Slave Next Door (20 page)

trol over the girl’s life.29 There is no glamour here, only misogynistic

brutality, carried on for profit and power.

A M E R I C A’ S D I R T Y L I T T L E S E C R E T

Pimps are equal opportunity exploiters: age, color, gender, and ethnic-

ity are irrelevant. And the jagged iceberg just below the surface of the

human trafficking issue in America is the sexual exploitation of chil-

dren. According to federal law, children get special status. Just by prosti-

tuting an underage person, the pimp becomes a trafficker in the eyes of the

law. Yet the pimps and traffickers are apparently unimpressed; the trend

toward trafficking children is on the rise. In 2005, the FBI issued the text

of a statement made in Congress on “the exploitation of children and

others in the United States.” In it assistant director Chris Swecker drew

upon what has been the largest and most complete study of sexual

exploitation so far of children in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

This study concluded that “between 244,000 and 325,000 American

children and youth are ‘at risk’ each year of becoming victims of sexual

exploitation, including as victims of commercial sexual exploitation (e.g.,

child pornography, juvenile prostitution, and trafficking in children for

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sexual purposes).”30 The report explained that the most vulnerable chil-

dren, those at special risk of sexual exploitation, are “runaways, throw-

naways, victims of physical or sexual abuse, users of psychotropic drugs,

members of sexual minority groups, [and] illegally trafficked chil-

dren.”31 What is chilling is the fact that this estimate of children at risk

of sexual exploitation is in addition to the more than 105,000 children

that annually are substantiated or indicated to be victims of child sexual

abuse.32

Rachel Lloyd states that to the government, “as a concept, domestic

trafficking [of children] is a new development” and that the government

is having a hard time with it. “The tremendous amount of money being

spent by Washington, compared to the minimal impact it’s having in the

streets, is alarming.”33 Says former assistant attorney general for the

Civil Rights Division Wan J. Kim, “All too often, these crimes occur

right in our own backyards.”34

“The average age range of a child first used in prostitution is 11 to

14,” FBI assistant director Chris Swecker says, “with some as young as

9 years of age.”35 It’s another unsupported statistic, but regardless, it is

clear that children are being prostituted. “I got an eleven-year-old the

other day,” says Rachel Lloyd. “The police picked her up at Port

Authority and brought her to me. It really shouldn’t be more shocking

than finding a thirteen-year-old, but it is. And I keep asking myself, who

in the hell would want to buy this child, who hasn’t even reached

puberty? What kind of person are we talking about?”36

Child prostitution is, in the words of one victim advocate, “America’s

dirty little secret.”37 Here, and elsewhere in the world, the sellers of chil-

dren are innovative and entrepreneurial. And given our increasingly

umbilical connection to the Internet, they can frequently be found

online, peppering the ether with every kind of child pornography. Once

in a great while, they get caught. A Boise, Idaho, man was recently con-

victed of producing a video of a toddler suffering sexual abuse and of

sharing it on the Internet. This unthinkably horrible crime is known as

“baby rape,” and for it, he received a sentence of life plus sixty years.

The prosecutor, U.S. attorney Tom Moss, summed up the current state of

affairs: “At any given time, 50,000 predators are prowling for children

on the Internet. It is not an exaggeration to say that we are in the midst

of an epidemic of sexual abuse and exploitation of our children.”38

Carlos Curtis is typical of those who traffic children into prostitu-

tion. Curtis was a pimp who picked up a twelve-year-old runaway in

New York City’s Times Square and took her to a Brooklyn hotel, where

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he forced her to have sex with an older prostitute as he took pictures.

He then drove her to Washington, D.C., where he put her on the streets

as a prostitute. She was not the only minor to be prostituted by Curtis.39

Curtis was arrested in Washington and indicted on seven counts,

including sex trafficking, transporting a minor in interstate commerce

for prostitution, and producing child pornography. He was the first

defendant in the District of Columbia to be tried for trafficking juveniles

under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA). Assistant

U.S. attorney Cynthia G. Wright wrote to the judge on the case, “The

defendant is a dangerous person. All children, particularly vulnerable

children, need to be protected from this predator.” Curtis already had a

conviction for pimping an underage girl in New Jersey. Although his

lawyer argued that this crime was not a violent one, the judge dis-

agreed—as vehemently as the law allowed. Viewing the crime from the

trafficked girls’ position, the judge stated, “Putting a girl out on the

street for prostitution exposes her to beating, to assault, to murder.

It . . . creates a serious potential risk.” She prefaced her sentencing by

saying, “They suffer psychologically and emotionally, and they suffer

physically. And they often suffer for a lifetime—as Mr. Curtis is going to

suffer for a lifetime.” As the defendant looked on in stunned disbelief,

Judge Kessler sentenced him to life in prison. Sadly, there was to be no

happy ending for the twelve-year-old girl. She was locked in a detention

center during the trial to prevent her running away, and when the trial

ended, she went off the radar. According to an article in the
Washington

Post,
“The authorities do not know where the troubled teenager is [she

was thirteen by this time]. . . . Prosecutors have not been able to find her

of late. They suspect that she is back on the street, making money the

way Curtis taught her to.” Although the law punished Carlos Curtis

with the maximum sentence allowed and for all the right reasons, it

failed utterly in the second vital part of its job: to protect and heal his

underage victim.40

How He Spent His Summer Vacation

On the surface, one form of trafficking doesn’t seem to meet the defini-

tion; but don’t let appearances fool you. When Americans travel to for-

eign countries to buy sex with children, it is categorized as human

trafficking in U.S. law. Norma Ramos of the Coalition Against Trafficking

in Women (CATW) asserts that a number of sex tourists are American

men. Asks Ramos, “What could possibly inform males’ sexuality, that

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leads them to children?”41 For years, outwardly respectable citizens—

husbands, fathers, businessmen—have gone abroad in search of the

cheapest kinds of thrills, knowing there was little or no chance the law

could touch them. According to Andrew Oosterbaan, chief of the

Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section

(CEOS), until recently, they were right: it was almost impossible to

make a case against these predators. In the past, the biggest obstacle

was the requirement to prove that a man
intended
to have sex with chil-

dren when he formed his plans to go abroad. The PROTECT

(Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of

Children Today) Act of April 2003 eliminated that particular impedi-

ment. Nonetheless, the path to arrest and conviction is still a rocky one,

placing a strain on the government’s most crucial resources: money,

time, and staff.

Building a sex tourism case usually involves several agencies, such as

ICE and the FBI. It can take years, and the pretrial work and the trial

can be very expensive. And there’s the risk that with time the evidence

can become corrupted. To make a case, it can be important to have the

child victim in court and willing to testify against the defendant.

“Children,” says Oosterbaan, “are the same [in court] as any other

victim; they have to be able to stand up and tell what happened to

them.” Yet the difficulties in bringing a child victim to the United States,

housing or detaining him or her until trial, and providing services for the

child’s mental and physical rehabilitation, are massive. Understandably,

a child victim can be hostile and suspicious, and, as Oosterbaan states,

“Unless you give them the help they need, you can’t bring a victim from

an uncooperative to a cooperative witness. There is no case without a

victim.”42

Still, some cases have to be made without the help of the victims. Such

a case went to trial in Miami in 2007. Kent Frank, a heavyset, fiftyish,

financially comfortable native Floridian with two teenage sons, traveled

to Phnom Penh in late 2003 and early 2004 to buy sex with underage

girls; but for a quirk of fate, he probably would have gotten away with it.

The local captain of the Cambodian National Police, a diligent and dedi-

cated officer named Keo Thea, was on the lookout for a different

American sex tourist when a taxi driver told him about Kent Frank,

whom he had seen taking four very young girls into a hotel. Thea got

authorization to search the room, where he discovered photos taken by

Frank of his underage companions, “posing naked and in sexually explicit

positions.” In one photo, Frank was having sex with one of the girls.43

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The Cambodian police arrested Frank and notified ICE criminal

investigator Gary Phillips, who happened to be in Phnom Penh on

another case. “The Cambodian government,” says CEOS trial attorney

Wendy Waldron, “lacks the resources to effectively prosecute the many

foreigners who are exploiting their children.”44 Still, the Cambodians

brought Frank up on charges of debauchery, a crime in Cambodia if the

girls are under fifteen years of age. For reasons that remain unclear, the

charges were dismissed. Once released, rather than return to the United

States, Frank traveled to Vietnam. Meanwhile, Phillips contacted and

updated Wendy Waldron at CEOS, who went to the U.S. Attorney’s

Office and volunteered to help build a case against Frank. She was

paired with an assistant U.S. attorney for Florida’s Southern District.

Phillips shipped the evidence to Miami, and together they began to

work up their case.

Although Frank was indicted in the United States in 2004, it took

years to bring him to trial. The prosecutors faced serious obstacles. The

most frustrating was finding three of the girls Frank had initially pur-

chased and photographed. Sadly, Frank’s defense team found them first,

and by the time the government was ready to go to trial, the girls were

listed as witnesses for the defense. Their pimp and their mothers—who

knew the girls’ occupation and were anxious for them to return to

work—pressured them into saying the police had beaten them and that

they had been eighteen or older at the time of the offense. At one point

the pimp even passed himself off as a girl’s father. None of them seemed

to be looking out for the girls’ interests; it was all a matter of profit and

loss. Two of the girls gave their testimony through depositions; a third

was flown to the United States for the trial. Ironically, the prosecution

had to make its case
around
the girls, treating them as hostile witnesses,

while still seeing them as victims of sex trafficking—on whose behalf, in

fact, the whole trial had been initiated.45

Frank was brought back from Vietnam to face ten charges. Medical

experts testified as to the girls’ probable age on the basis of their physi-

cal development, and a strong case was made. In April 2007, Frank was

convicted of eight of the ten counts, including engaging in illicit sexual

conduct with a minor (a new provision of law resulting from the PRO-

TECT Act), and purchasing or otherwise obtaining custody or control

of a minor with the intent to promote the production of child pornog-

raphy. Four months later, he was sentenced to forty years in prison, as

well as fifteen years of supervised probation, and was fined $25,000.46

As for the underage girls, a Cambodian NGO sheltered and provided

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them with social services.47 But perhaps because of pressure from their

pimp or their mothers, or because they found “living the life” more

lucrative, or simply because this was the way they had come to see them-

selves, the girls returned to the streets. In all, it took three and a half

years and a considerable investment of money and personnel to catch,