April 15, 2004
"I realized that slavery was still alive," said John Miller, Director of the U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. He was telling World magazine about the arrest of men who trafficked in sex slaves.
"I'm reading about how they lured these girls from Asian nations, promised them restaurant jobs, modeling jobs, ... seized their passports, beat them, raped them, moved them from brothel to brothel," he said.
This was not happening in some distant Third World nation, however. "There it was in civil Seattle," Miller said.
It is a crime -- and a sin -- that is almost too horrible to think about, but for the thousands of children and women trapped in the international sex slave trade, it is a nightmare with which they must live every day. Most people, however, would be stunned to know that the United States may be becoming a major importer of unwilling participants in this ghastly enterprise.
By the Thousands
This industry is technically called trafficking: "knowingly obtaining by any means -- often by force, fraud, or coercion -- any person for involuntary servitude or forced labor," according to Thomas M. Steinfatt, professor of communication at the University of Miami, who studies the subject.
It operates just like any other export-import business. According to Donna M. Hughes, professor of women's studies at the University of Rhode Island and an expert on the sexual exploitation of women, girls and women are procured in one nation, conveyed through transit countries, and finally arrive in the nation of destination.
There, "men use them in legalized or widely tolerated sex businesses, and men physically travel around the world to buy women and children in prostitution, as a form of tourism," said Hughes. "Through recently developed global communications technology, these forms of sexual exploitation are now carried out through phone lines and satellite transmission," namely the Internet.
To call what happens to these women slavery is not hyperbole. Hughes said, "The methods used in trafficking for sexual exploitation comprise a modern slave trade. The perpetrators range from loosely connected procurers and pimps to transnational organized crime networks."
It's big business. Hughes said estimates of the money that pours in through the sex industry -- prostitution, the sale of women and children through sex trafficking, the sale of child pornography, etc. -- are between $7 billion and $57 billion a year.
That indicates that a lot of flesh is being peddled, although exact figures are difficult to come by. Hughes said a United Nations estimate puts the number of women and children who are sexually exploited by the sex trade industry each year at one million, while child-advocacy groups, according to a story in USA Today, estimate that there are currently two million children worldwide that are working as sex slaves.
Locked in Cages
While the exact numbers may be difficult to ascertain, there are admittedly thousands of women and girls who are deceived or simply sold into forcible sexual slavery.
In his heart-breaking account of the international sex trade, journalist Peter Landesman wrote in The New York Times Magazine, "Some of them have been baited by promises of legitimate jobs and a better life in America; many have been abducted; others have been bought from or abandoned by their impoverished families."
Hughes told Voice of America, "Usually what happens is the woman is searching for a job and she is told that she can go abroad and make a lot of money ... but the problem is that when she arrives in that particular country ... she is told no, in fact you're not going to be a waitress, a nanny, you know, whatever job, a dancer maybe, that we told you. You're going to be in prostitution and you don't have a choice."
Those holding the women in slavery tell the victims they must remain and work as prostitutes until they pay off the transportation cost to the new country. Hughes said they're often told, "We'll beat you up if you don't do what we want and you owe us $30,000."
Sometimes, Hughes said, the men do release the women after the "debt" has been paid. "Other times, if the woman can't earn as much for the pimp as he likes, he sells her again. I've interviewed women who have been sold four or five times. Of course, the problem with this is that their debt starts all over again."
The coercion process is often a brutal one. Bharti Tapas, a girl interviewed by ABC News Downtown in 2001 for a special on the sex trade in India, was 14 when she was sold into slavery by her own parents, and then forced into prostitution.
"When I arrived at the brothel, I refused to do what they told me to and they beat me and starved me for 10 days," Tapas said. "I thought I would rather kill myself than be forced to work as a prostitute."
She relented, according to the story, and joined "thousands of other girls who are beaten, locked in tiny cages or hidden in attics. Some are forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a day under the watchful eyes of madams and pimps."
Psychiatrist Wendy Freed authored a report for Physicians for Human Rights. Her report on the psychological aspects of women trapped in sexual slavery in Cambodia presented this frightening pattern faced by thousands of girls and women:
"The young women have been in captivity for a period of weeks to months or years. Initially there is shock and disbelief. Many young women describe not being able to believe that they had been sold .... Once they realize that in fact they are sold, they fight the brothel owner's demand that they accept customers. Refusal leads to beatings, being locked in a room, and going without food. This persists until the young woman gives up and realizes that indeed they are trapped and have no options .... At some point in this process, the young woman becomes submissive in order to avoid further beatings and torment; her 'spirit is broken.' She surrenders, becomes resigned and accommodates to the circumstances of captivity."
Hughes calls these brothels "sexual gulags," and cites the reports of international aid workers that describe men buying oral sex from girls as young as five years old, and intercourse with girls as young as 10 or 11.
Porn -- Part of the Problem
