NEW YORK—Human trafficking—the illegal sale and transport of human beings—is happening right here in New York City.
Concerned citizens, heads of NGO’s, government officials, and scholarly experts came together at the Harvard Club on Nov. 14 to discuss this distressing issue in depth. The panel discussion, sponsored by Media 4 Humanity, sought to raise both awareness and funds.
Professor Zoe Trodd of Harvard, defined slaves as, “those people who are not free to choose to walk away from their situations.” She quoted an alarming statistic, stating that there are over 27 million slaves in the world at present, over 50,000 in the United States, and up to one half of these are children.
So, who are these invisible slaves? According to Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels and well-respected children’s advocate, they are naïve youngsters from broken homes, who come to the city in search of fame or some sort of better life, only to become food for predators well-trained in playing on their weaknesses. The slaves are women, children, and men from developing countries who are promised good jobs and instead find themselves held captive, forced into prostitution or sweatshop labor. They are people who, out of desperation, are willing to trust the well-crafted promises of strangers and as a result become a commodity in the fastest-growing and most profitable illicit industry.
“Go into any high immigrant-concentration neighborhood around New York, like Carona or Elmhurst, and you’d be amazed at the number of houses of forced prostitution you’d find,” said Sliwa. “Many a poor young girl is brought over [to the United States] thinking that she is going to get a job, but instead she immediately finds herself in a boardinghouse that is actually a bordello.”
Rachel Lloyd, founder of the Bronx-based Girls Educational and Mentoring Services and herself a human trafficking survivor, said that the people being trafficked should not be faulted for what they are doing.
“I see victims of human trafficking everyday, but they are seen by the public as teen prostitutes,” said Lloyd.
She added, “We have to make sure that when we talk about human trafficking we include those victims here in the U.S. that maybe don’t fit the stereotype. We need to make sure that young people aren’t criminalized for their victimization.”
Steve Wagner, director of the Trafficking in Persons program at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, points to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act as the federal government’s effort to address the fast-growing international problem. The act provides permanent visas for victims, and sets up an international incentive system that ties U.S. aid amounts to a country’s efforts to combat human trafficking. Though the benefits provided to the victims are generally praised, they have proved hard to apply.
According to Wagner, the problem is that, “victims of human trafficking will not self-report. Our task is to go out and find them. Our goal is abolition.”
Why won’t the victims go to the police? Usually they are in the country illegally, and are even more afraid of U.S. immigration services than they are of their tormentors. Many of them are also completely ignorant of the U.S. legal system, and are convinced by their captors that no one would believe there story, or care, or do anything to protect them from the violence they would face at their captors’ hands as punishment.
“It’s the same situation that made the Italian mafia so strong. The victims would rather deal with the criminals than go to the police and risk being deported,” said Sliwa.
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