When President Barack Obama made a landmark
speech against modern slavery on Tuesday, many of us in the news media
shrugged. It didn’t fit into the political narrative. It wasn’t
controversial, so — yawn — it wasn’t really news.
But women like Sina Vann noticed. She’s a
friend of mine who was trafficked as a young girl from Vietnam into
Cambodian brothels — where she was regularly punished by being locked
inside coffins with scorpions and biting ants. Now an anti-trafficking
activist with the Somaly Mam Foundation, she sent me an exuberant email
(in fractured English, her third language) with a message for Obama: "We
are survivors here so proud of you, you are the big president in U.S.
and you take action of trafficking. So you give victims from around the
world have hope."
Rachel Lloyd, a survivor of human trafficking
who was nearly choked to death by her pimp, felt the same way. Lloyd now
runs a superb program in New York City, GEMS, to help American girls
escape "the life." She told me that watching the speech was "one of the
most gratifying moments in my 15 years of work on the issue."
If Rep. Todd Akin’s remarks about "legitimate
rape" provoked an uproar, shouldn’t it be incomparably more offensive
that millions of human beings are still trafficked in the 21st century?
Yet the world often scorns the victims and sees them as criminals: the
lepers of the 21st century.
So bravo to the president for giving a major
speech on human trafficking and, crucially, for promising greater
resources to fight pimps and support those who escape the streets. Until
recently, the Obama White House hasn’t shown strong leadership on human
trafficking, but this could be a breakthrough. The test will be whether
Obama continues to press the issue.
I’ve been passionate about human trafficking
ever since I encountered a village in Cambodia 15 year ago where young
girls were locked up, terrified, as their virginity was sold to the
highest bidder. It felt just like 19th-century slavery, except that
these girls would likely be dead of AIDS or something else by their 20s.
Granted, not all prostitution is coerced.
Reasonable people can disagree about what to do in the case of adults
who sell sex voluntarily. Put aside that disagreement, for we can agree
to place priority on the millions of children and adults compelled to
provide sex or other labor.
Prostituted kids are among the most voiceless
of the voiceless around the world, and it will make a difference if the
White House speaks up for them — and fights for them.
On the India/Nepal border, I once chatted with
an Indian policeman who was on the lookout for terrorists and smuggled
DVDs but was uninterested in the streams of Nepali girls passing
through, destined for the brothels in Mumbai and Calcutta. The policeman
explained that the U.S. was pressuring India on movie piracy, so let’s
show India and the world that we’re also concerned with enslaved
children.
If we tell other countries to free their
slaves, we also have to clean up our own act. Contrary to public
opinion, the worst of America’s human trafficking arguably doesn’t
involve women smuggled into the U.S., but homegrown girls.
It’s a disgrace that police officers and
prosecutors routinely go after such teenage girls — often runaways
fleeing abuse or other impossible situations — and treat them as
criminals, while showing less interest in the pimps who exploited them.
Normally, if a man has sex with a young girl,
he risks jail and she gets counseling. But, if she has a pimp who earns
$50 from the transaction, then everything changes: The man may get a
slap on the wrist and the girl may go to jail. Does that make any sense?
So let’s demand that police and prosecutors go
after pimps and johns, while treating the teenagers as victims who need
comprehensive social services.
Republicans have done superb work on this issue
in the past, but now they’re balking at straightforward reauthorization
of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act — landmark legislation
against human trafficking. What are they thinking?
One person on the front lines here in the U.S.
is Alissa, who has a scar on her cheek from where her former pimp
mutilated her with a potato peeler as a warning not to escape. She did
get away and now works with prostituted girls in Washington whose
average age, she says, is 14. Alissa is her street name; she doesn’t
want her real name published because pimps still harass her.
Alissa watched Obama’s speech, and then
replayed it four times. She has always been treated as a "throwaway,"
she said, and now she was dazzled that the president was treating the
issue as a priority.
Some 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, let’s make sure that this isn’t just a speech, but a turning point.
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