CNS STORY: Conference aims to make face of human trafficking more visible

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CNS Story:

TRAFFICKING-VICTIMS Oct-18-2004 (940 words) xxxn

Conference aims to make face of human trafficking more visible

By Nancy Frazier O'Brien
Catholic News Service

BALTIMORE (CNS) -- Giving names and faces to the victims of human trafficking around the world "makes this human harm visible," a senior State Department adviser said Oct. 16 at a daylong conference on recognizing the signs of trafficking.

Laura Lederer, the State Department's senior adviser on trafficking, was commenting on the conference's opening talk, delivered by Peter Landesman, a New York Times Magazine investigative journalist who wrote a Jan. 25 cover story on human trafficking.

His wife, photojournalist Kimberlee Acquaro, also addressed the conference at Baltimore's College of Notre Dame of Maryland, sponsored by the college, the Baltimore province of the School Sisters of Notre Dame and a variety of religious, social justice and community organizations.

Landesman, whose investigation focused on human trafficking for sexual servitude, said many see the sex trade as something that takes place in Asian countries. But, he said, the situation in the United States "is as bad if not worse than any other countries we've heard of."

"Sex trafficking is invisible but it is everywhere," he added. "It is not only not rare, it is alive and well and burgeoning."

Landesman told the stories of the U.S.-born Andrea, who was sold or abandoned in the United States at about age 4 and spent the next 12 years as a sex slave on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border; Nicole, a young Russian woman who was smuggled into the United States but narrowly escaped sex slavery when U.S. immigration officials detained her; and Montserrat, born in Mexico and smuggled into Arizona at age 13, who was locked in an apartment and forced to work as a prostitute until she escaped her captors two years later.

"A story like this is only powerful if you get to the victims," the journalist said.

Landesman said the girls and women often are afraid to tell anyone about their plight because their captors have drilled into them that they -- or members of their families back home -- will be killed if word gets out. They often do not speak English and they are told they will be arrested by U.S. authorities if they admit to selling sex, even if they do not receive the money.

"Because of the hidden-in-plain-sight nature" of sex trafficking, it is often hard to distinguish between "the hooker, the con artist and the sex slave," he said. "She's not going to tell us" initially because her captors have given her a story and told her to stick with it, he added.

Landesman said one aspect of the story that his employers have not allowed him to pursue is the demand for the services of women and children trafficked for sexual purposes.

"Who are the men on top of these girls?" he asked. "In a certain sense, they are us."

The reporter said he wanted to look into "what trigger gets flipped in a man that he can be on top of an 11-year-old girl and not ask her story? What allows us to become monsters, even temporarily?"

Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, up to 5,000 people a year could receive special visas if they are deemed to be victims of "severe forms of trafficking in persons" and are willing to cooperate in prosecution of their captors. So far, only 137 cases have been successfully completed, Lederer said.

The law defines "severe forms of trafficking in persons" as "sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud or coercion" or involving minors or "the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud or coercion, for the purpose of subjecting that person to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage or slavery."

With official estimates of 18,000 to 20,000 trafficking victims entering the United States each year, "there may be as many as 600,000 to 800,000 who have come here over the past two decades," she added.

"She's still out there," Lederer said. "We haven't rescued her, we haven't rehabilitated her, we haven't restored her."

Acquaro, who took the photographs for Landesman's article, said her husband often focuses on the bigger picture while she sees projects such as the trafficking piece more in terms of its impact on individuals.

She told of meeting one Mexican mother and father whose daughter had been taken to the United States by sex traffickers and whose grandchild was being held as "collateral" to assure the daughter's cooperation.

After the New York Times Magazine article ran, Acquaro said, authorities in New York and Mexico held a joint raid that led to the rescue of the young woman and her baby and to the prosecution of many in the network that had enslaved her.

The "remarkably resilient" Montserrat returned to Mexico after her escape and went back to school at age 19, the photographer said. She now lives at a Mexican shelter for former child prostitutes.

Sister Mary Ellen Dougherty, a School Sister of Notre Dame who works with the U.S. bishops' Migration and Refugee Services in Washington, spoke about the progress of four Mexican girls -- ages 14 to 17 -- who were victims of sex trafficking at a home in a quiet neighborhood in Plainfield, N.J. The home, discussed in Landesman's story, was raided in February 2002 by Plainfield police.

"The four young women are doing very, very well," said Sister Dougherty, manager for outreach, education and technical assistance in MRS' human trafficking program.

One remains in Catholic Charities foster care, one returned to Mexico and the other two have gotten good jobs in the United States, she said.

END

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