Jeri Williams, once locked in a room by a pimp, shows a photo of her granddaughter.
Sentinel photo by Ed Langlois
Portland has emerged as a hot market in the modern slave trade, or human trafficking as it is now called.
The slaves of today are mostly young girls, coerced from poorer nations or homes. They are forced to work as maids, field hands, prostitutes or exotic dancers. Some pose for pornography.
Slick-talkers have bamboozled them in bars in their home countries, when they applied for jobs or when they signed on naively as mail-order brides. Now, they’re controlled by handlers, who keep all the money.
“We have a deep dark world right here in our back yard,” says Multnomah County Sheriff’s Deputy Keith Bickford, who directs the area’s human trafficking task force.
Statistics are hard to come by in this secretive crime. By federal estimates, 20,000 women and children are sold into the U.S. each year, with numbers increasing. Others claim the count is about 50,000. In Oregon, police say they are encountering three to five people per week who are victims of trafficking. About 80 percent are women and half are children.
The Washington State Office of Crime Victims Advocacy names Portland as one of the main hubs in human trafficking between Seattle and California, places with large trafficking problems because of their ports and location on national borders. The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies has recognized Portland’s booming sex industry — the largest per-capita in the nation — as a reason that female trafficking victims are plentiful here. A Portland State University branch — the Daywalka Foundation — says Portland’s location on two interstate freeways exacerbates the problem.
Human trafficking is lucrative. Drugs can be sold only once. But a child or young woman can clean a house or act as a prostitute over and over, bringing in steady income for traffickers. Human trafficking brings in an estimated $32 billion annually. It’s not unusual for a street prostitute to bring in $200,000 annually. But she sees little if any of the cash.
Girls as young as 12 are sent out to sell themselves in Portland.
“They are not prostitutes. They are victims,” says Bickford. “It’s stuff nightmares are made of.”
Sometimes, the nightmares belong to native Oregonians.
Jeri Williams needed to turn 15 tricks per night to make her quota of $300. Otherwise, her pimp would beat her.
In one summer, Williams figures she was with 1,200 men. In the daytime, her pimp would lock her in a room. Sometimes, he’d allow his friends to rape her. On top of it all, the pimp used her welfare check went to pay his rent.
One night in Southeast Portland in 1989, a trick stabbed her in the neck. She ran into the road, bleeding. The next day, the pimp ordered her to go back on the streets, to “get back in the saddle.”
The attack, and the pimp’s reaction, woke her from the haze of victimhood.
From a middle class Salem family with a strong work ethic and roots in the Klamath Tribe, Williams had begun to explore the rougher side of life in the early 1980s, when the economy was in a spin.
Now 47, Williams works for the City of Portland neighborhoods office after an earlier career as a workers’ organizer.
“People aren’t making a million dollars walking on 82nd Avenue,” she says. “It’s not a glamorous occupation. It’s about getting beat up and forced out on the streets. I’m not talking about someone who’s making a choice. These are not girls who can stop and then mommy and daddy will pay her tuition for college.”
Portland is big enough to shield one of the busiest urban sex trades in the nation. Oregon’s large rural areas are ideal for trafficking in labor, social workers say. Catholic Charities, which runs the region’s primary outreach to trafficking victims, says some farmworkers are held against their will and are forced to work by brokers.
Meanwhile, affluent immigrants sometimes work behind the immigration scene to import modern-day slaves to labor in their homes under harsh conditions.
Victims hesitate to run away. They are constantly watched and perhaps beaten if they try. Often, traffickers threaten to hurt family or friends of victims who seem poised to make an escape. Most victims don’t speak English and don’t have confidence in police, based on experience with corruption in their homelands. They fear being deported if they make trouble.
“This is a terrified population,” says Chris Killmer, who heads outreach to trafficking victims for Catholic Charities.
To help victims, Catholic Charities takes a comprehensive approach.
“You are talking about a population that has absolutely nothing,” Killmer says. “They are coming out of the trafficking situation with only the clothes on their back, if that. They need housing, food, language interpretation, mental health aid, cash aid and help with immigration status.”
It’s dangerous to work for change in human trafficking. Social service groups have had to labor underground because of threats. Catholic Charities keeps the location of its program secret.
Women Religious nationwide have decided to work diligently on thwarting human trafficking. Holy Names Sisters led prayer at a crowded session on the topic at Providence Medical Center this fall, asking that “the perpetrators of human trafficking turn away from their unjust ways” and that “government will address systems that make human trafficking possible.”
Catholic Religious communities are using clout as stockholders to fight child labor in the chocolate and cotton industries and make hotels aware of what they should do to impede the sex trade.
In 2000, a federal law was enacted to protect against human trafficking. Oregon passed its own law in 2007, making it illegal to subject anyone to “involuntary servitude.” Washington established an anti-trafficking law in 2003. All the legislation carries punishment for infractions, but none do much about prevention. An updated federal law has been stalled in the Senate.
“We need to focus on demand,” says St. Joseph Sister Susan Francois, head of a human trafficking abolition project sponsored by a Seattle-based a coalition of Northwest women Religious. The plan is to educate youngsters on the value of their bodies and the problems they would face later if they think it’s OK to buy sex. The campaign also lobbies against objectification of women in advertising.
“Trafficking is real,” says the former Portland City official. “I remember all those milk cartons. Where did those kids go?”
A group called Transitions Global has begun fundraising to establish a shelter in Portland for victims of trafficking. With about 20 beds, it would be the first such shelter in the U.S.
Human trafficking continues to claim victims in Oregon | Catholic Sentinel
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=a4e2cc68-b3d9-4e3a-a4ad-b6284f3a6f07)
No comments:
Post a Comment