Slave Next Door (23 page)

of exploitation below the surface that trafficking involves means they’re

always going to be estimates.”79 Simply put, if you can’t find victims,

you can’t count them. According to one government official who asked

to remain anonymous, “The claims are being made by advocates, not

officials who might be in a better position to know. The truth is, nobody

can prove at this point how many U.S. citizen victims are out there. It’s

the most underreported crime, and it carries with it its own reasons for

not reporting it. The only number I trust is the number [of victims] that

have been found.”

Conversely, while funding exists for foreign-born victims, they gen-

erally don’t receive it. Says Carole Smolenski of ECPAT, “The foreign-

born kids are simply not being found. Nobody knows what to look for

or what to do with them. Only one hundred foreign-born kids have

been found and certified since the TVPA was passed in 2000.” To those

on the “domestic” side of the discussion, that might well be because

they don’t exist, at least in any significant number. According to their

opponents, this is utter nonsense. They’re out there; it’s just a question

of training people to know where to find them and how to help them

once they’re found.80

Unfortunately, we have no true idea of the number of foreign-born

children and adults currently being sexually exploited in the United

States today. IOFA’s Alison Boak attributes this in part to the fact that

foreign-born survivors, to obtain victim certification, are encouraged to

cooperate with the police and aid in the prosecution of their traffickers—

a step many of them are fearful and unwilling to take.81 Sometimes a

young girl or woman refuses to view
herself
as a trafficking victim, for

various reasons. She falls in love with or grows dependent on her pimp

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and sees herself as the girlfriend in a loving relationship and not as a

commodity. Or perhaps she sees herself as sinner rather than sinned

against. She feels guilty, ashamed. Or perhaps her trafficker has so

indoctrinated her to fear the authorities that she doesn’t come forward.

As a result of this fear, a significant number of foreign trafficking vic-

tims are not counted.

And although the “domestic” advocates feel this country’s foreign-

born victims are receiving the lion’s share of the services, “there are

huge barriers in the assignment of benefits,” says Boak. “The whole

process is massive, daunting. Only a small percentage of those who are

identified as victims by either government or service providers actually

apply for these benefits. We . . . found that only one out of approxi-

mately four victims served by nonprofit agencies ended up taking the

step to go through the government’s process.”82

The service providers see their efforts blunted by sectionalism and

infighting. It benefits no one to promote or deepen the rift between

advocates of foreign-born versus domestic victims; they all require the

same degree of commitment for help and services from our government.

Lou de Baca, counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, says of this

kind of factionalism, “At the end of the day, all it does is hurt our abil-

ity to help slavery victims.”83 Andrea Powell, the executive director and

co-founder of FAIR Fund, an NGO devoted to reducing gender-based

violence in the lives of young women, similarly points out that although

the TVPA was designed more to serve foreign-born than domestic vic-

tims, “There’s a general lack of coordinated services available to
both

groups, and neither is getting the help they need.”84

A R E W E G E T T I N G O U R M O N E Y ’ S W O R T H ?

Beyond the question of who gets the money to perform these services is the

issue of accountability for the tax dollars spent. Many NGOs that have

had their federal funding reduced or cut off altogether point to what they

see as a stunning lack of performance by some of the agencies that
are

receiving government monies. According to a high-ranking official who

asked to remain anonymous, a number of these organizations were

selected by the Bush administration “regardless of whether they ever

helped anyone and without either peer-reviewed grants or bid contracts;

they’ve been accountable to virtually no one.” Andrea Powell sees

accountability as a big issue. Overall—for service providers and gov-

ernment agencies—she “would hope to see more organizations moving

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forward by evaluating their programs so we can gauge the impact and see

what’s not working. There are a lot of programs out there, and without

monitoring their success we’ll have no idea how successful we really are.”85

Some government agencies are making genuine efforts to institute

training programs for all levels of government and to uncover and pros-

ecute sex trafficking crimes. One federal prosecutor at the DOJ points

to “an ever-increasing percentage of federal prosecutions.”86 Yet while

they’ve shown an accelerated rate of success, not even they would dispute

that, while their record of cases is in the hundreds, at least thousands of

undiscovered cases of sex slavery remain. And beyond the arrests and

prosecutions, the big question arises: What is being done for the vic-

tims? Attempts to work with service providers through the formation of

effective task forces is certainly a positive step, but it should be a giant

step, taken quickly.

The consensus among service providers is that the current state of

governmental awareness, empathy, and services provided to trafficking

victims is poor. For all the dissension among the various NGOs and for

all the ideological differences among victim advocates, service

providers, and researchers, one general thread of agreement seems to be

that the government simply hasn’t allocated sufficient funds, or desig-

nated them appropriately, for the ongoing service and relief of sex traf-

ficking victims. Says Polaris’s Myles, “Our collective response as a

nation is so inadequate, and the recognition of the problems has so

many shortcomings, that we need a total mind change in how we think

about it and how we respond to it.”87

C A N I T G E T A N Y W O R S E ?

So we have an unknown number (thought to be in the thousands) of

people trafficked into the country each year to be made into sex slaves.

We also have thousands more U.S. citizens, including children, ensnared

into forced prostitution each year. The number of new victims of sex

slavery in the United States annually is likely to be greater than the

number of murder victims, but only a tiny fraction are rescued. And

the ones who
are
rescued must jump through hoops to get help, rarely

have a safe place to go, and encounter confusion and buck-passing from

the authorities. Can it get any worse?

You bet it can. Just add to the mix a civil war, fought on deep philo-

sophical grounds, between the groups dedicated to rescuing and support-

ing the victims. It is not the position of federal or state law that all forms

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of prostitution constitute slavery or that all pimps are engaged in human

trafficking. In the words of Edward P. Reilly of Suffolk County, New York,

police detective lieutenant and member of a federal antitrafficking task

force, “Not every prostitute is a trafficking victim, and not every pimp

is a trafficker.”88 But a battle has been raging for at least ten years over

the exact relationship between slavery and prostitution.

According to the federal government and several advocacy groups, of

all the forms of slavery in America today, human trafficking for sex is

the most prevalent. While other forms of trafficking include sexual

abuse as a standard feature, American law defines this form of slavery

by the fact that someone is making money from it. “Sex trafficking,” as

it is sometimes known, covers a multitude of sins, ranging from forced

prostitution, to involuntary work in strip joints and massage parlors, to

child pornography. Of these, prostitution gets the most media attention,

making it the form of human trafficking best known to most Americans.

This is not surprising. According to a recent study, “The United

States . . . ranks as the world’s largest destination/market country (after

Germany) for women and children trafficked for purposes of sexual

exploitation in the sex industry.”89

No question, forced prostitution is heinous. It is nothing less than

serial rape for the enrichment of the trafficker. But what makes forced

prostitution problematic is the difficulty that often arises in distinguish-

ing between human trafficking and more conventional, “voluntary”

prostitution, or “sex work.” Even stating the difficulty in this way gener-

ates controversy. Of all the types of contemporary slavery, only forced

prostitution engenders such radically divisive opinions. Much of the con-

troversy centers on this question: Should prostitution, in and of itself, be

considered a form of slavery? That question has become a battleground,

with lines firmly drawn separating factions that answer it in different

ways. To one faction, all prostitution is slavery, the very heart of slavery,

and only by punishing panderers and pimps can it be eradicated. To the

other side, this is nothing more than the old moralistic antiprostitution

crusade given a new venue—a red herring, deflecting much-needed aid

and resources from the real and broader issues of human trafficking.

1 8 0 D E G R E E S O F S E PA R AT I O N

The United States has debated prostitution for a long time. In the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a panic over the “White Slave

Trade”—white women being forced or sold into prostitution—swept

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the country and led to anti-immigrant laws and miscarriages of justice.

The Mann Act, which came out of this swirl of racial protectionism,

outlawed, among other things, taking a woman or girl across state

lines “for the purpose of prostitution, debauchery, or for any other

immoral purpose.” One of the first people to be tried under this new

law was the African American world champion boxer Jack Johnson,

who was jailed for driving a white prostitute to another state. (The

fact that they eventually married, and that he was taking her
from
a

brothel, had no effect on the court’s findings.) Today there continues to

be sharp debate over the best way to respond to prostitution, and

because many human trafficking victims are forced into sexual

exploitation they are in the spotlight.

On one side of this argument, representing the antiprostitution per-

spective, are individuals and groups who believe that, except for the

“teeny percentage of women who may have entered into it voluntar-

ily,”90 all prostitution is a form of slavery. Prostitution for this side is

often defined as “illegitimate violence against women and girls driven

by male sexual demand.”91 As one of the leading antiprostitution

groups, CATW, makes clear, “Exploitation of prostitution and traffick-

ing cannot be separated.”92

Proponents of this view are often referred to as “abolitionists”

because their ultimate aim is the “complete eradication of all forms of

sexual exploitation.”93 Anthony DeStefano, in his 2007 book,
The War

on Human Trafficking: U.S. Policy Assessed,
asks, “Why single out pros-

titution instead of, say, domestic, farm, or factory work, all of them set-

tings for labor trafficking? The answer: abolitionists and certain

feminists viewed prostitution as a special evil, a violation of women’s

rights, and by its nature an exploitation. Because prostitution involved

sexual commerce, it was laden with enormous moral and religious

implications, particularly for evangelical Christians, who saw it as

sin.”94 One researcher has described the “abolitionists” as “having

picked up the banner once carried by social purists and religious

spokespersons.”95 Another compares them to the “moral entrepre-

neurs” of the late nineteenth century, who “were convinced of the

immorality of prostitution, firmly believed that no woman could ever

freely and rationally choose such a career, and sought the worldwide

elimination of this traffic.”96 Says political scientist Barbara Ann Stolz,

“Similar to [the] earlier trafficking movement, the contemporary

‘antiprostitution sphere’ focuses primarily, if not exclusively, on traffick-

ing for the purpose of prostitution.” For antiprostitution groups, the

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“legalization or decriminalization [of prostitution] should only make the