In helping to prepare for the Underage Victims of Sex Trafficking event on Monday, the event’s main organizer asked the Student Human Rights Planning Committee for possible contacts with law enforcement who would be able to provide that key perspective during the discussion. I went to a fellow 2L who is in fact a full-time Buffalo police officer while attending law school full-time. (Superman?) He said he’d get back to me once he asked around but off the top of his head he suspected no one in his department dealt specifically with underage trafficking. That goes to the feds. That’s international. That’s not what we do.
The topic, it seemed, was not all that pertinent to Buffalo. … …
Rachel Lloyd, a renowned activist in the field of child sex trafficking in the U.S. and a survivor of sex trafficking herself, probed the packed house at the Baldy Center for word associations with the term “teenage prostitute”. “Pimps and Hos”, “small clothes”, “drug addict” were all thrown on the white board. (Lloyd was a particular fan of the euphemistic “small clothes” and vowed to use it in her future speaking engagements.) Then she called for terms connected to “child sex trafficking victim” and the audience enthusiastically offered words like “slavery”, “abroad”, “locked rooms”. The terms, it turns out, refer to the same population. Americans tend to be discriminatory against “Keisha” while pitying “Katya” when odds are both enter the sex trade because of circumstances beyond their control between the ages of 12-14 and both feel they cannot leave.
A similar exercise with the now fully engaged public produced a similar artificial distinction between our associations with “pimp” (cool, positive, pop culture icon) and trafficker (Russian mob, white man of indeterminate age, sketchy, without morals). The distinctions are not entirely the fault of the media (Law and Order?) nor that of the numerous hip-hop artists (It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp!) who glorify that lifestyle. The push to recognize victims of international trafficking as victims culminated a decade ago in a UN Protocol that removed any presumption – or even relevance – of the consent of the victim in qualifying for the protected status. The U.S. ratified the convention. This produced a rather glaring inequity with regard to victims of the domestic sex industry and victims of the international sex trade. A 16-yr-old Ukrainian girl gets picked up in a hotel room and offered asylum while the 16-year-old Bronx girl gets picked up on the corner and put in jail. Part of Lloyd’s advocacy is in getting legislatures to recognize the inherent injustice of charging a man with statutory rape if he has sex with an underage girl regardless of her consent – until, that is, he pays her $40 in which case it’s the girl’s unfortunate lot in life to bear the consequences.
The bulk of the talk was painting a picture of the various forces in American girls’ lives that lead them to enter the sex industry and keep them there without the need for locked doors. Although statistics in this area are hard to come by, according to some estimates, about 70% of child victims of the commercial sex industry have been sexually abused. I don’t remember the statistics on how many come from poverty, broken homes, failed school systems, immigrant and/or racial minority populations, but the factors are overlapping and predictably correlated. The other piece of the puzzle that no one wants to talk about (except for Lloyd, who does so unhesitatingly) is the ‘Johns’ who patronize prostitutes. One study estimated that one in seven men has paid for sex in his lifetime. And odds are if he has done so multiple times, he has probably paid for an underage girl. This resonated with me as I looked around the room to see under seven men in attendance. There was all but an audible collective sigh of relief that the 7th culpable male was apparently not in attendance. I remember doing a little social experiment of my own recently while in Thailand (known for being a sex tourism hotbed). I asked every male tourist I met if they had ever paid for sex in Thailand. The answer was always ‘No, not me personally, but I know men who have.’ It is this statisitcally solid result that leads me to conclude that the perpetrators are never the ones sitting next to you.
My friend and student colleague had volunteered at Lloyd’s non-profit organization GEMS (Girls Educational & Mentoring Services). This was the connection that brought Lloyd to Buffalo. When Lloyd openly acknowledged her former helper, who happens to be a law student of Puerto Rican descent, as having been one of the more effectual counselors in her program, I knew that the audience would presume that she was a survivor herself. (She is not.) My friend shared as much with me afterwards that more than one person had approached her to ask in round-about ways how she came to work at GEMS. A Buffalo area judge even has asked her to speak at an event where Lloyd’s documentary film “Very Young Girls” is to be screened. It was surmised in confidence that if she were white, people would not have made this assumption. I agreed, but with the caveat that if she looked slavic (as I do a bit) they may have assumed she was trafficked from abroad. Just goes to show that with all the education in the world, we are all slaves to a host of subconscious assumptions and biases.
Sure enough, when I ran into the law-student-cum-police-officer in class the next day, I asked out of curiosity if he or anyone he worked with had experience with teenage prostitutes. Oh sure, he replied, we pick them occasionally. They are usually on something and doing it for their next hit. Perhaps this underserved population in Buffalo will be the target for law students interested in applying much needed international human rights norms here at home. Stay tuned.
Jim Milles
lawirth2
SUNY Buffalo Law School
