Good is Good: Sex Trafficking in the US
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Sex trafficking within the U.S. is legally defined as commercial sex acts induced by force, fraud, or coercion or commercial sex acts in which the individual induced to perform commercial sex has not attained 18 years of age. The average age of entry into the commercial sex industry in the U.S. is between 12 to 14 years old.
The federal law is very clear on this issue: Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2003, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005, and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008.
Targetting the vulnerable
Sex traffickers frequently target vulnerable people with histories of abuse and then use violence, threats, lies, false promises, debt bondage, or other forms of control and manipulation keep victims involved in the sex industry. Sex trafficking exists within the broader commercial sex trade, often at much higher rates than most people realize or understand. Sex trafficking has been found in a wide variety of venues of the overall sex industry, including residential brothels, hostess clubs, online escort services, brothels disguised as massage parlors, strip clubs, and street prostitution.
To understand this problem on the ground, I recently spoke to a Special Agent with Homeland Security Investigations.
MATLACK: How do you define human trafficking?
AGENT: Two ways: labor trafficking and sex trafficking. Labor trafficking is basically modern-day slavery, people working and not being paid for their work, living in god-awful conditions. And then the other side is sex trafficking, people that are forced into commercial sex acts against their will.
MATLACK: When you’re dealing with young girls, does the definition of the girl being young enough make it human trafficking?
AGENT: If the girl’s a minor, she doesn’t need to be forced into it for it to be human trafficking. If it’s a 15-year-old girl and you’re her pimp, even if she wants to go out and have sex for money, that’s still considered human trafficking. Once somebody’s an adult, you have to be able to prove that through force, fraud, or coercion that this girl was forced into those sex acts.
MATLACK: And so what’s the breakdown in terms of the cases that you’re pursuing between minors and not minors?
AGENT: I would say it’s almost 50-50.
MATLACK: Can you help me understand how common it is?
AGENT: It is a lot more common that people think. Most people can’t differentiate between human trafficking and human smuggling. People think that this could never happen here, when actually it’s there. You just may not see it, may not know about it, may not hear about it. But, believe it or not, it’s a pretty common occurrence.
MATLACK: So how much of what you’re doing is folks who are bringing girls and women into the country?
AGENT: At Homeland Security Investigations, we’re usually dealing with foreign nationals. But that’s not to say we don’t have cases that involve sex trafficking with U.S. citizens, whether they’re minors or adults. But for the most part, we tend to see more foreign nationals. I’m on a task force that’s made up of several federal and state law enforcement agencies.
MATLACK: So when you find confirmed sex trafficking, are you then trying to prosecute the johns, the pimp, or what?
AGENT: For the most part we focus on the traffickers. Unless the john’s having sex with a 12-year-old girl and it’s readily apparent she’s a minor, then that’s a whole different thing. But for the most part, the johns don’t necessarily know that this girl is being forced into sex. Most of them think, “OK, she’s a willing prostitute, I paid her for sex, she had sex. She’s OK with it, I’m OK with it, no problem.” It’s the traffickers and their organizations that we try and prosecute.
MATLACK: Are they mostly sole proprietors, or are there larger networks of human traffickers?
AGENT: There are networks. Some are just very small, one or two people—maybe a couple of brothers or something—and others are a little bit bigger. For the most part, it’s not like a drug organization, where you have 100 people, from the ones that pick the coca leaves, to making it, turning it into cocaine, and then bringing it from Columbia to wherever, into the United States. They’re usually not that intricate. They do have people in foreign countries that help provide girls, and so there are multiple players that have their own specific roles.
MATLACK: So just walk me through how it works, and how the coercion works, and what kinds of girls end up in this position.
AGENT: What’s common in some of the sex trafficking from other countries, like Mexico, for example, is that it kind of tells a story. The girls meet this guy who treats them like gold, and promises them the world and tell them, “Hey, we can go to the United States, there’s work over there, and we can make money and send money back our families, and save money so we can build our own house in Mexico eventually …” So they get these girls and basically jerk them around, into falling in love with them. And once they’re here in the U.S., all of a sudden, the grass isn’t so green, or work’s not there, and then right off the bat it’s sort of, “Hey, well, you’re here now, you belong to me, this is what you’re going to do.” Or they sometimes take a little more of a softer approach: “You know, times are tough, we need to pay rent, this is something you can do to help. You don’t need to do it for long, just bring in some extra money.” So psychologically, a lot of the times the guys take over these girls, and next thing you know, the girls are being forced against their will into it.
And usually, when the time comes where they say no, there’s a lot of physical abuse, verbal abuse, mental abuse. I mean, a lot of these women feel like they’re worthless at this point, and they don’t know what else to do. Some girls think this guy really loves them and knows what is best. It’s amazing—we have girls in front of us that we know are victims, and even though they didn’t want to do this, they don’t see themselves as victims right off the bat. They thought that they were doing it because they love this guy, and he’s the best thing ever, and he wouldn’t do that to them. The guys have such a hold on them mentally.
And there are times where they’ll force these girls in with drugs. They’ll get the girls hooked on narcotics, heroin, cocaine, whatever it may be. Then it gets to the point where girls can become so addicted to that that that’s the only way that they’ll be able to get their fix is to go out and do this. Between the mental, physical, and verbal abuse, the traffickers usually have such a strong hold over these girls that they have no control over what is happening to them. And they have no control, for the most part, of being able to get out of it.
MATLACK: What’s the youngest girl in a case that you’ve been involved with?
AGENT: I think she was 13.
MATLACK: So if you can’t get them to admit, you can’t prosecute, even if you have other evidence?
AGENT: We can. We can use other evidence that has been gathered during the investigation to use that against her traffickers.
MATLACK: So in the cases where you are able to intervene and prosecute, what happens to these girls?
AGENT: We have a guy that’s assigned to us full-time; he’s called the victim assistance coordinator. He’s not a gun-carrying, badge-carrying person. He’s a licensed therapist. If we find the girls, besides him being able to talk to these girls, he also helps set up getting them to a shelter, getting them whatever sort of treatments they need. That’s what we try to take care of first. If it’s a minor, obviously they go right to a shelter because of her age. But, again, she has to want that. We can’t force anything on these girls.
And then, later on down the road, depending on where the person is from, if she is from another country and here illegally, there are things that we can do to help give her status, whether it be temporary or permanent while we investigate and seek help.
MATLACK: Do you know what the recidivism rate is?
AGENT: I don’t know, but that is always a concern of ours—that the girl could go back to what she was doing. Often, too, these traffickers will threaten the girls’ families, and that’s one of the big problems we have because these girls have been told, “I know who your mom is, I know who your sister is, where they live. If you ever say anything to the police, we’ll kill your family, and we’ll kill your kid.” There’s usually a lot of threats that keep these girls from running away or turning themselves in to the police.
MATLACK: How do you convince them to believe that those threats aren’t real?
AGENT: Well, we don’t necessarily try to convince them that the threats aren’t real, because we don’t know if they are. But we just try to explain to them that the situation that they’re in is not right, and that we can help them. We do our best to convince them that what has been done to them for so long is evil and wrong. At the end of the day, it’s really up to them. We can’t force them to do anything or say anything, but we do everything within our power to help them realize what happened to them, and what they can do with themselves.
MATLACK: Is there anything that you’re trying to do on your side to offer an alternative, other than getting these girls into a safe place? Or is that just not part of what you’re focused on?
AGENT: Well, it is. There are things in place for us to be able to provide these girls with some sort of immigration relief. I’m talking about a girl from a foreign country. There are visas for trafficking victims, that, if she is a documented trafficking victim, she can apply for. So, that being said, besides the help that we offer them right off the bat, trying to get them into the shelter, I do my best to explain that, first of all, it isn’t right what was done to them. Nobody should ever have to go through that.
But they need to ask, because, at the end of the day, if the girl is from a foreign country and just says, “You know, send me home, I’m illegal, I want to go back to Mexico,” or “I want to go back to Brazil,” if that’s really what she wants, and that’s what she asks for, we can’t stop that from happening. But we do what we can to make sure that doesn’t happen, because we know that she’ll go back there, and she’ll be back in the same position.
MATLACK: And in terms of the federal government’s stance on this being human slavery, how seriously do you think the government’s taking this?
AGENT: They take it very seriously. Human trafficking is basically at the forefront of my agency, Homeland Security Investigations. There’s lots of attention, lots of resources, lots of money put into it to make sure that we can do our job as effectively as possible.
MATLACK: I was listening to the Director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons at the U.S. State Department talking about how we’ve measured human trafficking all around the world and never measured ourselves, and now we’re beginning to do that because, obviously, there is human trafficking here. Do you have any sense of how we compare to other countries?
AGENT: I really don’t know. But we can’t be too far behind, and I think that our government is realizing that, and the people are realizing that. People do think, “Oh, that happens somewhere else, not here in the United States,” but every day it seems to surface somewhere. So if I were to take a guess, I would say we’re about as high as most countries. We’re probably not at the top, definitely not at the bottom, but I don’t think we’re lacking in terms of human trafficking that is occurring in the United States.
MATLACK: How do we solve the problem?
AGENT: Like anything else, education and information. Like I said, I don’t think most people really realize what human trafficking is, but more and more people know what it is. I find myself having fewer people say, “Oh, human trafficking? You mean like the people just jumping the border from Mexico?” And then I have to explain to them that no, that’s not it. But education, educating the populace, putting it out there, letting people know what it is and how they can stop it.
Do I think it’ll ever stop? No. It’s a moneymaker, and therefore there will always be somebody who will want to make an easy dollar. Whether or not that’s manipulating another person to make that dollar, it doesn’t matter.
MATLACK: How do you think about it compared to the sex trade in general, whether it’s stripping or non-human trafficking prostitution, or whatever? Do you think they’re related in any way, or is it a completely different kettle of fish?
AGENT: Like just regular prostitution?
MATLACK: Regular prostitution, stripping, porn. There’s obviously a great proliferation of the sex trade in general. I’m just wondering whether you think that’s at all related to sex slavery, or if it’s just a kind of completely different thing.
AGENT: I don’t really know. Do I think that the porn industry has anything to do with human trafficking? No. Prostitution, obviously, like everybody says, is one of the oldest businesses, one of the oldest jobs in the world. It’s not going away. Are there outside things that influence it? Yeah, probably, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the porn business, or the stripping, or stuff like that, really has anything to do with it. It’s not even a fine line. It’s a pretty distinct line between willing and not willing. So I can’t really say one way or the other. But there’s a big distinction between human trafficking and just prostitution.
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Comments:
Bella Robinson
9:35am on Thursday, May 19, 2011
I think indoor prostitution should be decriminalized, not legalized as there is a HUGE difference.
http://www.alternet.org/books/148327/how_19th_century_prostitutes_were_the_freest,_wealthiest,_most_educated_women_of_their_time
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/on-the-records-a-well-preserved-roadmap-to-perdition/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act
Once you do a bit of reading what you find out is that back in the 19th century, marriage WAS SLAVERY. Women were not allowed to leave home till they married and marriage was a BUSINESS. Women were not allowed to go in public alone, nor work or vote and if they inherited property it became their husbands and the husband was FREE to beat and rape his wife.
In 1910 we created the MANN ACT (the white slavery act) that was suppose to be to stop Human Trafficking, yet the real reason was to stop white women from fraternizing with black men. The Mann Act also gave CONGRESS its power and formed the FBI.
Our federal law states that each state has the right NOT make its own prostitution laws and in order to be charged with the Mann act one would have to exploit another person into prostitution and cross state lines. This was the way the Fed's are suppose to intervene.
Yet in 2010 the FBI spend a 800,000 grant in just 3 days supposedly to do a 3 day nationwide child prostitution sting. After arresting 884 people, we had 69 TEEN RUNAWAYS, along with their 99 pimps boyfriends and also caught up in the mix were over 700 adults looking to meet with another consenting adult in private. During this sting, more middle aged people were arrested than THE TEENS THEY WANTED TO RESCUE.
Now we have Bill hr 5575 gong to congress which is to ask for hundreds of millions for services for these TEEN victims and the bill clearly states that any women over the age of 20 would NOT be eligible for services, and most of the money would be spend training FBI and vice to STALK MIDDLE AGED ESCORTS ONLINE.
Now every city already has a whole juvenile court, a dept of child services, foster homes, boot camps and reform schools, but the women OVER 20 years of age have NO SERVICES. These people are trying to convince us that these RUNAWAY TEENS ARE VICTIMS and they are really UNGOVERNABLE TEENS that ran off with their boyfriends that exploited them. Are we not suppose to hold these teens accountable for their own behavior, why return them them with no real intervention to just run off again, and why is the parents not being held accountable for the COST OF RESCUING THEIR UNGOVERNABLE TEEN. Why not lock these teens up to protect them from themselves?
Original prostitution laws were created "to stop a women from showing her wares in public" The media likes to portray all prostitutes as curb crawling drug addicts and yet most are really middle aged single parents desperately trying to escape POVERTY.
Last year we spend 250 million to arrest 80,000 people for prostitution, that 250 million could have housed 80,000 women and children long term.
Yet anyone wanting to legalize prostitution wants the women to help pay off the deficit, nobody is even considering creating long term services for women who do want to exit the industry. Or they want these women to be forced to work in brothels where they would have to give half their earnings to the brothel owner, pay rent and then pay taxes and not be able to refuse any clients.
We are no dumb women, we know how to screen clients, advertise and choice our rates for our time. We not not need to be regulated anymore than any other business does, so why would we place regulations on this industry that is not placed on any other business. Why do we make it our business?
In Rhode Island, in 1976 a federal laws suit was filed in RI by a women named Mona St.James who later formed the organization COYOTE . The complaint was what right did they state have in the sexual conduct of consenting adults, and also they were only arresting the women and not the men. The case was dismissed by a compromise and indoor prostitution became legal in RI in 1979.
For 30 years there was never one case of human trafficking, women could work for massage spas or from their homes. There was never one public nuisance complaint in over 30 years (too bad we can't say that about nightclubs). The police never bothered to go into any spa, and check for ID to make sure the girls were of legal age and in the country legally. Yet they did run front page news articles about how sad it was that one could buy sex a block from city hall. These businesses were licensed and paid taxes and they even donated money to the state police and other local charities and the women spend their money in the other local businesses.
In 2009 the Craigslist killer, killed a girl in Boston and then went to RI and robbed a escort and he was CAUGHT because the escort dialed 911 as she had PROTECTION UNDER THE LAW.
Then in Nov 2009 they criminalize indoor prostitution (putting all the women in the state in harms way) as they claimed they could not investigate human trafficking without criminalizing us.
Ironically the police go in to strip clubs all the time and do ID checks and ask the girls if they are OK but for some reason they insisted this would not work in RI.
Now we have 10 women who have murdered in Long Island and even though they knew at least 5 of these girls were online escorts, the cops told the media that serial killers rarely murder hookers, one man on Long Island reported the women coming to door asking for help and when he told her he was calling the cops to help her, she ran off and has never been seen again. The man reported this in May 2010 and it took till Aug 2010 for them to follow up, and even a CNN reported wants to know if a prompt investigation was not done because after all these girls were JUST HOOKERS.
Theproviderpage.com/cms is a place dedicated to THE SAFETY & PROTECTION of escorts, we are trying to find services for women WHO do want to exit the industry and we are also trying to create new laws to protect sex workers and stop the discrimination against them.
Some cites want to create JOHN school so the men can walk away within criminal record. Even if a women has a 20 year old prostitution conviction, she can never get a job, or even rent an apartment.
Law enforcement is in the news weekly, for exploiting these TEENS themselves, or for abusing hookers and some of these women are even raped and beaten while in custody just because they are prostitutes.
To go a step further we ENCOURAGE society to hate these women with the "they get what they deserve attitude". The cops brag to the media that they will continue to run these women from there communities. Do we really think these women would be better off or an safer living in the streets?
Since they criminalize all the women in RI, the homeless rate for women in RI has increased 20% so far this year and the shelters are FULL.
Now lets look at MORALS. It is legal and even sociably acceptable for a women to pick up a strange man in a nightclub, bring him he and have unprotected sex with him, while her small children are in the home. Men are now reporting that most women give it up by the 3rd date.
Then we have the REAL HATERS that say they do NOT want it in their neighborhoods, while I agree with no allowing BROTHELS or Spa's In a residential neighborhood, but wha about the independent escort. If you can have sex with whoever in your home, why can't I, and we seem to only have issues with sex WHEN ITS NOT FREE.
A Canadian judge ruled last year "that no public nuisance equals allowing women to be murdered" of course its ow in appeals court and they are trying to stop the sex workers from being able to testify in court.
Then lets look at how the cops investigate these women, they use SWAT TEAMS to kick in the doors or these women homes, and then issue them a summons to appear, and some of these women are held on bonds as high as 20,000 even though they have not been charged with a felony.
Sex workers are always court ordered for STD testing but the MEN/CLIENTS are not, even though they are the ones with the riskiest behaviors and even though our own heath dept studies show that "hookers have less std's than the general public does and this is also true in Canada and these facts were presented to RI politicians by a Canadian Dr.
NY has created a law that ANYONE CAN BE ARRESTED FOR CARRYING CONDOMS, that is not the way to promote safe sex, I think law enforcement WHO is swore to PROTECT & SERVE should be out handing out condoms to the street girls to help protect them and the public.
Now lets look a the Human Trafficking advocates that have been collecting donations for the fight against human trafficking for years, the provide no services to the victims; instead the spend the money touring the country, like a politician, lying to the media about how many teens are being exploited. These grouped are anti prostitution groups in disguise and are the one PUTTING OUR YOUTH & WOMEN AT RISK by REFUSING US the same SANCTION & PROTECTION under the law given to all other citizens. Now if this is really about human trafficking, then why when they find a midlde aged escort do they arrest her?
THE SOLUTION:
If we decriminalize and make these women pay for a year license which would go to the heath dept so these women would have access to Health care, the women could pay taxes into state, federal and social security and even unemployment, but part of their taxes would go directly for services for women WHO want to exit the adult industry.
I always want to ask one of these DO GOODERS that if they were cold enough and hungry enough don't they think they would turn a trick for a blanket and burger, so why be so JUDGMENTAL about SEX.