Last week, The Atlantic, one of the country’s longest-running magazines, published an in-depth piece on the prevalence of sexual violence in U.S. agriculture. After months of extensive research, both historical and of the current agricultural industry, the magazine singled out the CIW’s Fair Food Program as a rare example of success in combatting the scourge of farmworker sexual abuse, offering a ray of hope not only for agriculture, but for other low-wage industries across the country as well.
In the first section of
The Atlantic’s extensive article, entitled “There’s a Sexual Harassment Epidemic on America’s Farms,” the author paints a bleak picture of farm labor conditions beyond the protections of the Fair Food Program. She examines the most recent forced labor operation brought to justice by the CIW’s Anti-Slavery Program, which took place on a small farm just 30 minutes from Immokalee in an area aptly named “Devil’s Garden”. The workers’ lawsuit took six long and painful years to resolve in civil court and resulted in a $3.5 million settlement. Through an extended interview with one of the survivors of the case, who faced both forced labor and sexual assault in the fields at the hands of her supervisor, Tapia Reyes-Ortiz,
The Atlantic piece offers some of the most extensive reporting yet on the notorious forced labor operation...
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