Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.
Kaleb is facing the large living room window in his Chicago house, skillfully playing Dvorak on his flute for a small group of houseguests. As he plays, lips pursed, I see the distant relation to Elvis he claims to have. At 23, Kaleb spends his days playing music, listening to opera and frequenting art museums and wineries. He has a flexible work schedule that allows for the Viagra Triangle lifestyle.
Trilling, Kaleb stops abruptly to answer the jewelry-box ring from his phone, he chats comfortably, making plans. “That was my Uncle”, he said with an eyebrow raise,” I’m meeting him at a restaurant to get money later.” F.Y.I: Uncle is the codeword for basically any man who would wants Kaleb by the hour, the restaurant is a cheap hotel room and the money is exactly $150 an hour for an “erotic massage”.
I feel it would be cliche and just tacky to point to Kaleb’s childhood, highlighting abuse. But as we talk he’s so open about it. It is part of him–and it was rough. “I just really focused on music and that’s how I got through it”, Kaleb said with large brown eyes. He won some significant music awards and was accepted to Oberlin, a music conservatory in Ohio that ranks among the top 8 in the country. But didn’t attend because of the expense.
He bounced around and after finding himself homeless with no live family members to turn to, he had to find a way to pay the bills.
Kaleb heard about online escorting sites from “high class women hookers” he knew in L.A. “I found websites and posted ads”, Kaleb said. “The one I chose charges $30 a month for a profile–it is worth it”. He pulls out his laptop. The website has an extensive member list, and breaks up the boys by city. The headlines exclaim that “these boys are eager to please you” with an “erotic massage” What does that even mean?
“it is just a both-partners naked, sensual massage that a lot of times becomes a hand job,” Kaleb says. “If the guy wants me to do oral then I will for $200. But I always use a condom ” he adds. “I have had sex a few times but I don’t like to. There was one man I did enjoy having sex with” he says, getting a bit gushy. “He was a married Puerto Rican Doctor on travel. So hot. He was obviously in the closet and that’s how a lot of clients are.”
Kaleb’s roommate John is a skinny college student. He identifies as a straight man, but adds that he is “just very sexual”. When his search for a job was unsuccessful, the independent 19-year-old decided, why not try what Kaleb was cashing in on? John had never been with a man but dove right in, placing a provocative ad online for a “four hand massage” alongside Kaleb charging $400.
“He was so down“ Kaleb exclaimed. “I was surprised, he treated it just like it was his everyday job.” John says he isn’t scared of the profession because he can get a good sense of the client’s personality by talking to them online and over the phone. “Though, the profession itself is not safe. No one knows where you are when you are in a hotel room with a client” he says.
We talk about how the illegality makes it dangerous. “If it weren’t (illegal) businesses could track where the workers are and run background checks to eliminate rapes and murders” he says. Not to mention, there would be no worry for arrest.
When both Kaleb and John talk about their gigs, they get this energy, giddy, eyes asparkle. There is a sense of enthusiasm about the the mysterious clients, the taboos and a sense of accomplishment in getting them off.
But it is apparent the enthusiasm is not for the sex. “I did an overnight once. I charged $500 and he even bought me stuff and took me out. But just like Vivian Ward, Kaleb doesn’t kiss on the lips. “It isn’t romance” he says “It is straight up sex. I had one guy who wanted it to be sweet and was disappointed when it wasn’t” Kaleb says. “But it is a service, they are paying me” he explains.
Currently, a bill is passing in Illinois that would severely penalize buying and selling sex. The argument used by many groups is that “all prostitution is violence of men against women.” But logically, no one can decide your consent besides you. Especially not the State.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/11/25/carr.human.trafficking/
Ann Arbor, Michigan (CNN) -- "We did not have a right to choose where we lived ... freedom of speech, or freedom of actions. The traffickers had keys to our apartment. They controlled all of our movement and travel. They watched us and listened when we called our parents. They didn't let us make friends or tell anyone anything about ourselves. We couldn't keep any of the money we earned. We couldn't ask anyone for help." -- Lena
Lena was an athletic student from Eastern Europe yearning to visit the United States through a study-abroad program at her college. She had visions of learning English and returning home to share her experiences with her family.
But the human traffickers who ensnared her had a different vision for Lena, shipping her to America and exploiting her in the sex industry for profit. They met her at the airport with news that her study abroad placement had been changed. She was given new bus tickets and sent off to Detroit, Michigan. Once there they took her passport and her freedom.
After almost a year of enslavement, Lena risked her life to make a daring escape. She is smart, resilient and funny, and I have been honored to be her attorney through the Human Trafficking Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School.
Unfortunately there are thousands of adults and children like Lena who have not been able to escape their traffickers. These victims, especially the children, are in the same position Lena was: They're being exploited and can't ask anyone for help.
The data on human trafficking is sparse, but what is known is terrifying. It's already the second largest criminal industry in the world -- behind only the trade in illegal drugs -- and it's growing fast. The global commercial sex trade exploits one million children annually. At least 100,000 and perhaps as many as 300,000 children in America are victims of sex trafficking each year.
The grim reality of child sex trafficking in the United States is this: Human traffickers are selling sex with children in big cities and small towns throughout America.
Child sex trafficking has been illegal in the United States since 2000 with the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Under this law it is illegal to recruit, harbor, transport, provide or obtain a person under the age of 18 years for the purpose of a commercial sex act. Since the passage of the TVPA many states have passed their own human trafficking laws.
Children who are selling sex in the United States are then, by definition, victims of human trafficking. Despite this, child victims of sex trafficking are frequently viewed as criminals rather than as victims. According to the Department of Justice in 2006, six years after the passage of the TVPA, 1,600 children were arrested for prostitution and commercialized vice.
The children victimized by sex trafficking are often very young. On average, girls are first exploited for commercial sex between the ages of 12 and 14. For boys the average age is even younger -- between 11 and 13.
But being a victim of sex trafficking does not have to be a life sentence. Victims can become survivors and build new lives. And while Lena is no longer the young college student she once was and it is too dangerous for her to return home, her speech and actions are now her own. She can choose where she wants to live. She is free.
Through my work with Lena and other clients in the Human Trafficking Clinic we have identified a number of ways to fight sex trafficking.
Raise awareness within your community: One of the biggest barriers to helping victims of sex trafficking is the lack of awareness about the issue. Human traffickers profit when we think human trafficking only happens in foreign countries.
• Human trafficking happens everywhere, and sex trafficking cases involving children have been found in all regions of the country. No community is immune to the horrors of human trafficking.
• Communities must prioritize the fight against human trafficking -- including providing enough resources to law enforcement.
Change the conversation: Children who by law are too young to consent to having sex obviously cannot consent to selling sex, so:
• Victims should not be described as entering into prostitution; they are being exploited and should be described as victims of human trafficking.
• Law enforcement officials often arrest and detain child victims of sex trafficking on either prostitution charges or other charges, such as truancy or curfew violations. Law enforcement must be trained about human trafficking.
• Sellers of sex, especially when they are children, should not be guilty of a criminal violation. Buyers and pimps should be the only individuals at risk of criminal penalties. This would ensure that no victims are arrested or jailed.
Reduce demand: The reality of sex trafficking must not be neutralized or glamorized.
• Individuals who travel abroad to purchase sex from children are demonized in the media and identified as sexual predators, yet individuals who stay in the United States and pay to have sex with children are given the anonymous title "john" -- and frequently aren't even charged with a crime.
• Individuals who pay for sex with children in the United States should be punished.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
UNITED NATIONS — Surprisingly, the perpetrators behind human trafficking around the world are often women, the U.N. reported Thursday.
Women are the majority of traffickers in almost a third of the 155 nations the U.N. surveyed. They accounted for more than 60 percent of the human trafficking convictions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
For many, human trafficking is a world they had been pulled into themselves.
"Women commit crimes against women, and in many cases the victims become the perpetrators," Antonio Maria Costa, director of the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said in an interview. "They become the matrons of the business and they make money. It's like a drug addiction."
Most of the world's nations reported some form of "modern slavery" last year involving mainly the sex trade or forced labor.
And the number of victims should grow as the global financial crisis deepens, Costa said.
The report by Costa's office was based largely on human trafficking convictions reported to the U.N. between September 2007 and July 2008. About 22,500 victims were rescued during that time. About four of every five reported cases involved sexual exploitation; most of the rest involved forced labor.
But Costa's agency gave no overall figures for how many millions of people might be affected. He said most countries' conviction rates for human trafficking rarely exceed 1.5 per 100,000 people.
Two of every five countries covered in the report had not recorded a single conviction from 2007 to 2008.
"Either these countries are blind to the problem or they are ill-equipped to deal with it," Costa said.
"We only see the monster's tail," he said. "How many hundreds of thousands of victims are slaving away in sweatshops, fields, mines, factories, or trapped in domestic servitude? Their numbers will surely swell as the economic crisis deepens the pool of potential victims."
The report's release coincided with the appointment Thursday of Academy Award-winning actress Mira Sorvino as a U.N. goodwill ambassador to help Costa's office fight human trafficking. Sorvino, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1989 with a degree in Chinese, won an Oscar for best supporting actress in 1995's "Mighty Aphrodite."
"Until a few years ago, I blissfully believed that slavery was a thing of the past. ... Well, obviously I was terribly wrong," she said after Costa draped a blue-ribboned medal around her neck.
Sorvino told how the stories of trafficked children hit her particularly hard since becoming a mother with two young children herself.
"If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," she said, repeating a famous statement by Abraham Lincoln, whose 200th birthday was celebrated Thursday.
The report also pointed out that women and girls suffer most from sexual abuse. About 20 percent of victims globally were children, mainly in Southeast Asia's Mekong region and parts of Africa.
Costa, who serves as the U.N.'s chief crime fighter, said it's difficult to get nations to address human trafficking because "it's at the crossroads" of other complex occurrences such as human migration and prostitution.
Sixty-three percent of the nations in the report had adopted some laws against human trafficking. The U.N. said most did so only after its protocol against human trafficking entered into force in December 2003.
We would stay for three months there to earn enough money and come back. I was extremely happy. I could not believe all that was happening to me. He took my passport and all necessary papers and said that he would take care of visa and travel arrangements. I was so happy and careless that I did not even ask to see the tickets or documents. The day of departure came. We took the plane and instead of Greece we landed in Dubai. As I had not been abroad before I could not really understand where I was. I could only recognize the Arabic signs and people dressed in Arabic robes. When I asked why we landed in Dubai he said we would have to stay for a couple of days in Dubai, and then later we would go to Greece. He took me to a hotel and said that he was going to see his friend and would be back soon. Two hours later a man came to take me to another hotel saying that I was his property. I could not understand, I kept saying that it was a misunderstanding and that my friend would come soon. I had come to Dubai for another purpose. The man told me that my friend had sold me to him, that from now on he would have my documents and I had to do whatever he told me to. He said that the next day I had to move to another place and serve all the clients he would send to me. I was shocked by what was happening. The next day he came and took me to another hotel. He said that every day I had to give him $500, no matter how many clients I would serve. He was so violent. It was a continuous hell. Each day I served around 30 to 40 clients. I was not able to move or think. It went on for weeks. I was living between clients and tears. That was the rhythm of my life. I could not even realize what they wanted from me. The intensity of the process lasted for a couple of weeks. One day I got terribly sick. He left me alone and sent another Armenian woman to visit me. That day I understood that it was an organized enterprise and that there were many women from many countries who shared the same fate.
Meanwhile the pimp refused to give back my passport because of the debts he said he had incurred on account of me. I had to work and earn money if I wanted to go back home. Then he introduced me to another man telling me that he had sold me to him and that I had to take my passport from him. The next day I was beaten like for the first time. He was an extremely cruel man. He came every morning to pick up his money and beat me terribly. I had no right to speak or express my concern, everybody knew him well for his cruelty. I did not receive any money from him. He did not even buy food. It all depended on the client’s will. I was resold four times.
One of my clients was trying to kill me. If it were not for the women in the next room I would have been killed. In his frenzy the man was beating me. He squeezed my throat.
Luckily enough there was a police raid in the hotel where I was working and I was taken together with other women to a police station and detained. My pimp did not do anything to release me from prison. I spent four months there. Though it was prison and the conditions were terrible, it was incomparable with what I had gone through before that. Nobody was cruel or rude to me there and I had to wait while my temporary documents from Armenia and the ticket for deportation were arranged. I came back without any money. All I had before remained with the pimp, I could not pick up anything. The most shameful thing happened at Yerevan airport. Everybody was treating me as if I were a prostitute, saying bad words. My life has changed since that time. Now you see me here in the street. I have become a real prostitute."
- Alina, trafficked in the UAE, originally from Armenia
Special Thanks to: Ex Oriente Lux
Website: http://ex-oriente-lux.org/acc_armenia_01.html
Original Source: IOM. "Trafficking in Women and Children from the Republic of Armenia: A Study" (2001).
When people hear that teenage girls are being exploited as sex slaves in the United States, they probably think it’s something involving the poor and underprivileged. They also probably believe that if their daughter was being exploited as a sex slave, they would see signs of it and would be able to intervene.
But people who think that way would be wrong. Just ask Theresa Flores.
Flores, who appeared Friday on TODAY, doesn’t have to cite studies or statistics or third-person accounts to prove her assertion. As a 15-year-old girl from a good, upper-middle-class Catholic family, she was used as a sex slave for two years in an upscale suburb of Detroit.
And her parents didn’t have a clue what was happening.
It has been 28 years since Flores’ nightmare began. But the problem has, if anything, gotten worse as the Internet has made it easier for predators to meet girls and profit by forcing them into sexual servitude.
“People … think trafficking only happens in India and China. Just because you make $100,000 a year and live in a fancy house doesn’t mean that it won’t happen to your kids,” Flores told TODAY’s Natalie Morales in a taped interview that was done for an MSNBC special titled “Sex Slaves: The Teen Trade” that will air Sunday (10 p.m. ET).
Erica MacDonald, a federal prosecutor assigned to sex trade cases, confirmed Flores’ account.
“These are cases that we work on on a regular basis,” MacDonald told TODAY’s Amy Robach after watching Flores tell Morales of her ordeal. “These are things that are happening to our youth in our suburbs. It not just something that happens just to the poor or in the inner city. It’s something that happens to every single one of our youth.”
Flores certainly had no reason to think it would happen to her.
“I was an Irish-Catholic, middle-class girl that lived in the suburbs,” she said. “I had a nice family. I was a good kid, I didn’t party and I wasn’t loose. I was just a normal, everyday kid.”
Her father was an executive who moved every two years as he got new assignments from his company. One of the moves took her to the Detroit suburb, where, as the new girl in a big high school, she was thrilled when a boy she calls “Daniel” invited her to visit his house. He was older than she – a junior. And she was thrilled to be noticed.
“I thought he was amazing. And I jumped at the chance like any 15-year-old girl would do,” she said.
He took her to an upstairs bedroom and, she said, “one thing led to another. He kissed me and. I’d always known when to tell somebody to stop, and he didn’t. I kept pushing him and trying to get him off me. And he wouldn’t stop until it was too late.”
Flores was a faithful Catholic – a “good girl.” And the rape was devastating
“My religion was so important to me that the shame that that carried with it was huge. There was no way I wanted my mom to know,” she said.
So she kept her secret and went back to school, where, a few days later, “Daniel” approached her and showed her pictures of the rape. The photos had been taken by his cousins, who were hiding in the room. He used the pictures to blackmail her into doing anything he demanded.
He drove her to a house where his cousins were waiting in the basement. “You’ll do what we say, whenever we say, and when we’re done, we’ll take you home,” he told her.
For the next two hours, they beat and raped her before driving her home.
“I was sore, I could hardly walk,” Flores said. “I then went to bed and got up two hours later to go to school.”
For the next two years, the boys used and abused Flores, filling her with drugs, raping and beating her and selling her body to others. This happened three or four nights a week, she said.
Flores felt she had no one to turn to. “Who’s going to believe me if I told them that these guys are doing this?” she asked. “The psychological torture that they put you under is nothing that an adult can even imagine. From a kid’s perspective, it’s fear and psychological torture and shame all together.”
And her parents never suspected that anything was wrong.
“They had no signs beyond the normal teenage things – like your grades dropping and being tired. I was a teenager going through hormones, so they had no idea.” Flores told Robach after watching Morales’ report. “I was very good, as all these girls are, at hiding it, because they can’t tell their parents. The shame is so huge and they have no other options, they have nobody they can really talk to, they feel.”
Familiar pattern
MacDonald said that what happened to Flores is, sadly, not uncommon.
“Human traffickers today, it’s not necessarily individuals using force or the threat of force,” she told Robach. “It’s different types of psychological manipulation: the threat of exposure, the threat, ‘I’m going to tell your parents.’ They use all types of psychological torture to hold these girls in place.”
The torture finally ended for Flores two years after it began, when her father was again transferred to a new assignment in a new city, where she finished her senior year and graduated high school. It wasn’t until she was in college that she found the courage to speak out about what had happened to her, and by then it was too late to prosecute “Daniel.”
Now the mother of three, Flores has written a book about her ordeal called “The Sacred Bath: An American Teen's Story of Modern Day Slavery.” She keeps a Web site, traffickfree.com, campaigns against sexual slavery and exploitation, and has recently helped open a home for trafficked girls in Ohio called Gracehaven House. Although there are resources for foreign women brought into the United States as sex slaves, there are very few places to which American girls can turn, she said, adding that there are just 39 beds for such girls in the entire country.
MacDonald said that when people think of sexual trafficking, they think of women and girls being transported from place to place, often from outside the country. That’s not necessarily the case, she said.
“You can traffic your next-door neighbor and that is what’s happening to many of our youth,” she said. “Victims, for whatever reason, are extremely reluctant to testify, extremely reluctant to disclose, not only to law enforcement, but to even those close around them.”
If you have been a victim of an experience like Theresa Flores, you can e-mail the makers of “Sex Slaves: The Teen Trade” at info@santokiproductions.com.
