IN India, a
23-year-old student takes a bus home from a movie and is gang-raped and
assaulted so viciously that she dies two weeks later.
In Liberia, in West Africa, an aid group called More Than Me rescues a
10-year-old orphan who has been trading oral sex for clean water to survive.
In Steubenville, Ohio, high school football players are accused of repeatedly
raping an unconscious 16-year-old girl who was either drunk or rendered helpless
by a date-rape drug and was apparently lugged like a sack of potatoes from party
to party.
And in Washington, our members of Congress show their concern for sexual
violence by failing to renew the Violence Against Women Act, a landmark law
first passed in 1994 that has now expired.
Gender violence is one of the world’s most common human rights abuses. Women
worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male
violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined.
The World Health Organization has found that domestic and sexual violence
affects 30 to 60 percent of women in most countries.
In some places, rape is endemic: in South Africa, a survey found that 37 percent
of men reported that they had raped a woman. In others, rape is
institutionalized as sex trafficking. Everywhere, rape often puts the victim on
trial: in one poll, 68 percent of Indian judges said that “provocative attire”
amounts to “an invitation to rape.”
Americans watched the events after the Delhi gang rape with a whiff of
condescension at the barbarity there, but domestic violence and sex trafficking
remain a vast problem across the United States.
One obstacle is that violence against women tends to be invisible and thus not a
priority. In Delhi, of 635 rape cases reported in the first 11 months of last
year, only one ended in conviction. That creates an incentive for rapists to
continue to rape, but in any case that reported number of rapes is delusional.
They don’t include the systematized rape of sex trafficking. India has, by my
reckoning, more women and girls trafficked into modern slavery than any country
in the world. (China has more prostitutes, but they are more likely to sell sex
by choice.)
On my last trip to India, I tagged along on a raid on a brothel in Kolkata,
organized by the International Justice Mission. In my column at the time, I
focused on a 15-year-old and a 10-year-old imprisoned in the brothel, and
mentioned a 17-year-old only in passing because I didn’t know her story.
My assistant at The Times, Natalie Kitroeff, recently visited India and tracked
down that young woman. It turns out that she had been trafficked as well — she
was apparently drugged at a teahouse and woke up in the brothel. She said she
was then forced to have sex with customers and beaten when she protested. She
was never allowed outside and was never paid. What do you call what happened to
those girls but slavery?
Yet prosecutors and the police often shrug — or worse. Dr. Shershah Syed, a
former president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Pakistan,
once told me: “When I treat a rape victim, I always advise her not to go to the
police. Because if she does, the police might just rape her again.”
In the United States, the case in Steubenville has become controversial partly
because of the brutishness that the young men have been accused of, but also
because of concerns that the authorities protected the football team. Some
people in both Delhi and Steubenville rushed to blame the victim, suggesting
that she was at fault for taking a bus or going to a party. They need to think:
What if that were me?
The United States could help change the way the world confronts these issues. On
a remote crossing of the Nepal-India border, I once met an Indian police officer
who said, a bit forlornly, that he was stationed there to look for terrorists
and pirated movies. He wasn’t finding any, but India posted him there to show
that it was serious about American concerns regarding terrorism and intellectual
property. Meanwhile, that officer ignored the steady flow of teenage Nepali
girls crossing in front of him on their way to Indian brothels, because modern
slavery was not perceived as an American priority.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has done a superb job trying to put these
issues on the global agenda, and I hope President Obama and Senator John Kerry
will continue her efforts. But Congress has been pathetic. Not only did it fail
to renew the Violence Against Women Act, but it has also stalled on the global
version, the International Violence Against Women Act, which would name and
shame foreign countries that tolerate gender violence.
Congress even failed to renew the landmark legislation against human
trafficking, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The obstacles were
different in each case, but involved political polarization and paralysis. Can
members of Congress not muster a stand on modern slavery?
(Hmm. I now understand better the results of a new survey from Public Policy
Polling showing that Congress, with 9 percent approval, is less popular than
cockroaches, traffic jams, lice or Genghis Khan.)
Skeptics fret that sexual violence is ingrained into us, making the problem
hopeless. But just look at modern American history, for the rising status of
women has led to substantial drops in rates of reported rape and domestic
violence. Few people realize it, but Justice Department statistics suggest that
the incidence of rape has fallen by three-quarters over the last four decades.
Likewise, the rate at which American women are assaulted by their domestic
partners has fallen by more than half in the last two decades. That reflects a
revolution in attitudes. Steven Pinker, in his book “The Better Angels of Our
Nature,” notes that only half of Americans polled in 1987 said that it was
always wrong for a man to beat his wife with a belt or a stick; a decade later,
86 percent said it was always wrong.
But the progress worldwide is far too slow. Let’s hope that India makes such
violence a national priority. And maybe the rest of the world, especially our
backward Congress, will appreciate that the problem isn’t just India’s but also
our own.
THE
silliness began when Todd Akin claimed during his Senate campaign in Missouri
that in the case of “legitimate rape,” women “shut that whole thing down” to
prevent pregnancy. Then, a few days ago, Richard Mourdock of Indiana seemed to
blame God for such pregnancies, saying this was “something God intended to
happen.” I think God should sue him for defamation.
But our political system jumps all over verbal stupidity, while giving a pass to
stupid policies. If we’re offended by insensitive words about rape, for example,
shouldn’t we be incomparably more upset that rape kits are routinely left
untested in the United States? And wouldn’t it be nice if Democrats, instead of
just firing sound bites, tackled these underlying issues?
A bit of background: A rape kit is the evidence, including swabs with DNA, taken
at a hospital from a woman’s (or man’s) body after a rape. Testing that DNA
costs $1,200 or more. Partly to save money, those rape kits often sit untested
for years on the shelves of police storage rooms, particularly if the victim
didn’t come outfitted with a halo.
By most accounts, hundreds of thousands of these untested kits are stacked up
around the country. In Illinois, 80 percent of rape kits were going untested as
of 2010, Human Rights Watch reported at the time — embarrassing the state to
begin a push to test all rape kits.
In Michigan, the Wayne County prosecutor, Kym Worthy, said she was shocked to
discover more than 11,000 rape kits lying around untested — some dating to the
1980s. Worthy said that her office is now going through the backlog and testing
those that are running into statute of limitations deadlines.
So far, of 153 kits tested, 21 match evidence in a criminal database and may
involve serial rapists. But Worthy, who herself was raped while she was in law
school, says the broader problem is indifference to sex crimes.
“Sexual assault is the stepchild of the law enforcement system,” she said. “When
rape victims come into the criminal justice system, they are often treated
poorly. They may be talked out of pursuing the case.”
The bottom line, Worthy said, is that “sexual assault is not taken as seriously
as other crimes.” That — more than any offensive words — is the real scandal.
Kamala Harris, the attorney general of California, eliminated the rape kit
backlog in state crime labs after she took office. “If you don’t test it, you’ve
got a victim who is absolutely petrified, and you’ve got a rapist who thinks he
got away with it,” she said. “There could be nothing worse as a continuing
threat to public safety.”
The lackadaisical attitude toward much sexual violence is seen in another
astonishing fact: Sometimes, women or their health insurance companies must pay
to have their rape kits collected.
“No other forensic evidence collection is treated in this way,” said Sarah Tofte
of the Joyful Heart Foundation, which has focused attention on the rape kit
backlog. If her home is broken into, she notes, the police won’t bill her or her
homeowner’s insurance company “for the cost of dusting for fingerprints.”
Yet another indication of cavalier attitudes: In 31 states, if a rape leads to a
baby, the rapist can get visitation rights. That doesn’t happen often, but the
issue does come up. In Massachusetts, a convicted rapist is suing for access to
the child he fathered when he raped a 14-year-old girl.
One way to start turning around this backward approach to sex crimes would be to
support the Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Registry (Safer) Act, a bipartisan
bill in Congress that would help local jurisdictions count and test their rape
kits.
According to data from the Department of Justice, one person in the United
States is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes. A slight majority of rapes
are never reported to the police, and others are never solved. For every 100
rapes, only three lead to any jail time for the rapist, according to the Rape,
Abuse and Incest National Network.
There has been plenty of outrage this year, justifiably, at the Catholic Church,
the Boy Scouts and Penn State for averting their eyes from sexual abuse of
children. Yet America as a whole typically does the same thing when it comes to
the trafficking of teenage girls by pimps, which amounts to rape many times a
day. The police often treat those girls as criminals, rather than victims, even
as the pimps get away.
These problems are not insoluble, and we are seeing progress. Some prosecutors
are going after pimps in a serious way, and according to surveys, sexual assault
has fallen by 60 percent over the last couple of decades. Even the furor over
the comments by Senate candidates shows that times are changing.
So, sure, let’s pounce on politicians who say outrageous things. But even more,
let’s push to end outrageous policies. Routine testing of rape kits would be a
good start.
I invite you
to comment on this column on my blog,
An
exhaustive government survey of rape and domestic violence released on Wednesday
affirmed that sexual violence against women remains endemic in the United States
and in some instances may be far more common than previously thought.
Nearly one in five women surveyed said they had been raped or had experienced an
attempted rape at some point, and one in four reported having been beaten by an
intimate partner. One in six women have been stalked, according to the report.
“That almost one in five women have been raped in their lifetime is very
striking and, I think, will be surprising to a lot of people,” said Linda C.
Degutis, director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which conducted the survey.
“I don’t think we’ve really known that it was this prevalent in the population,”
she said.
The study, called the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, was
begun in 2010 with the support of the National Institute of Justice and the
Department of Defense. The study, a continuing telephone survey of a nationally
representative sample of 16,507 adults, defines intimate partner and sexual
violence broadly.
The surveyors elicited information on types of aggression not previously studied
in national surveys, including sexual violence other than rape, psychological
aggression, coercion and control of reproductive and sexual health.
They also gathered information about the physical and mental health of violence
survivors.
Sexual violence affects women disproportionately, the researchers found.
One-third of women said they had been victims of a rape, beating or stalking, or
a combination of assaults.
The researchers defined rape as completed forced penetration, forced penetration
facilitated by drugs or alcohol, or attempted forced penetration.
By that definition, 1 percent of women surveyed reported being raped in the
previous year, a figure that suggests that 1.3 million American women annually
may be victims of rape or attempted rape.
That figure is significantly higher than previous estimates. The Rape, Abuse and
Incest National Network estimated that 272,350 Americans were victims of sexual
violence last year. Only 84,767 assaults defined as forcible rapes were reported
in 2010, according to national statistics from the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
But men also reported being victimized in surprising numbers.
One in seven men have experienced severe violence at the hands of an intimate
partner, the survey found, and one in 71 men — between 1 percent and 2 percent —
have been raped, many when they were younger than 11.
A vast majority of women who said they had been victims of sexual violence, rape
or stalking reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, as did about
one-third of the men.
Women who had experienced such violence were also more likely to report having
asthma, diabetes or irritable bowel syndrome than women who had not. Both men
and women who had been assaulted were more likely to report frequent headaches,
chronic pain, difficulty sleeping, limitations on activity, and poor physical
and mental health.
“We’ve seen this association with chronic health conditions in smaller studies
before,” said Lisa James, director of health for Futures Without Violence, a
national nonprofit group based in San Francisco that advocates for programs to
end violence against women and girls.
“People who grow up with violence adopt coping strategies that can lead to poor
health outcomes,” she said. “We know that women in abusive relationships are at
increased risk for smoking, for example.”
The survey found that youth itself was an important risk factor for sexual
violence and assault. Some 28 percent of male victims of rape reported that they
were first assaulted when they were no older than 10.
Only 12 percent of female rape victims were assaulted when they were 10 or
younger, but almost half of female victims said they had been raped before they
turned 18. About 80 percent of rape victims reported that they had been raped
before age 25.
Rape at a young age was associated with another, later rape; about 35 percent of
women who had been raped as minors were also raped as adults, the survey found.
More than half of female rape victims had been raped by an intimate partner,
according to the study, and 40 percent had been raped by an acquaintance; more
than half of men who had been raped said the assailant was an acquaintance.
The public release of the report was postponed twice, most recently on Nov. 28.
The findings are based on completed interviews lasting about 25 minutes each;
they were conducted in 2010 with 9,086 women and 7,421 men.
September
28, 2011
The New York Times
By ERICA GOODE
WASHINGTON
— Thousands of sexual assaults that occur in the United States every year are
not reflected in the federal government’s yearly crime report because the report
uses an archaic definition of rape that is far narrower than the definitions
used by most police departments.
Many law enforcement officials and advocates for women say that this
underreporting misleads the public about the prevalence of rape and results in
fewer federal, state and local resources being devoted to catching rapists and
helping rape victims.
“The public has the right to know about the prevalence of crime and violent
crime in our communities, and we know that data drives practices, resources,
policies and programs,” said Carol Tracy, executive director of the Women’s Law
Project in Philadelphia, whose office has campaigned to get the F.B.I. to change
its definition of sexual assault. “It’s critical that we strive to have accurate
information about this.”
Ms. Tracy spoke at a meeting in Washington on Friday, organized by the Police
Executive Research Forum, that brought together police chiefs, sex-crime
investigators, federal officials and advocates to discuss the limitations of the
federal definition and the wider issue of local police departments not
adequately investigating rape.
According to the 2010 Uniform Crime Report, released by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation last week, there were 84,767 sexual assaults in the United States
last year, a 5 percent drop from 2009.
The definition of rape used by the F.B.I. — “the carnal knowledge of a female,
forcibly and against her will” was written more than 80 years ago. The yearly
report on violent crime, which uses data provided voluntarily by the nation’s
18,000 law enforcement agencies, is widely cited as an indicator of national
crime trends.
But that definition, critics say, does not take into account sexual-assault
cases that involve anal or oral penetration or penetration with an object, cases
where the victims were drugged or under the influence of alcohol or cases with
male victims. As a result, many sexual assaults are not counted as rapes in the
yearly federal accounting.
“The data that are reported to the public come from this definition, and sadly,
it portrays a very, very distorted picture,” said Susan B. Carbon, director of
the Office on Violence Against Women, part of the Department of Justice. “It’s
the message that we’re sending to victims, and if you don’t fit that very narrow
definition, you weren’t a victim and your rape didn’t count.”
Steve Anderson, chief of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, said that
the F.B.I.’s definition created a double standard for police departments.
“We prosecute by one criteria, but we report by another criteria,” Chief
Anderson said. “The only people who have a true picture of what’s going on are
the people in the sex-crimes unit.”
In Chicago, the police department recorded close to 1,400 sexual assaults in
2010, according to the department’s Web site. But none of these appeared in the
federal crime report because Chicago’s broader definition of rape is not
accepted by the F.B.I.
In New York City, 1,369 rapes were reported by the police department, but only
1,036 — the ones that fit the federal definition — were entered in the federal
figures. And in Elizabeth Township, Pa., the sexual assault of a woman last year
was widely discussed by residents. Yet according to the F.B.I.’s report, no
rapes were reported in Elizabeth in 2010.
In a recent survey conducted by the Police Executive Research Forum, almost 80
percent of the 306 police departments that responded said that the federal
definition of rape used by the Uniform Crime Report was inadequate and should be
changed.
Greg Scarbro, the F.B.I.’s unit chief for the Uniformed Crime Report, said that
the agency agreed that the definition should be revised and that an F.B.I.
subcommittee would take up the issue at a meeting in Baltimore on Oct. 18.
“Our goal will be to leave that meeting with a definition and a mechanism,” Mr.
Scarbro said. But he noted that law enforcement agencies would have to support
any change.
A more comprehensive definition of rape is used by the National Incident-Based
Reporting System, or NIBRS, started by the F.B.I. in 1988 to address
deficiencies in the Uniform Crime Report. But that system covers 28 percent of
the population and has not gained wide traction as a reporting method. If the
F.B.I. does adopt a broader definition, law enforcement agencies — especially
those that use the federal standard in their own counts — may find themselves
explaining a sudden increase in reported rapes.
“You can’t ignore the politics of crime,” said Charles H. Ramsey, commissioner
of the Philadelphia Police Department and the president of the police research
forum, who backs changing the federal definition.
“With the new definition it’s going to dramatically change the numbers,” Mr.
Ramsey said. Police chiefs will then need to explain to the public that the
increase represents an improvement in reporting, rather than a jump in actual
numbers of sexual assaults.
The Chicago Police Department uses a definition of sexual assault laid out by
Illinois statute. Currently, the Uniform Crime Report does not include any rape
statistics from Chicago; a footnote in the report says that the city’s
methodology “does not comply with the Uniform Crime Reporting Program
guidelines.” The Chicago Department plans to start reporting the subset of rapes
that meet the federal definition to the F.B.I., according to Robert Tracy, chief
of crime control strategies.
But Tom Byrne, chief of detectives in Chicago, told the participants at the
meeting on Friday that “Technically we’re going to be taking rapes off the
books.”
The gap between the federal counts and the real numbers reported to the police
may be most apparent in small towns, said Robert W. McNeilly, police chief in
Elizabeth Township, just outside Pittsburgh.
“When we have a sexual assault in a small town, people know about it, people
talk about it,” Chief McNeilly said. “But when the U.C.R. report comes out at
the end of the year and we report zero rapes, I think we lose credibility.”
In some cases, however, police departments contribute to the problem. The
Baltimore Police Department made sweeping changes in the way it dealt with
sexual assault after The Baltimore Sun revealed last year that the department
was labeling rape reports as “unfounded” at a rate five times the national
average.
The problem, said Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, was rooted in the
attitudes and lack of understanding of officers and detectives toward rape and
rape victims.
“We didn’t just suddenly veer off the road and strike a tree — this was a very
long process that led to this problem,” Commissioner Bealefeld said.
After making changes, the department saw an 80 percent reduction in “unfounded”
classifications. But because they were misclassified, Commissioner Bealefeld
said, those reports never reached the F.B.I. or appeared in the Uniform Crime
Report.
“When you unfound those cases, you take it off your U.C.R. numbers, as though
they never occurred,” he said.
August 24,
2011
The New York Times
By CARA BUCKLEY
She seemed
to be the perfect witness. She came forward right away, disclosing detail after
damning detail of a sexual attack that, backed by forensic evidence, seemed
airtight. She stuck to her story. But then her case fell apart after prosecutors
questioned her credibility. The charges against the man she accused, Dominique
Strauss-Kahn, were dropped.
Now, rape victims, women’s rights advocates, detectives and prosecutors are
sifting through the wreckage of the case of the accuser, Nafissatou Diallo,
trying to determine what it will mean for rape cases — already among the most
delicate in the criminal justice system — in the days and months to come.
Advocates for domestic violence victims said women who are raped would almost
certainly be more fearful of stepping forward, knowing that everything in their
past may be exposed; indeed, reporting of rapes usually drops in the aftermath
of high-profile sexual assault cases. This reluctance, experts said, will be
heightened for new immigrants, who are already fearful of authority, often
fleeing a sexually violent past.
“This is going to twist and turn things around,” said Susan Xenarios, head of
the Crime Victims Treatment Center at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center.
Other advocates said the dismissal relayed a chilling message that rich and
powerful men were more likely to get away with sexual assaults. Still others
said the facts of the Strauss-Kahn case were unique unto themselves.
Experts said rape crisis centers usually see a drop in reported cases in the
aftermath of high-profile sexual assault cases, especially those in which the
prosecution failed, like the case against Duke University lacrosse players; the
recent acquittal, on the most serious charges, of two New York police officers
who visited a drunk woman repeatedly in her apartment; and the William Kennedy
Smith case in the 1990s.
More rapes go unreported than not: according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest
National Network, 6 in 10 sexual assaults are not reported, and just 6 percent
of rapists serve jail time.
Michael J. Palladino, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, said
the publicity of this case would unquestionably be a deterrent for some women.
“I’m sure some will hesitate,” he said. “They’re really dragged through the mud,
and they’re victimized a second time.”
That thought was echoed by Richard Emery, a longtime civil rights lawyer, who
said: “The victim is terribly, terribly tortured, at every level. First by the
crime itself. And secondly by the system. There’s no escaping.”
Lynn Hecht Schafran, senior vice president of Legal Momentum, a nonprofit legal
advocacy organization for women and girls, said the Diallo case did have its
uncommon aspects. The Manhattan district attorney’s office, she noted, went to
“unique lengths” to explain its reasoning in dropping the case. The unusual
background, including prosecutors’ contention that Ms. Diallo repeatedly lied
about her past, should not be a deterrent to other women, she said.
“Victims do not have to be pristine to be believed in court,” Ms. Schafran said.
None of the women’s advocates interviewed expressed doubt in Ms. Diallo’s claim
that she was assaulted. And they said her initial account of a gang rape in her
home country — which she later admitted was false, contributing to the undoing
of her case — could be explained by her anguished state and troubled past,
several advocates said.
Dorchen A. Leidholdt, director of the center for battered women’s legal services
at the Sanctuary for Families, a nonprofit group that works with victims of
domestic violence, noted that a vast majority of Guinean immigrant women had
suffered from female genital mutilation, and many were forced into early
marriages.
“Erratic responses are something that we see over and over again,” Ms. Leidholdt
said. “Her behavior was consistent with a trauma victim.”
Women from tightly knit West African communities in New York were especially
focused on the dismissal, saying it lent credence to entrenched beliefs that
governed behaviors and attitudes among Muslim immigrants here: that in the event
of a sexual attack, a woman is still to blame.
“In Africa, if something happens to you, you have to shut your mouth,” said a
35-year-old former saleswoman from West Africa, who left a job as a home
attendant after a charge in her care made sexual advances, and who did not want
her name published for fear of community retribution. “But when you come here
from Africa, you think that there’s protection for women’s rights.”
Still, several women said they were inspired by Ms. Diallo.
A 23-year-old graduate student who is from Guinea and lives in the Bronx said
Ms. Diallo’s allegations emboldened her to lodge a complaint against a professor
who had made sexual advances and offered her a higher grade if she complied. The
woman, who requested anonymity for fear of community stigmatization, was raped
by a family member years ago, she said, yet until recently never told anyone.
She said the dismissal in the Diallo case suggested to her that people in power
would always be protected.
“I feel more vulnerable,” she said.
As for Ms. Diallo, the young graduate student said the former hotel worker had
already been ostracized among New York’s Guineans for being an “unlucky woman.”
“This situation,” the young woman said, “is going to make things worse.”
Americans tend to associate “modern slavery” with illiterate girls in India
or Cambodia. Yet there I was the other day, interviewing a college graduate who
says she spent three years terrorized by pimps in a brothel in Midtown
Manhattan.
Those who think that commercial sex in this country is invariably voluntary —
and especially men who pay for sex — should listen to her story. The men buying
her services all mistakenly assumed that she was working of her own volition,
she says.
Yumi Li (a nickname) grew up in a Korean area of northeastern China. After
university, she became an accountant, but, restless and ambitious, she yearned
to go abroad.
So she accepted an offer from a female jobs agent to be smuggled to New York and
take up a job using her accounting skills and paying $5,000 a month. Yumi’s
relatives had to sign documents pledging their homes as collateral if she did
not pay back the $50,000 smugglers’ fee from her earnings.
Yumi set off for America with a fake South Korean passport. On arrival in New
York, however, Yumi was ordered to work in a brothel.
“When they first mentioned prostitution, I thought I would go crazy,” Yumi told
me. “I was thinking, ‘how can this happen to someone like me who is
college-educated?’ ” Her voice trailed off, and she added: “I wanted to die.”
She says that the four men who ran the smuggling operation — all Chinese or
South Koreans — took her into their office on 36th Street in Midtown Manhattan.
They beat her with their fists (but did not hit her in the face, for that might
damage her commercial value), gang-raped her and videotaped her naked in
humiliating poses. For extra intimidation, they held a gun to her head.
If she continued to resist working as a prostitute, she says they told her, the
video would be sent to her relatives and acquaintances back home. Relatives
would be told that Yumi was a prostitute, and several of them would lose their
homes as well.
Yumi caved. For the next three years, she says, she was one of about 20 Asian
prostitutes working out of the office on 36th Street. Some of them worked
voluntarily, she says, but others were forced and received no share in the
money.
Yumi played her role robotically. On one occasion, Yumi was arrested for
prostitution, and she says the police asked her if she had been trafficked.
“I said no,” she recalled. “I was really afraid that if I hinted that I was a
victim, the gang would send the video to my family.”
Then one day Yumi’s closest friend in the brothel was handcuffed by a customer,
abused and strangled almost to death. Yumi rescued her and took her to the
hospital. She said that in her rage, she then confronted the pimps and
threatened to go public.
At that point, the gang hurriedly moved offices and changed phone numbers. The
pimps never mailed the video or claimed the homes in China; those may have been
bluffs all along. As for Yumi and her friend, they found help with Restore NYC,
a nonprofit that helps human trafficking victims in the city.
I can’t be sure of elements of Yumi’s story, but it mostly rings true to me and
to the social workers who have worked with her. There’s no doubt that while some
women come to the United States voluntarily to seek their fortunes in the sex
trade, many others are coerced — and still others start out forced but
eventually continue voluntarily. And it’s not just foreign women. The worst
cases of forced prostitution, especially of children, often involve home-grown
teenage runaways.
No one has a clear idea of the scale of the problem, and estimates vary hugely.
Some think the problem is getting worse; others believe that Internet services
reduce the role of pimps and lead to commercial sex that is more consensual.
What is clear is that forced prostitution should be a national scandal. Just
this month, authorities indicted 29 people, mostly people of Somali origin from
the Minneapolis area, on charges of running a human trafficking ring that
allegedly sold many girls into prostitution — one at the age of 12.
There are no silver bullets, but the critical step is for the police and
prosecutors to focus more on customers (to reduce demand) and, above all, on
pimps. Prostitutes tend to be arrested because they are easy to catch, while
pimping is a far harder crime to prosecute. That’s one reason thugs become
pimps: It’s hugely profitable and carries less risk than selling drugs or
stealing cars. But that can change as state and federal authorities target
traffickers rather than their victims.
Nearly 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s time to wipe out the
remnants of slavery in this country.
