THE POLARIS PROJECT BLOG

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.
– John F. Kennedy

A year ago this month, Ambassador Lagon and I were steeped in conversations about how Polaris Project could strengthen awareness on modern-day slavery by increasing reports from the frontlines of the anti-trafficking field.  Too often, those working directly in the trenches lack the time to come up for air to share their experiences and thoughts about how this problem is affecting our communities.

Mark and I decided to co-create the North Star blog as a more concerted effort to highlight some of the current and important issues confronting the field.  As Polaris Project nears the one-year anniversary of its blog, I appreciate Mark for his leadership in carrying forward this vision in our launching year.

The North Star has been one of the most frequently visited sections of our website, providing readers with a diverse coverage of topics about modern-day slavery.   Ambassador Lagon was the primary contributor to the blog over the year, highlighting important films, recommending steps towards greater corporate social accountability, and describing situations of trafficking ranging from forced begging to domestic servitude to demand reduction.

He reported on his travels, in Japan and elsewhere,  and illustrated the importance of collaboration and partnership with government, private, and non-government agencies in the anti-trafficking field.  Mark also expressed Polaris Project’s celebration of achievements within the movement, as well as our mourning of the lives lost within the small anti-trafficking community of colleagues and friends.

I have appreciated Mark’s service within Polaris Project over the year and will miss his voice through the North Star blog postings as he pursues his next plans for continued public service.  I look forward to joining others at Polaris Project in building on the North Star’s foundation that Ambassador Lagon is leaving us with and carrying on the values that I most appreciate him for.

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.“  These are the words of Steve Biko, anti-apartheid activist jailed under the so-called Terrorism Act in South Africa in 1977. For 24 days Biko was interrogated and beaten before recieving hospital treatment; he subsequently died later that year in the custody of the South African Police.

Greed and criminal cunning are drivers of a human trafficker’s behavior.  Polaris Project is very focused on limiting the profit and increasing the accountability of the trafficker for that reason.  Traffickers are not just greedy criminals but oppressors too — whether they’re manipulative labor recruiters, brick kiln supervisors, the mamasans of child sex tourism’s prey, the confining employers of a domestic servant, or coercive pimps.

But Biko’s words are apt — not just for illiberal regimes’ treatment of political prisoners and marginalized minorities — but regarding human trafficking.

It is a crucial insight that much of human trafficking is not achieved by direct violence, or use of lock and key. Human trafficking for labor and for sexually exploited adults requires force, fraud, and coercion.  Fraud involves trickery and psychological manipulation.  I met two Romanian women – Anca and Silvia in a Bucharest shelter, who were recruited to the UK to what proved to be forced prostitution. They were lied to about what jobs they would get.  When an unregulated shark labor recruiter in a poverty-stricken South Asian nation offers to place someone seeking to feed their kids, in a job in a Gulf State for a fee equal to 1 or 2 years pay, it becomes a tool of coercion and control — without brute force.  When a cruel pimp woos a child into prostitution promising glitz and protection only to be used by john after john in 15-30 minute intervals for money the pimp extracts, that’s the world of fraud and coercion.  This is how contemporary slavery often relies on other means than chains and shackles, or other elements of physical bondage.

But Biko’s insight is even more subtle.  One way trafficking victims are “kept down” by their oppressor is that they are made to think they have no choices.  Sex trafficking pimps purposefully play on the notion that the females they oppress are spoiled from any feasible reentry into regular or “square” work and society.  The oppressors play up the idea that a women or girl can only be used by fellow human beings as a sex commodity.   The pimps play up the idea that the police will never trust the women or girls or will treat them as criminals.  Our police practice of locking up many more prostituted females than pimps and johns only reinforces that mindgame.

I met bonded laborers outside Bangalore, India.  These slavery survivors spoke of how they couldn’t imagine a life for themselves or their children outside of their lot in life in their disadvantaged cast.  They could not visualize the freedom they enjoy today.

When migrant workers become trafficking victims, coming from countries with corrupt law enforcement and immigration officials, traffickers succeed in convincing victims that if they run away they will only be treated as criminal or deportable by local authorities.

It is no wonder trafficking victims don’t typically identify themselves.

We must inform victims they have rights — rights to be treated as worthy, decent, valuable people.  A prostituted victim needs to believe she won’t be treated like a criminal.  An undocumented victim needs to know he or she will likely get a T visa and benefits rather than reflexive deportation.
When, as a society, we do find and help these victims, it’s essential we focus on undoing the damage of oppressors using the tool of their own minds.

Polaris Project believes we need systemic change to eradicate human trafficking.  But we see a moral imperative to help particular survivors, and inform our policy advocacy, public awareness, and law enforcement best practice-sharing with what we learn from case management for survivors.  In our Washington, D.C. survivor services program, we help law enforcement in late-night rapid response assessments of potential victims to try to carefully address and soothe the minds manipulated by oppressors.  In the anti-slavery movement, we rightly talk of helping survivors reclaim the inherent dignity that traffickers have attempted to rob them of.  That process of re-empowerment requires addressing the thinking and feelings of traumatized victims — minds purposefully and sadistically harmed by exploiters.

On January 13 Peter J. Nickles, the Attorney General for the District of Columbia, announced that his office successfully shut down a number of illegal brothels either based in residential homes or those posing as legitimate massage parlors.

As has often been described as a game of “whack-a-mole,” we know that the parlors often pop back up after temporary closures from law enforcement.  Sometimes, the persistence of the parlors to rebound repeatedly causes apathy among law enforcement because they feel like the parlors won’t ever go away.

The type of political will and enforcement action that Attorney General Nickles demonstrated and described last Wednesday signaled the mark of a new era in how the DC Office of the Attorney General (OAG) intends to handle cases of these types of businesses.

Essentially, he stated that in DC, the days of whack-a-mole are over.  Bravo!

Commendation and praise are in order for this Attorney General’s efforts, as well as the efforts of his dedicated staff, and the members of the DC Human Trafficking Task Force who have worked to combat these exploitative brothels for years.

The locations of the five businesses that permanently closed were highly relevant to Polaris Project’s work against human trafficking.  Many of us on staff have these locations committed to memory because we’ve frequently visited them over the last four years to offer services to the women after repeated police raids.  Both law enforcement and Polaris Project believe that potential victims of trafficking were located in the residential brothel and the three Asian Massage Parlors that were closed.

These cases are a good example of the importance of political will.  Let’s assume that 30 similar brothel locations were raided by law enforcement.  What made these particular five locations unique?  The answer is surely not unique behavior within these individual brothels.  In fact, we know that residential brothel and Asian massage parlor networks operate remarkably consistently all across the United States.  Just like Starbucks or McDonalds, an experience in one feels like a common experience in any of them.

The answer is political will – within the police department and the OAG to put continual pressure on the landlords and owners of the five properties until these characters eventually capitulated.  This could easily happen to any residential brothel or any Asian Massage Parlor (AMP) in DC and any other city around the country, if there were the requisite political will to do this type of follow-up work in the courts against landlords and owners.

This is where the importance of a highly motivated grassroots citizen movement against human trafficking can clearly be seen.  The grassroots advocacy of concerned community members often helps to create and sustain political will that fuels these types of enforcement actions in a mutually reinforcing cycle.

Another important facet of these closings is that they are an example of law enforcement changing strategies.  Instead of only arresting the women providing commercial sex in these locations, this time law enforcement went after the landlords and business owners.  Law enforcement went after the entrenched powerful interests, and won.

For all the other towns, suburbs, mid-sized and major cities nationwide who are still stuck in the quagmire of “whack-a-mole” mode, I hope they take note of what DC is beginning to do in regards to these brothels posing as massage parlors.

A concluding point: this work is not yet finished.  There are more residential brothel and Asian massage parlor locations operating in DC.

Let’s hope these five closings were just the beginning.

I distinctly remember a time, a few years ago in 2007, when craigslist became a point of focus at meetings and events throughout the anti-trafficking movement.  Sitting in conferences or at task force meetings, it became a frequent occurrence for a presenter from law enforcement or the victims services field to talk about how victims of human trafficking were increasingly being advertised in the Erotic Services section of the website.  I also heard this directly from the victims of human trafficking that Polaris Project was serving at the time.  I sat with our clients as they described the step-by-step process of how their traffickers took advantage of the free advertising being offered on craigslist.  Some advocates in the anti-trafficking movement even went as far to say that the Erotic Services section of craigslist was used by traffickers as their go-to “marketing wing.”

One day that year, I spent some time clicking through craigslist to see how bad things had become.  What I did not realize was how many individual cities had their own craigslist site, and how each city’s site had its own Erotic Services section.  At the time, after clicking through each state and then drilling down to the individual city pages, I counted around 350 distinct Erotic Services sections.

In Washington, DC at the time, we were seeing around 500 ads a day in the Erotic Services section.  But how many ads were there on a single day nationwide?

With some dedicated time and focus, it’s not very difficult to pick a given day, click through all individual Erotic Services postings for that day, and tally up the ads for every craigslist city.   In fact, that is exactly what we did one day at Polaris Project in spring 2007.  We randomly selected the date of February 7, 2007. On that day we counted 16,174 individual Erotic Services ads.  That’s quite a significant amount, and many of us at Polaris were shocked to see the total.

In 2009, we picked back up the task and decided to count the nationwide ads every few months or so.  The section has since been renamed “Adult Services” instead of “Erotic Services,” but little has changed in the basic purpose of the postings under the revised name.  A few of our counts from 2009 are below.

July                 12,834
September       13,491
October            9,231
November        13,693
December        12,533

These are some serious numbers, and they stay fairly consistent.  Some people will say that there may be some repeat ads for individuals who post multiple times per day.  Granted – this may account for some duplication. But even if we assumed a conservative average of 10,000 unique Adult Services ads per day nationwide, that’s around 3,650,000 ads in a single year! This then brings us to the topic of  “cost per ad.”  It is notable that since we started doing these counts in 2007, craigslist now charges a fee for each ad in the Adult Services section.  If you click on “POST” in the “Services” category of any craigslist site, it will direct you to a page to “choose the category” of your posting out of a total of twenty.  All of them are free to post except for Therapeutic Services and Adult Services.  For each of these categories, there is a parenthetical disclaimer that says “($10 per ad, $5 to repost. Ads reviewed daily 9am-9pm PT. No edits.)”

So, it’s $10 dollars per ad for the conservatively estimated 3,650,000 Adult Services ads per year nationwide on craigslist.  I hope you do the math.

In conclusion, I think it is important to recognize the sheer volume of these ads.  10,000 ads per day is a lot. Plus, craigslist is not the only website where ads like these are prevalent.  There is also Eros, Backpage, Sip Sap, and others.

Is every single person in every single ad a victim of human trafficking?  I am not making that claim.  However, based on our direct experiences serving trafficking victims and working with partner organizations in the field, we have learned how human traffickers are infiltrating these types of Erotic and Adult Services sections in large volumes.  Many of the women’s faces in these ads are the very faces of human trafficking victims that exist in our midst in the United States.  It is clear that traffickers are still using sites like craigslist as their go-to advertising source.

Today is Human Trafficking Awareness day in the United States.  Through a resolution passed by the US Senate last year, January 11 is dedicated to raising awareness of and opposition to human trafficking.  Indeed, elevating public consciousness of modern day slavery – not just acknowledging its existence, but deepening the understanding of its grim realities – is the one of Polaris Project’s key principles.  It’s important to understand what human trafficking is to prevent the spread of common myths and misconceptions.

Raising awareness is a crucial first step, but alone it is not enough.  We should ask ourselves when we seek to raise awareness – to what end?  Knowledge without action is information wasted.  It isn’t enough to merely be aware. Armed with information, we should act.

Often I hear the question, “Now that I know, what can I do?”  Every action, no matter how big or small, counts.  Below is a list of ways you can get involved:

1) Advocate for legislation. Work to strengthen existing laws and pass new anti-trafficking legislation to punish traffickers, create and provide resources and assistance to all victims, and implement training for law enforcement, prosecutors and judges. To get up-to-date information about current legislation related to human trafficking in all fifty states, visit our policy page.

2) Report a tip at 888-3737-888. The National Human Trafficking Resource Center (NHTRC) is a national, 24/7 hotline available to answer calls from anywhere in the United States.  Callto report a tip; connect with anti-trafficking services in your area; or request training and technical assistance, general information or specific anti-trafficking resources.

3) Shop smart.  Avoid buying products that could’ve been made with cheap labor.  Reference the Department of Labor’s List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor.  It gives consumers a tool to approach companies importing goods into the country and demand that what they sell is free of slavery.  Additionally, the Free2Work website offers consumers information about which major brands are addressing severe labor rights abuses.

Today we will be sending out news, information, and updates about human trafficking and Polaris Project’s work through our social networking sites.  There are numerous ways to get involved online right away.  Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Change.org. You can also visit our Action Center to learn more.

Now is the time to act!  Will you join us?

Grizzled cynics of Washington have a tendency to be dismissive about rhetoric and symbolic gestures.  But they are thoroughly wrong, as social innovators know, as evidenced so poignantly in President Obama’s declaration yesterday about human trafficking.

President Obama declared January “National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month” — as the month is bookended by the anniversaries of the Emancipation Proclamation and the dispatching of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution for ratification.

He stressed two important notions.  One is human dignity.  In the first line of the proclamation, Obama cites one of the most salient phrases in all of American political history and culture, captured in the Declaration of Independence – the unalienable right to freedom and the notion that every person has equal value. Every person.  Human trafficking, the veritable slavery of today, is based on categories of people being dismissed (far worse yet than rhetoric being dismissed).  Children, women, prostituted people, minorities, disadvantaged castes, and migrants are among groups vulnerable due to being devalued by their exploiters, by their consumers, by untrained authorities, and by society.  They inherently have dignity which cannot be alienated from them.  Indeed, undocumented “aliens” have unalienable rights, and can be trafficking victims under the law.

Which brings me to the second important implicit notion in this Presidential Proclamation: not just all people are of equal value, but all victims of human trafficking are of equal value.  Not only does the President stress that both males and females, both adults and children, and both victims of sexual exploitation and of labor exploitation can be subject to human trafficking.  He makes clear that victims include both those who cross borders and those who are victimized within their own country.  From the Dalit man who is enslaved in a rice mill in India to the teenage girl pimped in the United States, human trafficking doesn’t require being “trafficked” across a border.  The “traffic” is the trading in humans — selling and buying, leasing and renting a fellow human being.

The Proclamation really resonated with Polaris Project, given principles we are committed to advancing.

These notions — equal human dignity and multiple types of victims (including both migrants and U.S. citizens) — represent a strong continuity with the last Administration.

And yet, this is not just from a President, but from a special President.  That this Proclamation on slavery should come from the first President of African heritage is especially powerful.  A number of us in the anti-trafficking movement have been hoping for a moment like this for President Obama

Two days before Christmas, I joined the weekly support group at our Washington, DC Client Services Office.  As survivors of domestic servitude and sex trafficking, a number of the participants are beneficiaries of transitional housing that Polaris Project provides.  The transitional housing apartments and the Client Services’ office are truly homey and help clients get through the long, hard process of reclaiming normalcy.

The participants today discussed what 2009 was like for them — the problems and the blessings of the year.

One survivor said her life had moved from a situation of “can’t can’t can’t” to “can can can.”  She elaborated that she never used to have the ability to make choices, and now does.  She’s free again.  She’s moved from a situation of having her passport withheld to a situation of making decisions for herself — stressing that she savors the choices of buying things for herself, with the aid of Polaris Project, rather than things being given to her.

Another survivor said something that stunned me.  She said her experience of being an immigrant victim led her to contemplate that how in the United States we tend to treat animals like people, and sometimes treat people like animals — indeed worse than animals are treated.

In addition to thanking Polaris Project staff for caring, four to five survivors mentioned faith as a sustaining force.

It became obvious at this meeting that those who advocate, assist, donate, and volunteer not only help the survivors. The survivors teach others the valuable lesson that all humans should be treated as individuals of equal value.  An important sentiment for all of us to remember not only during the holiday season, but throughout the year.

The holiday gift season is upon us again.  The propensity of businesses to launch it earlier and earlier is heightened this year by nerves about tough economic times.  In the holiday season, it is said that to give is better than to receive.  An important way to give to the neediest is to we insist corporate actors do not wittingly or unwittingly fuel the abuses of human trafficking, forced labor, and the worst forms of child labor – today’s forms of slavery.

Regarding such supply chains, there is much discussion of “corporate social responsibility” (CSR).   Yet CSR too often consists of window-dressing, codes of conduct without teeth, and a smattering of distracting philanthropy doing little to wipe out gross exploitation.

What we need is corporation social accountability (CSA).  CSA requires laws and regulations with real and enforced criminal and civil penalties for violations, not just voluntary compliance with codes of conduct.  If a company is involved in what amounts to slavery, it should be held accountability for slavery.  Justice requires punishment commensurate with the crime.

And that accountability goes beyond chains of suppliers, subsidiaries and subcontractors.  For instance, shark-like labor recruiters get migrant workers into purposefully inescapable debt and use a bait-and-switch about the nature of their work.  To its credit Manpower Inc., as the world’s largest non-government labor agency and employer seeks to clean that sector up with real regulation and accountability.

Moreover, businesses can be enablers of not just labor trafficking but sex trafficking – through the hotel staff and taxi drivers who guide sex tourists to prostituted minors, and the print and on-line advertisers hawking exploitative commercial sex.  In supply chains, labor recruiting, and commercial sexual exploitation, corporate actors have many opportunities to fight human trafficking and slavery by active vigilance against being enablers.

Consumers also have a huge opportunity, with the power to insist on CSA – perhaps even more than regulators and law enforcement do – they can hit uncaring actors where it hurts: profits.

Without consumer demand, there would be no supply of goods and services on the backs of the slaves of today.  Demand fueling human trafficking is perhaps most obvious in the form of ravenous johns who prey upon minors and consume coerced, beaten, and manipulated adults in prostitution.  But equally important demand for cheap labor and goods can drive labor exploitation to its nadir—human trafficking and slavery.  If it weren’t for demand for cheap labor and goods, there would be no confined housemaids in the Gulf, no sugar cane plantation workers to produce biofuels in Brazil, no shrimp-processing slaves in Thailand to fill the shelves of American supermarket freezers.

Consumers can help reward the decent and shun the uncaring in the business world, as the engine of CSA.

So this holiday season there is a list that can really help guide your shopping.  It is The Department of Labor’s List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor, released four years after Congress mandated it.  It identifies sectors of products – steel from Brazil, shrimp from Thailand, cotton from Uzbekistan – rather than specific companies.  But it gives consumers – and citizen shareholders prepared to pressure the companies they co-own – to demand that companies importing goods into the U.S. make certain what they sell is free of contemporary forms of slavery.  Additionally, the Free2Work website offers consumers information about which major brands are addressing severe labor rights abuses. Free2Work is the result of a partnership between the Not For Sale Campaign (NFSC) and the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF).

It is a heck of a holiday season gift list.  Like Santa and his list, we should check it once and check it twice.

While we wait for supply chains to be verified and cleaned up, we have one recommendation to consumers for products to reward for fighting slavery.  The Emancipation Network helps human trafficking victims from Africa to South Asia learn to run businesses of their own for their long-term rehabilitation.  Their “Made by Survivors” products are just that.  They are products – from jewelry to clothes to notebooks – crafted by survivors of labor and sexual slavery.  This would be fine place to start in your holiday gift buying.

This Sunday we got great news that was long in coming!  The Senate passed an omnibus spending bill, approved days earlier by the House of Representatives, increasing by 25 percent the Department of Justice’s funding to assist survivors of human trafficking!  The report accompanying the bill specifies that, for the first time, this funding will be available to serve all trafficking survivors in the United States, whether they are foreign nationals or U.S. citizens.  We fought hard for these provisions together with our partners in the Alliance to End Slavery and Trafficking (ATEST).  Now, the spending bill simply awaits President Obama’s signature. Click here for more details and information on whom to thank in Congress!

This week I authored a blog “Private Sector Leverages Comparative Advantage to Fight Slavery” for the Hudson Institute. Please see below for an excerpt:

While the public sector has much to do to help victims and punish their traffickers, so much is to be done by other actors. Not just nonprofits, but funders and investors outside of government are essential to the ultimate goal in fighting slavery today: abolition rather than mere mitigation and regulation.

To read the full text please visit the Hudson’s Institute blog.