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LAWMAKERS URGED TO PAY ATTENTION TO GROWING HUMAN TRAFFICKING PROBLEM
By Michael P. Norton
STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE
STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, MAY 4, 2005
Rosa could make ten times her earnings doing the same job in Texas, send much of the money back home to her family and return home if she ever became homesick. Against the wishes of her parents and intrigued by the possibility of finding a new life, Rosa agreed.
She met her acquaintance at a hotel, where she and a group of other girls her age were driven towards the US border. They then walked for four days and four nights until they met a white van in Brownsville, Texas. From there, they were driven through Louisiana and into rural Florida. It was then that Rosa was informed that there was no restaurant job and she would be working in a brothel to pay off the $10,000 cost of her trip there.
When she objected, she was gang raped, frequently beaten and guarded 24 hours a day. "She said that she would die unless she succumbed, so she did," Laura Lederer, a US State Department senior advisor told about 100 people gathered here today to learn more about the growing problem of human trafficking in the US and Massachusetts. "She was very, very beautiful so they used and used and used her."
After three months as a sex slave, Rosa escaped after another young girl alerted neighbors of their situation and federal authorities, acting under the powers of a law passed by Congress in 2000, raided the trafficking ring.
But so much damage had been done, Lederer said. Rosa had been impregnated twice and had two abortions. She had sexually transmitted diseases, pelvic inflammation, post-traumatic stress syndrome and addiction problems associated with the drugs and alcohol her captors fed her to numb her pain.
"Frankly, she has never recovered from all of that," said Lederer, who urged Massachusetts lawmakers today to join Sen. Mark Montigny (D-New Bedford) and take a serious look at laws they might pass to address the problem.
Those familiar with trafficking said individuals can presently be prosecuted for rape, torture or kidnapping, but a broader trafficking law would enable state and federal authorities to more successfully target rings of traffickers.
The US Department of Justice has about 172 active human trafficking cases, half involving forced labor or servitude and half involving forced sex, Lederer said. Only three states don't have cases pending, she said, calling on policy makers to treat human trafficking under state laws like organized crime rings. The cases are brought under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, which declared human trafficking a federal crime.
"It takes lots of people to move people across borders from one nation to another," Lederer said. Lederer said the state should consider the approach adopted at the federal level which requires inter-agency cooperation to target trafficking. The strategy, she said, forces cooperation between federal health and human services, law enforcement, labor, international aid and State Department officials.
Officials in Massachusetts say human trafficking is a growing problem here, but they don't have a handle on it. "This is a topic that is clearly under the radar," said Middlesex County District Attorney Martha Coakley, who said trafficking cases are "bubbling up" more frequently. Coakley speculated that some unresolved murder cases may involve immigrants with no family ties in the area who were human trafficking victims. "Many of those are those people," she said.
Just as state laws allow smaller drug trafficking cases to be prosecuted by the state, with larger cases handled by federal authorities, Coakley urged state lawmakers to consider a role for state law enforcers in human trafficking law enforcement.
Montigny hopes the Legislature will pass a law creating the crime of human trafficking, but is also sponsoring a bill creating a 13-member commission to study the prevalence of trafficking and human servitude, the consequences of such activity, the ability to respond to victims, the effectiveness of existing laws, and the availability of services to victims. The proposed commission would be required to develop legislative recommendations in a year's time.
Carol Gomez, executive director of the Trafficking Victims Outreach and Services Network, said the network is aware of 30 potential trafficking cases in the Greater Boston area over the past year. Those cases involve domestic servitude, exploitation of workers in construction, manufacturing and restaurants, and sexual trafficking. Tackling the problem is more complex, she said, because many of its victims are undocumented immigrants and advocates are mindful about the potential for a backlash from those with "anti-immigrant sentiments."
One trafficking survivor from Haiti, introduced at today's briefing as Micheline, said she was never paid and was "like basically a slave" during the more than three years that she cared for a Connecticut couple and their three young children after coming to the United States at the age of 14. Micheline said she was in charge of all aspects of housekeeping, and was beaten with a belt when the couple was dissatisfied with her work. "If there was anything that wasn't done, I was in trouble," Micheline said. "Finally, I decided to run away. I couldn't take it anymore. It was an awful thing."
Human trafficking is a modern form of slavery that is "more subtle and more sinister" than previous forms of slavery, according to Mark Zuckerman, a New Hampshire-based assistant US attorney who helped prosecute a case against a tree-clearing company in Litchfield that had exploited Jamaican immigrants. Modern trafficking cases typically involve people from disadvantaged backgrounds with no place to turn and the breaking of their free will through threats and psychological coercion, Zuckerman said. "The hard thing about this issue is people don't want to believe that slavery is still going on," he said.
Montigny said the Legislature needs to fashion some response to the problem. "Human trafficking is in fact dehumanizing," he said. "There are many who believe that this is in fact worse than death itself. We need to turn over some very ugly rocks to determine what is going on. Very few states are doing what actually needs to be done. Some of it might be it's too difficult for people to comprehend something this horrible."
