"Is Slavery Really Dead? Global Human Trafficking" -- the title of Thomas Jefferson School of Law Professor Susan Tiefenbrun’s lecture left no doubt what she would tell her audience: not only is slavery not dead – but it is flourishing around the world in the form of human trafficking. Professor Tiefenbrun gave her lecture on November 16th in Room 201 the Courtyard Building, to a packed classroom, with people sitting in the aisles between desks.
She painted a horrifying picture of the trafficking in women and children which has turned poorer nations into suppliers of human cargo – a commodity used for sex and forced labor. Almost every nation on earth is either an “origination country, a transit country or a destination country.” Apparently, the U.S. is all three.
Worldwide, Professor Tiefenbrun estimates that human trafficking is a $7-10 billion business, and at least 50-thousand women a year are brought into the U.S. against their will to be used and abused as unpaid prostitutes.It usually starts with “force, coercion or fraud,” said Professor Tiefenbrun and winds up as a “living nightmare for the victims.” The women are terrorized into becoming sex slaves – often “servicing” 50 or 60 men per day while being held captive.
The women are brutalized and intimidated into not e
scaping by the traffickers, who threaten to kill a woman’s family if she does get free.Often the victims are treated like criminals, said San Diego County Sheriff’s Deputy Rick Castro, who was a guest of Professor Tiefenbrun at the presentation. Deputy Castro is the head of the San Diego Regional Human Task Force, and a recognized expert on the subject.
Deputy Castro told the story of a very pretty, young American woman who was kidnapped at gunpoint outside a nightclub and forced to be a sex slave on the threat of her family being killed. He says her captors even drove her to the homes of her mother and brother to show they knew exactly where they lived and what their routines were. They gang raped her to break down her will.
The woman was arrested twice, and charged with prostitution before the law enforcement authorities finally realized that she was not a criminal, but the victim of a very serious crime herself.
Deputy Castro told the group that as of January 1, 2007, California will have a law to combat human trafficking.
As for international efforts, Professor Tiefenbrun pointed to the 2000 Forum for Global Action Against Trafficking in Persons at the U.N. Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime in Palermo, Italy, as bringing the world spotlight on the situation. She also pointed to the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), which was passed under the Clinton Administration and supported by the Bush Administration – “it was the only time Bill Clinton and George W. Bush ever agreed on anything,” Professor Tiefenbrun joked.
TVPA has refocused law enforcement’s priorities into helping the victims and prosecuting the perpetrators. A key part of that strategy is training law enforcement and immigration officers to better recognize victims of human trafficking. TVPA has, in Tiefenbrun’s opinion, led to better cooperation between nations in facing up to the problem and doing something about it.
Despite the grim and horrifying picture Professor Tiefenbrun painted to them, she did leave the audience with a sense that he nations of the world are starting to realize that all of them have an important part to play in stopping human trafficking.
And the answer to Tiefenbrun’s question is, no, slavery is not really dead. Far from it.
-Chris Saunders