Getting Screwed (14 page)

How Trafficking Laws Harm Victims

In recent years, Congress has reauthorized the Trafficking Victims Protection Act several times, setting up multiagency task forces to expand the powers of law enforcement in investigating trafficking cases and spending more than $64 million to support those task forces and local police training in the United States.
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At the same time, forty-three states have passed antitrafficking legislation.

Yet research indicates that, in some cases, the proliferation of state and federal laws has ended up hurting the very people these laws were designed to protect. For example, since the original Trafficking Victims Protection Act was passed in 2000, the total number of arrests of under
age prostitutes has actually increased by almost 9 percent.
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Even though juveniles are supposed to be treated as victims, many end up being processed through the criminal justice system. In some cases, police arrest underage prostitutes in an effort to ensure that these kids get the services they need. “Some cops say the only way we can separate them from their pimps or get them off the streets is to arrest them,” Finkelhor says.

Police make a similar case for arresting adult sex workers. Melvin Scott, who heads up the Narcotics and Special Investigations Division of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., says that during a May 2014 raid on a brothel in the city, police found a young Mexican woman who said that she had been forced into prostitution when she was a minor and had been transported to brothels all over the United States for the past nine years. The young woman was not charged with prostitution; instead she was deported to Mexico.

Scott argues that without laws criminalizing prostitution, police would not be able to build cases against traffickers or pimps who exploit sex workers. “A lot of this information comes in after we arrest [prostitutes], and we have people saying, ‘Thank you for bringing me in, let me tell you what's going on,' ” he says.

However, researchers and legal advocates say that criminal laws actually create an atmosphere of mistrust and adversarial discord between police and sex workers, whether they're underage or adults. “Why do you have to use the criminal law with punishment and the deliberate infliction of pain [on victims] in order to catch traffickers?” asks John Lowman, a sociologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia who has studied the sex industry in Canada for decades. “Sex workers are much more likely to come forward if you just talk to them than if you arrest them.”

In fact, exposure to the criminal justice system can end up making the situation worse for trafficked victims. Some of the youngsters arrested for prostitution are sent to juvenile criminal facilities or foster homes where they are molested and traumatized all over again. And in the John Jay College study, some underage prostitutes said they were sexually assaulted by police or forced to provide sexual services for free.
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Underage sex workers are not the only ones harmed by antitrafficking laws. The researchers conducting the 2010 study of 1,515 municipal police departments around the country discovered that immigrants who were being trafficked were more likely to be deported than to be designated as victims deserving of a special visa and support services.
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This finding may explain why some victims who are truly trafficked remain reluctant to seek the help of law enforcement officials.

In eleven jurisdictions in New York State, including Brooklyn and Queens, sex workers who are arrested for prostitution are assumed to be victims of human trafficking and can choose to attend five or six sessions in a diversion program instead of being charged as criminals. However, the prostitution charges are kept on their (publicly available) records for six months before the records are sealed, thus limiting the sex workers' ability to find employment outside the sex trade. As a columnist for the
Nation
noted, New York's Human Trafficking Intervention Courts (as they are officially known) also lump trafficking victims and other sex workers together, thereby inflating trafficking statistics and violating the rights of women to decide on their own if, when, and how they want to leave sex work.
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Many states continue to disproportionately arrest individual sex workers even when state officials agree that the focus should be on traffickers, exploitative pimps, and those who patronize prostitutes. For example, although the state of Illinois recently passed legislation designed to stiffen penalties against traffickers and patrons or clients, prostitution-related felony charges continue to be brought almost exclusively against sex workers. According to an analysis of data from the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, performed by the
Chicago Reporter,
sex workers accounted for 97 percent of the 1,266 prostitution-related felony convictions in that county between 2008 and 2012. The
Chicago Reporter
article concluded that such data exposed an “unbalanced system that came down hard on people in prostitution but rarely held their patrons accountable.”
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The same pattern can be found in other states. In Alaska, for instance, the state's trafficking law (passed in 2012) has been used primarily against sex workers who are not involved in trafficking, according to Terra
Burns, a researcher at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. In 2013, Karen Carpenter, the owner of an Anchorage massage parlor (where she worked with two other women) was charged with sex trafficking in the third degree (inducing an adult into prostitution), managing a place of prostitution, and inducing a person under twenty into prostitution. She was found guilty of sex trafficking in the third degree (a felony) as well as the misdemeanor prostitution offense, according to the
Alaska Native News.
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An independent adult escort in Fairbanks was also charged with sex trafficking in 2013, even though (as the public defender argued), Alaska's laws make it clear that the offense should apply to people who are trafficking others for the purpose of prostitution.
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While that case was later dismissed, the original trafficking charges against this woman can easily be found in public court records, making it difficult for her to rent an apartment or find more legitimate employment. “In Alaska, landlords and employers regularly search CourtView [a website] before renting or hiring, and you can see how even suspicion of sex trafficking could make it difficult to obtain housing and employment,” Burns says.

Furthermore, some police departments are using the increased federal funding they receive for the purpose of fighting trafficking to expand their efforts to arrest adults engaged in consensual prostitution. Sex workers' rights advocates say this is happening in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Rhode Island, Ohio, and Alaska. In a 2012 interview published on Indybay, an online news collective for the San Francisco Bay area, Alexandra Lutnick, a researcher with
RTI
International, an independent nonprofit research organization, said the San Francisco police department had recently used federal trafficking funds to do a sweep of adult streetwalkers on Polk Street. “Money that is supposed to be used to prevent the trafficking of young people is being used to arrest adults,” Lutnick said.
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Alaska's Special Crime Investigations Unit recently set up a sting to find sex workers advertising on Craigslist and used an undercover officer to arrest a twenty-six-year-old white woman who was clearly not being trafficked by anyone. According to the April 2014 police affidavit, the
woman was a drug addict with a seven-year-old son and a boyfriend serving time in jail for selling drugs.

In May 2014, California police raided a number of Asian massage parlors in Alameda County, which includes Oakland and other cities on the East Bay of the San Francisco area, and arrested nineteen people as part of an investigation into human trafficking.
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Yet none of the sex workers swept up in the raids were actual trafficking victims, according to Maxine Doogan, founder of the Erotic Service Provider Legal, Educational and Research Project, a nonprofit group that provides services for San Francisco Bay area sex workers.

Nancy O'Malley, the district attorney for Alameda County, which conducted the raids, disputes that contention. “Some were trafficking victims, some weren't,” she says. “Some would not admit that's what it was.” O'Malley says that none of the fifty sex workers picked up in the raids are being prosecuted or deported. “Anybody who was here without documentation, we worked with them to get them linked into services so they could get T visas,” O'Malley says. “We view them as victims.” (Some illegal immigrants are granted T visas if they can prove they have been trafficked.)

The same month (May 2014), Rhode Island police raided an apartment in a run-down triple-decker in Providence and arrested two men and an undocumented Mexican woman who told police she had come to the United States of her own accord. After six years of cleaning jobs in New York, she decided to work as a prostitute to make more money. Police charged one of the men with trafficking and the other man (the customer) with a misdemeanor prostitution charge. The woman, who had been sending money home to her family, was taken to a shelter. By the next morning, she had vanished.
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THE ZEAL TO CURB
trafficking (even when it isn't happening) may also have been the motivation behind the joint
FBI
–New York Police Department raid that led to Julie Moya's arrest in 2005. As Julie recalls, that frigid January day began like any other work day for her. The tempera
ture outside was in the single digits, and her Honduran maid, Denora, brought her breakfast in bed, bustling in with a cup of Julie's favorite Hawaiian Kona coffee and a bowl of hot cream of rice cereal arranged on a tray. As Julie sipped her coffee and contemplated the day ahead, she thought about how much she had to be thankful for. She owned her four-bedroom house in Freeport, Long Island, overlooking the canal. From her living room windows, she could almost see the marina where her thirty-two-foot Family Cruiser was docked. Zulu and Natalie, her two African grey parrots, jabbered away down the hall, and Pamela, her brightly plumed cockatoo, cooed softly in her cage nearby.

Julie Moya had worked hard for all of this, and at forty-six, she was still working more than twelve hours a day, six days a week. It wasn't easy running a top-of-the-line escort business, which she liked to describe as “the nicest, friendliest brothel in New York City.” Her day often started at 11 a.m., when the phones began ringing at the office downtown, men booking lunch appointments with one or another of the girls. While Lucas, her trusted office manager, answered the phones and made appointments, Julie was always on call if a problem arose — one of the girls calling in sick at the last moment or a client insisting on a woman who wasn't available that day and refusing to take no for an answer. Julie herself was usually on site by 4 or 5 p.m. as the evening rush started, and she often found herself settling squabbles among the women. A new girl might try the dirty hustle when a customer came in and was introduced around, running up to him and kissing him or bending down to show him her cleavage, and that would set off the other girls. Julie's day would continue until well past 1 a.m., when the last clients left and all the girls would troop over to the office on 46th Street to get paid, order in Chinese food, and share war stories over laughter and occasional tears.

While Julie was starting to think about retiring and turning things over to Lucas and her son Jerry, she knew retirement was still a few years off. She had a taste for expensive cars, and her hobby — rescuing abandoned or neglected pets and getting them the care they needed until they could be resettled in loving homes — didn't come cheap. In addition, Julie was sending money to her now-grown daughter, who had been born
with a heart defect and remained in fragile health. Julie's mother and daughter lived together in Cincinnati, in the same house that Julie had run away from at the age of fourteen. When she could, she also helped out her older son, Tommy, who lived in Cincinnati with his wife and four children and worked for an oil company. With all these expenses, Julie knew she hadn't saved nearly as much as she needed to retire — not yet anyway. But she had time. This was the year of the rooster, according to the Chinese zodiac, her year, Julie thought, as she set aside the tray and swung out of bed.

Two hours later, showered and dressed, Julie and her son climbed into her black Cadillac Escalade. Before they headed into Manhattan, they had to drop off Earl Grey at the vet — the old tomcat had feline
AIDS
and needed surgery — and run a few other errands. So it wasn't until around 3 p.m. that they drove into midtown and picked up Julie's longtime assistant, Patrina, at one of the 49th Street brothels. Patrina was a hard-working single mother from Guyana, whom Julie was training to help out in the office. She had worked as a maid at Julie's brothels for years, and even though customers occasionally asked for her — she had fine features and a curvaceous body herself — she always said no.

They parked in their usual spot at the 51st Street garage and started walking down the street to Julie's favorite Thai restaurant for a late lunch. But at the last moment, she felt a craving for shrimp mofongo, so they turned around and walked up Ninth Avenue to El San Juan, a Puerto Rican eatery. Only later would Julie realize how serendipitous her change of heart had been. The police, she later discovered, had been waiting for her at the Thai restaurant, and they would have arrested her right then and there.

When her shrimp mofongo came, Julie ate quickly, anxious to check in and see how things were going at work. But when she called the office on her cell phone, there was no answer. She looked at her watch; Lucas should have picked up. “That's weird,” she said. Julie hadn't installed a landline at the 49th Street apartments for security reasons; she didn't want police tapping the phones. Instead, she punched in the number for Beverly, who lived at the 46th Street brothel and looked after that
location, but there was no answer there either. Julie's heart began racing. This was beyond strange. Beverly was almost always around in the afternoon. She tried the 46th Street number again. No answer. Finally, she called home, waiting for Denora to pick up. But the phone kept ringing and ringing.