Sex Trafficking and Prostitution
Teen Trafficking Survivor Gets Life Without Parole
Published August 25, 2009 @ 05:00PM PT
These days, the Rhodes scholars of the criminal justice system seem to like locking people up for life the way Mark Sanford likes frequent filer miles on Aerolineas. Well, they've managed another winner: sentencing 16-year-old trafficking victim Sara Kruzan to die in prison for killing her pimp. My partner-in-crime-blogging Matt has the criminal justice perspective on what happened, but here's how things look from Sara's perspective.
When Sara met G.G., the 31-year-old man who would become her pimp, she was 11. Sara's mom struggled with drug addiction, so when G.G. would drive Sara and her friends to the roller skating rink or the mall, it felt like having a real parent around. He gave Sara presents and told her she was special- so special, that she should never give sex away for free. He convinced her she was a product.
G.G. groomed Sara like this for two years before he raped her. By then, his control was complete and he forced her into prostitution. Sara and the other girls who G.G. exploited were out on the streets from 6pm to 6am, every night. Twelve hours a night, seven days a week, for three years, Sara was raped by strangers so G.G. could profit. After three years, she snapped, and she killed him.
Surviving sexual violence is one of the most difficult things in the world. Surviving repeated sexual violence as a child doubtlessly takes its mental and physical toll. G.G. stole Sara's 8th, 9th, and 10th grade years- money and rape taking the place of dances and dates. How can a person ever recover from something like that? But Sara survived.
What Sara did was terrible, and she knows it. But if ever there are mitigating circumstances for a crime, these are them. To tell someone like Sara who has overcome such abuse that her destiny is to die in prison, no matter how much she changes, is cruel.
The vast majority of women in prison have histories of abuse from families and/or intimate partners. Does this mean they are not accountable for their actions? Of course not. Murder should always be punished. But Sara Kruzan's case is one of ludicrous over-sentencing of a young girl who escaped from hell in a heinous way.
Sara Kruzan deserves to be punished. But she also deserves hope. She deserves hope that she didn't survive being raped and sold for three years for nothing. She deserves hope that the darkest chapter of her life has passed, and a horizon lies ahead. She deserves hope that she can change.
But in Sara Kruzan's life without parole, there is no hope.
Are Robots the Future of Prostitution?
Published August 20, 2009 @ 02:00PM PT
A creative new solution has been proposed to the problem of tourists demanding commercial sex in areas where women are unwilling to supply it: let them do robots. Tourism futurologist Ian Yeoman has pointed out that the possibility of robots in service roles such as waiters is very real in the next 40 years, so why not robots as prostitutes?
Supposedly, these robo-women would not pass along diseases such as HIV and other STDs, and wouldn't pose the serious questions of ethics that prostitution with real women and girls involves. Unless, of course, you have concerns about paying for sex with an inanimate object, which is a whole other issue. In a way, robots would be the perfect prostitutes. They have no shame, feel no pain, and have no emotional or physical fall-out from the trauma which prostitution often causes. As machines, they can't be victims of human trafficking. It would certainly end the prostitution/human trafficking debate. But despite all the arguments I can think of for this being a good idea, I've gotta admit it creeps me out a little bit. Have we devalued sex so much that is doesn't even matter if what we have sex with isn't human? Has the commercial sex industry made sex so mechanical that it will inevitably become.... mechanical?
Maybe robo-prostitutes are just a concept developed by a "tourism futurologist," whatever that is. But maybe they're also a bit of a methaphor for how we expect women in prostitution to be today; we already see them as robots. Pimps and traffickers see them as money-making machines. Johns see them as instruments of pleasure. No one cares how they got into prostitution or why they stay- force, choice, deception, desperation. What matters is that once in prostitution, the industry treats women like non-humans. The commercial sex industry is not about individual women as people, it's about the revenue they generate. It's about their output. And the fact that they do feel shame and pain and trauma takes a backseat to their ability to make money or pleasure.
Maybe the future's not as far away as we think. Maybe it's already here.
Image from canalred.com
Pedophile Beards
Published August 20, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
Not that I ever goof around on Facebook when I'm bored at work, but if I had, I might have stumbled upon a link to a satirical infomercial for a product called Pedophile Beards. The video is obviously meant to be funny. However, my sense of humor has been a little warped from years of violence against women and children work and too many Red Bull-fueled late night comedy shows. So is this funny? Why or why not?
While this video may appeal to some senses of humor more than others, it brings up an excellent point: we have a very clear picture in our heads of what a pedophile looks like. He's a white guy in his 40s with an outdated fashion sense and, perhaps, some unwieldy facial hair. But like all stereotypes, identifying pedophiles on the basis of what they look like means missing a lot of people who would seek to have sex with children.
There's a prevailing idea that the men who buy children for sex are like the guy in this ad- obviously creepy. They're not. They're fire fighters and policemen and teachers and businessmen. They have wives and children and families of their own. Some seek out children for sex, while others just want someone "young and fresh", regardless of the girl's age. And because they don't wear signs (or glasses) that declare "I am a child predator", they are much harder to identify. It's important for us to recognize that a beard does not a pedophile make.
Thankfully, unlike this video may claim, looking like a pedophile isn't popular. Acting like one by buying sex with children is, unfortunately, becoming increasingly so. Maybe it's time we started a new trend?
How Natural Disasters Make Children Slaves
Published August 20, 2009 @ 07:22AM PT
Natural disasters can destroy homes, raze farmlands, and devastate families. They can wipe out whole communities in moments and cause damage that costs millions of dollars to repair. But can natural disasters turn children into slaves? According to a recent report from ECPAT International, they sure can.
ECPAT International found increases in trafficking of children after severe droughts in Swaziland in 2007 and flooding in India in 2008. In Swaziland, an increased number of children were pulled out of school; their families traded their bodies for food and water. In India, children were sent to work as bricklayers and seamstresses to make up for destroyed business. Other girls left vulnerable by the floods were sold as brides into forced marriages.
But natural disasters aren't the only tragedies that push children into slavery; man-made conflicts can be just as devastating. Children in the Congo, Guinea, and other West African nations living in refugee camps are trading sex for basic supplies and food. In some cases, the adults who exploit them include camp leaders, teachers, and humanitarian aid workers.
So how do natural disasters and conflicts turn children into slaves? For the most part, these children were already vulnerable to human trafficking before the disaster struck. They were living at some level of poverty with little education and few resources. The disaster pushes children and their families over the edge into destitution and desperation. Sometimes the disaster causes a family to send a child away to work, a risk that ends in slavery. Sometimes the family must marry off daughters they cannot feed. Sometimes criminal businessmen will traffic children to regain profits lost to a natural disaster. The possibilities are as endless as the supply of children whose lives the disaster has destroyed.
Human trafficking is deeply connected to and propelled by hurricanes, floods, fires, tsunamis, and other natural disasters. And it's also deeply connected to civil wars and other armed conflicts. So the next time you hear about a natural disaster, remember that once the emergency aid organizations leave, the nightmare isn't over. And for some children, the nightmare is just beginning.
Image from ens-newswire.com
Legal Prostitution in Australia a "Failure"
Published August 18, 2009 @ 10:53AM PT
Ten years ago, Australia made a risky policy move it thought would help protect women and children: it legalized prostitution. Today, only 10% of the prostitution industry operates in Australia's legal brothels. The other 90% takes place in underground, illegal sex markets thick with forced prostitution and human trafficking victims.
The University of Queensland Working Group on Human Trafficking recently released a report stating that the prostitution laws in Australia had failed. Since 1999, women in Australia have had the option of working legally in licensed brothels or on their own. The hope was that women with an entrepreneurial spirit and a passion for commercial sex would set up their own businesses, and make everything safe, legal, and regulated. That hasn't happened.
What has happened, instead, is entrepreneurial pimps have lured and trafficked Asian women to Australia and set up illegal brothels with lower prices. Trafficking is "booming" in Queensland, and there are few laws to help protect women who are lured or coerced into prostitution against their will. And as legal brothels try and compete with the trafficking boom, they cut costs, which often involves cutting freedom and benefits for women. Even in the legal, liscenced brothels of Queensland, women have reported being coerced into working under unfair conditions or against their will.
Australian advocates and policy-makers are offering a number of solutions to this problem, everything from increasing the police force looking for illegal brothels to making the legal brothel's fees lower to adding new legal protections for immigrant women in the commercial sex industry. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that legal prostitution in Australia isn't working to protect women. But how should it be fixed?
Here's my vote: Legal prostitution in Australia isn't working to protect women because legal prostitution doesn't work to protect women. It will always be cheaper to set up an illegal brothel full of slave labor than to pay fees and salaries and health care to licensed workers. As long as there are men demanding cheap commercial sex, there will be traffickers willing to supply it. And where there is a legal market, there will be more men demanding sex, though not always at legal market prices.
Australia's experiment is one more example of when the theory of prostitution and the practice of it don't match up. In theory, Queensland should now be full of empowered women owning and working in commercial sex businesses and a vast majority (if not all) of women in commercial sex participating freely. In practice, it is a tiny, ineffective legal commercial sex industry with little entrepreneurship and a massive, booming industry of sexual slavery.
Image from abc.net.au
Inspired, Activist Creates NGO to Save Cambodian Girls
Published August 16, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
Nomi Network Co-Founder Diana Mao tells the powerful story of how a heart-breaking trip to Cambodia led her to create her own non-profit organization to help girls and women in Cambodia find freedom from slavery. You can check out my guest post on their blog here.
My first encounter with sex trafficking was when I was a micro-finance research fellow in Cambodia in 2005. My task was to interview over 300 micro-finance clients, many of whom lived in remote villages and made less than $1 per day. The experience was a rude awakening. A micro-finance client and father of 7 children offered to give me his daughter to bring back to the United States, in the hope that she would have a better life. As I stared into his eyes, I understood that he did not want to give up his daughter but that his request was a result of desperate poverty. In this same village very young girls were being recruited to work in brothels.
My experience in Cambodia led me to form the non-profit organization, Nomi Network. Sex traffickers prey on poor and unemployed women. The goal of Nomi Network is to empower women economically by employing them in manufacturing jobs in the fashion industry, and to help create a market for the products they make. Once women have stable employment and a steady income, they will no longer be at risk to sex traffickers. To ensure success and sustainability, Nomi Network coordinates the efforts of the women with manufacturers, retailers, and consumers.
Consumer purchases can contribute greatly towards the eradication of sex trafficking. The total market for illicit sex trafficking is approximately $28 billion dollars. What if just a fraction of that amount was channeled into creating opportunities for girls that have been exploited? Girls, some as young as 5, who were once exploited, violated, and stripped of their dignity could be given the hope of a future. Nomi Network offers survivors of sex trafficking gainful employment by ensuring that there is a demand for their products and not their body.
You can help break the vicious cycle of sexual exploitation and invest in their lives by purchasing Nomi Network's signature product, the "Buy Her Bag, Not Her Body," tote bag. The tote bags are made from recycled rice-bag paper, and are made by women who are either survivors or at risk from sex trafficking. The women who make the bags receive competitive wages, medical care, childcare, and one meal per day. In addition, a portion of the proceeds from each sale will be allocated to creating more training and job opportunities for survivors. Put your consumption power to use and pre-order a bag today for $20 at www.nominetwork.org. Bags will also be available at various boutiques for $25. Please look for a full listing on our website.
For more information about Nomi Network:
Mexican Drug Cartels Switch to Selling Humans
Published August 13, 2009 @ 11:19AM PT
Here's a math problem you won't remember from school: Which is higher, the black market value of a pound of cocaine or the black market value of a 13-year-old girl? If you guessed the girl, you get 100% on this math test.
When a drug cartel trafficks a pound of cocaine into the U.S., they can only sell it once. When they traffic a young woman into the U.S., they can sell her again and again. This is a simple economic fact that I (and others in this field) have been aware of for years. However, it seems some Mexican drug cartels have recently discovered this additional potential for profit, and they are now switching from trafficking heroine to trafficking human beings.
The idea that drug traffickers will suddenly switch to humans is even more disturbing in the light of an increased national discussion around legalizing some drugs, like marijuana. What would the pot traffickers do then? Would they get respectable jobs in the brand new legal marijuana industry? Or would they use their criminal contacts to traffic harder drugs, guns, and people? I'm of the inclination that while some criminals might go clean in a new legal drug industry, the rest will see how much more cash they can make through the illegal sale of human beings.
What do you think?
CNN recently did a story on this disturbing new trend, which feature anonymous interviews with women being trafficked into the U.S. by some of the Mexican cartels.
