Crackdown on sex slavery

women and children is concerned, slavery never really went away.

Today, according to the most conservative estimates from the Department of Justice, over 50,000 women and children a year are trafficked into the U.S. from developing nations, and roughly 700,000 are trafficked around the world. Non-governmental organizations, for their part, put the number much higher, at up to 100,000 trafficked into the U.S. and one to two million around the world.

How these women and children end up being trafficked varies according from person to person, and situation to situation. Some are kidnapped, and some are sold by family members desperate for a quick infusion of cash. Most are deceived by promises of decent jobs abroad as waitresses, models, seamstresses or nannies.

The Department of Justice considers human trafficking to be the third most profitable enterprise engaging in by organized crime, right behind drug and weapons trafficking. Some reports have even predicted that it will become even more lucrative than the drug trade within the next five years.

And as the economy gets worse around the world, and the U.S. and European countries tighten their immigration laws, the trafficking of women and children for sex work and other purposes is likely to become even more pervasive. Despite significant international attention to the problem, traffickers still operate with near total impunity and turn enormous profits.

"There are a lot of root causes for trafficking," says Veena Iyer, the asylum and trafficking services coordinator for the Midwest Immigrant and Human Rights Center. "There are economic reasons around the world that make people vulnerable," adds Iyer. "But ... we also have to understand that there is a lot of money in sex trafficking. And there are mechanisms that allow traffickers in other countries to bring women here and that allow people here to exploit them."

The Center for Women's Global Leadership has identified countries as varied as Russia, Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Thailand, Burma, Nepal, Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Nigeria and Benin as prime sources of trafficked women, who are usually brought to wealthier and more industrialized nations including the U.S.

Trafficked women also often end up in American territories such as the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa, where demand from tourists and others can be high and regulation is lax. A report from the European-based International Organisation for Migration notes that women from developing countries tend to be older, while those from Central and Eastern Europe tend to be younger and better educated.

Once women have been brought into the U.S. or Europe—often by traffickers of their own ethnicity and even from their own community—they are typically isolated and threatened physically and mentally.

Women abducted or coerced from their native countries rarely speak English, and their captors have perfected the art of intimidatation by regaling them with horror stories about life in America and capture by police or the INS.

Traffickers may also force the women to stay in their service through astronomical "debts" for travel, lodging and food "expenses."

"They'll charge $15,000 for travel from China," said Iyer. "There's no way [the women] can ever pay it off."

In Chicago, for example, police and INS agents recently busted several sex trafficking operations. In one case, a Chinatown storefront served as a cover for a prostitution business. In another, a Russian immigrant with alleged ties to the Chechen mob was coercing Latvian women to the U.S. with promises of $60,000-a-year dancing jobs. When they arrived, he forced them into sex work by taking their passports and beating and threatening them

In Florida, it was proven that young women from Mexico were being deceived about job opportunities and forced into prostitution. In Israel, four Eastern European prostitutes recently met with their death while locked in a hotel room that was torched by a religious fanatic.

Seeking remedy

The trade in women and children has continued to grow despite significant efforts on the part of the U.S. government and other Western nations to stem the tide of trafficking in the last several years.

Holland, Italy, Russia and the European Union as a whole now have governmental bodies designated to combat trafficking, many of them working in conjunction with international organizations to try to address and combat the scope of the problem.

On International Women's Day in 1998, President Clinton signed an executive order vowing to fight trafficking, resulting in the passage of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Prevention Act in 2000.

In addition to calling for prosecution of individuals and organizations involved in trafficking, the act mandates assistance for victims of trafficking including the availability of public aid benefits. Even more importantly, the act created a class of visas known as "T" visas for victims of "extreme trafficking," which covers sex trafficking. These visas allow the victims to stay in the U.S. for three years, after which time they are eligible for permanent legal residency, provided they cooperate with law enforcement efforts to nab the traffickers.

In 2002, the first year that the T visas are available, a total of 5,000 of them will be made available to women, a number that advocates hope to increase in the near future.

"There's always room for improvement but it's a good first step," says Iyer. "Part of the requirement is that they have to cooperate with law enforcement. We just want law enforcement to recognize that these people are traumatized. They might not be able to just sit right down and discuss everything they've gone through."

Local and Domestic Trafficking

While international sex trafficking gets the bulk of governmental and media attention, sex trafficking on local and domestic levels is also extremely prevalent.

Advocates have noted that American women fall into the hands of trafficking groups who move them between cities and around the country, forcing them to engage in prostitution or sex work. Though these women are still in their home country, it may be just as hard for them to escape or leave as it would be for an immigrant. Like international victims, U.S. women and children are often literally kept in physical captivity, locked in rooms and beaten and otherwise abused if they attempt to flee.

"There seems to be a lot of control of women and girls at all levels of the industry," says Jody Raphael, of the Women and Girls Prostitution Project at the Center for Impact Policy Research based in Chicago. "For example, police who pick women up from the 'stroll' on Halsted and North/Clybourn (west of downtown Chicago) say a lot of the girls are from Milwaukee or Tennessee. They're being moved around. It helps them avoid detection and gives the customers a variety of new girls. From our grassroots studies, I'm learning to no longer make such a distinction between local and international trafficking."

Like international victims, many low-income American women are recruited with false promises.

"Men will go to recruit girls at shopping malls, places like that, they'll find girls who have run away from home," explains Raphael. "They'll say you can earn a lot of money, it will be really glamorous, they'll tell a girl she's beautiful and does she want to be in a movie or make a music video. Then they'll drive her to Chicago and not let her leave. She'll be watched day and night by these goons. This happens with more frequency than people want to admit."

Solutions Ahead?

While advocates support the Trafficking Victims Act and current law enforcement efforts against trafficking, they insist that these efforts are still not adequate to the task, particularly in terms of the staffing necessary to truly combat the scope of the situation.

"The vice squad [in Chicago] is really under-resourced," says Samir Goswami, a policy specialist dealing with prostitution issues for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. "They have only 10 or 15 people, and they're working on gambling and other things as well as trafficking."

Goswami also notes that investigating international trafficking rings based in tight-knit ethnic communities can be extremely difficult.

"If this is happening in a Polish neighborhood or in Chinatown or in an Indian neighborhood, someone who doesn't speak the language or know the culture can't just go in and start asking questions," he says.

Advocates insist that addressing and combatting global and local poverty, repression and the nearly-universal low social status of women are the only true ways to end trafficking.

And on a more immediate level, say those involved in anti-trafficking efforts, there is a strong need for increased outreach to victims—and availability of financial and social resources for women and children victimized by traffickers.

Despite the Trafficking Victims Act, advocates also note that law enforcement and immigration officials are far from sensitive to the situations of trafficking victims, and many continue to end up in jail or immigration detention after being arrested.

"We need systemic change that alleviates policies that are criminalizing people caught up in prostitution," says Goswami. "Pimps and traffickers should be bearing the brunt of the criminal justice system. Women who end up in jail should have other alternatives developed for them."

Goswami also notes that while there is a demand for women sex workers, economics and other factors will always dictate that there is a supply.

"We also need to look at the cultural aspects, including [hyper-] masculinity" he states. "Why is it that so many men are buying women?"