WUNRN
Dr.
Donna M. Hughes holds the Carlson Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies at the
University of Rhode Island. She is considered a global expert in Prostitution
& Trafficking of Women and Girls.
Enslaved in the USA
American
Victims Need Our Help.
By Donna M. Hughes
National Review Online
July 30, 2007
A hypothetical, but realistic case: Eighteen-year-old Tammy is tired, broke,
and desperate. Originally from a town in the Midwest USA, Tammy left home with
a man she thought was her boyfriend. He turned out to be a pimp. He put her on
the street in a city in another US state and ordered her to sell sex and make
money. He takes every dime she gets. She’s been humiliated and hurt by johns.
The pimp is even meaner, beating her up and threatening her every day with what
will happen to her if she disobeys or holds back any money. Tammy is a victim
of sex trafficking. If tonight, Tammy decides to break free and accept the
offer of assistance from a street-outreach worker, will she be eligible for
federal funds for food and shelter? No. Why not? Because Tammy is a U.S.
citizen.
As public awareness has grown about global sex trafficking, Americans were
shocked to learn that victims from places such as Mexico, Korea, and Ukraine
were sexually enslaved in their towns and cities. In communities across the
country, concerned citizens voiced calls for zero tolerance for modern-day
slavery.
President Bush made combating human trafficking a priority. Both Attorney
Generals Ashcroft and Gonzales have spoken out against trafficking in the U.S.
and made the investigation and prosecution of trafficking a priority. Most of
the focus on identifying and assisting victims and prosecuting offenders has
been on foreign nationals trafficked into the U.S.
There are more American citizens than foreign nationals victimized by sex
traffickers in the U.S., yet there are no federally funded services for them,
particularly if they are over age 17.
Service providers who have requested funds from the Trafficking Victims
Protection Act (TVPA) to assist American victims have been turned down
repeatedly by government agencies. The recent attorney general’s report states
that TVPA funds are dedicated to non-U.S. citizen victims. Therefore, if
you are a victim of sex trafficking in the U.S. from Mexico or Ukraine, there
is money for immediate services ($1300 a month), but there are no funds
similarly available for an American victim.
This denial of services to U.S. victims has real consequences. An FBI agent
recently told me he found a 12-year-old American girl while investigating a
sex-trafficking case. Because of lack of resources, he had nowhere to put her
and had to send her home. (The biggest reason girls run away and get picked up
by pimps is because they are abused or neglected at home.)
The neglect of U.S. citizen victims has occurred for several reasons.
First is the lack of identification of victims. Sex traffickers have avoided
scrutiny of their criminal activities by operating under the social stigma of
prostitution. Few people realize the brutal control these predators exert over
their victims; instead, people believe myths popularized by Hollywood movies
and TV documentaries about empowered sex workers, or they condemn women and
girls for their “immoral” behavior and have little sympathy or understanding
for the conditions of their lives. Identification of domestic victims is not
included in federally funded training on human trafficking. As one services
advocate explained it to me: “It would make no sense to talk about domestic
victims when there are no federal funds to help them.”
How many women and girls perceived to be “just prostitutes” are actually
victims of sex trafficking is unknown. I tried to figure out how many women and
girls would qualify as victims of sex trafficking under the TVPA by looking at
existing studies of women and girls in prostitution in the U.S.
According to the TVPA, any minor used for a commercial sex act is a victim of
trafficking. According to two studies, 70 percent of these women or girls
entered prostitution before the age of 18. Therefore, at least a majority of
these girls are, or were initially, victims of sex trafficking.
According to the TVPA, adult women are victims of trafficking if they are
induced to perform a commercial sex act by “force, fraud, or coercion.” I
reviewed studies done in the U.S. (one of which I co-authored) and found that
women in prostitution suffered the following: 86 percent were physically abused
by pimps; 80 percent were sexually assaulted by pimps; 90 percent were verbally
threatened by pimps; 71 percent had pimps use drugs to control them; 79 percent
had money withheld from them by pimps; 75 percent of them who gave money to a
pimp feared being harmed if they did not; and 52 percent were forcibly returned
(kidnapped), stalked, physically abused, and threatened when they tried to
leave. Again, by definition, roughly 80 percent of these adult women had
experiences that met the definition of sex trafficking in the TVPA.
Second, there are no reliable estimates of how many children and adults are
caught in prostitution in the U.S. today. The Department of Justice has failed
to make efforts to determine the scope of victimization in the U.S. In the
Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) of 2005, Congress
authorized a nationwide study on the illegal commercial-sex industry in the
U.S. the kind of study that has been done for illegal gambling and drug
trafficking. The Department of Justice never requested funds to conduct the
study. If this study had been initiated promptly, we might now be close to
having the first estimate ever of the size of the illegal commercial-sex
industry in the U.S. and the number of women and children victimized in it.
Here is what little we do know. According to one estimate, from a University of
Pennsylvania study, there are 300,000 juveniles vulnerable to commercial sexual
exploitation. Compare this to the Department of Justice estimate of 15,000
foreign nationals trafficked into the U.S. each year for sexual slavery and
forced labor. Even by rough estimates, many more U.S. citizens than foreign
nationals are victims of sex trafficking, yet U.S. citizens are categorically
denied treatment equal to that accorded foreign victims.
Third, in the TVPRA 2005, Congress authorized a grant program for local and
state authorities to crack down on sex trafficking by focusing on the demand
for victims and provide services to mostly U.S. citizen victims. But these
funds were never requested by the Department of Justice, and subsequently no
programs have been funded.
This lack of assistance for American victims is especially egregious
considering that Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) monies are not available for
victims of sex trafficking, who desperately need this assistance. Each year,
approximately $400 million is appropriated for victims of domestic violence,
stalking, and sexual assault, but victims who are beat up and sexually
assaulted by pimps and johns are excluded from assistance from these funds.
U.S. citizen victims usually cannot get assistance from-state funded programs
either. They are usually trafficked from state to state and do not meet
state-residency requirements. In addition, pimps confiscate identification
documents from U.S. citizens, just as they do from foreign victims, and it
takes months to replace those documents so they can use them to apply for
assistance.
In fact, the only way for some women and girls to get services is to be
arrested for prostitution! In some cities, there are locally funded diversion
programs that give women and girls an opportunity to get assistance and get out
of prostitution instead of going to jail. However, this is hardly the solution
to assisting domestic-trafficking victims. During federal investigations,
foreign victims are not treated as criminals. It is not right that U.S.-citizen
victims are treated as criminals, while foreign victims are entitled to service
equivalent to that of an asylum-seeker.
Kristy Childs, the director of Veronica’s Voice, an agency in Kansas City that
provides services to women and girls trying to leave prostitution, said this
about the lack of services for U.S. citizen victims: “I can hardly stand what I
see happening for American women used in prostitution. Foreign nationals once
certified as a victim can have America send for their whole family to relocate
here and get all types of benefits, where it is hard to get our own victimized
and broken American women bus tickets!”
Ms. Childs is referring to the use of federal anti-trafficking funds to bring a
foreign victim’s family to the U.S. Often, traffickers control foreign victims
by threatening to harm relatives at home. Bringing their families here is a way
to protect them and enable victims to testify against traffickers without fear
of threats to family members back home. Compare that to the resources available
to assist U.S. victims: They buy the victim a bus pass so she can get out of
town and out of the reach of the pimp.
These policies and practices of discrimination against U.S. citizens must be
reversed immediately. This is not a call to reduce funds and services to
foreign victims of trafficking in the U.S., because there are many foreign
victims who are not receiving services. This is a call for equal treatment
for better treatment of U.S. victims.
To reverse this situation, we need the following: The Department of Justice
must carry out the study on the illegal commercial sex industry as authorized by
Congress in 2005. We need to have a baseline study of the problem so we can
begin to understand the scope of the problem and find solutions. And the
Department of Justice must initiate the grant program for local and state
law-enforcement agencies and service-providers so that U.S.-citizen victims,
particularly those over the age of 17, are assisted and perpetrators punished.
Next, Congress needs to make federal anti-trafficking funds available to U.S.
citizens and make VAWA funds available to victims of sex trafficking. The
brutal treatment of women and girls by these sexual predators has been ignored
for too long.
Americans have zero tolerance for all forms of modern-day slavery in their
communities, not just when foreign nationals are involved. Once awakened to the
existence of trafficking, concerned citizens have created the most successful
human-rights movement of our time.
As the injustice to American trafficking victims has been uncovered, the same
human-rights coalition composed of individuals and organizations from the
political right and left, secular and faith based that passed the TVPA is
mobilizing to secure equal treatment for all foreign and domestic, child and
adult. They will be pressing the Department of Justice to initiate previously
authorized programs and lobbying Congress to rectify this discrimination
against U.S. citizens.
Donna M. Hughes holds the Carlson Endowed Chair in women’s studies at
the University of Rhode Island. M. Hughes holds the Carlson Endowed Chair in women’s
studies at the University of Rhode Island.
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