The Modern-Day Slavery In Our Own Backyard
- Mar 24, 2008 - comment
The resignation of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has catapulted prostitution into the national spotlight once again. The details behind the call girl now known as “Kristen” are still unraveling, but one thing is certain: her life as a prostitute is anything but typical among women who exchange sex for money.
For tens of thousands of women and girls in the United States in this so-called “business,” reality paints a bleak picture of entrapment colored by merciless beatings and threats of death by their pimps if they fail to “service” a quota of customers on any given night or if they indicate plans to escape. Many of them had entrusted their futures to a friend’s or acquaintance’s promise of employment, only to realize later they had bought into a lie.
Enter modern-day slavery. Each year, an estimated 800,000 people, primarily women and children, are trafficked across national borders, and millions more are trafficked within national borders into slave-like conditions of forced or coerced sex or labor, according to a 2007 report by the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
The U.S. is not immune to this exploitation. It is estimated that at least 20,000 women and children are trafficked into our nation annually.
In 2000, the United States took a tremendous step forward in combating this evil by enacting a law that created an office in the State Department to address human trafficking worldwide. Since the law took effect, the U.S. has been largely successful at pressuring other governments to crack down on trafficking. Efforts to combat this slave trade within the U.S., however, have not been as effective.
The William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2007 (H.R. 3887), an update of the 2000 law, would rectify that by strengthening the government’s hand to choke the trafficking industry at its core—the pimps and suppliers of women and children—while rescuing its victims. Named in honor of the British parliamentarian who fought two centuries ago for the eradication of England’s slave trade, the legislation would increase federal funding to fight domestic sex trafficking and broaden federal prosecution to include trafficking within states, not just interstate trafficking.
It also adds teeth to the 2000 law by removing a requirement that fraud, force, or coercion must be proven to convict traffickers. Only the sex traffickers benefit from this current provision. Few women are willing to testify how they were tricked or forced into sex slavery because it only stokes future brutalization against them by their traffickers. Under the reauthorization, such proof would serve only as a basis for enhanced punishment, not conviction.
The Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Reauthorization Act has drawn the support of both conservatives and liberals, and the House of Representatives approved it in December with near unanimous support, 405-2. Its fate in the Senate, however, is not so certain. The bill is now before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where some detractors among the Senate and Department of Justice threaten to remove these ingredients essential to freeing untold thousands of women and girls from sex servitude.
Just as Wilberforce and others fought against the transatlantic slave trade of their time, we must fight to end the slavery of our time. If you agree that women and girls who are used and abused by pimps and johns deserve a law that would free them from this modern-day slavery, please tell your senators to support the House-passed version of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2007 (H.R. 3887).
The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission works to fight against sex trafficking in America and around the world. If your church would like to purchase materials on this important issue, bulletin inserts are available at our online bookstore.
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