Slave Next Door (22 page)

who will have the greatest impact, or who’s most appropriate, but as

paybacks to the groups who support the [Bush administration’s] politi-

cal agenda.”64 A high-ranking administration official, who asked to

remain anonymous, agrees: “The ‘company view’ is that a lot of money

was going out, with no results. In reality, it’s just a way for the federal

government to take money away from the more worthwhile NGOs—the

actual progressive service providers—and hand it over to the advocacy

groups, typically not service providers, who are aligned with the neo-

conservative, values-driven antiprostitution clique.”

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“None of the money flow makes sense,” says Florrie Burke, a well-

regarded expert on the treatment of trafficking victims, “with arbitrary

time lines, one source of funding for certified clients and one for uncer-

tified clients.”65 An anonymous senior law enforcement source takes it

a step further: “There needs to be a return to the old infrastructure,

wherein grants went to service providers.”

Y O U C A N ’ T G O H O M E A G A I N

When sex trafficking victims are found and liberated, they need a safe

and secure place to stay. Security and comfort are crucial to their recov-

ery. Yet a key issue raised by every NGO is the lack of adequate housing.

Once an adult or underage sex trafficking survivor is in the system, it is

imperative to provide a suitable living situation, but this hardly ever

happens because of the lack of available or appropriate space. According

to Lois Lee, it borders on the impossible: “There are only thirty-nine

beds allocated for sexually exploited children—in the entire country!

And we have twenty-four of them.” She adds that six are in Atlanta, at

a probation center called Angela’s House, and the rest are at GEMS, in

New York City.66 Christa Stewart states the Door’s policy: “If a victim

is, say, under sixteen, we’ll probably advise that they go into foster care,

just for safety reasons.”67 Without a place for the sex trafficking victim

to live, the greatest fear—and likelihood—is that she will return to the

streets and become victimized once again.

Ann Jordan, formerly of Global Rights, points to the lack of ade-

quate housing as the federal government’s biggest failure in addressing

the needs of trafficked children. “Unaccompanied children,” she states,

“are languishing in inappropriate housing. . . . They have no guardian

or parent or any supervised living situation.” To further complicate

matters, “Unaccompanied minors are forced to meet the same require-

ments as adults to cooperate with law enforcement.” This often means

testifying against their traffickers. Incredibly, it is up to the child to

decide. “Unaccompanied minors who are unwilling to speak with law

enforcement are pushed into a legal limbo in which they can either try

to fend for themselves or be held as a ‘material witness’ and be forced

to testify. In some cases, it could result in the child being faced with pos-

sible deportation.” Jordan tells of a trafficked child sent to detention

and given the option of either speaking with law enforcement or losing

the possibility of benefits. “She decided not to talk to law enforcement.

As a result, she was sent back to her home country, where she had

nobody to take care of her and had no social support.”68

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To CATW’s Dorchen Leidholdt, domestic violence shelters offer the

best option. “This is the best model for trafficking victims, whether

they’re domestically or internationally trafficked, sex or labor. If domes-

tic violence service providers start opening their doors, it’s a great

resource for trafficking victims. . . . The shelters’ provision of confiden-

tiality is exactly what trafficking victims need . . . and shelters are usu-

ally not filled to capacity.”69

CarlLa Horton, executive director of New York’s Northern

Westchester Shelter for over a decade, disagrees:

Domestic violence shelters, sadly, may be the “best place” for these vic-

tims, but that says more about our government’s pitiful response to the

issue than it does about the appropriateness of domestic violence agen-

cies. In my opinion, our shelters are not a good option for trafficking

victims. . . . Many of us, our agency included, do not have extensive secu-

rity systems . . . and other needed protections. Also, our agency, as with

so many other domestic violence agencies, is already challenged in meet-

ing our mission of sheltering domestic violence victims . . . and we cannot

allow our very limited resources to be diverted. We already turn away far

too many domestic violence victims due to lack of room. Our shelter aver-

aged 100 percent capacity for the last seven years; and over the last five

years alone, we had to deny shelter to 4,197 victims due to lack of room.70

Along with the lack of housing goes a severe shortage of psychologi-

cal and social services. Those who have been sexually victimized des-

perately need help. However, to award benefits, social service providers

must have authorization. Again, Ann Jordan: “Despite the fact that a

large number of trafficking victims are children, only thirty-four letters

granting eligibility for benefits to child trafficking victims were issued in

2005.” Jordan sees the “mandatory requirement for minors to cooper-

ate with law enforcement” as one of the underlying reasons for this

paucity of acknowledged child victims. And when benefits
are
assigned,

it is often after a wait of several weeks or months, during which time the

child is “receiving no treatment for the serious trauma of trafficking and

not receiving dental or medical care.”71 Being subjected to the brutality

of prostitution can require a lifetime of physical, mental, and spiritual

care to overcome. As Lois Lee describes the purpose of Children of the

Night, “We get them fundamental social security, give them bed and

board. We’re in the business of raising these kids; this isn’t a thirty-day

fix.”72 Yet the official response to trafficking into prostitution is often

arrest and detention. Florrie Burke puts it bluntly: “Lock-ups are not

acceptable shelters!”73 Says Lee, “Children are spending more time in

jail than their pimps.”74

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The treatment of children who have been liberated from sexual

abuse and exploitation should be guided by our sense of decency, not

by concerns over government budgets or policy. To require a child

who has been raped and assaulted to make mature decisions about

participating in a prosecution before he or she gets desperately

needed care is both cruel and misguided. To take a child out of violent

slavery just to lock her up in a detention center calls into question our

humanity. Children are not criminals. Our national response to the

needs of enslaved children is disorganized, harmful, and an ineffec-

tive way to address this crime. It is time for the lawmakers to fix this

mess, and as they do so to ask themselves, “What would I do if this

were my child?”

F O R E I G N - B O R N V E R S U S D O M E S T I C V I C T I M S :

A Q U E S T I O N O F PA R I T Y

One issue that seriously affects the quality of the government’s response

is whether the victims are foreign-born or domestic. Although this could

be said about all forms of modern slavery in America, the discrepancy

is felt most strongly in the area of sex-related trafficking. It influences

prosecutions of traffickers and funding of survivor services, and, not

surprisingly, opinions on it are widely divided.

When the TVPA was passed in 2000, it defined U.S. child victims

as such for the first time; yet its provisions favored foreign-born as

opposed to U.S. or domestic victims of trafficking. Imbalances in the

allocation of funding and benefits still exist. One activist points out,

“Clearly, if you look at the TVPA, the focus is on international traf-

ficking victims. The services are provided to international victims.

And although I don’t see it as a competition, I would suspect that

there’s a higher incidence of domestic than international trafficking—

I suspect largely because it’s become so hard these days to cross the

borders—and I think it’s being largely ignored.”75

Several antitrafficking groups are calling on the government to pro-

vide more money to domestic in addition to foreign-born victims. In the

view of some NGOs, the disparity in the numbers is massive. These

groups argue that hundreds of thousands of American women and chil-

dren are at risk, compared to the federal government’s estimate of up to

17,500 foreign victims of trafficking per year. These groups assert the

existence of an inordinately large number of
American
sex trafficking

victims—both minors and adults.

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So what funds does the government provide for their unique service

needs? According to Bradley Myles of Polaris Project, “Very little, when

compared to the scope and size of the problem. All federal funds created

under the TVPA for direct services to trafficking victims have been used

to assist noncitizen victims. Trafficking services grantees have been

required to serve only noncitizen victims with their grants, leaving no

federal funds for specialized services for U.S. citizen victims. We need to

reach a new paradigm where grants, policies, organizations, and task

forces can address both U.S. citizen and noncitizen victims without divi-

siveness and with the freedom to serve and protect all victims.”76

State allocation of funds and services can also be difficult because of

the constant mobility of the victims, whose pimps move them from state

to state, and the fact that their pimps will often confiscate or destroy

their identity papers. “This problem,” says Polaris’s Myles, “is exacer-

bated when dealing with U.S. citizens, who also frequently present com-

plicated custodial issues as minors.” Myles points out that such

problems as underdeveloped life skills, societal tendencies toward victim

blaming, mental and drug-related problems, and criminal histories also

hinder the assignment of money and services to survivors of sex traf-

ficking. To further complicate matters, domestic victims are often shut

out of government benefit programs, including welfare. As we’ve seen,

there is no provision for housing; victims are placed in detention or drug

rehabilitation centers, or in homeless shelters, where they not only suffer

the stigma of having been prostituted but are often easily found by their

pimps and traffickers. Additionally, most states’ crime victim compen-

sation programs do not address trafficking and reimburse only for med-

ical bills directly resulting from a specific list of crimes. In many

individual states, the victims are seen as criminals.77

In pointing to what he sees as a lack of parity in the provision of serv-

ices for U.S. citizen victims, Myles states, “In Polaris’s current caseload,

we are servicing far more U.S. than foreign victims. And yet, when we

try to enroll them in the federal government’s per capita system for serv-

ing trafficking victims, we’re told that the system is currently only avail-

able to foreign-born victims.” In many ways, the process of sexual

enslavement for a U.S. citizen parallels that of the foreign-born victim:

often her documents are confiscated by her pimp or trafficker, she is

taken from her home, initiated—or, “seasoned”—through gang rapes

and beatings, assigned a quota to be filled nightly, and held through

both threatened and real violence. And yet, forced into prostitution, she

is blamed, and that blame contributes to both a lack of empathy from

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law enforcement and a lack of benefits and services available to her.

“There’s a gross misunderstanding among U.S. citizens,” says Myles,

“about the nature of sex slavery.”78

An equally vocal and adamant group of service providers feel that

this view of the reported volume of domestic victims of sexual traffick-

ing is distorted and inaccurate. Much of the problem, they feel, can be

attributed to the hidden nature of the crime itself. It is stunningly diffi-

cult to try to ascertain numbers—in
any
form of human trafficking—

with any degree of accuracy when you don’t know where to look or, for

that matter, what you’re looking
at.
As Mark Lagon, director of the

State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in

Persons (TIP Office), puts it, “It’s a misconception that we’re ever going

to get a hard number of how many victims there are. By nature, the kind