they don’t want to go to school. They are pregnant or have had a baby, so they want to look at economic independence; so one of the other very sophisticated parts of Hagar’s programming is that we have a vocational program.
We have 42 different agreements with businesses that we either part-own or we have an agreement to place our clients in to train them up. It includes all the classics; sewing, hairdressing, and we have a very big business called Catering, which is the largest catering business in Cambodia, where we deliver about 3 million meals a year and 600 staff, 40 of which are people moving through from our programs into independence.
And then independence; we don't do micro-finance, we just do straight-up grants. If you want to go back to your village, if you know where you're from, we'll give you that thousand dollars to build your house or we’ll buy that sewing machine. We’re also seeing a really lovely thing 18 years into a program, where we have got a real demand for university scholarships.
We currently have three students in medical school, and we have got another block of 12 women that were rescued nearly 10 years ago. They were very young girls at the time. They were rescued in a notorious brothel raid, and half of them now want to go to university.
MS: It must be very rewarding to see that sort of thing happen. What about here in Australia? What sort of activities are you ramping up?
KK: We have three goals in Australia. We really want to increase knowledge. It's fairly obvious to us that the knowledge of slavery is really low. The knowledge of slavery in our region is really low. So we're going to do a whole series of educational campaigns.
We have developed some early primary school curriculum. We will be developing secondary school curriculum. And we are already starting to seek out partnerships with schools. We also want to do things like this interview; this is really important to us, taking a conversation to a broader audience through the media.
That is a really big goal - grow the understanding of slavery and grow our audience and knowledge about problems people suffer from in our region. The Australian Government is the second big thing. There is a lot that goes on; Australia itself has reasonable laws for slavery.
We have a bill that’s going through Parliament at the moment. We want the Australian Government to use Austrade and AusAid as effectively as they can to ensure that places like Cambodia – which are allowing perpetrators of human rights abuses to walk away through systems that are not robust enough to hold them in it - we want to see them taking that governance approach, that legal approach through those budgets.
We are one of the major trading partners and one of the largest suppliers of aid to that region, so we are in a fairly powerful position. The Australian Government is taking its commitment to countering violence against women, not only in Australia but offshore, very seriously. So we're looking at that mature.
MS: To what extent, Kate, are we seeing some of the victims of the things that you’re dealing with in the region coming here and needing help here in Australia?
KK: Last night I was at a lecture that was held at the Salvation Army, and they have a refuge in Sydney and a terrific program up there. In comparison to elsewhere in the region, they are really small numbers, as you would expect, but it still happens. There are Korean women and other Southeast Asian women working in brothels in Australia.
There was a young man, an Indian, who spoke last night who was transported to Australia and didn't even realise he was a slave until some of his co-workers started talking to him about the fact that he wasn't getting a wage and had inherited debt upon arriving in Australia, which is effectively slavery. They went and then reported the employer. But there has never been anyone prosecuted for trafficking in Australia that I know of.
MS: When one considers the things that people do to people that your organisation is seeking to help, it suggests some terrible things about intrinsic motivation. Yet when one considers the work done by Hagar and the people that you're working with in the organisation, it suggests some uplifting things about human nature. What is your view of human nature? Do you think people are intrinsically inclined to decency and doing what would generally be defined as good, or the opposite, or is it shades of nuance?
KK: It is almost a question you need a bottle of wine for, but I’ll attempt to answer it anyway. It is so tricky. I have never fallen for the black/white, evil/good scenario. I do think that we are an accumulation of the things that happen to us, and I think that you can see people who have become numb as they have got older to things that they inflict on others, because of certain circumstances in their early life.
I like to believe that there is cause and effect, but what is important to know, I think, is that there is a point of no return for some people, where they are in denial about how they live and how they impact on others. I don’t know if that really answers the question.
MS: Well, it is a really difficult question to contemplate, but it does seem to me to go to some of what you're doing in the sense that that $32 billion and the people who are profiting from the misery of others would seem to me to be hard to describe as decent human beings.
KK: I think you are dead right. In some ways, if you look at people trade, whether it's gold or humans or drugs, they are just trading in the same way, with no emotional connection to what they're trading. But the reality on the ground is the impact of being trafficked or of the drug trade or the arms trade is catastrophic effects on communities.
MS: Why is so much of it happening in our region?
KK: There is a number of reasons that trafficking and slavery happen. Poverty is one. Population booms and natural disasters also play into it. But one of the very consistent factors is when the law is not upheld. And that is what you see currently in Cambodia. We have seen trafficking decline in Thailand, largely because of pressure that brought by the tourism industry on Thailand and its reputation around sex tourism.
But we are seeing a rise in areas like Cambodia. There was a case quite recently where a Russian paedophile, who in terrible circumstance had a sex party for up to 20 children under 10 that involved rape and all sorts of terrible things, got a got a Royal pardon. He bribed his way through the judicial system and then got a Royal pardon and then was able to leave Cambodia.
We're also seeing in Cambodia at the moment the number of trafficking cases reported going up, but the number being prosecuted going down.
MS: How can people get involved in Hagar? How can they help you help?
KK: There is a number of ways. The most immediate and effective way is to help us with funds. We can only at the moment service about 25% of demand. Small amounts of money can really help. And I think people fail to perhaps remember that. To put a young person who has been trafficked through school for a donation of $49 a month over one year will give that child full curriculum and that two-year block that I spoke about earlier. So that is really significant.
And then of course there are larger ways: we have need for university scholarships, which are about $3000. You can assist a person going through their full college or university degree in that way. The second thing is that given we are really trying to expand our audience, like us on Facebook, go to our website and talk about it with your friends. We need to start getting this idea, this conversation about slavery and how unacceptable and atrocious t is out there in the community.
If you have primary school students, look up our website - Hagar.org.au - and look at the curriculum. It is surprisingly accessible; people think that it wouldn't be, but it is. Obviously, it does not reference things like sex, but I references trafficking and trade, which are things that young people understand.
MS: How did you end up being involved in this? What is your path to this job, Kate?
KK: I have been around the social-purpose space or the not-for-profit sector for most of my 20 years of working. Most recently I was strategic director of World Vision for about seven years. I saw Hagar; World Vision actually funded Hagar over a number of years. And it used to just kill me – the individual plight and the suffering.
You’d see it with poverty; I saw that all the time and you would go in and put in those essential cornerstones like birthing units and immunisation, but there was something about the plight of people who had suffered at the level that they had, the Hagar clients, that just completely unpackaged me in way and I feel compelled to do this work, and really excited about it.
MS: Why do you feel compelled? Where does that come from?
KK: Where does it come from? I think I was raised with a lot of service as a theme; I was raised in a Catholic family. There was a nun in New Guinea, my dad’s aunty. My mum's brother was a religious brother who also went to New Guinea. So there was a bit of this international development, missionary service thing that I always found compelling.
I think I was also really fortunate to go to a school where there was this real idea of volunteering and participating, there was that framework. Also, I was really engaged by the voiceless - things like people who are trafficked with no hope and the homeless just really speak to me. It feels really meaningful to me to try to be their voice.
MS: The school thing interests me. Can you talk a little bit about that?
KK: Yes. I went to Star of the Sea in Gardenvale, run by a lot of nuns. All the way through, there were these blocks of volunteering. We did everything from going to Montefiore Homes, where we did volunteering with people who has survived the Second World War, which is something that still stays with me today. I still remember seeing people with stamps on their arms. We’d go to Ozanam House and do service with meals.
All those experiences, I can still see them now. They were really important to me. My parents were also probably, in their own ways, volunteers participating in community life. And I just saw that as my role.
MS: So something clicked early?
KK: Yes.
MS: What is the hardest thing you've ever had to do, Kate? It is a very difficult question, and so there may be things that you don't wish to speak about, but this is not a professional question, this is a broad question.
KK: Giving birth was pretty hard. Also, I have found carrying the emotional responsibility of the work that I do and try to do very hard. There are enormous themes - poverty, ending slavery.
And there're different times when, you know, you just work and work and work and you find yourself at midnight still working and you have to actually stop, because you're not going to solve it, you just have to do what you can, whenever you can, as you can - which also happens to be our creed at Hagar. You can't solve it. In a way, that’s hard, not being able to solve it immediately, these big problems.
MS: Thank you for your time, Kate, and I wish you very well with Hagar and its work.
KK: Thank you.
Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/full-transcript-kate-kennedy-20120617-20hva.html#ixzz1yDgDKZ3t
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