Sex Slavery in America

The Good Men Project interviews a

special agent with Homeland
Security Investigations about sex
slavery in the U.S.--which is far more
common than most people think.

The promise that we're working to effectuate is actually the

13th Amendment promise that no one in the United States
shall be subjected to involuntary servitude. It doesn't matter
whether that's in a farm, in a brothel, or as a domestic
servant. If somebody is being forced to work against their
will, if they're trapped, can't get out, then that it is somebody
who would be considered a victim of modern slavery.

---Ambassador-at-Large Luis CdeBaca, Director, Office to

Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, U.S. State
Department

♦◊♦

We have written extensively about the many facets of the sex

industry, making clear that there is indeed room for many
points of view when it comes to porn, stripping, and
even prostitution. But now I am going to talk about an
under-reported problem that is less morally ambiguous:
sexual slavery.

Sex trafficking within the U.S. is legally defined as

commercial sex acts induced by force, fraud, or coercion or
commercial sex acts in which the individual induced to
perform commercial sex has not attained 18 years of age. The
average age of entry into the commercial sex industry in the
U.S. is between 12 to 14 years old.

The federal law is very clear on this issue: Trafficking Victims

Protection Act of 2000, the Trafficking Victims Protection
Reauthorization Act of 2003, the Trafficking Victims
Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005, and the Trafficking
Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008.

Sex traffickers frequently target vulnerable people with

histories of abuse and then use violence, threats, lies, false
promises, debt bondage, or other forms of control and
manipulation keep victims involved in the sex industry. Sex
trafficking exists within the broader commercial sex trade,
often at much higher rates than most people realize or
understand. Sex trafficking has been found in a wide variety
of venues of the overall sex industry, including residential
brothels, hostess clubs, online escort services, brothels
disguised as massage parlors, strip clubs, and street
prostitution.

To understand this problem on the ground, I recently spoke

to a Special Agent with Homeland Security Investigations.

MATLACK: How do you define human trafficking?

AGENT: Two ways: labor trafficking and sex trafficking.

Labor trafficking is basically modern-day slavery, people
working and not being paid for their work, living in god-
awful conditions. And then the other side is sex trafficking,
people that are forced into commercial sex acts against their
will.

MATLACK: When you’re dealing with young girls,

does the definition of the girl being young enough
make it human trafficking?
AGENT: If the girl’s a minor, she doesn’t need to be forced
into it for it to be human trafficking. If it’s a 15-year-old girl
and you’re her pimp, even if she wants to go out and have sex
for money, that’s still considered human trafficking. Once
somebody’s an adult, you have to be able to prove that
through force, fraud, or coercion that this girl was forced into
those sex acts.

MATLACK: And so what’s the breakdown in terms of

the cases that you’re pursuing between minors and
not minors?

AGENT: I would say it’s almost 50-50.

MATLACK: Can you help me understand how

common it is?

AGENT: It is a lot more common that people think. Most

people can’t differentiate between human trafficking and
human smuggling. People think that this could never happen
here, when actually it’s there. You just may not see it, may
not know about it, may not hear about it. But, believe it or
not, it’s a pretty common occurrence.

MATLACK: So how much of what you’re doing is

folks who are bringing girls and women into the
country?

AGENT: At Homeland Security Investigations, we’re usually

dealing with foreign nationals. But that’s not to say we don’t
have cases that involve sex trafficking with U.S. citizens,
whether they’re minors or adults. But for the most part, we
tend to see more foreign nationals. I’m on a task force that’s
made up of several federal and state law enforcement
agencies.

MATLACK: So when you find confirmed sex

trafficking, are you then trying to prosecute the
johns, the pimp, or what?

AGENT: For the most part we focus on the traffickers.

Unless the john’s having sex with a 12-year-old girl and it’s
readily apparent she’s a minor, then that’s a whole different
thing. But for the most part, the johns don’t necessarily know
that this girl is being forced into sex. Most of them think,
“OK, she’s a willing prostitute, I paid her for sex, she had sex.
She’s OK with it, I’m OK with it, no problem.” It’s the
traffickers and their organizations that we try and prosecute.

MATLACK: Are they mostly sole proprietors, or are

there larger networks of human traffickers?

AGENT: There are networks. Some are just very small, one
or two people—maybe a couple of brothers or something—
and others are a little bit bigger. For the most part, it’s not
like a drug organization, where you have 100 people, from
the ones that pick the coca leaves, to making it, turning it
into cocaine, and then bringing it from Columbia to
wherever, into the United States. They’re usually not that
intricate. They do have people in foreign countries that help
provide girls, and so there are multiple players that have
their own specific roles.

MATLACK: So just walk me through how it works,

and how the coercion works, and what kinds of girls
end up in this position.

AGENT: What’s common in some of the sex trafficking from

other countries, like Mexico, for example, is that it kind of
tells a story. The girls meet this guy who treats them like
gold, and promises them the world and tell them, “Hey, we
can go to the United States, there’s work over there, and we
can make money and send money back our families, and
save money so we can build our own house in Mexico
eventually …” So they get these girls and basically jerk them
around, into falling in love with them. And once they’re here
in the U.S., all of a sudden, the grass isn’t so green, or work’s
not there, and then right off the bat it’s sort of, “Hey, well,
you’re here now, you belong to me, this is what you’re going
to do.” Or they sometimes take a little more of a softer
approach: “You know, times are tough, we need to pay rent,
this is something you can do to help. You don’t need to do it
for long, just bring in some extra money.” So psychologically,
a lot of the times the guys take over these girls, and next
thing you know, the girls are being forced against their will
into it.

And usually, when the time comes where they say no, there’s
a lot of physical abuse, verbal abuse, mental abuse. I mean, a
lot of these women feel like they’re worthless at this point,
and they don’t know what else to do. Some girls think this
guy really loves them and knows what is best. It’s amazing—
we have girls in front of us that we know are victims, and
even though they didn’t want to do this, they don’t see
themselves as victims right off the bat. They thought that
they were doing it because they love this guy, and he’s the
best thing ever, and he wouldn’t do that to them. The guys
have such a hold on them mentally.

And there are times where they’ll force these girls in with
drugs. They’ll get the girls hooked on narcotics, heroin,
cocaine, whatever it may be. Then it gets to the point where
girls can become so addicted to that that that’s the only way
that they’ll be able to get their fix is to go out and do this.
Between the mental, physical, and verbal abuse, the
traffickers usually have such a strong hold over these girls
that they have no control over what is happening to them.
And they have no control, for the most part, of being able to
get out of it.
MATLACK: What’s the youngest girl in a case that
you’ve been involved with?

AGENT: I think she was 13.

MATLACK: So if you can’t get them to admit, you

can’t prosecute, even if you have other evidence?

AGENT: We can. We can use other evidence that has been

gathered during the investigation to use that against her
traffickers.

MATLACK: So in the cases where you are able to

intervene and prosecute, what happens to these
girls?

AGENT: We have a guy that’s assigned to us full-time; he’s

called the victim assistance coordinator. He’s not a gun-
carrying, badge-carrying person. He’s a licensed therapist. If
we find the girls, besides him being able to talk to these girls,
he also helps set up getting them to a shelter, getting them
whatever sort of treatments they need. That’s what we try to
take care of first. If it’s a minor, obviously they go right to a
shelter because of her age. But, again, she has to want that.
We can’t force anything on these girls.

And then, later on down the road, depending on where the

person is from, if she is from another country and here
illegally, there are things that we can do to help give her
status, whether it be temporary or permanent while we
investigate and seek help.

MATLACK: Do you know what the recidivism rate

is?

AGENT: I don’t know, but that is always a concern of ours—

that the girl could go back to what she was doing. Often, too,
these traffickers will threaten the girls’ families, and that’s
one of the big problems we have because these girls have
been told, “I know who your mom is, I know who your sister
is, where they live. If you ever say anything to the police,
we’ll kill your family, and we’ll kill your kid.” There’s usually
a lot of threats that keep these girls from running away or
turning themselves in to the police.

MATLACK: How do you convince them to believe

that those threats aren’t real?

AGENT: Well, we don’t necessarily try to convince them that

the threats aren’t real, because we don’t know if they are. But
we just try to explain to them that the situation that they’re
in is not right, and that we can help them. We do our best to
convince them that what has been done to them for so long is
evil and wrong. At the end of the day, it’s really up to them.
We can’t force them to do anything or say anything, but we
do everything within our power to help them realize what
happened to them, and what they can do with themselves.

MATLACK: Is there anything that you’re trying to do

on your side to offer an alternative, other than
getting these girls into a safe place? Or is that just
not part of what you’re focused on?

AGENT: Well, it is. There are things in place for us to be able

to provide these girls with some sort of immigration relief.
I’m talking about a girl from a foreign country. There are
visas for trafficking victims, that, if she is a documented
trafficking victim, she can apply for. So, that being said,
besides the help that we offer them right off the bat, trying to
get them into the shelter, I do my best to explain that, first of
all, it isn’t right what was done to them. Nobody should ever
have to go through that.
But they need to ask, because, at the end of the day, if the girl
is from a foreign country and just says, “You know, send me
home, I’m illegal, I want to go back to Mexico,” or “I want to
go back to Brazil,” if that’s really what she wants, and that’s
what she asks for, we can’t stop that from happening. But we
do what we can to make sure that doesn’t happen, because
we know that she’ll go back there, and she’ll be back in the
same position.

MATLACK: And in terms of the federal

government’s stance on this being human slavery,
how seriously do you think the government’s taking
this?

AGENT: They take it very seriously. Human trafficking is

basically at the forefront of my agency, Homeland Security
Investigations. There’s lots of attention, lots of resources,
lots of money put into it to make sure that we can do our job
as effectively as possible.

MATLACK: I was listening to the Director of the

Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons
at the U.S. State Department talking about how
we’ve measured human trafficking all around the
world and never measured ourselves, and now we’re
beginning to do that because, obviously, there is
human trafficking here. Do you have any sense of
how we compare to other countries?

AGENT: I really don’t know. But we can’t be too far behind,

and I think that our government is realizing that, and the
people are realizing that. People do think, “Oh, that happens
somewhere else, not here in the United States,” but every day
it seems to surface somewhere. So if I were to take a guess, I
would say we’re about as high as most countries. We’re
probably not at the top, definitely not at the bottom, but I
don’t think we’re lacking in terms of human trafficking that
is occurring in the United States.

MATLACK: How do we solve the problem?

AGENT: Like anything else, education and information. Like

I said, I don’t think most people really realize what human
trafficking is, but more and more people know what it is. I
find myself having fewer people say, “Oh, human trafficking?
You mean like the people just jumping the border from
Mexico?” And then I have to explain to them that no, that’s
not it. But education, educating the populace, putting it out
there, letting people know what it is and how they can stop it.

Do I think it’ll ever stop? No. It’s a moneymaker, and

therefore there will always be somebody who will want to
make an easy dollar. Whether or not that’s manipulating
another person to make that dollar, it doesn’t matter.

MATLACK: How do you think about it compared to

the sex trade in general, whether it’s stripping or
non-human trafficking prostitution, or whatever?
Do you think they’re related in any way, or is it a
completely different kettle of fish?

AGENT: Like just regular prostitution?

MATLACK: Regular prostitution, stripping, porn.

There’s obviously a great proliferation of the sex
trade in general. I’m just wondering whether you
think that’s at all related to sex slavery, or if it’s just
a kind of completely different thing.

AGENT: I don’t really know. Do I think that the porn

industry has anything to do with human trafficking? No.
Prostitution, obviously, like everybody says, is one of the
oldest businesses, one of the oldest jobs in the world. It’s not
going away. Are there outside things that influence it? Yeah,
probably, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the porn
business, or the stripping, or stuff like that, really has
anything to do with it. It’s not even a fine line. It’s a pretty
distinct line between willing and not willing. So I can’t really
say one way or the other. But there’s a big distinction
between human trafficking and just prostitution.

♦◊♦

In the United States, because there is such a correlation

between child sexual abuse and child prostitution, a lot of
times it might be somebody who has that ability to figure out
which are the vulnerable girls, whether it's eighth, ninth,
tenth graders. Maybe they have been abused at home. Maybe
they're willing to run away from---mom has a new boyfriend
or what have you or they might be wrestling with an
addiction.

The pimps seem to be able to look at the women around

them, look at the girls around them, find that vulnerability.
But then, they basically offer glamour, a better life, even love.
So it's very similar to what we see with international
trafficking as well. It's basically they offer hope, and they
deliver with a nightmare.

We have a president who has the Emancipation

Proclamation in his office, not a copy, the Emancipation
Proclamation. And I think that he sees it, and I certainly see
it in the work that I do, as we're delivering on a promise that
was made 150 years ago by President Lincoln and by the
people who went and fought for freedom. So I think it's
entirely appropriate for us to call this a modern abolitionist
movement.

---Ambassador-at-Large Luis CdeBaca, Director, Office to

Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, U.S. State
Department

Learn more about human trafficking at Polaris Project, an

NGO dedicated to "combating all forms of human
trafficking and serving U.S. citizens and foreign national
victims, including men, women, and children."

♦◊♦

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