What if you grew up in extreme poverty and somebody told you
that they would take you to a place where you could start a new
life, have a good job, and even send money home to support your
family?
What if you went with this person only to have them strip you of
your identification, force you to live in squalid conditions, and
threaten you and your family with violence and death unless you
agreed to sell your body on the street for sex?
This may sound like an extreme scenario, but millions of people
are probably trafficked across international borders every year and
forced into prostitution, making the trafficking of human beings
the third-largest criminal industry, after drugs and arms.
This modern-day form of slavery occurs all over the world,
including the United States. In fact, an estimated 10,000 women a
year are trafficked into Los Angeles alone for prostitution.
Though barely perceptible to most Americans, the sex trade has
not gone unnoticed.
In a campaign speech in Florida in July, President Bush called
for a crackdown on trafficking, pointing a finger at Cuban leader
Fidel Castro for encouraging sex tourism. The president’s
solution?
“Hasten the day” that Cuba becomes a democracy so
that “every Cuban citizen will live in freedom.” This
raises questions about what problems, if any, Bush thinks cannot be
solved by regime change abroad. Not to mention how many times Bush
can recycle the same speech.
Fortunately, there has been substantive progress made by both
Democrats and Republicans on the issue. There is now a federal law
making trafficking a felony, and many states are following suit by
enacting their own anti-trafficking laws.
There is even a law that gives victims of trafficking refugee
status in the United States if they testify against their
captors.
Although these laws are a major step toward fighting this type
of abuse, there are many issues that still need to be
addressed.
First of all, no one at the federal level has allocated enough
resources to enforce these laws.
Furthermore, forcing victims to risk deportation or testify
against their captors at great risk to themselves and their
families hardly seems fair.
But there are measures being taken at the local level, and in
Los Angeles specifically, that give us more reason to hope. The
Commission on the Status of Women recently created an
anti-trafficking task force, organizing a partnership between the
Los Angeles Police Department and local non-governmental
organizations to hunt down human smugglers and rehabilitate
victims.
But this would have been better news if Los Angeles Mayor James
Hahn had not cut the commission’s budget by 35 percent.
For the time being, then, real hope for trafficking victims
remains with grassroots human rights organizations and, even more
locally, UCLA student groups like Amnesty International and the
Polaris Project, which are working to promote awareness of the
issue on campus.
Mangold is a UCLA alumna.