Trafficking in the United States of America

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The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) supports the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), including Article 6, which ensures that governments take all measures to suppress all forms of traffic in women and exploitation of women. With the 198th General Assembly (1986), the Office of Women’s Advocacy “[d]eclares that sexual exploitation of women in any form is not to be condoned, disregarded or treated lightly.” [35.175] In keeping with the values upheld by the General Assembly and with a shared understanding that women’s lives and labor are undervalued, we have dedicated this entire edition to the issue of trafficking.

Testing Assumptions

Helpful Definitions

Listed below are a few of the binaries of dominant/privileged, oppressor/oppressed and favored/dejected that are components of our system of institutionalized power and privilege. We often make presumptions about the capabilities, contributions, morality and value of human beings based on where societal norms classify them within the power structure.

Classism: The value of the affluent over those of lesser socioeconomic means

Sexism: The value of males over females, masculine over feminine

Racism: The value of Anglo/Eurocentric traits and physical features and over all other

racial ethnic physical features and pervasive cultural norms

-Molly Casteel and Shaya S. Gregory

Eyes To See

An Introduction to Trafficking

by Shaya S. Gregory, Elder

Can you see her?
She is:
Lying tied to a bed awaiting the umpteenth man she will ‘service’ this afternoon … Stooped low, picking produce … Scrubbing the toilet of the man who made her his picture bride … Asking you if you’d like dessert, or perhaps coffee to go with your evening meal … Tediously embroidering a shirt that you will give to your son … 

She is:
Agonized by vivid memories of beatings...Terrified she’ll be tortured again … Afraid to return home — of bringing dishonor and harm to her family ... Unsure where they stashed her identity papers ... mistrustful of those she encounters … Weary from hunger and exhaustion …

She is a child of God.
She is a victim of trafficking.

According to the United States’ State Department Trafficking in Persons Report  (2005), our she is one of the women or girls who make up 80 percent of the 14,500 to 17,500 persons per year brought involuntarily into America, the Land of The Free.

She is the commodity, the laborer, or both, that fuels the nine-million-dollar trafficking industry, which may have cost her a portion of her self-worth and has certainly jeopardized her well-being.

Trafficking in persons is, “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.” 1

Trafficking takes on a myriad of manifestations. Broadly, the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act  (TVPA) has identified two categories, Sex Trafficking and Labor Trafficking. Sex Trafficking is the illicit acquisition of a person for a commercial sex act such as prostitution, pornography, sex shows, and/or stripping. Labor Trafficking typically exploits a person for agriculture, manufacturing, domestic service, construction, restaurant services, hotel and motel housekeeping and marriage. Many victims of Labor Trafficking are often repeatedly and violently subjected to sexual abuse. 2

There are American shes who are lured and abducted by traffickers, but most victims of trafficking in the United States are from Eastern Europe, Asia, Central or South America where, like women worldwide, she is susceptible to poverty, underdevelopment and an omnipresent lack of equal opportunity because of her gender. 3  Her gender-based vulnerabilities, however, are compounded by her home country’s effort to compete in a globalized world economy and the repercussions that come with  industrialization, i.e., urbanization, warfare, and social displacement. 4

Our she is thus circumscribed by oppressive dynamics of race, ethnicity and culture, geography and gender that are exacerbated by economic deprivation. Such repression increases the likelihood that she will be lured by traffickers or sold to them by unsuspecting relatives.

The traffickers’ access to women and girls like her is heightened by the dawn of information technology, which makes it easier for traffickers to recruit and sell her. 5 The irony is that her image is seen by the purveyors, but often she remains invisible and faceless to those of us who can offer her solace, solidarity and relief.

We are the other side of her reality. We understand that we are called to love her as we love Christ and ourselves. We understand her inherent value as a human being. This is the most urgent question of all: How can she feel our influence and our presence, working on her behalf?

Will she see us?

1 Article 3 (a) of theUnited Nations Trafficking Protocol

2 U.S. State Department Human Trafficking Fact Sheet

3 Article 9 of the United Nations Trafficking Protocol

4 Casting Stones: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States. Rita Nakashima Brock and Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite: Minneapolis, Fortress, 1996. p.17.

5 AWID Digital Dangers: Information and Communication Technologies and Trafficking in Women, Spotlight Number 6

Understand

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the Trafficking in Persons Report?

Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in 2000 and strengthened it in 2003 and 2005. This law provides tools for the United States to combat Trafficking in persons, both domestically and abroad. One of the key components of the law is the creation of the Trafficking in Persons Report. The Department of State produces this annual report assessing government response in each country with a significant number of victims of severe forms of Trafficking in persons. Countries in the annual report are rated in tiers, based on government efforts to combat Trafficking.

What impact does Human Trafficking have on the world?

Human Trafficking is a multi-dimensional threat. It deprives people of their human rights and freedoms, it is a global health risk and it fuels the growth of organized crime. Human Trafficking has a devastating impact on individual victims, who often suffer physical and emotional abuse, rape, threats against self and family, passport theft, and even death. But, the impact of Human Trafficking goes beyond individual victims; it undermines the safety and security of all nations it touches.

Remember

Gender Vulnerabilities

Gender discrimination makes women and girls uniquely vulnerable to the exploitation of Human Trafficking. A set of interrelated factors arises out of gender discrimination:

• 70 percent of the world’s poor are women and girls. Women and girls work two-thirds of the world’s working hours and  produce half of the world’s food, yet earn only 10 percent of the world’s income and own less than one percent of the world’s property.
• Women and girls make up 80 percent of the world's refugees, a population extremely vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.
• Two-thirds of those denied a basic education are girls, and 75 percent of the world’s illiterate adults are women. School attendance has been linked to increased protection of children against exploitation, making them less exposed and vulnerable.

Ears To Hear

An Opinion On The Dehumanizing Portrayals Of Women Of Color

by the Rev. Teresa Chávez Sauceda, Ph. D.

• 98 percent of U.S. households have at least one television in the home
• The average U.S. resident watches nearly seven hours of television a day
• Television and movies programs are downloaded on handheld electronic devices

Heeding The Word

Becoming Involved

We hope The Worth of Women will inspire you to tackle trafficking by:

1.) Praying for the victims and perpetrators of trafficking

2.) Encouraging your congregation and community to make leadership development of girls/women a priority

3.) Pushing our denomination to work with ECPAT-USA and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to address women’s vulnerability to trafficking

4.) Contacting the PC(USA) United Nations Office to lobby the U.S. to ratify CEDAW and join over 90 percent of the members of  the United Nations who are party to the ConventionMass media carries tremendous power to define how we see the world we live in. The media also shapes how we see other people in the world. And unfortunately, the media often intensifies the deeply hierarchical racist and sexist views of our society. At the intersection of race and gender, women of color are particularly targeted for the destructive, exploitative stereotypes that make them vulnerable to trafficking.

Sexual stereotypes of women of color often serve to set them outside the norms of acceptable roles for women as defined by the dominant culture.  For example, while the particular stereotypes of African American, Asian, Latina or Native American women vary with each group, they all tend to depict women of color as promiscuous, either wild and animal-like or highly subservient and compliant — and — highly attracted to white men as superior partners to men of their own race or ethnicity (reinforcing the perceptions of racial inferiority in men as well). These stereotypes all work to label women of color as not being “good” women; i.e., not like white women, not capable of being responsible moral agents, indeed, as morally inferior to white women.

Mass media does not cause racism or sexism per se, but neither does it offer a value-free medium in the exchange of ideas and information. Marshall McLuhan asserted, "The medium is the message." What is the message, then, if women of color are excluded from that medium or largely represented in highly sexualized, highly objectified terms?  The power of stereotypes that characterize women of color as weak, vulnerable, sexual commodities — rather than as full human beings — is immense. It makes women of color vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation and is especially evident in the growing sex trafficking industry.

The invisibility and the powerlessness of women of color in our society contribute to the very limited awareness or acknowledgement in U.S. society and the church to this growing criminal industry.  In October 2006, the San Francisco Chronicle published a four-part series on sex trafficking. While focusing on San Francisco, the series noted that this industry is growing in cities around the U.S. This series is available online.

Unhardened Hearts

The Girl Child And Trafficking

Fourteen-year-old Boriana should have been entering secondary school. Instead, her abusive father demanded that she terminate her education and help to support the family. After contacting an employment agency in her town, she was offered a job abroad as a waitress with the promise of a high salary. But the anticipated job turned out to be an empty promise. Boriana was forced to become a sex worker in a brothel in a neighboring country far from home. 1

There are millions of children, most of them girls, who suffer from sexual exploitation every year. According to a recent global estimate by the international Labor Organization, of the 12.3 million people who are victims of forced labor, nearly 1.4   million are involved in forced commercial sexual exploitation. Of this number, 40 to 50 percent are children. 2 A recent study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that an additional 300,000 to 400,000 children and youth are victimized by sexual exploitation within the United States, with criminal networks increasingly benefiting from this activity. 3

Citizens of the United States and other industrialized nations also contribute to the sex trade when they participate in sex tourism abroad.  Some appear to adhere to the mistaken notion that sex with young girls in another country is somehow different and acceptable. Particularly disturbing is the demand for increasingly younger children, some as young as six. 4 This appetite is fueled by myths about the curative powers of sex with young girls, whose so-called purity is seen as a protection against the transmission of disease. When, in fact, children whose immature body systems are still developing are more vulnerable to the ravages of disease and to the injury incurred during sexual abuse. Other contributing factors to the market for ever-younger children are cultural norms like machismo, in which sex with virgins is viewed as highly desirable.

Many interrelated elements contribute to the growth of the sex trade. In industrialized countries, family structure is significant. Economic inequalities, domestic violence, and the disintegration of the family, coupled with drug addiction and a dearth of support systems are known to be related to child prostitution.

In developing countries social, economic, and political upheaval lead to an increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots. When poverty deepens or a country is at war, children and young women are at increased risk of exploitation. 

Boriana's story is illustrative of several of those interrelated factors. Under her father's control and abuse, she was forced to go to work rather than completing her education, where at school she would have had the opportunity to increase the skills needed for success and would have been less available to exploitation. Her poverty put her at risk for the lure of those who exploited her, then kept her captive to their abuse. Even after she was hospitalized and potentially might have been rescued, she was caught between the sex trade and a return to her first abuser.

The old adage of “women and children first” undergoes an ironic twist when viewed through the lens of trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Women and children are first to be at risk, first to be exploited and first to suffer from the effects of disease, grinding poverty and abuse. They may also be first to be criminalized or deported. But gender discrimination renders them last when it comes to access to the power needed to transform their own lives. More sustained international efforts are needed to ensure that girls have the opportunity to meet their full potential.

1 “Child protection from violence, exploitation and abuse: Build­ing a protective environment for children”. UNICEF

2 “Child Protection Information Sheet: Commercial Sexual Exploitation.” UNICEF.

3 “The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada and Mexico” (abstract of the U.S. National Study) by Richard J. Estes, Ph.D. and Neil Alan Weiner, Ph.D. Univer­sity of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, Center for Study of Youth Policy, September 10, 2001.

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