Trafficking

WAPPP takes on the sex trade

By Alexandra Marks MPA 1991

"Katrina" was a feisty 13-year-old Filipina, a street kid from a family of squatters in Manila. When recruiters offered her a chance to work in Saipan — an American territory — she jumped at the opportunity. She packed a few belongings and was flown to her new home. But instead of waiting tables, she claims she was forced to dance nude on stage and engage in graphic, lewd acts before crowds of rowdy men. Sometimes a man would get up on stage, strip and aggressively fondle her. "I learned how to use cough medicine so that I don't know what I'm doing," she said. "I was treated like an animal."

"Katrina," not her real name, is one of millions of women and children tricked or forced into the sex trade around the world each year. The shadowy, multibillion dollar business is by all accounts growing rapidly due to the recent Asian financial crisis and the economic dislocation brought about by the fall of Communism. Many international law enforcement officials believe the trafficking of women and children is now more lucrative than the drug trade for Russian organized crime syndicates.

"You make a drug sale and it's done, you get one sale," says Laura Lederer, research director of the Protection Project, a part of the Kennedy School's Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP). "But you take a human body — a person, and you can use that person over and over again, once they're commodified."

The anecdotal evidence of the growth of the sex trade, coupled with the unusual brutality of the Russian Mafia, has more sharply focused government and law enforcement agencies' attention on the problem worldwide.

The United States and the European Union, in particular, have begun exploring new legislation to combat the traffickers. They're also supporting education campaigns to warn vulnerable women of the traffickers' tricks, and social services to help women who've escaped, rebuild their lives.

But policymakers and police around the world face common stumbling blocks. Their resources are minute compared to the enormity of the problem. They're also working with a stunning lack of information. No one knows exactly how many women and children are sexually exploited for commercial reasons each year. The estimates range as high as 30 million. The legal statutes designed to punish the recruiters, traffickers, and pimps are also different in every country — which makes it easier for perpetrators to elude prosecution.

"This combines about as many pernicious social ills as one could imagine," says Jonathan Winer, deputy assistant secretary of state for teh Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL). "It's criminal activity, it's the systemic violation of the human rights, it's fraud, extortion, violent organized crime, and often involves the corruption of public officials."

With funding from the State Department, UNICEF, several women's foundations, and church organizations, the Protection Project is creating a comprehensive database that will be pivotal in developing a solid grasp on the scope of the sexual commercial exploitation worldwide and devising comprehensive international strategies to combat it.

The Protection Project is headed up by Frederick Schauer, the project's principal investigator, who is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment and the Kennedy School's academic dean.

"We're trying to come up with boundary solutions to cross-boundary problems," says Schauer. "We're also trying to analyze the extent to which laws and law enforcement make a difference in dealing with a problem of increasingly catastrophic proportions."

A detailed questionnaire about the types of statutes that exist on prostitution, child prostitution, pimping, pandering, and trafficking have been sent to more than 190 countries. A second questionnaire asks for a rundown of the national laws that deal with pornography and the Internet. A third will go out in the near future that will ask about the scope of the problem in each country and how it's measured, as well as other issues related to the sex trade. "There's a real urgency about the problem, women and children are being hurt," says Lederer. "But we need to be measured and make policy decisions from a good, solid base of information."The database should be completed in the next year; the comparative legal analysis will be done by the year 2000, along with model legislation tailored to different legal systems around the world.

None of it will sit on any library shelf for long. Human rights groups, legal scholars, and public policy officials are planning to use the work to make critical decisions on how to build an international consensus and legal framework for combating sex trafficking and other forms of commercial sexual exploitation.

It's the kind of practical research that WAPPP, the Kennedy School's new policy center, is determined to champion. "We are very interested in looking at policies that impact women's lives, as well as women who are shaping policies," says Ambassador Swanee Hunt, director of WAPPP and head of the U.S. delegation to the 1996 EU conference on trafficking.

"We're fortunate to have one of the top minds at the Kennedy School leading this effort with Fred Schauer as principal investigator," says Hunt. "This work follows the strong interest he has had in this field for many years."

The Protection Project focuses on a subject that is of passionate interest to the American Justice Department and the Department of State, which are both headed by women. At President Clinton's direction, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, chair of the Inter Agency Council on Women, has made combating the trafficking of women and children a top priority.
"The European Union has been focusing in on trafficking for sexual exploitation purposes," says Carla Menares Bury, a foreign affairs officer at INL. "In the United States we're trying to broaden that to include not only trafficking for prostitution and sexual exploitation, but for other forms of labor exploitation — sweat shops and domestic servitude — as well."

As the former Ambassador to Austria, Hunt says the analysis and model legislation that will result from the Protection Project work will give the United States and others practical tools that can reap concrete policy benefits. "It is one thing to go to a country and say, 'You ought to be doing something about this,'" says Hunt. "It's quite another to say, 'We want you to look at this legislation that's being used in such and such a place and see if it can help you.' You find some very good policymakers who are simply overwhelmed. If you can come to them with the legislation and the analysis, you give them the tools to do what they may have wanted to do anyway."

A recent State Department survey found that Asia, Nepal, the Philippines, and Thailand are the primary sources for trafficked women and children. In Eastern and Central Europe, most women are recruited in the Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus.

But the problem extends as far away as Latin America. The recruiters tell the women they are either going to be waitresses or dancers. When they arrive at their new country, often in Western Europe, Asia and increasingly the United States, their passports are usually taken away, they're beaten up and raped and told to pay off the costs of travel. They end up working essentially for free for an extended time.

Because they're frightened, don't speak the language in the country to which they've been brought, and don't know what to do, they tend to be exploited for long periods of time. That's exacerbated by a lack of enforcement. Very few arrests have been made in this area, according to James Finkenauer, director of the International Center at the National Institute of Justice. And there have been even fewer prosecutions.

"I don't know that law enforcement has taken this problem particularly seriously, in part because they're feeling overwhelmed by other international and transnational crime problems," says Finkenauer. "They haven't given sufficient attention to it."

In many European countries, prostitution is either legal or semi-legal and that had further diminished the importance of the issue in some countries. But according to Winer, that is beginning to change. "There's been an increasingly rapid understanding that this is not a victimless crime, and sexual tolerance needs to be distinguished from toleration of trafficking of women," says Winer.

"Katrina" in Saipan turned out to be luckier than most. After a year of being exploited, and having her wages garnished and sometimes withheld, she went to the Philippine Consul General and complained. Because Saipan is a U.S. trust territory, the U.S. Department of Labor filed a civil suit on her behalf and the Department of Justice has filed a criminal case. An American adopted her and she has returned to school as she tries to rebuild her life.

Last March, behind closed doors, she told a committee of U.S. senators her story and urged them to do more to stop the trafficking in women — particularly in the U.S. trust territories.

"Please change the laws to help other girls and workers," she said. "Otherwise human beings will still be treated like animals. Young girls like me will still dance naked in bars instead of going to school. They will still learn to be prostitutes. They will have no childhood."