Slave Next Door (21 page)

try, and sentence one American sex tourist.48

According to Anna Rodriguez, head of the Florida Coalition Against

Human Trafficking, you can find
American
children for sale outside our

borders as well. Rodriguez recalls a trip she took to Tijuana, Mexico,

with other antitrafficking workers, as well as Mexican and American law

enforcement officers: “As we walked,” she says, “I saw American kids

trafficked and sold for sex for $15. We identified a couple of kids who

had been listed as missing.” Rodriguez described corrupt members of

the local police, “standing next to the traffickers, promoting specific

brothels. We had two undercover Mexican
federales
walking with us, and

still it felt dangerous. We reported it to the FBI and were told it wasn’t in

their jurisdiction. We made numerous phone calls—to ICE, the San

Diego TIP [Trafficking in Persons] office, and the State Department—but

no one helped. They told us it wasn’t as easy as just going in and taking

them out.” Rodriguez states that efforts within Mexico itself can often

end badly: “The head of the federal police in Tijuana, who had been

actively investigating trafficking, was shot and killed.”49

A Long, Hard Road

Andrew Oosterbaan is not ambivalent about stopping child sex crime;

he believes strongly in the mission of his agency: “I’m not a politician,

never will be. This is an easy job for me, because we’re dedicated to

the kids. We’re prosecuting cases that no one else will take.” But it is

an uphill struggle, with the number of offenses against children multi-

plying yearly. Oosterbaan sees the government’s problem as simply

“not enough” of everything: money, time, and resources. CEOS, says

Oosterbaan, has been seeking to link with service providers and other

government agencies for the express purpose of providing support for

the child victims of sex crimes. Oosterbaan is proud of the task force he

helped set up in the District of Columbia in partnership with the U.S.

Attorney’s Office. It consists of several governmental organizations,

including ICE, the FBI, and the DOJ, and a long and impressive list of

NGOs. It covers several jurisdictions and opens lines of communication

for sharing perspectives and information.

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Innocence Lost, a joint initiative created by CEOS, the FBI, and

Washington’s National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, also

prosecutes sex trafficking cases. It has set up task forces in twenty-four

cities known to have extensive child trafficking problems, and the group

stages awareness and sensitivity training for government and NGOs.

Still, there are huge gaps in the response to child sex crime. For exam-

ple, there might not be service providers, or informed law enforcement,

in the places where these crimes take place. Word is slow to spread,

training even slower.

Meanwhile, what is to be done for the victims? What is needed, says

Oosterbaan, is to take the model of the D.C. task force on the road. It’s

an ambitious idea, he states, but one that could only improve things. “It’s

our short-term objective to put a broad-based, national working group

together to assist in setting up and supporting all of the individual task

forces. . . . It won’t happen overnight, but with the help of this working

group, eventually all of the task forces will be operating effectively. This

is really world-changing stuff.”50 As Wendy Waldron emphasizes, fight-

ing child sex crime “has to be done city by city, agency by agency, agent

by agent. Rather than wait for someone to be busted, we have to gather

intelligence and share databases on the bigger pimps. Although efforts

are being made at all levels, there’s tons of room for growth.”51

W H O C A R R I E S T H E C A N ?

T H E V I E W F R O M T H E N G O S

This all sounds like progress, but the government doesn’t get high marks

from most groups that serve the child or adult victims of sex trafficking.

Rachel Lloyd places much of the blame with the police: “There’s a hand-

ful of really great cops who approach it thinking, ‘This could be my

child.’ But this doesn’t represent the attitude of law enforcement as a

whole. Most cops are ignorant and prejudiced on the issue. Although

force, fraud, and coercion have no legal place in a situation involving

child trafficking, the police will approach it with the attitude, ‘Well, she’s

not chained to a bed.’”52

CATW co-executive director Dorchen Leidholdt agrees: “Pretty

much, the police response that I’ve encountered has been extraordinar-

ily obtuse. Whether it’s international or domestic, they’re not recogniz-

ing it as such. The victims are treated as criminals. If they’re not seeing

bruises, . . . overt fear, indicia of ‘force, fraud and coercion plus,’ then

it’s not human trafficking.”53

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S U P P LY A N D D E M A N D / 9 7

The organization ECPAT, based in Bangkok, was the first to blow the

lid off child sex tourism in Southeast Asia, and since the mid-1990s it has

grown into an international agency of some seventy-three groups.54

Carole Smolenski is the executive director of ECPAT USA, the Brooklyn-

based office that addresses the trafficking of children both to and within

the United States, as well as child sex tourism by Americans. For three

years, beginning in 2002, her organization—in partnership with the

International Organization for Adolescents (IOFA)—conducted a pro-

gram called the Community Response to Trafficking Project, paid for by

HHS. This project called on law enforcement, community members, and

other NGOs to reach into various ethnic neighborhoods and offer printed

material in seven languages. It was, in Smolenski’s words, “incredibly suc-

cessful”; then its funding was cut and the program ended. She points out

that, despite the wide range of agencies dedicated to rescuing and helping

child victims of slavery, “since the passage of the TVPA in 2000, very few

immigrant children have been officially identified as trafficking victims and

afforded the protection due them.”55 Even so, says Smolenski, foreign-

born child prostitutes tend to be accepted as victims more often than

prostituted American children. There seems to be the assumption that

native-born child prostitutes are there by choice; they are seen as “bad,”

and “in need of punishment and reform,” whereas immigrant child pros-

titutes are more likely to receive help as trafficking victims.56 Rachel Lloyd

agrees: “Despite the growing number of American children forced into

prostitution, Americans tend to view sex trafficking as an international

problem. And despite the progress that the Trafficking Victims Protection

Act of 2000 represents, young people trafficked within the United States

are still often treated as criminals rather than victims.”57 Smolenski feels

that much of the responsibility for this misperception lies with the local

police and the courts. Few child prostitution cases ever make it to the fed-

eral level; and further victimization of these children by the legal system

is likely to continue until police and state and local courts get the training

they need to recognize and help child trafficking victims.58

Christa Stewart worked at the victim assistance agency Safe Horizon

and now serves as director of legal services for an organization called

the Door. Based in New York, the Door provides health programs, edu-

cation (such as English language classes), counseling, and legal services

to at-risk young people between the ages of twelve and twenty-one.

Around one-third of the nine thousand young people helped each year

are foreign born. Child trafficking cases, generally involving debt

bondage and sex slavery, pop up regularly. Stewart takes a hard view of

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the government’s response. “Just to get the government to take on a case

relating to the prostitution of a minor can be a daunting, and often fruit-

less, effort,” she says. “It’s extremely frustrating to get the feds involved

in a case. They have such a strict view of what constitutes prostitution

that they wouldn’t bother with a situation . . . if it’s not a brothel, charg-

ing X number of dollars for specific services. They take kind of a limited

view. I had one case that was going on over a year, and I made thirty-

four calls [to ICE] to get a young victim certified. And
that
was a case

that you would have thought they’d be interested in, because it did

involve prostitution of a minor.” Either no one responded to Stewart’s

calls, or she was told, “We’re looking into it,” or the ICE agent would

make an interview appointment for Stewart and the girl: “We’d come

in—again and again—and they wouldn’t be there. There’s supposed to

be a victim witness coordinator, but they’re just as hard to get in touch

with. The whole thing was just a travesty!”59

Stewart was also trying to get the girl certified as a trafficking victim:

“Although they said repeatedly they’d get it for me, and had already

granted the girl continued presence with work authorization, they

simply wouldn’t do it. They told me the investigation was still ‘young,’

although it was over a year and a half old. Finally, I filed for an affirma-

tive T visa on my own.”60

The FBI, says Stewart, can be just as frustrating: “They’re hard to con-

vince. There’s a general lack of belief in a victim’s story, which is especially

frustrating when the victims are so young—twelve or thirteen—that they

just don’t remember.” As for HHS’s community awareness-raising

“Rescue and Restore” program, “I’m aware that there’s supposedly this

campaign, and I’ve been to a few of their press conferences. . . . I’ve

asked that we be involved, and they said they’d keep me apprised, but

they’re ‘reviewing what’s going on.’ I for one don’t
know
what’s going on

with them, but as a concerned advocate, I’m disappointed that they’ve

poured a lot of money into that campaign and there’s no kind of tangi-

ble product from it.”61

On federal government’s efforts to date, Stewart says, “Some excel-

lent efforts were initially made to effect training, but it’s all become

muddled.” Asked what she would like to see changed, she replies,

“Everything. More outreach to foster general awareness, let people

know what trafficking encompasses. I’d like to see more dialogue

around the contributing factors—the global issues—why this is happen-

ing. I’d pour funding into services, and I’d rewrite the law, to remove the

distinction between sex and labor trafficking!”62

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The “distinction” to which Stewart refers is made in the legal defi-

nitions of the TVPA. Unlike any other law or international treaty, the

key U.S. law distinguishes between two types of “severe forms of traf-

ficking” and a third form called, simply, “sex trafficking.” The two

forms of severe trafficking separate sex and labor trafficking: the first is

any commercial sex act by a minor induced by force, fraud, or coer-

cion; the second includes obtaining labor or services, also induced by

force, fraud, or coercion, with the purpose of “involuntary servitude,

peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.” “Sex trafficking” is defined as the

“recruitment, harboring, provision, or obtaining of a person for the

purpose of a commercial sex act” but does not include the proviso of

“force, fraud, or coercion.” If this seems confusing, imagine being a

lawyer or prosecutor and trying to determine if a twenty-one-year-old

who has been enslaved in a brothel is a victim of a “severe” form of

trafficking or simply “sex trafficking.” Of course, a good deal of the

confusion arises because the crime being defined as “trafficking” is

slavery pure and simple. The TVPA defines severe “trafficking” by its

outcome—a state of enslavement—but then seems to rule that any

recruitment or “obtaining” of a person for prostitution is also “traf-

ficking.” Not sure how to handle this subtle difference in the legal def-

inition, local law enforcement tends to fall back on local statutes, or

worse, as when enslaved trafficking victims are charged with “solicita-

tion.” The NGOs that try to make sense of this, and to support traf-

ficking victims, build up experience and understanding over time but

are often unable to benefit from this experience since the necessary

funding is capricious.

Funding is, understandably, a big issue among NGOs. Lois Lee, of

Children of the Night, observes, “There’s so much competition . . . and,

go figure—there’s no money to compete for!”63 Alison Boak, president

of IOFA, also finds the federal government’s criteria for the distribution

of funding wrongheaded: “The dollars are given out not on the basis of