I am happy to be here, on Law Day, to talk with you about human trafficking. For the past few years I have been calling human trafficking ... a contemporary form of slavery. When I first made the comparison, I took some heat. Critics said that "slavery" was too strong a term. That it referenced a particular period in our country's history ... that true slavery doesn't exist today. [However] as I examined it further, I became convinced that the comparison was apt. In a previous century, Africans labored in the tobacco fields, and slaves were bred for strength and endurance. The fields have been replaced by brothels and sex shops, and the new trade is in young women and children. Yet even with these changes, the similarities are striking: • As were African slaves, these young women are tricked, deceived, lured, induced, kidnapped, and coerced into bondage. • They are taken from their native homelands and moved vast distances to foreign countries. • In these new places, they do not know the language, the culture, the laws. They are separated from family and friends. They have no identification papers, no passports, no visas. Strangers in a strange land, they have no way to escape. • As were slaves of earlier times, they are under the complete control of the people who have enslaved them. If they don't do what they are told, they are held without food or water, beaten and raped, their families threatened. • And perhaps most important, as were the slaves of earlier times, they are forced to do someone else's bidding for someone else's financial gain. ---- Unlike drugs ... human beings can be sold over and over again. ... The problem has always been marginalized, but it is so great that it can't be ignored any longer. ---- We started by bringing trafficking victims from Russia, the Ukraine, Nepal, India, and Mexico to the U.S. House and Senate to testify at Congressional hearings, because we knew that if American citizens heard their terrible stories we would be successful in passing a new law. We organized education and awareness campaigns on sex trafficking and labor trafficking in the U.S. and abroad. And, perhaps most important, we dared to challenge a subtext in the mainstream human rights movement, a subtext that said, "If we can only get AIDS, STDs, violence, exploitation and rape, drug addiction and drug trafficking, international organized crime and other horrible elements out of prostitution, then it could be a legitimate career option for young women. ---- In addition to the three Ps (Prevention, Prosecution, and Protection) we also need the four Rs: rescue, rehabilitation, restoration, and reintegration. ---- Human trafficking ... must be fought on three fronts: Supply, demand, distribution. You have to address all three at one time instead of just one or the other. Preventive campaigns without interdiction, without the high penalties that make it high risk, will not work. Likewise, it is important to address the demand side: the customers who purchase trafficked humans. There is explosive growth of child prostitution worldwide, often linked to trafficking. [T]he phenomenon is fueled by Western demand, and the U.S. increasingly is addressing demand. ---- Victims of trafficking often endure brutal conditions that result in serious physical and mental health problems. These include HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, as well as other serious communicable diseases such as hepatitis and tuberculosis. Rape, assault, battery, and other forms of violence are also common. Victims of human trafficking also have reproductive problems such as
pelvic inflammatory disease,
forced abortion, and/or abortion related complications. Unwanted pregnancies are common. Many trafficking victims become addicted to
alcohol or other
drugs, used to numb the physical pain of long-standing abuse. Finally, the health implications of sex trafficking extend not only to victims and their children, but also to the customers/users, who can be infected or become carriers and transmitters of these diseases. In the U.S., victims are being trafficked from countries as disparate as India, Thailand, Russia, Cameroon, Mexico, Honduras, and many more. Most often, they are from resource poor countries with more than their share of serious health problems. Some of these countries have a thriving sex industry make them epicenters for epidemics. And where people are being moved vast distances around the globe to do someone else's bidding for someone else's gain, the epidemics are moving with them, thereby having a direct impact on the health of the destination country. ---- Media reports would have us believe that commercial sexual exploitation is confined to a few poor regions of the world. But new evidence demonstrates that every country, rich or poor, North or South, produces its own child sexual abusers. Laws and law enforcement to prevent child sexual exploitation are hopelessly inadequate. Around the world, the definition of a child varies so widely as to make it impossible to have a cooperative effort protecting children from sexual exploitation. In Tanzania and the Philippines, the age of majority is 12; in a dozen other countries, it is 14: over 100 countries set the age of majority at 18. But these same countries have variations on age of consent to sexual relations. Thus, what may be illegal sexual relations or statutory rape in England may be legal in a Southeast Asian country. A country that prohibits child prostitution but makes the age of majority 12 has no protection for a teenage child targeted by an adult exploiter. . Countries must examine their definitions of child and the age of consent for sexual relations. As much as possible, nations should regularize these definitions, taking into account what we already know about the universal physical, psychological and emotional development of a human being. Only an international campaign can make cooperation among law enforcement agencies feasible." ---- Survivors have a great deal to offer in the realm of anti-trafficking work. They are the ones who have real-life experience with trafficking. They have a knowledge and expertise that cannot be gained from any textbook or course of training. We need to make our programs more survivor-centered, not out of pity for the survivors, but because every aspect of our programs, whether prevention, prosecution, or protection, will be strengthened, and ultimately more successful, if we do incorporate survivors. For example: • was a survivor who traced the trafficking routes in one of the first sex trafficking cases in the U.S. She identified the small town in Mexico where the recruiting took place, described the four-day walk through the Mexican desert and across the Rio Grande, told of the houses in transit cities where the traffickers harbored them, and identified the series of trailer brothels in a small rural town in Florida where she and many other young women and children were forced into prostitution through violence, threats, and intimidation. This intelligence was critical in designing interventions tailored to the problem. It could not be readily obtained in any other way. • It was a survivor in India who returned to her trafficker with a group of anti-trafficking law enforcement officials, and led them to the brothel to which she was trafficked when she was 11, to show us the hollow wall behind which children were hidden whenever there were raids, resulting in the rescue of some fifteen more children that day. • It is survivors who have designed the most successful rehabilitation programs for other survivors. Why? Because they know in intimate detail the physical and mental hell of slavery and can therefore shape programs that hit the mark, both for emergency shelters when victims are first rescued, and for longer term employment and education programs that can help people learn new skills for survival. == Publications ==