Any Given Sunday

Fifteen minutes of sexual intercourse for $30 dollars cash.

That’s the going rate for men seeking to buy commercial sex from one of the major sex trafficking networks that spans throughout the United States.  Women held in these brothels are bought by a different man every 15 minutes.  Four different men per hour, like clockwork.  Maybe upwards of 30 to 40 different men per day, for 12 hours, 7 days a week.

It’s a living hell for a woman involved.  It’s also the pricing structure and the business model that has been designed and perfected over time by sex traffickers who operate certain types of residential brothels and escort “delivery” services that are prevalent in the United States.  They primarily target foreign-born Latina women and children as the “providers,” and the traffickers exist to make money from the Latino, Spanish-speaking men as the customers.

It’s not hard to realize why the traffickers do it.  Profit – plain and simple.  It’s often a rational decision, weighing the potential chance at making huge profits, against the risk of getting caught and punished.  Most sex traffickers instinctually know about the millions of men all over the world who will pay for commercial sex, and the traffickers think to themselves, “If I could only tap into that vast ocean of dollars.”

Polaris Project’s DC office works on the ground providing direct in-house services to victims of trafficking.  We have a team of social workers in DC who offers a range of services to clients, including emergency and crisis response, comprehensive case management, transitional housing, job training, and individual counseling. Currently, the population of clients that we are serving includes victims of sex trafficking and victims of labor trafficking, men and women, adults and children, and victims who are foreign-born immigrants or U.S. citizens.

Over the past two years or so, we’ve increasingly received referrals to provide services to Latina women and children who were victimized in the types of networks described above.  We knew that the networks existed, just by learning about different federal human trafficking prosecutions, such as U.S. v. Cadena and U.S. v. Monsalve in Florida, U.S. v. Carreto in New York, and U.S. v. Aparicio in suburban Maryland.  But we’ve learned that by directly serving the victims, we gain much deeper understanding of how the networks operate, and how sinister they really are.

One particular woman’s story sticks in my brain.  She was recruited in Mexico by a man who promised her a well-paying job as a waitress in the United States.  Thinking it was a benign job that she thought she could do, she agreed to the plan he had laid out for her.  After all, she was desperate, and needed money to pay for medical bills for her elderly mother who was recently taken to the hospital.  Then, upon arriving in the U.S., the recruiter pulled the typical “bait and switch,”, and brought her to a brothel instead of a restaurant.  We’ve heard this common story before, at least this far into it.

But here’s the more nuanced part that I hadn’t realized.  In this particular situation, she was horrified and disgusted to learn that it was a brothel.  Being bought for sex by strange men was not what this woman had signed up for.  She worried about STDs, HIV/AIDS, and her own personal health and hygiene.  She worried about some of the men getting violent and not stopping when she said “stop.” It went against her pride in herself, her own views of human decency, her children’s views of her as a mother, and her religion’s view of a woman’s inherent worth.

The trafficker then reminded her how much he knew she needed money for her family back home, and he offered to let her keep half of any money she made.  At the standard pricing structure of $30 for fifteen minutes of sexual intercourse, she was being told that she could keep $15 per “john.”  She still felt burned by the false promise of being a waitress.  Eventually, the financial pressures on her were too great, and she agreed to this unexpected deal.

She started “work” on a Monday, and two days later, she had, had enough.  Twenty men on the first day and thirty on the second was far beyond what she imagined her body could bear.  The men were grunting, disgusting, sweaty, and rougher than she had thought.  This is not going to become my life, she thought.  By Wednesday morning, she told the man running the brothel that she was done, she wanted to leave, and she wanted to be paid for her two days of enduring what most of us can’t even fathom.

This is when the man revealed another part of the business operation that he hadn’t previously told her.  “I won’t pay you today,” he said.  “In this house, we only pay out on Sundays.  You only get your money if you make it through to on Sunday.  You’ve only made it through two days.”  The woman had, had sex with 50 men in two days.  She thought she had earned $750 dollars, according to her agreement with the man of $15 per john.  But making it through five more days was something this woman knew was beyond what she could take.  She began to truly feel that she was caught in a trap.

As the anti-trafficking movement, what are we to make of this woman’s situation, and this brothel’s modus operandi?  Many traffickers use violent force – this man had not.  At least not yet.  Many traffickers take 100% of the profit – this man offered to share the spoils.  But “you only get paid on Sunday?”  Sexual intercourse with over 150 men, just to be paid for one of them?

Clearly, something sounds very wrong with this picture.  Let’s all then remember the subtle, sinister, and sometimes quiet conniving ways that traffickers exploit vulnerable women for profit.  Ensuring justice and dignity for these women is definitely a cause worth fighting for.