Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence, U.S. EstimatesThousands of Victims, But Efforts t

Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence

U.S. Estimates Thousands of Victims, But Efforts to Find Them Fall Short

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/22/AR2007092201401.html

By Jerry Markon

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, September 23, 2007; A01

Outrage was mounting at the 1999 hearing in the Rayburn House Office

Building, where congressmen were learning about human trafficking.

A woman from Nepal testified that September that she had been drugged,

abducted and forced to work at a brothel in Bombay. A Christian activist

recounted tales of women overseas being beaten with electrical cords and

raped. A State Department official said Congress must act -- 50,000

slaves were pouring into the United States every year, she said. Furious

about the "tidal wave" of victims, Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.)

vowed to crack down on so-called modern-day slavery.

The next year, Congress passed a law, triggering a little-noticed

worldwide war on human trafficking that began at the end of the Clinton

administration and is now a top Bush administration priority. As part of

the fight, President Bush has blanketed the nation with 42 Justice

Department task forces and spent more than $150 million -- all to find

and help the estimated hundreds of thousands of victims of forced

prostitution or labor in the United States.

But the government couldn't find them. Not in this country.

The evidence and testimony presented to Congress pointed to a problem

overseas. But in the seven years since the law was passed, human

trafficking has not become a major domestic issue, according to the

government's figures.

The administration has identified 1,362 victims of human trafficking

brought into the United States since 2000, nowhere near the 50,000 a

year the government had estimated. In addition, 148 federal cases have

been brought nationwide, some by the Justice task forces, which are

composed of prosecutors, agents from the FBI and Immigration and Customs

Enforcement, and local law enforcement officials in areas thought to be

hubs of trafficking.

In the Washington region, there have been about 15 federal cases this

decade.

Ronald Weitzer, a criminologist at George Washington University and an

expert on sex trafficking, said that trafficking is a hidden crime whose

victims often fear coming forward. He said that might account for some

of the disparity in the numbers, but only a small amount.

"The discrepancy between the alleged number of victims per year and the

number of cases they've been able to make is so huge that it's got to

raise major questions," Weitzer said. "It suggests that this problem is

being blown way out of proportion."

Government officials define trafficking as holding someone in a

workplace through force, fraud or coercion. Trafficking generally takes

two forms: sex or labor. The victims in most prosecutions in the

Washington area have been people forced into prostitution. The

Department of Health and Human Services "certifies" trafficking victims

in the United States after verifying that they were subjected to forced

sex or labor. Only non-U.S. citizens brought into this country by

traffickers are eligible to be certified, entitling them to receive U.S.

government benefits.

Administration officials acknowledge that they have found fewer victims

than anticipated. Brent Orrell, an HHS deputy assistant secretary, said

that certifications are increasing and that the agency is working hard

to "help identify many more victims." He also said: "We still have a

long way to go.''

But Tony Fratto, deputy White House press secretary, said that the issue

is "not about the numbers. It's really about the crime and how horrific

it is." Fratto also said the domestic response to trafficking "cannot be

ripped out of the context" of the U.S. government's effort to fight it

abroad. "We have an obligation to set an example for the rest of the

world, so if we have this global initiative to stop human trafficking

and slavery, how can we tolerate even a minimal number within our own

borders?"

He said that the president's passion about fighting trafficking is

motivated in part by his Christian faith and his outrage at the crime.

"It's a practice that he obviously finds disgusting, as most rational

people would, and he wants America to be the leader in ending it,"

Fratto said. "He sees it as a moral obligation."

Although there have been several estimates over the years, the number

that helped fuel the congressional response -- 50,000 victims a year --

was an unscientific estimate by a CIA analyst who relied mainly on

clippings from foreign newspapers, according to government sources who

requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the

agency's methods. Former attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales told

Congress last year that a much lower estimate in 2004 -- 14,500 to

17,500 a year -- might also have been overstated.

Yet the government spent $28.5 million in 2006 to fight human

trafficking in the United States, a 13 percent increase over the

previous year. The effort has attracted strong bipartisan support.

Steven Wagner, who helped HHS distribute millions of dollars in grants

to community groups to find and assist victims, said "Those funds were

wasted."

"Many of the organizations that received grants didn't really have to do

anything," said Wagner, former head of HHS's anti-trafficking program.

"They were available to help victims. There weren't any victims."

Still, the raw emotion of the issue internationally and domestically has

spawned dozens of activist organizations that fight trafficking. They

include the Polaris Project, which was founded in 2002 by two college

students, and the Washington-based Break the Chain Campaign, which

started in the mid-1990s focusing on exploited migrant workers before

concentrating on trafficking after 2000.

Activist groups and administration officials strongly defend their

efforts, saying that trafficking is a terrible crime and that even one

case is too many. They said that cultural obstacles and other

impediments prevent victims from coming forward.

Mark P. Lagon, director of the State Department's Office to Monitor and

Combat Trafficking in Persons, said that such problems make the numbers

"naturally murky. . . . There are vigorous U.S. government efforts to

find and help victims in the United States, not because there is some

magic number that we have a gut instinct is out there. Any estimate

we're citing, we've always said, is an estimate."

But Lagon said he is convinced that "thousands upon thousands of people

are subject to gross exploitation" in the United States.

Few question that trafficking is a serious problem in many countries,

and the U.S. government has spent more than half a billion dollars

fighting it around the world since 2000.

Last year, anti-trafficking projects overseas included $3.4 million to

help El Salvador fight child labor and $175,000 for community

development training for women in remote Mekong Delta villages in

Vietnam, according to the State Department. Human trafficking, in the

United States and abroad, is under attack by 10 federal agencies that

report to a Cabinet-level task force chaired by Secretary of State

Condoleezza Rice.

In the United States, activists say that trafficking has received far

more attention than crimes such as domestic violence, of which there are

hundreds of thousands of documented victims every year.

The quest to find and help victims of trafficking has become so urgent

that the Bush administration hired a public relations firm, a highly

unusual approach to fighting crime. Ketchum, a New York-based public

relations firm, has received $9.5 million and has been awarded $2.5

million more.

"We're giving money to Ketchum so they can train people who can train

people who can train people to serve victims," said one Washington area

provider of services for trafficking victims, who receives government

funding and spoke on condition of anonymity. "Trafficking victims are

hidden. They're not really going to be affected by a big, splashy PR

campaign. They're not watching Lifetime television."

Yet the anti-trafficking crusade goes on, partly because of the issue's

uniquely nonpartisan appeal. In the past four years, more than half of

all states have passed anti-trafficking laws, although local

prosecutions have been rare.

"There's huge political momentum, because this is a no-brainer issue,"

said Derek Ellerman, co-founder of the Polaris Project. "No one is going

to stand up and oppose fighting modern-day slavery."

A Matter of Faith

Throughout the 1990s, evangelicals and other Christians grew

increasingly concerned about international human rights, fueled by

religious persecution in Sudan and other countries. They were also

rediscovering a tradition of social reform dating to when Christians

fought the slave trade of an earlier era.

Human trafficking has always been a problem in some cultures but

increased in the early 1990s, experts say.

For conservative Christians, trafficking was "a clear-cut,

uncontroversial, terrible thing going on in the world," said Gary

Haugen, president of International Justice Mission in Arlington, a

Christian human rights group.

Feminist groups and other organizations also seized on trafficking, and

a 1999 meeting at the Capitol, organized by former Nixon White House

aide Charles W. Colson, helped seal a coalition. The session in the

office of then-House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) brought

together the Southern Baptist Convention, conservative William Bennett

and Rabbi David Saperstein, a prominent Reform Jewish activist.

The session focused only on trafficking victims overseas, said Mariam

Bell, national public policy director for Colson's Prison Fellowship

Ministries.

"It was just ghastly stuff," Armey recalled last week, saying that he

immediately agreed to support an anti-trafficking law. "I felt a sense

of urgency that this must be done, and as soon as possible."

A New Law

A law was more likely to be enacted if its advocates could quantify the

issue. During a PowerPoint presentation in April 1999, the CIA provided

an estimate: 45,000 to 50,000 women and children were trafficked into

the United States every year.

The CIA briefing emerged from the Clinton administration's growing

interest in the problem. First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton had been

pushing the issue, former administration officials said.

But information was scarce, so a CIA analyst was told to assess the

problem in the United States and abroad. She combed through intelligence

reports and law enforcement data. Her main source, however, was news

clippings about trafficking cases overseas -- from which she tried to

extrapolate the number of U.S. victims.

The CIA estimate soon appeared in a report by a State Department analyst

that was the U.S. government's first comprehensive assessment of

trafficking. State Department officials raised the alarm about victims

trafficked into the United States when they appeared before Congress in

1999 and 2000, citing the CIA estimate. A Justice Department official

testified that the number might have been 100,000 each year.

The congressional hearings focused mostly on trafficking overseas. At

the House hearing in September 1999, Rep. Earl F. Hilliard (D-Ala.)

changed the subject and zeroed in on Laura J. Lederer, a Harvard

University expert on trafficking.

"How prevalent is the sex trade here in this country?" Hilliard asked.

"We have so very little information on this subject in this country. . .

.. so very few facts," Lederer said.

"Excuse me, but is the sex trade prevalent here?" Hilliard asked.

Nobody knows, Lederer said.

Bipartisan passion melted any uncertainty, and in October 2000, Congress

enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, significantly broadening

the federal definition of trafficking. Prosecutors would no longer have

to rely on statutes that required them to prove a victim had been

subjected to physical violence or restraints, such as chains. Now, a

federal case could be made if a trafficker had psychologically abused a

victim.

The measure toughened penalties against traffickers, provided extensive

services for victims and committed the United States to a leading role

internationally, requiring the State Department to rank countries and

impose sanctions if their anti-trafficking efforts fell short.

The law's fifth sentence says: "Congress finds that . . . approximately

50,000 women and children are trafficked into the United States each year."

Raising Awareness

Just as the law took effect, along came a new president to enforce it.

Bell, with Prison Fellowship Ministries, noted that when Bush addressed

the U.N. General Assembly in 2003, he focused on the war in Iraq, the

war on terrorism and the war on trafficking.

Soon after Bush took office, a network of anti-trafficking nonprofit

agencies arose, spurred in part by an infusion of federal dollars.

HHS officials were determined to raise public awareness and encourage

victims to come forward. For help, they turned to Ketchum in 2003.

Legal experts said they hadn't heard of hiring a public relations firm

to fight a crime problem. Wagner, who took over HHS's anti-trafficking

program in 2003, said that the strategy was "extremely unusual" but that

creative measures were needed.

"The victims of this crime won't come forward. Law enforcement doesn't

handle that very well, when they have to go out and find a crime," he said.

Ketchum, whose Washington lobbying arm is chaired by former U.S. Rep.

Susan Molinari (R-N.Y.), formed coalitions of community groups in two

states and 19 cities, to search for and aid victims. The coalition

effort was overseen by a subcontractor, Washington-based Capital City

Partners, whose executives during the period of oversight have included

the former heads of the Fund for a Conservative Majority and the

Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, in addition to the

former editorial page editor of the conservative Manchester (N.H.) Union

Leader newspaper.

Trying to Get the Number Right

Three years ago, the government downsized its estimate of trafficking

victims, but even those numbers have not been borne out.

The effort to acquire a more precise number had begun at the Library of

Congress and Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania, where graduate students

on a CIA contract stayed up nights, using the Internet to find clippings

from foreign newspapers.

Once again, the agency was using mainly news clips from foreign media to

estimate the numbers of trafficking victims, along with reports from

government agencies and anti-trafficking groups. The students at

Mercyhurst, a school known for its intelligence studies program, were

enlisted to help.

But their work was thought to be inconsistent, said officials at the

Government Accountability Office, which criticized the government's

trafficking numbers in a report last year.

A part-time researcher at the Library of Congress took over the project.

"The numbers were totally unreliable," said David Osborne, head of

research for the library's federal research division. "If it was

reported that 15 women were trafficked from Romania into France, French

media might pick it up and say 32 women and someone else would say 45."

A CIA analyst ran the research through a computer simulation program,

said government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because

they were discussing the CIA's methods. It spat out estimates of

destination countries for trafficking victims worldwide. The new number

of victims trafficked into the United States: 14,500 to 17,500 each year.

The simulation is considered a valid way to measure probability if the

underlying data are reliable. "It seems incredibly unlikely that this

was a robust, sound analysis," said David Banks, a statistics professor

at Duke University.

The CIA's new estimate, which first appeared in a 2004 State Department

report, has been widely quoted, including by a senior Justice Department

official at a media briefing this year. It's also posted on the HHS Web

site.

The Justice Department's human trafficking task force in Washington has

mounted an aggressive effort to find victims.

But at a meeting of the task force this year, then-coordinator Sharon

Marcus-Kurn said that detectives had spent "umpteen hours of overtime"

repeatedly interviewing women found in Korean- and Hispanic-owned

brothels. "It's very difficult to find any underlying trafficking that

is there," Marcus-Kurn told the group.

People trafficked into the United States have traditionally been the

focus of the crackdown. In recent years, there has been increasing

debate about whether the victim estimates should include U.S. citizens.

For example, adult U.S. citizens forced into prostitution are also

trafficking victims under federal law, but some say that such cases

should be left to local police.

D.C.: A Trafficking Hub?

In a classroom at the D.C. police academy in January, President Bush

appears on a screen at a mandatory training session in how to

investigate and identify trafficking. The 55 officers who attended watch

a slide show featuring testimonials from government officials and a clip

from Bush's 2003 speech to the United Nations.

Sally Stoecker, lead researcher for Shared Hope International in

Arlington, which aims to increase awareness of sex trafficking, takes

the microphone. "It's a huge crime, and it's continuing to grow,"

Stoecker says, citing the government's most recent estimate of victims.

The D.C. officers are among thousands of law enforcement officials

nationwide who have been trained in how to spot trafficking. In

Montgomery County, police have investigated numerous brothels since the

force was trained in 2005 and last year. Officers have found a few

trafficking victims, but there have been no prosecutions.

The Justice Department runs law enforcement task forces across the

country. It's a top priority for the department's Civil Rights Division.

Justice officials have said there has been a 600 percent increase in

U.S. cases. But the department said in a report last September: "In

absolute numbers, it is true that the prosecution figures pale in

comparison to the estimated scope of the problem."

The 148 cases filed this decade by the Civil Rights Division and U.S.

attorney's offices might not include what Justice officials call a

limited number of child trafficking prosecutions by the Criminal

Division, Justice officials said Friday. They could not provide a number.

Arlington County Commonwealth's Attorney Richard E. Trodden, who studied

trafficking for the Virginia Crime Commission, said he doesn't know of

any local prosecutions in Northern Virginia.

Nearly seven years after it began, the anti-trafficking campaign rolls on.

"This is important for me personally," Gonzales said in January as he

announced the creation of a Justice Department unit to focus on

trafficking cases. Encouraged by Gonzales, who sent letters to all 50

governors, states continued to pass anti-trafficking laws.

Maryland enacted a law in May that toughens penalties.

Virginia has not taken legislative action; some legislators have said

that a law isn't needed.

HHS is still paying people to find victims. Last fall, the agency

announced $3.4 million in new "street outreach" awards to 22 groups

nationwide.

Nearly $125,000 went to Mosaic Family Services, a nonprofit agency in

Dallas. For the past year, its employees have put out the word to

hospitals, police stations, domestic violence shelters -- any

organization that might come into contact with a victim.

"They're doing about a thousand different things," said Bill Bernstein,

Mosaic's deputy director.

Three victims were found.

CURRENTLY CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES VIOLATES MORE CIVIL RIGHTS ON A

DAILY BASIS THEN ALL OTHER AGENCIES COMBINED INCLUDING THE NSA / CIA

WIRETAPPING PROGRAM....

CPS Does not protect children...

It is sickening how many children are subject to abuse, neglect and even

killed at the hands of Child Protective Services.

every parent should read this .pdf from

connecticut dcf watch...

http://www.connecticutdcfwatch.com/8x11.pdf

http://www.connecticutdcfwatch.com

Number of Cases per 100,000 children in the US

These numbers come from The National Center on

Child Abuse and Neglect in Washington. (NCCAN)

Recent numbers have increased significantly for CPS

Perpetrators of Maltreatment

Physical Abuse CPS 160, Parents 59

Sexual Abuse CPS 112, Parents 13

Neglect CPS 410, Parents 241

Medical Neglect CPS 14 Parents 12

Fatalities CPS 6.4, Parents 1.5

Imagine that, 6.4 children die at the hands of the very agencies that

are supposed to protect them and only 1.5 at the hands of parents per

100,000 children. CPS perpetrates more abuse, neglect, and sexual abuse

and kills more children then parents in the United States. If the

citizens of this country hold CPS to the same standards that they hold

parents too. No judge should ever put another child in the hands of ANY

government agency because CPS nationwide is guilty of more harm and

death than any human being combined. CPS nationwide is guilty of more

human rights violations and deaths of children then the homes from which

they were removed. When are the judges going to wake up and see that

they are sending children to their death and a life of abuse when

children are removed from safe homes based on the mere opinion of a

bunch of social workers.

CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES, HAPPILY DESTROYING THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT

FAMILIES YEARLY NATIONWIDE AND COMING TO YOU'RE HOME SOON...

BE SURE TO FIND OUT WHERE YOUR CANDIDATES STANDS ON THE ISSUE OF

REFORMING OR ABOLISHING CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES ("MAKE YOUR CANDIDATES

TAKE A STAND ON THIS ISSUE.") THEN REMEMBER TO VOTE ACCORDINGLY IF THEY

ARE "FAMILY UNFRIENDLY" IN THE NEXT ELECTION...