Traffick Jamming

Taking On the Traffickers

August 23, 2008
New York Times Editorial

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/opinion/23sat2.html?ref=opinion

The Federal Trafficking and Victims Protection Act of 2000 was an ambitious attempt to rescue women and children who are smuggled into the country as sex slaves and to step up prosecution of the pimps and traffickers who drive this ghastly business. It has fallen short on both counts.

The law is now up for reauthorization, and Congress must strengthen it and extend protections and services to victims born in the United States.

The legislation provides federal funds to local trafficking task forces made up of prosecutors, law enforcement officials and social service groups. The social service groups are supposed to help identify victims and then provide them with the guidance and support they need to rebuild their lives.

According to federal estimates as many as 17,000 people — most of them women and children — are brought into this country and forced to work in brutal and inhumane conditions, often as prostitutes. The 42 federally funded task forces that have been set up have only been able to identify a small fraction of those victims.

There are many reasons for this. Traffickers are experts at moving people around without being detected. They also train the women they exploit to fear the police. The task forces are often understaffed, with too few investigators to do the job effectively. That needs to change if the country is going to get at this problem.

Prosecutors are also having a hard time making cases against traffickers and pimps. Even victims who are not too terrified to testify, must meet a very difficult standard. They must prove that they did not consent to become prostitutes and did so because of “force, fraud or coercion.”

The House reauthorization would help prosecutions by adding the Mann Act’s somewhat easier-to-prove standards that calls for prosecution of pimps who “persuade, induce, entice” women into prostitution. The Senate should add that language as well.

The social service groups that help prostitutes on the streets have zeroed in on another serious shortcoming: the government’s failure to protect and support sexually exploited women and children born in this country. The House reauthorization requires the Justice Department to conduct a study of domestic victims so that there is at least an understanding of the scale of the problem. That would be a start but is not enough.

Congress was right to take on the problem of sexual trafficking. Now it needs to pass a more effective law; one that will provide real protection and help for all exploited women and children.

Posted by mel at 02:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Both Sweden and the Republic of Korea do.

And - no surprise - both countries have progressive laws on the books that focus on buyers and sellers of women in prostitution, rather than criminalizing the women themselves.

See August 11, 2008 article about Republic of Korea's Minister of Gender Equality signing a statement against violence against women, which includes mention of a comprehensive action plan to prevent prostitution as one aspect of eliminating violence against women. click here

The United States needs a Minister for Gender Equality. We could learn a lot from Sweden and Korea.

Melissa Farley

Posted by mel at 05:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Like pimps on the street and pimps in strip clubs, the US military is using psychological methods to harm, not heal. Many of the practices systematically used by pimps to control women in prostitution - sensory deprivation, dehumanization, threats to family, deliberately induced exhaustion - are the same as those used by military torturers. I've written briefly and plan to write more about these practices. See p 114 of this article click here Also see the kink.com torture pornography thread on this blog.

The US military has used psychologists to assist in the practice of torture, now it's funding psychological research on the use of mind control as a weapon of destruction. This is nothing new - similar research was conducted in the 1950s-1980s. The American Psychological Association has miserably failed to oppose these practices, while other groups such as Physicians for Human Rights and Psychologists for Social Responsibility have taken far more ethical stands against psychologists' participation in torture and mind control.

The National Science Foundation, through Project Minerva (they love being perverse. She's the goddess of wisdom) is offering $50 million to fund psychological counterinsurgency programs that further military goals of the United States. For a chilling analysis of this program, please read Tom Burghardt's Militarizing the Social Sciences click here For those of you who know the ways that pimps use mind control, this will be all-too familiar.

Melissa Farley

Posted by mel at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)