Today I participated in a Google+ Hangout with two of my heroes, Somaly Mam of the Somaly Mam Foundation, and Rachel Lloyd of GEMS Girls. Both have devoted their life’s work to fighting sex trafficking, and here’s our discussion. Let me know what you think in the comments section.
Minati, 19, was never meant to be rescued from a brothel here in the red light district of Kolkata, India. When Nick Kristof accompanied the International Justice Mission and the police on a raid in a brothel in the Songachi district last year, they were looking for a girl much younger than Minati.
It almost came as a surprise when Minati, a pseudonym I am using to protect her identity, spoke up and asked if she too could leave the brothel. Everyone assumed that she was there voluntarily and when Nick wrote about the raid in a column he mentioned her only in passing.
I caught up with Minati on my recent trip to India, and learned very quickly that she had suffered more than anyone had imagined. Her story sounds like something out of a Hollywood drama, but unfortunately Minati’s experience is an all too common path into sex slavery for girls in India, which has the largest number of human trafficking victims in the world.
If you want to understand why girls who are sex-trafficked don’t run straight to the police, Withelma Ortiz, known as T, could tell you a thing or two. The 22-year-old has a pretty good grasp on the issue — having been first sold for sex at age 10.
T was 10 years old when she met a man who said he could change her life. She had told him that she’d essentially been in foster care since birth, living with families that sexually and psychologically abused her. He was appalled. He said he wanted to take care of her. He would feed her, clothe her, take care of her when she was sick. “He basically told me that I could survive,” T recalled. “You know, when nobody cared what happened to me, nobody cared what was going on with me, I could survive.” T’s biological father was in jail, and her biological mother was nowhere to be found. She was not about to turn down the first person who ever tried to make that kind of connection with her.
In a way, the man was right: He did change her life. He began selling T for sex across the West Coast. It turned out that her youthful “tween” body was a major selling point, and he demanded that she meet a quota of a thousand dollars a night. “The chains around the mind, the captivity of the mind, it started there,” she said. “But it got to a place in which my physical life was threatened.” Her pimp would beat her mercilessly — but then would beg for her forgiveness. This was unusual for T. She was used to caretakers beating her, but no one had ever been sorry for it. “Somebody finally beats the crap out of you and then comes back and kisses it and says, ‘I want to make it better.’ ” To a 10-year-old T, this was love.
I was born in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia, to two professors. Lisa, a woman my age from a poor neighborhood in Washington, was born to a rapist and an alcoholic. I was my parents’ first and only child. Lisa was one of 12. I’m now working at The New York Times, while Lisa is recovering from brutal mistreatment at the hands of pimps and johns.
My parents never pressured me to get good grades, but they made it clear that I had better try my very best. Many kids don’t have these opportunities, my mother would say, so you better not waste yours.
Lisa is proof of this truth. If I’ve lived a charmed life, then Lisa’s was doomed from the start. Her mother drank heavily, and Lisa was born with fetal alcohol syndrome.
People with fetal alcohol syndrome tend to have a host of developmental problems, including difficulty paying attention, bad memory, learning disabilities and speech problems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web site lists a couple of factors that can help, if not cure, the disease: a loving and nurturing home environment, for example.
Unfortunately, Lisa wasn’t brought up that way. When she turned 4, her father began to rape her and her two sisters, she says, and court documents back her up. The abuse continued for 10 years.
My Sunday column tries to pull back the veil on the owners of Village Voice Media, the company that owns (besides the Village Voice newspaper) the website Backpage.com, which is generally regarded as the leading site for trafficking of women and girls in the United States. The big surprise: Goldman Sachs turned out to be a 16 percent owner.
In writing the column, I tried to walk a fine line. On the one hand, I don’t think senior managers at Goldman knew that they were part owners of a company that is tied to sex trafficking, and I don’t want to demonize the company just because it is so, well, demonizable. In fairness to Goldman, it did some of the pioneering economic research on the benefits of empowering women, and its 10,000 Women program is a terrific initiative to bring the world’s women into the business sector. On the other hand, I think investors should bear some accountability when they own companies that behave so irresponsibly. This isn’t just a victimless accounting scam: many women and girls have been daily brutalized through Backpage, as owners turned a blind eye. Goldman and the other owners could at least have tried to exert pressure to get out of that business. I see no evidence that Goldman and other private equity investors ever uttered a whisper of protest internally, even as arrests were made in 22 states for trafficking of under-age girls who had been marketed on Backpage.
So read the column and tell me what you think. There’s also a debate about whether it even makes sense to target Backpage. Some people disagree with me and say that if Backpage pulled out of this market, even seedier companies would step in and be less cooperative with law enforcement. I don’t buy that (when Craig’s List pulled out of escort ads, the market shrank by half, according to a trade estimate), but what’s your take?
I’ve often written over the years about human trafficking abroad, from Cambodia to India to Pakistan. But we don’t have the moral authority to complain about other countries until we clean up our own act, and today I focus on sex trafficking right here at home. In fact, the young woman whose story I tell in my column, Alissa, was sold by pimps right outside my office in mid-town Manhattan. (You can also watch a video of Alissa giving me a tour of the streets.)
Too often, I think we just resign ourselves to these kinds of human rights abuses by thinking that they’re just inevitable. Yes, to some extent they are, just as murder and robbery are inevitable, but we still can reduce their scale. And that’s why I emphasize the role of marketing channels for traffickers, such as Backpage.com, owned by Village Voice Media. If Backpage stopped running prostitution advertising, the problem wouldn’t go away — but it would make it harder for pimps to peddle under-age girls. Keeping ads for hit men out of newspapers doesn’t eliminate hit men, but it probably makes it harder to find them.
If you’re thinking, “what can I do?” — well, in my column, I linked to the Change.org petition against Village Voice Media, so that’s a starting point. And if you have ideas or see something suspicious, you can call the trafficking hotline run by Polaris Project: 1-888-3737-888
My Sunday column returns to a regular theme — human trafficking — and recounts a raid on a brothel in northern Cambodia with one of my heroes, Somaly Mam. The youngest girl in the brothel had been trafficked from Vietnam a few months ago when she was in the seventh grade, meaning that she was born in 1999. That makes her about 12 years old.
Her youth made her very popular in the brothel. There were sometimes lines of men waiting to have sex with her, and she could have 20 customers a night. Of course, she didn’t get a penny of that income.
There’s a tendency in some quarters to be non-judgmental about trafficking and even to criticize the raids on these brothels as traumatic to the girls involved. Well, it strikes me as pretty traumatic for a 12-year-old girl to be raped 20 times a night, seven days a week — not including the tortures that pimps worldwide use to break a girl’s spirit. This trafficking, in other words, has nothing to do with consenting adults and everything to do with rape and child abuse. Figuring what to do with adult prostitution is a tough challenge (I favor experimenting with the Swedish model), but cracking down on human trafficking should be a no-brainer.
Obviously, not all prostitution is enslavement or trafficking, and some is voluntary. China probably has more prostitutes than any country in the world, and it is largely voluntary with the women themselves keeping the money they earn. But in many countries — including the U.S., for that matter — there is a considerable amount of prostitution that is forced or involves minors. Talk to the survivors, and the stories are chilling. For that matter, read Somaly Mam’s terrific memoir, “The Road of Lost Innocence,” which offers a luminous window into what these girls go through.
The other reaction that people sometimes have is resignation, the sense that forced prostitution is as inevitable as it is evil. On the contrary, I’m struck every time I visit Cambodia how much improvement there is. In Poipet, most of the brothels are now shut down, and one trafficker there whom I’ve known for years is now reduced to selling lottery tickets — because kidnapping girls and selling their virginity is just too dangerous. There was one police-run brothel in Poipet that I thought would never close because of its connections, but it is now just a plain vanilla hotel. Sure, there’s still prostitution in Poipet and no doubt some children are still held in cages and sold to buyers — but much, much less often than before. And this change came about because of international pressure from the United States and other governments, from news organizations, and from NGO’s.
Read the column and weigh in with your thoughts.
On Friday I was on a panel at Bay Path College along with Somaly Mam, my friend and hero. Somaly is a Cambodian who was trafficked into a brothel as a little girl but managed to escape — and then started an anti-trafficking organization to fight the brothels and help other girls escape. She has been extraordinarily courageous in keeping up the fight when the brothel-owners just want to kill her, and she seems so unbelievably poised when she speaks in English — her fourth language — before large audiences under a spotlight. But on Friday, I saw a reminder of how that past haunts her and anyone who went through such a trauma.
To get to the stage, we took a freight elevator, and it was vaguely like a dark cage. That terrified Somaly, because it reminded her of the cages in which she had been punished and tortured when she was in the brothel. Many of the Cambodian brothels have underground rooms in which they beat and terrorize girls who are considered insufficiently cooperative. Just entering that elevator was enough to bring back those hideous memories of torture for Somaly, and it left her shaken and rattled.
One of the topics on my “to do” list this year is more on human trafficking here in the U.S. I’ve written a fair amount about the topic in Cambodia, India, Pakistan, but I haven’t done as much reporting on the issue here in the U.S. Stay tuned!
In the meantime, Texas Monthly has a terrific piece on trafficking by Mimi Swartz, told largely through a Thai woman who was brought to the U.S. and apparently enslaved initially in a series of brothels and massage joints. The customers often didn’t realize that the women were enslaved, for they weren’t chained and spent much of their time smiling. I think the article is very good at capturing the psychology of these women. They may have been promised a job in a restaurant, but they arrive without knowing the language, without any legal status… Read more…
Josh Ruxin is a Columbia University expert on public health who has spent the last few years living in Rwanda. He’s an unusual mix of academic expert and mud-between-the-toes aid worker.
Josh Ruxin is a Columbia University expert on public health who has spent the last few years living in Rwanda. He’s an unusual mix of academic expert and mud-between-the-toes aid worker.
Mombasa, Kenya, has long been world-renowned for its pristine shorelines, abundant night life and cultural attractions dating back centuries. I took my family there for vacation last week. It’s a lovely (though desperately hot) place where I cut my teeth in high school as a volunteer at what is now called Haller Park (after the Swiss agronomist who started it, Rene Haller), famous among children the world over for the unlikely relationship that sprouted there between a hippo and a tortoise a few years ago. Over the last four decades, Haller transformed desert-like limestone quarries into beautiful wetlands and park space. The area where I worked 21 years ago was completely unrecognizable and loaded with animals that my family loved seeing. Sadly, much more than Haller Park has changed in greater Mombasa.
I hadn’t a clue about the city’s thriving sex business until I noticed dozens of women and several girls and boys, no older than age 10, dressed for sale on the narrow road heading north from the city. Go-go bars and clubs frequented by sex workers form a patchwork of poverty along the road that is highly trafficked by European sun-seekers. According to my Kenyan friends, they’re seeking more than sun. When I inquired about the phenomenon, everyone told me that tightened restrictions in Thailand and elsewhere in Asia had pushed the trade to Mombasa, where dozens of weekly flights from Europe fuel its existence.
But I suspect there’s more to it. This situation is just the latest example of malfeasance and human rights misery that follows the weakest governments. Child sex tourism in Mombasa is the direct result of lax local laws and corrupt public officials, including police. The police tried on five occasions to take my driver’s license and hold it for a bribe; one can only imagine how they engage in the finances of sex work and childhood sex slavery. While the core of the problem is poverty, it’s clear that poor governance plays an enormous role in it.
Mombasa’s child sex trade is a disturbing thing to watch, but I found that it’s exploding everywhere in this scenic city, one of Africa’s major tourist destinations. Officially, the problem doesn’t exist, but according to one estimate, up to 30,000 girls between 12 and 14 years old are currently being lured into hotels and private villas along Mombasa’s north and south coasts where they are sexually exploited with promises of riches and trips abroad. In Malindi, impoverished children of both sexes looking for a new life sell their bodies to tourists along the historic town’s white, sandy beaches, and Lamu Old Town – which five years ago was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site – is now known as a place that attracts men looking for young boys. These days, many visitors to Mombasa travel there specifically for illicit sex.
So how did poverty and corruption create this situation? The growing number of children joining Mombasa’s sex tourism trade is in part attributable to the lack of opportunity and further displacement caused by the violent outcome of 2007’s disputed presidential election. It may have been kicked off in part by the dramatic fall in tourism receipts following 9/11 as well. The Kenyans I spoke with said that the situation appeared to sprout from nowhere during the last six years. With few, if any, economic prospects at hand, unscrupulous agents are able to entice boys and girls with the promise of legitimate jobs. Often, however, the kids end up being forced into sex with strangers under the supervision of their putative sponsors. Seduced by the fast cash, many may end up becoming life-long sex workers, with lives cut tragically short by AIDS and violence. Read more…
During Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearings this morning, she was asked by Barbara Boxer about violence against women. Senator Boxer referred to my column on acid attacks in Pakistan and the column about the Cambodian teenager whose eye was gouged out by a brothel owner, showed pictures from them, and then declared: “No woman or girl should ever have to live in fear or face persecution for being born female, and Senator, I know how deeply you feel about this. So I wanted you to take a little more time to talk about your commitment to this particular issue. And obviously I would be so pleased if you would commit to help us work on legislation to fight this immorality.” Senator Clinton responded:
I want to pledge to you that as Secretary of State, I view these issues as central to our foreign policy. Not as adjunct or auxiliary, or in any way lesser than all of the other issues we have to confront. I too have followed the stories that are exemplified by the pictures that you held up. I mean, it is heartbreaking beyond words that, you know, young girls are attacked on their way to school by Taliban sympathizers and members who do not want young women to be educated. It’s not complicated! They want to maintain an attitude that keeps women — as I said in my testimony — unhealthy, unfed, uneducated and this is something that results all too often in violence against these young women, both within their families and from the outside.
This is not culture. This is not custom. This is criminal. And it will be my hope to persuade more government — as I have attempted to do since I spoke at Beijing on these issues, you know, 13 and some years ago — that we cannot have a free, prosperous, peaceful, progressive world if women are treated in such a discriminatory and violent way. I’ve also read closely Nick Kristof’s articles, in the last months and especially the last weeks, the young women that he has both rescued from prostitution, and met, who have been enslaved and abused, tortured in every way– physically, emotionally, morally– and I take very seriously the function of the State department to lead our government through the Office on Human Trafficking, to do all that we can to end this modern form of slavery. We have sex slavery, we have wage slavery, and it is primarily a slavery of girls and women. So I look also forward, Senator, to reviewing your legislation and working with you as a continuing partnership on behalf of these issues we care so much about.
So we’re going to have a very active office on trafficking, we’re going to be speaking out consistently and strongly against discrimination and oppression of women, and slavery in particular. Because I think that is not only in keeping with American values, as we all recognize, but American national security interests as well.
Senator Clinton has indeed been far-sighted on this issue, and I think she gets it. Rumor has it that she’s going to appoint a senior aide for these matters to sit on the seventh floor along with her. One of the problems in the State Department has been that the serious issues are perceived as those relating to nuclear warheads, trade or Middle East peace, and the rest is fluff. In fact, we’re seeing the rise of a new foreign policy agenda — side by side with the old one — consisting of issues like human trafficking, the environment, genocide. They are every bit as important as the traditional agenda, and I write about them a good deal partly because I want to help shape how they’re perceived and partly because I want to help legitimate them as “serious” matters.
If Mrs. Clinton as secretary of state embraces this new agenda (without, of course, dumping the old one), then I’ll take off my hat and cheer.
(UPDATE: By the way, Senator Boxer and Rep. Carolyn Maloney have introduced legislation that goes to this issue. The International Women’s Freedom Act of 2009 would create a U.S. Commission on International Women’s Rights. The commission, modeled on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, would report to Congress and the President on the status of women worldwide. The bill would also establish an Office on International Women’s Rights headed by an Ambassador at large for International Women’s Rights and it would direct the President to conduct an annual review of the status of women’s rights in each foreign country, and subsequently designate ‘Countries of Particular Concern’ that have severe human rights violations.)
My Sunday column is about sex trafficking again. It’s based on interviews with brothel-owners and looks at how we can make sex slavery more risky and less profitable for those who engage in it. I think the key to eradicating it is to put ourselves more in the shoes of the traffickers; they’re profit-maximizing business people, and if we change their incentives they’ll turn to stealing motorcycles instead.
There’s been a lot of debate in the blog about how much coercion there is, and how meaningful coercion is. After a lot of interviews, my sense is that there is a steady continuum from adolescent girls who are absolutely imprisoned in brothels at one end, to adult women who freely decide that they can make more money in prostitution than in other fields. I’ve interviewed women in each category and in every shade inbetween.
On this visit, I revisited one teenage girl whom I had interviewed a couple of times earlier. She had been kidnapped and sold to a brothel in Poipet, imprisoned for a few weeks until her virginity was sold, and then she was beaten, locked up and forced to comply. To me, that was slavery. By the time I saw her in 2006, she was closely monitored and wasn’t given any cash, and she was still being beaten at times, but at times she was allowed on short trips outside the brothel. She wasn’t actually physically imprisoned and could have escaped if she had wanted. I offered to help her do so, but she hesitated for three reasons: She was afraid of being beaten up if caught; she was afraid that if she went home her parents and neighbors would figure out what had happened to her; and the brothel-owner claimed the girl owed her money and needed to repay the debt, and the girl kind of believed her. At that point, I wouldn’t exactly call her enslaved, but she certainly wasn’t free, either, and she was still a minor. When I interviewed her on this visit, the situation had evolved further: she was now free to come and go and hadn’t been beaten for a year, she said; on the other hand, she was still a minor, may have been addicted to drugs provided by the brothel, and was kept in place partly by stigma. That’s a situation that started out as slavery but evolving into something more nuanced over the years.
By the way, I do encourage you to watch the video we prepared on the brothels of Poipet; it’s right beside the column.
Your comments on the column or video?
The videos taken on my Cambodia trip were taken by Kassie Bracken, a young woman who is a staff videographer for the Times. I thought that it would be interesting to get her perspective, since she hasn’t been to the region before and since she is the same sex as the girls we interviewed in the brothels and not all that much older. Here’s Kassie’s take:
I’d never been to Southeast Asia before, nor had I ever stepped foot in a brothel. I suppose the word summoned up grainy red images of numbered young girls for sale, but I don’t know that I really knew what to expect.
Each brothel we visited had a completely different energy and vibe, but for the most part, all of the girls seemed young – the majority looked to be in their teens. They were all tiny in stature too, which only made them seem even younger. Nick has asked me for my reflections in part to get a female perspective – and this is difficult to put into words when I think about the moments we were in the presence of these girls. I didn’t see sexy or feminine, I saw adolescent energy, and that trumped anything else.
Outside of one brothel a staunch mama-san never made eye contact with Nick and looked past him, calculating the street as they spoke. I was surprised that she continued speaking to us, knowing that it wouldn’t lead to a sale. Behind her, young girls mechanically reapplied lipstick and mascara over and over again under red lights. One woman’s face will stay with me – she kept circling lipstick around her lips with a desperation. She’d put the cap on and then open ten seconds later and do it again.
Later that night we also spoke with a younger mama-san, heavily made up in a strapless cocktail dress with multiple gold rings and bracelets and long pressed-on nails. She and said she could fulfill a request for a virgin girl with a few days’ notice, and never lost her flirty smile when she spoke. When we walked away she kept smiling and as we turned our backs she smashed three full beer bottles into the street behind us.
At both of those brothels, the girls had a deadness in their eyes that I sort of didn’t want to contemplate for fear that I would become completely depressed about the world. But at the karaoke shacks I was struck by the youth and energy in the laughter of some of the girls with whom we spoke. The mood seemed lighter and I generally couldn’t tell who the mama-sans were. For brief moments I would completely forget why we were there, and just see the enthusiasm of
teenage girls talking to what probably appeared to them to be two odd Westerners. Then it would hit me that like all of the other young women we’d met, they would have to offer sex to the next man who wanted to pay two dollars. No matter what he looked like, smelled like, or his physical
manner. It’s difficult to imagine where I would be mentally and emotionally under those conditions.
I think in general, I felt emotionally abstracted from the girls in the brothels, in part because I never directly interacted with them and let Nick handle the conversations. And in a weird way, I think I didn’t feel comfortable speaking. I had this weird feeling that to speak was to somehow expose an inexplicable inequity – namely all of the choices I’ve had in my life in a world where many women by virtue of their gender have close to none. I felt that to speak to them would somehow solidify that they were selling their bodies and I was not.
There was an older – by older I mean, maybe 20? Maybe 30? — woman in a brothel in Poipet where Nick had conducted a sit-down interview with the mama-san. During the course of the hour we were there, the woman had had sex with six men, for a total of perhaps 15 – 18 dollars. She was beautiful – high cheekbones and a slightly square face, thick black hair and dark eyes – but she also looked like a tired woman at work. As we were about to leave she looked me in the eye – we just sort of looked at each other and took one another in – and then she smiled at me. I smiled back, awkwardly. At the moment, I didn’t know why I felt nervous, but I think now it’s because it was one of the only moments of mutual vulnerability – albeit brief and innocuous – I felt on the entire trip.
I’d like to think I am a fairly strong person, but in meeting Long Pross and hearing her tell her story, I wondered if I could ever match her strength. Long Pross was the woman we did a video about who had been abducted in her Cambodian village and sold into forced sexual slavery. She’d been beaten regularly, electrocuted, and had gotten pregnant twice. She kept resisting her customers. When after a painful abortion she’d begged for a week off, the mama-san gouged her eye out with a metal shard. During the interview she sat with Sina Van, who’d also suffered sexual slavery and who seemed like a big sister to Pross – Pross very rarely looked up during the interview, and Sina would hold her and touch her hair as Pross told her story.
It’s been a week since Cambodia, and I am thinking about it every day, and talking to friends willing to listen, just telling them what I saw. I’ve always thought that the concept of selling one’s body is a tricky one – I’ve read a lot of comments on Nick’s blog saying that it’s not the worst thing these women could be doing, given the extreme poverty in Cambodia, and that he is overplaying the abuse angle. Ultimately, I wonder most not about the reality of a young girl in a sexual act with a paying stranger, but I wonder about the impact on that girl’s future – will she be able to be vulnerable to another human – will she be able to experience love?
And I think about the end of Nick’s interview with Pross. Sina was attempting to make Pross smile by saying “when we get your eye fixed up and get you beautiful again, we’re going to find you a husband.” When I watch Pross’s expression in the video footage I see light in her eyes for
the briefest moment – then it’s gone. It’s the moment from the trip that haunts me the most.
Readers made a few general comments after my Thursday column about trafficking, so let me try to address some of them:
Most of customers in places like Cambodia are locals, not Westerners. That’s entirely true, and I didn’t mean to imply the opposite. Western men are only a tiny fraction of the customer base, although non-Asian foreigners are a problem. Overseas Chinese from Singapore, Taiwan and elsewhere often end up as buyers of virgins, for example.
It’s just as bad in the U.S., so focus on the problem here. I haven’t done enough reporting on the issue in the U.S., but the reporting I have done suggests that the situation is much better in America than in, say, Cambodia. By and large, the young Asian women working as prostitutes in the U.S., for example, are not forced into the sex trade (although they often they are deceived about how much they will earn) and have some freedom of movement. As far as I can tell, the biggest problem of forced prostitution in the U.S. doesn’t involve foreign women trafficked into the U.S., but teenage American runaways who end up in the control of pimps. That’s where the most abusive forced prostitution lies, more than with women trafficked from abroad.
Girls in Asia are happy to sell themselves to earn some money; there’s no force involved. This is a delusion perpetuated by male customers who flatter themselves. In fact, the “voluntariness” of prostitution varies tremendously with the location. China is one extreme, where it’s almost all voluntary; likewise, in southern Africa and Brazil, few girls are imprisoned in brothels. In contrast, India probably has more sex slaves than any other country, and one study suggests that about half of prostitutes in India enter the profession unwillingly. Indeed, there are some reasons to believe that the proportion is much higher. Thailand is the country most Americans think of in this context, and it used to have a great deal of forced prostitution as recently as the 1990s. These days, Thai girls in Thai brothels mostly work voluntarily and keep a share of the money they earn, while foreign girls — especially Cambodians and Burmese — are often imprisoned in the Thai brothels and aren’t paid.
By the way, there’s one fairly simple test that gives a strong sense of whether a girl is imprisoned or not. If the customer can take the girl back to his hotel room, then that suggests that she is not forced. If the brothel requires customers to sleep with girls in the brothel, then that suggests that she is imprisoned. Both arrangements are common.
The bottom line is that, sure, some prostitutes work voluntarily. My concern isn’t what consenting adults do. But the fact that there are some women who choose to sell sex doesn’t mitigate the horror of 14-year-old girls kidnapped and locked up in brothels until they get AIDS. Millions of girls today are kidnapped and enslaved, particularly in countries like India, Pakistan, Cambodia and Malaysia. Estimates are all over the map, with the U.N. referring to 1 million children enslaved in Asia, and Lancet estimating that up to 10 million children are engaged in prostitution around the globe. The journal Foreign Affairs estimated that more women are trafficked each year into brothels than the number of slaves transported annually to the New World at the peak of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Then there were readers who ask: What can I do? That’s complicated, because there’s no silver bullet to end the abuse. In the long run, the answers include educating girls and giving them more status in these societies. But in the short run, the law enforcement model works to some degree: If brothel-owners know that they may go to prison for kidnapping girls, they may fence stolen motorcycles instead, or sell pirated DVD’s. I have one more column from this trip that relies on interviews with brothel-owners, so stay tuned.
One way to help is to support particular groups that are active in this area. I’ve mentioned Somaly Mam’s foundation, which is a leader in Cambodia. I’d also strongly recommend reading Somaly’s memoir, “Road of Lost Innocence.” In India, one of the leaders in this effort is Apne Aap. Then there are international groups, such as the Coalition Against Trafficking, Equality Now, International Justice Mission, Ecpat; many other organizations with a broader mandate also have anti-trafficking programs.
Americans can also have an impact through the U.S. political system. In 2000, Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and that led to the possibility of sanctions against countries that tolerate trafficking. Two successive heads of the U.S. State Department trafficking office, John Miller and Mark Lagon, did superb work to tackle human slavery, and it’s one of President Bush’s few positive legacies in foreign affairs. Just a few weeks ago, Congress passed an updated version of the trafficking legislation, the Wilberforce Act, which strengthens the original legislation in some ways. It will be crucial for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to appoint a new head of the trafficking office who will purse this issue with passion. We’ve seen that the trafficking office can shame other countries into cracking down on brothels, and so letters/phone calls to Obama/Hillary Clinton calling on American leadership would be one useful step. One of the leaders in the fight against trafficking has been Carolyn Maloney, a member of Congress from New York, and she’s one of the candidates to succeed Hillary as the new senator from New York; if she becomes a senator, that will help as well.
So…your turn. What are your thoughts on the column or the points raised here?
My Thursday column is from Cambodia and looks at sex trafficking, which I describe as 21st century slavery. I focus on an extraordinary young woman named Sina Vann, who works with the Somaly Mam Foundation.
I’m sure some readers will protest: Sure, there may be some atrocities, but by and large women who sell sex do so out of desperation, not out of coercion. That depends on the country. China may have more prostitutes than any country in the world, and most sell themselves quasi-voluntarily. In contrast, in countries like India and Cambodia, most girls seem to enter prostitution by force, and the issue is very much slavery rather than prostitution.
From the late 18th century through the mid-19th century, the abolitionist movement took on and eventually defeated the slavery of people of African descent. Now it’s time to revive that movement and defeat the enslavement of millions of girls and women. For those who want to help, supporting the Somaly Mam Foundation is one approach, as is urging the new administration to take this issue seriously. In the U.S., groups like Equality Now, Coalition Against Trafficking and International Justice Mission are among the leaders. I’d welcome other suggestions for what people can do.