In the past several months, I have visited a number of addresses where trafficked girls and young women have reportedly ended up: besides the house in Plainfield, N.J., there is a row house on 51st Avenue in the Corona section of Queens, which has been identified to Mexican federal preventive police by escaped trafficking victims. There is the apartment at Barrington Plaza in the tony Westwood section of Los Angeles, one place that some of the Komisaruk/Mezheritsky ring’s trafficking victims ended up, according to Daniel Saunders, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the ring. And there’s a house on Massachusetts Avenue in Vista, Calif., a San Diego suburb, which was pointed out to me by a San Diego sheriff. These places all have at least one thing in common: they are camouflaged by their normal, middle-class surroundings.
”This is not narco-traffic secrecy,” says Sharon B. Cohn, director of anti-trafficking operations for the International Justice Mission. ”These are not people kidnapped and held for ransom, but women and children sold every single day. If they’re hidden, their keepers don’t make money.”
I.J.M.’s president, Gary Haugen, says: ”It’s the easiest kind of crime in the world to spot. Men look for it all day, every day.”
But border agents and local policemen usually don’t know trafficking when they see it. The operating assumption among American police departments is that women who sell their bodies do so by choice, and undocumented foreign women who sell their bodies are not only prostitutes (that is, voluntary sex workers) but also trespassers on U.S. soil. No Department of Justice attorney or police vice squad officer I spoke with in Los Angeles — one of the country’s busiest thoroughfares for forced sex traffic — considers sex trafficking in the U.S. a serious problem, or a priority. A teenage girl arrested on Sunset Strip for solicitation, or a group of Russian sex workers arrested in a brothel raid in the San Fernando Valley, are automatically heaped onto a pile of workaday vice arrests.
The U.S. now offers 5,000 visas a year to trafficking victims to allow them to apply for residency. And there’s faint hope among sex-trafficking experts that the Bush administration’s recent proposal on Mexican immigration, if enacted, could have some positive effect on sex traffic into the U.S., by sheltering potential witnesses. ”If illegal immigrants who have information about victims have a chance at legal status in this country, they might feel secure enough to come forward,” says John Miller of the State Department. But ambiguities still dominate on the front lines — the borders and the streets of urban America — where sex trafficking will always look a lot like prostitution.
”It’s not a particularly complicated thing,” says Sharon Cohn of International Justice Mission. ”Sex trafficking gets thrown into issues of intimacy and vice, but it’s a major crime. It’s purely profit and pleasure, and greed and lust, and it’s right under homicide.”
IMPRISONMENT AND SUBMISSION
The basement, Andrea said, held as many as 16 children and teenagers of different ethnicities. She remembers that it was underneath a house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood on the West Coast. Throughout much of her captivity, this basement was where she was kept when she wasn’t working. ”There was lots of scrawling on the walls,” she said. ”The other kids drew stick figures, daisies, teddy bears. This Mexican boy would draw a house with sunshine. We each had a mat.”
Andrea paused. ”But nothing happens to you in the basement,” she continued. ”You just had to worry about when the door opened.”
She explained: ”They would call you out of the basement, and you’d get a bath and you’d get a dress, and if your dress was yellow you were probably going to Disneyland.” She said they used color coding to make transactions safer for the traffickers and the clients. ”At Disneyland there would be people doing drop-offs and pickups for kids. It’s a big open area full of kids, and nobody pays attention to nobody. They would kind of quietly say, ‘Go over to that person,’ and you would just slip your hand into theirs and say, ‘I was looking for you, Daddy.’ Then that person would move off with one or two or three of us.”