August 10, 2013 Compiled by the Center for Public Policy Studies Boulder Weekly

Human Trafficking News Digest: August 10, 2013 Compiled by the Center for Public Policy Studies Boulder Weekly

Nationwide Sting Recovers More than 100 Trafficked Children, 9 from Denver (August 1): A nationwide sweep to search for children who were being commercially sexually exploited found 106 juvenile victims of sex trafficking nationwide, nine of whom were recovered by efforts coordinated by the Denver division of the FBI. The enforcement action, Operation Cross Country, combined the efforts of local law enforcement, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and 47 FBI divisions, including the Denver office with the Rocky Mountain Innocence Lost Task Force. This was the seventh Operation Cross Country organized by the FBI’s 10-year-old Innocence Lost National Initiative. The initiative’s efforts have led to the recovery of 2,700 children. The Denver FBI office has also reported that during the operation they arrested six alleged pimps and identified 11 pimps, cited/arrested 51 adults for prostitution, arrested 25 johns and arrested six adults for other crimes, including four felonies. Local agencies involved included police departments in Aurora, Casper, Colo- rado Springs, Denver, Greenwood Village, Lakewood, Pueblo and Wheat Ridge; sheriff ’s offices in Arapahoe, Douglas, Jefferson and Pueblo counties; the FBI; Homeland Security Investigations; the United States Marshals; and Wyoming Division Criminal Investigation.

Tracking Down the Trafficked (July 25): In 2012, the FBI recovered 49 girls who were victims of sex trafficking in Denver. As of the end of June, the Innocence Lost Task Force, a multi-jurisdictional effort to combat juvenile sex trafficking that can track traffickers across agency lines and responds to calls from Colorado and Wyoming, had recovered 25 children in Denver who were sex trafficking victims so far in 2013. The agency usually sees a spike over the summer months, putting them on track to set a record high for the number of sex trafficking victims recovered this year. The task force has dedicated staff and officers from the FBI and police departments in Denver and Aurora and Arapahoe County. Before the task force was launched in January 2012, the FBI was recovering 10 to 15 juvenile sex trafficking victims each year. That number more than doubled just in the first year the task force existed. There are two centers to help commercially sexually exploited children in Colorado. Amy’s House in Fort Collins opened earlier this year and Sarah’s Home in Colorado Springs will be opening soon, which is encouraging in terms of local treatment options. Attention Homes reports that on a par- ticular sample night in January 2012, 162 Boulder County youth were reported homeless, a 165 percent increase over 2011. They also claim that 1,500 12- to 25-year-olds are homeless in Colorado right now. Within 48 hours of leaving home, 30 percent of runaways are recruited into trafficking. Based on the cases that came in during 2012, Darr estimates that runaways’ first contact with a trafficker occurs within 24 hours of leaving home.

Time

Mexican Drug Cartels’ Other Business: Sex Trafficking (July 31): The fight against trafficking is compli- cated by the deep involvement of the country’s notorious drug cartels in the business. Narco gangs like the Zetas — a criminal army founded by defectors from the Mexican military — have diversified their portfolio to include

For more information visit www.centerforpublicpolicy.org 1 kidnapping, extortion, theft of crude oil, gun running and lucrative human-trafficking networks. It’s impossible to know the exact value of Mexico’s human-trafficking trade, though the U.N. estimates the global industry to be worth $32 billion a year. “As the drug war has become more intense, the networks that traffic women have made their pacts with cartels,” says Jaime Montejo, a spokesman for Brigada Callejera, a sex-worker support group in Mexico City. “Those that don’t cannot survive.” In addition to selling women for sex, Mexican cartels also have been known to kidnap women and girls and use them as their personal sex slaves. The antitrafficking drive has gained momentum in Mexico City, where a special prosecutor took power in May and has since overseen 86 raids on hotels, bars and massage parlors, rescuing 118 women and charging 62 alleged traffickers. Other signifi- cant arrests have been made across Mexico in states including Hidalgo and Puebla in recent months. Activists are also supporting cases as far away as the U.S., where Mexican women have been smuggled over the Rio Grande into forced sex work. This month, police in New Jersey arrested six Mexican nationals on sex-trafficking and organized-crime charges following a raid on a brothel in the town of Lakewood. The new human-trafficking law takes into account cases of women forced to work directly for cartels, punishing anyone who helps bring women to them. Some recent testimonies made to journalists and activists cast light on the horrifying ordeals of women held in servitude for long periods by the gangsters. Many sex workers continue plying their trade independently in the shadow of Mexico’s bloody drug war and the predations of human traffickers. Patricia, who has been a sex worker in the Merced for 30 years, says she believes the majority of Mexican prostitutes are not coerced, though they face few options in life. However, Marcela, who was forced into sex work as a teenager, says there are often coercive pressures that cannot be seen, like threats against the sex worker or her family. “There might be some women who do it out of choice, but many are forced,” Marcela says. “Nobody, when they are a young girl, says, ‘I want to be a prostitute.’”

Greenwich Time

Advocates Clash Over Sex Trafficking Treatment (August 8): When Gov. Rick Scott and Attorney Gener- al Pam Bondi visited Miami a year ago, they touted a new law that would allow sex trafficking victims to go to a safe, therapeutic place instead of being jailed as prostitutes. The state’s first short-term safe house opened in April in a crime-ridden neighborhood that was a hot bed for sex trafficking. Within days, several victims ran away and one was raped after she fled, according to a recent report from a Miami-Dade County grand jury. The six-bed safe house closed in June, reigniting a debate about how to best help sex trafficking victims. Some advocates are pushing to make these safe houses locked down facilities to help victims break their bond with their pimps while others warn locking them up in safe houses, which look like regular homes, will cause more harm. When advocates pushed legislation last year to open safe houses around the state, they warned girls would run away because they are often more comfortable on the streets and accustomed to moving around with few belongings and personal attachments. It’s part of the process, similar to relapse in addiction treatment, said Mary Faraldo, community relations officer for Kristi House. In the past, victims have been kept in jail and pressured to give information about their pimps or sent to juvenile detention where they receive little treatment and return to their pimps once released. Florida is one of the most popular destinations for human traffickers in the U.S. and sex trafficking of young victims is among the most underreported offenses, according to the Department of Children and Families. The agency started a statewide task force in 2009 because the majority of sex trafficking victims are foster youth. Kristi House opened Florida’s first short-term shelter under a new Safe Harbor law where girls can live and receive treatment for one to two-months. Six girls, age 13 to 17-years-old, painted and wrote in thera- py journals, were taught to cook, had group and individual counseling and slowly learned about life away from their abusers in a home with pink patterned bedspreads and colorful artwork on the walls. The girls had run from previous foster and group homes in the past. At the new safe house, one ran away and never returned. Two others ran away for 24 hours to visit family but returned. One of the girls was raped while she out, officials said. No other details were released about the rape. When the two runaways returned, therapist Tabitha Gallerani held a group counseling session to discuss the rape. “What breaks my heart is that this girl didn’t even know she had been sexually exploited. She was so used to being abused,” said Gallerani.

For more information visit www.centerforpublicpolicy.org 2 US News and World Report

More Human Trafficking Lawsuits Filed Against Major US Shipbuilder (August 8): New human trafficking lawsuits were announced Thursday against a major U.S.-based shipbuilder, alleging that Signal Inter- national had brought 500 Indian guest workers to the U.S. and then forced them to work under “barbaric conditions.” The first-of-its-kind case was initially brought as a class action suit on behalf of workers represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other advocacy groups, and would have been the largest labor suit in history. But the case is now being brought as a series of individual cases in part because of the diversity of worker complaints. Among them: “Workers were promised green cards and once they arrived those turned out to be false. They were living in horrible labor camps with more than 20 men in one trailer... Instead of being paid what they were promised, they were paid a lot less,” says Chandra Bhatnagar, the ACLU staff attorney on the case. Many of the workers had also paid $20,000 up front to the company to come to the U.S., according to the suit. The H-2B nonimmigrant program was set up to allow U.S. employers to tem- porarily hire foreign citizens for nonfarm work, and a similar H-2A program exists for farm work. Hundreds of thousands of foreign workers come to the U.S. every year, according to the National Guestworker Alliance, an advocacy group for temporary foreign laborers. A June 2012 report from the Alliance on the state of the guest worker program said it found many laborers were being subjected to “deeply exploitative conditions” that “rise to the level of forced labor and involuntary servitude.” The Department of Labor sought to address some of those concerns in April of last year by establishing a new set of rules for the H-2B program, but litigation from the companies it would affect has so far blocked its implementation.

Huffington Post

How Big Data Is Fighting Human Trafficking: Google, CNN and Others Share Solutions (July 16): For some 27 million victims of modern-day slavery, there is one combatant leading the way in terms of prevention and protection: technology. A recent panel featuring Google, CNN, HuffPost and others discussed ways big data is being used to target traffickers and affect changes in policy that fights modern-day slavery. Google Giving and anti-trafficking nonprofit the Polaris Project spoke out on HuffPost Live about how they’re using technology to fight the issue. The two groups are culling data of reported trafficking instances involving anyone from sex workers to witnesses to truckers to carnival workers. Google and Polaris are then mapping information, tagging it and looking for patterns they can use to inform law enforcement and affect policy change. The value in these types of initiatives could lie in the fact that victims and bystanders might be more likely to report instances of trafficking to non-government organizations, Bradley Myles, executive director of the Polaris Project, pointed out during the segment. Margaret Howard, a trafficking victim-turned-advocate, pointed out during the Huff- Post Live segment that stories like these highlight the fact that trafficking spans both the labor and sex industries and prevention includes tackling slavery in supply chains as well as advocating for those are are kidnapped or sexually exploited.

CNN

Cyber-Sex Trafficking: A 21st Century Scourge (July 18): Andrea was 14 years old the first time a voice over the Internet told her to take off her clothes. “I was so embarrassed because I don’t want others to see my private parts,” she said. “The customer told me to remove my blouse and to show him my breasts.” Andrea, which is not her real name, said she had been lured away from her rural, mountain village in the Philippines by a cousin who said he would give her a well-paid job as a babysitter in the city. She thought she was leaving her impoverished life for an opportunity to earn money to finish high school. Instead, she became another victim

For more information visit www.centerforpublicpolicy.org 3 caught up in the newest but no less sinister world of sexual exploitation -- cyber-sex trafficking. For the next few months, Andrea said she was one of seven girls, between age 13 and 18, who spent day and night satisfying the sexual fantasies of men around the world. Paying $56 per minute, male customers typed their instructions onto a computer and then watched via a live camera as the girls performed sexual acts. She said the girls were often forced to watch the men they served on screens. Andrea dreamed of returning home but her employer, an uncle, slept downstairs and kept the front door locked. “I was told if I tried to escape, the police would put me in jail. I believed it. I was very innocent -- I grew up without TV and had never left my village before,” she explained. According to Andrey Sawchenko, National Director at the International Justice Mission Philippines, the private nature of the technology allows the crime to take place in a venue that law enforcement can’t easily access -- and that makes it harder to gather evidence against perpetrators. Although no official statistics exist, Ruby Ramores, a former Executive at the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking (IACAT), believes tens of thousands of women are involved in the industry and that most of the girls are recruited by friends, family -- sometimes even by their parents. According to Ramores, parents who submit their children to cyber-sex -- especially the ones from rural areas -- think this is something that won’t violate their children in the way that traditional sex crimes do because it is just a camera and just the body being shown, and there is no touching with anyone else. “So, it’s a better option than being pushed to prostitution which has physical interaction,” she said. Social workers say the families don’t understand the effect of the work on their children. They are thinking, instead, about money and survival. In 2011, the Philippines successfully prosecuted its first case of cyber-sex trafficking against two Swed- ish nationals and three Filipinos. Andrea was rescued after being held for three months, when one of the other girls escaped and told the authorities. She is now a star witness in a case against her abusers, but she said she has received death threats and that has prevented the case from progressing. Recently, CNN reported that the testi- mony of three girls in the Philippines helped convict a Pennsylvania man who had been involved in a cyber-den. He has been sentenced to 12 years in a U.S. federal prison for child pornography.

Salem News

Groundbreaking Portland State University Study Sheds Light on Child Sex Trafficking (August 7): A study from Portland State University (PSU) unveiled by U.S. Attorney Amanda Marshall showed that than 469 children in the Portland metro area received social services for commercial sexual exploitation over the last four years. The study by PSU associate professor Christopher Carey and graduate student Lena Teplitsky sheds light on child sex trafficking in the Portland metro area in a way that no other study in the United States has done. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR, who spoke at a press conference Monday along with Marshall, stressed the importance of the information, and the need for the federal government to join with state and local jurisdictions to fight the problem. Carey and Teplitsky’s report examined case data from the Oregon Department of Human Services’ Commercial Sexual Exploitation Unit and the Sexual Assault Resource Center (SARC) in Portland. The docu- mented cases were from 2009 to 2013. The cases covered a range of crimes involving using children for prostitution. The report is unique because it focuses solely on social service cases, providing authorities with a consistent and conservative standard for measuring the problem. Marshall said it will serve as a template that other states can use to measure their own rates of child exploitation. Among the findings in the report: • The average victim was 15.5 years old. The youngest was 8. • More than 96 percent of the victims were female. • Forty percent were Caucasian. African Americans represented 27.1 percent of the total – a disproportionately high number considering they make up only 5.8 percent of Multnomah County’s population. • More than half are dealing with addiction issues. • Nearly half the cases have a gang connection. Marshall said “gangs have learned that it’s cheaper and less risky to traffic girls than guns or drugs.”