A hard-to-read New York Times Magazine article describes the sexual slavery industry in the USA today There’s a lot to get pissed off about here, but near the top of the list is that the US could be doing a lot more to halt sexual slavery….
”This is not narco-traffic secrecy,” says Sharon B. Cohn, director of anti-trafficking operations for the International Justice Mission. ”These are not people kidnapped and held for ransom, but women and children sold every single day. If they’re hidden, their keepers don’t make money.”
I.J.M.’s president, Gary Haugen, says: ”It’s the easiest kind of crime in the world to spot. Men look for it all day, every day.”
But border agents and local policemen usually don’t know trafficking when they see it. The operating assumption among American police departments is that women who sell their bodies do so by choice, and undocumented foreign women who sell their bodies are not only prostitutes (that is, voluntary sex workers) but also trespassers on U.S. soil. No Department of Justice attorney or police vice squad officer I spoke with in Los Angeles — one of the country’s busiest thoroughfares for forced sex traffic — considers sex trafficking in the U.S. a serious problem, or a priority. A teenage girl arrested on Sunset Strip for solicitation, or a group of Russian sex workers arrested in a brothel raid in the San Fernando Valley, are automatically heaped onto a pile of workaday vice arrests.
I wish I had some interesting feminist theory to offer here, but really I don’t have anything to say besides: [some] people suck. I recommend reading the entire article, although there’s a lot in there which is sickening.
UPDATE: But then again… It’s unfortunate that I focused on the numbers here, because (as this Slate article, cited in comments by “Patrick O,” argues) the numbers given in the Times article may be badly exaggerated. Slate argues that the real numbers are essentially impossible to know:
On the other hand, I’m don’t find Slate’s primary argument – “if it happened, then the police would be busting slave houses more often” – very convincing. I can see dozens of drug dealers and prostitutes any night by just walking through the right neighborhood, and I’m sure the police know of them. If we accept Slate’s logic, that must mean the dealers and streetwalkers don’t exist. Merely because the police know of something doesn’t mean that they will priortize it. Furthermore, the number of locations suggested by the article – dozens in New York City, hundreds nationwide – is actually not fairly small, compared to the scale of (respectively) NYC and the United States.
Slate is correct to point out that some of the anecdotes in the Times article are hard to buy – in particular the description of prostituted women and girls in Vista, California smacks of overelaboration. From Slate:
If that’s how San Luis Rey River works, one would imagine that the health worker then blew the whistle, the cops raided the reed brothel, and people went to jail or were deported. Maybe those events transpired, and maybe they didn’t. Landesman doesn’t say! Instead, he writes, “It was 8 in the morning, but the girls could begin arriving any minute.” The reader naturally expects Landesman to stake out the site with the deputy, but instead the scene terminates.
As Corwin suggests in my comments, such stories bring the McMartin preschool trials to mind. It would be a much better article had the Times writer ever exhibited skepticism. On the other hand, just because the writer was probably fed some hooey by a California cop doesn’t mean the entire article is junk..
Lets take a stab at this
People tend to act on their options when they know or become aware of them. As for men and sex, generally speaking men will act to engage in more sex with more partners if the opportunity is available or made available. This may or may not be biological determinism but it sure is a fact of life in the U.S. and everywhere else on the planet.
This sexual slavery, especially as it concerns American men, is part of the spectrum of the increase in knowledge of sexual availability among women living in other nations. This knowledge may also change the attitude toward American women. The men start to become spoiled since they are getting mostly what they want from women, that is, the ease of sex and attention from foreign women. The attitude becomes: American women are just “too difficult” and it takes too much effort to have sex with them – ie proving that they have a good job, conversation, gifts, dinner dates etc. This may also be a factor in “date rape” as it relates to the sense of entitlement to sex among men.
Sites such as the World Sex Guide (www.worldsexguide.org) are a good example. This one is free. Others such as Travel and the Single Male (tsmtravel.com) require a member fee.
Look at the WSG. This is trading of information among men as to where to find and how much to pay for sex. Advice is also given about how not to pay and acquire a “girlfriend” for a time on the promise of a better life. The girlfriend experience or GFE. Quite frankly, these sites may be doing more damage than porn sites or mail order bride sites.
The Dominican Republic is about an hour from Miami. Do you know what goes on down there? If not, the WSG will tell you. That is the problem-the awareness. Whether acted on or not, this awareness that women all over the world will give them what they want one hour from the States surely must lead to a change in attitude among men and could lead to the undermining of respect men have for women here at home.
Think about it. A man (could be your coworker or neighbor) takes a quick three-day holiday weekend to a beautiful tropical country that is teeming with young friendly women, gets constant attention and has sex with as many women as he could handle (about $12 each in the DR). Upon return, how does he now view women? sex? his status in the world? you? desire to marry? forget about the last one, hey why bother.
Some men may not want to or have the time to make the trip. Its these guys who find it more convenient to go to the next town where the women are held as sex slaves. But its all the same thing, minus the beach.
Of course, lifting countries such as the DR out of poverty is the ultimate solution. Assuming that this is not plausable in the near term, what else can be done?
Terry Gross interviewed the journalist who wrote the Times Magazine story, Peter Landesman, yesterday on Fresh Air. You can listen to the interview here.
Actually I thought the article was over-the-top yellow journalism of the type we’ve become accustomed to from the Times.
Jack Shaeffer on Slate had a pretty good analysis of it: http://slate.msn.com/id/2094414/
LuAnn —
What men do you know? Most of the men I know would not go near a prostitute, especially an younger one. Of course, many of the men I know have daughters, and that makes a huge amazing enormous difference.
Yes, of course there are American men who act in the manner you described, but it you lose me when you generalize it to all men. And sex has been way to easy to buy for years — the forced sex slave trade in the US is nothing new. The forced sex slave trade in the US all over the world is a huge problem, and will be until there are no victims left. And the whole legalization thing doesn’t work for me either, since so many of the women and girls in the sex trade industry have been molested, raped, victims of incest, etc.
That said, Ampersand, I agree, although I would change it to some people suck. Some people suck so much I would like to drive over them with my neighbor’s SUV (don’t have one, don’t wanna wreck my car…) Some people are spending their limited free time leading scout troops, driving meals to shut-ins, sending clothing and toys to orphans all over eastern Europe and Asia. Those people don’t suck.
“Some men may not want to or have the time to make the trip.”
Hey, thanks for conflating me with people who keep and use sex slaves.
I particularly like how the “or have the time to make the trip” manages to imply that most men probably would purchase a sex slave if they had the time or opportunity.
And of course, this article does not make me think of the McMartin preschool trials at all. Nope, not at all.
Disclaimer for trolls: If I ever found evidence that such things actually took place, I would do everything in my power to stop it.
“We’re a virus with shoes.” – Bill Hicks
I don’t care if the article in the NYT was yellow journalism or not. That one picture of the men standing around looking at the thirteen or fourteen year old was enough for me. It kept me up all night. Nobody should have to do that and certainly not at that age.
However common or rare sex slavery might be, it definitely exists. There’s lots of information about the trade from the countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union, and also from Nepal and Thailand.
I also think that there is a feminist angle to this which is even apparent in our discussion: we focus more on the sex part than the slave part, and there’s very little discussion about those who demand the services of sex slaves in these illegal markets. Reading that article and listening to the writer’s interview brought it home so clearly. The one thing that was barely mentioned was the fact that these women wouldn’t have to go through what they are experiencing if there weren’t people (probably mostly men) who find having sex under these conditions desirable, i.e. having sex with someone whose mind has been broken and who is kept as a prisoner, for example.
LuAnn, I find your view of men pretty gloomy. Do you really think that men won’t get married if they can get easy sex otherwise, or stop respecting American women if others provide them with easier, more plentiful and cheaper intercourse? I really doubt that men are like that, or at least I doubt that most men are like that. And if they actually were like that, wouldn’t this mean that all the men who supposedly now respect women are just pretending? Doesn’t seem worth striving for.
I’ve been considering posting on this for a while, then echidne goes and says everything I want to say. How unfair.
But don’t these girls know that “spreading their legs” gives them “power”?
Julie: Many of the men I have known have lost their virginity to prostitutes.
Truly, I found some of Slate’s criticisms to be vague:
* Slate complains that Bales’ estimate of 27 million slaves is inconsistent with the Anti-slavery Society’s claims of 2.7 million. Here is a quote linked from the Anti-slavery Society’s Newsroom web page to UNESCO:
The NGO Anti-Slavery says at least 20 million people are held in bonded labour around the world, while the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) puts the estimated number of people trafficked for bonded or forced labour at 700,000 a year.
So, definitions of slavery may be a little different (bonded for labour vs. trafficked for bonded labour).
*The Slate article says, State Department go-to guy on slavery John Miller tells Landesman that the 10,000 new sex slaves a year estimate by Bales “could be low.” But the fact is nobody in the field seems to have a good handle on slave traffic numbers or the sex slave population in the United States. So, when Bales surmises that there are between 30,000 to 50,000 sex slaves in the United States at any time, don’t feel the need to believe him. Nobody really knows the true answer, but we do know whose interests are served by any inflation of the numbers.
Is it so impossible to believe that, even if there are only 5,000 people trafficked for sex in a year, that there are 30,000 to 50,000 in the US at any given time?
* Again from Slate, But if police know of dozens of active stash houses in the metro area and hundreds more in other cities, why haven’t they busted them? If they have, Landesman isn’t telling.
Landesman has said that most of the police do not take the prostitution seriously because they consider prostitution an activity of choice!
* They don’t believe the stories because they’re too “preposterous?” I don’t find the San Luis Rey River story that unbelievable. I used to live in San Bruno, CA which is between San Francisco and San Jose. There were some train tracks running through the city and, since I was a jogger, I used to do some running near them. I was surprised to find that there were many, usually Hispanic, men sleeping in the bushes along these tracks. They were spread out along the tracks for some distance and were an eerie, “shadow” society.
* Per Slate, One of Landesman’s pseudonymous ex-sex slaves, “Montserrat,” says she’s lived in Mexico City “since she escaped from her trafficker [Alejandro] four years ago.” But Montserrat also talks about how Alejandro took her to see Scary Movie 2 in Portland, Ore. This would be impossible. Scary Movie 2 was released in 2001.
Well, OK, but could this have been an innocent mistake? Scary Movie 2 is a sequel, maybe it was really Scary Movie (released in 2000).
*From Slate, Other minor annoyances populate “The Girls Next Door.” Landesman writes about a Glendale, Calif., highway rest stop that’s used as a transfer point for sex slaves. Glendale is a densely populated Los Angeles suburb, like Pasadena or Burbank. If there’s a highway rest stop there, it’s news to me.
Well, there are four highways (I-5, the 210, 134 and 2) going through Glendale, CA and the reference is to a rest stop, not necessarily a “Rest Area.” In spite of being a “densely populated Los Angeles suburb,” Glendale also borders the huge (over 4,000 acres) Griffith Park to the west and even the Angeles National Forest to the north
* Per Slate, During a session with federal immigration agents in Fairfax, Va., Landesman suggests they look at a Web site “that supposedly offered sex slaves for purchase to individuals.” The agents had never heard of the site and gasped when they clicked to an on-going auction for a woman that had topped $300,000. Was the auction real? Did the agents investigate the transaction? Like other shocking scenes in Landesman’s piece, it dribbles away without explanation or resolution.
This auction could have involved a buyer in Saudi Arabia and a seller in Albania. US agents may not have had authority to do anything immediately or without more research??
* Slate: During the visit with federal immigration agents, he mentions “Operation Hamlet,” in which the agents “broke up a ring of adults who traded images and videos of themselves forcing sex on their own young children.” Awful, nasty, and despicable, but what does the prosecution of adults forcing sex on their own children have to do with international sex-slave rings except to boost the tone of depravity already cresting?
“Operation Hamlet” involved some international connections between people trading their own children for sex. While not quite along the lines of the rest of Landesman’s story involving victims trafficked by non-relatives, it is relevant.
* Slate: Slate colleague Josh Levin notes that much of the sensational material in “The Girls Next Door” comes from “Andrea,” a source who can’t remember her real name or age. Andrea does remember, though, that one American businessman read to her from the Bible before and after sex, that she witnessed a 4-year-old boy being purchased for $500, that she was regularly passed off to customers at Disneyland, and that one regular john was a child psychologist. (It’s difficult to imagine that tidbit coming up in conversation.)
No, much of the sensational material in the story does not come just form Andrea. The article refers to numerous sources in government, academia and non-profit agencies as well as former madams, a parent whose child was abducted in Mexico and other former sex slaves. Also, the fact that the “Andrea” would know of a man’s profession, especially if it was so contradictory to what he was doing, is not difficult to imagine at all.
* Slate: Because Landesman offers so few verifiable facts, he repeatedly pairs fudging adverbs of “typically,” “sometimes,” “most,” “often,” and “some” with specific nouns to make his unsourced generalizations appear more real than they are.
Landesman seems to be repeating the language used by the people he interviewed about what happens.
* Slate: Radosh is especially good at calling Landesman out for mix-and-matching “instances in which a moderated quote from a government source is paired with an extreme one from someone at Free the Slaves or another advocacy group, as if the former is bolstering the latter.”
Would that be this quote from Landesman’s article:
In fact, the United States has become a major importer of sex slaves. Last year, the C.I.A. estimated that between 18,000 and 20,000 people are trafficked annually into the United States. The government has not studied how many of these are victims of sex traffickers, but Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves, America’s largest anti-slavery organization, says that the number is at least 10,000 a year. John Miller, the State Department’s director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, conceded: ”That figure could be low. What we know is that the number is huge.”
I think this quote actually shows the opposite. Although the CIA has not estimated the percentage of trafficked people who are victims of sex traffickers, the State Department’s John Miller thinks the so-called extremist Bales’ numbers may be too low.
I’ve been considering posting on this for a while, then echidne goes and says everything I want to say. How unfair.
In San Francisco, police just raided four suspected brothels using illegal Asian immigrants as sex slaves: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/23/MNGTA4GD2K1.DTL
One major gap in the article: he made no attempt whatsoever to talk to a customer or an “owner.” I’m sure that more than a few of us wonder just what the customers are thinking–and we still have no clue. (The pimps/owners are an easier case: they can make lots of money. if it didn’t make them money, they wouldn’t bother.)
Oddly enough, I’ve been doing some consulting work this week with someone who’s putting together services for victims of sex trafficking. As the article noted, on of the things that makes identifying victims of trafficking difficult is that they’re typically not streetwalkers. And they do seem to be moved around a lot. the person I’m working with (whose location I’m not telling) says that it’s obvious that many are brought in for big events in the city in which she works, and then taken out again afterwards.
The article may not have been as well-reported as we would all like, but enough of it agreed with the words of someone who’s actually out there on the front lines to convince me.
And it just occurred to me that this was the same issue of the NYT that included an article on how to pick up chicks (in the Sunday Styles section) using tricks learned from, apparently, “the community” and neurolinguistic programming.
As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I didn’t read anything in the article that I found shocking or surprising. There are a lot worse stories in many books by survivors–one that I’ve read recently was The Deepest Wound : How a Journey to El Salvador Led to Healing from Mother-Daughter Incest by Linda Crockett
There’s also a news story today about the arrest of the leaders of a large-scale Russian prostitution ring in LA. It doesn’t use the term “sex slavery,” but it stands to reason that Russian pimp = sex slavery, I think.
Plainfield, NJ, also has some misgivings about Landesman’s sex slavery story. We find the following discrepancies–address [non-existent] of the bordello, color of the house, description of the neighborhood, and–like Vista, CA, an incomplete telling of the story of the local police work.
–you can check them out on my blog at–
http://plainfield-times.blogspot.com/
where you can read about it from a Plainfield point of view, as well as find links to other comment.
Dan Damon-home
Public Information Officer
City of Plainfield (NJ)
(908) 226-4905 office
Errr, does anyone know the adress of a shop for buying a sex slave i’ve been looking all day on the internet, i have even tried eBay but i cant find it.
help plz
Lollyman,
I suggest that you go to this site:
http://www.fbi.gov
Good luck and let us know how it turns out.
This is sick walk you are try to do. You are looking. For sex slaves I found them in just 5 minute of looking on the internet. Those girls should not be forced to have sex that is not right and you our trying to by some of them that just sickess me. If I get my reasurch done on this topic there will be no more sex out there I will be taking this public in a matter of weeks a a few girls may get to go home off of this.
P.S. What kind of idot try to find them on ebay.
This is sick walk you are try to do. You are looking. For sex slaves I found them in just 5 minute of looking on the internet. Those girls should not be forced to have sex that is not right and you our trying to by some of them that just sickess me. If I get my reasurch done on this topic there will be no more sex out there I will be taking this public in a matter of weeks a a few girls may get to go home off of this.
P.S. What kind of idot try to find them on ebay.
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Seems a lot of this is related to, and has a parallel in globalization. American women (it is said) are too “uppity” and too high maintenance. Same argument has been made for American workers. Outsource your needs to all those poor brown people who are grateful for any penny you give them. Meanwhile, back here, it gets harder and harder to maintain anything like a decent standard of living or make reasonable demands of our employers, husbands, or boyfriends when they can have their needs met more cheaply and with less effort by exploiting other people.
This issue is getting a good response at the Lifetime site here:
http://boards.lifetimetv.com/WebX?14@156.1v6LbtItSoe.0@.ef23c73!skip=top
While reading the responses, I found that the topic is getting a scary review here:
http://www.americanwomensuck.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=5069