ECPAT- USA,
Inc .
FOCUS ON SEXUALLY
EXPLOITED CHILDREN
CONSIDER FOR GIRLS
ECPAT-USA Comment on the
2010 U.S.
State Department Trafficking in Persons Report
The 2010 version of the U.S.
State Department Trafficking in Person’s (TIP) report was published last
week. This is the annual review by the U.S.
government of every country’s effort to combat human trafficking, which it has
issued since the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) was made law
in 2000. This year, for the first time,
the U.S.
government includes an assessment of its own efforts, as a response to the
frequent criticism it has faced for not evaluating itself by the same standards
it uses to measure other countries. In
its latest review, the U.S.
places itself in Tier 1. Countries
ranked in Tier 1 are defined as those whose governments “fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards for
the elimination of trafficking.”
In some ways, this is a fair assessment, but for one huge exception: the
government’s dismal efforts to identify and protect sexually exploited
children. Children who are used in the
sex industry suffer horrific physical and mental cruelty. Their bodies are bought and sold as if they
are nothing more than commodities.
Pimps, traffickers, and sex exploiters rule their young worlds. During the period of life when they are
developing physically, spiritually and emotionally, at time when they should be
offered the opportunity to dream, to learn and to shape their own world, they
are instead abandoned to an industry that uses them as nothing more than meat
to feed the demand for sex services.
To the extent that a society can measure its level of civility by its
willingness and ability to protect children from some of the worst possible
abuse, the TIP report offers one opportunity to do so. Yet, this year, when the U.S. government
reports on its own efforts, it
dispassionately informs us that in 2009 it rescued 306 children from prostitution
and offered 50 “letters of eligibility” to international child trafficking
victims. (A “letter of eligibility” is
the means by which a child trafficked to the U.S.
is officially defined as a victim of sex trafficking.) Meanwhile, in 2008, the latest year for which
numbers are available, the U.S.
reports that 849 children were arrested
for prostitution and commercialized vice.
In effect, the U.S.
says that almost three times as many
children were arrested and processed through the criminal justice system, as
were offered protection and assistance.
This is probably an undercount since it is likely that many children
originally arrested for prostitution were ultimately charged with a lesser
offense. And yet, the U.S.
government places itself in the top tier of countries in combating human
trafficking.
On the plus side, the U.S.
government report states that it “funded three demonstration projects to
provide comprehensive services to U.S.
citizen child victims of labor or sex trafficking, two projects for case
management assistance to children found in prostitution, and one training and technical assistance
project….” It mentions that all 50 states
have laws that make it a crime to sexually exploit children, so law enforcement
officials could arrest pimps and traffickers instead of the sexually exploited
children, if they chose to do so. It convicted 151 traffickers under its
federal Innocence Lost Initiative, “a collaboration of federal and state law
enforcement authorities and victim assistance providers focused on combating
the prostitution of children.” This is
all good news.
The U.S.
government admits that, though there are runaway and homeless youth programs
and programs for at-risk youth, “it is not clear to what extent these programs
identify and assist child trafficking victims among the children they
serve.” It is gratifying that the report
gives the NGO point of view, despite how mildly it states it, that “these programs
and agencies require training to better identify and work with trafficking
victims.”
Prevention is one of the areas where the U.S.
government applauds its own work, although most of the prevention work focuses
on labor trafficking. As for reducing
the demand for sexual exploitation, there is apparently not much to
report. Though the report says, “[s]tate
and local jurisdictions engaged in a number of efforts to reduce demand for
commercial sex,” in fact very little has been done. There are no data and no meaningful attempt
to address why certain children are more vulnerable, why there is such
significant demand for sexually exploited children or what programs are needed
to stop such abuses of children before they occur.
The U.S.
government report is critical of other countries’ inability to combat child sex
tourism, using it throughout the report as one of the benchmarks for assessing
countries’ tier ranking. As for its own
success, the U.S.
“made 11 criminal arrests, brought five indictments, and obtained 10
convictions in child sex tourism cases in FY 2009.” There is a discernible commitment by the U.S.
government to investigate most American child sex tourism cases that come to
its attention. But there is virtually no
effort by the U.S.
government to raise awareness and educate its own population about laws against
child sex tourism. There are no public
awareness campaigns, and only one large company in the U.S.,
Carlson Companies, has signed the Code of Conduct for the Protection of
Children from Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism. So when the U.S. government report says that
Belize or Barbados, for example, has an emerging child sex tourism problem, it
is just as much a problem that can be counted against U.S. efforts as it is
against the governments of the destination countries. .
In the whole human trafficking field, reliable statistics are very
difficult to come by. But every expert
accepts that there are at the very least 100,000 sexually exploited children in
the U.S. (and probably many, many more than that) and that Americans represent
large percentages of the sex tourists traveling abroad to sexually exploit
other country’s children. Yet last year
we arrested many more children than we helped in the U.S.
and we convicted ten sex tourists.
The U.S.
has set itself up as a world leader in the fight against human
trafficking. To be a true leader it has
to act forcefully and methodically to clean up its own house. This is an urgent fight for the lives of
children. ECPAT-USA would be so proud if
the U.S.
government truly picked up the torch of leadership for the protection of every
child’s right to grow up free from sexual exploitation. While we see some efforts, and some limited
successes, the children deserve