Herbert On U.S. Slave Trade

"The horror of slavery," says Kevin Bales, is "not confined to history."

The author of Disposable People: New Slavery in The Global Economy states that slave labor is not just responsible for the shoes on your feet or your daily consumption of sugar, but that the products of forced labor comprise a large portion of daily Western life.

"They made the bricks for the factory that made the TV you watch. In Brazil slaves made the charcoal that tempered the steel that made the springs in your car and the blade on your lawnmower.... Slaves keep your costs low and returns on your investments high."

From an Amazon. com review:

"The exhaustive research in Disposable People shows that at least 27 million people are currently enslaved around the world. Bales, considered the world's leading expert on contemporary slavery, reveals the historical and economic conditions behind this resurgence."

Included in this number are those who are demeaned and abused even further: sexual slaves.

Many in the U.S. think that sexual trafficking is just a Third World problem.

It's not.

Foreign women are lured with promises of real jobs - waitressing, factory work, laundry work - to find themselves in hell right here in the good ole U.S. of A.

Bob Herbert reports today on Kika Cerpa, who came to New York City from Venezuela in 1992, thinking she was coming to a land of opportunity.

Instead, she was coming to another land of slavery and rape.

An excerpt:

The word spread that there was a new girl at the brothel in Queens, and the johns began lining up.

"I was crying all night," said Kika Cerpa in an interview last week. "One by one they came in."

That first night, she said, "I had sex with 19 men."

Afterward, she took a shower, and then the man who had forced her into the sex trade demanded his turn with her. When she refused (saying, "I can't have sex with nobody - I feel like I'm dead"), he beat her up.

It may seem peculiar, but there is no law against sex trafficking in the state of New York - or most other states, for that matter. Many thousands of women and children are coerced into the sex trade each year, and the pimps, madams and other lowlifes who trap them are seldom subject to legal sanctions commensurate with the severity of their crimes.

Why is it so important to make this unpopular topic into a national conversation?

Because trafficking is much more widespread than most people realize. As the advocacy group Sanctuary for Families has pointed out, "In our backyards and communities, a slave trade is flourishing that makes a mockery of our belief in civil and human rights."

As reported by Peter Landesman in The Girls Next Door:

'Because of the porousness of the U.S.-Mexico border and the criminal networks that traverse it, the towns and cities along that border have become the main staging area in an illicit and barbaric industry, whose ''products'' are women and girls.

On both sides of the border, they are rented out for sex for as little as 15 minutes at a time, dozens of times a day. Sometimes they are sold outright to other traffickers and sex rings, victims and experts say. These sex slaves earn no money, there is nothing voluntary about what they do and if they try to escape they are often beaten and sometimes killed.'

Yet, to our shame, most of us are too busy seeking our own entertainment to pay attention to stories like this.

Trafficking is a world-wide problem yet, until recently the U.S. has ignored it both at home and abroad.

As reported by Nicholas D. Kristof in Bush Takes On The Brothels:

"My own epiphany came in 1989, when my wife and I lived in China and covered the crushing of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement. Arrests of dissidents were front-page news, but no one paid any attention as many tens of thousands of Chinese women and girls were kidnapped and sold each year by traffickers to become the unwilling wives of peasants.

Since then, I've seen the peddling of humans in many countries: the 8-year-old Filipino girl whose mother used to pull her out of school to rent to pedophiles; the terrified 14-year-old Vietnamese girl imprisoned in a brothel pending the sale of her virginity; the Pakistani teenager whose brothel's owner dealt with her resistance by drugging her into a stupor. The U.N. has estimated that 12.3 million people worldwide are caught in forced labor of one kind or another.

In an age of H.I.V., sex trafficking is particularly lethal. And for every political dissident who is locked up in a prison cell, hundreds of teenage girls are locked up in brothels and, in effect, sentenced to death by AIDS."

In Sex Slaves? Lock Up The Pimps he wrote:

'Two girls, age 4 and 6, were being quietly offered for sale in Poipet earlier this month. That kind of child abuse can be defeated, as has been shown in the Cambodian hamlet of Svay Pak, which specialized in pedophilia. When I first visited it, 6-year-olds were served up for $3 a session,"

In 2000, Congress finally passed anti-trafficking legislation. Urged to do so by President Bush who has earmarked more money to the problem of human trafficking than any of his predecessors, this is one thing he has gotten right. But the office responsible is still very small.

In Kristof's opinion:

"But the heaviest lifting has been done by the State Department's tiny office on trafficking -- for my money, one of the most effective units in the U.S. government.

The office, led by a former Republican congressman, John Miller, is viewed with suspicion by some career diplomats who fear that simple-minded conservative nuts are mucking up relations with countries over a peripheral issue.

Yet Mr. Miller and his office wield their spotlight shrewdly. With firm backing from the White House (Mr. Bush made Mr. Miller an ambassador partly to help him in his bureaucratic battles), the office puts out an annual report that shames and bullies foreign governments into taking action against forced labor of all kinds.

That's all fine and good - no amount of money or effort should be spared in rescuing the enslaved from the clutches of their enslavers around the world and we must continue. I think Mr. Miller should be given more help to expand his work.

But what about those enslaved here in the U.S.? The effort to root out the brutes who profit from their misery must be led by local and state politicians - yours and mine - but they seem to lack the political will to tackle it.

Am I the only one who finds it outrageous that trafficking rings exist under our noises here in the U.S. even as our government dances around talking about preventing terrorism?

Sexual slavery and rape is a terrorism that affects a huge number of women and children and deserves at least as much attention as Bush's now maligned "War On Terror."

While terrorism against 3,000 justified a war, expeditures of billions and the loss of thousands of other lives, the ugly and ongoing terrorism against 10,000 women and children each year - due to enforced sexual slavery and trafficking in the U.S. - is not even causing a blip on the screen of our attention.

Everyone should be hounding their Congressional Representatives and Senators on this issue. The daughter you save may wind up being your own.

Molly