Published: Sunday, March 4, 2012
Updated: Monday, March 5, 2012 00:03
A police officer casually dressed, but for the shining silver badge hanging from her neck, walked into the nearly empty Lincoln Police Department on a November evening. She will remain unnamed because of her work undercover, first in prostitution, now in narcotics.
One evening about five years ago, she said, a man walked up to her on a sidewalk near downtown. "Hey, what's up?" he asked, striking apparently normal conversation. But a few minutes later, the officer said, the man turned to her and made his intentions chillingly clear.
"You work for me now," she remembered him saying. "You don't go anywhere without me."
Within two minutes, the man found her a customer and a price: $20.
"It's a job," the officer said with a laugh, deflecting any idea of personal bravery by pointing to her fellow officers nearby. "I just rely on everyone else."
Nonetheless, just like that, she'd found herself taking the first footsteps of a human trafficking victim. And it doesn't appear to be all that unusual in Lincoln.
"It's crazy. It's a lot of money and a lot of victims," the officer said, recalling her interviews with women arrested for selling sex. Escort services, online ads, massages for one hour, oral sex for a few bucks. They're all ready and waiting, some on the street, more on the Internet. She had to laugh mirthlessly when asked why — when just a Google search away — these "services" haven't been shut down.
"There's so many of them," she said simply.
* * *
Recruiting, transporting or harboring a person for exploitation by force, coercion or other means is human trafficking — a crime — as defined by the United Nations. It can include sex trafficking, the celebrity of this underground world, but also agriculture, domestic labor and construction trafficking.
Worldwide, most nonprofit organizations estimate this system has spirited 27 million people, if not more, across countries and their borders.
Experts, federal agents and law enforcement officials differ on some matters of response and priority, but all agreed on two things:
First, human trafficking — and its twin, modern-day slavery — is a growing, multibillion, international industry, one that extends into nearly every town on the globe, including the capital city of Nebraska.
"It is one of the fastest growing criminal enterprises in the world," Weysan Dun, a special agent in the FBI's Innocence Lost program branch in Omaha, which focuses on child sexual exploitation, told the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's third annual Human Trafficking Conference late last September. "Clearly it's big business."
Second, most citizens are unaware of the problem or its local reach. Even the people working with potential and past victims of trafficking are unsure of how big of a problem trafficking is overall, much less here.
The term "human trafficking" is about a decade old, and the research to go with it is just beginning to accumulate. On top of that, the market for people doesn't want to be found.
"Who's willing to tell you?" asked the female officer. "How are you going to dig into that unless someone comes forward?"
The only thing certain, officials have said, is that human trafficking is here. According to Free the Slaves, an international non-profit based in Washington, D.C., the U.S. is mainly a receiver of human traffic, with tens of thousands of fresh victims each year about evenly split between labor and sex work, though the line between the two is easily crossed.
"There's no one that's immune to this," said Anna Brewer, head of the FBI's Lost Innocence Task Force in Omaha, which focuses on child sex trafficking. She spoke to a nearly full auditorium in the Nebraska Union after a screening of a documentary on stateside trafficking.
"People want to turn a blind eye to it in the Midwest," Brewer said with frustration, mentioning several local towns as hot spots. "Stop putting your head in the sand."
Labor, Agriculture and Trafficking
Immigrants coming for agricultural work in states like Nebraska are highly vulnerable to traffickers, especially if they're undocumented, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Polaris Project, which focuses on national policy and law applicable to trafficking. The victims can be forced to work in exchange for passage, for example, and the debt can take years for immigrants to pay off, if they ever do.
Tom Casady, Lincoln's public safety director and former chief of police, referred to this arrangement as "indentured servitude." Throw in a common distrust of law enforcement and unfamiliarity with English, and immigrants and refugees — documented and undocumented alike — can become prized targets for traffickers.
The interstate that passes north of Lincoln from San Francisco to Chicago and New York City, I-80, is an ideal conduit for bringing labor trafficking to Lincoln as well, Casady said, but the labor side of the equation appears to be relatively minor.
"The biggie for us here in Lincoln is the sex trafficking we see," he said.
The Problem of Prostitution
The Lincoln neighborhood where the female officer was claimed, located around the area of 13th and E streets, had a huge problem with prostitution about five years ago, Casady said.
"(The neighborhood's inhabitants) were seeing transactions on the street," he said. In fact, he met the prostitution problem firsthand after leaving a meeting with the neighborhood association about it.
"We left that meeting and I was solicited by a woman as I left," Casady said incredulously. She walked over to his car before realizing he was an officer, but Casady said he wasn't quick enough on his feet to react. "The first 25 years of my career, I'd never seen a street-level prostitute, and, out of nowhere: boom."
Prostitution is illegal in Nebraska, and many would say the practice is morally problematic. But it's often called a "victimless crime," an agreement between consenting adults, not coercive exploitation like human trafficking.
"Some policy-makers and advocates have been misled by these unreliable estimates into the belief that human trafficking and sex work are inextricably linked and that all sex work is coerced," the New York-based Sex Workers Project says in its online press kit. "The reality is very different."
Here in Lincoln, the picture isn't as clear as the Project claims.
A Blurred Line
There was little question among law enforcement, mental health and other professionals that prostituted people often made a conscious decision to turn to sex work, pushed by drug addiction, poverty or other socioeconomic factors. These social factors are also common to global human trafficking and blur the line between coercion and choice.
"The vast, vast majority of the women involved were addicted to crack cocaine," Mike Bassett, a former LPD sergeant who's now a police officer in Colorado, said by phone. Bassett was one of the officers in charge of the effort countering the Lincoln neighborhood's prostitution surge several years ago.
Bassett said the split was about 50-50 between women with a pimp and those on their own when he was working in Lincoln. But to him, sex work was exploitation, pure and simple.
Pimps, customers, drug dealers who decide to branch out — all see the person as a commodity, he said. And unlike other commodities, a person can be made available again and again.
Women who sell sex might say they're taking back control of their bodies, but the decision's only worth it because of demand from men, said Norma Ramos, executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, in an interview after a crowded October lecture at Wesleyan University. Poverty also is more likely to affect women, maintaining a powerful and gendered inequality, she added.
"Prostitution is commercial sexual exploitation," Ramos said bluntly. "Sex trafficking is facilitated prostitution."
Further, according to the U.S. Justice Department, the average age of entry into prostitution work is about 13 years for both boys and girls. These children often run — or are thrown — away from dysfunctional homes and lured by traffickers who promise safety and comfort.
Such underage sex work automatically qualifies as human trafficking.
Donna Akers, an associate history professor at UNL, described this world in the Daily Nebraskan in September 2009. That month she wrote about a girl who claimed to be 15 but was actually 12, lived on the streets in Omaha and survived by having sex with men for money.
"If you were a 12-year-old girl on the streets, exactly where would you go for work that paid enough to feed, house and clothe yourself — or for any work at all for that matter?" Akers wrote. "What would your ‘choices' be?"
danholtmeyer@dailynebraskan.co
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