Congresswoman, Obama administration appointee shine a sobering light on illegal practice they stress must be combated more efficiently worldwide and locally.
When many people think of human trafficking, they picture anonymous faces in far-off countries, Rep. Loretta Sanchez said Friday.“When you think it’s not here, it can be in the house next door to you, and you don’t even know it’s going on. But we’re going to work to eradicate it,” said Sanchez (D-Garden Grove).
She spoke at a town hall meeting on the issue at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa to a crowd of stakeholders, clergy, students and interested community members. About 40 cases related to human trafficking have been uncovered within Orange County to date, with many more perpetrators believed to be hiding in the shadows.
Held by the university’s Center for Women’s Studies, the meeting gave locals a chance to hear from and speak with Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, an Obama administration appointee who heads up the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
“Human trafficking is modern day slavery. It is the fastest growing illegal commerce in the world, overtaking weapons trafficking and only exceeded by drug trafficking,” said Sandie Morgan, the director of the university’s Center for Women’s Studies and the administrator for the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force.
Currently, among others, the task force is investigating a tip in Costa Mesa that people may be held against their will as servants, and a Huntington Beach tip about human smugglers, Westminster Police Lt. Derek Marsh said.
“It’s real, it’s evil and it’s hurtful,” Westminster Police Chief Andrew Hall said. “It’s as serious a crime as child abuse, elder abuse, rape or domestic violence.”
But cases usually remain unreported, so authorities are unsure how pervasive the issue is in Orange County.
“We’re only now beginning to scratch the surface,” Hall said.
Rather than focusing solely on prosecuting, authorities said the Orange County Task Force also included victim advocacy and service agencies to create a victim-centered restorative process.
“In our world, saving a victim is better than winning a case,” Marsh said.
Sanchez also spoke at the town hall about her efforts to bring awareness to the issue of human trafficking, along with members of the Westminster Police Department, which has been a critical part of the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force to deal with the problem locally.
“We all know that this is a profound personal, local, national, international, global concern — and it’s a crime,” Sanchez said.
Modern-day slaves typically are held in domestic servitude as maids, in labor camps or in sweatshops, or as prostitutes, Sanchez said.
Eighty percent of people trafficked are women and girls; half are children.
“These women and children are used and sold like pieces of furniture, and once they use them for a couple years, they’re sold to the next person,” Sanchez said. “They’re used over and over, and year after year, until — if they’re lucky — they just drop them.”
Usually the slave is left in a homeless camp or somewhere in town, but sometimes their dead body is left by the side of the road, she said.
“It’s outrageous, and we need to change it,” she said.
Her work in Congress has helped ensure that every country that houses a U.S. embassy has to complete an annual report on the trafficking of people there.
A recent reauthorization of that law has put “more teeth” on it, she said.
The underground business yields $18 billion in profit a year, Sanchez said.
“That’s why they do it: They’re trading people for money,” she said.
CdeBaca spoke of the need to make discussing human trafficking “acceptable” in polite society, and for euphemisms to be removed.
“I think we have to realize how damaging it can be when we want to look at euphemisms,” he said, throwing out words like “servant,” “prostitute” or “illegal.”
What if those servants, prostitutes or illegal immigrants were enslaved or abused, he asked.
“It’s been said that when there are problems in the world that affect men, that’s politics or national security — and we will act,” CdeBaca said.
CdeBaca is one of the country’s best-known slavery and alien smuggling prosecutors. He received an award from the U.S. attorney general for his work in saving more than 300 Vietnamese and Chinese enslaved workers from a garment factory in American Samoa.
“The chains may be long, but the chains are there,” CdeBaca said. “The voice of the victim is too often unheard.”
But human trafficking has traditionally been euphemized as a “cultural practice” or a “woman’s issue.”
CdeBaca said one of the biggest advances in his cause has occurred in recent years, when leaders in law enforcement stopped seeing human trafficking as such and instead began to treat it as a crime.
“This morning, I had a coffee. I put on a cotton shirt,” he said. The ambassador was frustrated that he didn’t know whether the coffee came from a plantation in South America that keeps slaves, or whether the cotton was picked by children in Central Asia.
“I don’t think any of us knows what we have done in the last four hours that impacts the slavery world,” he said.
The most damning example can be found in most people’s pockets or purses, he said.
“Women are being stolen from villages; they are being raped en masse; and then they are being put to work in what we euphemistically call ‘artisanal mining,’” he said.
These women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are enslaved and handed shovels or tin cans in order to harvest tantalum, a rare element that is used in mobile phones, he said.
“It is a war crime, and we need to think of it as a war crime,” he said.
He also hopes that the current “sexy” portrayals of prostitution in television and on film will go the way of depicting smoking on screen, making perpetrators into pariahs instead of studs.
Getting Involved
If you suspect someone may be a victim of human trafficking, call (888) 3737-888 or visit www.acf.hhs.gov/trafficking.
http://www.dailypilot.com/articles/2009/10/09/publicsafety/dpt-humantrafficking101009.txt
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