Take Action Against Trafficking

TRAFFICKING IN THE USA–AND WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT

By Talia Carner

The awarding of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize to Dr. Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war has brought attention to the issue of sexual slavery.

According to the U.S. State Department, 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders every year, of whom 80% are female and half are children. However, both the international arena, and human trafficking for labor (as separate from trafficking for sexual purposes) are too vast for this article to cover. Since the novel THE THIRD DAUGHTER deals with sexual subjugation, this article and the following resources refer specifically to sex trafficking within the US borders—as do the links for action.

Between 14,500 and 17,500 people are trafficked into the U.S. each year for commercial sex. Yet, it has been estimated that two-thirds of sex trafficking victims in the United States are US citizens, bringing the numbers of new recruits to estimated 50,000 each year. The average age a teen enters the sex trade in the U.S. is 12 to 14 years. Poverty and a lack of education play major roles in the lives of many women in the sex industry. Many victims are runaway girls who were sexually abused as children. California harbors 3 of the FBI’s 13 highest child sex trafficking areas on the nation: Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego.  The National Human Trafficking Hotline receives more calls from Texas than any other state in the US.

This article hopes to open a window of understanding and compassion toward the centuries-old phenomenon as it manifests in our contemporary society, where popular travel, cellular phones, and the internet make it easier than ever to reach and groom potential victims. I hope to offer readers the means to combat the evil of sex trafficking in their own backyard.

The first misconception about trafficking is that it involves transferring humans across borders, and is exclusive to immigrants. That is not necessarily so. “Trafficking” can be domestic, of US citizens who are subject to any form of enslavement, be it forced labor, debt bondage, or sexual exploitation. Trafficking is committed under coercion, fraud, or force and deprives the victim of his or her freedom to escape. The force can be applied as physical restraint or emotional blackmail. Furthermore, in regards to persons under the age of 18, no force, fraud or coercion need be present if the victim is compelled to engage in commercial sex.

Modern-day enslavement is, unfortunately, present in all communities across the nation—and growing fast. Victims of human trafficking can be of any age, gender, race, or immigration status; they live in cities, suburbs, and rural areas. Human traffickers relentlessly canvass ways to take advantage of people in circumstances of extreme adversity, deprivation or violence, who experience discrimination, economic vulnerability, or dependence. Pockets of population that suffer a greater share of such hardships are particularly vulnerable to human trafficking.

An example of local trafficking that does not include crossing borders is the recruitment of a teenage girl by her older boyfriend to service his friends, from whom he reaps favors or payment. The victim seems to be free to move about or attend school, but she is threatened with exposure (such as broadcasting videos of her performing sex acts) unless she agrees to offer more sexual services. Thus, she is deprived of the freedom to stop the exploitation.

That said, about 2/3 of all trafficked victims (including for labor) first pass through airports after being lured from other countries with false promises of decent jobs. When the promises are combined with the myth of the riches of the USA, victims are more likely to believe their recruiters. Of those, the sex trafficking victims are most vulnerable to be broken into prostitution by force and torture. Their passports and cell phones are confiscated. They are often locked up and are closely monitored during their contact with customers for any potential transgression. Lacking language skills, disoriented about their location, and unfamiliar with domestic social and legal services, the victims are powerless against their jailers. Fear of the corrupt police in their home countries is carried into a deep distrust in the US authorities. Threats for any attempt to escape involve exposure by photos and videos of the victims’ sex acts, or of direct harm to their families back home—such as holding a child of the victim hostage—thus preventing the victims from contacting their families.

The victims are often charged fees for transportation, boarding, food, fines for missing quotas, and penalties for “bad behavior.” They become trapped in debt bondage whose parameters are never clearly defined, yet can never be paid off. Such debts are multiplied when a victim is sold to a third party, and her new master demands that she earn and pay off her purchasing cost.

According to a report conducted by the University of Pennsylvania, anywhere from 100,000 up to 300,000 American children at any given time may be at risk of commercial sexual exploitation due to factors such as drug use, homelessness and severe emotional stress. (“At risk” doesn’t mean that they’ve been ensnared by the traffickers’ net.)

A small percentage of sex trafficking is familial trafficking, in which the victim is controlled by family members who allow them to be sexually exploited in exchange for favors, drugs or money. For example, a mother may allow a landlord to molest a child in exchange for a place to stay. Often, the mother was a victim of human trafficking herself. (Familial trafficking may be difficult to detect because victims seem to move freely, such as going to school—and they may not understand that they are being trafficked.) Furthermore, Child marriage is legal in the U.S., and an estimated 248,000 children as young as 12—mostly Pakistani—were married here between 2000 and 2010. Almost all were girls wed to adult men.

Exploited children become exploited adults. Prostitution is not a victimless crime between two consenting adults.

Women’s prisons are a fishbowl from which traffickers can pluck their “merchandise.” Government records—available on the internet—provide mugshots, charge sheets and release dates. Traffickers approach their potential recruits via sympathetic—even romantic—letters, money, and care packages sent through the prison system. Upon the women’s release, the pimps offer them shelter and drugs before forcing them into prostitution.

The scourge of our society, sexual slavery in the United States, may be present in Asian massage parlors, Mexican cantina bars, residential brothels, or street-based pimp-controlled prostitution. The anti-trafficking community in the United States is debating the extent of sexual slavery. Some groups argue that exploitation is inherent in any act of commercial sex, where even independent sex workers are exposed to physical harm—and the barriers for exiting their profession are high. Other groups take a stricter approach to defining sexual slavery, considering an element of force, fraud or coercion to be necessary for sex slavery to exist.

Recognizing key indicators of human trafficking is the first step in identifying victims and can help save a life. Here are some common indicators:

• Does the person appear disconnected from family, friends, community organizations, or houses of worship?
• Has a child stopped attending school?
• Has the person had a sudden or dramatic change in behavior?
• Is a juvenile engaged in commercial sex acts?
• Is the person disoriented or confused, or showing signs of mental or physical abuse?
• Does the person have bruises in various stages of healing?
• Is the person fearful, timid, or submissive?
• Does the person show signs of having been denied food, water, sleep, or medical care?
• Is the person often in the company of someone to whom he or she defers? Or someone who seems to be in control of the situation, e.g., where they go or who they talk to?
• Does the person appear to be coached on what to say?
• Is the person living in unsuitable conditions?
• Does the person lack personal possessions and appear to not have a stable living situation?
• Does the person have freedom of movement? Can the person freely leave where they live? Are there unreasonable security measures?
• Not all indicators listed above are present in every human trafficking situation, and the presence or absence of any of the indicators is not necessarily proof of human trafficking.

Read more about US government initiative to combat human trafficking in Blue Campaign https://www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign.

Why you should learn more about sex trafficking?
Community Awareness of Human Trafficking Essential to Ending Crisis

Get the facts: World Without Exploitation

EXAMINATION OF AREAS THAT MAKE TRAFFICKING POSSIBLE

While sex trafficking is illegal, the industry does not operate in a vacuum, but depends on and intersect with legitimate industries and systems.

Polaris reports that 71 percent of trafficking victims travel on planes—internationally or domestically. That means that both airlines personnel and the flying public can take steps when suspecting trafficking. Furthermore, ground personnel, from porters to check-in personnel and gate agents can be on alert for any such activity.

Airline professionals have unique opportunities to interface with traffickers or victims before they reach their destination. That’s why the world’s airlines organization, IATA, has launched a global awareness and industry-wide training program called #EyesOpen. It has two aims: One is teaching airline personnel to spot people who are being unwittingly lured or forced to travel. The other is increasing the public’s awareness of the crime that happens thousands of times daily, typically right in front of us.

A passenger noticed on a long flight from Berlin to New York across the aisle two pretty young women speaking Russian flanking a portly, aging passenger, giving him their full attention, stroking him and giggling. She alerted the flight attendant. Upon landing, security waited for the three, and the women were taken separately for interrogation. All they knew was that the man was flying them to a dance club, where they were to be well paid, but they had no business address nor a possible place of residence. (Yet, not unusual, they disbelieved the officers when explained the true fate awaiting them.) Further investigation of the man’s record found him related to a criminal ring involved in trafficking.

The flying public can step in by texting “Help” to 233733 (BeFree) or calling 1-888-373-7888, the National Human Trafficking Hotline. The 24/7 line is run by Polaris, a nonprofit group that fights human trafficking and is supported by the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Department of Homeland Security developed Blue Campaign, a national public awareness campaign, designed to educate the public, law enforcement and other industry partners to recognize the indicators of human trafficking, and how to appropriately respond to possible cases. Protocol procedures are important to assure the smooth handling of such cases.

In addition to IATA, some airlines have launched their own initiatives. Delta partnered with Polaris to develop a training that teaches employees about trafficking indicators in the air, on layovers, or in the local community. So far, Delta has trained over 56,000 employees and it receives as many as 5 reports each day from its on-board personnel recognizing potential human trafficking indicators.

Sadie Lambert, Delta Air Lines Flight Attendant, wrote: “If an individual is travelling alone with no idea where they’re going, who is picking them up, how long their trip is or the purpose of their travel…. If the companion of a traveler isn’t allowing them to speak, look me in the eye, go to the restroom unaccompanied, or even hold their own ticket, it clues me in….”

Airlines’ staff often represent the last line of detection and defense against the heinous crime. Once victims get off of the airplanes on which they’re flown into modern slavery, they disappear from society and become extraordinarily difficult to trace and rescue.

Read more:

https://www.iata.org/policy/consumer-pax-rights/Pages/human-trafficking.aspx

https://polarisproject.org/blog/2018/12/20/how-airlines-can-play-vital-roles-fighting-human-trafficking

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/airline-ticket-agent-saved-teen-girls-human-trafficking-article-1.3829623

Association of Flight Attendants – https://www.afacwa.org/stop_human_trafficking

Watch the video, starring Mira Sorvino, Goodwill Ambassador for the airline industry fight against human trafficking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Afr5FOl9LY

More and more, pimps find that running a brothel in a decent neighborhood attracts the neighbors’ attention—and brings law enforcement. Moving their businesses to hotels seems like the next logical step, and that is where the hospitality industry can take notice, prevent sex trafficking, and move on to rescue the victims.

Major hotel chains such as Marriot and Sheraton have taken steps to educate their personnel, assign managers on duty to handle delicate situations without causing a major disruption, and connect with the local precinct where a trained liaison is assigned to work with individual hotels. Therefore, hotel personnel at the reception level are trained to watch for warning signs, such as intoxicated underage people, guests wearing inappropriate clothing, or multiple men being escorted one at a time to a room. Housekeeping is on alert for excessive requests for linens and towels.

Hotel guests are also in a position to recognize and report potential trafficking situations, and some hotels post notices to educate the public to watch for certain unusual behavior.

A couple of hotel companies are taking their efforts to the next level to assist survivors after they have left their trafficking situation by offering them training and jobs while the victims are rebuilding their lives in freedom.

Read more:
http://www.hotelnewsnow.com/Articles/292396/The-signs-of-human-trafficking-and-what-hotels-can-do

https://polarisproject.org/blog/2019/01/16/hotel-companies-step-fight-human-trafficking

https://www.hotelmanagement.net/security/5-misconceptions-about-human-trafficking-hospitality

SCHOOLS

Schools are a particularly lucrative ground for traffickers to recruit naïve and vulnerable youth and trap them into a net of prostitution. Federal law states that any person under 18 years of age cannot consent to participating in sex trafficking, and that the sex trafficking of minors is a form of child abuse. Yet, traffickers are adept at identifying and grooming young victims.

Risk factors include previous sexual or physical abuse; being a runaway, in foster care or homeless; being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender; social isolation; and having a history of substance abuse. Victims are lured into the commercial sex industry as a result of economic need, family crisis and peer encouragement, need for social acceptance, and previous childhood trauma. The increased use of the internet and social media by children and teens has made access to potential victims easier to attain. Indeed, traffickers are increasingly relying on technology and social media to target victims as young as middle school and advertise them for sex. Before 2015, most victims met their trafficker for the first time in person, while since 2015 more than half sex trafficking survivors surveyed were first contacted via texting, websites or apps. Using the internet, predators now have immediate access to our children in their own homes, and it is hard for parents to monitor.

From Florida to California, dozens of programs now focus on educating teachers, parents, and school boards—and especially students. In educating students, the emphasis is both for the potential victims to watch for predators, but also for peer groups to watch and detect out-of-the ordinary behavior of a potential victim. (e.g., A poor girl suddenly showing off expensive clothes, phone, or jewelry.)

Predators are not always outsiders to the school, but rather may be found in the ranks of students and members of school gangs.

Prevention education varies. A basic program offers students a mobile app for free health services and a list of hot line numbers. Many programs, though, use creative, innovative ways to educate students: In San Diego County, the kNOw MORE program is a drama-based curriculum designed to help students recognize the red flags and vulnerabilities around trafficking and to equip them to take action for themselves and for their peers.

The curriculum involves an interactive, 20-minute drama of a high school girl being recruited into sex trafficking while no one around her is aware of the signs. As the drama is re-enacted several times, a survivor facilitator helps the students interject in the drama at different points where they see they could have made a difference.

Another program by PROTECT provides teacher training modules that include grade-appropriate curriculum for students, training them to identify the signs of trafficking, and implementing protocols that must be followed if a student is suspected or identified as a victim.

Read more:

KNOw MORE program – http://www.abolishhumantrafficking.com/know-more-awareness-prevention-curriculum/

Human Trafficking in America’s Schools
https://safesupportivelearning.ed.gov/sites/default/files/HumanTraffickinginAmericasSchools.pdf

https://medium.com/@CSBA/close-to-home-the-surprising-truth-about-human-sex-trafficking-691f827eaa33

3 Strands Global Foundation: Prevention through Education, Employment & Engagement: https://www.3strandsglobalfoundation.org/

PROTECT program – http://www.fdfi.org/protect.html and http://protectnow.org/

How to Teach Teens About Human Trafficking
https://www.usnews.com/high-schools/blogs/high-school-notes/articles/2017-02-21/3-ways-high-schools-can-educate-teens-on-human-trafficking

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/fl-ne-ap-human-trafficking-house-floor-20190409-story.html

Online safety – https://www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign/online-safety

Major corporations have set policies about the use of hotels during their personnel’s corporate-sponsored business trips, and give specific priority to hotels that employ anti-trafficking practices. Such corporations prohibit the purchasing of sexual services while traveling as a representative of the organization and using work time to purchase sexual services (such as online pornography), and prohibit the use of work properties (buildings, computers, vehicles, and phones) to purchase sexual services. Many take it further and set supplier-related policies, including a code of conduct for their suppliers.

In her TED talk, anti-trafficking activist, Nikki Cliffton, points out that sex buying online spikes at 2:00 PM on company time. Rather than being complicit, companies may shame and fire the employees that use company time and resources for such purposes.

Various industries have taken advantage of their particular access to trafficking information. Beyond airlines, such as Delta offering miles to enslaved trafficked victims to return to their families, truckers along their routes can hear chatter on their radios and see girls in trucks stops soliciting sexual services. MasterCard, Visa, and American Express have barred their credit cards from being used on certain websites thus forcing these exploitative sites to shut down, (e.g. backpage.com, a former website where sex traffickers advertised their offerings.) Microsoft partnered with the King County (Washington) Prosecuting Attorney’s Office and Seattle Against Slavery to run trafficking-deterrence ads that target sex buyers who used prostitution-related search engines. Dating websites that have been misused to lure women have now on alert for such schemes. Match Group has created an advisory board comprises of anti-trafficking groups.

Banks are in a particularly advantageous position to program their systems to automatically flag customers who frequently bring in cash, change mailing addresses, process credit cards or make deposits during late night and early morning hours, transfer large sums of deposited cash domestically or internationally, or use of anonymous payment methods rather than personal checks. Bank-issued credit cards can flag purchases of classified ads in particular publications or sites. Banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America have followed money trails to help prosecutors build cases against trafficking rings.

Major sports events attracts hordes of spectators—and men seeking to purchase sex—along with traffickers who bring their victims to service the surge in demand. (At the 2017 Super Bowl, a sting operation called Operation Guardian Angel yielded 94 HT arrests. The operation received 1,560 responses to sex ads placed by law enforcement during the 11-day period.) Now some sports teams and their corporate sponsors use the arena as an opportunity to educate the audience about the problems and ask them to become part of the solution.

On the other hand there are businesses actively involved in the sex trafficking. According to Polaris, the current law governing business registration in the United States shields human traffickers from arrest and prosecution. This is particularly problematic in the illicit massage industry, which boasts some 9,000 business locations in the United States, many of which are also human trafficking venues, according to a Polaris’s analysis.

Read more:

Business Ending Sex Trafficking (BEST) –For HR policies:
https://www.bestalliance.org/adopt-policies.html 

Help unmask human traffickers and expose criminal networks
https://act.polarisproject.org/page/43629/action/1?ea.tracking.id=lightbox

Truckers Against Trafficking
http://truckersagainsttrafficking.org/

Dozens of organizations and initiatives are geared toward fighting the commercial sex exploitation of girls and women worldwide and in the US. Yet, the number of victims rescued each year pales in comparison with the number of new girls and women ensnared into the net of prostitution. The demand continues to increase, yet most initiatives have not addressed the demand part of the equation—the men consumers. Like in any profitable industry, the supply chain is made up of the product, the retailers, and the buyers. In the sex-trafficking supply chain, the first part is the most resistant to intervention. Global poverty and strife guarantee the continued supply of victims. Creating risks for the retailers, e.g., by raising the punishment when traffickers are caught, may discourage some traffickers only if laws are vigorously enforced and the price to traffickers catches up with the enormous potential profits.

It is the consumer side of the business that is the easiest to address, as most sex buyers are vulnerable to exposure and can be easily discouraged. Yet, currently, they are subject to no consequences for exploiting sex trafficking victims. If we adopt the approach that sex slaves are not consenting to sex with the consumer because the ability to consent has been taken away from them , then every commercial sexual act with a sex trafficking victim (regardless of how it came about of how the victim was acting) is rape.

Indeed, the only successful effort to abolish sex trafficking has been the Swedish model, which has addressed the demand—the male clients. The 1998 Swedish government Bill on Violence Against Women included an analysis of prostitution. In a cultural shift, it viewed prostitution as one more form of male violence against women, and as such it was a crime and consequently, there was a perpetrator. The immediate perpetrators were the men who committed the sexual acts, and therefore were no different than rapists. In Sweden today, it is illegal to buy sex rather than to sell it.

We have seen the beginning of such view take hold in isolated US towns and pockets of law enforcement—without enough legal consequences when perpetrators are caught beyond social embarrassment. We have laws in place against “the Johns” in all states (except a few counties in Nevada) yet they are not enforced. The change in enforcement that reflect the new paradigm requires enormous goodwill on the part of our legislators to adopt the Swedish (aka Nordic) model. But when a national debate opens to naming the problem of trafficking as direct result of men’s demands for subjugated women’s sexual services, we may get closer to the solution. The public discourse alone has proven in countries such as Israel that has change the normative thinking about sex trafficking and made the passing of new laws–and their enforcement–as the new moral compass.

Talia Carner
August 2019

Read more about the demand side:

Who are the customers of sexual services? https://theconversation.com/these-are-the-customers-who-support-sex-trafficking-in-the-us-121866

How to stop sex trafficking? https://endsexualexploitation.org/articles/why-sex-buyers-must-be-stopped-and-how-to-do-it/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/nation-now/2018/01/30/sex-trafficking-column/1073459001/

The problem of demand in combating sex trafficking: https://www.cairn.info/revue-internationale-de-droit-penal-2010-3-page-607.htm#

An example of a changed paradigm: https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/104-johns-nabbed-nassau-county-pay-sex-article-1.1361717

Criminalize buyers of sex: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/04/19/is-legalized-prostitution-safer/criminalize-buying-not-selling-sex

Get the facts: https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5b7ed53e01bf9702b9df675b/5e1cd98f61c439d812b34ed3_Get_the_Facts_January_2020.pdf

Throw the book at the offenders: What are the laws in your state? www.ProCon.org 

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MORE WAYS YOU CAN HELP

If you or someone you know may have experienced forced labor or commercial sexual exploitation, know there is help. You can call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at
888-373-7888 or text BEFREE (233-733).

ANTI-TRAFFICKING ORGANIZATIONS

A worldwide network of organizations working to end the sexual exploitation of children

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