American Beauty Part III

Slavery: covert to overt

Women and children are the new commodity in the 21st century. With the disappearance of boarder controls in Europe and with each new country keen to join the European Union there is effectively very little preventing the trade in people.  Women desperate to leave their homelands due to high unemployment and poverty the American Dream quickly becomes an alluring prospect. However, this Hollywood-fuelled fantasy becomes a literal death trap for those for whom sexual exploitation is merely something that happens to others. At the same time, this is not restricted to those without income or struggling to survive, where “the grass is always greener.” Author Victor Malarek described it in the following terms:

Crime syndicates use a variety of methods to capture young women. A girl walking down a road in Moldova is forced into a car. An overflowing Romanian orphanage receives a visit from ‘social workers’ offering ‘apprentice programs’ for adolescent girls. A young Ukrainian woman desperate to help her starving parents responds to a newspaper advertisement for au pairs to work in Germany. An ambitious young graduate signs up with what appears to be a legitimate foreign corporation at a job fair at a Russian university. 1

While  steadfastly ignored by the selective trafficking reports of the US state Department the origins of much of the paedophilia sex rings and their links to blackmail, organized crime and the arms trade, are to be found within the boarders of the USA. The effects of a multi-billion dollar industry of human trafficking will soon eclipse even narcotics as the no.1 source of criminal funding. As such the new industry is interlaced with virtually all forms of high level criminal activity.

A March 2001 report from The Coalition against Trafficking in Women found that trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation is a national problem, and one that is increasing in scope and magnitude. The U.S. government estimates that 50,000 women and children are trafficked each year into the United States, primarily from “Latin America, countries of the former Soviet Union and Southeast Asia.” Their report was the first of its kind drawn from international and national data along with interviews with prostitutes themselves. However, NGO’s and charities put the total number of women and children trafficked into the US as 100,000. This is probably a conservative estimate.

Human rights groups, immigration attorneys and former workers, have shown that thousands of domestic servants are being brought into the United States from impoverished countries and severely exploited by foreign employers, many of whom work for embassies and international organizations in the Washington area. 2 In a July report from the same year the US State Department got their act together enough to confirm that most of the victims of human trafficking were women and children, no less than 700,000 people a year according to the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act Conference of 2000. These figures are also likely to be very conservative.

The disappearance on May 30th in of high society, blue-eyed, blonde American socialite Natalie Holloway and may also have had much more to do with a global trafficking trade than at first expected, though this is far from substantiated. The similar possible abduction of 23 year-old Amy Lynn Bradley’s in 1998 shows that Congress and the US State Department is rather uninterested in the rise in global sex-trafficking of vacationing females taken from cruise ships, island hotels and bars for sale to South American brothels as sex slaves.

Mexico and South America as a whole has historically been a place of exploitation for North America. With sex trafficking businesses burgeoning in Colombia and Venezuela and with Curacao or Aruba within sight of the Caribbean Islands “Spotters,” can be paid to watch for women on vacation as potential sex slaves. Guiding them into situations which leave them drugged and transported to a waiting car and boat for transportation to mainland or island brothels is a relatively easy enterprise. Yet this is simply mirroring the developing trade within the US itself.

Back in 1997 one San Francisco resident, 36 year-old Catalina Suarez, testified before the United Nations about her ordeal as a sex slave. She  told the San Francisco Examiner how she was 9 years old when “…a grandfatherly neighbour lured her with a gift, kidnapped her and kept her chained her to a bed in a rural Puerto Rico shack, forcing the child to have brutal sex with a succession of men.” There are hundreds of similar accounts. Federal and State officials told the San Francisco Examiner that: “The multimillion-dollar sex-slave trafficking stretches from Thailand to San Francisco, from Russia to New York City. The U.S. Justice Department in Washington, D.C., is conducting a nationwide investigation of the prostitution slavery of Thai women and girls.” 3 

This report is over ten years old and since that time, the market has exploded into a billion dollar business.

There have been a number of prosecutions involving the trafficking and/or forced prostitution of children in 2001 and 2002, including two defendants in Maryland who brought a 14-year-old girl from Cameroon and, with threats and sexual and physical assaults, forced her to be their domestic servant. A businessman in California trafficked numerous young girls into the United States to work in prostitution and a group of defendants recruited approximately 40 girls aged 12-17 from Georgia for prostitution, threatening them with violence if they tried to leave. These cases have resulted in jail sentences for the defendants and orders that restitution be paid to the victims. A wealthy landlord from Berkley, California was charged with buying two teenage girls in India and bringing them to the United States for forced labour. A couple in eastern New York State has pleaded guilty to a variety of charges related to smuggling Peruvians into the United States with the same intention.

Washington State is reported to be a hotbed of trafficking in brides, sex workers, domestic workers and children. The director of the US State Department, John Miller, told how he was forced to confront the issue that slavery was “still alive”:

‘I'm reading about how they lured these girls from Asian nations, promised them restaurant jobs, modelling jobs, ... seized their passports, beat them, raped them, moved them from brothel to brothel,’ he said. This was not happening in some distant Third World nation, however. ‘There it was in civil Seattle,..’ 4

The US government would have us believe that forced prostitution and trafficking is predominantly an external problem. In fact, the international trade in women and children is fast becoming more prevalent in the US than many other destination and transit countries. Jody Raphael, of the Women and Girls Prostitution Project at the Center for Impact Policy Research, based in Chicago, believes that this control extends across all levels of the industry:

 ‘For example, police who pick women up from the ‘stroll’ on Halsted and North/Clybourn (west of downtown Chicago) say a lot of the girls are from Milwaukee or Tennessee. They're being moved around. It helps them avoid detection and gives the customers a variety of new girls. From our grassroots studies, I'm learning to no longer make such a distinction between local and international trafficking.’ […]
‘Men will go to recruit girls at shopping malls, places like that, they'll find girls who have run away from home,’ explains Raphael. ‘They'll say you can earn a lot of money, it will be really glamorous, they'll tell a girl she's beautiful and does she want to be in a movie or make a music video. Then they'll drive her to Chicago and not let her leave. She'll be watched day and night by these goons. This happens with more frequency than people want to admit.’ 5

Women and children within the United States of America and abroad who are locked into poverty are far more likely to become victims of exploitation, most particularly trafficking. This inevitably  leads to a catch-22 of long-lasting physical and psychological trauma; disease (including HIV/AIDS), violence/abuse; drug addiction; unwanted pregnancy; malnutrition; social ostracism; and in many cases, death. All this is exacerbated and prolonged by the growing market in sex tourism from both the United States and Europe. 6 
Perhaps one of the most shocking stories to finally receive some public attention in recent years are the Child Rape Camps of San Diego County, California, involving hundreds of Mexican girls between 7 and 18 being kidnapped or subjected to false romantic entrapment by organized criminal sex trafficking gangs.  

According to libertadlatina.org who have tried to campaign for this information to be given a mainstream hearing, the victims: “…were brought to San Diego County, California. Over a 10 year period these girls were raped by hundreds of men per day in more than 2 dozen home based and agricultural camp based brothels.” 7 The girls were sold to farm workers - between 100 and 300 at a time - in small “caves” made of reeds in the fields. Many of the girls had babies, who were used as hostages with death threats against them, so their mothers would not try to escape. It was only in January of 2003 when the Mexican paper El Universal published a three part series on the trafficking and brothel camps that interest began to take place further afield.

The cover-up was evident not just in the fact zero coverage in the mainstream media but for another reason: a Latina medical doctor employed by a U.S. federal agency provided condoms to the victims for years, and was told by her supervisors not to speak out and organize efforts to rescue the victims. This doctor was ordered under threat of legal action to keep quiet about the mass victimization of children in “rape camps.”
 
Numbers of murdered immigrant teen girls are still being found in San Diego, possibly linked to trafficking rings. Despite a programme filmed by a local T.V. station and occasional arrests of supposed ring leaders who only receive minor jail terms - the camps continue to exist as of 2005.

With crime networks emerging as the channels for the new and strengthened forms of trafficking, narcotics and arms we can see parallel increase in the commercial sector – the seemingly “presentable” face of exploitation. In the United States research has revealed that between 244,000 and 325,000 American children are at risk of being victimized by commercial sexual exploitation each year.

Dr. Melissa Farley of Prostitution Research and Education, and Dr. Richard Estes of the University of Pennsylvania have provided the American public with a snapshot of the commercial sex trade in the US. Dr. Farley's interviews with 130 people working as prostitutes in the San Francisco area revealed that:

• 83% have been threatened with a weapon;
• 82% have been physically assaulted
• 68% have been raped (59% of these have been raped four or more times)
• 84% reported past or current homelessness.
• 49% reported that pornography was made of them in prostitution
• 75% have a drug abuse problem
• 50% now have a physical health problem
• 88% want to leave prostitution
• 57% were sexually abused as children. 8

 This latter figure confirms a correlation with sexual abuse in society and its connections to other forms of non-familial systems of exploitation.

If Bush’s “ownership society” is allowed to continue, where the richest 1 percent of households already owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined; one out of six Americans has no health insurance and one out of eight Americans live below the official poverty line, then exploitation can only increase still further. We should not be surprised that The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services program Rescue & Restore Victims of Human Trafficking, remains terminally under funded. 9 Indeed, the President’s feckless attempts to prove his credentials regarding the slave trade went the way of most of his legislative promises by waiving any financial sanctions on Saudi Arabia. We might remember that the Saudi government has consistently failed to do enough to stop the modern-day slave trade in prostitutes, child sex workers and forced laborers. 10

Notes

1 The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade by Victor Malarek, Arcade Publishing (2004) ISBN: 1904132545. 
2 Hidden Slaves: Forced Labour in the United States. A 2004 report from the Human Rights Center at University of California - Berkeley and the Free the Slaves organization, concerning contemporary trafficking and slavery in the United States.
3  ‘Global Sex Slavery’ by Seth Rosenreid, San Francisco Examiner, 6 April 1997.
4  ‘The Abolitionist’ by Anne Morse, World Magazine, October 2004.
5  ‘Women and Children First: The Economics of Sex Trafficking’ by Kari Lydersen, April 15, 2002.

6  One can see just how prevalent this tourism is and how a largely Western influx of men are fuelling the demand from one Sex tourist website: Extract: “This web site is an interactive discussion and archive database dedicated to providing information about prostitution, escort services and sex tourism. Here you will find articles both past and present providing information about escorts throughout the world. This is not a porno site that boasts millions of "hardcore" images. Rather, it is a place where fellow hobbyists gather to share information with one another through real time discussion boards on a variety of topics that deal with prostitution, escort services and sex tourism.” Upon viewing some of the topics and “exploits” I found the first hand accounts detail how and where to pick up often underage prostitutes by city and country."
7  Latino Women and Children at risk: ‘The San Diego Child Sex Trafficking Scandal’ updated article: November 2005 by libertadlatina.org
8  Statement of Joseph Mettimano Child Protection Policy Advisor, World Vision Before the Subcommittee on the Constitutional, Civil Rights and Property Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate July 7, 2004.
9  ‘Anti-Sex-Slave Trafficking Program Underfunded’ newsday.com, January 2006.

10  Bush Waives Saudi Trafficking Sanctions, Associated Press.September 21, 2005.