Legislation imposing stricter penalties on organizers of sex slavery
rings has been approved by the House of Representatives, making its way
to the Senate with the support of an unlikely coalition of the
“religious right” and feminist organizations.
Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., introduced H.R. 3244, called The Trafficking Victims Protections Act of 2000, to combat the growing crime which forces women and girls into prostitution.
Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., forged a coalition of the “religious right” and the “feminist left” to promote a bill combating sexual slavery. |
Under the measure, the secretary of state would be required to include information regarding countries involved in severe forms of trafficking in the annual Country Report. It also establishes an interagency task force to monitor and combat trafficking and includes an allocation of $94.5 million over two years to establish programs assisting trafficking victims.
“H.R. 3244 has attracted such broad support, not only because it is pro-woman, pro-child, pro-human rights, pro-family values and anti-crime, but also because it addresses a problem that cries out for a solution,” Smith said.
“The problem is not abstract,” he continued. “It shatters the lives of real women and children. In Russia, for example, traffickers prey on orphanages. In a typical scenario, a trafficker will pay an orphanage director approximately $12,000 to take a group of children on a ‘field trip’ to the local McDonald’s, for example. Groups of children will then leave the orphanage with the trafficker and never be seen or heard from again.”
Even more common is what has become known as “Lydia’s story” — an amalgamation of several true stories of women and girls who have been trafficked in Eastern Europe in recent years.
“Lydia” is approached on the street by an older, beautifully dressed woman who befriends the girl and her friends. The woman tells the girls they are beautiful enough to become models. After taking Lydia and her friends to dinner and buying them small gifts, the older woman invites the girls to her home for a drink, which is the last thing they remember.
Having been drugged, Lydia awakes in another country, sometimes as far as the U.S. or Japan, where a man tells her she is now his property. She was purchased for several thousand dollars and must work-off the “debt” she owes the man by prostituting herself.
Lydia has no papers, she doesn’t speak the language of the country to which she’s been brought and when she tries to escape, she is beaten and drugged. Soon becoming addicted to the drugs used to control her, Lydia is forced to sexually service 10 to 20 men every day and the proceeds go to her captor.
When police raid the brothel, Lydia is seen as a drug-addicted prostitute who has contracted several venereal diseases. She is arrested and prepared for deportation.
Smith, who related “Lydia’s story” to Congress, believes part of the problem in combating the brutal crime lies in the strategies used by law enforcement agencies. Nations, including the U.S., often punish the victims more severely than they punish the perpetrators. When a sex-for-hire establishment is raided, women — and sometimes children — in the brothel typically are deported if they are not citizens of the country in which the establishment is located.
Such deportations occur without reference to whether the arrested parties’ participation was voluntary or involuntary. Additionally, said Smith, no one considers whether the women will face retribution or other serious harm upon return to their country of origin.
“This not only inflicts further cruelty on the victims, it also leaves nobody to testify against the real criminals and frightens other victims from coming forward,” he said.
“More than 50,000 human beings, mostly women and children, are trafficked into the United States each year,” said
Rep. Sam
Gejdenson, D-Conn., a co-sponsor of the bill. “It is intolerable that at the beginning of the 21st century, people are still being sold into modern-day slavery. This bill seeks to not only address the effects of this problem in the United States but also its root causes — the economic conditions which continue to imperil the lives of vulnerable women and children.”
Rep. Sam Gejdenson, D-Conn., is an original co-sponsor of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. |
Dr. Juliette M. Engel of
MiraMed Institute, an organization dedicated to helping trafficking victims, submitted a letter to Congress in support of Smith’s bill. Engel makes note of efforts in Russia to combat trafficking there, including the sponsorship of legislation similar to H.R. 3244. The measure is currently before the State Duma of the Russian Federation, she wrote.
But the congressmen say the problem is not just overseas. Smith and Gejdenson met with women who had been what Smith describes as “virtual slaves” in the Washington, D.C., area. The women had worked for employees of the
World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund.
According to Smith’s statement to the House, both organizations “have promised to monitor their employee’s exploitation and mistreatment of women who have been brought into the country to work as domestic servants.”
The World Bank’s coordinator for U.S. affairs, John Donaldson, clarified the statement during an exclusive interview with WorldNetDaily. As an international agency, said Donaldson, World Bank recruits employees from around the globe. Many of them are mid-career with spouses and children. When transferred to Washington, D.C., World Bank’s headquarters, new employees often wish to bring family nannies. The nannies, who frequently perform both child care and housekeeping duties, are given special visas known as G-5s.
International World Bank employees are given G-4 visas. Should an employee’s visa status change — most often through termination of employment — the nanny’s G-5 expires.
Donaldson acknowledged such a situation provides an “opportunity for abuse.” Former employees wishing to keep their nannies in the U.S. after their G-5s have expired may abuse the services of the women. If a nanny complains, the employee may threaten to turn the woman in to the authorities for immigration law violations.
“We like to think we hire people that don’t do that,” said Donaldson.
Since 1995, the World Bank has received 20 such complaints. In all, the organization has brought approximately 800 G-5 workers into the U.S. out of 10,000 employees.
The bank changed its rules governing G-5s at the first of the year, though the spokesman said there is a limit to what the bank can do. Standardized contracts are now required between G-4 employees and G-5 nannies. Both parties must attend an orientation explaining their legal requirements and G-5s are given a copy of their legal rights written in their native language. Stricter standards are also in place to ensure appropriate taxes are being paid by both parties.
“We don’t have a legal relationship with [G-5s]. But we do feel we have a moral responsibility toward them,” said Donaldson. “We have as much an interest in identifying abuse as a G-5 does,” he added, saying the bank does not want abusive people working there.
World Bank employees are not shielded by diplomatic immunity and the agency has adopted a “zero tolerance” policy against such abuses. Violations of any of the new rules could warrant actions against an employee ranging from loss of the privilege to have a G-5 worker to loss of employment with World Bank.
“Even one case is one case too many,” Donaldson concluded.
The IMF adopted identical policies for its employees. Spokesman William Murray told WND abuse allegations have been brought against IMF employees by domestic workers but the complaints do not warrant the attention brought by Smith’s legislation.
“[His] remarks are a bit hyperbolic,” Murray said. “We don’t see a systemic problem.”
One of the women who met with Smith was an Ecuadorian who had worked for an IMF employee, he noted. She was “loaned” to another family — a violation of her visa status.
While complaints against the international agencies may be considered a relatively small part of the problem, the organized kidnapping, trafficking and selling of young women around the world has captured the attention of both religious groups and feminists.
But the truce between faith and feminism is an unstable one at best.
The Clinton administration is opposed to Smith’s bill because of a specific provision requiring the cessation of non-humanitarian aid to countries not meeting minimum standards for combating the sex-slave industry. However, the bill allows the president to waive prohibition of aid if he believes providing non-humanitarian assistance is in America’s national interest.
Frank E. Loy, Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, told the National Journal, “The people who are committing the criminal acts are criminals, not governments. We have to aid the governments in fighting the criminals. We’re afraid that sanctions would hurt the people we’re trying to help and interrupt existing collaboration in those countries.”
Tensions between the groups further escalated after Christian leaders Chuck Colson of
Prison Fellowship Ministries and William Bennett of
Empower America wrote a column critical of the Clintons that was published in the Wall Street Journal. In it, Colson and Bennett accuse the first couple of not doing enough to combat sexual slavery.
Ironically, Hillary Clinton chairs the
President’s Interagency
Council on Women, which is leading America’s anti-sex trafficking movement. Smith’s right-left coalition lobbied hard to persuade the council to include both “voluntary” and “involuntary” prostitution in the
United
Nations’ Convention on Transnational Organized Crime. But the administration settled for a single, weaker term proposed by some European nations, according to the National Journal.
Colson and Bennett blasted the White House, prompting a fury from feminists who view the Clinton administration as an overall asset to the women’s movement.
The bill must now be heard in the Senate before it is considered by the president.
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