Slave Next Door (37 page)

heard the sounds of her being beaten. The mama-san used a big wooden

spoon to beat her girls, and the sound was very sharp, very distinct. She

was being punished for having contact with me.”

Sarah’s earnings went toward college, where she took courses in

negotiation, mediation, crisis management, and human trafficking.

“Until then, I was mostly curious, I befriended them.” But the more she

learned, the clearer it became to her that the Asian women were

enslaved. “They never left; the mama-san did all the grocery shopping.

They slept in the same space where they worked, they were being paid

practically nothing, and the mama-san beat them regularly. And when

the police raided the place and arrested the women, a cab would pull up

and deliver four or five more, each carrying a single suitcase.”

Sarah realized that she wanted to do more for trafficked women,

so—while still working at the massage parlor—she volunteered with a

local antitrafficking group. “I never told them exactly what I did for a

living, that I was still very much ‘in the life’; I just said I was a nude

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dancer; that seemed okay to me. I let them know that I was friends with

people in the sex trade and could serve as something of an expert.” As

a volunteer, Sarah performed direct outreach services, speaking to

women from their teens up to their mid-twenties, giving them printed

material, and asking trafficking-related questions. “Because I’m white,

the organization only wanted me to work with the Caucasian women,

but they all seemed to relate to me well.”

Sarah makes it clear that her goal at this time was not to free enslaved

women: “When I volunteering, I wasn’t after freeing prostitutes. I just

wanted them to be able to
keep
the money they earned. I mean if they

had to do this kind of work, then at least they should be paid for it, as

women empowered.” One prostitute with whom Sarah worked, aged

fifteen or sixteen, was not a good fit at the NGO shelter: “She already

had a baby, whom her pimp had taken, her personal hygiene was poor,

she was a habitual liar, and she communicated with her pimp, which

put the shelter in jeopardy.” So the girl had to leave, but when she

needed a place to stay, Sarah shared her apartment with her. “I wanted

to get her away from her pimp. Aside from taking her kid, he put her in

the hospital on a number of occasions and kept most of what she made.

I just wanted her to make her money and live her life.”

When asked how she came to leave “the life,” Sarah responds, “I

didn’t leave it; it left me!” The massage parlor was raided so often that

the owner, sensing that the feds were closing in, closed her doors. “I was

really lucky. I was never arrested, never used my real name. As I look

back, I realize the woman I worked for was trafficking minors into pros-

titution. She’s now under federal indictment.” When the woman was

indicted, Sarah’s former co-workers, whom she still considers good

friends, became alarmed and came to her for counsel—because she had

gone to college. Sarah advised them that the government was pursuing

cases of human trafficking and had no interest in them.

Sarah, now in her mid-twenties, made a remarkable career decision.

Rather than continue in her present life, she chose to make a career

working against human trafficking. “When I was ‘working,’ I was trying

to help people; now, I just wanted to carry it on.” Believing that the

police are “the ones with the power to do something,” she went straight

to a large organization concerned with the legal affairs and applied for

a job. The TVPA had already been passed and reauthorized, and the

organization was including trafficking among its public awareness pro-

grams. Sarah was hired, and for the past few years she has been in

charge of programs concerned with human trafficking. When you call

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the organization and ask what they’re doing in the area of human traf-

ficking, Sarah is the person you’ll talk with. Along the way, she earned

a master’s degree from a major university.

Sarah Schell has covered a lot of ground from underage sex worker in

a massage parlor to heading up antitrafficking programs. But she didn’t

come out of it unscathed. “Anyone who’s been in the sex industry comes

away with scars,” she states. “I still suffer from depression, and I’ve been

diagnosed with PTSS [post-traumatic stress syndrome]. I used to hate

being thought of as a survivor—not of trafficking, but of exploitation—

but now I realize that it’s better to be a survivor than a victim.”

TA K E I T U P A N O T C H

Good Samaritans like Elaine Fletcher, Sandy Shepherd, and Sarah Schell

would not admit to being anyone special. Yes, they have saved lives and

brought freedom to slaves, but ask them about what they have done and

they tend to say something like, “Oh come on,
anyone
would do that in

the same situation!” They are average citizens confronting something

new and dangerous; they’re not blind to the danger, but their focus is on

the human being in front of them. For most Good Samaritans that focus

is combined with a big heart, determination, sensitivity, and common

sense. These are self-deprecating, even reluctant heroes in the battle

against slavery, but heroes nonetheless. We owe them thanks and sup-

port, but grassroots volunteers and well-intentioned individuals can’t

stop slavery in America by themselves. Ending slavery means that com-

munities have to make collective conscious decisions. Fortunately, many

American communities, in the absence of national leadership, have done

just that. Some of these are physical communities, others are the virtual

communities we share on the Internet, but what they have in common is

the conviction that they don’t wait for someone else to end the suffering

of slaves in America.

In many towns and cities, faith communities have taken the lead.

Mark Massey was a lay minister at a small Pentecostal Church in Tulsa,

Oklahoma. This was not a rich church; anyone could see that just by its

location, facing an oil pipeline welding factory that took up a whole

city block. One weekend the church had visitors. Massey explains: “It’s

a little country-type church and they came into the church one Sunday

morning, and you could tell they were kind of uneasy.” Two men from

India sat in the back for the service, and afterwards Massey approached

them. As a lay minister he had done outreach to homeless people and

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taught English to migrants. He welcomed them to the church and asked

how they came to be in Tulsa. The men shied away, suspicious of his

interest, but Mark gently stuck with them and they came back to the

church again. Over time they came to trust Mark, and from them a

remarkable story unfolded.

The owner of the oil pipeline company was a man named John Pickle.

Pressured by competition from overseas companies, he had devised a

scheme to bring highly skilled welders from India to America under a

visa program listing them as “trainees.” Dazzled with promises of high

wages, comfortable working conditions, and great opportunities, thirty

men chose to come to America. Members of the middle class in India,

they paid a recruitment fee amounting to a year’s salary at home and

arrived at the factory in Tulsa. At the factory they were ushered into a

warehouse that had been converted into barracks. Here, bunk beds were

crammed together, two toilets served for everyone, and there were no

tables or chairs. But what most concerned many of the men was the

heavy steel door that was the only entrance.

As time passed control over the men increased; guards kept them on

the factory grounds, and they were often locked in. Food was in short

supply and of poor quality. But in a strange way, and not uncommon

among traffickers, Pickle had convinced himself that he was doing these

poor men from a poor country a favor. One way he showed his benevo-

lence was to allow a few of the men to go to Massey’s church.

In conversations after services, Massey learned more about the men’s

lives. He says that at first “I thought I must have misunderstood them.”7

Their strong accents, plus some of the workers’ poor grasp of English,

sometimes made communication hit or miss. In time, Massey asked a

friend who had originally come from India to come and translate. Then

the whole story came out, and Massey told them that if things got unbear-

able he would help as best he could. Shortly afterward Pickle said he was

going to deport some of the men who had complained about the condi-

tions; they called Massey. That night he parked next to the factory as men

began to sneak away, crawling under the fence and rushing to his van.

One of the men Massey had not met before; the man told him that he was

not a Christian, like the men who had attended church, but a Hindu.

“Will you help me?” he asked. “Of course,” replied Massey.

In time, fifty-four men were freed from the factory, and a local lawyer

began to build a case for back wages. No government office or law

enforcement agency got involved, and Massey began to devote all his

time to the care of these trafficked workers. He moved his own family

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out of their big house and into a smaller rental house that they owned

in order to give fifty-two of the men a place to live. In his own church,

Massey says, “We didn’t become popular for doing this or praised

really, there’s been a lot of hurt. . . . Our churches have been good to

help foreign missions, but when the foreign comes into our own com-

fort area, we’re not ready to accept. There were some ministers . . . that

felt that it wasn’t God’s will that I did what I did.” Fortunately, other

churches, individuals, and charities felt otherwise and began to work

together to support the Indian workers. When Robert Canino, a lawyer

from the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, joined the

case, the power of government finally arrived on the scene. At first,

Canino had to work hard to convince his bosses that employment law

was an appropriate way to fight human trafficking. In the process of

winning the Pickle case, he set new standards and was later named

“Lawyer of the Year” for his breakthrough. In 2003 Pickle was found

liable and still owes millions to the Indian men, many of whom have

remained in the United States on a special visa.

Many other faith communities have stepped up to help. On Long

Island, New York, a couple trafficked sixty-nine people from Peru into

forced labor. They were crammed into a suburban home and then

placed with a number of businesses, working in a plant nursery, even a

cannoli factory. For these workers, freedom came in part from their con-

tact with Catholic charities. They worked tirelessly with the service

provider Safe Horizon to find housing and services for the victims. And

in San Francisco, Jewish organizations came together to create the

Jewish Coalition to End Human Trafficking. They work with the San

Francisco District Attorney’s Office and promote the passage of strong

antitrafficking legislation.8

T H E C O P O N T H E ( T R A F F I C K I N G ) B E AT

In chapter 2, you read how a policeman made his own antitrafficking

video to help train other officers. Around the country law enforcement

personnel are often the first to encounter cases of modern slavery. When

they do, they regularly reach out to the only experts nearby, the faith com-

munities and service providers who are also on the front line. This is most

likely to occur where the problem is most prevalent. In Florida’s Panhandle,

an area rife with human trafficking, the sheriffs of four counties—

Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa, and Walton—formed their own human

trafficking task force to investigate “organized criminal enterprises that

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engage in worker exploitation, . . . labor fraud, . . . identification docu-

ment fraud and commercial sexual exploitation of minors.” Their aim,

when they discover human trafficking, is to refer the case to “the appro-

priate federal agency for prosecution.”9

Some officers simply come to the decision that finding and liberating

trafficking victims is just something they have to do. The Hillsborough

County Sheriff’s Office in Tampa, Florida, boasts 1,200 officers; since

March 2006, two of them have devoted themselves to pursuing human

trafficking cases. The point person, Detective Jason Van Brunt of the

Criminal Intelligence Unit, had been working computer crime and

decided he needed a change. The Crime Prevention Section of the