Interview with a journalist
In this episode, Fuzz Kitto interviews Matt, an Australian investigative journalist in Asia, who has interviewed and written dozens of stories on modern slavery. They discuss Matt’s personal journey and grown in understanding modern slavery and how it has impacted and changed his perspective on the challenging issue of modern slavery.
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Fuzz: Welcome to slavery unravelled. And this is the beginning of a new series. And we're doing it on stories of people that have been caught in modern slavery, and to give a bit of an insight into how it happens, why it happens, and how it affects people, not just the people who've been caught, but also the people that work with those that have been caught in modern slavery. And today, what we're going to do is have a conversation with Matt. We've known that for quite a while now we've visited together in in Southeast Asia. We've had Matt speak at the Asian regional anti trafficking conference a couple of times. And he's been really, really helpful to give an insight in how to work with the media and what the media does. And what's the role of the media to say, Matt, welcome, it’s really good to be able to have this conversation together.
Matt: Thanks, Fuzz. I hope I can live up to that introduction.
Fuzz: I'm sure you'll go way past it. Matt, was did work with Reuters, when Reuters had a verygood project where they had a number of reporters around the world reporting on on modern slavery. So Matt, what got you into this? What was the thing that first hit you when you came across or that you were asked to go into reporting on slavery?
Matt: That's a good question, I think. So, I came to Cambodia, and began working here at the newspaper in 2012. And at the time, I was a I was a sports journalist back in Australia, and was on holidays here and ended up staying here. And what I can remember, I can remember one, one time I was sent out by the newspaper to go to the factory district out on the edge of Phnom Penh here to interview some workers who were there was a big protest against conditions at the factories. And we were sitting on a gutter out and outside one of the factories and chatting to a man who was involved in the protests, and he was pretty distraught. And during the interview, he said to me, something along the lines of this is worse than Thailand. And then, I explored that further. And he told me a story that I had not heard the likes of ever before. And it was a story like one of the loads that we're featuring in this campaign, it was this man had had gone to Thailand to work on a fishing boat thinking that he was going to earn a few hundred dollars a month that would get sent back to his family in Cambodia. Little did he know, he was at he was he was at sea for maybe two years, I think. And, and all the while being worked like a slave. But in his head, he was thinking that was worthwhile, because all this money was going back to support his family, which is, you know, a kind of struggling family in the the bush in Cambodia. And when he eventually got out of got off the boat and escaped and got made his way back to Cambodia, he found that his wife actually thought that he was dead. You know, he'd gone for two years to do this virtuous thing. And then it were turned, and everything that he'd been working towards was totally gone. And, you know, when this guy was telling me this story, he's sitting on the gutter at the front of the factory, and his whole life, you know, I've never heard anything like it. And at the same time, the way that he told it was like, it was almost like, you know, he wasn't angry. He was more like, Oh, this is this is the sad fate, I'm just processing it and dealing with it. And you know, then I went back to the to the newsroom and said, like, Hey, we got the story about the protests. But I also met this dude who told me this story about when he was stuck on a fishing boat in Thailand. And that kind of led me to look further into that particular story, which in the end turned out to be a huge story about one company that had one you could call it a company, it's a kind of a fake company set up in Cambodia to recruit people to go and work in Thailand and it was actually thousands of people that went to work on those boats. And to this day, there's still people who have who aren't accounted for. And that was back in 2010, 11, 12. And then, I mean, in the series of stories that we've done, I, I've written about Vito, who has a very similar story to that. And I mean, Vito is a man that I met only about maybe six or eight months ago, I was up in the north east of Cambodia doing some different work. And I was in a talking to the tuk tuk driver, and the tuk tuk driver starts to tell me this story about when he was in Thailand. And I mean, it just blows me away that these people have such extreme, extremely strenuous situations that most of us could not even imagine enduring. They go through that, then they come back to Cambodia, and they kind of just fold back into normal life. And they could be any of these people that we walk past or who sell us noodles, or Yeah, anywhere, anyone could have experienced some of these, this kind of abuse.
Fuzz: So, in your experience, and you talk there about in those two stories, you talked about sort of going in, and then coming back. So, what causes people to actually fall into slavery?
Matt: Yeah, that's, I mean, that's something that I'd love to talk about. And I'd love more people to understand, because the very, I think, you know, I've had my head in this slavery stuff now for the best part of 10 years. So, it's hard for me to kind of step back and think about how other people see it. But one thing I think, is that we have, you know, before we become heavily involved in learning about and reporting this stuff, we kind of think of slavery, as, you know, women chained up in basements and these kinds of really stark imagery that we might have seen in movies or whatever, it's a lot different to that. Rhere's a lot of different ways that it happens. And it can be a lot more like women chained in basements is one end of it. But the reality is, it's a lot more subtle than that. And often I'll talk about my work with, with friends and family, and tell them stories that I've learned of people, you know, being trafficked or becoming enslaved. And people will often say to me, you know, they look at me with disbelief, you know, like, “why did they do that? Or how did they not see the red flags? Or why didn't she just run away? Or why didn't she call for help? Or why didn't the police do something?
But I think the base understanding of all this has to be that people who fall into these situations, generally, and this has changed a little bit recently, but generally, these people are desperate people, people in really, really dire situations, often in debt, and often growing up in communities where the opportunities to move forward in life, are not anywhere similar to those that we might have experienced. You might go to do a story about some people who, who allowed themselves to be trafficked onto fishing boats in Thailand, and then you go to the place where they come from. And you see that in their, in their home communities in their villages. The opportunity is, I mean, bleak is an understatement. You know, some of these places the previously the almost the only thing they could rely on was a bit of agriculture, subsistence farming, usually of rice, and then potentially some fruit and vegetables. But in recent years, the climate in Cambodia has seen a lot of rice crops falling off, and a lot of fruit crops falling off and smaller scale, particularly for people who don't have the means to do large scale agriculture are being kind of shouldered out of the market. People are usually people who end up in these situations are usually coming from very, very dire situations where the other options are not much better. And we often see these people and think like, how did they not? How did they allow themselves to get in this situation? But we need to also think what the alternative was, and the alternative might have been sitting, you know, in a house with a large family and a lot of debt and waiting for the bank to come and repossess, repossess the house. So then when someone comes through the village, offering a job on a boat in Thailand or in a factory or to go to China and get married to a wealthy man, of course, these people jump at these opportunities, or at least see some value in these opportunities. And then it's up to the up to the negotiations as to whether you know whether they stay or whether they go.
Fuzz: The lot of what you're talking about, I guess is poverty. And, and their situation of falling into poverty, either because of the climate change or crops or the economic systems in the, in the agricultural sector. Are there other things that make people vulnerable to slavery besides poverty?
Matt: I mean, it kind of fits in the same column. But lack of opportunity, you know, and then, like speaking specifically about Cambodia, it's a country that was in one form or another at war into the 90s. And has since had, the headline is extreme economic development in Cambodia. It has, it's one of the fastest growing economies in the world, but beneath that headline is a growing gap between the rich and the poor, and high levels of uneducated people in the population. And even those who have been to schools. I mean, this this country was near destroyed in the 70s and 80s. So, there's a lot of people getting around who haven't had much, if any education, and even some of you have had an education, it's not it's an illegitimate education, it's not very good.
Fuzz: So, it's probably important for people to understand that the whole Pol Pot Khmer Rouge situation is that they actually wipe out the educated people and then teachers and musicians and artists. So, has that had a lasting effect in those things that you're talking about?
Matt: I mean, I've don't think I'd be in a position to say that it's had. You would suggest that it has had a lot of lasting effect, right. At the time of that horrible kind of era of the Pol Pot era, there was a million Cambodians, roughly. And there was 2 million of them gone by the end of it. And yes, you're right. They did, they specifically targeted, I mean, to the point where they killed people who wore glasses, or who didn't have calluses on their hands from working in the fields, you know, they did target that the intellects, and the people who might be garner a following, such as you know, musicians and artists, so you would imagine that that has had a lasting effect, given that a quarter of the population was wiped out, and it was targeting the, you know, the more sophisticated or the more intellectual.
Fuzz: Two-three years ago, we did some research into the nature of the vulnerability of people and men, particularly in Cambodia being to being trafficked into Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia. And one of the things that a number of NGOs told us was that it's very difficult because the grandparents who were really affected during that period, had children and now their children have had children. But a number of the parents are going away for work. And because of the situations that you've been talking about, because of the vulnerability of poverty, etc. So the children, actually were the grandchildren actually left for the grandparents, who had no education, so that the children are being still very affected by the grandparents generation, the fact that they're the ones who were there and bring them up. And in the culture, of course, they respect elderly people as well. And so there's been a number of factors there that we've been picking up. But the thing which I really would want to pick your brains on is what's called intergenerational trauma. So you know, places like Cambodia, places like Myanmar, some parts of Thailand, other parts of Vietnam, of course, right around the whole Southeast Asia and certainly in Indonesia as well. There have been large political upheavals and war, factional fighting, etc. And that affects people's what's called cosmology or the way they see the future. So, do you think that a lot of those people when they are finding themselves in vulnerable situations, have not got a lot of generational experience and wisdom to pick up on because of all that fighting and struggles? Do you think that that's any effect that carries into these people that makes them vulnerable?
Matt: It's got to be, I mean, first of all just back to the start of what you said, yeah, it's quite stark sometimes when you go out into the countryside here into the communities and see that they have been largely hollowed out of kind of the middle generation, and is very much largely just grandparents looking after grandchildren with the middle generation kind of gone in search of cash and, and in the rural areas here, if you're not got a successful kind of crop that you're growing, the next option is you go looking for work elsewhere. So it's very, very common for people of working age to leave their home town or home village and go elsewhere, whether it be to Phnom Penh to work in a factory or to Thailand to work on a construction site. So just to paint the picture a little bit that that leaving your village and going somewhere to try and earn some money to send back to your village is a very normal, it's that that's kind of the main way to earn for the majority of people who live in rural Cambodia. And then so as you said that, then we're left with grandparents looking after grandchildren. And yeah, I mean, I'm not an expert on this. So, I wouldn't want to speak too strongly on it. But of course, these people who have lived through the Khmer Rouge era do retain the characteristics of people who have you know, survived atrocities and, and seen war firsthand, you know, so their kind of survival instincts, of course, are different to ours. And so when, you know, I mean, I've seen a lot of stories where the middle generations gone from the village, and then the grandmas looking after the kid, the grandkids who might grow up to be 14, 15, 16, and 17. And then someone comes through the village offering, you know, a cash payment to this grandmother in order to take the granddaughter to work in China or wherever else they might be offering to go. And yeah, I think I mean, it's hard to speak too strongly about the psychology of those people. But definitely, I think it plays it plays a role. Yeah, I mean, people are still very much affected by what happened here and intergenerational trauma. I mean, you can read a lot about it. And, and, and I would say that Cambodia might be ground zero for kind of modern research on intergenerational trauma. And they very much do think that it is very real, that these traumas are passed down to these grandchildren, or to the children and then the grandchildren. But yeah, I do think I do think yes, so the psyche of the of the grandparents definitely has an effect on what happens with the kids and grandkids.
Fuzz: So Matt, thank you for these insights that you've shared with us from your experience as a reporter and being involved in covering modern slavery across the region. And we also want to reflect back on some of the vulnerabilities which had been poverty, which has been lack of opportunity, which has been a lack of systems that have been there to help people and support people, but also the effects of war and of history, that sort of breakdown of civil society as well. Well, this has been the beginning of this series, where we've been looking at some of the things which help us understand something of the vulnerabilities that cause people to fall into or be vulnerable to modern slavery. Next podcast we're going to be looking at some of the stories that Matt has been collecting together.
So, this has been Fuzz Kitto may you have a slavery free day.
Well, this has been Slavery Unravelled a podcast from beat slavery free. If you want to know more and find out what you can do about modern slavery. Then go to our website, beslaveryfree.com and they you can find out many actions and resources and campaigns you can be a part of, and also to find out ways you can donate to help the work of Be Slavery Free.