Challenges Arise and Opposition Emerges

No one approves of or defends involuntary servitude and sexual violence, but the crusade against human trafficking has provoked some opposition among thoughtful people and concerned groups for a number of reasons.

First of all, some activists share the moral outrage of the crusaders but feel that the widespread use of the

shocking phrase modern-day slavery is overly dramatic and an historically inaccurate equation of contemporary forms of servitude with the horrific institutionalized barbarism of the transatlantic slave trade that for several centuries relent- lessly brought fresh supplies of captive Africans to the new world as chattel to be bought, sold, and worked to near death (similarly, the very serious terms lynching, genocide, and holocaust can be inappropriately applied to lesser crimes).

Other critics are dismayed that this reform movement has become drawn into a divisive and intractable debate over the “oldest profession”: whether the sale of sexual favors is inherently coercive, invariably embodies female subordina- tion, and must be driven out of business by punishing prof- iteers, pimps, the women themselves, and their customers. Some argued that becoming a sex worker as an adult can be a voluntary and rational choice, and that these employees or independent contractors deserve economic rights, medical care, and basic legal protections rather than further stigma- tization and permanent criminal records that just drive their forbidden exchanges of erotic acts for money deeper under- ground where they become even more dangerous (see Grant, 2013). In 2003, the Bush administration reaffirmed its oppo- sition to pimping, pandering, and maintaining brothels as inherently harmful and dehumanizing and as furnishing an incentive for the international sex trade in females. This stance prohibited any nongovernmental service organizations that receive federal funding to help victims from supporting any toleration of prostitution as a solution to the trafficking problem. As a result, advocacy groups have become embroiled in a debate over prostitution, instead of focusing their ener- gies on devising improved services for individuals who feel trapped (see DeStefano, 2007; Chuang, 2010; Cavalieri, 2011; and Uy, 2011). Some defense attorneys representing indigents estimate that many, but not all, of their clients arrested on prostitution charges are, in fact, trafficked according to the current broadened definition, and many more have survived an extensive amount of brutality and trauma. But they ask why hyperbolic rhetoric that conflates prostitution with slavery usually leads to crackdowns in which the ostensible victims who are supposed to be rescued by raids instead are prosecuted, resulting in their facing jail time, possible deportation, warrants for failure to appear in court, and rap sheets that undermine their efforts to find jobs and housing in order to leave “the life” (Mugulescu, 2014).

Many concerned activists and advocacy groups feel that the media’s preoccupation with lurid stories about sex traf- ficking causes lawmakers and law enforcement agencies to lose sight of the more pervasive forms of people smuggling for the purposes of taking terrible advantage of them as migrant

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laborers as they toil in the fields, factories, and private homes of their exploitive employers (see Chuang, 2010; and Uy, 2011).

Similarly, an emphasis on the criminal justice approach to trafficking as a threat to border security (especially in a post-9/11 world) and as a way of smashing transnational organized syndicates draws substantial amounts of very lim- ited resources toward “crime-fighting” and away from efforts to protect and address the needs of victims (see Lobasz, 2009; Chuang, 2010; and Uy, 2011).

Finally, some skeptics suspect that the true magnitude of the problem has been exaggerated by campaigners who dissemi- nate shocking overestimates in order to arouse an otherwise jaded public (see Grant, 2013). They point out that the actual number of cases, successful prosecutions, and verified victims are tiny fractions of these large, widely circulated figures. For example, between 2000 and early 2007, federal agencies had certified only 1,175 people from 77 countries as victims of human trafficking (U.S. Department of State, 2007). During 2009, the State Department issued only about 600 T visas and Continuing Presence orders to cooperating victims (U.S. Department of State, 2011). Yet a CIA report in 2000 estimated that up to 50,000 women and children are trafficked into the United States each year for the sex trade (see Rieger, 2007). Other estimates came in lower; the yearly figure cited above by President Bush was about one-third the size of the CIA estimate but still way beyond the tiny number of rescued persons. On New York’s Long Island, an area reputed to be a hotbed of trafficking, not one arrest was made during 2005, and only one woman was rescued from pros- titution (Mead, 2006). As for the importation of teenage girls from abroad and from other parts of the United States to the streets of New York City for the purposes of prostitution, a fed- erally funded ethnographic study of underage sex workers found very few that could be considered “trafficked.” The estimates derived from the field interviews were surprising: Nearly half were boys; almost half were recruited into the sex trade by friends; only 1 in 10 were involved with pimps; over 9 in 10 were born in the United States; and more than half were native New Yorkers (see Curtis et al., 2008; and Hinman, 2011).

Several explanations attempt to account for this dis- crepancy between rough estimates and actual statistics. One is that the low numbers indicate that the U.S. government has not allocated sufficient resources to thoroughly train law enforcement officers and to fund extensive investigations into this problem and extract people from the clutches of traffickers and exploiters. A variation on this theme is that there is insufficient cooperation and coordination between the agencies tasked by the TVPA enforcement provisions with bringing this problem under control. But others suspect that the low numbers of substantiated cases reveal that political figures and advocacy groups may have greatly overestimated the prevalence of trafficking into (as well as within) the United States (see Farrell et al., 2010).