Exploited girls in US seek same protection
afforded foreign women

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Mar. 5 — Children forced to become prostitutes in the United States should receive far more protection and support from government and non-governmental agencies than they are receiving today, according to five survivors of domestic sex trafficking in the United States who spoke at an unprecedented Congressional briefing on sexually exploited youth on Mar. 4.

The five survivors, most of whom were sexually assaulted as young children, want enforcement and protection provisions that apply to foreign girls and women brought by traffickers to the United States to apply to girls trafficked within the US as well. The provisions are spelled out in the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA).

The girls charged that the men who exploited them were rarely arrested or prosecuted by law-enforcement officers, even though they were known to police and frequently in contact with them.

“There were plenty of times where my pimp would get pulled over just to get searched for drugs or anything on him and they would pull $15,000 out of this man’s pocket,” recounted a 23-year-old Chicago woman named Jessica, who said she was forced by her father to earn money on the streets beginning at age nine.

“You know what they would do with that money? They would just give it back and say, ‘Oh, this was a good night, huh? Wasn’t it? All right, I’ll see you tomorrow. Keep your hoes on the other side of the bridge.’ Then they would go half way around the block and be, like, ‘Come on, let’s go, you’re going to jail; you know the routine’ or, ‘Alright, let’s go behind this building and you take care of me so that I will let you go to your daddy tonight.’”

The survivors, who were brought to testify by social services agencies that specialize in dealing with child prostitution in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and San Francisco, also complained that police, social workers, and other front-line service-providers lack training in dealing with child prostitutes, as well as the resources to help them escape trafficking and establish new lives.

“We believe that law enforcement is not receiving the training that is necessary to even acknowledge that girls are victims of sexual exploitation,” said Candace, a 21-year-old survivor who bounced around foster homes after being raped at the age of four and now works with the Girls Educational Mentoring Services (GEMS), a specialized agency in New York City. “Girls are arrested and criminalized; they are in a system where they are penalized for something that they were forced into,” she said.

Rachel Lloyd, GEMS executive director, told the briefing — which was co-hosted by the Congressional Caucus on Women’s Issues and the Congressional Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children — said some 300,000 children are victims of sex trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation in the US every year. Their plight, she said, has been largely hidden from public view.

Last summer, GEMS and several other specialized agencies held a meeting of 22 victims from around the country, called Breaking the Silence.

“For a long time, it’s been seen that survivors don’t have a voice,” said Lloyd, and the meeting and th Mar. 4 briefing were designed to provide them with one.

“It didn’t just take putting on a suit and getting on the plane,” she said of the five survivors who spoke at the briefing. “It took years of struggle and surviving and fighting, through danger and life-threatening experiences of feeling that you didn’t belong, that you didn’t fit in, that you were stigmatized by society, and that no one will ever hear your voice.”

In describing how they came to be trafficked, the women stressed the role of media in glamorizing prostitutes and pimps; the friends, family, and caretakers who abused them or lured them into prostitution; and the ways they were blamed and shamed by police, social workers, and other community agencies who should have protected and supported them.

“I can’t remember the first trick but I do remember the pain long after years of being on the streets,” said Paula, who began working at a massage parlor at the age of 12. “I remember having to make quotas before being able to come in the house. I remember lonely nights, wishing I was dead, wishing [that] if only my family would have been different, if only my brother didn’t sexually abuse me, if only my dad’s best friend didn’t abuse me, my life would be different.”

She said she had been bought, sold, and traded by different pimps eight times, often ending up in hospital emergency rooms with broken bones and beatings. “No one told me that I was a traffick[ing] victim or a domestic [abuse] victim. Not only was I not seen as a victim, but I was seen as a criminal,” said Paula, who now works with the Breaking Free agency in St. Paul.

Jennifer, originally from Portland, OR, began hanging out on the street at 13 due to an abusive home situation, and was soon picked up by a pimp who took her to San Francisco where she was given the choice of selling drugs or sex. “From the mental abuse, the beatings, everything, I thought I deserved it, you know, I thought it was my fault, I was a bad person. I couldn’t leave, you know, because there was nowhere to go, nobody cared,” she said, adding that while police would stop her and verbally abuse her, “they’d look at the pimps and just go, like, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ Never once [did] the police officer say, ‘You now, you are better than this ... There are programs that can help you.’” It was only after she was arrested at 16 that she met someone from a special-services agency, Stragies for Advancing Girls Education, for which she currently working.

The survivors stressed that the enforcement of the TVPA against domestic traffickers, as well as additional funding for victim services under the PROTECT Act, could make a major difference for many children.

The TVPA, which was meant to crack down on traffickers who smuggle an estimated 50,000 foreign girls and women into the US each year for sexual and other forms of exploitation, provides penalties of up to 20 years in prison for trafficking with the possibility of life imprisonment where the offense results in death or involves kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse, or attempted murder. It also provides special protections and support for victims who agree to testify against the perpetrators.

The survivors also called for greatly expanded services for victims, stressing that very few cities have specialized agencies to work with child prostitutes. “Basically, there is a location in Chicago; there is a location in New York; there’s one in Minnesota and California, but what about Colorado? What about Arkansas? What about Florida? What about New Mexico?” asked Jessica.

They also called for schools to teach and warn children about sexual abuse and trafficking as early as the sixth grade.

Source: OneWorld.net

By Dan Glaister

Los Angeles, CA, Mar. 8 — Brian A. Smith didn’t know the two women who were shoplifting. They were caught on security cameras stealing sheets at the Los Cerritos mall in Los Angeles and received a two-year sentence.

But Smith was seen standing near the shoplifters as they committed their crime. Despite having no stolen goods, he was convicted of aiding and abetting them.

Under California’s three strikes law, which marked its 10th anniversary on March 7, the 30 year old received a 25-year-to-life sentence.

Smith’s crime was to have had two previous convictions, one 11 years earlier and the second six years before the shoplifting incident. Those convictions, for purse snatching in 1983 and burglary in 1988, earned him the dubious honor of being one of the first criminals to be sentenced under the California law.

By September last year, California, the US state with the highest prison population, had 7,234 prisoners held under the three strikes rule.

Sitting in her Los Angeles home, Smith’s aunt, Dorothy Erskine, a retired schoolteacher, recalls the family’s reaction to his sentence. “We were, like, is this really happening? I’m sure he was in shock when he was sentenced and thought he could get it reduced on appeal.

“But he was advised not to appeal. And we were told that unless you have about $20,000 or $30,000 to pay for the right type of a lawyer, your chances are very, very slim. I did not have $30,000.”

Three or four years after he went to prison, Smith suffered a stroke. “They didn’t notify anyone in the family that anything had happened to him,” said his aunt, “but when I went to visit him and they rolled him down in a wheelchair I knew that something had happened. He says it was like a wake-up call, and he has turned his life to the Lord.”

Erskine keeps a picture of her nephew in her living room. Taken with a Polaroid camera in a prison visiting area, it shows a strong-featured young man in jeans and a blue drill shirt standing next to a Christmas tree. His hands behind his back, he smiles tentatively at the camera.

On Saturday, that picture was one of almost a hundred displayed on mock gravestones at a vigil held at Leipert Park in south Los Angeles for prisoners incarcerated under the three strikes law. Each “gravestone” bears witness to the haphazard sentencing under the legislation.

With the slogan Buried Alive! above each name and the case history, the gravestones read like a roll call of the disappeared: Richard Morgan, 25 years for shoplifting a baseball glove; Herman Clifford Smith, 25 years for trying to cash a forged check for $193; Gilbert Musgrave, 25 years for possession of a stolen video recorder; George Anderson, 25 years for filing a false driving license application; Johnny Quirino, 25 years for stealing razor blades; Eric Simmons, 25 years for possessing three stolen ceiling fans.

Under the three strikes law, 25 years means 25 years: prisoners have no chance of parole. The law was voted for in March 1994, under California’s proposition system, in which the electorate votes directly for specific policy initiatives. But unlike the three strikes laws operating in some other states, California’s version does not restrict the initiative to violent crimes.

Sixty-five per cent of those imprisoned under three strikes in California were convicted of non-violent crimes; 354 of them received 25-years-to-life sentences for petty theft of less than $250.

Campaigners for an amendment to the legislation point out that offenders sentenced under the law for drug possession outnumber those serving sentences for second-degree murder, rape, and assault with a deadly weapon combined.

They also point to the cost of the sentencing policy, with the imprisonment of non-violent offenders under the three strikes law estimated to cost the state nearly $1billion a year. With California’s budget deficit the subject of intense political activity, they argue that this would be one easy way to save money. The private operators of California’s prisons might have a different view of the possible removal of a steady source of long-term income.

Yet there is no indication that the law has decreased crime. Counties in the north of the state which have not used the legislation have seen crime drop by 22 percent more than the southern California counties that have rigidly applied the law. Between 1993 and 2002 New York state, roughly comparable with California, but without a three strikes law, saw its crime rate reduced by 27 percent more than California’s.

The three strikes policy has also disproportionately affected blacks and Hispanics. The African-American incarceration rate is 12 times higher than that for whites, while the rate for Hispanics is 45 percent higher.

Wearing a black T-shirt bearing the slogan “Let the time fit the crime,” Andre Mohamed cries as he talks about his younger brother, Ronnie, 43, nine years into a 37-years-to-life sentence for burglary. “I don’t want nobody to hurt like I hurt,” said the 48 year old, as the park vigil drew to an end.

“This is something I feel every day. Right now the most important thing that could happen to me wouldn’t be winning the lottery, it would be having Sunday dinner with the four Mohamed brothers.”

This November, when the country goes to the polls to elect the next president, voters in California will be given the opportunity to amend the three strikes legislation so that it can be applied only in cases of violent crime. Dorothy Erskine is optimistic. “Ten years from now we will not have this law as it is,” she said. “There will not be a 20th anniversary.”

But her optimism is laced with fatalism. “I’ll be very honest with you. These are the hopes that I have: maybe I’ll get $1 million in the lottery. But I am a believer, and my hope is in the Lord.”

Source: Guardian (UK)