By MELODY JAMESON
In a Pinellas County beach community, young women were held captive
in a large waterfront house without clothes, money or identification,
forced to work in local commercial sex trade joints strictly for the
pleasure and profit of others.
In Boca Raton, more than 30 Philippine Island natives were confined
in a small house, threatened with deportation, their passports and
transportation tickets confiscated, forced to work at low-paying jobs
theoretically to discharge debts involved in bringing them to the
U.S. for a better life. Accumulating charges for their board ensured
they never were free of the debt.
In South Hillsborough County last weekend, sheriff’s deputies
and U.S. Border Patrol agents intercepted two women
transporting five Mexican nationals illegally in this country
and enroute to farms in Immokalee, ostensibly for jobs
and wages, quite possibly for another outcome.
In the first instance, charges under Florida’s human
trafficking statute have been lodged against three pimps.
In the second, a husband and wife team operating
so-called employment agencies was charged with a
number of offenses from trafficking to fraud, and
convicted. In the new South Hillsborough case,
a drug charge has been filed and a human
trafficking filing is pending as one of the women
carrying $6,000 in cash resides for the
moment in a Hillsborough jail. Border patrol
agents took custody of the currency and the vehicle.
This is 21st century human trafficking. And
Florida is in the thick of it, one of three primary
U.S. human trafficking destinations. Its climate,
beaches and landscape make attractive lures
used to entice victims then isolated and made
increasingly vulnerable by their captors, enslaved
by physical, verbal and other abuses.
It targets populations least able to defend
themselves – children, runaways, attractive
women in need, foreign adults desperate
for a chance in the U.S. It is linked to pornography
and to organized crime. It is largely a cash
business, and lots of it.
It’s a brutal, ugly, inhumane business with a long history.
Prehistoric artifacts indicate that enslavement of and
trade in human beings goes back to the hunter societies.
Americans began taking an interest in “white slavery”
— trafficking in women and girls – a hundred years
ago, passing the country’s first laws prohibiting
the practice. Today, task forces exist to inform
the general public, advocate for tougher laws
and provide for rescued victims.
It still happens, though, and the efforts
of one of them focused on South Hillsborough
in late January, human trafficking awareness
month. Using a workbook developed by the
Florida Regional Community Policing
Institute at St. Petersburg College, members
of the Clearwater Area Taskforce on Human
Trafficking conducted a four-hour seminar
for interested South County citizens.
The taskforce covers Pinellas, Pasco and
Hillsborough Counties.
Dewey Williams, a retired deputy police chief,
and Sandra Lyth, chief executive of the Intercultural
Advocacy Institute in Pinellas, took turns explaining
“the many faces of human trafficking,” how it
functions in Florida, the profits realized by its
perpetrators and the toll taken in human lives.
They were joined by Hilary Sessions, mother of
Tiffany Sessions, the 20 -year-old University
of Florida student who disappeared without a
trace 23 years ago this month in Gainesville.
The economics major’s abduction case remains
open and the search for her continues as authorities
consider she could have become a human trafficking victim.
For profit-making organized crime, human trafficking is
second only to the drug trade, Williams and Lyth
emphasized, producing an annual return to all
perpetrators estimated at $32 billion. It is becoming
the preferred business activity for crime syndicates
around the world, they added. And on a worldwide basis,
some 12 million people are in forced labor and forced
prostitution, they said.
Victims often are “invisible,” perhaps in the U.S. illegally,
kept physically isolated and guarded, the speakers said.
They may be unable to use English, may not know
where they are located and may face many cultural
barriers, unaware that they have rights under American law.
They are controlled by their captors with a wide range
of abuses, including beatings, burnings, rape, starvation,
drug and alcohol dependency as well as threats aimed
at their families, debt bondage and loss of documents
proving their identities, origins and other vital information.
Victims can be found working not only in prostitution,.
exotic dancing and adult clubs, but also as maids in
hotels, in restaurant kitchens, in domestic service,
in factories, on landscape crews and in agricultural
packing plants or fields, plus as day laborers, on
carnival midways and begging on public streets.
They once may have been among the millions of
homeless youngsters roaming America’s
cities or among the many girls and women
who disappear from their home ground every
year for no apparent reason or from an impoverished
country where the only chance for improvement
in circumstances is escape. What they have in
common are needs, dreams, ambitions that can
be exploited, Williams and Lyth noted.
However, victims sometimes can be spotted, they also
said. Human trafficking victims may lack personal items
and possessions, may be without financial records and
personal documents, may not have transportation or knowledge
of the community. They may appear malnourished, have
injuries from beatings or weapons and show signs of
branding or torture. They also may be overseen by a third
party who insists on interpreting or holding legal
and travel documents.
As the three-county taskforce now focuses on South
Hillsborough, plans are taking shape for a number of
awareness programs and fund-raising projects with a
range of objectives, according to June Wallace, a Kings
Point resident and taskforce member.
In the near term, legislation tightening Florida’s human trafficking
law – contained in SB 1880 – is making its way through the
process in Tallahassee at this time, three billboards showing
a man and the message “he wants to rent your daughter” are
planned along interstate roadways during the August GOP
convention and a WRAP – White Ribbons against Porn –
campaign is set for the first week in November.
The local committee being chaired by Wallace also is putting
together a speakers’ bureau to provide programs for local
organizations as the men’s group at the United Methodist
Church in Sun City Center is initiating a mentoring program
for its boy scouts. In addition, an eight-hour training course
for local law enforcement officers is being coordinated
with sheriff’s office schedules.
From a longer perspective, Wallace said the groundwork
for an ARTreach program as an after-school activity for
middle and high school girls now is underway. The
objective is to conduct classes after school hours
and probably under the aegis of one of the local
churches in graphic and dramatic arts designed
to educate girls in avoiding human trafficking pitfalls.
Supplies are being collected.
And one of the longest range goals is development of a
safe retreat for rescued trafficking victims in Central Florida,
she added. Such a sheltered environment exists in Georgia,
using equine therapy in a ranch-like setting to promote the
emotional and psychological healing required for the
trafficking victim’s successful journey back to constructive,
independent living. This goal has been undertaken by a
St. Petersburg-based organization called “Bridging freedom”
dedicated to “restoring stolen childhoods” by finding “Solutions
for Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking Victims.”
Wallace’s South County committee will be helping with fund
raising for the retreat development, beginning with an event
dubbed “Chair-aTea” foreseen on a Sunday in early 2013,
she said. The event is to feature an especially blended tea,
along with assorted delicacies, served to tables of eight, she
added. The event also will include a silent auction of donated
novel and unique handbags “filled with goodies” in a feature
called “Purses for a Purpose.”
Yet another highlight of the event is to be a live auction of
one-of-a-kind chairs created and donated by local artists.
Wallace said she anticipates the chairs will materialize in
the months before the slated tea so they can be displayed
and viewed in prominent South County locations prior to
the bidding opportunity.
Wallace can be reached by email at junewallace@gmail.com.
Copyright 2012 Melody Jameson
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