Sex Trafficking and Prostitution
Who's Stealing Little Black Girls?
Published August 13, 2009 @ 08:05AM PT
Across America, young African-American girls are vanishing from homes, schools, and neighborhoods and reappearing in brothels, escort agencies, and strip clubs. But what's happening to them isn't magic- it's slavery. And the insidious part of the trick is that no one seems to be helping them.
Across America, about 800,000 children are reported missing each year, 33% of which are African-American. In New York City last year, half of reported missing children were black and 60% were female. And these aren't 17-and-a-half-year-olds; most of the girls were between 13 and 15. Other urban areas like Atlanta, Washington DC, Chicago, and Los Angeles with large African-American populations also have high instances of young black girls being kidnapped or "running away". But what's happening to these girls? Surely they don't vanish into thin air?
They vanish, in fact, into pimps' pockets; these girls end up as trafficking victims in the commercial sex industry. Some meet pimps on the street and are deceived or coerced into street prostitution. Others are forced into strip clubs or filmed for pornography. Still others are advertised on Craigslist, escort agency websites, and other corners of the Internet. They are just as much human trafficking victims as the Vietnamese women enslaved in brothels in Thailand or the Guatemalan girl held in a home in El Paso.
However, many law enforcement agents still understand human trafficking as an international crime and seek it out primarily among communities of immigrants. According to the AMBER Ready Inc./Foundation,
Law enforcement in general only discusses human trafficking in terms of the Asian and Latino immigrant population while ignoring the threat to young and under-aged indigenous Black and Latino women.
In addition to the lack of attention by law enforcement, significant public outcry has claimed missing black kids are not featured in the national mainstream media as much as missing white kids. In an entirely un-scientific study, I thought about the last few missing kids I remember, and yes, all of them were white. I live in Washington, DC, a majority African-American area, and all I can remember are stories of missing white kids. True, my memory could be faulty, but I think few would argue that missing black and white kids get truly equal time on the national news.
So between a faulty understanding of human trafficking and a racially-biased national media, young black girls are falling through not so much cracks as gaping holes in America's safety nets. And at the bottom of those holes are pimps waiting to make money and johns wanting to "get lucky". At the bottom of those holes is a life of rape and abuse and slavery.
We know who's stealing little black girls, and they aren't magicians or illusionists. They're human traffickers, and it's time we put an end to their act.
New Jersey Pimp “Prince” Ruled Women from a Throne
Published August 10, 2009 @ 03:00AM PT
He called himself "Prince," a self-styling that had nothing to do with his heritage and everything to do with the autocratic way he ruled and controlled women. For almost 20 years, real-life pimp Allen Brown Jr. aka "Prince" beat and exploited the women he forced or coerced into prostitution, including ruling them from an actual throne. But despite his pretensions, Brown was nothing special.
As a pimp, Brown sought out vulnerable women for his "stable". He found them at bus stops, train stations, and night clubs. He found women desperate for money, love, stability, or a home. Some of them were already addicted to drugs, and those who were got their first fixes from Brown. Once he became their supplier, his autocratic control tightened.
Once they were addicted and under his control, Brown would send the women out to achieve their nightly quota, which ranged from $500 to $1000. If they failed to reach the quota, the women were beaten and/or locked out onto the street until they returned with the full amount of cash. Brown would also withhold fixes from the women who came home short and let their addiction force them back to serve another set of clients. In this way, he kept many of the women enslaved for years.
Brown was not unique for a pimp, in any way other than his ability to evade capture for 20 years. The ostentatious displays of complete control over women (such as issuing edicts from a living room throne), the quotas, and the punishments for failing to bring home money are all par for the course in the pimping game. Brown is a pimp and a trafficker because he forced or coerced his victims into prostitution before taking their money. And in that he wasn't unique either.
What may surprise some people about this trafficker was that all of the 47 women who Brown recruited were American citizens, and all but a couple were adults. Often we assume that only foreign women and children are forced into prostitution, and American adult women choose it willingly. Brown's case is a great example of how a pimp can use tools like drug addiction to keep adult women in slavery, even when those women are enslaved only a few miles from home. They came to rely on Brown for everything, and his coercion and threats of violence prevented their leaving.
Allen Brown Jr. has been indicted on charges of first-degree racketeering, human trafficking, money laundering, drug possession, theft by extortion, possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose, and failure to pay state and gross income tax. He faces 20 to life on the human trafficking charge alone. In addition, seven other people who worked with Brown, including his mother, have also been charged.
This case is by no means unusual, and its message is as plain as can be: pimping is a crime, not a cool occupation or hobby. The gaudy trappings of the pimp may look royal to some, but his throne is built on rape, exploitation, and slavery. History has shown that true monarchs never stay in power long. Hopefully, that is true of the prince-pimp as well.
And after all, a throne in New Jersey is the definition of ridiculous.
China's "Comfort Women" Exposed in New Film
Published August 09, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
The topic of "comfort women", women forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during World War II, recently got a lot of publicity when the U.S. House of Representative passed a resolution on the topic. But lesser known is the story of the thousands of Chinese women who were trafficked into prostitution and forced marriage in the early 1950s. A new Chinese film, 8,000 Girls Ascend the Heavenly Mountain, tells their story.
In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the Chinese government sent around 200,000 soldiers and 40,000 young women and girls to the far Western provinces of China, which at the time were heavily Muslim areas. The communist government's goal was to marry off the girls to the army's officers (often arranged as a reward for service and seniority), and thus populate the region with the children of patriots and communists, who would soon outnumber the Muslims. The women were claimed via force, deception, and coercion and then forced to marry whichever officer chose them. Some were brainwashed and convinced they were doing a patriotic duty to create a "new China" for their children.
Xiao Yequn was 15 when she was first brought to the military camp. First, she refused to marry the significantly older man she had been assigned to.
When I found out he was nine years older than me I was unwilling to be his wife. He immediately took out his pistol and put a bullet in the chamber. I dared not resist and the next year we got married.
Simultaneously, Chairman Mao was ordering women in prostitution to be sent in forced service to Chinese troops to undergo "thought reform." The accounts of rape, suicide, forced marriage, forced prostitution, and other abuses from the survivors of this period of Chinese history are not terribly unlike those of the Japanese and Korean comfort women. Yet, the plight of these trafficked Chinese women is much less understood or publicized. Perhaps the lack of information on this issue is due to the Chinese government's reluctance to examine historical (and current) human rights violations.
While it is unclear exactly how 8,000 Girls Ascend the Heavenly Mountain will address the issue, it will hopefully bring a better understanding of the experience of women trafficked into forced marriage in China to Chinese and international audiences. And more importantly, it will hopefully bring a greater sense of peace and justice to the women who survived the ordeal.
Image from theonlinephotographer.typepad.com
The Price of Sex
Published August 08, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
Photo journalist Mimi Chakarova has created a great collection of videos and photos of Eastern European women telling their stories of being enslaved in prostitution. Four of the videos tell the stories of individual survivors, and two others are focused on women at risk and how sex trafficking works. You can view all these at: www.priceofsex.org.
This project tells the story of one form of trafficking from one region, affecting one group of victims. The issue of trafficking women into prostitution is, of course, a problem in areas other than Eastern Europe and former Soviet-bloc countries. However, as many of the videos explain, women in this area have been some of the most vulnerable to exploitation in prostitution. Many face the impossible choice of remaining jobless and poor in their home country or risking trafficking by taking a job overseas. It's a risk they know, and they take it because staying and starving is not a viable choice.
It's also important to note that many women who are trafficked knowingly and willingly enter prostitution. While the most publicized stories are about women who thought they would be waitresses or nannies, some take a job in the Netherlands or Germany in what they expect will be legal, safe prostitution on their own terms. Even after making that choice, women can be trafficked one their freedom is removed or their labor stolen and exploited. A woman who took a job as a prostitute and one who took a job as a waitress are equally trafficked once they loose their ability to leave or control their situation. The women from Eastern Europe thought they were taking a number of different kids of jobs, jobs that all turned into slavery.
The price of sex is higher than you think, and Chakarova eloquently tells the stories of just how high it can be.
Image from humantraffickingproject.blogspot.com
Sex Slave Training Video Game For Sale Under New Euphemism
Published August 05, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
Earlier this year, women's rights blogger Jen brought you a great story about Amazon.com's refusal to sell the Japanese video game Rapelay, where the main character/player is a stalker and rapist. That company is still selling rape games, plus games focused on "sexual slave training." To skirt regulations, however, they've just given the games new, more euphemistic names.
The website BGamebox which sells these games via download to home computer has recently "removed" the offending categories, but in a Craigslistesque move is just going to rename them. The "ryoujoku" (rape) category has been renamed the "Platinum" category and the and "choukyou" (sexual slave training) category is now the "Thoroughbred" category. They're also renaming individual games. For example, "Gang Raped by the Entire Village: Girls Covered in Milky Liquid has become the slightly-tamer sounding The Trap Set by the Entire Village: Bodies Covered in Milky Liquid. Wow, that new title leaves me totally wondering what on Earth that liquid could be! The content of the games, remains the same.
The fact that these video games, which train players (often young men) how to rape and abuse women and train them as sex slaves, are for sale is bad enough. But these new cleaned up titles mean than now they might be stumbled upon by someone looking for a much less nefarious game. A kid looking for a video game about horses now has a chance of finding one about training women to be sex slaves! How could this possibly be considered an improvement? All this change is doing is marketing exploitative, x-rated video games to unsuspecting audiences.
I did a quick search on Amazon.com for video games and "thoroughbred" and "platinum", and found nothing but games about horses and war, so it looks like Amazon.com is still seeing though the ruse. But the thought of video games that encourage rape and trafficking of women and girls are available to teen boys online is a disturbing one.
Image from escapistmagazine.com
The Role of Parents in Child Trafficking
Published August 01, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
Across the world and here in the U.S., parents sometimes play a role in the trafficking of their own children. The parents' intentions vary from the purely criminal to the completely innocent, and everywhere in between. Here are some of the common ways in which parents play a role in the trafficking of their children.
Parents Directly Traffick Kids
Sadly, sometimes, parents directly traffick their children. I worked with one case in the U.S. where a father was giving his young sons to pedophiles in exchange for beer and cigarettes. A case recently cited in the State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report involved a five-year-old sold into prostitution by her stepmother in Nicaragua. Direct parental trafficking can be as simple as a mother trading her teenage daughter to the landlord for rent that month, or as complicated as parents involved in a larger, multi-child crime ring. In my experience, the smaller scale parental trafficking, and especially in exchange for drugs, rent, food, etc. is more often the case.
Parents Knowingly Sell Children into Trafficking
Often, this is the sort of parental trafficking you hear about in the media: A destitute family in India/Thailand/Bolivia sells one child into slavery in order to feed the rest. Sometimes the situation is that simple, but more frequently it's more complicated. Parents may realize they are signing their child into debt bondage, but believe the debt can be worked off or is limited to a short time period. Parents may intend to send their child to work, but may believe he or she will be better paid, better fed, or work in less dangerous conditions than turns out to be the case. In one case, a Bangladeshi mother sold her daughter into debt bondage to work as a domestic servant but thought the debt would be repaid in 5 years and the daughter well-fed during her time working. In reality, the debt continued to grow and the girl was allowed a small bowl of rice a day, with a serving of vegetables once a week.
Parents Are Negligent or Abusive and Allow Trafficking
Parental negligence or abuse can allow for child trafficking to occur. Children may run away from an abusive home and fall victim to traffickers. They may be more susceptible to predatory pimps offering them the love they have been stared for. Parental negligence may even make it easier for traffickers to kidnap children or otherwise force them away from home. In the U.S., foster youth are extremely vulnerable to trafficking in part because of issues with parental negligence and abuse. I worked with one case of a girl who was trafficked into prostitution at 15 because she ran away from a negligent, abusive home.
Parents Are Duped By Traffickers
In some cases, traffickers trick parents into believing their children are going to school or to work, especially in another country, and will be well-paid and cared for. Sometimes the trafficker is a distant relative promising a Western education. Sometimes the trafficker is promising a job as dancer/waitress/model which turns out to be prostitution. Sometimes, once the child is gone and no money is sent home and no letter written, the parents realize what has happened. Other times, traffickers may force or forge correspondence home to tell the parents their children are safe and happy and the money is being put in a "special account". This is a common technique of traffickers, especially where parents are poorly educated or illiterate.
West Africa to EU: Major Sex Trafficking Circuit
Published July 31, 2009 @ 08:07AM PT
A report released by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime this week identified a major and continuous trafficking route from Western Africa to Western Europe. Most of the people moved along this route are women and girls from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Cameroon on their way to be forced into prostitution in the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and other EU countries. You can read the report here.
According to the report, this trafficking circuit is huge. It moves between 3800 and 5700 women into the EU annually, to the tune of over $200 million dollars a year. And yet despite those huge numbers, it is estimated that West African trafficking victims comprise only about 10% of the trafficking victims enslaved in commercial sex in Western Europe. If $200 million dollars is only a tiny percentage of the money being made through forced prostitution in Europe, imagine how much money exists in the industry as a whole. We're talking billions of dollars generated by the enslavement of human beings all over Europe. And when there is that much money to be had by the criminals, you can be the crime becomes harder to fight.
The system usually used on this circuit is debt bondage. The trafficker gives the victim a "loan" of somewhere between $40,000 and $55,000 to cover the costs of entry into the EU, usually including false documents, transportation, housing, etc. The trafficker then creates a "contract" detailing the method and time period of repayment. However, victims are often deceived about the nature and conditions of work awaiting them. Even if the victims know they will be engaging in prostitution in Europe, they are often lied to about the working conditions, their ability to leave or say "no", or the amount of money they will get to keep. Victims are then forced into prostitution on the traffickers terms "until the debt is repaid", which is sometimes never.
More often than not, victims are flown in (another reason we need better training for immigration personnel at airports). Adult women may be presented as the trafficker's wife or newly hired maid. Minor girls are often told to ask for asylum, after which they are placed temporarily in a juvenile shelter. It's easy for the trafficker to then take the girl from the shelter. Once in the EU, the victims are often rotated between countries or cities. This serves the dual purpose of keeping the faces (and bodies) changing for the male buyers and keeping the victims disoriented and confused.
This route is one which the international community has known about for a long time. But because of the hidden nature of the crime, it is still thriving.
