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I was made a humerous man...hopefully this doesn't send me south.. (lemmy.ca)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I was threatened by local leaders and family if I didn't go on a 2 year mission in another country, then when I got there, they:

took my passport immediately and locked it in a building I couldn't access
required 12 to 16 hours of work a day, with discipline if productivity dropped
refused to provide adequate food or medical care
restricted my communication with my family
assigned me a companion to surveil me 24/7 and report disobedience to leadership (and assigned me to surveil someone else)
disciplined me when I was physically and sexually assaulted by other missionaries

I didn't want to call it trafficking for a long time. I figured maybe God just had a weird way of doing things. But my spouse works at a recovery center for survivors of violence (including trafficking) and helped me realize that's what it was.

A pretty big misconception is that trafficking has to look like selling slaves, and I agree that's an egregious thing, but it can be a lot more broad than that.

There are a lot of resources at https://humantraffickinghotline.org/en if you're curious. My mission experience checked just about every box for labor trafficking, and I've heard very similar stories from a lot of other people who have been missionaries.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago

Yep, sounds like slavery. Taking your passport away would already be enough.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Were you mormon? Or is this more widespread than I thought?

If you are talking about the mormon church, and if what I've heard is correct, you missed an added point that makes it look all the worse. That you had to pay for the right to let them do that to you. Normally in a labour trafficking situation you'd at least be expecting some sort of compensation, even if it's grossly inadequate and ends up largely back in the hands of the traffickers as they charge for accommodation and transport. But from what I've heard, mormons do the labour entirely for free, and pay a large amount for the "honour".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I was mormon. Thankfully my parents paid to traffic me, so I could afford to go to college and cut them off relatively soon after I got home.