(Christa Hillstrom / Medill)
by Christa Hillstrom - Medill Reports
“She was like a walking dead person, not even a person.”
Jody Raphael struggled to describe a woman who had been trafficked into the sex trade. -
“There was no personhood, no personality, like the soul had been removed.”
Raphael, a senior researcher at the DePaul University College of Law who has worked with dozens of trafficked women, is not talking about someone from Russia or China. She’s talking about a girl from Chicago.
Controversy over the reauthorization of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Act has stalled the bill in the U.S. Senate since it was passed in the House last December, with only two dissenting votes.
Lobbies on both sides are clashing over the inclusion of a new provision that eliminates the need to prove women were unwillingly forced or coerced into the sex trade, in order to penalize third parties who commercially benefit from the buying and selling of women: In other words, pimps.
“Our federal public policies have always focused on the woman’s willingness,” said Samir Goswami, director of policy and outreach for the Justice Project Against Sexual Harm.
“Forget about her willingness, whether she had a gun to her head or three guys who put her in a sack and shipped her off to Canada,” he said. “It’s about them: The guys out there who are preying on the most vulnerable people.”
The Trafficking Victims Protection Act, first passed in 2000 to address the enslavement of people in the sex and other trades worldwide, has largely focused on international victims when it comes to enforcement. But the removal of the need to prove violence or coercion will open up a new can of worms for federal law enforcement: Domestic trafficking.
Under the provision, cases where violence and other coercive measures can be proved would be tried as cases of “aggravated” human trafficking.
If supporters are able to get the bill passed without the removal of the clause, their hope is that all people who commercially benefit from the sale of someone else’s body can be charged with human trafficking, a significantly serious felony and a major domestic problem in America.
This is something the bill’s proponents say the whole country has shied away from acknowledging until now.
“It’s not as sexy a topic as international trafficking, but we have a lot more trafficking going on domestically than we want to admit to,” said Goswami. “What this bill does is it finally addresses what’s really happening, not what we’d like to think is happening.”
Some studies have placed the number of women and girls involved in Chicago’s sex trade as high as 16,000, making it a major hub for traffickers.
The National Runaway Switchboard estimates that it takes an average of 48 hours before girls who have fled their homes are recruited into prostitution by a pimp, or are solicited for sex.
Raphael, who co-authored a study last month on the domestic trafficking of women and girls in Chicago, argues that recruitment tactics for internationally and domestically trafficked women are exactly the same, and it’s time to start giving young women from Chicago equal attention.
“You’re taking people that are totally needy, and you are promising a roof over their head and money,” she said. “The same thing that happens in developing countries, happens in our own low-income communities.”
According to the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, the average age of entry into prostitution in Chicago is 12 years old.
Girls typically become attached to a pimp through enticement and even love, which turns to violence and force only later, Raphael’s research showed. Because of the apparent complicity in the beginning, focusing prosecution on women’s willingness to participate is problematic and even detrimental to stopping traffickers, Goswami said.
While the study doesn’t measure the percentage of girls who came from sexually abusive backgrounds, Raphael said many participants shared staggering stories of abuse.
“Many of our sample came from horrible family backgrounds that they ran away from,” she said. “What hit me was that they were so disconnected, so isolated, they had this relationship with this pimp and that was it. They were just this sad little island.”
Raphael explained that young women without support systems are easily enticed into the sex trade by the recruitment tactics of pimps.
What Goswami said he hopes the much-contested provision in the new bill will do is recognize this enticement as exploitation and enable prosecutors to target pimps, whether the woman seemed complicit or not.
“They don’t necessarily kidnap you—knock you on the head and put a rag in your mouth,” he said. “They can talk you into it.”
Some sex workers’ advocacy groups fear the new law will be manipulated to arrest sex workers, rather than just third-party pimps.
Groups that view sex work as a viable option for women who are able to choose it say that tightening legislation may result in increased criminalization of already targeted women.
Jasmine Jewels, a representative of the Sex Workers Outreach Project in Chicago, whose East Coast counterpart is a major lobby against the proposed bill, is no stranger to the tension between law enforcement and sex workers: She is a sex worker.
She said she is unsure whether she opposes the bill, but recognizes the potential for the government to use it to crack down on women.
“It’s easier to arrest 10 of them [sex workers] than infiltrate a ring of traffickers,” she said. “And you always take the shortest distance between two points. The government will probably manipulate the law, because in history, that’s what they’ve done with us.”
Anti-prostitution groups and the media tend to skew and narrow what the sex trade looks like, according to Jewels, who said she doesn’t know any sex workers who report to pimps.
“You have to understand the difference between someone who is using sex as a legitimate income, and a 14-year-old girl who is being exploited,” she said.
Jewels spends her Friday nights on the street with a backpack full of condoms and business cards to seek out and educate young women who might be at risk of contracting sexually-transmitted diseases, or being harmed by pimps and customers.
Her own experience of sex work is quite different, she said, citing her expensive condo and self-run website, which allows her to screen customers.
Goswami said he understands why sex workers would be leery of increased legislation, since they have been traditionally stigmatized by the law. But to jump to such conclusions with this act would be a mischaracterization of something that is designed to protect women, especially the ones who don’t have the freedom to choose to be there, he added.
“The bill is very, very clear that it’s only going to prosecute third parties,” he said. “That’s the whole idea.”
The Department of Justice has also contributed to blocking the bill’s passage. It has expressed fear that the amendment goes too far by implicating all third-party participants in prostitution under the federal umbrella of human trafficking, regardless of the presence of force. This would obligate federal law enforcement to take on what previously fell under the jurisdiction of state and city law.
The Department issued an official statement in November, expressing doubt about the ability of the federal government to address so broad an issue as prostitution due to lack of resources.
But that’s not a good enough excuse, said James Wagner, executive director of the Chicago Crime Commission and 31-year FBI veteran. He said he understands that resources are strained and the FBI is already stretched thin with complicated caseloads that include counterterrorism and mortgage fraud, but trafficking must still be made a priority.
“I think lack of resources is a poor reason for opposing something that should be done,” he said. “You have to decide where you’re going to put the manpower to work.”
“So what if it’s difficult?” Goswami asked. “It’s difficult to go after gang bangers and international drug cartels. But we still have to do it.”
Part of the difficulty for law enforcement comes from the complexity and secrecy that shrouds the so-called “indoor sex industry.” Some studies have suggested that 85 percent of prostitution happens indoors, rather than on the street, and it is notoriously difficult for police to infiltrate these networks.
“The way we handle prostitution is we respond to complaints by districts,” Goswami explained. “People call 911 and say, ‘There’s a prostitute on my street, come and get her.’ The street is cheap, it’s 10 bucks a sex act. The real money is in these indoor venues.”
Frank Bochte, a representative for the Chicago field office of the FBI’s human trafficking task force, said police largely rely on tips to penetrate more hidden operations. But it’s rare to get them, he added, since men who patronize prostitutes aren’t likely to come forward, even when they suspect human trafficking might be occurring.
The problem is further compounded by the lack of general community awareness.
“These kinds of things, whether they’re gentlemen’s clubs or massage parlors, blend into the community they’re in and people don’t really recognize what’s going on,” Bochte said.
The crafty mobility of the trafficking industry also keeps it under the radar. When law enforcement is able to sniff out potential trafficking sites it is often too late, according to Dr. Mark Rodgers, dean of the School of Social Work at Dominican University in Oak Park, who has worked extensively both locally and internationally on the global trafficking crisis.
“As soon as things get hot, they [traffickers and pimps] have these vans, and they can pack up their people and they’re gone,” he said. “They are well-organized. We are the disorganized ones. They are years ahead of us.”
“I happen to know that when the police squeeze here in Chicago, pimps go right down to Joliet,” he added, emphasizing the need to make sure this issue is taken seriously everywhere, not just in the big cities.
Rodgers, who has coordinated programs to combat human trafficking in Latvia, Ecuador and Romania, said Chicago’s trafficking problems have similarities to those in many developing countries in that the city lacks the holistic services needed to assist victims of domestic trafficking once they are found.
“They need so much, they need everything,” Raphael said of the process of rehabilitating survivors. “They had no childhood, so they can’t go back home. What do you build on? Where do you start?”
In addition to the social and emotional challenges of addressing legacies like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, lack of services has a direct effect on prosecution, said Jessica Ashley, a senior research analyst for the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority.
“There’s no safe place in Chicago to put them,” she said. “There’s very little safe housing specifically for prostitutes. So a lot of times they leave the placement out of fear, and go back to their pimps. It’s not worth the risk for them.”
It is precisely because of this overwhelming danger that Raphael said she doubts that tightening provisions in the reauthorization act will make much of a dent in the trade.
“I don’t think law enforcement can go after the trafficker or the pimp,” she said. “I’m all for giving law enforcement every tool that they need to go after every wrong-doer, but I don’t think you can arrest and prosecute without the testimony of the girls that have been trafficked. And it’s a very dangerous thing for those girls.”
Instead Raphael suggests eliminating the conditions that drive young girls out of their homes and onto the streets, and the fundamental problems that prevent so many disenfranchised communities from ensuring safe homes for their young women.
“It’s about offering opportunity in these low-income communities, and getting it to all of these people at all levels,” she said. “The community, in turn, has to be the one to blow the whistle — they know who these traffickers are, and they have to turn on them.”
Goswami too said factors like poverty, inequality and violence against women, which enable trafficking to flourish in many cultures, must be halted with long-term solutions.
A state senate resolution passed on May 29, sponsored by state Sen. Jacqueline Collins, a Chicago Democrat, encourages U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Barack Obama to support the bill’s passage in Washington.
Despite the outcome of the Senate vote, which may not take place before the session’s adjournment, at the very least proponents of the bill say the contentious clause has at least thrown the issue of domestic trafficking into the fringes of the spotlight — even if the provision does not remain in the final version of the bill that is voted on.
Rodgers said he hopes this self-examination will take root in the way Americans view their own attitude towards human rights. “If the domestic issues had been removed from the bill, it probably would have sailed right through,” he said. “As if trafficking is a problem out there, not in here.”
“These girls are not going to Mexico, they’re not going to Europe,” said Goswami. “They’re being shipped around this country. And that’s what I think is a huge step forward in this bill. The rest of the world has recognized this for years. We haven’t.”
For Raphael, it remains a personal issue with a very human face.
“Humiliation, degradation, and fear of death on a daily basis? I’d say that’s a human rights issue,” said Raphael of the experience of the trafficked women with whom she’s worked.
“We think our culture is better, we think we don’t exploit people the way they would be exploited in Thailand or Bangladesh. For most people, we just can’t go there, to say Americans do these things. We haven’t been able to accept that… yet.”
(Christa Hillstrom/Medill)
