The Factbook on Global Sexual Exploitation was compiled from media, non-governmental organization and government reports. It is an initial effort to collect facts, statistics and known cases on global sexual exploitation. Information is organized into four categories: Trafficking, Prostitution, Pornography, and Organized and Institutionalized Sexual Exploitation and Violence.
Sources were not contacted to verify information. Close examination will reveal that there are contradictions in information depending on the sources of information (ex: how many women are in prostitution in Thailand). All statistics are reported with no attempt to evaluate which numbers are more likely to be accurate. In fact, the exact numbers in many cases are not known and estimates come from different sources which use different methods to determine what they report.
We hope these facts will assist people to recognize the harm caused throughout the world by sexual violence and exploitation and catalyze action against this violence agianst women.
If you use this information in your work, please reference this factbook--The Factbook on Global Sexual Exploitation, Donna M. Hughes, Laura Joy Sporcic, Nadine Z. Mendelsohn, Vanessa Chirgwin, Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, 1999.
For a South African victim of human trafficking, this was the endgame. On a freezing night last July, Sindiswa, 17, lay curled in a fetal position in bed No. 7 of a state-run hospice in central Bloemfontein. Well-used fly strips hung between fluorescent lights, pale blue paint flaked off the walls, and fresh blood stained her sheets, the rusty bedpost and the linoleum floor. Sindiswa had full-blown AIDS and tuberculosis, and she was three months pregnant. Sweat poured from her forehead as she whispered her story through parched lips covered with sores. A few blocks away, the roars of rugby fans erupted from Free State Stadium. In June the roars will be from fans of the World Cup. (See pictures of South Africa.)
Sindiswa's family was one of the poorest families in Indwe, the poorest district in Eastern Cape, one of the poorest provinces in South Africa. Ninety-five percent of the residents of her township fall below the poverty line, more than a quarter have HIV, and most survive by clinging to government grants. Orphaned at 16, she had to leave school to support herself. Last February, a woman from a neighboring town offered to find work for her and her 15-year-old best friend, Elizabeth, who, like Sindiswa, was poor but was also desperate to escape her violent older sister. (I have changed Elizabeth's name to protect her identity.)
After driving them eight hours north to Bloemfontein, the recruiter sold them to a Nigerian drug and human-trafficking syndicate in exchange for $120 and crack cocaine. "[The recruiter] said we could find a job," Sindiswa recalled, "but as soon as we got here, she told us, 'No. You have to go into the streets and sell yourselves.' " The buyer, Jude, forced them into prostitution on the streets of central Bloemfontein for 12 straight hours every night. Each morning, he collected their earnings — Sindiswa averaged $40 per night; Elizabeth, $65. Elizabeth tried to escape three times, once absconding for several weeks. Jude always found her or used Sindiswa as a hostage to lure her back, then enlisted an enforcer named Rasta to beat her. (See pictures of violence in South Africa.)
It is unclear if Sindiswa contracted HIV before or after she was sold, but some of her clients didn't use condoms. She was diagnosed with the virus only a week before I met her. When she was too sick to stand and thus useless as a slave, Jude had thrown her onto the street. Nurses expected her to die within days.
Despite more than a dozen international conventions banning slavery in the past 150 years, there are more slaves today than at any point in human history. Slaves are those forced to perform services for no pay beyond subsistence and for the profit of others who hold them through fraud and violence. While most are held in debt bondage in the poorest regions of South Asia, some are trafficked in the midst of thriving development. Such is the case here in Africa's wealthiest country, the host of this year's World Cup. While South Africa invests billions to prepare its infrastructure for the half-million visitors expected to attend, tens of thousands of children have become ensnared in sexual slavery, and those who profit from their abuse are also preparing for the tournament. During a three-week investigation into human-trafficking syndicates operating near two stadiums, I found a lucrative trade in child sex. The children, sold for as little as $45, can earn more than $600 per night for their captors. "I'm really looking forward to doing more business during the World Cup," said a trafficker. We were speaking at his base overlooking Port Elizabeth's new Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium. Already, he had done brisk business among the stadium's construction workers.
Although its 1996 constitution expressly forbids slavery, South Africa has no stand-alone law against human trafficking in all its forms. Aid groups estimate that some 38,000 children are trapped in the sex trade there. More than 500 mostly small-scale trafficking syndicates — Nigerian, Chinese, Indian and Russian, among others — collude with South African partners, including recruiters and corrupt police officials, to enslave local victims. The country's estimated 1.4 million AIDS orphans are especially vulnerable. South Africa has more HIV cases than any other nation, and a child sold into its sex industry will often face an early grave.
As Sindiswa told me her story, her voice trailed off, and the man who brought me to her — Andre Lombard, 39, a pastor of the Christian Revival Church — laid his hands on her. Lombard had a penetrating gaze and a simmering rage toward men who abuse women. His father, a brutal drunkard, had beaten his mother regularly. Lombard became a born-again Christian at age 17, then served in South Africa's élite special forces for 11 years. (See 25 people who mattered in 2009.)
He began a street ministry in April 2006 and recruited some 60 volunteers to distribute food, blankets and Bibles to the dozens of women and girls selling sex within a 10-block radius of the stadium. They also preached to clients and traffickers. Fights were commonplace. Lombard allowed his volunteers to carry firearms, and several wound up in the intensive-care unit of the local hospital. Lombard acknowledges that most of the prostitutes were not enslaved. Still, in a controversial move, he purchased bus tickets home for more than two dozen women as a way to "escape the streets." With no comprehensive rehabilitation, however, several wound up back in prostitution. Mainstream antitrafficking organizations often decry such tactics as reckless. In response, Lombard says, "I'm a goer. If you drive by and just talk about it and don't do anything, you're actually justifying it."
After we left the hospice, Lombard drove eight blocks east of the stadium to the notorious Maitland Hotel. Police had identified the Maitland as a base of drug- and human-trafficking operations. HIV-positive survivors described how traffickers used gang rape, drug provision, sleep deprivation and torture to "break" new children on the fifth floor; the fourth floor featured an illegal abortion clinic. On other floors, as many as four girls slept on a single mattress. Police raided the Maitland in 2008 and shut the place down last January. Traffickers had been tipped off about the final raid, yet officials still rescued dozens of underage girls and seized weapons and thousands of dollars' worth of drugs. Though still officially closed, the Maitland was active. Next door, a club blasted music by Tupac, and several girls worked the front of the hotel, where a makeshift concierge took rents. (See TIME's tribute to people who passed away in 2009.)
A shivering girl in a red sweatshirt and flip-flops stood alone at the corner of the hotel. She said she was 15 and desperately needed help. I asked Lombard's volunteer to translate from Xhosa. Shockingly, this was Elizabeth — Sindiswa's best friend — still controlled by Jude. Having researched modern-day slavery for eight years, I knew how difficult it was for survivors to heal after emancipation. In this case, mere emancipation would be a dangerous procedure.
Earlier that day, I spoke with Luis CdeBaca, who was visiting South Africa on his first foreign visit as President Obama's ambassador-at-large to monitor and combat human trafficking. "Dedicated cops, prosecutors and victim advocates are fighting the traffickers in several host cities, but they're largely doing it on their own," he said. Obama has pledged to make the fight to abolish modern-day slavery a top foreign policy priority, but the U.S. currently spends more in a single day fighting drug trafficking than it does in an entire year fighting human trafficking. So CdeBaca, whose office evaluates every country based on its efforts to fight human bondage, must rely largely on diplomatic pressure. "An exploitation-free World Cup will require resources and political will from the South African government and the international community alike," said CdeBaca.
Such political will is not evident. At best, the South African government's response to child sex trafficking has been superficial or piecemeal; at worst, some officials have actually colluded with the traffickers. American and South African law-enforcement sources described how police at all levels have solicited underage prostitutes in Bloemfontein, Durban and other World Cup cities. South African officials claim that Parliament will pass a comprehensive law against human trafficking in early 2010. For now, enterprising police officers who take on human traffickers do so with few legal tools at their disposal. Convictions for trafficking-related offenses typically bring little or no jail time. And those vigilante humanitarians like Lombard face an emboldened and violent adversary, as I saw that evening. (See TIME's South Africa covers.)
Elizabeth insisted that we recover her scant possessions: a handful of clothes and a Bible. Jude had convinced her that he would perform witchcraft on those items, to track and punish her if she again attempted escape. We drove to Jude's fortified crack den five minutes away. Lombard and I followed Elizabeth into the darkness behind the compound. We were joined by Shadrack, a kung-fu-trained church volunteer who worked as a financial adviser by day. Elizabeth tapped a secret knock, and after Jude ushered her in, Shadrack wedged his foot in the door. We pushed into the dingy flat, which bore the medicinal odor of crack. As the churchmen escorted Elizabeth to retrieve her clothes, I smiled and feigned ignorance of their intent. While Lombard and Elizabeth retrieved her possessions, I spoke to Jude alone. Short and muscular, with dark, patchy skin, Jude wore slim, brown corduroys and white Crocs with green dollar signs. Jude explained that he lured girls from Johannesburg, where many survive by "picking through garbage." Our conversation turned to soccer. I asked him if he was looking forward to the World Cup. "Yeah, this is good! Us people are going to make a lot of money then if you know what you're doing." (See pictures of Johannesburg preparing for the World Cup.)
As I prepared to leave, a woman began screaming from a sealed-off room in the compound. Lombard burst back into the room and forced his way to the darkened recesses of the compound. He kicked in a door to find Rasta, the syndicate's enforcer, half naked with the screaming woman, who ran behind Lombard. "Did you beat her? Because if you beat her, you must beat me," Lombard said, inches from the flaring eyes of the muscular Rasta. Rasta launched a haymaker at Lombard, who ducked. Rasta threatened to call in his "brothers." "I'll break their legs too," Lombard retorted as we retreated to our car, where the photographer traveling with us, Melanie Hamman, was bent in prayer with Elizabeth. With Jude chasing us on foot, we drove off.
Newly elected South African President Jacob Zuma addressed fears about sex trafficking in a speech last August. "We have noted the concern amongst women's groups that the 2010 FIFA World Cup may have the unintended consequence of creating opportunities for human trafficking," the President said. "We are putting systems in place to prevent this, as part of general security measures that we should take when hosting an event of this magnitude."
Zuma's pledge was too little, too late for Sindiswa, who died on July 22. Immediately after we took Elizabeth off the streets, Hamman and I drove her eight hours to her home in Eastern Cape. Wary of the failure rate of Lombard's unmonitored returns, we worked with a dedicated social worker in Indwe to ensure that the conditions under which she was originally trafficked did not reappear. A suburban-Chicago couple has given her a full scholarship, enabling the otherwise impossible goal of finishing school. She is HIV-negative. It is a stretch to call her lucky. But she has another chance at life.
Skinner is the author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery (Free Press, 2008), which was awarded the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for nonfiction. This investigation was supported by a grant from Humanity United.
Sitting in the Boone County jail, the Chinese woman didn’t look like a criminal to Kelley Lucero. She looked like a middle-aged mom.
Soon, Lucero learned that the woman had indeed come to America to scout out a college for her teenage son. She had come, legally, as part of a cultural exchange program, but her life had taken an unexpected and terrifying turn here in Middle America.
Forced to work in a one-room massage parlor, she ended up being arrested for prostitution at a truck stop between Kansas City and St. Louis.
Only an experienced eye like Lucero’s could see something that Boone County, Mo., deputies appeared to miss. What so many in law enforcement all over the nation still are not trained to see.
And yet, the Chinese woman sat in jail for five months.
When the United States took a global stand on human trafficking in 2000, lawmakers wanted to rescue foreign-born women turned into American sex slaves. In too many cases, though, that hasn’t happened.
In its six-month investigation into America’s effectiveness in the war on human trafficking, The Kansas City Star found that the system orginally designed with sex trafficking in mind is often unsuccessful in reaching those victims.
Some are mistakenly identified as prostitutes and end up either lost in the criminal justice bureaucracy or back on the streets. Even when victims are identified by law enforcement, some are reluctant to go through the gantlet that accompanies the prosecution of their trafficker, too untrusting or scared to reveal the horrible things that happened to them. Critics complain that the U.S. law is inherently flawed because it connects victims’ aid with their willingness to help make cases.
“No one is seeing the situation for what it is,” said Karen Stauss, an attorney with Polaris Project, an anti-trafficking organization based in Washington, D.C. “It’s like we’re saying, ‘We blame you for what you are suffering.’ ”
The government also has been slow to recognize an emerging class of new victims: young American girls. While millions are spent each year to combat international sex trafficking, lawmakers have yet to approve funding for domestic victims — perhaps the fastest-growing class of those trafficked in the United States.
Anti-trafficking experts say that the current federal and state laws are blunt legal instruments in trying to address the complexity of an ever-evolving global criminal enterprise and do not account for the trauma of women forced into sexual abuse. Of all human trafficking crimes, The Star found, the ones involving sex slavery have proved to be the most difficult when it comes to catching and prosecuting the traffickers.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Act “is not creating the legal environment we worked so hard to create so we can prevent human trafficking,” said Norma Ramos, of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. “It’s a federal law that’s really not that useful for what it was supposed to do — end human trafficking.” All in the Approach
When the mother from China was arrested, deputies in Boone County hadn’t been trained to recognize human trafficking. They didn’t know what questions to ask.
Or that the crime requires a victim-centered approach, much different from what officers are traditionally schooled in.
Boone County Assistant Prosecutor Merilee Crockett said she couldn’t discuss specifics of the case, but generally cases that may involve human trafficking are a “conundrum” because if victims are released they could end up back with their traffickers. And sometimes there is no safe place to keep them other than jail.
“Where is the rescue? What do we do for them? How do we protect them?” Crockett said.
Law enforcement authorities also have different priorities, explained Ivy Suriyopas, staff attorney for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. “They focus on catching perpetrators, making sure the public is safe from additional crimes. That doesn’t necessarily correlate with the needs of the victims.”
Some police officers get it and know how to work human trafficking cases, advocates acknowledged. Yet many don’t. At least not at this point.
But experts say that’s not surprising.
“They are being asked to take off their glasses and put on a slightly different prescription,” said Bill Bernstein of Mosaic Family Services, which works with human trafficking survivors in Dallas. “They’re having to view some people who we think might be victims in a slightly different light. That’s beginning, but it will take time.”
Further complicating anti-trafficking efforts is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are supposed to not only screen victims for possible human trafficking, but also root out illegal immigration — what some see as a conflict of interest.
At the very least, that creates an “inherent challenge,” according to Kristyn Peck Williams, screening and field coordinator of the anti-trafficking services program for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
“ICE would do the raid, but they would also be the ones in the position to identify trafficking victims,” Williams said.
The initial contact with potential victims is crucial, advocates maintain. If agents use the same hard demeanor they use investigating other crimes, it can further traumatize a victim and destroy the case.
In one instance, a federal agent in the southern region of the United States interviewed a foreign-born woman picked up in a brothel raid. “So you were a prostitute?” the agent asked during the investigation.
An immigration attorney in the room told The Star that the woman instantly clammed up. Later, she was deported.
“I’ve seen a lot of women who were helped, but I see a lot of women who slipped through the cracks,” said the attorney, who didn’t want to be identified for fear of retribution by law enforcement.
In routine prostitution cases, officers are usually only interested in the money generated by the ring and the people involved. But human trafficking cases require more sensitivity and different questions.
“We now ask, ‘Where do you live? Who do you live with? Where did you come from? How are you paid?’ ” said Capt. Ken Bergman of the Independence Police Department, who works with the local anti-trafficking task force and has six “very trained” detectives who know how to identify victims.
The local task force has trained more than 2,000 officers throughout Missouri and Kansas about trafficking.
Still, that’s only a fraction of the officers in both states.
“You have to know what you are looking for or you will miss it,” Bergman said.
Without the right approach, a sex trafficking victim can be recycled into a lifetime of slavery. Help us, we’ll help you
From the outset, the system set up to help trafficking victims had a major flaw, advocates found. Especially when it came to helping sex trafficking victims.
The protection act concentrated on three Ps: preventing trafficking, protecting victims and prosecuting the traffickers. Some critics, however, believe that the United States has put too much emphasis on prosecution.
Victims are required to show reasonable cooperation with law enforcement before they receive all the benefits intended for them, such as food stamps, shelter and the opportunity to stay in America.
In effect, victims are told, they may not get help from the government unless they help the government prosecute the trafficker.
“It is very wrong to have this condition,” said Joy Ngozi Ezeilo, appointed last year as the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on human trafficking. “Countries must avoid that.”
Victims are not given enough time for reflection or counseling, Ezeilo said, before they have to agree to cooperate. Given time to heal, some victims may be more likely to help prosecute their trafficker.
Kelly Heinrich, who has studied human trafficking and the laws addressing it, said the federal law is more witness-centered.
“It’s the way it was designed to begin with and implementation made it worse,” Heinrich said.
Many victims aren’t stable enough to immediately tolerate having to relive what they went through, said Judy Okawa, a licensed psychologist specializing in the evaluation and treatment of survivors of severe trauma.
One sex trafficking survivor Okawa has worked with said she relives her abuse every time the sun goes down. She told Okawa it’s then — when the quality of light is at a certain level — she’s reminded of the time she was forced to have sex.
Other survivors have different triggers. But the last thing they want to do is speak of the abuse. Or look into the eyes of the perpetrator.
It brings it all back, Okawa said. The fear. And the threats.
“If that trafficker is not in jail or dead, there’s always a chance he or she will hurt them,” Okawa said. “(The trafficker) says, ‘You can run, but you can’t hide from me. I will find you and I will kill your family.’ ”
One trafficking victim reached out to a domestic violence advocacy program in Kansas. Her trafficker was forcing her to work long hours for little pay, stopping her from leaving the country, and frequently sexually assaulting her.
Pregnant with his baby, she wanted help.
But she was afraid to pursue a trafficking visa designed for victims because it would mean having to report her trafficker, which could put her, and her baby, in more danger.
“Although she may have had a remedy available … she didn’t feel like she could do that. She was too afraid,” said Pamela Jacobs, immigration project attorney for the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence.
“Being asked to testify against a person you’ve been afraid of for a long time, and someone who could still hurt you, and your child, is very difficult. Just having a visa does not guarantee a victim’s safety.”
The woman did not see a way to escape, and advocates do not know what happened to her.
Consensual Arrangement?
In the late spring of 2007, Johnson County authorities undertook the first major human trafficking investigation in the Kansas City area. Law enforcement at the time said they “rescued” 15 women from strip-mall Asian massage parlors — one called China Rose — and there could be many more victims.
Originally from China and Korea, the women worked 14 hours a day, seven days a week, performing sex acts. Sometimes they slept on the same bed where they serviced customers.
For investigators, on paper they looked like human trafficking victims.
But as time went on, and the case wound through criminal court, more information surfaced. Some women came to Kansas City knowing they would work as prostitutes. One woman, according to statements made by one of the defendants, made about $15,000 in a month.
Others said they had no idea they would be prostituted when they got here.
Ultimately, prosecutors didn’t charge the four main defendants with human trafficking. Instead, they were charged with and pleaded guilty to coercing females to travel for prostitution.
Court testimony and other information prompted the federal judge hearing the case to dismiss the notion that there were “vulnerable victims.”
“The victims were more participants than victims,” said Chief U.S. District Judge Fernando Gaitan in sentencing the lead defendant, Ling Xu. “They appeared to be professionals.”
Defense attorney Melanie Morgan, who represented Ling, said she believes prosecutors tried too hard to make the case into something it wasn’t.
“This wasn’t human trafficking,” Morgan said. “This was a very consensual arrangement.”
The case provided a small window into the complexity of sex trafficking investigations. Prosecutors across the country are filtering through scenarios where the water is muddy regarding what is coercion and what is consensual.
In the China Rose case, federal prosecutors said evidence supported the charges filed, and the government still contends that some of the women met the definition of a human trafficking victim.
Those women were offered trafficking visas, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Cynthia Cordes, who specializes in trafficking cases.
“But they wanted to return home to their families,” Cordes explained.
Our Own Backyard
Ever since passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act nearly a decade ago, foreign-born victims have been the law’s focus. They get extensive counseling, visa assistance and help with food and housing costs as they rebuild their lives.
For victims born in the United States, however, state governments were expected to take care of children prostituted by pimps or family members.
But that rarely happens, The Star found.
“You talk about frustration,” said Thomas Egan of Catholic Charities in Phoenix. “We found hundreds of prostituted kids and no funding available to help them.”
Kristy Childs sees it every day.
As founder and director of the nonprofit Veronica’s Voice, Childs works to help Kansas City area women and girls escape the commercial sex industry.
That’s what Childs did this summer when she and her staff searched the streets for a 12-year-old girl. Day after day, they heard from sources on the street, the junior-high-school girl was forced to prostitute herself.
“Every day she’s out there, she’s in more danger,” Childs said one day as they went out to search again. “…We’re trying to save the world and we can’t. We can’t even save the victims in our own backyard.”
With American-born victims, it becomes a maddening game of catch and release.
Most welfare programs require recipients to be at least 18 to receive benefits. Since many young domestic trafficking victims are considered unaccompanied minors, they don’t qualify.
Critics said this is another area where the law is deeply flawed.
“They (lawmakers) messed up,” said Theresa Flores, who was sex trafficked as a teenager growing up in Michigan and now works as a victim advocate. “They didn’t include Americans, and they should have.”
Four years ago, Childs and other advocates lobbied U.S. legislators to make it clear that domestic victims should be protected under the act. They specifically wanted American-born girls under the age of 18 who are sex trafficked to be considered victims entitled to services and benefits.
Lawmakers included that provision in the 2005 reauthorization of the protection act.
But they didn’t fund services for domestic victims, leaving thousands of young girls vulnerable to further abuse.
“We’re going to point the finger at other countries for how they deal with their domestic trafficking, but then we’re not doing enough for our own citizens?” asked Colette Bercu of Tennessee’s Free for Life International, a nonprofit organization that supports trafficking survivors. “We’ve got a problem.”
At a national symposium in July, social workers and health care experts pointed out that resources available to help domestic victims don’t come close to what’s available for foreign-born victims.
Near the top of the list is housing. Police and community organizations are having a tough time finding somewhere to take domestic victims lucky enough to have escaped their pimps.
“As a result, many domestic minor victims are housed in juvenile detention centers, which often do not recognize or treat these youth as victims of a crime, but rather as perpetrators,” a symposium report said.
Cordes said she prosecutes domestic sex trafficking cases with the same fervor as cases with international victims but it can be challenging.
“We have a duty to protect our own citizens and children,” she said. “Because the domestic victims are ineligible for funding under the (protection act) each case demands extra effort and creativity to obtain services.”
More than 1,800 Las Vegas youths under the age of 18 were in juvenile lockup on prostitution-related charges between 1996 and 2007, according to a study released this year by Shared Hope International, which rescues victims of sex trafficking. In Dallas, 165 youths were in police custody on prostitution-related charges in 2007 alone. Shared Hope officials believe all of these kids were victims and should not have been thrown in jail.
“We have to stop criminalizing, arresting the kids,” said Shared Hope founder Linda Smith.
For the 12-year-old in Kansas City, police were more understanding. Especially after Childs called them when her search came up empty.
Within a day, law enforcement had found her. But only after two officers spent a night doing nothing but looking for her. She was taken to a local hospital and examined.
Authorities tried to connect her with Veronica’s Voice and Childs, to get her the counseling she needed. But somehow she slipped away.
Now, Childs worries she’s back on the streets.
A Long Way Home
With foreign-born human trafficking victims, the line between victim and criminal isn’t always clear, either.
Consider the Chinese woman Lucero met in jail.
The woman paid $13,000 — her family’s life savings — to enroll in what she thought was a cultural exchange program that would bring her to the United States. Her teenage son planned to go to college in America, and someone in their family had to come in advance to get a job and earn money.
She made the trip on a six-month visa, Lucero said. But when she got off the plane in Los Angeles, she was taken to a Chinese restaurant where she went to work washing dishes.
Next, she thought she’d get a job as a nanny for a wealthy family. But then she met a man who said he was from her province in China. He told her about the massage business, how she could get a license and make good money.
She believed him. With what the woman thought was a legitimate license in hand, she traveled with several other women to the Midwest.
Twelve of them worked 12 hours a day inside cramped parlors set up inside truck stops across Middle America.
“They gave her half of what she was making,” Lucero said, noting that she still knows very little about the traffickers.
The woman ended up with a couple of hundred dollars a week. Most she’d send to family back in China.
Then police got a tip about a one-room massage parlor operated out of a Boone County truck stop along Interstate 70. The night she was arrested, police didn’t have a translator and she couldn’t tell her story.
The Chinese woman never told Lucero all she was forced to do. She even denied having sex.
“It would be too humiliating,” Lucero explained.
The woman spent Christmas 2007 behind bars.
“My parents are old and sick,” she later wrote Lucero. “My mother knows I’m in jail and she’s had a heart attack and is in the hospital. My husband (still in China) … can’t work because of my situation.”
Eventually, charges were dismissed. The woman went to California and got her temporary visa extended. Then she headed east to work, she said, in a market.
But before she left the Midwest, she wrote Lucero about missing her homeland.
“The only thing I wish for is to leave America and go to my loved ones,” she said. “I feel like America is a place where they talk a lot about human rights, and I know I have the right to go back to China. Can you please help me?”
For almost a year, Lucero didn’t hear from her and wasn’t sure where she ended up.
Then last week, Lucero received an e-mail. The woman is on the East Coast waiting for her green card.
“She just wanted to say merry Christmas to me and tell me that she loves me,” Lucero said. “And that we have a special connection.”
By Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan Special to The Washington Post Sunday, September 27, 2009
In the dark, I wended my way through a thicket of hungry-eyed men, brushing off leering looks as I focused on reaching my goal: a fluorescent white beacon coming from a slender alley behind a scruffy-looking motel.
My family and I had come to Geylang, Singapore's best-known red-light district, in search of a good time, but probably of a different sort from what the men around us were after. In the alley, we perched on greasy plastic stools, taking in the smells of wok-fried seafood and tempura eggplant as we waited for our meal to surface at J.B. Ah Meng, a little hawker-stand-style restaurant with tables set up in a grimy passageway.
Soon enough, the sounds of hawkers' flip-flops signaled the arrivals: a bed of slightly crispy glass noodles tossed with bits of cuttlefish, egg and pork, stir-fried in a sweet dark soy sauce; and a platter of crispy, deep-fried fish skins topped with a tart fresh papaya salad. But the truly unusual star of the meal was a dish of shrimp and clusters of corn kernels slathered with a thick coating of salted egg and then deep-fried. The slightly grainy salted egg crust was an intriguing and delicious juxtaposition with the plump, juicy bits of shrimp and corn. Our entire meal of four big platters (including an order of tempura eggplant) cost just under $40. Not a bad price for a few well-conceived and perfectly executed dishes that we'd remember for some time to come.
When people think of Singapore, a few things tend to come to mind: squeaky-clean malls, an iron-fisted government, a ban on chewing gum. There is a seamier side to the country, however, and the pockets where this underbelly flourishes are increasingly where you'll find some of the best meals.
Along Keong Saik Road, in a neighborhood that has housed brothels for more than a century, narrow lanes are dotted with old Chinese coffee shops known as "tze char" places, which are basic stalls that offer a variety of stir-fried dishes such as crab noodles and har jeong gai, a dish of chicken coated with prawn paste and then deep-fried. Near the east coast, Joo Chiat Road is a growing hub of cheap Vietnamese eateries selling pho and shredded duck soup that have popped up to cater to the Vietnamese prostitutes who walk the streets after dark. And in downtown Singapore's Orchard Towers, a shopping center filled with seedy bars and massage parlors whose dank corridors are heavy even at noon with the scent of furtively smoked cigarettes, there is standout Thai food to be had at places that increasingly cater both to food lovers who can afford to order a lemon grass whole fish for $10 and to the young Thai girls in fishnets looking for cheaper sustenance.
Singapore has had red-light districts since its birth: The British established them in the early 19th century to cater to the waves of young businessmen and laborers who came to the country from China, Malaysia, India and Europe, leaving their families behind, according to Mark Emmanuel, an associate professor of history at the National University of Singapore. He notes that prostitution became such a thriving industry that in the 1930s, Singapore earned the nickname "Sin galore" in the region.
In Geylang, a neighborhood that has been a well-known red-light district for decades, Singaporeans have always known that the even-numbered lorongs (which means "small roads" in Malay) are where you'll find the red-lanterned houses, while the odd-numbered ones are for unrelated enterprises. Along those roads, there's been a boom since the 1990s of late-night eating stalls that serve up a variety of fare, from noodles topped with melt-in-your-mouth-tender beef to dishes not for the faint of heart: chopped duck's necks and pig's ears that are cheap, savory and meant to go well with an ice-cold beer sipped while watching the girls walk up and down the road.
"These are the two greatest sins in the world; they go hand in hand," said KF Seetoh, a Singapore-based TV food-show host and author of a guide to the country's hawker food. "These guys who go and hunt down hookers, when they're in that mode, they don't scrimp on food and drinks. It's about eating well and living well."
On a trip to Singapore two years ago, Seetoh took me to Geylang Clay Pot Rice. We called 30 minutes ahead to order the signature dish of piping-hot clay pot rice, filled with waxy Chinese pork sausage, chicken and salted fish, then doused with vegetable oil and sweet, molasses-like soy sauce and tossed bibimbap style. But the dish that I would wax lyrical about for months afterward was the soft-shell crab, which was chopped into pieces, breaded with a mixture of spices, deep-fried and topped with a generous sprinkling of chilli padi, a tiny, flaming-hot, fire-engine-red pepper.
Remembering that meal with great hunger, I asked Seetoh on a recent trip back, "Where to now?" And we drove to Rochor Beancurd House, a place that makes a deliciously comforting dessert of silky-smooth warm bean curd. The Portuguese egg tarts -- which differ from those in most Chinatowns because of their sweet, caramelized topping -- also were a must-try.
The next day, I trekked to Joo Chiat Road for a late lunch. In midafternoon, the food stalls along the several-blocks-long street were slowly waking up. After prowling some somnolent coffee shops, my family and I stopped at the Beef House, a little place whose house-made, springy beef balls have made it a draw. The balls are served with noodles done in the style of the Hakka Chinese who first immigrated to Singapore from Southeastern China in the 19th century. The soup version is similar to Vietnamese pho, while the dry version features noodles and beef balls drenched in a gummy gravy that's both sweet and beefy but also thick with the flavor of spices such as star anise.
Though the noodles were delicious, it was a neighboring food stall, Kway Guan Huat, that stole the show with its popiah, a Chinese summer roll filled with a host of ingredients including crab, sauteed turnip, fish paste, lettuce and chili sauce. The stall has been selling popiah since 1938 and remains a place Singaporeans from all parts of the island are willing to drive to just for a summer roll.
There are drawbacks to dining in such establishments: If you are a woman and you're wearing heels or anything fairly dressy, you're likely to be given the hairy eyeball and perhaps even propositioned. There are dangers for men, too.
Chef Willin Low, who owns the upscale Wild Rocket restaurant in Singapore, said he often eats in Geylang on nights when he's not cooking. On a recent trip, he parked along a particularly dark and seedy road because he couldn't find a space anywhere else. "As I was walking from my car to the main road, this car full of friends from church stopped and said, 'Um, Willin, what are you doing here?' " he said.
Not all stalls are cheap: Sin Huat Eating House, which Anthony Bourdain recently included on his list of "13 Places to Eat Before You Die" for Men's Health magazine, serves up heavenly crab noodles that come with massive claws and legs that will keep you busy for quite a while. But those crab noodles, a main dish that would probably serve a family of three at the most, will set you back nearly $80. The place also has an especially bare-bones setting, even by coffee-shop standards: On the night we went in June, the restaurant's lights would periodically flicker and go dark for several long seconds before coming back on. Our table by the grimy, greenish fish tanks also offered us front-row seats to the sweaty cooks reaching into the tanks up to their armpits to scoop out shellfish whenever a customer placed an order.
It can be hard not to be affected by the plight of your fellow customers. On a recent trip to Cafe Supunsa in Orchard Towers, my friends Jeanette and Eudon and I ravenously attacked garlicky chicken wings, basil chicken, a massive hotpot of deliciously sour tom yum soup and a spicy salad of julienned papaya topped with crackling dried shrimp and roasted peanuts. As the hunger subsided, we suddenly became aware of our surroundings.
The waves of weary young girls wearing too little clothing and too much makeup were ceaseless. Purposefully, they would stop in for a quick meal, a respite in their nightly onslaught. Suddenly we felt a bit guilty about our relative good fortune, and our food euphoria began to wear off.
Avoiding one another's eyes, we quietly paid our bill and left.
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a freelance writer whose food memoir, "A Tiger in the Kitchen," will be published in 2011. She blogs at http://www.atigerinthekitchen.com.
J.B. Ah Meng, No. 2, Lorong 23, 011-65-6741-2677. Open 5 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. Prices $4.25 to $14.
Geylang Clay Pot Rice, 639 Lorong 33, 011-65-6744-4574 or 011-65-6744-3619. Open 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., 5 p.m. to midnight. Prices $6 to $21.
Rochor Beancurd House, 745 Geylang Rd., 011-65-6748-3989. Open 24 hours. Drinks and desserts 65 cents to $2.15.
The Beef House,97 Joo Chiat Rd., 011-65-9472-2601. Open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Bowls $2.50 to $4.25, depending on size.
Kway Guan Huat, 95 Joo Chiat Rd., 011-65-6344-2875. Open 10:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Rolls $1.40 or $2.50, depending on filling.
Sin Huat Eating House, 659/661 Geylang Rd., 011-65-6744-9755. Open 6:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. Prices $35 to $85.
Cafe Supunsa, 400 Orchard Rd., #02-36; 011-65-6737-0223. Open 11 a.m. to 6 a.m. Prices $3.50 to $14.
This article is the first part of a two-part series. The next installment will explore alternative approaches to addressing the problem of trafficking for the purposes of forced prostitution. --The Editors
Gary Haugen is cradling the padlocks in his thick hands. A former high school football player--bristly crew cut, broad shoulders squeezed into a dress shirt--Haugen has more the mien of a military man than a lawyer, although his image is in keeping with the muscular work of the organization he founded and heads. The president of the International Justice Mission, an evangelical Christian organization devoted to combating human rights abuses in the developing world, Haugen is musing over the mementos of IJM's work in India and Cambodia. The padlocks look ordinary enough: heavy brass, a squat square one, a round one with a key. But they had once hung on the doors of brothels, until local law enforcement busted the establishments in raids initiated by IJM.
"Have you been to Tuol Sleng?" Haugen asks, looking down at the padlocks. He is speaking of the central Khmer Rouge detention center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, now a museum filled with photographs of the thousands who perished at the prison. "There it is--you see a factory where people got up every day and then went to work, and their job was to torture people as painfully and horribly as possible to extract a confession from them and then kill them.
"A lock on a brothel, for me, represents this element of violence and force," says Haugen. "The lock is on the outside of the door, not inside."
For Haugen, the locks are reminders of his calling: to break the chain of human rights abuses, one person at a time. He argues that the main problem facing the disenfranchised is not one of hunger, homelessness, lack of education or disease. Rather, the root cause of much of the suffering in the developing world is the failure of the criminal justice system to protect the poor from violence--the brutality that robs them of food, home, liberty and dignity.
In an effort to counter those failures, IJM marshals more than 300 Christian lawyers, law enforcement specialists and social workers who collaborate with local counterparts and police to provide services to victims of slave labor, sexual abuse, police brutality, illegal detention and land seizure. In the case of its best-known and most controversial work--brothel raids--IJM provides evidence of trafficking to police in countries including India, Cambodia, the Philippines and, in the past, Thailand; and it collaborates on "interventions" to remove victims from the establishments and arrest and prosecute their abusers. Although the raids have undoubtedly saved a number of trafficking victims from exploitation, human rights advocates have criticized the interventions for disrupting HIV-outreach efforts, heightening the potential for police brutality and subjecting adult sex workers and trafficking victims to possible deportation or long involuntary stays in shelters.
In light of the organization's tactics, Haugen's mention of Tuol Sleng is an uneasy one that points out the potential perils of IJM's approach--an example of state power used to prey on, rather than protect, its populace. Haugen acknowledges that law enforcement agents have often been the perpetrators of abuse, and he has testified against this police corruption in Congress. Nonetheless, he has based his decision to work with local police on the premise that power can be harnessed to bring about justice--especially when tethered to divine aims. As Haugen writes in his book Good News About Injustice, "God is the ultimate power and authority in the universe, so justice occurs when power and authority is exercised in conformity with His standards."
This philosophy found deep resonance with the Bush administration. Eager to complement his war on terror with a parallel "soft-power strategy," according to his speechwriter Michael Gerson, President Bush signed on to the "war on trafficking" with a vengeance. Although countertrafficking funds found their way to groups that worked more broadly on immigrants' rights and services, much of the money went to organizations like IJM, whose interventionist attitude was congruent with Bush's foreign-policy stance, and to groups that believed that prostitution was inherently exploitative and deserving of abolishment.
Part of the appeal of the law-and-order solutions proposed by groups like IJM is that they are highly visible and forceful responses to the horrifying abuses faced by trafficking victims and sex workers--injury, extortion, rape, even murder. (New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof tried a similarly dramatic tack when he went so far as to purchase the freedom of two trafficked girls, with decidedly mixed results.) The narrative that frames such vigorous interventions as the noblest response to the scourge of sex trafficking is an understandable one, but it skirts the economic and social problems that make recovery so difficult for the "rescued." It also rips their lives out of context, so that an approach that might be suitable, if still controversial, in a country with reliable law enforcement and criminal justice systems is applied in a country where those systems are more likely to be part of the problem than the solution. The Obama administration seems to be aware of these issues, but rolling back the momentum on raid work in order to scrutinize its efficacy is a tough challenge--especially when there is always another young victim to rescue.
In 1997 Haugen launched IJM to answer the biblical mandate to seek justice. As he writes, "Over time, having seen the suffering of the innocent.... More and more I find myself asking not, Where is God? But, Where are God's people?" Dedicated to a "casework" model, IJM staff work to remove victims from exploitation. IJM then prosecutes the abusers under local law and assists victims with "restoration" by winning them financial compensation or providing "aftercare" services through partner organizations.
IJM's casework approach focuses on individual rescue. As Haugen has written, "The good shepherd would leave the ninety-nine to go find the one lost sheep because the one mattered." Sharon Cohn Wu, IJM's senior vice president of justice operations, concurs. "While there are millions of girls and women victimized every day, our work will always be about the one," she said in a public address. "The one girl deceived. The one girl kidnapped. The one girl raped. The one girl infected with AIDS. The one girl needing a rescuer. To succumb to the enormity of the problem is to fail the one. And more is required of us."
Thousands of Christians have answered Cohn Wu's call, joining IJM campus chapters, attending Haugen's talks at the Saddleback and Willow Creek leadership conferences, and swelling the organization's budget to $22 million in 2008. IJM has become a major force in humanitarian work and an even larger one in burgeoning evangelical activism.
IJM's rise was fueled by the millions in federal grants it received under the Bush administration, which also expanded the federal law on trafficking. Before the Bush era, the law created a State Department office to rank--and potentially sanction--countries on the basis of their countertrafficking efforts in its annual "Trafficking in Persons" report. When the law was reauthorized under Bush, however, it included a clause to suspend funding to organizations that "promote, support, or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution." Those applying for funds for HIV education or outreach were subject to the same clause.
President Bush then released anti-trafficking funds to feminist anti-prostitution groups and to faith-based organizations like IJM. The funding decision outraged HIV-education NGOs and sex workers' unions, a number of which were cut out of HIV-outreach and countertrafficking funding or refused it in protest. Human rights advocates, meanwhile, raised concerns that IJM's criminal justice approach would cause "collateral damage"--putting women and girls on a collision course with police brutality, detention and deportation, and disrupting HIV services while failing to address the economic inequities that would replace one rescued girl with another victim.
Those concerns fell on deaf ears. IJM began receiving federal funding in 2002, and by the end of 2010 the organization will have received more than $4 million from the government, including a $500,000 grant to open an office--established just last January--to work against trafficking for forced prostitution in Samar, the Philippines.
IJM's ardent sense of mission--its moral clarity about justice work, dedication to the individual and passionate desire to find relief for victims--brought a revitalized engagement to believers and those concerned about trafficking. But those qualities often led to a quagmire in IJM's early years. Although the organization has refined its techniques, its operations have ambiguous, and sometimes troubling, results on the ground.
As for IJM's symbolic quest to provide individual rescue, finding "the one" for whom the group toiled and whom IJM had "saved" would prove nearly impossible. She is a cipher, a repository of innocence and redemptive hope that seemed to call more loudly to the IJM staff than the voices of trafficking victims and sex workers who decried the raids and their experiences of police brutality. "The one" was a symbol that IJM staff would always be driven to break free, even if she would wind up running away from her rescuers in the end. The shepherd claimed to have benevolent aims but did not always know the way to safety.
Ping Pong is frowning, her formidable charm dampened by memory. The sex worker is mulling over IJM's work in Thailand. As a health and legal-services advocate with the sex-worker organization Empower, she's seen the aftereffects firsthand.
"Oh, yes, there were problems," she says at last. "The deportation--and back to Burma! They were desperate to leave in the first place. The long detention. The girls running away. And the way they treated other NGOs, just expecting them to clean up the mess afterward. Even the other anti-trafficking groups couldn't get along with them."
We are meeting in Empower's Chiang Mai offices, perched over the Can-Do Bar, an "experitainment" venue cooperatively owned by sex workers and managed in compliance with Thai labor laws. The bar is a cavernous space--front patio, full bar, pool table, fairy lights and two poles for dancing.
IJM set up its Chiang Mai office in 2000, intent on tackling the northern city's trafficking and child-prostitution problems. Located near the Burmese border, Chiang Mai serves as the gateway to uncertain refuge for Burmese and ethnic Shan migrants seeking escape from a despotic regime, or fleeing the rape and plunder of a Burmese military determined to eradicate a Shan insurgency through the cruelest means possible. Thailand has thrived on the underground labor of these migrants, who often work the construction sites, wash the laundry and sell sex--largely without benefit of documentation or legal protections.
The group's early raids soon resulted in IJM being branded vigilante "cowboys" and "cops for Christ" by other humanitarian workers. The organization even busted the same brothel twice, in 2000 and 2003, each time calling local NGOs in a panic afterward to ask for translation help--no one had realized the frightened women and girls were Burmese and Shan.
In accordance with Thai laws, older, voluntary prostitutes caught in IJM raids were deported to the border, while younger ones, automatically defined as trafficking victims on the basis of their age, were moved to government rehabilitation centers, where they were often required to stay for months or years, waiting to testify in court and be repatriated directly to their families. As Thai law did not grant trafficking victims temporary legal documents at the time of IJM operations in country, the girls were not allowed to leave the shelter grounds. (The new law, passed last year, allows for the possibility of temporary residence for foreign trafficking victims, but it remains to be seen if this provision will be implemented.)
Rather than face a potentially long period of detention, some rescuees took matters into their own hands, knotting sheets together to escape shelters--one was hospitalized with back injuries when she fell during an escape attempt.
Ping Pong sighs, recalling the reaction of the women and girls rescued in an IJM raid in 2003. "They were so startled, and said, 'We don't need rescue. How can this be a rescue when we feel like we've been arrested?' All their possessions were taken away, they were photographed by the media and some of them couldn't leave for quite a long time. The women who get rounded up usually wind up back here and doing sex work again--but this time with more debt from having to make the journey or be retrafficked again.... We wrote a report critiquing the raid, but then IJM accused us of supporting brothel owners--so we never talked to IJM again." In a 2003 position paper, IJM had argued that Empower turned a "blind eye" to child prostitution by failing to report brothel owners they knew were practicing it "in order to further their work among adult commercial sex workers."
According to Empower staff member Liz Hilton, in the late '90s, before IJM began its work in Thailand and when police raids were at a high, brothel owners would occasionally drop off women and girls at the Empower office after learning of an impending raid. Empower staff would then assist the women in deciding what their next steps would be. Should the brothel remain open, they could return there to work. Others sought work elsewhere, returned home or entered shelter programs voluntarily. Hilton says, "After they were deposited on our doorstep, well, we eat first--it's Thailand!--and we see what everyone needs and wants." Hilton recalled two cases where girls under 18 were dropped off by brothel owners, and both were referred to shelters and services. According to Hilton, Empower made it clear to the brothel owners that "there was no guarantee that they'd be willing to go back" and that Empower had as its dictate "whatever the women want." Even so, "to be honest, sometimes the best interests of the women and what they want fits more closely with brothel owners than with the rescue organizations or police," says Hilton, meaning that sometimes the women wanted to continue working rather than face deportation or receive alternate vocational training. Still, the evacuation prompted by the threat of the raid did mean that some who wanted to leave got the chance to do so.
A number of trafficking victims from the 2003 raid initially refused to provide their real names and addresses in order to protect themselves and their families, according to Ping Pong. They were willing to stay in the shelter rather than face a return to impoverished villages and the shattering shame at the discovery of the nature of their work or the possibility of detention in Burma for their illegal exit from the country. Burmese officials are not above extorting the women's families, and Ping Pong recounted anecdotes of entire households being forced to move because village gossip broke out after Burmese officials came to locate the women's relatives in the repatriation process. The victims eventually relented and were repatriated--my efforts to find and speak directly with women and children recovered in IJM-initiated raids in Thailand were unsuccessful.
"IJM talks about saving an individual," says Joe Amon, director of the health and human rights division at Human Rights Watch. Amon met with the group in 2007 to discuss its tactics. "And what's incredible is that it's not clear if that individual has been saved. IJM is not clear on how aftercare leads to protection for these kids. I asked them about deportation of these girls. And they had no tracking for that, for any minors that had been repatriated. That to me is incredibly troubling."
Ben Svasti is the executive director of Trafcord, a Thai organization that provides liaison among social workers, police and lawyers on trafficking cases. Trafcord used to work closely with IJM--the group's undercover investigators would hand over evidence of trafficking to Trafcord, which would launch an inquiry and decide the best course of action.
"Half of those IJM cases didn't hold water," says Svasti. Part of the problem was that IJM had difficulty differentiating between voluntary sex workers and trafficked women and girls, a difficult task even for Trafcord. "IJM would go in and ask, Do you like working here?" says Svasti. "The girl says no, and then they'd assume she wanted to be rescued. But you very rarely get a woman who says, I like this kind of work."
Svasti links this problem with US policies that conflate trafficking and prostitution. "I remember talking to US officials who were confused that there could be voluntary prostitution," he says. "They thought, 'Why would we need to differentiate? It's all forced and largely the same as trafficking. If we come across it, we should shut it down.' If you think that sex work is one of the worst things that can happen to a person, then I guess you can say you are rescuing people to take them out of it."
Christa Crawford served as IJM's country director in Thailand in 2001 and '02, after which she worked for the United Nations and wrote a book on using international law to fight trafficking. As she explains it, American perceptions of trafficking led to policies centered on eradicating large-scale brothel prostitution, rescuing "an innocent pre-pubescent girl victim who has been kidnapped or tricked" and targeting traffickers who are part of international criminal rings. "That does exist. But the on-the-ground reality often consists of the big murky middle," says Crawford, referring to the family members, neighbors or formerly trafficked women who often pull others into prostitution.
"There were degrees of volition involved," Crawford continues. "Under international law the minors can't consent to prostitution, but it was important to understand what they were thinking. As for the women, they were making a rational decision under horrible conditions--to be raped for free in Burma or paid to do commercial sex work is one situation. For me, they are making a rational decision, but that's a decision no one should have to make. We should be talking about the labor laws, migration laws and the situation in Burma--just as much as working with the courts and police."
A high-ranking police officer at the provincial level agrees with Crawford's assessments. "The 'victims' we found intended to come and work in prostitution. That's the majority of the people we found, I would say 80 or 90 percent, back then when we were working with IJM, and now, too," he says, speaking on condition of anonymity. "I feel bad for the women--and they get so angry about what we're doing."
IJM harnessed US influence to pressure local NGOs and police to fall in line. In one IJM-initiated case, Trafcord's "slowness" in taking action on raiding a brothel earned it a rebuke from the State Department, according to Svasti, which raised diplomatic hackles in Thailand and in effect severed the relationship between IJM and Thai countertrafficking efforts.
Stymied by Thailand's inflexible laws on detention and deportation and shut out by Thai organizations, IJM gradually tapered off its countertrafficking work there; now it focuses on helping ethnic minorities file for legal citizenship. It shifted its countertrafficking efforts to the next battlefront--a neighboring country with an appetite for child prostitution, Cambodia.
Head north out of Phnom Penh on National Road 1 for eleven kilometers and turn left, and you'll find what was once Cambodia's most notorious haven for child prostitution. These days, visitors who come to Svay Pak during the day will find an open-air billiards area, a few drugstores and one or two gold shops that form part of an informal banking system for the poor and undocumented, who display the gold as a form of aspirational fashion or tuck it away for safekeeping. A few young men and women are cutting and stacking rags, and farther down, past a dusty marketplace full of the smell of overripe fruit and empty of customers, is a recycling outpost where a woman with a scarf wound around her head is at work crushing water bottles. Svay Pak is a town of scraps and remnants--including a diminished child-sex trade that lingers on, despite the efforts of IJM and the Cambodian police.
It's a melancholy ending to what was supposed to be a happily-ever-after story--after all, Svay Pak helped IJM make its name. The predominantly Vietnamese village was the staging ground for IJM's most celebrated raid, in March 2003, which became the subject of a Dateline NBC special and Haugen's book Terrify No More.
"They would bring the youngest of girls and sit them on your laps in the streets," said Patrick Stayton, who became IJM's field office director in 2007, after the first IJM raid. "There were girls that were anywhere from 5 to 8. After that [IJM raid] they no longer had to have every orifice of their body violated ten times a day.... That ended for at least a few that day."
I first met Stayton in February 2008. The tall lawyer had a deep, rolling voice--a natural fit for singing in a chorus, which he says serves as "one of my outlets"--and an intense gaze that radiated moral seriousness and genuine, if guarded, warmth.
He folded himself into a wicker chair, and we turned to his work, faith and the classic conflict that IJM had encountered: how to balance the needs of trafficked women and girls with the potential for disruption in the lives of adult sex workers and the distribution of HIV services.
"I believe that God is all-powerful. He could do this, but I think it pleases him to let his creations be his hands and feet here," he said. "I have an opportunity to bring heaven on earth in places that are already hell on earth. I believe in a God who created us with the ability to feel this kind of pain, and to understand and recognize and see it, a heart to want to do something about it. I think the evil that happens here breaks his heart.
"Am I happy about the potential disruption? No. But I'm looking at the girl there, the 15-year-old girl who is nothing more than an organ for rent," he says. "That's what we find unacceptable. And I think that IJM has weighed that cost--I have personally weighed that cost. I wouldn't be working with IJM if I didn't feel that cost was one I could take."
IJM was prepared to stake it all on its first major intervention in Cambodia. On March 29, 2003, it staged an ambitious and massively publicized raid. Haugen had agreed to embed a crew from Dateline, hoping that the TV segment would create enough public outrage to force Cambodian authorities to shut down the village, should the raid fail.
Posing as prospective clients, IJM investigators had amassed videotaped evidence that around forty girls, some as young as 8 or 9, were being offered for sexual services. After the raid, IJM was able to count thirty-seven girls among the rescued; the ensuing court case resulted in six convictions. I was unable to meet the girls rescued in the raid or any from subsequent interventions; shelter managers said they wanted to protect the girls from too much media exposure. But in August 2008 Dateline ran a follow-up story with the girls, who appeared healthy and happy, and had dreams of becoming doctors and dance teachers.
The Svay Pak raids seemed to close on that triumphant note--but the story after the redemptive ending is far darker, according to Peter Sainsbury, a consultant who worked with Cambodian human rights group LICADHO to review the IJM raid. A number of bystanders had been caught up in the intervention, including a noodle seller suffering from high blood pressure. Although Sainsbury notified IJM staff of her condition, little was done to earn her release or provide her with medical care, and she died in custody. Her body was returned to her family with teeth missing--prison guards had used pliers to wrench out any with gold fillings.
As for the children, a number of them were addicted to ketamine and injectable drugs, according to Sainsbury, and cut deals with police in the safe house in order to procure them. At least twelve of the victims ran away, some of them later reappearing at Svay Pak to continue prostitution, according to local sources. A police raid a year later netted a number of the rescuees from the high-profile March 2003 IJM raid. Within days of the later raid, all the girls had fled the shelter.
A USAID-funded "census" of sex workers in Cambodia uncovered the fact that the number of underage children offered for prostitution actually increased after the raid, from forty-six before to twelve directly after to fifty-five by May 7 of that year.
"We were a little surprised at the increase after the raid," said researcher Thomas Steinfatt by phone. "But a lot of the girls have a debt contract. If [a girl] winds up in a shelter after a raid, she wants to get out because her family will be pressured to pay back the debt. They won't be able to do that, so the 15-year-old [sister] may get sent. Then the 13-year-old may get sent as well. That's one way the larger number could be accounted for. I argue that the contracts should be null and void, but the girls and women are not going to see it that way."
Those who remained or returned to Svay Pak faced an additional challenge: according to Sainsbury, pimps believed that local HIV-education and social work NGOs had aided IJM and the police, and after the raids cut off the groups' access to the women and barred them from providing care.
In an effort to put a definitive end to child prostitution in Svay Pak, IJM raided the village multiple times after its initial intervention, and the Cambodian police also conducted 100-day saturation/surveillance operations. In his report on the impact of these initiatives, however, French economist Frederic Thomas discovered that the raids had merely dispersed the problem. The women and girls of Svay Pak who hadn't returned to Vietnam had been relocated to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, the town just outside the famous Angkor Wat ruins.
By 2007 business in Svay Pak had recovered and reappeared more covertly. Pimps would search clients for cameras, according to Interior Ministry and IJM sources, or use intermediaries like hotel staff and motorcycle-taxi drivers to help deliver children from the village directly to clients' hotel rooms.
Shortly after its first Svay Pak raid, IJM launched a police-training initiative in Cambodia that brought its own controversy. USAID awarded a nearly $1 million grant to the organization to train police in countertrafficking techniques--a decision that fueled criticism from human rights advocates concerned about corruption. Cambodian police are notorious for their involvement in trafficking, through extorting protection money from brothel owners, or through assault and rape of sex workers and trafficking victims.
According to a 2006 USAID-funded study that drew on interviews with 1,000 sex workers and sixty police officers, approximately a third of the freelance sex workers surveyed had been raped by a policeman in the past year; a third had been gang-raped by police. As for sex workers who worked in brothels but also accepted clients outside, 57 percent had been raped by a lone policeman; nearly half had been gang-raped by law enforcement. Fifty percent of freelancers and nearly 75 percent of the brothel group had been beaten by police in the past year.
The police themselves testified to their behavior:
Frankly speaking, I did not like sex workers in the past. I have recently abused many hardheaded women who were working in the parks at nighttime. I beat them when they refused sex with me.... I can't remember the number of beatings. Because I thought that sex workers needed extreme sex from men [laughs]. People in my area called sex workers pradap (meaning "equipment that people can use for doing something," a public vagina for men). Sometimes I asked for some money from them to buy beer or wine.... Sometimes I f***ed them on the stone bench. I never paid them for sex.... There were many policemen who used to work in this park and they did the same.... Now I realized that women become sex workers because they have no job and no money to do business. I know that sex workers have suffered a lot from men, especially men who have guns and power like policemen. I am so sorry for what I have done to those sex workers. Maybe at that time I was too young to know everything in this society. About five years ago, I arrested one woman who was walking on the street late at night. I threatened her to give me some money. I needed money for buying beer and cigarettes. That woman told me that she had no money. I beat and forced her to find money for me. She took off her earring and sold it for money to buy wine for me. I raped her on the ground near Wat Phnom. I used a condom and I raped her three times. I beat her when she was crying for my mercy. [Respondent silent for a while.] I will never do it again. I did many wrong things in my life. I want POLICY [the project that performed the study] to train police about women's rights.... I want to be a good man and take care of my family.
Such stories, according to a US government official who works on anti-trafficking, speaking on condition of anonymity, raise serious questions about "whether or not working with police as allies on this issue was a good [policy] in Cambodia."
Indeed, the "war on trafficking" blew up in Cambodia last year. In the wake of US pressure on trafficking and the advent of a new countertrafficking law, the Cambodian government launched a campaign of indiscriminate sweeps of streets and brothels. Security forces harassed HIV-outreach workers, disrupting condom-distribution efforts, and caged sex workers and street people in detention centers--actions that drew criticism from UN agencies and other civil society groups.
Cambodian government officials responded with indignation. "It is not true police are using this law to arrest and extort money from the suspects," said Gen. Bith Kim Hong, head of the anti-trafficking police. "We never arrest prostitutes, but rather we save them from brothels."
According to LICADHO, the sweeps resulted in the murder of three detainees, who were beaten to death by prison guards, and the suicides of at least five others.
IJM did not help conduct the sweeps and condemned them publicly--Stayton even attempted to contact the local sex workers' collective to offer his help in investigating the allegations of abuse. He was rebuffed by silence, however--a representative of the collective argued that the sweeps were an unsurprising consequence of US pressure on trafficking, in which IJM has played a strong part, and of a policy that favors engagement with law enforcement while failing to heed the voices of those they ostensibly protect.
Some in the human rights community remain open to dialogue with IJM and to the possibility of positive collaboration with the police. Joe Amon of Human Rights Watch offered a slew of possible modifications to IJM's work, including establishing formal mechanisms like citizens' commissions and independent investigations to pursue complaints about police abuses. As for the sex workers, IJM could engage in "real dialogue with sex workers' groups, which have their own ways of gathering information and informing police they trust. They could also provide legal representation for adult sex workers, particularly those abused by police, or they could support local legal NGOs to do so." In the absence of those safeguards, Amon felt that IJM's strategies have yielded mixed results at best.
It's unclear how IJM may be addressing the potential complications of working with such volatile partners. The organization did not respond to repeated requests to speak on concrete strategies in the field to avoid or counter police corruption and brutality. IJM staff did, however, mention the protocol they had issued to local police, which advises them on ways to shield sex workers from the media and to reassure them they are not being arrested, and which explains techniques for conducting raids so they do not implicate social service NGOs operating in the area. My request to see the manual, however, resulted in no response. Asked about the provision of legal representation for adult sex workers, Haugen responded by noting that most of the women were undocumented and therefore less likely to press charges against law enforcement.
For Marielle Lindstrom, weighing the balance of IJM's work in Cambodia is a difficult task. Formerly chief of the Asia Foundation's anti-trafficking project, Lindstrom was in charge of disbursing the major USAID grant on the issue and served as main coordinator on Cambodia's anti-trafficking strategies, convening a task force of government officials, ministries and more than 200 NGOs. She acknowledges that IJM is "doing a good thing rescuing the children" and could have a strong positive effect should its training be incorporated into the national police academy, but she is torn about the overall impact of the organization's work.
"In the end," she says, "it's the way of thinking that troubles me. Do you want to make a difference in one person's life, or change the system? Many people are here because they've been called to do something, they have a calmness and a conviction. They know this is right. For me, I'm only human. I doubt myself all the time. I need to consider different approaches. I'd much rather say that God tells me to do this. It would be easier." Lindstrom sighs again. "Because what about your responsibility to a fellow human being, to what they want? Do we ever ask them? Some see proof of their faith in that one person they rescue. That's my concern--there's no self-doubt. It didn't cross anyone's mind to work with sex workers on the law, for example. And we talk about the minimum standards of assistance, but victims are not consulted in the creation of those standards."
Before I left Cambodia, I met with the secretariat of the sex workers' collective. Three of them had been trafficked--although I didn't ask for details, they provided them, their stories of deception by friends and family.
At the end of our conversation, I asked if they had any questions. They had only one. "Sister," Preung Pany said, "we tell our stories to so many journalists, so many people like you, but then nothing changes. Still we are raped by the police, still there are young ones in the brothels. There are so many people working on this--the rescuers, the HIV people, people like you--and so much money going into this problem. But why doesn't anything change?"
About Noy Thrupkaew
Noy Thrupkaew is a freelance writer based in New York City.
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