Trafficking and Prostitution

"Gov. David A. Paterson has signed a law that will allow victims of sex trafficking to clear prostitution convictions from their criminal records. Advocates for sex workers said the bill, signed on Friday, is the first of its kind. It allows an individual to have a conviction vacated if she was forced into prostitution, and it also applies to related crimes like loitering.

It’s a hard reality that trafficked people are often arrested, convicted, and released without the justice system realizing what’s really going on,' Sienna Baskin, co-director of the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center, which helped write the bill, said in a statement.

A victim’s record can be a major impediment when applying for jobs, housing or immigration status, Ms. Baskin said. 'With this landmark legislation, New York has created a model that will help end treatment of these survivors as criminals,' she added.

"Um Ali is one of over a million refugees who have sought shelter in Syria since U.S. troops entered Iraq in 2003. She left with her husband and children during a wave of militia violence against Iraqis working--"collaborating"--with Americans in 2006.

Some girls and women among these refugees face being sex trafficked by people within their own families. No statistics or studies are available on this specific problem, but there are plenty of stories of men in a pinch treating female relatives as young as 13 as commodities for sex and marriage markets. Dodging such threats is particularly hard for women when they come from inside the family. Women who run away risk being branded prostitutes and subject to death at the hands of "dishonored" male kin. Marrying young and depending on men all their lives, they struggle to cope without a male provider and protector in Syria."

"The 15-year-old had been “trained” in prostitution in a nightclub in the southern Romanian city of Calarasi. Now, the sex traffickers were getting ready to sell her off to a Turkish brothel for $2,800.

Iana Matei, Romania's leading advocate for the victims of trafficking, had made contact with the girl and offered to wait outside the nightclub in her car, ready to take the teenager away if she could get out on the street for a cigarette break. But the girl had tried to escape before, and had been beaten severely. Ms. Matei was not sure she would have the courage to try again.

Then she appeared, bolting for the car and scrambling into the back seat. For more than 10 years, Ms. Matei, a psychologist by training, has been pulling young women out of the hands of traffickers, sometimes by staging “kidnappings,” sometimes just by offering them a place to stay, heal and rebuild their lives."

 "Across Mexico, young girls dream of escaping their small towns for the big cities. They dream of a good job and a better life in the United States. That was the case of 'Claudia,' a name given to protect her identity. Her dream of a better life quickly evolved into a nightmare.  When she was 15, she met a charming man at a party who would later become her boyfriend.  'This individual would tell me a lot about the United States and would ask me to join him to go work at a clothes factory,' she said. Claudia was eventually smuggled into the United States and taken to New York City.  Once there, she soon realized her boyfriend was part of a prostitution ring. He forced her into prostitution. She says he would beat her up, burn her with lit cigarettes and tell her he would have her parents in Mexico killed if she tried to resist or escape.

Many people associate prostitution with women walking the streets in shady areas and being picked up by johns. But Claudia says the prostitution ring for which she was forced to work had a long list of clients who knew the price they had to pay, who to call and where to go.  It's a well-organized and lucrative underground industry.  Luis CdeBaca monitors human trafficking at the U.S. State Department. He says there are no reliable figures on the scale of the problem, but forced prostitution from Mexico and Central America is a big part of it.  'They know that their victims are not going to go to law enforcement," said CdeBaca. "They know that their victims are afraid. In fact, sometimes one of their threats is to turn people over to the immigration service.'"

"The footprint of the United States occupation of Iraq is embedded in the country’s rocky political sojourn, and the status of women marks the nation’s arrested progress. After the invasion, Washington thought Iraqi women would find American-style freedom irresistible. Today, they’re left holding up half the sky in the midst of a ravaged political and economic landscape.

The Associated Press reports that many Iraqi women feel increasingly alienated from civil society and face traditional pressures to find a husband in a bombed-out marriage market.

Women’s advocates may on the one hand lament the inequality that makes women economically dependent on marriage. But there’s also justifiable frustration that women bear so much of the burden of their unraveling social fabric.

While Iraq’s struggles for gender justice go beyond just the U.S. presence there, will the White House at least redress some of the violence done by the occupation by helping resettle trafficking survivors as refugees? At this point, further abandonment by Washington would prove that despite the glossy public-relations schemes, the “liberation” of Iraqi women was from the start a doomed affair."