Close
About
FAQ
Home
Collections
Login
USC Login
Register
0
Selected
Invert selection
Deselect all
Deselect all
Click here to refresh results
Click here to refresh results
USC
/
Digital Library
/
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
/
A spatial analysis of human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles
(USC Thesis Other)
A spatial analysis of human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles
PDF
Download
Share
Open document
Flip pages
Contact Us
Contact Us
Copy asset link
Request this asset
Transcript (if available)
Content
A SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING
IN GREATER LOS ANGELES
by
Jacqueline W. Holzer
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(GEOGRAPHY)
December 2010
Copyright 2010 Jacqueline W. Holzer
Dedication
Joey and Mimi
ii
Acknowledgements
I am forever grateful to all of the individuals who shared their wisdom and stories with
me and through ample support and dedication helped me bring this project to fruition. In
particular I would like to thank my advisor, Michael Dear, whose belief in my work and
generous support was instrumental in the creation of this study. I am also grateful to my
committee members, Rod McKenzie and especially Eliz Sansarian, whose sincere and
cordial companionship encouraged me in times of doubt. Thanks also to my fellow
graduate students at USC, especially Jen Mapes, Peter Marolt, and Andrew Burridge, for
their friendship.
This work would not have happened without a number of individuals in the field who
offered their experience, opinion, and friendship. Special thanks go to Sandie Morgan,
Susan Munson, Kimberly Agbonkpolor, Namju Cho, Charles Song, Lisa Helene
Donovan, Grant Takahashi, Elena Shih, and Jennifer Musto. In addition I would like to
express my sincere thanks and admiration to Wendy Barnes, Shyima Hall and Maria
Suarez, whose brave and honest personal accounts have greatly enriched my
understanding of the issue and strengthened my belief in the good in humankind.
Finally, I owe deepest thanks to my family and friends in Austria and California for their
unconditional encouragement and support. A special thank you to Elvira for lovingly
caring for our daughter while I was hiding behind the computer. Above all, I am most
iii
indebted to my dear Joey whose endless love, inspiration and faith in me were my
constant companion; and to my little Mimi, whose sole presence in my life turned the last
stretches of a strenuous project into a joyful ride.
iv
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Figures viii
Abbreviations x
Abstract xii
Chapter 1: Old wine in new bottles: combatting human trafficking 1
Research objectives and plan 5
Significance 12
Chapter 2: A cruel awakening – forced labor in the 21
st
century 14
Globalization, international migration and human trafficking 16
Conceptual considerations 16
Economic integration 18
Political collaboration 21
International migration 23
Immigration Regulation in the United States and California 27
Human rights infringements in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands 33
Framing human trafficking 40
Chapter 3: Towards a model of localizing the fight against human trafficking 43
Creating a model of localizing efforts to eradicate human trafficking 48
Data sources and methodologies 52
Reflections on activist research 56
Chapter 4: Unpacking the concept of human trafficking 61
Human trafficking: a formal discourse 65
International Legislation 65
US Legislation 69
Forms of human trafficking 82
Human trafficking: a new form of slavery? 86
Informal discourse: in search of the survivors of human trafficking 96
A working definition of human trafficking 110
v
Chapter 5: The Dimensions of human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles 112
Breaking the news on human trafficking 112
Assessing the scope of human trafficking 115
International 115
United States 122
California 123
Greater Los Angeles 125
Immigrant communities and cultural ties 130
The American dream, low income workers and forced labor 140
The impact of the border and transnational crime on human trafficking 158
Concluding Remarks 163
Chapter 6: The emergence of an anti-human trafficking sector 168
Starting from scratch 168
The Stakeholders 169
Federal money for local coalitions 169
Human rights based and victim-advocacy organizations 176
Faith-based organizations 179
Federal, state and local governmental organizations 182
Independent warriors and victims' voices 187
Negotiating common ground 189
Rolling out the campaigns 200
Getting the message out – awareness, outreach and training 201
Identifying potential victims 210
Meeting the needs of survivors 214
Social and health services 214
Legal services and prosecution 220
Policy and research 224
Falling short 224
Chapter 7: The dynamics of place in anti-human trafficking work 230
Thinking grassroots 230
Anatomy of a successful anti-human trafficking mission 231
Ingredients for success 242
Roots in the local community 242
Establishing productive relationships 247
Practicing a true victim-centered approach 251
Tackling the problem from several angles 255
Implications – upgrading the toolkit for combatting human trafficking 257
Chapter 8: Reflections on human trafficking 263
Summary 263
Looking ahead 273
vi
Bibliography 277
Appendices 300
Appendix A: Questions submitted to USC's IRB 300
Appendix B: List of organizations and agencies approached 303
vii
List of Figures
Figure 3.1: A spatial theory of human trafficking 45
Figure 3.2: Localizing anti-human trafficking actions 50
Figure 4.1: United Nations model explaining human trafficking 67
Figure 4.2: Increase of state legislation on human trafficking 81
Figure 4.3: Forms of human trafficking based on the TIP Report 2009 85
Figure 4.4: Key differences between old and new slavery 88
Figure 4.5: Slavery market brochure from 1784 91
Figure 4.6: Distribution of print media articles on human trafficking 98
Figure 4.7: Google news results for human trafficking between 1990 and 2009 100
Figure 4.8: Number of publications for human trafficking in given time period 100
Figure 5.1: Map of Greater Los Angeles 114
Figure 5.2: Human trafficking estimates by various international organizations 116
Figure 5.3: Global human trafficking law enforcement data 119
Figure 5.4: Annual global revenue of human trafficking 121
Figure 5.5: Regional distribution of forced labor cases in California 124
Figure 5.6: Forms of forced labor in California 125
Figure 5.7: Forms of human trafficking according to CAST clientele 127
Figure 5.8: Demographics of client population at CAST 128
Figure 5.9: Cities with over 1 000 000 foreign-born residents 132
Figure 5.10: News article of Nena Jimeno Ruiz' case 135
viii
Figure 5.11: Shyima Hall, spokesperson and survivor of trafficking 137
Figure 5.12: Elder care facility in Long Beach, California 147
Figure 5.13: Carwash place in Los Feliz, Los Angeles 150
Figure 6.1: The anti-human trafficking sector in Greater Los Angeles 171
Figure 6.2: Map of 40 human trafficking task forces in the United States 174
Figure 6.3. Federal agencies involved in addressing human trafficking 183
Figure 7.1: Thai workers outside the El Monte compound after the raid in 1995 234
Figure 7.2. Thai workers of the El Monte case in a Downtown L.A. courtroom 237
ix
Abbreviations
ACRC - African Community Resource Center
BJA – Bureau of Justice Assistance
BSCC - Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition
CAST LA – Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking Los Angeles
CHIRLA - Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles
CSI - Christians for Social Issues
CSP – Community Service Programs
GAO – Government Accountability Office
GMP – Gross Metropolitan Product
HHS – Department of Health and Human Services
ICE - Immigration and Customs Enforcement
ILO – International Labor Organization
INS – Immigration and Naturalization Service
LACUC - Los Angeles County Unity Coalition
LAMTF-HT - Los Angeles Metro Task Force on Human Trafficking
LAPD – Los Angeles Police Department
OCHTTF – Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force
OMCTP – Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons
OVC – Office for Victims of Crime
PPLA – Polaris Project Los Angeles
Thai CDC - Thai Community and Development Center
x
TIP Report – Trafficking in Persons Report
WHD – Wage and Hour Division (Department of Labor)
WPD – Westminster Police Department
xi
Abstract
This research provides a spatial analysis of the local anti-human trafficking movement
that has emerged in Greater Los Angeles since the discovery of the El Monte case in
1995. Over the past 15 years, the U.S. government has allocated substantial funds and
resources to fighting human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles and elsewhere in the
country. Non-governmental and governmental institutions have launched a series of
awareness campaigns, established coalitions of agencies, developed and implemented
rescue strategies and social service programs, and educated tens of thousands of law
enforcement members and local communities on the issue of human trafficking. So far,
these federally led anti-human trafficking efforts have struggled to yield their expected
outcome in terms of the number of victims identified and traffickers prosecuted.
Deploying a variety of ethnographic and qualitative methods, this study investigates how
and in what form a localization of international and national anti-human trafficking
responses through local agents has emerged as an essential but often neglected factor in
effectively combating human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles. The study identifies key
agents operating in the anti-human trafficking sector and analyzes the forms in which
local agents create space for meaningfully and effectively translating national anti-
trafficking policies into specific local contexts. Results show that community-based
organizations embracing the dynamics of place and adopting a strong victim-centered
approach have produced better outcomes in terms of identifying victims, organizing
adequate and necessary assistance, and seeking justice for survivors of human trafficking.
xii
Chapter 1
Old wine in new bottles: Combatting human trafficking
In August 1995, a multi-agency task force led by the California State Department of
Labor raided an apartment complex in El Monte, Southern California. What the officers
brought to light was one of the most horrendous cases of forced labor in modern-day
United States. Law enforcement officers freed 72 undocumented Thai immigrants, mostly
women, held in virtual slavery behind wired fences and forced to sew garments in
inhumane conditions. The operators of the sweatshop were of Chinese-Thai decent and
had held some of the workers in forced labor for up to seventeen years. The El Monte
case made tangible on the local scale the global connections that are integral to the
network of human trafficking. Sweatshops and other forms of forced labor in the region
were common throughout the last century. However, outrage over cases like the one in El
Monte eventually kicked off a growing governmental and non-governmental campaign
against human trafficking in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, a key hub for human
trafficking in the United States.
The goal of this research is to provide a spatial analysis of the local anti-human
trafficking movement that has emerged in Greater Los Angeles since the discovery of the
El Monte case in 1995. Over the past 15 years, the U.S. government has allocated
substantial funds and resources to fighting human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles and
1
elsewhere in the country. Non-governmental and governmental institutions have launched
a series of awareness campaigns, established coalitions of agencies, developed and
implemented rescue strategies and social service programs, and educated tens of
thousands of law enforcement members and local communities on the issue of human
trafficking. So far, these federally led anti-human trafficking efforts have struggled to
yield their expected outcome in terms of the number of victims identified and traffickers
prosecuted. This research proposes localizing anti-human trafficking efforts in the form
of empowering community-based agents in order to more effectively address human
trafficking in Greater Los Angeles. The study identifies key agents operating in the anti-
human trafficking sector in Greater Los Angeles and analyzes the forms in which local
agents create space for meaningfully and effectively translating national anti-trafficking
policies into specific local contexts. For the purpose of this research, the region of
Greater Los Angeles is defined as the five county area including Los Angeles, Orange,
Riverside, Ventura, and San Bernardino counties. While all counties have reported cases
of human trafficking, the study primarily focuses on Los Angeles and Orange counties as
the prime setting for anti-human trafficking efforts in the region.
Slavery is not history. On the contrary, the trade in and the exploitation of human beings
in the form of human trafficking for personal gain today has become a most lucrative
criminal business in the world, reaching dimensions almost equal to trafficking in
weapons and drugs. It is an epidemic to which the world has only recently begun to
awaken. A cultural and economic phenomenon prevalent in literally every region of the
2
world, human trafficking has developed into a rampant local byproduct of the ever-
intensifying globalization processes shaping national politics and economies, regional
cultures as well as facilitating the international passage of people. As a consequence
millions of people around the world are estimated to be victims of human trafficking
(Trafficking in Persons Report 2009). Accurate data documenting the scope of human
trafficking to and within the United States is sketchy and oftentimes confused with
estimates on undocumented immigration or human smuggling. However, while the
United States government in recent years has refrained from publishing estimates of the
human trafficking population in the country, officials acknowledge that the United States,
along with other developed countries, has emerged as a center stage for forced labor.
Forms of labor exploitation have existed throughout human history on every continent
and in almost every culture. However, present-day slavery in the form of human
trafficking has reached new, unprecedented dimensions of violation and disregard for
basic human rights. There is no single victim prototype of human trafficking; victims are
males and females of all ethnicities and ages. To provide a small sample of classic human
trafficking situations: The crime affects children cocoa bean pickers in Western Africa,
men working in quarries in India, child soldiers fighting wars in the Congo, Vietnamese
women forced into prostitution in Bangkok, Moldovan women trafficked as mail-in
brides to Saudi Arabia, Mexican farm workers working the fields in California, American
women tricked into prostitution rings in the United States, Thai men and women forced
to labor in sweatshops in Los Angeles, or under-aged boys traded for sex work on Los
3
Angeles’s Craigslist site. Just as the forms of human trafficking are varied and contested,
so too are the terms and phrases used to describe the phenomenon. In this study I follow
the United Nations' definition of human trafficking, and thus understand human
trafficking as the trade and exploitation of a person under conditions of coercion and
force. This stance adopts the notion that human trafficking first and foremost is a severe
violation of an individual's human rights and thus calls for a victim-based approach to
addressing the problem.
To implement my proposed research goal, I have conducted a qualitative analysis of a
major trafficking destination and its anti-trafficking sector situated in the U.S.-Mexico
borderlands. I have chosen Greater Los Angeles as a study-site because of several
interrelated components. First and most significantly, Los Angeles, along with New York,
Florida, and Houston, has emerged as a top destination for human traffickers in the
country. Second, Southern California recently experienced decisive demographic changes
resulting primarily from immigration. Around the world, city-regions—epitomizing
economic prosperity, opportunity, and new beginnings—have emerged as prime
destinations for migrants eager to escape the socioeconomic hopelessness of their home
countries. Since victims of human trafficking are in most cases migrants, migrant cities in
the United States are the best place to begin my consideration. More specifically, in Los
Angeles, in spite of considerable Asian immigration, Latinization—and particularly
“Mexicanization”— has been the “dominant engine” of the changing ethnic landscape in
the borderlands (Davis 2000, p. 2). This pattern of ongoing “Latinization” is, to some
4
extent, mirrored in the human trafficking population of the region. Today, L.A. receives
the majority of new immigrants to the U.S., mostly from Latin America, and, far ahead of
projections, this population became a majority-minority in 2000 (Davis 2000; Straughan
and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2002). Third, this influx of new immigrants is largely dominated
by the region’s proximity to the US-Mexico border, which in the case of Los Angeles has
played a key role in the emergence of the city as the number one magnet for new
immigrants to the country. Between 1965 and 1990, more than half of L.A.’s immigrants
arrived from countries in Central America or Mexico (Waldinger and Bozorgmehr 1996).
Further impetus for trans-border migration came with the signing of NAFTA in the early
1990s, which promoted new economic opportunities for residents south and north of the
US-Mexico border. Lastly, Los Angeles currently attracts much research interest, because
some consider the city, the third largest metropolitan economy in the world (Tokyo-
Yokohama and New York are first and second) (Davis 2000), as the metropolis of the
21st century (Erie 2002, 2004). Another decisive element for metropolitan Los Angeles
as my focus is the presence of a vital anti-trafficking sector.
Research objectives and plan
Human trafficking is a complex phenomenon and has been conceptualized in a number of
ways—among them, as a gender issue, a prostitution issue, a national-security issue, an
immigration issue, and a human rights issue. This research primarily views human
trafficking as a human rights problem overwhelmingly affecting migrant workers.
5
Accordingly, Chapter Two explores human trafficking through the lens of the globalizing
processes, with an emphasis on global economic integration, international migration, and
the discourse around safeguarding basic human rights in this newly emerging world
order. This approach allows for a more profound understanding of the global dynamics
that are creating forced labor situations in local settings. The flow of global capital has
fundamentally transformed national political economies, resulting in the decline of the
nation-state and in the structural regulations serving its citizens. Over the past decades,
transnational co-operations have joined nation-states as powerful conductors of world
economic processes and have dictated new meanings to the social contracts defining the
relationship of citizens, workers, and the state. I concur with others who claim that an
erosion of the social contract has taken place, thus hollowing out the safeguarding of
fundamental human rights. Hand in hand with global capital flows go increasing numbers
of transnational migrants in search of more promising economic opportunities and
responding to an ever-increasing demand for cheap labor. In this regard, author Janie
Chuang (2006, p. 138) is spot on when she points out that human trafficking, in many
cases, is “labor migration gone horribly wrong.”
Currently, comprehensive theoretical works explaining human trafficking or efforts to
eradicate the problem are few and far between. Instead, multiple conceptual approaches
to understand human trafficking primarily anchored in gender inequality, human rights, or
immigration regulation have been developed across academic fields. This research
provides a geographic angle to the body of literature investigating efforts to combat
6
human trafficking in the United States. As outlined in Chapter Three, this study adopts a
spatial analytical approach to investigating how and in what form a localization of
international and national anti-human trafficking responses through local agents, most
importantly cities, has emerged as an essential but often neglected factor in effectively
combating human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles. A central concern of human rights
work is how to translate universal norms into locally acceptable and meaningful
standards. Also at stake is how to address human rights infringements in an effective way,
thus guaranteeing long-term improvement. This work concurs with geographic work
emphasizing that localization remains a significant phenomenon in spite of global
processes deeply influencing the production of place. I thus argue that place matters in
successful human rights work, as causes, processes, responses, and outcomes are
embedded in a very specific time and space framework. Since place-producing processes
play out differently in different locales, acknowledging the very specific composition of
places in the implementation of human rights policies and legislation is essential.
The United States is not only a prime destination for human trafficking, but also in recent
years the federal government has passed some of the most extensive and broad legal
initiatives to address the human trafficking problem nationally and internationally. The
center-piece of this legislation is the Trafficking in Persons Protection Act of 2000. In
spite of this ambitious set of measurements, however, national anti-human trafficking
efforts have not produced the expected outcome. While time certainly plays a role in the
often interminable process of policy implementation, I suggest that a key problem is that
7
the response efforts lack contextualization. Federal agencies, which currently play a key
role in anti-human trafficking efforts in Greater Los Angeles and elsewhere in the
country, lack sufficient social resources, place-specific knowledge, and the kind of spatial
access on a local scale that is required to tackle human trafficking successfully. Human
trafficking is a local manifestation of a set of global processes, which necessitates an anti-
human trafficking approach that is informed by and reflects local contexts to understand
and successfully address the problem. Facing a substantial humanitarian crisis caused by
thousands of migrants trafficked to and within the United States, cities and their
constituents have primarily picked up the slack in national anti-trafficking work.
Consequently, I argue that city-regions have emerged as mediators or nexus between
federal/state policy and local needs. Urban centers not only are important agents stepping
up to combat the human trafficking permeating their economic, social, and cultural
environments, but are also serving as interactive platforms for a large variety of
international, national, state, and local governmental and non-governmental agents.
It is important to understand what defines human trafficking before investigating efforts
to combat the problem. Chapter Four critically explores the definition of human
trafficking through in-depth analysis of primary and secondary sources including mission
and campaign statements, legal texts and media reports. As indicated earlier, human
trafficking is a highly contested issue entangled in a web of political debates ranging
from immigration regulation and national security, to questions of the voluntary factor in
prostitution. A central focus in this discussion is the difference of framing human
8
trafficking in both the international sphere and the United States. The United Nations'
definition of human trafficking offers a broader, looser framework, which emphasizes the
exploitation of a person under use of force. In contrast, the United States' approach to
human trafficking is strongly rooted in historic forms of slavery in the country and
suggests a narrower framework focusing on severe forms of human trafficking, i.e., labor
exploitation under significant use of coercion or force.
Shifting to the study of the local anti-human trafficking movement in Greater Los
Angeles, Chapter Five investigates the dimensions of human trafficking and the demand
of services by survivors of labor exploitation it produces in the region. It outlines the
nature, scope, and scale of trafficking in human beings, including the origins of victims,
the global trafficking routes, the taxonomy of human trafficking types (highlighting
major cases), the economic dimension of human trafficking as well as its relation to other
criminal networks such as drug trafficking and weapon trafficking in the Mexico-US
border region. The bulk of the analysis is based on human rights reports, media articles,
governmental and non-governmental accounts, oral histories, interviews, and
documentary films. This chapter provides the context for an in-depth investigation of
efforts and policy implementation to tackle human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles.
The analysis revolves around five major themes, including immigration, the demand for
low-income workers, the city as epitome of the American Dream, Los Angeles as a
border and port city, and the nature of domestic human trafficking.
9
The promotion and protection of human rights is a defining motif in the founding of the
United States and to this day is widely considered a powerful vehicle to further peace,
economic prosperity, and civil government. Organizations such as the American Anti-
Slavery Society (now Anti-Slavery International) have a long history of advocating for
the rights and freedom of people forced to work under inhumane conditions (Miers 2003;
Clapham 2007). UNICEF, too, has fought against the commercial sexual exploitation of
women and children long before human trafficking was acknowledged as a common
practice. However, to this day, Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation Act has
not been fulfilled. On the contrary, a new awareness of the existence of slavery-like
practices, or human trafficking, has emerged around the world, provoking a conglomerate
of agents and activists determined to address this new form of labor exploitation and
human rights violation. Chapter Six critically explores the anti-human trafficking sector
in Greater Los Angeles. By adopting a spatial analytical approach, this chapter explores
the supply of service and awareness programs developed and implemented in Greater Los
Angeles with a special focus on how a localization of international and national anti-
human trafficking responses through local agents is taking place. Chapter Six is
structured around two key aspects: F irst, the key stakeholders, their collaboration and
their varying political and ideological approaches to addressing human trafficking are
identified and investigated. The anti-human trafficking movement in Greater Los Angeles
is defined by a multi-agency approach, incorporating local, state, and federal
governments, community agencies, legal advocates, law enforcement agents, survivors of
human trafficking, human-rights groups, shelters, faith-based communities, immigrant
10
rights organizations, and ethnic communities. Second, the chapter looks at how the
community addresses and meets the extensive needs of survivors of human trafficking. A
closer look at the campaigns and programs reveals the overall challenges— from tight
resources and funding to cultural barriers— that activists face in their work with
survivors of human trafficking.
The federal government has taken on a leading position in fighting human trafficking in
Greater Los Angeles and elsewhere in the country. Not only do federal dollars make up a
substantial part of the anti-trafficking funding base on the ground and thus determine the
outlook on and nature of the work that is implemented, but also a federal agency—
namely ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement)— has emerged as the lead
investigator of human trafficking in the region. Analysis has also shown that, to date, the
resources spent and investigations conducted into human trafficking have not produced
the desired outcome. Chapter Seven thus conducts a case study to explore the dimensions
of place in anti-human trafficking work in Greater Los Angeles. The overall argument
calls for reassigning anti-human trafficking responsibilities and suggests that the federal
government take a back seat, and instead empowers local community organizations “on
the ground” in the battle against human trafficking. As this chapter shows, small,
community-based organizations with a strong victim-centered approach and established
social and cultural roots in the communities have produced better outcomes in identifying
victims, organizing adequate and necessary assistance, and seeking justice for their
clients.
11
Significance
Human trafficking is a fairly new academic topic. The body of scholarly work on the
issue is small and scattered. Still, in recent years researchers across the fields have
increasingly taken on human trafficking as a largely unknown field of academic
investigation, providing a richer understanding of the nature of the problem. The bulk of
published work on human trafficking provides a macro-analysis of the economic
dimensions that create human trafficking situations and legal responses to the problem.
Other substantial bodies of human trafficking literature explore the nature of anti-
trafficking legislation and the trade of women and children for sex trafficking.
Geographic academic work on human trafficking is scarce. This dearth of research is
indicated by the fact that, as yet, the concept of human trafficking has not secured an
entry in the well-established Dictionary of Human Geography (Johnston et al. 2000),
which is considered Geography's standard work and the defining benchmark of the
discipline's ever-changing research boundaries.
This research is of relevance in two regards. On the one hand it expands upon a small
body of literature exploring the place-specific dimensions of human trafficking.
Enhanced by ethnographic work, this study offers a unique view into a microcosm of
human trafficking and how this problem is locally embedded in a network of global
processes. Greater Los Angeles is particularly relevant in this context, as the city-region
not only has one of the most vibrant anti-human trafficking sectors in the country, but
also the national anti-human trafficking movement originated in the region in 1995 with
12
the El Monte case. On the other hand, I believe that current anti-human trafficking
programs, as they are conceived by federal agencies, must be re-evaluated in terms of a
spatial contextualization to address and overcome administrative and other hurdles to
improve the outcome. This study offers an alternative approach to addressing human
trafficking in the country by recommending the empowerment of grassroots agents in the
anti-human trafficking movement.
13
Chapter 2
A cruel awakening - forced labor in the 21
st
century
The trade in and the exploitation of human beings in the form of human trafficking for
personal gain has become a lucrative criminal enterprise in today's world. It is an
epidemic to which the world has only recently begun to awaken. A cultural and economic
phenomenon prevalent in literally every region of the world, human trafficking has
developed into a rampant local byproduct of ever-intensifying globalizing processes,
shaping national politics, national economies, and regional cultures as well as facilitating
the international passage of people (Salt 2000; Koser 2007). As a consequence,
researchers estimate that human trafficking is affecting millions of people around the
world (Trafficking in Persons Report 2009) and has become one of the most lucrative
transnational crime businesses in the world— quickly diminishing the lead held by
trafficking in weapons and drugs (Bales 2000, 2005; Bales and Lize 2007). Though it has
been an omnipresent phenomenon throughout human history, human trafficking only
recently has been perceived as a reemerging serious and pervasive problem in the United
States. Accurate data documenting the scope of human trafficking to and within the
United States is sketchy and oftentimes confused with estimates on undocumented
immigration or human smuggling. However, while the United States government in
recent years has refrained from publishing estimates of the human trafficking population
in the country, officials acknowledge that the United States, along with other developed
14
countries, has emerged as center stage for forced labor (Batstone 2007; Laczko 2005).
In spite of increasing legal and political efforts on the international, federal and local
scale, and a growing body of research programs and studies to eliminate trafficking in
human beings, a comprehensive understanding of the nature, circumstances, and
implications of human trafficking to the United States is still absent. In fact, theoretical
understanding and factual evidence runs behind media and political interests. At the same
time, while substantial international and national legal frameworks aim at the prosecution
of trafficker as well as secure social and legal services for their victims (Chacon 2006;
Nagan and Medeiros 2006), human trafficking is still on the rise around the world, as
trafficking syndicates enjoy impunity and prosperity in a multi-billion dollar business.
This study understands the reemergence of forced labor in the form of human trafficking
as a phenomenon deriving from globalizing processes that shape economic and political
integration in the world. The following sections will thus frame human trafficking
through the lens of globalizing processes with an emphasis on global economic
integration, international migration, and the discourse around safeguarding basic human
rights in this newly emerging world order. The subsequent section reviews human
trafficking in the US in the context of immigration regulation, human rights violations in
the borderlands, and anti-human trafficking legislation.
15
Globalization, international migration and human trafficking
Conceptual considerations
Globalization is a highly contested concept. In spite of its omnipresence in public and
academic debates, little agreement exists with regard to what essentially defines and
determines globalization, its scope, the degree to which globalization is effecting the
world, whether it is a new or old phenomenon, and whether it is a blessing or a curse for
the world's poor. One basic common denominator among researchers is that globalization
is one of five core dynamics and processes shaping current and future urban development
and urban social structures
1
(Dear 2009). Globalization is understood as a social
continuous process and less as a social condition or end product, which Steger (2009)
terms as globality. Globalization is also distinguished from global imaginary, which
suggests people's increasing awareness of being or becoming part of a global community
(Steger 2009). The idea of a global imaginary, however, does not entail a fading
importance of national and local social structures as powerful sources for creating
communal identities and a sense of belonging, which will be discussed in more detail
below.
Even though globalization only became a buzzword in the 1990s, the term emerged as a
concept in the 1960s when Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan introduced the
concept of the “global village” to characterize the impact of new communication
technologies on cultural and social life (Dicken 2000). Four different philosophies
1
Besides globalization, Dear refers to sustainability, inequality or socio-economic polarization,
hybridization, and the network society as core processes determining future urban development.
16
currently attempt to define the chronological rise of globalization, i.e., to answer the
question of whether the current global integration is a new reality or a variation on
historical precedents (Steger 2009, Hirst and Thompson 1996). Some researchers argue
that globalization only truly emerged in the last four decades and especially in post-Cold
War times, pointing out that the enormous expansion and acceleration of worldwide
integration in recent times is unexampled in human history. Other scholars see the origins
of globalization in the technological achievements that brought about the Industrial
Revolution in the 1800s. A third group of globalization scholars refers to the political and
economic integration that occurred in the 16
th
century with the emergence of European
colonialism and related trade routes, which signaled the advent of modernity and
capitalism as defining pillars of the world system. Lastly, only a handful of writers argue
that globalization really began with the dispersion of African hunters and gatherers to all
five continents about a million years ago and is thus almost as old as humanity itself.
Adopting Steger's definition, this study of human trafficking understands globalization as
a long-term phenomenon that consists of a set of processes “whose transformative powers
reach deeply into the economic, political, cultural, technological and ecological
dimensions of contemporary social life” (2009, 14-15). In its broadest sense,
globalization is thus considered a development with an all-encompassing reach into
multiple aspects of daily human life, even though, as pointed out earlier, the process is
anything but even.
17
Economic integration
Globalization talk most commonly refers to and is limited to its economic component,
i.e., the economic integration of markets, trade, and financial flows across the globe.
Researchers suggest that people and companies have significantly changed their ways of
economic production and exchange of commodities, thereby transforming the structures
linking national, regional, and local economies. The essential transformative power in
this change of economic interaction has been a revolution in communication
technologies, most importantly the Internet. The Internet has allowed for rapid expansion
into and integration of previously untapped markets as well as an unprecedented
acceleration of market and financial transactions. This “speeding up” of the world
compels people to use and experience space and time in new ways (Hubbard et al. 2005;
Held and McGrew 2000).
Today, economic globalization is largely based on a neo-liberal ideology advocating the
reduction of trade barriers among nations and the deregulation of financial markets
(Brohman 1996), or as Susan George puts it, “neo-liberalism and its dogmatic doctrine
has become the major world religion” (George 1999). By nature, the global financial
market is defined by minimal oversight and maximal flexibility, which in recent years has
developed into a highly vulnerable and insecure enterprise. The recent global crash of the
housing sector and banking industry, most significantly in the US, has become a painful
reminder to many people of just how interwoven and volatile the world's dominating
business philosophy has become (Taibbi 2009). A major claim of the neo-liberal
18
discourse has been that everybody benefits from globalization— which, as pointed out
earlier, is not the case (Pogge 2007). For instance China and India are often referred to as
the big benefitors of globalization in the less developed world. However, their remarkable
economic growth and the increase of per capita income is primarily tied to the upper 10
per cent of the population. As a matter of fact, the bottom 50 per cent in India and China
have at best stagnated or even decreased in recent years. Similar data published by the
UN Human Development Report show that before the beginning of global economic
integration in the early 1970s, the distribution of wealth between the richest and the
poorest countries was 44 to 1, and today it is 74 to 1 (World Development Report
1999/2000). A trend of socio-economic inequality can also be observed in the
economically richest countries in the world. Take, for example, the income gap in the
United States. The top 1 per cent of the American households exceeds the combined
wealth of the bottom 95 per cent of households (Steger 2009). In 2007 the top .01 percent
of American earners pocketed 6 per cent of total U.S. income, a figure that has nearly
doubled since 2000 (Saez 2009). These and other aspects dealing with the neglect of
human rights, and reduced union power or gender issues have prompted the emergence of
a broad movement comprising NGOs and platforms in the developed and less developed
world protesting neo-liberal hegemony and uneven development, unequal societies,
unfair trade policies, and limited public services (George 2001).
According to Friedmann's “world city hypothesis,” today's global financial market is
anchored in a network of global cities that serve as core centers in the global financial
19
market (2005). These core cities are characterized as major financial centers,
headquarters for transnational corporations (TNCs), and international organizations (such
as the United Nations), having a rapid growth of business services sectors and
manufacturing centers, accommodating significant populations as well as serving as
major transportation nodes. In addition, Friedmann's global cities are defined by a
substantial division of labor, i.e., with highly skilled and educated professionals in upper-
management and serving as decision making entities, and a larger workforce of low-
skilled workers hired in the manufacturing, personal services, hospitality and
entertainment industries. Lastly, Friedmann refers to migration (rural-urban as well as
international) as a key feature defining global cities, as they have emerged as rapid job
growth centers.
Based on Friemann's model, Greater Los Angeles largely qualifies as a core city in
today's economically globalized world. While not considered as significant a financial
center as New York or Tokyo, Greater Los Angeles has emerged an important node in the
global financial sector, with its economy largely driven by international trade, the
entertainment industry, aerospace, technology, petroleum, fashion and apparel, and
tourism. For instance, Los Angeles is home to the largest manufacturing center in the
United States (City-data.com 2010). The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together
comprise the fifth busiest port in the world and the most significant port in the Western
Hemisphere. As of 2007, Greater Los Angeles has had a gross metropolitan product
(GMP) of $697.9 billion, making it the largest economic center in the western hemisphere
20
after New York. If Los Angeles’ CSA (Combined Statistical Area) were a country, its
economy would rank 17
th
in the world (IMF 2007; Global Insight 2008).
Apart from city-regions, a second major force in economic globalization has been
immense Transnational Corporations (TNC), which have emerged as substantial
competitors for nation states, and play a significant role in the social, political, and, of
course, economic realm of many countries. TNCs, such as WalMart, V olkswagen, or
General Motors, belong to the 200 largest companies in the world, which comprise over
half of the world's industrial output (Steger 2009, Sassen 2006, Korten 1995). Most
TNCs, which largely control the world's investment capital, are geographically
headquartered in North America, Europe, Japan and South Korea. The rapid rise of TNCs
as global economic powers largely originates in the neo-liberal deregulation of labor
markets, which made available large pools of cheap labor, resources, and advantageous
manufacturing sites in the global south.
Political collaboration
While economic perspectives on globalization have largely dominated globalization talk,
globalization clearly encompasses more than increased integration of financial markets
and outsourcing of production and manufacturing overseas. Closely tied to global
economic processes are political processes that enable and further such economic
integration. The most significant change in the political realm has centered on the re-
conceptualization of the role of the nation-state in world economic activities and the
21
increasing influence of transnational non-governmental organizations (Amnesty
International), supranational organizations (European Union), and international
organizations (United Nations) on the restructuring of the world order (Ruggie 1998).
Some argue that the consequence of a neo-liberal economic world view, which sees the
state as a minor figure in economic processes of production and assigns the state an
interventionist role only in situations of market failure, is the “erosion of state power” or
the “hollowing-out of the state” (Dicken 1994). Put differently, this re-conceptualization
of the state means a weakening of national boundaries, thus allowing for less restricted
flows of capital and goods (and to a much lesser degree the flow of people), and enabling
a transfer of power from the nation-state to the most powerful actors in neo-liberal
economies, TNCs (Dicken 1994; Andreas 1998). Others, however, are quick to point out
that even though the idea of reduced state intervention in economic structures and
processes is widely accepted as a significant element of neo-liberalism, it is not a
question of the “magnitude of intervention,” but rather an issue of the nature and type of
state action. Ian Clark speaks of the changing rather than eroding sovereignty (1999).
Furthermore, these critics deny the market's viability without the state apparatus and
believe that the state still plays an “indispensable role in the creation, governance, and
conduct of markets” (O'Neill 1997, 257). Compared to economic globalization, however,
global political integration is less advanced and profound, and lacks an established body
of global governance, as has been revealed in the recent– and so far unsuccessful–
attempts to tackle the global economic crisis. In spite of having powerful transnational
organizations in place, when it comes to economic interests, nation-states generally put
22
their agendas first.
Apart from a transformation of the role of the nation-state, we can also observe
significant changes on the municipal and provincial level. Most importantly we have
witnessed the emergence of powerful city networks that have become the initiators of
policy initiatives and transnational linkages. A good example is the World Association of
the Major Metropolis that deals with common local issues across national borders. In this
regard, global cities like Tokyo, London, and New York are more closely interconnected
than they are to many cities in their home countries (Steger 2009, Friedmann 2005). On a
different note, cities increasingly take the lead and pick up the slack where nation-states
fail to take on significant responsibilities of governance. For instance, the US federal
government has not ratified the Kyoto Treaty to date; however about 285 cities in the
United States, including Los Angeles, have made the Kyoto Treaty an integral part of
their local environmental policies (ICLEI 2009).
International migration
A component of globalization processes that is highly relevant for this study of human
trafficking is international migration, which is largely a product of the processes
discussed above. A highly contested and debated subject across the globe, international
migration is oftentimes reduced to a single narrative of national threat, a view that
completely neglects the complexity and diversity of international migration. What
follows are some facts and statistics that help briefly contextualize migration on the
23
international scale. Migration is not a new phenomenon. In fact, migration is almost as
old as human life itself. According to a UN definition, an international migrant is a
person who stays outside his or her usual country of residence for at least one year (IOM
2009). More international migrants exist today then ever before. Recent data suggests that
there are about 200 million international migrants worldwide, which is about three per
cent of the world's population. Migrant workers have become an integral part of the
world economy and hence have contributed significantly to economic growth in the
developed world. Migration today affects every part of the world, whereby the traditional
distinction between countries of origin, transit, and destination is no longer accurate, as
the lines have blurred. We distinguish between regional and international (mostly from
less developed to developed countries) migration (Koser 2007).
Women have emerged as the majority among migrants functioning as the primary
breadwinners for their families. This trend is also reflected in the increasing demand for
female migrant workers in the service, healthcare, and entertainment industries in the
global North. Contrary to political and public opinion, migrants tend to spend a large part
of their income in their host countries. While traditionally migration constituted a
permanent move, today temporary migration has become a means of realizing life in the
home country. A most essential characteristic of international migration is that migrants
are among the most dynamic and entrepreneurial members of society i.e., they are people
who take the risk of leaving their homes with the intention to create new opportunities for
their families and communities (Castles and Miller 1998, Cornelius 2001). As pointed out
by Koser in his study on international migration, “the history of the United States
24
economic growth is in many ways the history of migrants” (2007). Not only were
Andrew Carnegie or Samuel Goldwyn migrants, but also the co-founders of Google,
Intel, Hotmail, and Ebay.
The reasons and motivations for why people embark on journeys that we understand as
international migration are manifold. Basic and commonly used distinctions applied to
political, economic, and social migration are push and pull factors. The category of push
factors comprises issues such as growing economic disparities, deteriorating welfare
systems, a lack of professional and educational opportunities,
2
political oppression, war
and human rights violations. Conversely, pull factors consist of political freedom,
economic opportunity, or family reunions. In the case of the United States, pull factors
are often encapsuled in the notion of pursuing the American Dream.
While migrant workers in the developed world also take on high-skilled, white-collar
jobs in managerial and development sectors, larger pools of migrants are employed in so-
called “3-D jobs,” i.e., work that is dirty, dangerous, or difficult (Steger 2009). These jobs
are mostly found in agriculture, timber, plantations, heavy industry, construction, and
domestic service. Once again countering wide-spread public opinion that migrant
workers tend to take away jobs from native workers, research data show that even in
times of economic hardship, native workers are disinclined to take 3-D jobs. Thus, the
demand for migrant workers in the global North continues in spite of certain economic
2
Unemployment rates average about 12 per cent in the developing world, whereas in developed countries
they usually level off at 6 per cent, unless the world is rocked by a global economic crisis like the current
economic meltdown (ILO 2007).
25
trends (Brysk 2002). Lastly, international workers' migratory paths are often determined
by transnational migration networks that have traditionally been established by friends or
family sometimes over the course of generations. This pattern means that senior migrants
provide novices with essential information about the migration process, help finance the
trip, and assist with social integration in the host country (Koser 2007).
The discussion of globalizing processes is of relevance to the study of human trafficking
in Greater Los Angeles on several grounds. Global economic integration in large parts of
the world has created a number of incentives for labor migration, at the center of which is
the rule of demand and supply. Economic powerhouses such as TNCs and city-regions
(including Greater Los Angeles) have developed a substantial need for low-skilled and
low-income workers, the demand of which is primarily met by international migrant
workers. However, the majority of these migrant workers face substantial legal hurdles
when moving internationally in pursuit of economic opportunities. The reason is that in
spite of national borders breaking down to enable economic flows, stringent immigration
systems in most western countries prevent migrant workers from legally moving across
national borders. Consequently, migrant workers oftentimes are forced into the
underground of society, which not only makes them vulnerable to any form of
exploitation and mistreatment, but also deprives them of comprehensive protection under
national laws and services. The lack of an efficient international governing body
aggravates the situation, as migrant workers and other migrating populations literally fall
through the cracks.
26
Immigration Regulation in the United States and California
Victims of human trafficking are oftentimes international migrants who, in many cases,
leave their homes and families in hopes of better employment opportunities only to later
find themselves trapped and forced into a coerced labor environment on the other side of
the world. As Chuang (2006) has put it, “human trafficking is labor migration gone
horribly wrong,” and as the numbers indicate, this journey is ending in a forced labor
situation for thousands of migrants in the United States every year. Immigration is a
defining pillar of US history, or, citing Oscar Handlin, one could argue, “immigration is
the history of the nation” (Handlin 2002). Since the early days of the United States,
immigrants from many origins have notably shaped the social composition and political,
economic and cultural landscapes of this country. Today, immigration to the United States
still matters, in fact— and as pointed out earlier— current immigration numbers are the
largest in the country's history (Castles and Miller 1998). The demand for immigrant
labor in the US and particularly California keeps rising as a result of a global economic
world order that is still producing the greatest job growth of low-skilled and part-time
labor from the less developed world (Martin 1994). In California, for instance, the
numbers of foreign-born restaurant cooks increased from 29 to 69 per cent between 1980
and 1996. At the same time, the proportion of non-citizen gardeners almost doubled and
that of construction workers more than tripled (Cornelius 1998). International migration
particularly matters in Southern California, which functions as the prime destination for
newly arriving immigrants to the country (Myers 2002; Arreola 2004; Davis 2000;
Waldinger and Bozorgmehr 1996), and which will be the geographical focus of my study.
27
In spite of, or maybe because of, immigration being an integral part of the American
historical and social make-up, immigration has been cyclically at the center of public and
political debates. Depending on the nation’s economic performance as well as position
and engagement in world politics, immigrants have either been subjected to entry
restrictions and even expulsion or welcomed— and, if not welcomed, at least understood
as a vital force in the country’s economy (Kropp and Dear 2003; Waldinger and
Bozorgmehr 1996; Gorman and Watanabe 2009). A historical review of immigration
policy also shows that not all immigrant groups have been treated equally. Most notably,
the exclusion of slaves and later documents such as the Chinese Exclusion Act
3
denied
certain populations the rights to citizenship and thus their claims to rights (Maher 2002,
Kropp and Dear 2003). In scholarly terms, we distinguish between restrictionist or
nativist and affirmative approaches mirroring public and political discourse and policies
in regards to immigration (Chavez 2001). The latest major immigration legislation from
1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, exemplifies a
restrictionist position toward immigration, having introduced an emphasis on controlling
the international border with increased border personnel, equipment, and technology,
especially at the Southwest border (Dunn 1996; Varsanyi and Nevins. 2007).
Central to this latest re-enforcement or fortification of the border between the US and
Mexico is the Border Patrol, a federal agency that was established in 1924 and became
the “chief guardian of the revolving door” (Dunn 1996, p. 11). From its early days, the
3
The Chinese Exclusion Act is one in a series of immigration legislations that restricted immigration of
certain populations into the United States. In this case, a federal law was passed in 1882 banning
Chinese immigration for a period of 10 years.
28
Border Patrol’s main task was preventing immigration by Mexicans and other
undocumented immigrants into the country. Over the past few decades, the agency was
involved in several large-scale military strategies against immigrant workers, prominent
among them was Operation Wetback in 1954, which led to the deportation and flight of
up to a million undocumented mainly Mexican migrant workers and which repeatedly
demonstrated that Mexicans were abided in the US only as long as there was a demand
for labor.
California’s recent immigration legislation and enforcement largely reflects developments
and policies on the national scale. Because of economic restructuring and the end of the
Cold War, Southern California experienced a significant economic setback. Thousands of
workers lost their jobs, sparking intensified socio-economic tensions among ethnic
minorities, which in 1992 erupted in the biggest act of social unrest in Los Angeles since
the Watts Riots of 1965 (Waldinger and Bozorgmehr 1996; Mehan 1997; Nevins 2002).
Right at that moment— or, rather, precisely because of this social unrest and the
economic uncertainty lingering over California— then Governor Pete Wilson introduced
Proposition 187 to the California voting public, which ordered the exclusion of
undocumented immigrant children from public schools and health care services (Davis
2000; Sabagh and Bozorgmehr 1996). Proposition 187 marked the beginning of the latest
restrictionist wave in California. The same month California approved Proposition 187,
the federal government under then President Clinton established an enhanced boundary
enforcement strategy— Operation Gatekeeper— to reduce undocumented migrants from
29
crossing the U.S.-Mexico border into Southern California (Nevins 2002). As opposed to
the old strategy of apprehending migrants after they cross, Operation Gatekeeper
attempted to hinder migrants from entering to the United States through an increased
number of Border Patrol agents, increased use of surveillance technologies and the
construction of a wall along the border. As Joseph Nevins (2000, p. 2) has made clear,
Operation Gatekeeper “is the pinnacle of a national strategy that has achieved historically
unprecedented levels of enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico boundary.”
What is particularly striking about this latest nativist development in border enforcement,
however, is that the implementation of this strategy builds upon increased inter-
organizational collaboration between the Border Patrol and the U.S. military. The
militarization of the border has therefore evoked wide concern among human rights
activists and scholars that the “distinctions between immigration control and narcotics
interdiction have become so blurred that border-dwellers speak routinely of the ‘war
against drugs and immigrants’” (Davis 2000, p. 35). In times of economic struggle,
immigrants have been unjustly scapegoated as the enemy of the people in California
(Chavez 2001; Espenshade and Hempstead 1996). This trend also reveals a clear
prioritization of efficient border control over the value of a migrant's life (Maher 2001).
The terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001 and its political processing only enhanced
the public and political perception of immigrants as a considerable threat to the country’s
security (Massey 2005). By the same token, the emergence of vigilante groups in several
30
states of the US, most notoriously the Minutemen Project, has entailed similar concerns
among human rights activists and legal observers (Cretin 2005). Media and the public
more or less acknowledge immigrants as an essential demographic, cultural, and
economic component of American society. However, in times of economic and political
crises, immigrants quickly, though arbitrarily, “surface as objects of crisis” in the public
discourse (Chavez 2001, p. 301; Mehan 1997). Along similar lines, Hugh Mehan (1997,
p. 249) argues that with the disappearance of the Soviet Union as the enemy, the “State is
searching for a new discourse with a new enemy to discipline our thoughts and actions.”
This time, however, the search for an enemy has turned inward and targets the
undocumented population by undermining and hollowing out migrants’ most
fundamental human rights.
This shifting view of immigration has had a direct effect on the framing of human
trafficking in the United States. Farrell and Fahy (2009) conducted an extensive content
analysis of U.S. newspapers exploring the representation of human trafficking in print
media. They showed that the public understanding of human trafficking has significantly
shifted over time— from being a human rights issue to a national security issue, with the
corresponding criminalization of human trafficking. Accordingly, when it surfaced as a
global social problem in the mid-1990s, human trafficking was primarily framed as a
women's issue, more specifically a women's human rights issue. By the late 1990s, not
only had the media caught on to human trafficking, but also high-profile political figures
such as Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton turned their attention to the issue and
31
geared up the process for passing comprehensive legislation to deal with the problem
(BBC News 1999), which in return found an outlet in extensive media coverage. In the
early 2000s, the debate between consensual vs. forced prostitution camps flared up,
leading to an unlikely alliance between anti-sex trafficking activists and labor rights
activists with the goal of broadening the framing of human trafficking. The common
denominator of these diverse groups was the belief that human trafficking is a crime that
necessitates a crime-centered response (Farrell and Fahy 2009). This shift in defining
human trafficking thus expanded to include other forms of exploitation beyond
commercial sex trafficking, a development that brought about the uncovering of a high
profile case of labor exploitation in American Samoa.
During the early 2000s, human trafficking was increasingly redefined as a crime problem,
calling for a criminal justice response. Accordingly, the Trafficking Victims Protection
Act, passed in 2000, put a strong emphasis on identifying and prosecuting defenders and
rescuing and assisting victims willing to support investigations against their traffickers.
This emphasis on crime was further heightened in recent years, when— partly fabricated
— fears of terrorism and undocumented immigration emerged as the defining lens
through which the public came to perceive human trafficking. Anti-trafficking efforts
became “rooted in anti-immigrant and terrorism dialogue of post-September 11
government” (Farrell and Fahy 2009, p. 622). The intertwining of human trafficking and
national security threats on the political scale, a claim that remains largely
unsubstantiated today, led to an increase in medial reporting about human trafficking in
32
the context of national security and diverted the attention away from the original focus on
the preservation of human rights.
Human rights infringements in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands
When politicians, policymakers, or activists refer to human rights today, they are
referring to the human rights recognized in international and national law “concerning
injustice, inhumanity and better government” (Clapham 2007, 20). Human rights
4
are
most prominently anchored in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
5
which was
adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948 and later amended by numerous treaties
and intergovernmental declarations (Selby 1987). In spite of questions of efficient
enforcement and differing cultural interpretations, human rights are considered a
powerful and persuasive tool for change in the world. While contemporary human rights
have their origins in the rights discourses of the Enlightenment period (Brysk 2002), the
modern normative international framework of human rights has evolved from a series of
transnational movements embedded in the struggles against colonialism, imperialism,
slavery, apartheid, racism, and the fight for women's and indigenous rights (Clapham
2007).
4
According to their chronological emergence, human rights are divided into three “generations”: security
or political rights encompass the rights to life, bodily integrity, liberty. Social and economic rights comprise
the rights to food, health care, education, and free labor. And cultural rights include rights such as
membership in a cultural community and access to a healthy environment (Brown 1997).
5
The UN Declaration of Human Rights has been translated into over 300 languages and for over 60 years
has served as powerful toolkit to peoples and individuals struggling for the protection of their rights.
33
A key issue in the universal human rights debate centers on claims that a new Western
imperialism aims to dominate political and cultural discourses in non-westernized parts
of the world. Clapham, however, retorts that while, “Western governments may recently
have dominated the discourse at the highest international levels, the chanting on the
ground did not necessarily take its cue from them, nor did it sing to the West's tune”
(Clapham 2007, 19). Instead, Clapham refers to the origins of the modern human rights
movements and suggests that no country today contests the existence of an international
human rights regime, but the world community struggles with its implementation. The
biggest challenge human rights advocates are currently facing is the relevance of the
Universal Declaration, especially given the continuing occurrence— and emergence of
new forms— of substantial human rights violations across the globe. Given the lack of a
global governing body endowed with the political and legislative power to enforce a
variety of human rights, governments have implemented a number of strategies to
guarantee more effective protection of human rights. Notably, this process is anything but
even, leaving wide leeway for unsatisfactory developments. Examples for enforcement
strategies are international monitoring bodies such as the United States annual
Trafficking in Persons Reports (TIP Reports) or the establishment of regional and
international courts (European Court of Human Rights and the International Criminal
Court (ICC) in DenHague), which enables individuals to bring complaints against states.
An essential fact revealed by the growing importance of legal bodies to enforce human
rights above and below the state is that increasing numbers of residents lack a claim to
34
citizenship. Deconstructing US immigration policy in a recent study, Kristen Maher
reveals a “citizenship gap” as a result of “universal personhood still [being] subordinated
to citizenship as a basis for rights” (2002, 21). In other words, the international human
rights regime has generally been enacted within the nation-state system and “framed as
entitlements exclusive to citizens” (Maher 2002, 21). Lacking this exclusive ticket to
citizenship, transnational migrants' rights have been greatly disputed and largely
undermined in immigration policy and legislation in the US, and especially California, a
matter that also affects victims of forced labor. Maher further argues that citizenship is
primarily defined in opposition to “aliens,” especially with regard to migrant workers
from less developed countries. This construction of the alien vs. the citizen, Maher
continues, has two dimensions. One is based on the liberal concept of contract and
property and thus classifies migrants as “criminals, trespassers, and usurpers who have
forfeited claims to rights by virtues of individual breaches of contract or law” (2002, 21).
The other dimension centers around a neocolonial worldview that bases an individual's
rights on his/her ranking in a “racialized international division of labor” (2002, 21).
6
Maher summarizes that both dimensions are embedded in US political and public
discourses and thus undermine migrants' basic claims to political and social rights.
The struggles to abolish the slave trade and slavery in the United States and elsewhere in
the 19
th
century is sometimes considered the beginning of the human rights movement.
6
To illustrate Maher's argument for a racially determined entitlement to rights, consider this common
story, publicly recounted by Pat Buchanan. Buchanan referred to someone who rushed a family member
to the emergency room, only to be the last in line of patients who most likely were residents of south of
the border. The moral of his story was: “Illegal aliens to the front of the line, American citizens to the
rear” (Buchanan fears Mexico to seize Southwest 2000).
35
Even though distinct economic and political motivations played a central role in the
abolition of slavery in the 19
th
century, sincere concern about the inhumanity of slavery
was also a factor (Zinn 2003). Organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society
(now Anti-Slavery International) have advocated internationally for the rights and
freedom of slaves and, among other things, for three decades published a weekly
newspaper, the National Anti-Slavery Standard (Miers 2003; Clapham 2007).
Human rights movements operate on a global scale to address claims and entitlements to
human dignity. In this regard, the increasing global interconnectedness and new forms of
communication have empowered citizens to challenge state-centered abuse (Falk 2002;
Rosenau 2002) and to form partnerships across national boundaries. A recent powerful
example is the documenting and sharing of state-based brutal violence against citizens by
“resident reporters” in the wake of the Iranian national election. The footage broadcast
and watched by millions all over the world caused a public and political outcry, resulting
in global solidarity with the mostly peaceful demonstrators in the streets of Teheran
(Pitney 2009). Other examples are the formation of transnational professional networks
such as Doctors without Borders or Amnesty International. However, globalization also
poses substantial new challenges to human rights, most significantly through the
integration of markets, the changing role of the state, the unaccountable flow of migrants
across the globe, and the emergence of multi-national corporations as key decision-
makers in the political and social sphere (Held 2000). Accordingly, scholars talk about
increasing human rights abuses below and above the state in addition to traditional abuses
36
through the state (Brysk 2002, Falk 2002, Rosenau 2002). The latter aspect especially
poses a substantial threat to labor rights throughout the world, making migrant workers
vulnerable to abuse in the new economic global world order. In addition, international
economic adjustments and the growth of tourism have lead to a surge in prostitution and
the trafficking in women, children, and men throughout the world (Richard 1999).
The borderlands between Mexico and the U.S. have emerged as an important theme in
academic writings. The result is an ever-increasing body of literature examining the
nature and implications of cultural and economic integration in the region. Academics
have investigated and theorized issues such as how the industrialization and globalization
of the border region has led to its emergence as a hub of the global economy (Esparza,
Waldorf, and Chavez 2004); cross-border management of environmental and ecological
concerns (Shogren and Marosi 2005; Lorey 1999; Wechsler and Huerta 2005); water
policy and management in the region (Lorey 1999); health and education across the
border (Loustaunau 1999); transitional and transnational identity formation (Spener and
Staudt 1998; Socio and Allen 2002); the appearance of cultural hybridities and novel
cultural expressions along the borderlands (Dear and Burridge 2005; Dear and Leclerc
2003); and, vice versa, the US-Mexico border as a leading theme of artistic articulation
(Fox 1996). Substantial writing on the context and processes defining migration to and
across the border (Martin, Abella, and Kuptsch 2005), as well as on the militarization of
the border (Andreas 2000; Nevins 2002; Dunn 1996, 2001) have also mirrored vocal
discourses about these matters in the public and political realm.
37
The discourse on human rights in border studies mainly centers on two incidences
relating to urbanization, economic growth, and migration in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands
that have had wide medial and public repercussions. The murders of women in Ciudad
Juarez are probably the most prominent cases of human rights violations along the U.S.-
Mexico border (Rodriguez 2007; Camacho 2005). Since the signing of the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992, Ciudad Juarez, much like other cities
in Mexico’s northern border region, has transformed into a central outpost of the global
economy (Esparza, Waldorf and Chavez 2004). The development of the maquiladora
economy along the border triggered a wave of internal migration that has brought
hundreds of thousands of migrant worker from other parts of Mexico to the borderlands.
The majority of migrants who came to Ciudad Juarez in the hopes of escaping boredom
and bleak futures in their villages and snatching one of the jobs in the 3800 maquiladoras
was young, poor, and increasingly independent women (Quinones 2003; Esparza,
Waldorf, and Chavez 2004).
Sadly, parallel to economic growth, far-reaching demographic changes and increasing
urbanization, the murder rate of women in Ciudad Juarez has also mounted since
NAFTA’s implementation in the early 1990s. Estimates vary, but cross-border
organizations and the victims’ families claim that as many as 400 women have been
kidnapped, assaulted, and murdered since the early 1990s (Quinones 2003; Ellingwood
2009; Weissmann 2005; Wright 2004). Criticism has been directed at the Mexican
government and local police for its failure to protect women and solve these crimes. A
38
collaboration of local, trans-national and international efforts has ceaselessly put pressure
on Mexican officials to conduct a thorough investigation of the murders to bring the
perpetrators to justice. The results, however, are negligible. Mutilated bodies of young
women are still being discovered and the murderers are still on the loose.
A less well-known academic discussion on human rights in the borderlands has evolved
around the militarization of the border by the U.S. government since the 1990s and its
implications for the human rights of millions of undocumented and documented migrants
crossing into the United States. Conservative estimates suggest that since 1995 more than
3000 mostly Latin American migrants have perished in an attempt to cross the border into
the United States (Cornelius 2001; Eschbach et al. 1999; Nevins 2003, 2007). Many
migrants are ill-equipped for their journeys across the border and the improvisational and
basic help provided to migrants by grassroots organizations like the Good Samaritans or
No More Death is only a drop in the ocean. Tragicomically, several volunteers of the
Good Samaritans have recently been arrested and charged by the Border Police for
smuggling migrants into the United States, while driving two dehydrated and seriously
weakened migrants to a hospital (Cooper 2006).
The militarization of the border has further, though hardly known, human rights
implications that mainly affects female migrants entering the United States (Dunn 1999).
In her study Rape as Weapon of War, Sylvanna Falcon (2001) illustrates why rape of
migrants by INS officials and Border Patrol agents is an outcome of the militarization of
39
the border and poses gross infringements of human rights that remain mostly unpunished.
Falcon argues that military units policing the border lack proper civilian training, and
based as they are on a racially constructed “us versus them philosophy” fails to conform
to general law enforcement standards (Huspek et al. 1998).
Framing human trafficking
Similar to the public sphere, the academic world has only recently discovered human
trafficking as a field of concern and study. A significant number of studies of human
trafficking across the fields have found a home in journals concerning migration issues,
most notably International Migration (e.g., migration studies Oxman-Martinez et al.
2005; Richards 2004; Salt 2000). This dearth of publication venues reflects one of the
assertions of this paper— that human trafficking is to a large extent a migration issue that
calls for more in-depth analysis of the underlying socio-economic dimensions that
produce the given outcome. A good example for such a view is Wheaton and Schauer's
(2010) study of the overall economic factors that enable human trafficking nationally and
internationally. Most interestingly, the authors also take into consideration the everyday
consumer of products and argue in their analysis that “consumers are employers of
trafficked labor” (Wheaton and Schauer 2010, 1). This approach is noteworthy, as most
studies concerning human trafficking are limited to rather abstract notions of supply and
demand and fail to put a name on a key component furthering and enabling labor
exploitation. Berman (2010), on the other hand, criticizes national anti-trafficking policy
programs for failing to acknowledge migrant workers’ agency in making economic
40
decisions based on a simple cost and benefit analysis. On similar grounds, Buckland
(2008) claims that refocusing on the socio-economic and political reasons why workers
become victims of forced migration is necessary in order to get at the bottom of the issue.
A number of human trafficking studies have also been published in journals in the legal
field (Garber 2006; Torg 2006; Vergara 2007), sociology (Jones et.al. 2007), political
science (Beeks and Amir 2006; Flowers 2001; Hughes 2000), anthropology (Gozdziak
and MacDonnell 2007), and human rights studies (Bridget 2003; Shigekane 2007).
Scholarly work in geography exploring issues of human trafficking is limited mostly to
publications by John Salt (1997, 2000) and Koser Khalid (2000, 2001, 2007), whose
expertise in migration studies serves as their angle for exploring human trafficking in
Europe. For instance, Koser’s study from 2010 concerns the challenges involved in
measuring irregular migration, including the difficulty of distinguishing migrant
smuggling from human trafficking and the unscientific methods applied to such efforts.
Additionally, the author highlights a shortage of micro-level explanations for human
trafficking, as most studies are set on the macro level, focusing on structural causes and
policies aimed at addressing human trafficking.
Koser correctly claims that broad studies intending to provide an overview of certain
aspects of human trafficking dominate the field. Noteworthy among them are the work of
Kevin Bales (2007), Benjamin Skinner (2008b), or Siddarth Kara (2008). However, while
these studies provide a valuable and important overview of human trafficking as a global
41
issue by highlighting its occurrences in different parts of the world, their works also
signal that academic research on the issue is still in its infancy in that scholars, along with
politicians and non-profit organizations, are still grappling with the real scope, cause, and
effect of the issue. A significant number of studies replicate this approach on a national
scale, including Robby and Tanner's (2009) analysis of human trafficking in Thailand, or
Buckley's (2009) investigation of public perceptions of human trafficking in Russia.
Nami and Keiko (2009) conducted a similar study of Japanese perceptions of human
trafficking.
Scholarly work focusing on any aspect of human trafficking on a regional or local scale is
scarce and hard to come by. If it exists, such work is many times the product of non-profit
collaboration and is created and published outside of academic circles. A good exception
is Freedom denied: Forced labor in California (2005), a report issued by the Human
Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley that provides a regional analysis
of human trafficking as a form of severe forced labor. The goal of this study is to start
filling in this significant gap in investigations of place and human trafficking in the
United States and elsewhere. Against the backdrop of extensive studies of national and
global studies of human trafficking, this research offers a place-centered approach to
studying the issue based on the belief that valuable knowledge can be obtained by
observing the local economic and social dynamics that have an impact on the problem
and the way society tackles it.
42
Chapter 3
Towards a model of localizing the fight against human trafficking
Human trafficking has emerged as one of the most complex and intricate sociopolitical
global challenges of the 21
st
century. Its complexity is manifest in and determined by a
variety of interrelated aspects. Mirroring the notion that in our increasingly globalized
world no place is static and gridlocked in time and space, human trafficking is now in
some form or other prevalent in every region of the world. Human trafficking is the
product of a number of core processes of globalization with a very specific manifestation
in place. As outlined in the previous chapter, global economic integration and
transnational political partnerships have dominated the constitution of and relationships
between nation-states in recent decades. Global integration is also linked to a weakening
of national borders and a steady increase in international migration. Coupled with a lack
of substantial political supervision and regulation in terms of the preservation of
migrants' basic human rights, this development has resulted in the exploitation of millions
of workers around the globe. Thus, I understand human trafficking to be a specific
outcome in a specific place produced by a set of socio-economic and political processes
initiated on the global, national, and regional scale (Figure 3.1). I emphasize the local
scale as well as the scale of the body, because while human trafficking is indeed a global
and transnational phenomenon, its consequences primarily become tangible and visible in
local outcomes (e.g., survivors of human trafficking and disrupted local communities).
43
In the case of Greater Los Angeles, I have identified urbanization, migration, and
militarization as key processes to creating an environment in which trafficking in human
beings flourishes. Over the past century or more Greater Los Angeles has experienced
enormous growth in terms of urban sprawl and population size, and epitomizes economic
prosperity, opportunity, and new beginnings to its inhabitants. Migrant workers are
particularly attracted to Greater Los Angeles with its enormous demand for low-skilled
workers.
However, since the current immigration system in the United States is structured in a way
that denies most unskilled migrant workers to enter the country legally, the bulk of
migrants come to the country as undocumented immigrants. This development has been
aggravated by a militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, which tends to increase the
vulnerability of migrant workers to becoming victims of exploitation. Especially
urbanization and labor migration, but also restrictions to legal migration, are
characteristic of urban development throughout the world and produce a number of
outcomes. In the case of Greater Los Angeles, the localization of these processes has
made the city-region a prime hub for human trafficking and led to the exploitation of
workers, women, and children from around the world.
44
Figure 3.1: A spatial theory of human trafficking.
45
Drawing a clear and comprehensible picture of the scope and dynamics of human
trafficking is a complicated task, in part because of the countless different scenarios in
which the problem occurs. The commonly used distinction between sex trafficking and
labor trafficking does little justice to the multifacetedness of this problem. Such diverse
manifestations present a profound challenge to defining human trafficking. Over the past
decade, a number of international and national documents have been introduced with the
intention of providing a definition of human trafficking that reflects the problem's basic
dimensions and serves as a tool for legal prosecution. While these documents provide a
useful toolkit for addressing the problem, precisely what defines human trafficking is not
agreed upon across the board and has thus opened up space for wide interpretation. For
instance, in the United States, the effort to define human trafficking has been dominated
by parties at odds on the issue of sex trafficking and the legalization of prostitution. What
results is a variety of interpretations of human trafficking embedded in issues of
immigration regulation, moral misconduct requiring religiously motivated counteraction,
international human rights, sex versus labor exploitation, and gender inequality.
This range of opinions in the human trafficking debate has inevitably resulted in a diverse
landscape of anti-human trafficking strategies and efforts implemented and initiated
mostly in relation to national and international governmental protocols. Advocates for an
immigration regulation approach argue that human trafficking poses a threat to national
security and thus calls for militarizing the border and cracking down on undocumented
migration. Faith-based groups, on the other hand, largely view human trafficking as sex
46
trafficking and prostitution, and fight the problem on moral grounds. Human rights
activists see human trafficking first and foremost as a violation of a person's basic human
rights and call for socio-political strategies to address the issue. Two central points of
criticism arise from this aspect. First, while each approach addresses an important matter
pertaining to human trafficking, none represents a holistic approach reflecting and
incorporating the complexity of the problem at hand. Instead, they provide a partial
solution to combating labor exploitation. In theory, the simultaneous implementation of
the various strategies outlined above could yield meaningful results. However, in the case
of anti-human trafficking work in the United States, an emphasis on immigration
regulation and the abolition of prostitution has dominated anti-human trafficking
programs and thus diluted the mission to identify and serve all victims of labor
exploitation in the country. Second, the majority of strategies deployed in the fight
against human trafficking in the United States are conceived and launched on a national
scale. The federal government has emerged as the leading entity in providing financial
and other resources for anti-human trafficking work in cities throughout the United
States. This dynamic has led to a top-down approach, with federal agencies dominating
anti-human trafficking work on the ground, thereby overlooking the spatial differences
and place-specific characteristics that are crucial to successful implementation in local
settings. Recent data reviewing the number of victims identified and served versus the
estimated number of people in forced labor situations in the United States reveal the
limits of such an approach.
47
Creating a model of localizing efforts to eradicate human trafficking
My research provides a geographic perspective on efforts to combat human trafficking in
the United States by anchoring important aspects of existing approaches in a spatial
analysis. I adopt a spatial analytical approach to investigate how and in what form the
localization of international and national anti-human trafficking responses through local
agents has emerged as an essential but often neglected factor in effectively combating
human trafficking in the United States (Figure 3.2). A central question in human rights
work is how to translate universal norms into locally acceptable and meaningful
standards, and thus to address human rights infringements in an effective way
guaranteeing a long-term improvement (Carmalt 2007). I disagree with the body of
geographic literature claiming that an “end of geography” was brought about by a time-
space compression, which has in turn led to the deterritorialization of human activity in
times of globalization. Proponents of such a notion state that the new natural order is
centered on the global scale, undermining the significance of other geographical scales
(Ohmae 1990). Instead, I concur with geographic work emphasizing that localization
remains a significant phenomenon, in spite of the global processes deeply influencing
specific places (Massey 1991, 1994; Castells 1996; McDowell 1999). Put differently,
while the relations of time and space have indeed been profoundly transformed, requiring
a re-conceptualization of scale relations and of the speed of the processes that change the
world, geographers simultaneously argue that the value of place has gained new meaning
(Swyngedouw 1997). Central to this debate is the status of the nation-state, which some
argue has been rendered obsolete, whereas city-states have emerged as key agents of
48
political and economic power (Ohmae 1990).
Place especially matters in the context of human rights work, as causes, processes,
responses, and outcomes are always embedded in a very specific time and space
framework. Acknowledging the very specific composition of places in the
implementation of human rights policies and legislation is therefore essential. Places are
shaped by a bundle of economic, social, political, and cultural processes, which differ
from one locale to another. In other words, certain phenomena play out differently in
different places. These place-producing processes can include economic structuring,
multiple religious populations, demographic change, ethnic diversity, national and
international migration, as well as the spatial composition of a place. These locally
specific factors shape the success or failure of the conservation of human rights
standards.
49
Figure 3.2: Localizing anti-human trafficking actions.
50
The United States is not only a prime destination for human trafficking, but also in recent
years the federal government has passed some of the most extensive and broad legal
measures to address the human trafficking challenge nationally and internationally. In
spite of this ambitious set of measurements, however, national anti-human trafficking
efforts have not produced the desired outcome in terms of victims identified and served
and traffickers prosecuted. While time certainly plays a role in the often interminable
process of policy implementation, I argue that a key problem is the absence of
contextualization and localization in the response efforts. National policies have been
gridlocked on a national scale, because the federal government lacks sufficient social
resources and the kind of place-specific knowledge that facilitates the fight against
human trafficking. Moreover, I argue that since it is a local manifestation of a set of
global processes, human trafficking necessitates an anti-human trafficking approach that
is informed by and reflects local contexts to understand and to address the problem
successfully (Figure 3.2).
Facing a substantial humanitarian crisis caused by large numbers of migrants trafficked to
and within the United States each year, cities and their local partners have had to pick up
the slack in the national anti-trafficking work. I thus argue that cities have emerged as
mediators or nexus between federal/state policy and local needs. Urban locales not only
are important agents stepping up to combat the human trafficking that is permeating their
economic, social, and cultural environments, but also serve as interactive platforms for a
large variety of international, national, state, and local governmental and non-
51
governmental agents. As suggested elsewhere (DeTroy 2009), large overarching
institutional initiatives tend to use a “one size fits all” approach that produces
disappointing results. Instead, diverse and locally customized approaches are key to
social change. A place-focused concept is essential to dealing successfully with the crime
of trafficking, as only an approach that incorporates the various processes and conditions
informing agents and shaping the context they operate in will enable the anti-trafficking
movement to be successful. In particular, understanding local communities' economic and
social needs and establishing a good rapport among community leaders and groups are
essential to addressing the issue of human trafficking in a meaningful and place-sensitive
way. A localization of national and universal human rights policies is necessary to
safeguarding a victim's basic rights.
Data sources and methodologies
My methodological toolkit includes a variety of ethnographic and qualitative methods,
since qualitative methods are best suited to revealing an in-depth and nuanced
understanding of a matter as socioeconomically and politically complex and diverse as
human trafficking and the respective movement that has evolved to combat it.
Understanding what defines human trafficking before investigating efforts to combat the
crime is important. Human trafficking is highly contested definitionally speaking. In
Chapter Four, I consider definitions of human trafficking, and explicate how it compares
to and differs from related phenomena such as human smuggling, prostitution, illegal
immigration, or refugee movement. Because the term “human trafficking” was only
52
widely introduced in the early 1990s, this chapter also investigates how academic
literature and the public media framed the phenomenon of trafficking in human beings
pre-1990s, and what led to this significant shift in the slavery debate in the past decade.
Using in-depth analysis of secondary and historical sources, mission and campaign
statements, as well as legal texts and media reports, the chapter critically assesses how
slavery has been historically perceived and what distinguishes modern forms of slavery
from the historic counterpart. The chapter also undertakes a content analysis of news
media articles and Internet blogs about human trafficking. This analysis of articles
published between 1995 and 2008 considers publications that use the terms “human
trafficking,” “slavery,” and “labor exploitation” to analyze the presence and
understanding of the phenomenon in the public mind as well as how perceptions of it
have changed.
Chapter Five provides a quantitative and qualitative analysis of human trafficking and the
demand for services by survivors of labor exploitation it thus produces in the L.A. region.
The chapter outlines the nature, scope, and scale of trafficking in human beings,
including the origins of victims, the global trafficking routes, the taxonomy of human
trafficking types, the economic dimension of human trafficking as well as its relation to
other criminal networks such as drug trafficking and weapons trafficking in the Mexico-
US border region. The bulk of the analysis is based on human rights reports, media
articles, governmental and non-governmental accounts, oral histories, interviews, and
documentary films. The analysis revolves around five major themes: immigration, the
53
demand for low-income workers, the city as epitome of the American Dream, Los
Angeles as a border and port city, and the nature of domestic human trafficking.
Chapter Six critically assesses current efforts to tackle human trafficking in Greater Los
Angeles. By adopting a spatial analytical approach, this chapter explores the supply of
service and awareness programs developed and implemented in Greater Los Angeles,
with a special focus on how a localization of international and national anti-human
trafficking responses is taking place through local agents. Chapter Six is structured
around two key agents. First, the chapter identifies and investigates the key stakeholders,
their collaboration across the lines and their varying political and ideological approaches
to addressing human trafficking. The anti-human trafficking movement in Greater Los
Angeles is defined by a multi-agency approach incorporating local, state, and federal
governments, community agencies, legal advocates, law enforcement agents, survivors of
human trafficking, human-rights groups, shelters, faith-based communities, immigrant
rights organizations, and ethnic communities. Second, the chapter examines how the
community addresses and meets the extensive needs of survivors of human trafficking. A
closer look at campaigns and programs reveals the overall challenges anti-trafficking
activists are facing in working with survivors, from working with scant resources and
funding to overcoming cultural barriers.
The analysis in Chapter Six is largely based on a series of interviews and participant
observations I conducted over the course of two years, between 2007 and 2009. I adopted
54
a two-fold approach. First, I attended more than 35 public outreach events, training
seminars, and task force meetings in Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties to
undertake participant observation and establish initial contact with potential interview
partners. Second, I conducted a series of 50 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 43
interviewees from 34 institutions involved in anti-human trafficking actions in Southern
California over the course of 12 months
7
. My aim in choosing the interview partners,
which include law enforcement agents, legal councilors, social service providers, policy
advocates, local government officials, academics, and volunteers, was to draw upon a
wide variety of agents in terms of their political nature (governmental or non-
governmental) as well as the scale and scope of their operation. At the interviewee's
request, I submitted a set of questions in advance of the scheduled interview. The group
of non-governmental agents interviewed and observed in their work is by no means
holistic, but should rather serve as an overall representation of a movement that has
experienced substantial growth over the past several years.
The federal government has taken a leading position in fighting human trafficking in
Greater Los Angeles and elsewhere in the country. Not only do federal dollars make up a
substantial part of the anti-trafficking funding base on the ground, and thus determine the
outlook on and nature of the work that is implemented, but also a federal agency—
namely ICE— has emerged as the lead investigator of human trafficking in the region.
Analysis has also shown that, to date, the resources spent and investigations conducted
7
The University of Southern California University Park Institutional Review Board staff declared this
study “not human subjects research” because of the non-personal nature of the interview questions
asked (Appendix A).
55
into human trafficking have not produced the desired outcome. Chapter Seven thus
conducts a case study to explore the dimensions of place in anti-human trafficking work
in Greater Los Angeles. The overall argument calls for reassigning anti-human trafficking
responsibilities and suggests that the federal government take a back seat, and instead
empowers local community organizations “on the ground” in the battle against human
trafficking. As this chapter shows, small, community-based organizations with a strong
victim-centered approach and established social and cultural roots in the communities
have produced better outcomes in identifying victims, organizing adequate and necessary
assistance, and seeking justice for their clients.
Reflections on activist research
This study has evolved out of three years of personal participation and collaboration with
anti-human trafficking and human rights groups in Southern California. It is therefore
important to address issues of positionality, accountability, and reciprocity within my
research as a defining aspect of my methodological approach. I undertook this research
project with the firm intention and hope of producing a study that would not simply retire
on a library shelf, but rather would make a direct and relevant contribution to a certain
campaign for social justice in this world. Of late, integrations of academic writing and
civic engagement have become more popular, and will likely continue to be of relevance
in a United States, where political leadership calls upon constituents to give new meaning
to and campaign for matters of social urgency. My interest in human trafficking arose
during an extended trip through Southeast Asia's Mekong Delta several years ago, which
56
piqued my curiosity about this particularly horrendous problem of human rights
violations and eventually led me to become a dedicated and committed human rights
activist combating human trafficking in Southern California. My role as an academic
activist naturally prompts questions of reconciling responsibilities to academia as well as
to the community with which I have engaged. I will address this issue by elaborating on
the ethical “dilemmas” or challenges I have encountered and the strategies I have
employed in an attempt to resolve or at least mitigate them.
In my reflections, I draw upon a well-established body of feminist theory, challenging the
objective, god's view claim on the production of knowledge by asserting that all forms of
knowledge are situated, meaning that researchers are not silent witnesses, but rather that
their various identities form and shape the knowledge they produce (Haraway 1991). This
line of thought further suggests that declaring one's position and acknowledging the
“partiality of gaze” (Maxey 1999, p. 199) to the social world may lead to a more solid
and sound analysis anchored in the researcher's unique experience. Reflecting on one's
identity is thus an essential part of considerate and reasonable activist research (Mountz
2002). In my case, I am a white, European, graduate student bringing a strong human
rights perspective to the discussion and activism against human trafficking. Accordingly,
one of my ethical dilemmas has been in disagreements with dissenting activists on
political and moral grounds, while at the same time I have established close relationships
and even friendships with more like-minded fellow activists. I acknowledge and accept
this bias, which is also revealed in the hypothesis I laid out for the research project, the
57
methodological choices I made, and the writing-up of my analysis, because a central goal
of my research is to show that a localized human rights approach is the most efficient
and, in the long-term, successful way to initiate social justice for all victims of human
trafficking.
As a scholar-activist, I have been both an ally in the movement and an academic who
capitalizes on observing and tapping into other people's lives, the results of which will
lead to the completion of a graduate degree and thus boost my professional career. In
order to reconcile this ethical challenge of giving and taking, I have followed Pulido's
(2009) suggestion and seriously considered aspects of accountability and reciprocity in
my activist research. In Pulido's view, accountability denotes the researcher's rooted
commitment to and long-term engagement with the research community, as only this
dedication will “ensure the relevancy of your work to create social change” (2009, p.
351). I partly realized this requirement by becoming a part of the anti-human trafficking
world in Southern California well before I made a decision to focus my dissertational
research on this subject matter. I have also stayed involved after finishing my fieldwork.
My level of engagement has changed over the years. I started out as a simple volunteer
for one of the most distinguished anti-human trafficking agencies in the area, and later
became a key organizer of a local community group with a couple of hundred members
dedicated to combating modern-slavery, a position that I hold to this day. This later, more
intensive level of engagement with the community has especially blurred the boundaries
among myself, my research, and my research subjects, an ambiguity I feel compelled to
58
address. Without ever attempting to reinforce strict, artificial boundaries, I have initiated
certain attempts to place myself on more neutral ground in order to sustain channels of
communication with and amongst disagreeing parties and to take on a more “objective”
role as a researcher. Most significantly, when I took over as the organizer of the Los
Angeles Fight Human Trafficking Meetup, my colleagues and I redefined the group's
mission to serve as an unaffiliated platform open to activists from all walks of life who
care about ending human trafficking. This “neutral” stance has proven immensely
valuable for my research as well as for the activists involved, as we have been able to
build bridges in an otherwise largely polarized anti-trafficking sector in Southern
California.
The discussion of accountability overlaps with the question of reciprocity, i.e., the
question of how the community has benefited from my participation. Documenting and
telling the story of the activists' struggle is a standard, but many times insufficient, way to
give back to the community, as this product more often than not ends up in a dusty
drawer without ever reaching a larger audience or readership, and thus having little
impact on social change. Hence, it is my firm intention to publish an executive summary
report of my dissertation, providing the community with a status quo of the anti-human
trafficking sector in Southern California in the hopes that such a document will help the
agents to identify common problem areas as well as opportunities to improve and
intensify collaborative work. Apart from my academic work, I have initiated a series of
projects of direct use to the activist community. These efforts include drafting a life-skills
59
manual for survivors of trafficking in Los Angeles; organizing and implementing several
fundraisers in support of established human rights and anti-human trafficking agencies;
producing a public service announcement for Human Trafficking Awareness Day that
was screened to more than 7000 viewers across the country; serving as a keynote speaker
at a local high-school awareness event; organizing donations for emergency backpacks
for local shelters taking in survivors of trafficking; or, in case I was not able to provide
certain required skills myself, providing access to a network of people equipped with
such sought after talents.
Whether my efforts to show appreciation to the research community and serious
commitment to this particular political struggle has been adequate without compromising
my role as a researcher and fulfilling my responsibilities towards the academic
community remains to be seen. However, from the standpoint of personal ethics, the
approach I have chosen has been the only acceptable way for me to engage in this
project, which I care deeply about and with which I hope to make a contribution that
reaches beyond the academic world.
60
Chapter 4
Unpacking the concept of human trafficking
Human trafficking has many faces and forms. This human rights problem comprises
stories of men forced to work the mining shafts of India, women from Nigeria tricked
into prostitution in Vienna and Paris, and the exploitation of farm workers in the
strawberry fields of California. The complexity and variety of scenarios of this activity
pose a significant challenge to any attempt to conceptualize and capture human
trafficking as a gross human rights violation. The scope and complexity of the issue,
endeavors to encapsulate human trafficking in a single definition have proven
problematic on at least five grounds. First, the terminology used to frame the crime is
“vague and confusing” (Sax 2009), as the phrase “human trafficking” poorly captures the
nature and diversity of the problem. For instance, “trafficking” semantically connotes the
movement or transportation of people, which is not an essential element of trafficking.
Vagueness also pertains to the scope of the problem. Accordingly, estimates of trafficking
victims vary widely. A common number invoked is 27 million victims globally— a
statistic based on research conducted by Kevin Bales (2007). The International Labor
Organization (ILO) puts the number of victims at 11.3 million (CIA 2010), 56 per cent of
whom apparently are women and children (TIP Report 2009). The US government
estimates that between 14 500 to 17 500 people are trafficked into the United States every
year (TIP Report 2006), a number revised after it was initially put at 50 000 in 2000 (TIP
61
Report 2001). Similarly unclear is the economic scope of human trafficking. Estimates
suggest that human trafficking has become the second largest criminal industry in the
world, generating up to $32 billion in revenue (Polaris Project 2010). Second, human
trafficking is largely embedded in the global process of international migration. Any
policy attempting to tackle this form of human rights violation is therefore always
entangled in a larger discourse of migration regulation, which generally tends to
subordinate victims of human trafficking to a grander narrative of national threat and
protection. In this regard, the lack of a clear distinction between human smuggling and
human trafficking is a matter of confusion. Third, sex trafficking and forced prostitution
constitute a significant component of human trafficking. Efforts to conceptualize human
trafficking have thus also been dominated by a controversy between forces of pro-
legalization and anti-legalization of prostitution, centered on whether “voluntary”
prostitution should be incorporated in defining the crime.
Related to the previous issues, a fourth aspect impeding a clear definition of human
trafficking is the competing political and ideological grounds of the various parties
involved in framing human trafficking . While it certainly emerges in any endeavor
aimed at defining such a complex socio-political matter, such a challenge strikes me as
particularly problematic and challenging in the given case. In their most extreme form,
these different ideological approaches result in the construction of a person subjected to
human trafficking as either a victim of gross human rights violations or a perpetrator
“who threaten[s] the integrated nation-state” (Chavez 2001). Competing stances around
62
human trafficking generally incorporate human rights advocates, immigration regulation
policymakers, moralistic and faith-based abolitionists, or feminist activists. Fifth,,
cultural nature and practices as well as the historical specifics of a place also play into the
crime, and more importantly, into developing and implementing successful policies to
prevent it. For instance, anti-human trafficking activists find a very different socio-
political and cultural landscape in the United States, where slavery was legally abolished
almost 150 years ago and where a stronger legal and political agenda to fight human
trafficking is in place than in, for example, Mauritania, where to this day— and in spite of
a government emancipation declaration that declared slavery illegal in 2007— slavery
remains an integral cultural element of a society in which ethnic Haratines continue to be
enslaved by the Beidane, the ruling elite of Arab-Berber descent (Oloruntoba 2009).
The purpose of this chapter is to offer a critical investigation of the formal and informal
discourse of human trafficking in the public sphere in the United States. It examines the
history and nature of this human rights issue as it is being shaped and portrayed in
national and international policy agreements, the media and historical sources, and by
non-profit activists. Clarifying fundamental questions pertaining to understanding human
trafficking, this chapter serves as the backdrop to an investigation of the anti-human
trafficking efforts in Southern California in the following chapters. This chapter is
composed of three sections, each centering on a core of research questions, which are
outlined below. As an entry point into framing human trafficking, the first part examines
the basic dimensions of human trafficking as they are being defined in key legal
63
documents and policy agreements that are generally being accepted and employed as
guiding tools in the national and international fight against human trafficking. The legal
framing of the problem is termed the formal discourse of human trafficking. While the
emphasis in this discussion is on the United States, this section also offers an
international comparative perspective. Apart from definitional matters, this section
concerns how these agreements came about and what constituted the main issues of
controversy in the negotiations and drafting of the documents.
Having sorted out the fundamentals, part two looks at the historical dimension of human
trafficking and its roots in slavery. Of concern here is the question of whether terming
human trafficking a modern form of slavery is accurate, and the extent to which this
claim, as widely utilized in the anti-human trafficking movement, employs apt language.
A comparative look at what constitutes “old” and “new” slavery in terms of victim
population, legal framework, geographical range, and forms of exploitation brings light to
this aspect. Part three concludes this chapter with a look at the informal discourse of
human trafficking, i.e., how the issue is portrayed in contemporary media and perceptions
in the public sphere. More importantly, this section offers a glance at what role survivors
of human trafficking take in the framing of this human rights violation. The main
argument here is that survivors of trafficking are largely banned from the chain of agents
involved in constructing the narrative of human trafficking, and are portrayed as the
passive Other subjected to criminal practices and for whom society has to take action.
64
Human trafficking: a formal discourse
International legislation
The definition of human trafficking is a “terminological minefield” (Skeldon 2000). The
earliest definition of human trafficking goes back to the 1949 Convention for the
Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others,
which focused on the recruitment and movement of women across borders for the
purpose of prostitution. Today, two of the internationally most widely accepted
documents framing trafficking in persons stem from the UN Protocol to Prevent,
Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, also known
as the Palermo Protocol and supplementing the United Nations Convention against
Transnational Organized Crime (2000), and the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act
(TVPA 2000), both passed in 2000.
The Palermo Protocol (2000) was adopted by resolution A/RES/55/25 at the 55
th
session
of the General Assembly of the United Nations and, as of September 2008, 117 countries
out of 124 parties had signed the document (Palermo Protocol 2008). The agreement
went into effect in December 2003 and is the first global legally binding instrument
addressing human trafficking. It defines human trafficking as:
the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means
of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of
deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving
or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having
control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall
include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms
of sexual exploitation, forced labor or service, slavery or practices similar to
slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.
65
The UN definition of trafficking in people emphasizes three elementary components:
transportation, coercion, and exploitation (Figure 4.1.). The aspect of transportation
suggests that a trafficked person at some point has moved voluntarily or involuntarily
from one place to another, but does not necessarily require a transnational crossing. As
discussed below, in cases where human trafficking entails the crossing of a national
border, human trafficking oftentimes is linked to human smuggling, which constitutes a
different crime and needs to be clearly distinguished. The second defining component of
human trafficking according to the UN is any form of coercion or fraud that has
established a trafficking situation. The range of possible coercive or fraudulent measures
to manipulate a potential migrant worker is vast, and thus leaves plenty of room for
broader or narrower interpretations of what constitutes a trafficking situation. For
instance, a fraudulent case may be where a woman from Southeast Asia is promised a
waitress job in England, when in fact the waitress job entails sexual performance for
customers. On the other hand, a Mexican worker may be coerced into a trafficking
situation by his trafficker, who has confiscated his documentation papers and thus
prevents him from alerting the authorities without compromising his status in the foreign
country. Exploitation is defined just as broadly and openly as is coercion, but sets a
minimum standard that addresses forced prostitution, forced labor, and the organ
trafficking – the last a step-child to the anti-trafficking movement.
66
Figure 4.1. United Nations model explaining human trafficking. Source: United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime. 2010. What is human trafficking? Available at:
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/what-is-human-trafficking.html.
In short, while providing a generally powerful instrument to the anti-trafficking world,
the UN definition lacks detailed guidelines and keeps the framework broad, allowing for
individual national interpretations of which cases specifically fall into the category of the
exploitation of human beings. This wide interpretability is no coincidence. While the
Palermo definition is globally accepted, its enactment antedated heated debates over how
to address human trafficking in the context of irregular labor migration, the preservation
of human rights, targeting the socioeconomic factors determining human trafficking,
national security implications, and transnational crime (Chuang 2006a)— an issue that
should also dominate the trafficking debate in the United States. In the end, the approach
67
to regulate human trafficking as a criminal justice problem trumped endeavors to address
the root causes of trafficking in persons. Thus, assessing human trafficking first and
foremost as a border and crime control issue, the United Nations passed the counter-
trafficking law under the larger umbrella of international crime prevention.
As highlighted by Chuang (2006), the obvious concern with border control by the
participating states was also revealed in attempts to draw a legal distinction between
human trafficking and human smuggling— defined as the illegal movement of persons
across borders for profit (Protocol against the smuggling of migrants 2000)— a
distinction that is often difficult to make in practice. Take, for instance, a routine raid of a
workplace in Los Angeles by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, where
workers who lack any proper identification are in a first processing step round-up as
undocumented and thus are labelled smuggled immigrants. According to this protocol,
potential victims of trafficking are first and foremost criminalized as perpetrators against
national immigration law when they in fact have fallen victim to a federal crime. Whether
the trafficking component of their situation will be investigated properly mostly depends
on the training, expertise, and surely the willingness of the officers in charge. Too often,
victims of human trafficking are designated undocumented smuggled migrants and thus
never obtain the services and help they are entitled to according to federal trafficking law.
Again, such ambiguity may not be a coincidence in a political and cultural environment
where anti-immigration rhetoric has been dominating any attempt to humanize and ease
immigration regulation in the past decade.
68
But the national security debate was only one obstacle to international trafficking
legislation that would have focused on the preservation of the trafficked person's human
rights. At the same time, global anti-trafficking policy provoked controversy between the
anti-prostitution and the pro-legalization of prostitution parties concerning whether an
international legal definition of trafficking should encompass “voluntary” prostitution as
a form of forced and involuntary labor (Soderlund 2005; Schauer and Wheaton 2006;
Kulish 2007). Anchored in the White Slavery
8
movement of the early 20
th
century, anti-
prostitution feminists together with conservative Christian advocates agitated for an
abolitionist approach to prostitution and therefore aimed for an inclusion of all forms of
prostitution— whether voluntary or involuntary— in an international definition of
human trafficking (Kempadoo 2005). The United Nations also opted for a broader
conceptual framework and adopted a definition of human trafficking that has left more
questions to the individual member states.
US Legislation
Simultaneous to the passing of the UN Convention, the United States announced its own
national anti-trafficking legislation in the form of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act
(TVPA 2000), which made trafficking in humans a federal crime and which is to date one
of the most comprehensive pieces of anti-human trafficking legislation in the world
(Chacon 2006). Under the TVPA, victims of trafficking are given protections including
8
White Slavery refers to an alleged international criminal ring in the U.S. in the early 20
th
century that
abducted women and girls in Europe and forced them into prostitution in brothels in Chicago. The
claims of such practices resulted in the passing of the White-Slave Traffic Act (also known as the Mann
Act) in 1910, which prohibited the interstate transportation of women for “immoral purposes,” i.e.,
prostitution.
69
immigration status, social service benefits, and legal rights. The TVPA enables
prosecutors and law enforcement to prosecute and punish traffickers by creating federal
crimes that address trafficking, a list that has expanded in the act's reauthorizations in
2003, 2005, and 2008. The TVPA applies its definition of human trafficking to “severe
forms of trafficking” and distinguishes between sex trafficking and labor trafficking.
Accordingly, sex trafficking is defined “in which a commercial sex act is induced by
force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not
attained 18 years of age.” Labor trafficking, on the other hand, is defined as 'the
recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person of labor or
services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to
involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery” (TVPA 2000).
The U.S. definition focuses on elements of force, fraud, and coercion deployed in order to
exploit a person. While force and coercion in practice overlap to a large degree (Song
2009), the law explicitly defines coercion as “threats of serious harm to or physical
restraint against any person; any scheme, plan, or pattern intended to cause a person to
believe that failure to perform an act would result in serious harm to or physical restraint
against any person; or the abuse or threatened abuse of the legal process” (TVPA 2000).
Force, on the other hand, refers to the use or threat of use of physical violence to make a
person work against his or her will. Fraud entails any use of false pretenses and promises
by means of which a person is tricked into exploitative labor.
70
In contrast to the UN definition, the US definition does not require the physical
transportation of a person from one location to another in order to constitute human
trafficking. This aspect has contributed to some general confusion about what constitutes
trafficking, as the term is naturally associated with the movement of a person or object
internationally or nationally. Sandie Morgan, a leader in the Southern California anti-
trafficking movement and administrator of the Orange County Human Trafficking Task
Force, made it clear that “we need to do a better job to explain why we use the word
trafficking” (Morgan 2008). A look at the dictionary shows that trafficking is an inflected
version of the verb “traffic” (Merriam-Webster dictionary 2010). “Traffic” as a verb takes
on several meanings. As an intransitive verb it either means “to carry on traffic” or “to
concentrate one's effort or interest.” As a transitive verb, traffic is defined as “to travel
over/visit as a customer” or as “to trade or barter.” Thus, while the component of
movement has a strong presence in defining “traffic,” understandings of trafficking in the
U.S. clearly focus on trading or bartering in persons, which may or may not entail the
transportation or movement of a person across or within national borders. The U.S.
approach, in this regard, follows definitions of drug trafficking or weapon trafficking.
Accordingly, a person selling drugs from his home is considered a drug trafficker, even
though his business only entails an exchange of monetary value, but no movement across
borders. Similarly, a person subjected to forced labor in his/her own house is also a
victim of trafficking, even though the person does not set a foot outside his/her house,
much less crosses an international border in order to become a victim of human
trafficking.
71
Still, the vocabulary used to define the issue is confusing. Apart from the term's
lexicological ambiguity, this confusion also stems from a general conflation of human
trafficking with human smuggling in the public sphere. For that reason, reports and
training materials on human trafficking strongly emphasize the difference between the
two phenomena (e.g., California Alliance 2007). Human trafficking is considered a crime
against a person and human smuggling is a crime against a border. At the same time, the
UN Palermo Protocol is one of three protocols supplementing the United Nations
Convention against transnational crime, one of which is the Protocol against the
Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air. In this case, human trafficking is viewed
through the lens of transnational crimes and closely associated with smuggling human
beings, which in fact are two completely different criminal offenses. An additional factor
contributing to the blurry picture of trafficking and smuggling is the predominant view
that victims of trafficking in the U.S. are mostly foreigners, which is actually true. Most
of these victims at one point embarked on a journey that included crossing borders—
legally or illegally. The common belief that human trafficking is at least associated with
human smuggling, if not the same issue, is thus not farfetched.
A look at other countries’ terminology for a trafficking situation shows that the focus is
generally set on trading a person. As with the English terminology, exploitation, which is
at the heart of trafficking, is missing or neglected. This absence certainly complicates a
grounded understanding of how a trafficking situation is constituted. For instance, in
German the terms “Menschenhandel” and “Zwangsprostitution” are used to denote a
72
situation where a person is subjected to forced labor. “Menschenhandel” literally
translates as the trade in human beings and emphasizes the commercial aspect of the act.
The Spanish term “la trata de personas” or the Chinese expression “fan mai ren kou” used
to refer to trafficking in persons similarly put the emphasis on the selling and buying of
persons. This focus on the trade of people and less so on the element of servitude derives
from the 18
th
century transatlantic slave trade and is central to terminology used around
the world today. In many cases neither the English expression, “trafficking,” nor other
terminology adequately describes the complexity of what a trafficking situation entails,
especially the exploitation of a person for personal financial gain. In Spanish-speaking
countries the phrase “la trata de personas” is preferred over “el trafico de personas,” as in
Latin America the latter is easily associated with drug and arms trading. On a similar
note, further confusion is created by a lack of terminology, especially in local languages.
For instance, in Swahili the phrase “usafirishaji haramu wa binadamu” means the illegal
transportation of human beings, which again refers more to the smuggling of persons than
to exploitation.
The lack of clear language in capturing the key aspects of human trafficking has caused
confusion not only in the public perception, but also in drafting meaningful legislation
and policies to prosecute traffickers and to protect victims of trafficking. On the one
hand, focusing on movement and transportation excludes any victims who have never
crossed an international border, but are still subjected to human trafficking within their
own country or town. On the other hand, focusing on trade and the selling and buying of
73
people neglects the element of fraud and coercion implied in a trafficking situation. It
omits victims who are never traded, but rather voluntarily engage with the imposter who
later traffics the person.
Yet another factor adding to the already complex discourse of what actually is human
trafficking relates to the aforementioned international debate between anti-prostitution
and pro-legalization groups, which was reproduced on the national scale and, as we shall
see, the local scale in the United States. The U.S. government opted for a prostitution-
based approach to regulating sex trafficking, a move that was strongly embraced by
conservative feminist groups, who view all forms of prostitution as an inherent violation
of women's rights and who regard victims of sex trafficking as helpless and weak
individuals lacking any self-willed agency. At the other end of the negotiation table,
rights-based activists argue for a distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution,
the latter of which is considered an inevitable aspect of society (Katayama 2005).
Though the definition of severe forms of trafficking also entitles a victim of forced labor
to protection and services under the TVPA, in practice the emphasis has been largely put
on cases of sex trafficking involving women and children. The distinct emphasis on sex
trafficking is also written into the law, which requires that victims of sex trafficking
“only'” prove fraud, whereas victims of labor trafficking have to prove fraud and force in
order to qualify for legal protection under U.S. legislation (Song 2009). As declared on a
fact sheet on trafficking issued by the Bush Administration's State Department in 2005
74
“[i]t is a vicious myth that women and children who work as prostitutes have voluntarily
chosen such a life for themselves” (USEU 2005). Underlying this strategy, critics have
revealed both a strategy of deflection from other domestic and foreign debacles, and a
deliberate act to turn a blind eye to the rights of victims of human trafficking, who lack
medial sensation and thus are subjected to the general debate on irregular migration into
the United States (Srikantiah 2007; Soderlund 2005). Consequently, President Bush
devoted a third of his speech at the UN assembly in 2005 to the “war on sex trafficking,”
while victims of agricultural, domestic, and other labor exploitation are foremost
considered illegal immigrants and thus have no reserved place in the medial and political
spotlight (Bales 2007). On the contrary, in these cases, human trafficking is primarily
framed as a transnational crime and a national security problem, whose prevention, so the
line of argument goes, requires tighter immigration policies and more secured borders
(Chuang 2006b). The integral cultural and socio-economic processes underlying the
phenomenon, however, remain largely unclear, misunderstood, or ignored.
To put the U.S. approach in perspective, a brief glance at the international landscape on
the regulation of prostitution and human trafficking is in order. Sweden, known for its
politically progressive policies especially on gender equality, adopted an abolition-based
approach in 1999 by passing a law prohibiting the purchase of sexual services and thus
decriminalizing the prostitute. Consequently, based on reports by the Norwegian Ministry
of Justice, the numbers of street prostitutes in Sweden plummeted by 41 per cent between
1998 and 2003. However, as a result, it is assumed that the majority of women now just
75
work “out-of-sight” in clandestine environments such as homes, brothels, or clubs, and
recruit their customers through new technological devices such a cell phones and the
Internet. The business went underground, increasing the danger of violence for women
and men as they lack legal protection (Katayama 2005). The Netherlands, on the other
hand, views prostitution or sex work as an inevitability and has accordingly regulated
prostitution by legalizing brothels and street prostitution. “Trafficking,” in this case, only
applies to the case of a person forced into prostitution. Police reports suggest that the
Dutch approach regulates prostitution, making it socially more acceptable, an issue
human rights organizations and migrant advocates push as an important step toward a
safer workplace for sex workers. While this approach certainly works for EU citizens
working in the sex industry, critics point out that migrant sex workers mostly from
outside the European Union fall through the cracks and yet again become vulnerable
targets for traffickers as they lack any protection under national law (Musto 2009). Lastly,
the United Kingdom, taking a similar stance to prostitution as the United States, passed
the Sexual Offenses Act in 2003, ruling that the use of coercion, deception, or force is not
imperative in establishing a case of sex trafficking, but rather any person migrating to the
U.K. for consensual sex work is considered a trafficked person (Katayama 2005). If
nothing else, this brief overview of international strategies to tackle the issue of sex
trafficking and forced prostitution shows a substantial global struggle to provide efficient
solutions to a very complex social, cultural, and economic problem.
76
Apart from providing a legal framework, the TVPA consists of a set of instruments to be
deployed in the combat against trafficking in the United States and abroad. Among other
things, the TVPA enables certified victims of human trafficking to apply for a resident
visa, the so-called T-visa, in the United States, provided they file a legal enforcement
agreement, meaning they agree to cooperate fully with legal investigators in their efforts
to prosecute the trafficker. In addition, the U.S. State Department Office to Monitor and
Combat Human Trafficking publishes the annual Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP
Report), which assesses states' anti-trafficking efforts according to a three-tier
categorization and which can constitute the basis for unilateral sanctions by the United
States against any state that fails to adequately address issues of human trafficking. It is
argued that equipped with a powerful political and legal tool in the form of the TIP
Report, the United States has emerged as the “global sheriff” in the global anti-human
trafficking arena and, with its adoption of a conservative and anti-prostitution approach,
has significantly shaped the discourse on human trafficking in the global arena (Chuang
2006b; Nagan and Medeiros 2006). However, the U.S. anti-trafficking policing record is
not clean. Kinney (2006) points out that the globally imposed anti-trafficking approach
by the U.S. has undermined efforts to prevent human trafficking and HIV/AIDS in
Southeast Asia among other countries. In a different context, others have argued the
United States put forward the TVPA to strike political opponents with unilateral sanctions
for geopolitical purposes unrelated to issues of human trafficking. For instance, the
United States, on such grounds, denied previously proposed financial aid to Venezuela in
2005 (Stolz 2007). Alice Miller, human rights activist and co-director of the Human
77
Rights Concentration at Columbia University strongly critiqued such practices, calling
the TVPA, “just a tool for the US to sop the Christian right wing and to whack
governments that it is also otherwise angry at” (quoted in Katayama 2005).
U.S. anti-human trafficking legislation is one of the most advanced trafficking policies in
the world. Still, in spite of its uniqueness and comprehensiveness, the TVPA so far has
yielded disappointing results. Since its inception in 2000, only several hundred out of the
hundreds of thousands of victims have received a T-visa and other forms of legal and
social protection through the TVPA (Bales 2007).
9
The numbers of trafficking
prosecutions are similarly low. For instance, in the fiscal year 2008, the Department of
Justice conducted only 183 investigations, which resulted in 77 convictions in 40 human
trafficking cases (13 labor trafficking and 27 sex trafficking) (TIP Report 2008). The poor
performance in identifying survivors and prosecuting traffickers has instigated a serious
questioning of the concept of human trafficking as adopted by the U.S. government in the
TVPA. An article in the Washington Post challenged that the problem of human
trafficking was blown out of proportion (Markon 2007). The reasons for its limited
effectiveness have given rise to various speculation and thought. While a detailed
examination of the success and failure of the TVPA and other anti-trafficking campaigns
is discussed elsewhere, the aforementioned problems also relate to definitional aspects of
human trafficking in the U.S.. A comparison to the UN definition will help illustrate the
problem.
9
See Chapter Six for a detailed analysis of campaigns and policy effects.
78
The UN framework on human trafficking has been intentionally drafted as broad and
vague to offer a general basis of international agreement and to allow individual member
states to mold and carve out a definition reflecting local political agendas and cultural
practices. The U.S. approach to human trafficking is more narrowly defined, as it applies
only to “severe” forms of trafficking, and thus a smaller human trafficking population
(Dougherty 2006). Legal experts in the field consider this definition a crucial problem
with U.S. anti-trafficking legislation, as a person needs to suffer substantial abuse to be
considered a trafficking victim in the United States (Song 2009). The reasons for such a
narrow framework are at least two-fold. On the one hand, the historical roots of the U.S.
definition laid the basis for such a framework. It essentially derives from the Thirteenth
Amendment 18 U.S.C. 1584 to the United States Constitution, which officially abolished
slavery and involuntary servitude in 1865. More specifically, title 18 U.S.C., section 1584
makes it a crime to force a person to work against his will by use or threat of use of
physical or legal coercion. The Thirteenth Amendment concerns slavery that existed prior
to the Emancipation Proclamation Act,
10
at which time people were openly bought and
sold on markets, subjected to the transatlantic slave trade, considered property and legally
owned. With the TVPA 2000, the United States attempted to provide a 20
th
century
version of the Thirteenth Amendment in order to define human trafficking (Song 2009).
The core of the up-dated view still centers on forcing someone to work against his/her
will. However, the crux of the problem is that what is considered “force” is narrowly
10
The Emancipation Proclamation Act issued in 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln declared that, "all
persons held as slaves within any States, or designated part of the State, the people whereof shall be in
rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free" (Africans in America
2010). The Emancipation did not free all the slaves in the United States, only those who lived in states
not under control of the Union.
79
defined. Take, for instance, a migrant farm worker, whose employer takes away his legal
documents, thus depriving him of any legal identification that makes him a visible human
being whose basic human rights are protected under national and international law. In
spite of no direct threats or coercion, this farm worker's legal vulnerability makes him
easy prey to labor exploitation. Yet, under U.S. law, he would not fall within the
parameters of what constitutes a trafficking situation.
On the other hand, the prevalent anti-immigration environment in the country has put its
stamp on the current U.S. definition of human trafficking. Proposing legal protection and
social services to victims of human trafficking, who in many cases are undocumented
migrant workers, is politically and culturally a liability. Taking an anti-immigration
stance has proven politically advantageous in a political climate where border
enforcement to stop illegal immigration has been widely greeted and anti-immigrant
sentiments have dominated political campaigns and public attitudes over the past decades
(Chavez 2001). A prevailing position in the negotiations advocated for a narrower
approach to human trafficking, otherwise the “floodgates” would be opened and there
was fear that thousands of migrant workers may claim to be trafficking victims and enter
and stay in the country through the trafficking channel (Song 2009). As a consequence,
instead of a victim-centered approach, the U.S. adopted a national-security approach to
narrow the population eligible for protection and services. Thus, the very narrow focus of
protection to only victims of severe forms of trafficking. As an extension of this
approach, the number of available T-visas was limited to 5000 per year, only a handful of
80
which were actually given out to certified victims of trafficking.
Figure 4.2. Increase of state legislation on human trafficking between 2003 and 2006. In
2006, twenty states in the United States had passed legislation to address human
trafficking. Source: Farrell 2006.
Shortly after the passing of the TVPA, states followed suit by introducing legislation
addressing human trafficking over the past decade. Today, more than half of the states in
the U.S. have introduced human trafficking statutes (Figure 4.2.), which vary greatly in
terms of goals and strategies. In developing trafficking statutes, state legislators followed
one of three model statutes provided by the Department of Justice, and the non-profit
agencies Polaris Project and the Freedom Network. The alternative models were deemed
necessary by human trafficking advocates in order to broaden the legislative scope and to
81
address the shortcomings of the federal model. The Department of Justice model
emphasizes specifically criminal provisions and advocates for a national legal strategy to
combat trafficking. The alternative models by Polaris Project and the Freedom Network
added several victim services provisions
11
that were not included in the Department of
Justice model (Farrell 2006). In California, state legislators passed the California Human
Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2005. It is one of only a few state statutes in the
country that provides social services to immigrant survivors of human trafficking. That
same year, California established an interagency statewide task force, the California
Alliance to Combat Trafficking and Slavery, which was charged with examining
California's response to human trafficking, identifying gaps in servicing victims,
investigating and prosecuting traffickers, and preventing trafficking (California Alliance
2007).
Forms of human trafficking
While the overarching theme of new slavery or human trafficking is economic
exploitation under use or threat of use of violence, the degree to which slavery is
enforced varies greatly from case to case. A short overview of the classification of human
trafficking will specify the varying forms, according to Kevin Bales and the State
Department's Trafficking in Persons Report. As a point of caution, these forms of slavery
are not mutually exclusive, rather the boundaries often blur and overlap with other kinds
of exploitation and criminal practices.
11
These victim services provisions include access to state crime victims compensation funding, shelter,
medical and mental health treatment, translation services and protection for the safety and privacy of
victims.
82
Bales (2000) categorizes new slavery into chattel slavery, debt bondage, and contract
slavery. Chattel slavery is, by nature, closest to old forms of slavery, in which a person
may be owned by the slaveholder and is either captured, born, or sold into permanent
servitude. Chattel slavery is mostly found in some African and Arab countries and makes
up a small number of trafficking cases in today's world. Debt bondage, on the other hand,
is the most common form of new slavery today. No ownership is exercised, however it
entails absolute physical control over the bonded laborer. When a person takes out a loan
from another person and repays his/her debt through personal labor, however, the labor
does not reduce the amount owed is a situation that constitutes debt bondage. This form
of slavery is most common in South Asia. Lastly, contract slavery is when laborers are
tricked into employment only to find out afterwards that they are, in fact, enslaved. The
contract serves two ways, it attracts potential workers and it makes the employment look
legal, while, in fact, the laborer is subjected to violence, lack of freedom and movement,
and lack of payment. Contract slavery, according to Bales, is rapidly on the rise and most
common in Southeast Asia, Brazil, and some Arab and South Asian countries (Bales
2000, p. 19-22).
Broader and more nuanced forms of human trafficking are offered by the U.S. State
Department in its annual Trafficking in Persons Report 2009. Accordingly, major forms
of trafficking in persons include forced labor, bonded labor, debt bondage among migrant
laborers, involuntary domestic servitude, forced child labor, child soldiers, sex trafficking
and child sex trafficking and related abuses.
83
Forced labor: also known as involuntary servitude happens when an employer
exploits, sometimes under use of physical violence or coercion a vulnerable
person; vulnerability is defined by poverty, unemployment, crime, discrimination,
corruption, political conflict and cultural acceptance of practice; both immigrants
and people in their own country are subjected to forced labor.
Bonded labor or debt bondage: a bond or debt is used to exercise control over a
person; the trafficker exploits an initial debt the worker assumed as part of the
terms of employment; in traditional systems of bonded labor debt is inherited
from generation to generation.
Debt bondage among migrant laborers: migrants are particularly vulnerable to
debt bondage, because of mainly three factors: 1. abuse of contract; 2. inadequate
local laws governing the recruitment and employment of migrant laborers; 3.
intentional imposition of exploitative and often illegal costs and debts of these
laborers in source country; excessive costs imposed in laborer and element of
exploitation for 'privilege' to work abroad can make laborer easy target and may
lead to debt bondage.
Involuntary domestic servitude: a special form of forced labor; the informal, out-
of-sight workplace of domestic workers makes them particularly vulnerable to
conditions of involuntary servitude; confined to a home through either use of
physical violence or through confiscation of travel and identity documents, a
particularly high degree of vulnerability is established and access to protection
and help difficult; mostly female migrants are hired from less developed countries
in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America to work as domestic
servants and caretakers in more developed locations like the Gulf States,
Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Europe, and the United States.
Forced child labor: while light forms of child labor are widely legally accepted,
severe forms of child labor are considered a form of involuntary servitude;
particularly, the sale, trafficking and entrapment in forced and bonded labor are
among the worst forms of child labor; accordingly, any child who is subjected to
involuntary servitude, debt bondage, peonage, or slavery through the use of force,
fraud, or coercion is a victim of human trafficking regardless of the location of
that exploitation.
Child soldiers: a unique form of human trafficking, child soldiering is defined as
the unlawful recruitment of children – often through force, fraud, or coercion – for
labor or sexual exploitation in conflict areas; a global phenomenon, child
soldiering is most prevalent in Africa and Asia.
84
Figure 4.3. Forms of human trafficking based on the TIP Report 2009. Source: TIP
Report 2009.
Sex trafficking: a victim of sex trafficking is coerced, forced, or deceived into
prostitution, or maintained in prostitution through coercion; sex trafficking is
oftentimes coupled with debt bondage, when a person is forced to work in
prostitution through the use of unlawful 'debt' purportedly incurred through
transportation or recruitment which they must pay off before they can leave.
85
Child sex trafficking and related abuses: this category addresses a variety of
forms of child exploitation; 1. Child sex trafficking: children subjected to
prostitution in the commercial sexual industry; prohibited both under US and UN
law; 2. Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC): includes all child
prostitution as well as child pornography and is the sexual exploitation of children
for the commercial gain of other persons.
Child sex tourism (CST): a form of child sex trafficking; it involves people,
mostly from developed countries, travelling to other countries to engage in
commercial sex acts with children; US citizens engaging in such acts abroad are
prosecuted under US law.
Human trafficking: a new form of slavery?
Human trafficking is widely referred to as modern-day slavery or a contemporary form of
slavery. The use of such terminology suggests a strong relation to historical forms of
slavery. At this point, it is worth going back in history and determining precisely what
defined slavery and whether a comparison of past forms of labor exploitation to incidents
of 21
st
century human trafficking is adequate. History books define slavery as a form of
forced labor in which a person is considered the private property of the slave holder. The
word “slave” derives from the Old French “esclave” and Medieval Latin “sclavus,” and
originally referred to the Central European Slavs, who were frequently enslaved in the
Middle Ages (Harper 2001). The 1926 Slavery Convention refers to slavery as, “the
status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right
of ownership are exercised” (Slavery Convention 1926 2010). The slave is coerced to
work by use of force or other methods and is “denied any control over either their own
labour or their own reproduction” (Johnston 2000, 745). This notion of slavery generally
corresponds with the public discourse on the phenomenon and how the historic practices
86
of slavery are addressed in curricula, in period movies and literature, as well as in
everyday vernacular. However, while there is common agreement about this basic
definition of slavery, like “human trafficking,” the term has been subject to extensive
academic debates. A key question in the debate has centered on whether connotations of
Western slavery are applicable to non-Western forms of slavery, an issue that has led
”slavery” to apply to a range of different situations (Miers 2003).
A closer look at the issue of geographical scope, people involved as perpetrators and
victims, and the underlying factors of forced labor exploitation will help to determine the
extent to which human trafficking is a 21
st
century version of the slavery practiced in the
1800s (Figure 4.4.). Kevin Bales (2000), a sociologist, activist, and authority in the anti-
human trafficking sphere, considers human trafficking a new form of the old slavery.
Accordingly, in his view, every person trafficked for exploitation is a slave. Bales bases
his claim on an economic analysis underlying the practice of slavery then and now.
Accordingly, he defines slavery as “the total control of one person by another for the
purpose of economic exploitation” (Bales 2000, p. 6). And while several conventions and
agreements have banned legal ownership of a person internationally, Bales argues that
legal ownership was simply replaced with a different element of control and a new
means of sustaining control over a person in order to maintain economic exploitation.
Thus today's “[s]laveholders have all of the benefits of ownership without the legalities”
and responsibilities tied to owning a slave in the past (Bales 2000, p. 5). Historically, the
definition of slavery emphasized ownership/property of a human being for the purpose of
87
labor exploitation. Today, the emphasis is put on exploitation, as not all victims of human
trafficking are owned, or traded in the historical sense.
Figure 4.4. Key differences between old and new slavery. Source: Bales 2000, p. 15.
While the most common association with historical slavery is the transatlantic slave trade
between the 16th and 19th century, where an estimated 10 million Africans were sold into
forced labor in the Western Hemisphere (Eltis 2007), the geography of historic slavery in
fact spans the entire globe. Slavery was as common and spread across the world as
human trafficking is today. Historic slavery was regarded as an acceptable and natural
institution in many cultures dating back to ancient times. The earliest documentation of
slavery goes back to the Code Hammurabi and the Bible, both referring to slavery as
established institutions. Ancient slave-holding civilizations were, among others, the
Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and even the older Sumer. For instance, historians estimate
that over one third of ancient Rome's population was enslaved (Madden 2005). In
medieval Europe, the Vikings conducted slave raids through Europe and the British Isles;
88
Muslim conquerers took European slaves; economic powerhouses in the Mediterranean
like Venice and Genoa sold Slavs, Balts, and other ethnicities in the Muslim world; and
European Christians sold Muslims captured in wars. Slavery is not to be confused with
the institution of serfdom in medieval Europe, though, which obligated the serfs to work
the land of their master, but were not chattel property. In Mayan culture, slaves were used
as victims for human sacrifice, and indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast as
far as California were known as slave-traders (History of Slavery 2010).
Historic slave-holding practices are as varied as today's forms of human trafficking.
Slaves were forced to work in the plantations, the mines, as maids, and sex slaves; they
were forced into arranged marriages and used as human sacrifices for religious
ceremonies in Mayan culture; or served as entertainment, such as the gladiators in ancient
Rome. Historically, slavery was a race-based issue, whereby otherness in the form of
race, ethnicity, and religion constituted a defining factor for who was the slave-holder and
who was the slave. In the new slavery, Bales (2000) argues, racial and other differences
play a marginal role between slave and slaveholder. An exception is Mauritania, where
forms of old slavery based on racial division persist. Instead, economic vulnerability has
become the key component determining who falls victim to the practices of new slavery.
Then and now, at the bottom of slavery lie economic interests. However, while
historically slaves were often detained through so-called slave raids or captured as
prisoners of war, the acquisition of a person for labor exploitation today is largely rooted
89
in the economic inequality and power disparity that have become defining factors in the
world's economic structure. Social economic changes on the global and national scale
have produced substantial disparities, exposing the poor to economic abuse, an issue
further aggravated following the end of the Cold War. In William Greider's words:
One of the striking qualities of the post-Cold War globalization is how easily
business and government in the capitalist democracies have abandoned the values
they putatively exposed for forty years during the struggle against communism –
individual liberties and political legitimacy base on free elections. Concern for
human rights, including freedom of assembly for workers wishing to speak for
themselves, has been pushed aside by commercial opportunity. Multinationals
plunge confidently into new markets, from Vietnam to China, where governments
routinely control and abuse their own citizens. (quoted in Bales 2000, p. 13)
Apart from a shift in economic structuring, the dramatic increase in world population
from 2 to 6 billion over the last fifty years, especially in countries already struggling with
economic resources, has created a vast pool of potential victims of new slavery. This
surplus of potential slaves is a “dramatic illustration of laws of supply and demand,” and
has, in turn, reduced the cost of acquiring a person for labor exploitation (Bales 2000, p.
14). Historically, a slave had a specific price tag and was considered a commodity and
substantial investment encouraging the slaveholder to maintain a long-term relationship
with the slave in order to make the investment back (Figure 4.5.). In new slavery, Bales
(2000) suggests, however, a slave is no longer a major investment, but rather a short-term
opportunity that can easily be replaced by another slave— the so-called ”new
disposability”— thereby maximizing the slaveholder’s profits. Tied to the acquisition of
slaves is the question of ownership— historically determined through bills of sale and
title of ownership— which has become obsolete and illegal.
90
Figure 4.5. Slavery market brochure from 1784: Two advertisements in a colonial
broadside newspaper: one for a cargo of slaves just imported from Africa on the ship Two
Brothers, and one for “Thirty Seasoned Negroes,” including a carpenter, a cook and the
cook's family. Source: MPI/Getty Images. 2009. Senate Apology for Slavery. National
Public Radio. Available at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?
storyId=105850676.
An essential difference between labor exploitation then and now, however, pertains to the
question of a person's rights, the social acceptance of the institution of slavery, and the
legal framework addressing the matter. Whereas, historically, the accepted view was that
slavery was a natural, given matter, today almost every country in the world has
abolished and legally prohibited slavery as an immoral and inhumane practice. In the
91
western world, William Wilberforce is the leading figure associated with the abolition of
slavery in the British Empire in the 19
th
century. The United States followed suit with
President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation Act in 1863 and the passing of
the Thirteenth Amendment, which legally abolished slavery in the United States in 1865.
Internationally, under the auspices of the League of Nations, the signatories of the 1926
Slavery Convention, its subsequent protocols (Supplementary Convention 1956), and the
Convention to Suppress Slavery and the Slave Trade from 1949 banned slavery and the
slave trade. As of February 2002, 97 parties have signed the Convention and its
subsequent protocols. Accordingly, today it is unlawful to own, sell, or buy a person,
force a person to work against his/her will, and exploit a person using or threatening with
any form of coercion or force in most corners of the world. At the same time, a person
who becomes victim to such practices at least in theory is protected under law, can claim
the preservation of basic human rights, receive some form of compensation, and seek the
prosecution of his or her perpetrators.
How can we make sense of the question of whether 21
st
century human trafficking is a
modern form of slavery? The answer depends on what framework one applies to the
concept of slavery. On the one hand, speaking from a strictly legal point of view,
referring to human trafficking as a modern form of slavery is not permissible for two
reasons. First, as noted earlier, slavery in legal terms entails, among other things, a strong
component of ownership over a person, an aspect that today certainly still exists in a
number of human trafficking cases particularly in Eastern Africa or South Asia, but that
92
does not constitute a defining element of all contemporary forms of labor exploitation.
Second, the institution of slavery is legally abolished in almost every country of the
world. For that reason, referring to a victim of labor exploitation as a slave is—
technically speaking— incorrect, as the institution does no longer exist, at least in its
traditional sense. This observation then also provides a basic answer to the question that
if slavery was banned internationally in the 20
th
century, why was new legislation
addressing human trafficking necessary? Human trafficking is a broader concept than
slavery, encompassing a range of victims of forced labor that goes beyond the
conventional idea of slavery, whereby a person is property to his owner who forces him
to work against his will by using physical force. Human trafficking is a more complex
concept in that it applies a subtler set of exploitative labor situations, i.e. it has more
shades of grey.
On the other hand, the concept of slavery especially in the United States carries
considerably more cultural weight than laid out in its legal parameters. It takes on a
broader understanding of slavery as a form of severe social injustice and immoral
behavior. As a well known historic phenomenon that affected tens of millions of people
and that is collectively regarded as an institution upon which the wealth and power of this
nation was built, the very idea of slavery evokes uneasiness and an imperative to act. As
Bill Warner puts it: “Slavery still stalks the American consciousness,” and the nation
struggles with coming to terms with “the damage this peculiar institution wrought on our
national soul” (Warner 2008). The collective guilt and acknowledgement of this injustice
93
is expressed in museums and exhibitions throughout the country and celebrations on
commemoration days such as Juneteenth Day. Most recently the U.S. Government issued
the first official resolution to African-Americans apologizing for more than two centuries
of slavery in the United States and the years of racial segregation that followed
(Thompson 2009). Lastly, a broader approach proposed by Bales (2000) goes beyond the
American experience and captures slavery as a general denotation for the exploitation of
a laborer by use of force and with no or inadequate compensation. This observation is in
line with the UN framework that lists slavery as one form of human trafficking. The
argument therefore is that looking at slavery from a broader “exploitation” angle makes it
permissible to refer to human trafficking as a modern form of slavery, as what it all boils
down to is a person forced to work against his will and thereby losing his freedom and
basic rights.
Related to the understanding of human trafficking as slavery is the issue of victim
population. Again, the particular framework applied to slavery naturally defines the scope
and population of exploited people. An often-heard slogan used by anti-human trafficking
movements is that there are more slaves in the world today than at any other point in
history (Bales 2000). Whether this statement is true again depends on what point of view
of slavery is adopted. As pointed out, an understanding of slavery along the lines of legal
definitions suggests a smaller “slave” (speak human trafficking) population, than when
applied to the notion of slavery as a wide variety of situations of labor exploitation. Put
differently, looking through the lens of the U.S. framework on human trafficking suggests
94
a different, smaller “slave” population, than the UN framework proposes. However, in
neither case is the game of juggling numbers for the sake of accurate statistics helpful.
Rather, claims on the scope of the victim population play a role beyond the calculator.
As pointed out earlier, the concept of slavery primarily makes reference to the historic
slave-holding practices of the British Empire and the United States. The transatlantic
slave trade of Africans to North America and Europe is the predominant image associated
with the concept of slavery. It is also the most studied and investigated form of old
slavery. The current understanding of human trafficking as modern-slavery is probably
also rooted in the Anglo-American role in the debate. The United States occupied a
dominant role in world matters in the 20
th
century and thus shaped general perspectives
on social, cultural, and political matters here and beyond its borders—including
international anti-human trafficking politics. Regardless, deploying the concept of slavery
in the current fight to combat human trafficking in the 21
st
century is smart policy.
Slavery is a powerful idea and well known beyond history books and museums. To
deploy the concept in the contemporary movement to fight human trafficking is thus a
logical and useful tool for rallying public and political support for the cause. The use of
the term slavery aims to tap into the public conscious of guilt and collective memory
associated with an enormous social injustice that has dominated a large part of this
country's young history and the repercussions of which are still felt in the every day life
of the 21
st
century society from Los Angeles to New York City. Whether the numbers in a
comparative analysis add up, or to what degree old slavery corresponds with today's
95
human trafficking or modern slavery are secondary. Evidence that a variation of a past
wrong is being repeated provides sufficient munition for rolling out a serious campaign to
activate whatever means necessary to stop the systematic exploitation of too many people
around the world— be it in thousands or millions.
Informal discourse: in search of the survivors of human trafficking
After delving into a legal and bureaucratic analysis of human trafficking and addressing
the dynamics and problems shaping the formal framing of the issue, this section provides
a look at how the everyday, informal world perceives and understands human trafficking.
It especially concerns the public discourse on human trafficking in the United States as it
plays out in the national print media, new media, and documentaries. An aspect of
particular interest in this discussion is the role of survivors in framing the issue of human
trafficking. In the formal sphere, the voices of survivors if not missing, take a subordinate
and muted role in explaining human trafficking. Rather, the official view is almost
exclusively shaped by legal and political agents (policymakers, lawyers, social service
providers and law enforcement agents), whose understanding of the issue is largely based
on secondhand reports and accounts. Based on this secondhand knowledge, policies and
strategies to combat human trafficking are formed and funded. The victims and survivors
of human trafficking are blatantly underrepresented in the processes of defining and
framing the matter of human trafficking. They are mostly perceived as passive,
vulnerable subjects who lack substantial self-agency. For instance, the mouthpiece for the
survivors of human trafficking in the Department of State's TIP Report is limited to small
96
inserts in the early pages of the report highlighting in visuals and third-person narration
the ordeals individuals were subjected to, but are not weaved in to the overall narrative
constructed to explain human trafficking. The reader gets the impression that the
presentation of these individual stories in the report functions more as a stylistic and
editorial device than a substantial component to the meaning of the text. The assumption
therefore is that the voices of survivors of trafficking find a more prominent place in the
informal sphere of framing human trafficking, since new media offers a more diverse and
plural platform for social exchange and critical dialogue about matters of social justice.
Media plays an important role in shaping the public's understanding of the meaning of
social phenomena in today's world and thereby in constructing social reality. Exposure to
media in the United States results in individuals being significantly influenced and having
their “opinions shaped, reinforced and altered” (Macarro 2002). Accordingly, media is
key to how the public interprets and how policymakers respond to a social problem. This
section explores how media discursively constructs human trafficking as a social
problem. It also traces back the resurrection of human trafficking or modern slavery to
early reports in the 1960s about sex trafficking in Asia.
97
Figure 4.6. Distribution of print media articles on human trafficking. Source: Farrell and
Fahy, p. 619.
Only a few publications exploring human trafficking from a media analytical angle are
available. An excellent exception is a recent study by sociologists Farrell and Fahy
(2009), who conducted an extensive content analysis of U.S. newspapers exploring the
representation of human trafficking in print media. Deploying a natural history of social
problems model as a theoretical framework,
12
Farrell and Fahy analyzed more than 2000
U.S. newspaper articles published between 1990 and 2006 to examine the framing of
human trafficking. They argue that stakeholders in the anti-trafficking world utilized the
media as a vehicle to convey their views to the public and thus shaped “publicly accepted
definitions of and solutions to the problem” (2009, p. 618). The results of the study
12
Specter and Kitsuse's natural history of social problems model suggests “social problems evolve over
time, competing and co-opting other identified problems to gain legitimacy and support” (Farrell and
Fahy 2009, p. 618)
98
highlight two matters. First, the number of print media publications reporting on human
trafficking has significantly increased over the past fifteen years (Fig X), co-relating with
the uncovering of high-profile cases of human trafficking as well as the passing of key
trafficking legislation on the global and national scale. As shown in Fig., this spike in
media coverage of trafficking is apparent on a broader scale, including new media
content such as online magazines, newspapers, and blogs. The graph generated with the
Google News Archive
13
shows a historical timeline of news articles published in print and
online media addressing human trafficking between 1990 and 2009. While in the early
1990s, only a handful of publications covering human trafficking shows up (fewer than
100), the number of articles has significantly grown throughout the 2000s, peaking in
2009 with more than 8000 pieces addressing human trafficking that year. Compared to
the volume of publications on other social problem, such as domestic violence in the
same time period (more than 421 000 articles), human trafficking is still a low-profile
issue in public mainstream media reporting. However, the data clearly suggest that in the
past two decades, human trafficking has rapidly emerged as a pressing matter in the
public discourse and has made it to the forefront of political agendas.
13
Google news archive is an online search tool that enables to search and explore historical news
archives. The function allows one to generate a historical timeline as well as lists the individual news
pieces that partly are free of charge. The results largely come from digitized content through Google's
News Archive Partner Program and other online archival materials.
99
Figure 4.7. Google news results for human trafficking between 1990 and 2009. Source:
Google news archive search. 2010. Available at: http://news.google.com/archivesearch.
Figure 4.8. Number of publications for human trafficking in given time period according
to Google News Archive. Source: Google news archive search. 2010. Available at:
http://news.google.com/archivesearch.
Second, Farrell and Fahy show that public understanding of human trafficking has
significantly shifted over time, from being a human rights issue to a national security
issue with the corresponding criminalization of human trafficking. Accordingly, when it
100
surfaced as a global social problem in the mid-1990s, human trafficking was primarily
framed as a women's issue, more specifically a women's human rights issue. The recent
international interest in trafficking originated in Southeast and South Asia. One of the
first reports addressing human trafficking was a field report by Human Rights Watch in
Southeast Asia drawing attention to the trafficking of Burmese women and girls into
Thailand for forced prostitution (Human Rights Watch 1994). The emphasis on female
victims of trafficking in the context of (forced) prostitution overlaps with the earliest
definition of trafficking outlined in the 1949 Convention on Suppression of Trafficking in
Persons and the Exploitation of Prostitution of Others, which framed human trafficking
as a prostitution issue. Thus most early reporting focused on sex trafficking. The problem
of labor exploitation was not included in the definition of human trafficking at that time.
By the late 1990s, not only had the media caught on to human trafficking, but also high-
profile political figures such as Madeleine Albright or Hillary Clinton had turned their
attention to the issue and geared up the process for passing comprehensive legislation to
deal with the problem (BBC News 1999), which in turn provoked extensive media
coverage. In the early 2000s, the debate between consensual vs. forced prostitution camps
flared up, leading to an unlikely alliance between anti-sex trafficking activists and labor
rights activists with the goal of broadening the frame of human trafficking. The common
denominator of these diverse groups was that human trafficking is a crime that
necessitates a crime-centered response (Farrell and Fahy 2009). This shift in defining
human trafficking now also included other forms of exploitation beyond commercial sex
trafficking, a development that was brought about by a high profile case of labor
101
exploitation in American Samoa.
During the early 2000s, human trafficking was increasingly redefined as a crime problem,
calling for a criminal justice response. Accordingly, the TVPA 2000 put a strong
emphasis on identifying and prosecuting defenders and rescuing and assisting victims
willing to support investigations against their traffickers. This emphasis on crime was
further heightened in recent years, when— partly fabricated— fears of terrorism and
undocumented immigration emerged as defining factors in how the public mind
perceived the issue of human trafficking. Anti-trafficking efforts became “rooted in anti-
immigrant and terrorism dialogue of post-September 11 government” (Farrell and Fahy
2009, p. 622). The intertwining of human trafficking and national security threats on the
political scale, a claim that remains largely unsubstantiated today, led to an increase in
medial reporting about human trafficking in the context of national security and diverted
attention away from the original focus on the preservation of human rights. Farrell and
Fahy point out that each shift in the definition of human trafficking correlates with policy
responses implemented at different stages. Hence, human trafficking programs in the
United States have increasingly focused on identifying and supporting victims,
prosecuting perpetrators, breaking up criminal networks and militarizing the country's
borders.
Human trafficking is the product of a complex set of multi-scalar processes (see Chapter
Three). The discussion of human trafficking thus incorporates a variety of views and
102
agents involved in the practice of framing and developing strategies to address the
problem. Agents involved in the process operate and co-operate on the international,
national, and local scale, and come from the governmental as well as non-governmental
sector. As illustrated earlier, particularly in the United States, the human trafficking
debate has prompted the passing of vast trafficking legislation and in recent years the
adoption of a crime-centered approach that places the problem of human trafficking in the
context of undocumented migration, terrorism, and national security. Framing the
trafficking problem in this regard suggests that it has become an issue about “us,” a
problem that requires “us” to protect “our” society, “our” borders, and “our” interests.
However, as pointed out, this formal approach is faulty as it neglects to give room to the
voices of the most important people affected by human trafficking-- namely the survivors
of trafficking.
The scale of the body, i.e., the experiences of the exploited individual have not been
adequately addressed and incorporated into efforts to understand and combat the problem
in the United States. A good example is the legislative model developed by the
Department of Justice in order to advise and guide states in drafting their own anti-
trafficking statutes. The model mainly centers on framing human trafficking as a crime
threatening national security and thereby fails to address adequate social service
provisions for the victims. Polaris Project, a leading non-profit organization in the anti-
trafficking world in the U.S., stepped up and developed a more victim-centered approach
filling these gaps. Similarly, survivors of trafficking, or at least representatives, are
103
missing from the list of invitees to the fourth National Conference on Human Trafficking
in Arlington, Virginia in May 2010. As stated in the announcement, about 600 federal,
state, and local law enforcement officers, prosecutors, victim service providers, and other
professionals will attend the event to “address the complexities of human trafficking,
facilitate the sharing of promising practices, and support the development of evidence-
based strategies to combat slavery and human trafficking in the U.S.” (Russo 2010).
While one can assume that ideally invitees attend as representatives of survivors and
victims of trafficking, thus promoting their interests, the key figure in the debate is
prominently missing on the invitation list. Naturally, inviting survivors of trafficking as
advocates in the public domain is a delicate matter, as many have been physically and
psychologically traumatized by their experiences of abuse. However, some of the
survivors have chosen public advocacy against human trafficking as a means of healing
and coming to terms with the past. It is these figures to whom policymakers and law
enforcement agents should closely listen in order to create meaningful anti-human
trafficking strategies and policies.
The formal trafficking discourse tends to depict trafficked persons as lacking agency and
the will power of decision making. Survivors of trafficking are portrayed as mostly
passive agents subjected to forced labor and violence, and on behalf of whom society is
morally obligated to take action to rescue and prosecute. One learns little about the
trafficked person’s wishes and personhood, the reasons why they embarked on the
journey that led them into a forced labor exploitative situation, and what their alternative
104
paths could have been. The trafficked person's voice is kept at the fringes of the
discourse. And, if considered, the voice is framed in a voyeuristic and sensationalized
context about reporting on high-profile cases– mostly sex trafficking– which often leads
to re-victimization. Consequently, the promotion of an individual's human rights has
taken a back seat in the mainstream framing of human trafficking and so has any serious
attempt to explore socio-economic factors such as poverty and the inequality underlying
the dynamics of human trafficking on a global scale. The adopted anti-trafficking strategy
and its protocols suggest that the helping hand to survivors only extends as far as
national and societal interests are not compromised. This limitation, for instance,
becomes apparent with the required cooperation of survivors with law enforcement in the
investigation against their traffickers in order to be eligible for social and legal benefits in
the United States. For many survivors, a lot is at stake engaging in such cooperation, as
they have cogent reasons to fear retaliation from their trafficker.
To learn about a trafficking survivor's experiences and thereby to explore the components
of human trafficking missing from government reports and statistics, one has to step
outside the mainstream discourse of human trafficking and consult sources off the beaten
track. A good place to investigate survivors' personal stories is in documentaries and on
the Internet. The blogosphere,
14
in particular, has recently emerged as a medium for
independent, democratic, unfiltered storytelling (Bowman and Willis 2003). Thus, blogs
and social justice websites offer an important platform for telling a victim's survival story
14
In recent years, blogs have increasingly become mainstream media producing fast, up-to date and wide-
ranging news content. Technorati, an Internet search engine for searching blogs, tracked more than 112
000 000 blogs as of 2007.
105
in a raw and matter-of-fact manner. Reading through a series of survivors' testimonials is
nothing less than a tour de horror. The amount of personal hardship and the depth of
injustice depicted in each and every single narrative is heart-wrenching and utterly
disturbing. These stories tell about dreams and hopes ending in broken promises, personal
loss and broken lives. It is an insult to every democracy proclaiming their constituents'
human rights. However, apart from getting a sense of the scope of human tragedy that
human trafficking presents, the stories of individual survivors of trafficking make it
crystal clear how complex the matter of human trafficking actually is and that the
depiction of the problem mainly as a crime and national security threat clearly falls short
of understanding the big picture. A brief analysis of some survivors' stories will help
unearth some of the missing links. Personal accounts of human trafficking experiences
show that no human trafficking incident is like another. In fact most survivor stories paint
very different scenarios about why and how people end up as victims of human
trafficking. However, a number of major themes run through all of these experiences, an
understanding of which will help draw a more comprehensive map of the nature of
human trafficking.
First, human trafficking has a strong economic component. It is largely driven by the
economic interests of a chain of agents including, in many cases, the trafficked (at least
initially), the trafficker, and the consumers of trafficking. Many would-be victims of
trafficking migrate voluntarily, fueled by dreams and entrepreneurial aspirations for better
economic futures for their families and themselves. Through personal connections or “
106
coincidence,” they meet perpetrators who offer to arrange the necessary steps to realizing
their professional dreams. Little do they expect the sort of labor situations in which they
will end up, even if they had initially agreed to work as mine workers or prostitutes (see
Den's Story in Polaris Project Survivor Testimonies 2010). To traffickers, human
trafficking is an attractive business opportunity that entails little risk and accrues high
profits. Accordingly, drug traffickers increasingly take on human trafficking as another
business division; as compared to drugs, human cargo can be sold over and over yielding
exponentially higher results (Morgan 2008). But these traffickers would not be in
business were it not for their customers, who generate an insatiable demand for the
services of forced labor. This essential component of the economic law of supply and
demand underlying human trafficking practices is missing in any significant political
agenda, national and international, aimed at combating human trafficking. Any
meaningful anti-trafficking policy thus has to address the issue of demand and how it can
be curtailed. Otherwise, the fight against human trafficking may be in danger of suffering
a similar fate as the “war on drugs,” which failed to curtail the demand of narcotics in the
United States.
Second, closely related to the economic element is the issue of agency and vulnerability.
Tens of thousands of workers worldwide express self-willed agency by voluntarily
embarking on a migratory journey in the good hope of achieving a more socio-
economically viable life. That these trips are built on false pretenses by their traffickers is
initially seldom apparent. There are some exceptions and thus proof that awareness
107
campaigns about human trafficking may have successfully started spreading the news—
as shown in Tatiana's story. When Tatiana decided to join her boyfriend on a trip from
Moldova to Amsterdam, her mother handed her a brochure with a human trafficking
hotline number just in case her daughter might need help. Tatiana unfortunately
dismissed her mother's cautious advice and was sold by her boyfriend to a pimp and
forced to prostitution in the red-light district in Amsterdam (MTV Exit 2010). The point
here is that many potential victims of human trafficking are anything but passive and
clueless, as portrayed in the mainstream trafficking discourse. They have ideas and plans
for what they want their lives to be and act upon them. The misery is that they are dealt a
bad hand in the first place increasing their vulnerability to abuse and failure. The overall
global economic structure produces a vast disparity of wealth and resources, resulting in
an ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor. Simply belonging to the latter
already significantly weakens the odds for a successful socio-economic life— globally
and individually. The majority of nations have become vulnerable and fallen victim to
exploitation by economic powerhouses and this inequality has been reproduced on the
individual scale. Migrant workers decide to take the risk leaving their family and country
in order to find better economic opportunities in the United States. The vulnerability
factor takes a different form in cases of national human trafficking. According to
estimates by the University of Pennsylvania (quoted in Polaris Project 2010), every year
200 000 youths (many runaways in the foster care system) are at high-risk of becoming
victims of sex trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation in the United States. Unlike
the economic and cultural vulnerability of migrant workers, youths in the United States
108
become endangered through social vulnerability. Again, this aspect finds little mention in
the overall anti-trafficking policies in the United States. The bulk of resources allotted to
the fight against trafficking is for prosecution and victim identification, and only
marginally on prevention.
Third, survivor testimonies put a human face on an issue that has been too abstractly
framed as a statistic concerning national policy interests such as immigration regulations,
terrorism, and national security. Human trafficking is very much about individual,
personal lives ruined by broken promises, brutal lies, torn families, abandoned children,
physical abuse, and irreparable psychological scarring. Many times the victim's family
also becomes victimized by the trafficker, as family members are killed in retaliation for
the victim's cooperation with law enforcement or family businesses in the source country
are destroyed. As a consequence of the conditions of forced labor, victims' health declines
and substance abuse becomes the only means of survival. This humanization of the
trafficking issue is essential should the anti-trafficking movement ever want to succeed in
containing the problem. Author and human trafficking activist Ben Skinner (2008a) likes
to say slavery does not mean much unless you understand the slavery of an individual.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff concurs and quotes scientific proof that
individual, “emotional stories tend to open the portals, and that once there's a connection
made, people are more open to rational arguments” (quoted in Hochschild 2010, p. 44).
Not to frame human trafficking as a glaring human tragedy effecting individuals is a
missed opportunity in fighting one of the greatest human rights challenges of our times.
109
Therefore, a quest must be made to bring the discourse of human trafficking from the
national concern to the individual experience and revive the 1990’s conceptualization of
the problem first and foremost as a human rights issue.
A working definition of human trafficking
This chapter explored a number of aspects pertaining to the current conceptualization of
human trafficking in the public and political sphere. If anything, the discussion has
shown the complex nature of the issue and how it is entangled in a web of political
debates ranging from immigration regulation and national security, to questions of the
voluntary factor in prostitution. Of importance is the difference in the framing of human
trafficking in the international sphere and in the United States. While the United Nations'
definition of human trafficking offers a broader, looser framework emphasizing the
exploitation of a person under use of force, the United States approach to human
trafficking is strongly based on historic forms of slavery in the country and suggests a
narrower framework focusing on severe forms of human trafficking, i.e., labor
exploitation under significant use of coercion or force. Generally, the understanding of
human trafficking in the United States has changed over the past decade and is now
increasingly addressed in the context of transnational crime-prevention and national
security. Conspicuously, the voices of survivors of human trafficking are largely missing
from public trafficking discourse. Hence, the argument has been made for a humanization
of human trafficking, a rescaling of the discourse back to the individual, and a focus on
the preservation of the individual's human rights. Whether human trafficking is a modern
110
form of slavery, a term widely and interchangeably used to refer to trafficking in persons,
depends on what definition slavery is based on. From a legal standpoint, referring to
human trafficking as a modern form of slavery is not permissible, as the institution has
been abolished in almost every country of the world. However, a broader understanding
of slavery as a reference to any form of unjust exploitation of the labor of a person under
use of force allows for a terming of human trafficking as a modern or contemporary form
of slavery.
The definition employed in this study understands human trafficking as the trade and
exploitation of a person under conditions of coercion and force . Against the general
notion of human trafficking in the United States, this definition takes a more holistic
approach. Not only does it encompass the gravest forms of human trafficking, but it also
refers to any situation of labor exploitation where an individual's basic human rights are
breached and disrespected, as in human trafficking. This stance follows the notion that
human trafficking first and foremost is a severe violation of an individual's human rights
and thus calls for a survivor-based and human rights-based approach to address the
problem. This consideration is based on the belief that any other framework applied to
defining human trafficking discriminates against a certain victim population, which is
consequently denied services, justice, and rehabilitation. For instance in the case of the
United States, victims of less “severe” forms of human trafficking are not entitled to any
legal or social assistance in the human trafficking context.
111
Chapter 5
The dimensions of human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles
“The problem of human trafficking has reached into neighborhoods throughout
California”
Sally Lieber, California Assembly Member
September 21, 2005 – signing of AB 22
Breaking the news on human trafficking
Greater Los Angeles is a prime destination and transition hub for human trafficking in the
United States. While not the only hotspot for trafficking in persons in the country,
15
the
region's distinct geographical features as a prime immigration destination, its proximity
to the U.S. Mexico border, and an economic landscape with a high demand of low-
income jobs have propelled Los Angeles into the limelight of the human trafficking
world. It is therefore not surprising that Los Angeles was where the first major case of
human trafficking in the United States broke in the mid-1990s. In August 1995 a multi-
agency task force led by the California Department of Industrial Relations raided an
apartment complex in El Monte, Southern California. What the officers brought to light
was the first major case of human trafficking in the modern-day United States. Law
enforcement officers freed 72 undocumented Thai immigrants, mostly women, held as
forced laborers behind wired fences and forced to sew garments in inhumane conditions.
The operators of the sweatshop were of Chinese-Thai decent and had held some of the
workers in slavery for up to seven years. The El Monte case made tangible on the local
15
Other US centers for human trafficking are places with similar geographical features as Greater Los
Angeles, including New York City, Houston, Texas or Miami, Florida.
112
scale the global connections integral to the process of human trafficking. The practices of
sweatshops and other forms of forced labor in the region were common throughout the
last century (Loo 2006). However, outrage over cases like the El Monte incident
eventually kicked off a growing governmental and non-governmental campaign against
human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles.
Depending on whom one talks to, Los Angeles takes different geographical parameters
and meanings. In the narrowest sense, Los Angeles refers to the city of Los Angeles,
which encompasses roughly 500 square miles and is home to more than 3.8 million
people (State and County Quick Facts 2010). Metropolitan Los Angeles, on the other
hand, is defined as the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana corridor and basically
consists of the two most populous counties in California, Los Angeles and Orange
County. The population of metropolitan Los Angeles totals more than 15.5 million people
(Metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas and principal cities 2010). What is
currently known about human trafficking, i.e., major cases and the core of the anti-human
trafficking work in the region centers on Metropolitan Los Angeles. However, the
region's human trafficking problem does not stop at the fringes of Los Angeles and
Orange Counties. Rather, because of a high level of social and economic integration,
experts know and are concerned that more isolated areas in San Bernardino, Ventura, and
Riverside counties function as the hinterlands for clandestine human trafficking activities
in the Los Angeles region (Kreymann 2009). For this reason, my geographical focus
covers Greater Los Angeles (Figure 5.1.), which consists of the five counties of Los
113
Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino. Greater Los Angeles has an
estimated population of 18 million and covers almost 34 000 square miles (about the size
of Austria) (State and County Quick Facts 2010).
Figure 5.1. Map of Greater Los Angeles including Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino,
Riverside and Ventura counties. Source: Dear, M. et al. 2009. Sprawl hits the wall.
Confronting the realities of metropolitan Los Angeles . Southern California Studies
Center. University of Southern California. p. 9.
114
Assessing the scope of human trafficking
Determining the scope of human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles and elsewhere is a
challenging, if not altogether impossible, endeavor. The main reason is that reliable and
accurate statistics on the victim population is extremely difficult to obtain. By nature,
human trafficking is a covert problem that only occasionally erupts to the surface of
society, bringing to the limelight the stories of individuals who were subjected to forced
labor. It is mostly individual stories that offer a glimpse into an illegal business that
otherwise is difficult to measure. Nevertheless, based on research and government
reports, experts have attempted to assess the scope of the issue and provide statistics.
Depending on the source and methodology applied, the numbers provided vary greatly at
times (Figure 5.2).
International
Ever since the passing of the Trafficking in Victims Protection Act in 2000, the U.S.
Department of State has estimated there are between 600 000 and 800 000 victims
trafficked across international borders every year (TIP Report 2007). This number has not
included the millions of victims trafficked within their own country. Under the new
Obama administration in Washington, the U.S. Department of State Trafficking in
Persons Report changed its numerical assessment of human trafficking, now solely
providing data offered by the International Labor Organization ILO. No explanation has
been issued about why previously widely advertised numbers on human trafficking
generated by their own agencies were abandoned. However, in a 2006 report on human
115
trafficking, the U.S. Government Accountability Office states that in the U.S.
estimates of global human trafficking are questionable. The accuracy of the
estimates is in doubt because of methodological weaknesses, gaps in data, and
numerical discrepancies. For example, the U.S. government’s estimate was
developed by one person who did not document all of his work, so the estimate
may not be replicable, casting doubt on its reliability. There is also a considerable
discrepancy between the numbers of observed and estimated victims of human
trafficking. (GAO 2006, p.10)
This evaluation by the GOA is a strong indication of how problematic and complex the
task of gathering accurate data on human trafficking is. If not the U.S. Government, who
else has the means and resources to succeed in this task?
Figure 5.2. International human trafficking estimates. Source: California Alliance to
Combat Trafficking and Slavery 2007, p. 34.
116
The ILO numbers on human trafficking do not come without inconsistencies either.
While earlier reports by the ILO suggested an international human trafficking victim
population of about 2.45 million (Figure 5.2.), more recent estimates put the number
closer to 12 million people in a forced labor situation worldwide (ILO 2010), an almost
fivefold increase of previous calculations. This figure does not even include an estimated
215 million child laborers worldwide, many of whom are subjected to forced and
dangerous labor (ILO 2010) that some consider a severe form of human trafficking. One
point this statistic elucidates is that the definition applied to human trafficking determines
the size of the estimated trafficking population. Leading human trafficking expert and
sociologist Kevin Bales (2000, p.8) also admits that, “[g]etting useful, reliable
information on slavery [read human trafficking] is very difficult.” He notes this challenge
is especially true for countries notorious for human trafficking, where governments are
eager to avoid damage to their country's image and tend to overlook the existence of the
crime, while human rights activists are eager to uncover it. Sandie Morgan (2008) from
the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force (thereafter OCHTTF) concurs, stating
that she knows from experience that, “Southern Europe's governments are concerned
about their image and reputation [which] is hampering reliable studies and statistics on
the status-quo in trafficking.” Still, Bales, after diligently plowing through reports on
human trafficking from the International Labor Organization, the British Library, human
rights organizations and charities, as well as having conversations with anthropologists
and economists, felt comfortable enough to give an estimate of 27 million slaves in the
world (Bales 2000, p. 8), a number widely used in the United States and dwarfing any
117
government estimates to date. Bales has not revised his number since he introduced it in
1999 and while his estimates are in the highest ranges, the recent up-revisions by the U.S.
government and the ILO speak for Bales' assessment of the human trafficking situation,
which apparently is much more severe than has generally been assumed. Human
trafficking is a fairly new phenomenon to governments and international organizations.
For that reason not surprisingly only through experience, time, and a more sophisticated
methodological approach to gathering reliable data can a more coherent and accurate
assessment of the problem be established. In the meantime, major human rights and
human trafficking organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch,
and Anti-Slavery International rely on government-issued reports on the scope of human
trafficking.
The question of what kind of exploitation people are subjected to poses similar
challenges to a general assessment of the scope of the situation. To some extent, this
aspect depends on the regional and cultural characteristics determining the forms of labor
exploitation that occur. For instance, based on current knowledge, the vast majority of
trafficked people in South Asia are in debt bondage, whereas trafficked people from
Eastern European countries often are forced into prostitution. On a global scale, however,
human trafficking is primarily seen through the lens of sex trafficking, which is reflected
in global law enforcement data on trafficking investigations, prosecutions, and
convictions (Figure 5.3.). Accordingly, the number of global sex trafficking prosecutions
and convictions in 2007 and 2008 is ten-fold the number of legal investigations of labor
118
trafficking.
16
Similarly the U.S. State Department in 2006 estimated 66 percent of human
trafficking victims is in commercial sexual exploitation, and 34% is in labor exploitation
(the heavy focus on sex trafficking in the anti-trafficking legislation and allocation of
anti-trafficking resources in the U.S. has been discussed elsewhere). In this regard it is
worth pointing out that the ILO assumes a more balanced distribution of victims of sex
trafficking and labor trafficking, a fact that is skewed to some extent by the high numbers
of internal trafficking for debt bondage in South Asia.
17
Figure 5.3. Global human trafficking law enforcement data. Numbers in parenthesis
indicate labor trafficking prosecutions and convictions. Source: TIP Report 2008.
The international community has reached more consensus about the gender of victims
and the economic scope of human trafficking. According to U.N. and U.S. estimates, the
majority of trafficking victims by far is women (about 80%), and almost half of the
victims are minors (Figure 5.2.). These numbers correspond with current trends in
international migration, whereby women have increasingly become economically mobile
and already make up 50% of the migrant work force. Clearly, gender inequality plays a
16
These numbers do not include prosecutions and convictions in the United States.
17
Kevin Bales (2000) estimates that there are between 15 and 20 million people in bonded labor in India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal.
119
significant role in human trafficking. A central component underlying human trafficking
is also a culturally determined attitude that tends to subordinate and neglect women and
children socially and economically, leading to the predominant abuse of this particular
population by traffickers. In addition, experts have noticed an increasing demand for
female migrant workers in the service, healthcare, and entertainment industries in the
global North, which are all areas showing a higher prevalence of human trafficking and
may help explain a higher number of female victims. However, the fact that men are
outnumbered by women on official human trafficking statistics does not mean that men
are significantly less subjected to forced labor. Instead, a 2006 report by U.N. Office on
Drugs and Crime states that sex trafficking has dominated discussions concerning the
purpose of human trafficking, and forced labor is often not viewed, “as a significant issue
in many countries” (p. 33). Consequently, the number of male victims and forced labor
victims in general is most likely to be vastly underrepresented.
The financial cost suffered by victims of forced labor is enormous. According to “The
Cost of Coercion,” a recent ILO report, workers subjected to forced labor (not including
victims forced into commercial sexual exploitation) lose about US$ 21 Billion in work
compensation annually (ILO 2009, p.4). This measurement is based on two sources of
evidence. On the one hand, forced laborers earn wages that are below the market rate,
are overcharged for food and accommodation, and are not compensated for overtime. On
the other hand, fees paid to recruitment agents in the victim’s home country for drafting
contracts and processing paper work (usually in the thousands of dollars) and travel costs
120
to the country of destination add to the cost of the forced laborer. Earlier estimates by the
ILO on the economic impact of human trafficking suggested a US$ 32 billion annual
profit for criminals exploiting victim of trafficking, making it the second largest criminal
industry in the world (ILO 2005). To illustrate the meaning of this number to laypersons,
the OCHTTF training manual on human trafficking includes a graph visualizing the
multi-billion dollar revenue of human trafficking by equating it with the annual revenue
of McDonalds, Ihop, Denny's, Pinnacle, Burger King, and Hershey's combined (Figure
5.4.).
Figure 5.4. Annual global revenue of human trafficking compared with the annual
revenue of major companies such as McDonald's and Burger King. Source: OCTTHF.
2009. Training Manual.
121
United States
Given the critique of U.S. government data by the GAO, the reliability of numbers issued
on trafficking victims in the United States has been called into question. At the time of
the passing of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in 2000, estimates
suggested that roughly 50 000 people were trafficked into the United States annually, a
number that was revised down to 14 500 to 17500 in 2005 (TVPA 2005). Due to a lack of
alternative data, these numbers are most widely referred to by local officials and human
rights advocates. Based on actually investigated cases of forced labor, a clearer picture
can be drawn on the situation in the United States. A national study on forced labor in the
United States concluded that sex and labor trafficking were most likely to occur on
prostitution and sex services, agriculture, sweatshop factories, restaurant and hotel work,
domestic work, and entertainment (Free the Slaves and Human Rights Center 2004). In
the meantime, human trafficking is also known to affect cities throughout the country in
varying degrees. Between 1998 and 2003, cases of forced labor were reported in more
than 90 cities, and especially in states with large immigrant populations such as Florida,
New York, Texas, and California (ibid.). While the majority of trafficking victims is of
foreign descent, experts also notice an increase in domestic trafficking, i.e., U.S. citizens
are forced into labor situations within their own country. Particularly children in the
foster care system and runaway kids are at a high risk of being trafficked into commercial
sexual exploitation (Estes and Weiner 2001).
122
California
The situation of reliable data on trafficking at the national level is grim, and even
grimmer on the state level due to the dearth of research on the topic. An exception is two
state-wide reports published for California that offer a first, but by no means
“comprehensive” attempt to assess the local situation. “Human trafficking in California”
(2007) is a report published by the California Alliance to Combat Trafficking and Slavery
Task Force (California Alliance), a state-initiated coalition of law enforcement,
prosecutors, public defenders, NGOs, health services, social services, mental health,
domestic violence and sexual assault services, researchers, farm workers, immigrant
rights groups, and labor commissioned to investigate California's response to human
trafficking. The second report, “Freedom denied: Forced labor in California,” was
published by the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center (Human Rights Center) in 2005 and
played a key role in the passage of state legislation on human trafficking. Addressing the
difficulty of calculating accurate data, the report points out that similar to other crimes
such as rape, domestic violence, and elder abuse, human trafficking is a largely
underreported crime. Heidi Rummel, a prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los
Angeles, explains that human trafficking is
very hard to quantify because man victims are not willing or able to come
forward. They have to escape or at least have an opportunity to make a phone call.
And even if they have the chance to call, they rarely call the police of the FBI,
they call a friend or a family member or a neighbor who speaks their language.
(quoted in Freedom Denied by the Human Rights Center 2005, p. 10).
123
Figure 5.5. Regional distribution of forced labor cases in California. Source: Human
Rights Center. 2005. p. 29.
According to the Human Rights Center report (2004), between 1998 and 2003 more than
500 victims of human trafficking from 18 countries were identified in 57 cases of forced
labor in California. The majority of reported cases occurred in major urban areas such as
Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose (Figure 5.5.). The victim
population is ethnically and racially diverse and includes 136 victims from Thailand,
followed by 104 victims from Mexico, and 53 victims from Russia. More than 30 victims
were US citizens. In terms of types of trafficking, prostitution leads with 47 percent,
followed by domestic servitude (33 percent), sweatshops (5 percent), and agriculture (2
percent). The California Alliance (2007) counted 554 potential victims between
124
December 2005 and March 2007 by five human trafficking task forces in California
(Figure 5.6.).
Figure 5.6. Forms of forced labor in California. Source: Human Rights Center 2005, p.
30.
Greater Los Angeles
Given the difficulties outlined above concerning data collection on human trafficking, it
is not surprising to find a similarly fragmented data landscape on the very local scale. No
comprehensive statistic or overview summarizing the scope of human trafficking in
Greater Los Angeles is available. However, occasional statistics issued by individual non-
profit organizations about their clientele and a summary of individual and investigated
cases offer a valuable glimpse into the diverse and complicated world of human
trafficking in the metropolitan area. Figure 5.5. shows that between 1998 and 2003
Greater Los Angeles has had the most investigated cases (44%) and thus the most
identified victims (47%) in all of California. Los Angeles, Artesia, Anaheim, and Long
125
Beach are all part of Greater Los Angeles and had, in sum, 25 cases of human trafficking
and 262 victims. If the general distribution of forms of human trafficking in California
also applies to the situation Greater Los Angeles (Figure 5.6.), then the majority of
victims was subjected to labor trafficking (47,4%) including domestic servitude (33,3%),
mail order bride (5,3%), sweatshop (5,3%), and other forms of forced labor (8,9%). Sex
trafficking made up 47,4% of the cases. The trends revealed in these numbers to a certain
extent correspond with a more recent statistic published by CAST LA, the Coalition to
Abolish Slavery and Trafficking in Los Angeles, about forms of trafficking to which their
clients were subjected (Figure 5.7.). Noteworthy here is the significantly lower number of
commercial sex trafficking cases (38%) and the presence of forced labor cases in child
and elderly care (7%), and peddling (7%). A similar statistic from 2004 also shows a
dominance of domestic servitude (32%) and sex trafficking cases (24%). Unusual is the
high number of victims in construction in 2004 (24% or 18 cases out of a total of 75),
which can be explained by the fact that oftentimes a single human trafficking
investigation produces a larger number of victims. A famous example is the El Monte
sweatshop case that involved 72 Thai victims.
126
Figure 5.7. Forms of human trafficking according to CAST clientele. Source: CAST LA
2010a.
Figure 5.8. shows the client demographics of CAST clients. Accordingly, most victims
serviced by CAST in 2008 and 2009 were from Mexico (22%), followed by Guatemala
(19%), the Philippines (17%), and South Korea (12%). CAST is known as a leader in the
anti-human trafficking work in Greater Los Angeles and services all ethnicities and
communities. For that reason CAST's data provides a valuable overview on the
demographics and forms of human trafficking in the region. Again, depending on the
breaking of major cases, the demographic overview may fluctuate greatly from year to
year. In comparison to the 2008/2009 statistics, similar data from 2004 shows a large
number of Thai victims (36% or 27 victims), followed by Mexicans (17% or 12 victims),
and Indonesians (12% or 9 victims) in the CAST LA victim population.
127
Figure 5.8. Demographics of client population at CAST. Source: CAST LA. 2010.
Based on the sparse and patchy statistical human trafficking situation, a significant gap
exists between what the public sector thinks the scope of human trafficking is and what is
currently being discovered. For instance, the Police Department of Westminster in
Orange County has employed one of the most human-trafficking savvy and apt law
enforcement agents in the region and, as a result, the staff at the agency is profoundly
educated on human trafficking and able to identify possible victims. Nevertheless, Lt.
Marsh admits that on average they are working one or two cases at a time, and sometimes
they “go weeks without working on anything human trafficking” (Marsh 2008). The Thai
Development Community Center, on the other hand, was quite busy rescuing and
128
assisting victims of human trafficking in its 15 years of anti-human trafficking work.
Ever since the El Monte case broke in 1995, the Thai CDC has worked with more than
400 Thai victims of human trafficking. Talking about their clients over the years, the
center's executive director, Chancee Martorell (2009), notes that while initially their
victims were mostly women, in recent years they have increasingly serviced male clients.
Similarly, depending on what human trafficking service provider or agency one talks to,
the demographic picture varies. For instance, as a labor and workers' rights organization,
CHIRLA encounters more cases of labor trafficking (such as domestic, agricultural, and
construction workers) than sex trafficking. On the other hand, Sgt. Estrada from the Los
Angeles County Sheriff's Department states that his agency handles more sex trafficking
than labor trafficking cases. This difference is less of a surprise given that most human
trafficking cases are initiated by tips from immigrant communities and the Sheriff's
Department in Los Angeles County has been one of the first law enforcement agencies in
the nation to sign a collaboration with the federal Immigration Customs Enforcement
(ICE) responsible, among other things, for the deportation of undocumented immigrants
in the country.
These numbers are the best that current data can offer. Since they are only based on actual
investigations and service provisions to victims, the extent of human trafficking in the
area can only be surmised, in spite of the fact that certain numbers and statistics are
widely used and advertised as a given fact. As pointed out earlier, several institutions
have revised their estimates over the past years, including the U.S. government and the
129
United Nations. The public is left with great uncertainty and the current situation allows
for much speculation on the true extent and impact of forced labor. Some argue that the
scope of human trafficking has been largely overstated and call for a cut of allocated
resources to the anti-human trafficking sector (Markon 2007). Others, however, see the
problem of human trafficking as greater than its current framework. Sandie Morgan
(2009) from the OCHTTF claims that if she “were to do statistics, [she] would guess
numbers are much higher, because in [her] experience, trafficking is related to money,
where people can afford to pay.” Similarly, immigration agents estimate that 10,000
women are being held in Los Angeles' underground brothels, a number that does not
include possibly thousands of victims in domestic work, sweatshops, or other informal
industries (CAST LA 2010a). While these bits and pieces of information about trafficking
in Greater Los Angeles do not give a complete picture of the extent of the problem, they
— more than any international estimate or statistic— enable a deeper understanding of
the reasons why people are being trafficked and what economic and cultural factors
create such situations. In the following section, several geographical dimensions
regarding Greater Los Angeles as a hotspot for human trafficking in the country are
discussed in order to show how this global phenomenon becomes localized.
Immigrant communities and cultural ties
Los Angeles and its surrounding areas have a long history of international migration and
function as a prime destination for immigrants newly arriving in the country (Myers
2002; Arreola 2004; Davis 2000; Waldinger and Bozorgmehr 1996). Founded by an
130
immigrant, Spanish governor Felipe de Neve, El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de
Los Angeles del Río de Porciúncula (The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels
of the river of Porziuncola) became part of Mexico in 1821. Following the end of the
Mexican-American war, Los Angeles and the rest of California were integrated into the
United States as a partial fulfillment of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Today, the city
is home to cultures and communities from all over the world that have inhabited Los
Angeles over the course of the past two centuries. Los Angeles receives the majority of
new immigrants to the U.S., mostly from Latin America, who in 2000— far ahead of
projections— became a majority-minority (Davis 2000; Straughan and Hondagneu-
Sotelo 2002). In 2008, Los Angeles County was clearly on top of the 10 counties in the
United States in terms of the number of immigrants, the share of immigrants in the total
county population, the absolute growth, and the percent growth between 2000 and 2008.
Accordingly, Los Angeles County had 3,470,000 immigrants followed by Miami-Dade
County, Florida with 1,196,000 immigrants and Cook County, Illinois with 1,117,000
immigrants (Terrazas and Batalova 2009). Los Angeles has recently experienced
significant demographic changes. Most evidently a Latinization or “Mexicanization” has
been the “dominant engine” in the changing ethnic landscape in the city and in the
borderlands (Davis 2000, p. 2).
Around the world, city-regions— epitomizing economic prosperity, opportunity, and new
beginnings— have emerged as prime destinations for migrants eager to escape the
socioeconomic hopelessness of their home countries. Migrants have become to play a
131
significant role in the labor force and social life in urban centers in Europe, Asia,
Australia, and North America. Los Angeles is among 20 cities in the world with more
than 1 million foreign-born residents (Figure 5.9.). According to the United Nations,
these 20 metropolitan areas are home to 37 million immigrants and account for 19
percent of the world's foreign-born residents. In other words, fewer than two dozen cities
in the world are the destination for one in five of international and national migrants
(Price and Benton-Short 2007). Since the majority of known human trafficking victims is
migrant workers, cities in the United States with a higher immigrant population have
emerged as an obvious research object for investigations of human trafficking.
Figure 5.9. Cities with over 1 000 000 foreign-born residents. Source: Price and Benton-
Short 2007.
132
A significant number of victims of forced labor are trafficked by members of their own
ethnic community. Migrant communities serve as contact points for future potential
migrants and thus potential victims of trafficking. International workers' migratory paths
are often determined by transnational migration networks that have traditionally been
established by friends or family, sometimes over the course of generations. Douglas
Massey (2006) refers to established social ties to people who previously migrated as
“social capital” that enables and facilitates the movement and migration of family
members, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. Senior migrants provide novices with
essential information about the migration process, help finance the trip, and assist with
social integration in the host country (Koser 2007). Social capital comes in different
forms, including the specific social ties an individual has or general experiences with the
migration process. Traffickers of human beings are experts in utilizing their social capital
to lure and deceive their victims into migrating to another place. A common story of how
a migrant worker ends up in a human trafficking situation may unfold like the following.
Traffickers approach their victims in their home villages, through family and friends, or
via ads in local media. They offer help in finding attractive jobs in restaurant businesses,
domestic service, or the entertainment industry. They assist in managing travel
arrangements and promise adequate accommodation upon arrival in the place of
destination with the sole purpose of luring their victims to embark on the journey only to
later exploit them in a forced labor situation. Once arrived at their destination, the victim
is stripped of his or her official and personal documents, sometimes under ridiculous
pretenses. In one case in Los Angeles, the trafficker confiscated his victim's passport and
133
jewelry alleging they are “safer with him because of the earthquakes in Los Angeles”
(Deutsch 2009). Taking papers and documents away is part of the process of isolating the
victim, a key component of many human trafficking situations. The migrant workers soon
realize that their dream job as a “waitress” was bogus, and are forced into domestic
servitude, elder care, or prostitution. In addition, the traffickers inform them of a financial
debt accrued from travel expenses, accommodation, and paper processing, which they
have to work off before they are free to go. In reality, this debt only continues to grow
and the trafficked person is stuck as a forced laborer indefinitely. More often than not, the
trafficker exerts physical and emotional violence to silence any aspirations in the victim
to escape the situation. With some variations in the details, this narrative is the common
plot line of hundreds of known stories of survivors explaining how they ended up in a
forced labor situation.
One such case is that of Nena Jimeno Ruiz, who became a victim of forced domestic
servitude in Culver City, Los Angeles in 2001. Ruiz, a then 60-year-old former teacher in
the Philippines, was lured from her home country by the promise to work as a travel
companion for her trafficker's sick mother, but ended up working 18-hour days in the
home of James and Elizabeth Jackson (Figure 5.10.). James Jackson then was a vice
president of legal affairs at Sony Pictures. His wife Elizabeth Jackson shared Filipino
descent with Ruiz. Ruiz describes her ordeal in the Jackson household thusly:
134
I had to cook, clean, wash clothes, iron, hem dresses and tame the two dogs. […] I
cooked for the dogs, but I was given leftovers that had been in the fridge for days.
I had to clean (the dogs') ears and give them vitamins, but I was forced to sleep on
a dog bed. […] If I complained, Mrs. Jackson said she'd call the police, they'd
lock me up and I'd never see my family. (Whitmarsh 2004, p. 7)
Figure 5.10. News article of Nena Jimeno Ruiz' case in the Santa Monica Daily Press.
Source: Whitmarsh 2004.
Ruiz was discouraged from communicating with others and the few times she left the
house in the gated-community the Jacksons were always with her.
18
Like many others,
18
Elizabeth and James Jackson were sentenced to more than $250,000 in punitive damages. Ruiz received
$551,000 in back wages, penalty and other damages. Upon her rescue, Ruiz was employed as a certified
nurse's assistant and shared a Los Angeles apartment with a roommate (Whitmarsh 2004).
135
Ruiz was a victim trafficked by a member of her own ethnic community. She shared a
cultural and ethnic background with her trafficker, which facilitates building trust and
offers a sense of security and familiarity. In the end, leaving your home country and
family to pursue an economic opportunity is a serious step associated with the hardship of
leaving loved ones behind and travelling into an unknown and oftentimes dangerous
world. Knowing someone who shares your nationality, language, and cultural habits eases
the move and helps the victom to overcome natural fears and obstacles. Thus, it is even
more unexpected and cruel that an alleged facilitator turns out to be a tormentor.
While Nena Ruiz endured, but never accepted her ordeal in the Jackson household to be
right and just, the case of Shyima Hall in Irvine, Orange County shows that what the
United States views as an outright injustice and brutal violation of basic human rights
may in fact be a culturally accepted practice in other parts of the world. Shyima Hall
grew up in Egypt in a family of 14. To make ends meet, her parents sent her sister to
work as a domestic servant with a well-off family in their town. When her sister's
employers decided to move to the United States, they took Shyima Hall along on a valid
tourist visa. Her sister refused to leave the country and family. Once the family moved
into their $1.4 million house in a gated-community in Irvine, Orange County, Shyima
Hall was put to work. She had to look after the youngest of the five kids in the park and
swimming pool. She had to prepare lunch for the twins and iron the clothes for the older
sisters every morning. She lived in the garage and had to wash her clothes with dish
washing soap (Figure 5.11.). She never got medical attention when she was sick and was
136
not allowed out of the garage without permission. In her own words: “It was freaking
cold [in the garage and once the] the lightbulbs broke, […] they never got replaced” (Hall
2009). Shyima Hall was 11-years-old when a neighbor called 911, and reported to social
services and the Irvine Police Department that a school-age girl was not going to school.
Figure 5.11. Shyima Hall, spokesperson and survivor of human trafficking, sitting in the
windowless garage in Irvine, Orange County, where she was kept for 2 years as a child.
Source: TIP Report 2009, p. 12.
Shyima was rescued and her perpetrators went to prison and were later deported. The
mother never showed any remorse about how they were treating Shyima amid their
luxurious life in Orange County. The day she was sentenced in court, the mother
“protested that she had to be in court that day, because it was a Muslim holiday,” and she
137
wanted to be home with her kids (Hall 2009). Obviously she was convinced that the
practice of having a child running her household and serving the family while her own
children went to school and enjoyed any aspect of a well-off family was normal and
accepted in her community. Shyima's family sided with her traffickers and claimed that
Shyima was “ungrateful to the family and that she should shut up and go back being a
servant” (Hall 2009). Cultural practices travel across national boundaries and clash with
other cultural norms. In isolated spaces, maintaining such practices is easy. Immigrant
communities function as just such isolated spaces, especially if a person is not familiar
with the local language and is underage. Knowing that her entire extended family
depended on her made the situation particularly difficult for Shyima. A controversial
argument made in this case is that Shyima may be better off as a house slave in the
United States than without education and enough food for her and her family in her home
country. But that is not the point. The fact is that Shyima and all human beings are
entitled to the protection of their very basic human rights. The place for a girl aged eleven
living in the United States is in school, and certainly not behind the ironing board. That
her family sided with the trafficker illustrates an enormous obstacle to the world
community that believes in the preservation of every individual's human and civil rights.
In the case of Shyima these rights include the right to education, freedom of movement,
food, and shelter— especially for a child. But since her case took place in the United
States, her traffickers were sentenced, and Shyima, abandoned by her family, was
adopted by U.S. parents. Like Ruiz, she is now a spokesperson in the local anti-human
trafficking movement.
138
Once trafficked into an urban center like Greater Los Angeles, victims are often kept
isolated in their ethnic immigrant communities. This segregation is all intended, as it
allows traffickers to exert their power and keep the victim under control. This spatial
isolation also aggravates attempts by the anti-trafficking community to reach out and
offer help to the victims. In Los Angeles, a particularly cruel case of forced labor with a
young Indonesian woman illustrates how inter-ethnic ties in an immigrant community
can further the victim's isolation and make a rescue difficult. The woman came from
Indonesia in her late teens and was forced into domestic servitude, where she worked as a
childcare giver, as a maid, a cook, and a cleaner. Without any proper compensation and
under the worst living conditions, she lived in this way for more than 10 years. Her
traffickers, also from Indonesia, abused her physically, sexually, and emotionally. For
instance, they cut off her eyelashes and eyebrows and made her work naked (Yoshioka
2009). The victim's way out of her ordeal was dramatic, largely because she and her
trafficker were from the same immigrant community. Compared to other immigrant
communities, the Indonesian community in Los Angeles is tiny and only counts several
thousand members, according to the 2000 census (Los Angeles Almanac 2010), which
makes it particularly difficult to go unnoticed or to stay anonymous.
The woman ran away once and sought shelter at the Indonesian Consulate. However, the
consulate staff sided with the family and returned her to the trafficker, who was a rich,
prominent, and greatly influential businessman in the Indonesian community. One day,
the family went on a vacation and left the woman wit hout enough food to survive locked
139
up in the garage. The woman escaped over a wall that was secured with barbed wire and
landed on a “normal busy street in Beverly Hills” (Yoshioka 2009), where an ordinary
person rescued her and took her to the consulate again. The consulate was about to return
her to the family again, when a staff member, a “Good Samaritan,” brought her to CAST.
Her social worker, Sari Yoshioka (2009), recalls the moment when she first met the
women and will never forget “her face color. […] She had never seen the sun. She was
totally malnourished. She had these strange blotches on her skin. Later I knew it was a
vitamin deficiency issue. It was like she was wearing a mask.” The woman's rescue was a
top-secret mission. The consulate worker turned out to be a true saint, as she stayed
involved in the case and was the only one able to speak to the victim in her native
language (Bahasa Indonesian) and help the rescuers to unearth the true extent of the
forced labor situation to which the woman was subjected. As in Shyima's case, having a
domestic slave may be a common cultural practice and thus not called into question in
certain circles of Southeast Asian societies. However, apart from the outrageousness of
such abuse of a human being, this case highlights the tremendous challenges law
enforcement, social workers, and local politics face in establishing trust and access to
immigrant communities in order to address human trafficking in the city.
The American Dream, low income workers and forced labor
Greater Los Angeles is an economic powerhouse. The city-region has a gross
metropolitan product (GMP) of $831 billion and is, after Tokyo-Yokohama and New
York, the third largest metropolitan economy in the world (Davis 2000; Global Insight
140
2008). In a list of national economies, Greater Los Angeles is in 15
th
place, leading the
Netherlands, Turkey, Sweden, Belgium, and Indonesia (CIA Factbook 2010). The city-
region currently attracts much research interest, because some consider the city as the
metropolis of the 21st century (Erie 2002, 2004). Once based on a three-tiered economy
centered on aerospace, entertainment (television, motion pictures, music production, and
video games),and tourism, Los Angeles has an economic landscape that has expanded
into a multi-faceted economic engine including the banking and finance industry,
technology research, construction, and agriculture. The entertainment industry is
substantial and Los Angeles is still considered the entertainment capital of the world. The
region's economy has a vibrant international trade that centers largely on the port of Los
Angeles and Long Beach, which together are the fifth busiest port in the world (Port of
Long Beach 2010). In addition, Los Angeles is home to the largest manufacturing center
in the western United States, with 500 000 workers in the industry in 2003 (City-
data.com 2010).
A powerful economy produces a large pool of jobs that, in the case of many industrialized
countries, are only partially filled with local workers. Instead, the demand for immigrant
labor in the U.S. and particularly California keeps rising as a result of a global economic
world order that is still producing the greatest job growth of low-skilled and part-time
labor from the less developed world (Martin 1994). In California, for instance, the
numbers of foreign-born restaurant cooks increased from 29 to 69 percent between 1980
and 1996. At the same time, the proportion of non-citizen gardeners almost doubled and
141
that of construction workers more than tripled (Cornelius 1998). Leading a national urban
trend, the Los Angeles' decentralized urban structure has made the ever-growing suburbs,
particularly the San Fernando Valley and, increasingly, San Bernardino and Riverside
counties, major employment centers (Singer et al. 2008). Consequently, the city-region
has a vast demand for low-income workers and functions as a major spatial pull for
migrant workers from across the globe.
There is no shortage of such workers in the world. Recent estimates indicate that there are
more than 200 million migrants in the world (3 percent of the world population), the
majority of them economic migrants. The reasons and motivations why people embark on
journeys of international migration are manifold. A most basic and commonly used
distinction applied to political, economic, and social migration is that of push and pull
factors. The category of push factors comprises issues such as growing economic
disparities, deteriorating welfare systems, a lack of professional and educational
opportunities, political oppression, war, and human rights violations. Migrant workers
move in the hopes of earning enough money to feed and provide housing and education
for their families back home. According to a recent World Bank report, migrants sent
$338 billion to their home countries in 2008 (Levitt and Lamba-Nieves 2010). In many
developing countries remittances have become a key component for the survival of
national economies. On the other hand, pull factors influencing migrants' decisions to
move consist of political freedom, economic opportunity, or family reunions in the
country of destination. In the case of the United States, the pull factors are often
142
encapsulated in the pursuit of the American Dream. While migrant workers in the
developed world also take on high-skilled, white-collar jobs in managerial and
development sectors, large pools of migrants are employed in so-called 3-D jobs, i.e.,
work that is dirty, dangerous, or difficult (Steger 2009). These jobs are mostly found in
agriculture, timber, plantations, heavy industry, construction, and domestic service. A
combination of pull and push factors leads to the trafficking in persons. Workers eager to
escape economic disparity or social confinement become easy prey for recruiters
(agencies or individuals) in the developing world, who deceive their victims with
promises of sustainable jobs and better lives in industrialized nations. Forced labor is
most rampant in economic sectors that show a large demand of cheap labor and a lack of
efficient monitoring at the work place.
In Greater Los Angeles, it is primarily the service sector that employs large numbers of
migrant workers and this segment of the work force also chronicles a significant number
of human trafficking cases. A substantial part of the service sector is domestic service.
Domestic service is a lucrative branch for traffickers for several reasons. One, as pointed
out in the Indonesian case, it is easy for the trafficker to keep their victims spatially and
socially isolated from the community and to exercise complete physical and
psychological power in order to groom a submissive servant. Two, domestic service is a
universal concept and thus easily sellable to potential migrant workers around the world
and in the United States. Three, even less qualified workers are good candidates for
recruitment into the domestic service industry, which is not to say that domestic service is
143
easy and harmless work. On the contrary, anyone running a household knows that
working as a domestic servant is an exhausting and laborious task. But domestic service
requires fewer professional skills and is thus the perfect entry-level job, especially for
women migrant workers. This scenario is exactly what young Maria Suarez had in mind,
when in 1976 she travelled with her father from Mexico to Los Angeles at the age of 16
in the hopes of finding work. The following is a summary of Maria's experience—
the oldest known case of human trafficking in the United States as reported in the
California Lawye r (Yeung 2004, p. 30-35, 60).
[Maria] left behind her parents, farmers who lived in an adobe mud flat in rural
Timbuscatio, in the Mexican state of Michoacan, to live with her sister in Sierra
Madre, California. Two weeks after her arrival, a woman with a Timbuscatio
accent offered Suarez a housecleaning job and then took Suarez to a modest, tidy
house in nearby Azusa, where she introduced her to 68-year-old Anselmo
Covarrubias. Covarrubias asked Suarez to stay until the evening to meet his wife
when she came home from work. Afterward, he told Suarez that he was too busy
to take her home and said she should spend the night. The next day, after she had
cleaned the house, Covarrubias again told her that he was busy and that she
should spend the night there. Suarez hesitantly agreed. But on the third evening,
when Suarez begged her employer to take her home, he told her: “I bought you for
$200, and you are going to be my slave.” Then he demanded sex. “No, I don't
want it,” Suarez told him in Spanish. When she tried to escape, Covarrubias
ripped off her clothes and shoved her out the front door. Humiliated, Suarez
begged to be let back in. Covarrubias opened the door, pulled her inside, and
started kicking and punching her. She ran into the bathroom, but he followed her
and pushed her, knocking her head against the windowsill. Suarez passed out, and
when she regained consciousness, she says that she knew she had been raped.
“Don't tell anyone what I did,” he told her. “I have power. I am a witch, and I can
kill you or your family anytime I want.” Suarez was horrified and desperately
afraid. […] Witches were part of the local lore in Timbuscatio, so when
Covarrubias made a doll out of her underwear soon after the rape and embedded it
in cement on the front porch, she believed him when he told her that the doll
would prevent her from leaving him. The days turned into months, and Suarez
endured frequent rapes, beating, and threats with knives or guns. Covarrubias
occasionally allowed Suarez to see her family in Sierra Madre, but when he did,
he would drive her to their home and allow her to stay only as long as it took him
to drive around the block. During these visits, Suarez's sister and brother noticed
144
that Suarez was acting strangely. They called the police a few times, but each time
the officers went to Covarrubias's house to investigate, Suarez insisted that
nothing was wrong between her and Covarrubias, whom she referred to as her
husband and the officers left without filing a report. Then, one morning in August
1981, a male neighbor named Rene Soto, enraged by past encounters with
Covarrubias, waited outside Covarrubias's house and then beat him to death with a
wooden table leg. Suarez heard a scream and ran outside to find Covarrubias lying
face down in the bloody grass and Soto and his wife, Felipa, standing over him.
Soto approached [Maria] with two bloody sticks and told her to hide them. Suarez
took the sticks, washed them in the bathtub, and then hid them in a crawl space
under the house. The police [later] told her that they had learned from the Sotos
that Suarez had masterminded the murder. They eventually obtained an unsigned
confession from Suarez and charged her with first-degree murder, soliciting
another to commit a crime, and accessory after the fact.
Maria Suarez, represented by a later disbarred attorney, was convicted in 1982 and spent
the next 22 years in State Prison. In 2002, Maria was granted parole by Governor Gray
Davis and finally released in December 2003. However, instead of meeting her family
that waiting outside the gates, Maria was greeted by Immigration officials who
handcuffed her and transported her to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
detention center in San Pedro. Meanwhile a group of lawyers and advocates centered
around lawyer Jessica Dominguez, attorney Andres Bustamente, Patricia Valencia
(Maria's niece), Olivia Wang of Free Battered Women, and attorney Charles Song from
CAST Los Angeles had taken on Maria's case and eventually succeeded in fighting off
her imminent deportation and securing her one of the first T-visas issued to survivors of
human trafficking in the United States. The T-visa enabled Maria to stay in the country
and to be eligible to government benefits. Today, Maria is one of the most vocal survivor
advocates in the anti-human trafficking world and has spoken at numerous events,
including the United Nations in New York, and with Maria Shriver at the Governor's
Conference in California in 2008 (Suarez 2009).
145
Human trafficking is not confined to hidden, isolated, and secluded places such as the
houses where Maria or Nena were kept. On the contrary, human trafficking happens in
workplaces open and frequented by the public, and thus truly is a crime “hidden in plain
sight” (Alimurung 2009, p. 1). While the overall dynamics of a trafficking situation also
apply to “public” incidents of forced labor (coercion, deceit, force), at times workers are
exploited for years in broad daylight before a neighbor or the community notices and
takes action. Such was the case of Filipino women forced to work in an elderly day care
facility in Long Beach, an incident that drew wide media attention and was brought to
daylight as a result of a multi-agency investigation. The victims again were migrant
workers who embarked on a trip from half-way around the world in the hopes of realizing
the American Dream in Los Angeles. One woman, called Alien A.G. in court papers,
came from a small province in the Philippines. One day a woman with the name of
Evelyn Pelayo approached her and offered her a job taking care of elders in a facility in
California. She also offered to take care of her travel and visa documentation. It is nearly
impossible for anyone without money, special skills, and family ties to find a legal way to
emigrate to the United States. For that reason, Alien A.G. jumped at the opportunity.
Against the general notion that victims of human trafficking largely enter the country
undocumented, the women's traffickers managed to pull off a fraud scheme and obtain
proper visa documentation from the U.S. Immigration officials in Manila, Philippines.
Pelayo and her accomplice obtained visas for their victims by posing them as martial arts
students who were to compete in tournaments in the United States. The plan worked
146
several times before and brought the women on a Chinese Airways plane from Manila to
LAX.
Figure 5.12. Elder care facility in Long Beach, California where Philippine women were
forced to work for several years. Source: Alimurung 2009.
Once put up in the care facility in Long Beach (Figure 5.12.), their passports were
confiscated and the women were forced to work in order to pay off their travel expenses,
including the two-month training in martial arts in Manila, the visa application, and travel
147
arrangements. Pelayo welcomed them with the threat that should they ever attempt to run
away they will face “'severe consequences'.” “'You cannot leave me,” Pelayo apparently
told her victims. “'After 10 years, maybe you can go home. I don’t want you to stab me in
the back.'” (quoted in Alimurung 2008, p. 3). Some women worked up to 24 hours daily
for several years before they escaped; the place was raided by federal agents in August
2008. Apart from the detestable exploitation of the victims and the violation of their basic
human rights, the truly astonishing twist in this story is that the nursing home run by
Pelayo in Long Beach was a state-licensed facility fulfilling all necessary and mandatory
requirements on paper.
An even more visible and public crime scene of forced labor in the heart of Greater Los
Angeles was discovered in the form of four carwash places in Hollywood, Northridge,
and Los Feliz (Figure 5.13.). For the past decades, the city's carwash places have
provided low-skilled entry-level jobs for mostly Latino immigrant workers. The carwash
industry is a significant business in the area, generating more than $251 million out of
$872 million nationally in Los Angeles County alone (Albano 2009). The city’s
fetishization of cars city creates a high demand for carwash places, which are integral
elements of the urban landscape. After receiving a number of complaints from workers
for unpaid wages and intimidation and harassment with a deadly weapon, the Carwash
Workers Organizing Committee and the United Steelworkers, along with Faith
Community Outreach, organized boycotts and lobbied local government officials to look
into the abuse and mistreatment of workers in the carwash industry. The result was a 176-
148
count criminal complaint filed by the Los Angeles City Attorney against two car wash
owners. In October 2008, city council members also voted to cancel a city contract with
Auto Spa Express carwash after discovering employers were mistreated and not properly
paid. While these incidents were not ruled a case of human trafficking, as it was not a
“severe form of human trafficking” (see Chapter Four for details), the broader definition
by the United Nations and other countries considers the experiences of the workers in the
subjected car wash places forms of forced labor in that they were intimidated, under
threat of violence, and inadequately paid for the performed work. In addition, the poor
economic situation in which many migrant workers find themselves contributes to
involuntary labor situations. As advertised in the picture below, a basic cleaning
treatment, including waxing and hand washing the car inside and outside at the Vermont
Car Wash costs $10. A basic commonsensical calculation of what it takes to complete this
task in terms of time, employee payment, water and soap, electricity, towels, and many
other overall overhead business aspects makes it clear that this does not add up at all.
Paying $10 for a 30-minute labor-intensive task creates disadvantages for someone in the
production chain, and mostly it is not the owner or employer who takes the cut, but rather
the workers, who in this case have joined forces and taken action to protest their
situation.
149
Figure 5.13. Carwash in Los Feliz accused of worker mistreatment and failed payment.
Source: Albano 2009.
A notable number of forced labor cases has also emerged in the region’s manufacturing
industry. Most prominently and widely known is the El Monte case, where in 1995 72
150
Thai workers were freed after being forced for years to work in the garment business of a
Thai family. A year later, another 5 victims of human trafficking were identified in a
garment factory in Los Angeles (Martorell 2009). In 2001, a group of Thai men was lured
to the United States and forced to work in welding and construction (Martorell 2009), a
business sector that again functions as an entry-level job for migrant workers and is thus
a lucrative recruiting place for traffickers seeking to exploit people based on their
economic aspirations and social insecurity as fresh migrants. In December 2006, a
financial settlement was reached on behalf of 48 Thai welders hired through Kota
Manpower Inc. of Thailand and Los Angeles, who were accused of forcing men to live in
squalor while working for little or no pay (Martorell 2009). Particularly vulnerable to
exploitation are day laborers. Day laborers are mostly men who stand at a corner of a
street and look for work on a day-to-day basis for the day or up to six months. Some are
family men, some single men. Some have a status or work permit, some are
undocumented. Some have homes, some are homeless, and some are roommates.
According to the workers' rights organization CHIRLA, the number one problem day
laborers face is non-payment of wages, followed by issues of safety, which at times is a
matter of life and death due to a lack of insurance and safety network. CHIRLA reports
cases in which day laborers are picked up and promised a certain amount of money for a
certain job, but after completing the task get dropped off in the middle of nowhere
without any payment. As pointed out earlier, Greater Los Angeles is not only a
destination, but also a transit hub for traffickers. CHIRLA worked on a case where a man
reportedly showed up at the Downtown laborer center and posed as a contractor from
151
Michigan. He wanted to recruit workers for a job in the mid-West. The staff at the center
denied his request based on doubts of the man's sincerity, but he still managed to recruit
workers. It later turned out these men were forced to work in Michigan for 6 months,
before three of them were able to escape to Chicago and alert the local work center about
abuse.
Another important sector affected by human trafficking is the agricultural industry. In the
words of a CHIRLA advocate, “the industry of agriculture lends itself to human
trafficking” for several reasons (Mesa 2009). First, the agriculture industry has a high
demand for a low-skilled, labor-intensive workforce, and thus provides entry-level jobs
in the U.S. economy. Second, the workers employed in agriculture are mostly low-
income workers making about $12000 a year (Mesa 2009). In comparison, the living
wage in L.A. County is twice that amount (L.A. County Online 2010). Third, agricultural
work is seasonable. Fourth, agricultural workers are primarily occupied in remote
locations, a fact that, as mentioned earlier, weakens the worker’s position and him
vulnerable to labor exploitation. Fifth, the employment structure enables forced labor
situations, as farmers seldom directly hire workers to work their farms. Instead
subcontractors recruit laborers. Consequently, workers oftentimes are unaware of what
ranch they actually work for. This lack of transparency in the chain of command and
ultimately the question of who is responsible for the workers is particularly problematic
for the victims if they attempt to bring charges against their traffickers and for the
investigators who make an effort to build a viable case for prosecution. Incidents of
152
human trafficking in the agricultural sector in Los Angeles include a case in Oxnard,
where a woman from the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County was known to pick
“the smallest, the darkest, or most simply dressed folks” whom she identified as the
“more recently arrived” migrant workers and transported them to Oxnard. The victims
were put in little rooms and had to sell ice cream in push carts. Because the workers were
unable to speak English and lacked any sense of where they were, it took a long time to
get help and to escape their forced labor situation (Mesa 2009). In 2009, the Thai
Community Development Center was working on a case of more than 1000 Thai
nationals trapped in forced agricultural work all over the United States (Martorell 2009).
In spite of strong elements of forced labor, none of these or similar cases has been
officially investigated as a human trafficking cases. This lack of investigation may be
explained by the fact that over the past decade, the U.S. government has advocated a
biased toward sex trafficking, neglecting the need to address human trafficking in areas
other than forced prostitution (see Chapter Four and Six for a more detailed discussion of
this issue).
Lastly, a significant part of human trafficking tied into the demand side in Greater Los
Angeles concerns the trafficking in persons for sexual exploitation. Without tapping into
the politics of a greatly politicized topic, the demand for sexual service or prostitution is
almost as old as human history. At the same time, prostitution is universal and occurs in
regions and countries across the globe. This demand is particularly true for Los Angeles,
the entertainment capital of the world. In spite of a set of laws prohibiting prostitution
153
and pimping in California, the business is booming. Again, a lack of accurate data only
allows for vague estimates, but experts agree that more and more women (it is mostly
women) are involved in or forced into prostitution. Immigration agents estimate that the
number of women affected by prostitution in Los Angeles is as high as 10 000 (CAST LA
2010a). Because it is illegal, the business is largely driven underground. Nightclubs and
massage parlors double as entertainment venues and hidden brothels. Other places
frequented by pimps are motels along freeways and private homes. The author
acknowledges that women and men may choose prostitution as a means of making a
living. However, a very large number of mostly women and children is forced into
prostitution and thus become victims of sex trafficking. Thanks to extensive media
coverage, political agendas, and the push by non-profit organizations, sex trafficking is
the best known (and many times only known) aspect of human trafficking. The scheme
by which women and men end up as victims of sex trafficking is similar to labor
trafficking, only with an additional layer of severity. Women are lured by the promise of
finding a legitimate job and a better life in America. Others have been abandoned by their
impoverished families and sold into prostitution.
A typical plot line of a sex trafficking story is the recently tried case of young women
from rural Guatemala who were baited to Los Angeles and forced into prostitution.
According to the testimony of the ten young victims, five men and five women, promised
the women legitimate jobs as babysitters, housekeepers or waitresses with an hourly
salary of $10 in Los Angeles. In the hopes of a better life in the United States, the women
154
from the countryside agreed to embark on the dangerous journey to the United States
with the help of smugglers. Upon their arrival in Los Angeles, however, they were forced
into prostitution by their countrymen to repay their supposed debts for being smuggled
into the country (Glover 2009). The women were forced to have sex with up to 30 men a
day and had to work while ill and menstruating. The women testified they were almost
constantly watched by their traffickers and were threatened with violence and beaten to
scare them away from leaving. A girl named Esperanza, who was 17 when her ordeal
began, allegedly was told, “her legs would be cut off and her entire family killed if she
tried to escape” (Glover 2009). Another one told the jurors that one of the traffickers
threatened to “throw acid on her face if she ever tried to leave” (Glover 2009). In the end,
the five defendants were convicted of sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion, and
face life prison sentences (ICE 2009). In another case involving victims from Guatemala,
the traffickers specifically targeted young Guatemalan mothers and forced them to work
as prostitutes in Los Angeles by threatening to kill their children back home if they would
not comply (Song 2009). While the majority of sex trafficking victims in Greater Los
Angeles seems to be women, labor rights activists also report of men being forced into
sex work. CHIRLA worked on a case in which men were initially hired for construction
and then later forced or solicited into sex work (Mesa 2009). Prostitution and pimping are
lucrative business and obviously the demand for sex services in urban centers such as
Greater Los Angeles is insatiable. Unfortunately, traffickers increasingly take up this
business opportunity and prey on women and men already disadvantaged through factors
like gender discrimination, family violence, and a lack of access to education and
155
economic opportunity.
The typical victim of sex trafficking is depicted as a young female from a foreign
country. Media coverage has largely framed sex trafficking as an overseas event affecting
poor, powerless, and uneducated women and girls from everywhere else but the United
States. While this profile is a very common one that investigators encounter when dealing
with sex trafficking in the United States, it is also only part of the story. Unbeknownst to
the general public, a significant number of men and women in the United States become
victims of what is called domestic trafficking. A recent report by the University of
Pennsylvania estimates that every year more than 200 000 underaged girls and boys are at
high risk of being trafficked for sexual exploitation in the United States (Estes and
Weiner 2001). Especially concerning to advocates for human rights is the commercial
sexual exploitation of children in the country. An alarming detail to the story is that
experts think the average entry-age into prostitution in the United States is 13 or 14
(Morgan 2008). How many children, women, and men actually fall victim to domestic
trafficking is not known, however, individual cases offer a glance at the severity of the
situation and especially the underlying socio-economic causes creating and enabling the
sexual exploitation of U.S. citizens.
One such chilling story is that of Wendy, who, long before the term “human trafficking”
was coined, became a victim of commercial sexual exploitation at the hands of another
U.S. citizen. Wendy, of Caucasian descent and now in her early forties, grew up in a
troubled family in the Northwestern United States. Her family struggled making ends
156
meet. At an early age, Wendy experienced physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the
hands of her stepfather. When Wendy confided to her mother about the abuse, a
restraining order was filed against the stepfather. The family broke apart, and Wendy,
along with her mother and brother, moved out of the stepfather's house, which until that
day had offered them a slightly more comfortable life. In high school, Wendy had a crush
on the coolest guy on the block. They started dating when Wendy was 15-years old. A
year later she gave birth to her first child. At that time she stayed with her mother, who
due to their economic struggles was not particularly supportive of her. One day, when the
young family was hard-pressed on money again and the baby had to be fed and diapered,
her boyfriend and the father of the baby approached Wendy with a proposal. He told her
he knew of a job that would pay enough for diapers and other necessities for the baby. He
told her it would not be an easy task, but if she really loved her baby, she would endure
the job. Stuck with an unsupportive mother, no one else to turn to, and already
emotionally dependent on the boyfriend, she agreed to do the job without knowing
initially what it entailed. Shortly after that conversation she met her first customer, a
Chinese businessman. He became the first of many.
Over the course of the next several years, Wendy's life took a turn for the even worse.
Her “boyfriend” managed to build up one of the biggest prostitution rings on the U.S.
West Coast involving more then 300 women. To enhance profits, the “boyfriend” spread
out his business and transported the women under his control to cities up and down the
Western United States, including Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, always following
157
the demand. To keep the women he exploited under physical and emotional control, he
addicted them to drugs and never shied away from exerting brutal violence. Wendy tried
to run away several times. Once she called a regular customer for help and he took her
and her kids (in the end she had three kids) to a shelter in Portland, Oregon. When she
called the house where the other girls were still stuck, she learned that one of them was
hospitalized with a broken back. The “boyfriend” had promised to keep beating this girl
until Wendy and her kids came back to the house. Over the course of time, the
“boyfriend” had perfected his weapons of psychological terror and one of his favorite
tools was to emotionally torture and punish one girl by making her watch his beating of
another girl. Years later, when Wendy had just given birth to her third child, police
knocked on their door and arrested the pimp boyfriend along with all the girls. Wendy
was convicted of prostitution and put behind bars for two years. Based on legislation in
the 1990s, Wendy was a criminal. The fact that she was a victim of abuse, social, and
economic neglect and mistreatment was never considered in her trial. A bitter side plot is
that while she was imprisoned, she lost custody of her three kids, who went to the pimp's
mother. To this day, her youngest child lives with his paternal grandmother. Wendy, a
remarkable woman with an unfathomable story, now lives in Orange County and speaks
about her experiences at human trafficking awareness events (Barnes 2008).
The impact of the border and transnational crime on human trafficking
So far, the role immigrant communities play in human trafficking and the high demand
for low-income workers in the local economy have helped shed some light on why
158
Greater Los Angeles has emerged as a prime destination for human trafficking. Another
vital component in this analysis is the extensive international border with Mexico. The
The influx of new immigrants is largely dominated by the region’s proximity to the US-
Mexico border, which in the case of Los Angeles has played a key role in the emergence
of the city as the number one magnet for new immigrants to the country and thus a prime
market for traffickers. Between 1965 and 1990, more than half of L.A.’s immigrants
arrived from countries in Central America or Mexico (Waldinger and Bozorgmehr 1996).
Further impetus for trans-border migration came with the signing of NAFTA in the early
1990s, which promoted new economic opportunities for residents south and north of the
US-Mexico border. As discussed earlier, the migrant workers' vulnerability in terms of a
lack of stable work, legal status, or a social support system, coupled with a high demand
for cheap labor and the absence of a functioning control mechanism creates opportunities
for traffickers to exploit and capitalize on the dreams and aspirations of their victims. The
ongoing militarization and tightening of the border paired with a lack of legal avenues to
enter the country for many migrant workers further aggravates matters, since stricter
border control has led to an increase in trafficking, because migrants turn to third parties
to smuggle them into the country. Large numbers of migrant workers enter the country
with the help of human smugglers. Experts in the region have recently noticed that
smugglers increasingly turn into traffickers because they are attracted by the business
opportunity. Kristin Krayman (2009) from the Public Legal Council in Santa Ana points
out a newly emerging phenomenon in which, after bringing people across the border,
smugglers kidnap and keep them in a drop house against their will until they have paid
159
off an additional debt that has accrued through the smuggling process. Apparently,
immigration officers receive more and more phone calls from family members reporting
that their husbands or brothers are being kept in a particular location and held hostage for
ransom. Calling on the help of immigration officers to end these situations is probably
not the best move, because if the kidnapped person fails to prove that he has been a
victim of severe trafficking under force, fraud, and coercion, he will most likely be
deported to his country of origin. Regardless, this new trend of hostage-taking adds
another layer of danger and risk to migrating workers who have to come to the United
States the illegal way.
The US-Mexico border region has been the setting for a number of transnational crimes,
most notably the traffic in drugs, but also money laundering and weapons trafficking. In
spite of massive economic and financial support to other countries and particularly
Mexico, and a broad set of prohibitions and policies in place in the United States, the
general assumption is that the United States and its ally Mexico are losing the war on
drugs, as it was initiated under President Nixon in the 1970s. Not a week passes without
reports concerning violent killings and brutal executions of civilians and officials who get
caught in the deadly rivalry between drug trafficking gangs operating on both sides of the
border. Government officials are aware that these crimes severely affect and destabilize
communities in California and elsewhere along the border and increase the potential for
other violent crimes such as human trafficking. Gangs and other criminal organizations
have taken on human trafficking as a new business opportunity. Kris Bruckner, a former
160
L.A. County Sheriff's Deputy, explains that criminal networks are “now trying to run
their organizations like Fortune 500 companies. They need to raise revenue, but if they’re
out there shooting each other, doing drug sales, their potential to make higher revenues is
actually lower” (quoted in Ono 2010). Gangs operate very strategically and, based on a
cost-benefit analysis, have simply diversified their business. As Sandie Morgan illustrates
in her training sessions on human trafficking in Orange County, compared to drug
trafficking, human trafficking is more lucrative. A drug can only be sold once, whereas a
human being can be “sold” and exploited over and over again until the victim has been
mangled and disposable.
This scenario turns into reality when gangs become involved in the trafficking of women
for sexual exploitation. In a 2006 Trafficking in Persons Report, the U.S. Department of
State acknowledges a correlation between human trafficking and crime and gang activity,
child exploitation, public health problems, and depressed wages in local communities
(TIP 2006). Signs in local communities show a connection between impoverished
neighborhoods, organized crime and gang activity, and human trafficking. Nicole Rivera,
a school teacher, noted just such a triangulation in the L.A. neighborhood of Watts, where
the infamous gang MS 13 is active. Watts is a largely Latino (61%) and Black (37%)
neighborhood in South L.A. and home to t he gang Mara Salvatrucha, a transnational
criminal organization that started in Los Angeles and is now active in the United States
and several Central American countries. Most of the gang's members have backgrounds
in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, but have lived most of their life in the United
161
States. Brutal violence, robbery, drug trafficking, extortion, and human smuggling are
among the gang's activities. U.S. and Mexican authorities acknowledge that MS-13 has
been heavily involved in drug smuggling and human trafficking operations on both sides
of the border (Altered Dimensions 2010). Rivera decided to take action and educate
students at her school about human trafficking in the context of gang violence in their
Watts neighborhood. With the help of dedicated students and limited resources, Rivera
organized a human trafficking awareness day at their local high school in Watts,
including a student performance depicting various scenarios of how young people may
end up victims of human trafficking in their own neighborhoods.
While human trafficking is certainly embedded in large transnational criminal operations
and orchestrated as a lucrative business component in addition to other criminal and
illegal activities, experts in the field believe that organized crime plays a less significant
role than one might assume. Instead, trafficking largely involves “disorganized crime,”
meaning, “there is no standard profile of traffickers” (Feingold 2005, 28). A case of
Taiwanese girls trafficked to Greater Los Angeles for sexual exploitation by members of
the United Bamboo, a transnational gang with roots in Taiwan, is the exception, not the
rule (Tsui 2008). Rather, more isolated, less organized or structured human trafficking
operations by individuals or families make up the larger part of human trafficking cases
that authorities come across (Krayman 2009). An incident that meets these criteria is the
Guatemalan sex trafficking case discussed earlier in which the defendants came all from
one family. Similarly, the Long Beach elder care case was largely orchestrated by a
162
woman in the South Bay and her aide in Manila. These traffickers sense an opportunity
for making money and seize that opportunity. In contrast to established criminal
networks, these small-scale operations in human trafficking are more or less start-ups,
initially involving one or two victims and later expanded and established as business
structures to increase the revenue. A more sophisticated, but still-small scale,
international human trafficking network is the case of a South Korean trafficking network
that was detected by authorities in the U.S. in 2004. The traffickers in this case were
Korean brokers based in L.A. who “ordered” women with recruiters in Seoul, South
Korea. The women were recruited through newspaper ads or outside the U.S. Embassy
after they had been rejected for a visa. Promised the usual benefits, like housing, food,
and a secure job, many women trusted the recruiters and responded, eager to escape the
economic bleakness of their homecountry and sold on the idea of starting all over in the
United States. In the U.S., the L.A.-based brokers charged spa managers around the
country between $8000 and $12000 per worker. The Korean women were kept in
indentured servitude and forced into prostitution to pay off the costs that they had
apparently incurred through their recruitment and transportation to the United States
(Finley 2005).
Concluding Remarks
This chapter provided an overview of the nature and scope of human trafficking in
Greater Los Angeles. It quickly became clear that attempting a numerical assessment of
the scope of the problem is close to impossible. The reasons are largely a lack of
163
substantial accurate data on human trafficking due to the hidden and underground nature
of the crime. In addition, officials and other agencies in the field struggle with the fact
that victims are hesitant to come forward for fear of experiencing retaliation from the
trafficker or deportation through immigration officers. Oftentimes, victims also are not
aware of laws, rights, and customs, and thus tend to accept their situations as the normal
state. Even the U.S. government faces challenges in giving an accurate picture of human
trafficking nationally and internationally, as indicated by the several revisions of
published estimates over the past decade. The forms of human trafficking occurring in
Greater Los Angeles are manifold. This chapter only highlighted major forms of labor
exploitation and by no means provided a holistic overview of each case of human
trafficking that authorities in the region have come across. Each case of human
trafficking is unique, however they share common factors—
an understanding of which is essential to exploring more effective strategies for
addressing the problem. While domestic service, construction, factory work, agriculture,
and forced prostitution are common areas of labor exploitation, other areas include
restaurant and hotel work, the newly emerging phenomenon of servile marriage, children
forced to sell candy, or isolated incidents such as the case of a Thai toddler who was
rented out by his mother in Thailand to a trafficker who transported women to Japan and
the United States for sexual exploitation and used the boy as a prop to stage them as a
normal family when passing immigration authorities.
164
Notably, what qualifies as a human trafficking case depends greatly on what definition of
the crime is applied to a labor exploitation situation. Seldom do authorities come across a
clear-cut human trafficking case. More often than not, a potential trafficking case
overlaps with other worker rights and human rights issues such as workplace
mistreatment, human smuggling, or failed payment. Regularly, non-profit organizations
encounter cases that they identify as potential trafficking incidents based on a broader
definition of what constitutes a forced labor situation. Ultimately, however, the case is not
investigated as a trafficking case by authorities in the United States, because it does not
fulfill the requirement of a severe form of human trafficking under force, fraud, or
coercion. One such case is that of Guatemalan workers, who had signed over their land to
smugglers to be smuggled into the United States in order to find work in Greater Los
Angeles. The smugglers were loan sharks and their debts were exorbitant. With the
economic demise in the United States, the Guatemalan workers did not find the work
they were hoping for. Unable to pay off their loans, they lost their land in Guatemala to
the smugglers. Clearly, these workers became victims of a global economic meltdown
paired with the audacity and unscrupulousness of criminal minds who do not shy away
from exploiting the vulnerability of already desperate and disadvantaged migrant
workers. In addition, the militarization of the border and tight immigration policies in the
United States play against migrant workers and make them more vulnerable, forcing
migration underground and depriving migrants of protection through government
agencies. While the Guatemalan case shows signs of coercion to labor and human rights
agencies, U.S. trafficking law does not identify these workers as victims of human
165
trafficking and most likely will deport the workers to their homecountry.
The chapter provided an outline of the major dynamics underlying the emergence of
Greater L.A. as a prime destination and transit hub for human trafficking in the country.
Focusing on Los Angeles as a stronghold of immigrant communities and an economic
powerhouse that generates a high demand for cheap labor, the analysis showed how these
factors create ample opportunities for labor exploitation on a small and large scale. Even
though experts believe transnational organized crime in the border region plays a
significant role in trafficking of persons, in the majority of investigated cases the
traffickers operate independent of established criminal structures and networks. In this
regard, small-scale traffickers are criminals of opportunity. They take an opportunity and
implement a business idea, only in this case they exploit and play with the fates and lives
of vulnerable workers. How inventive traffickers are is shown in the case of 56 deaf
Mexican teenagers, the youngest only 15 years old, who were lured to Los Angeles and
later brought to New York City with the promise of “opportunities for deaf people in the
United States” (Dwyer 2010). Upon their arrival, the deaf teenagers ended up working
endless shifts as peddlers selling jewelry and toys in the streets of Los Angeles and New
York City handing all money over to their traffickers, the Paoletti family.
In sum, international and local authorities are still largely in the dark about the true scope
of human trafficking here in the United States as well as abroad. However, the burning
question is not so much how many victims of human trafficking are out there, but rather
166
why more victims are not identified. The increasing number of discovered and
investigated cases of human trafficking offer a glimpse at the nature and underlying
factors enabling human trafficking and show that the crime is real and effects probably
many more people than is currently known. Discovered and investigated cases are most
likely only the tip of the iceberg, and it is left to authorities and communities to find the
ways and means to unearth the true scope of forced labor in the United States and
especially in Greater Los Angeles.
167
Chapter 6
The emergence of an anti-human trafficking sector
“You may never know what results come of your actions,
but if you do nothing, there will be no result.”
Mahatma Gandi
Starting from scratch
A new awareness of the existence of slavery-like practices, or human trafficking, has
emerged around the world and called into action a conglomerate of agents and activists
determined to address this new form of labor exploitation and human rights violation.
While human trafficking is similar in nature to historic slavery (i.e., a person is working
against her will and thereby loosing a string of basic human rights), contemporary
“slavery” comes in a wide number of forms and situations and thus poses new challenges
to human rights advocates who operate in a highly integrated and complex world.
Consequently, governments and activists in Greater Los Angeles and all over the world
are scrambling to find a 21
st
century solution to contain, if not abolish, all forms of forced
labor.
This chapter explores current efforts to tackle human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles.
By adopting a spatial analytical approach, I aim to highlight the general dimensions of
local anti-trafficking work that have emerged in a particular place to address the demand
for services by trafficking victims. This chapter particularly focuses on how and in what
168
form a localization of international and national anti-human trafficking responses through
local agents is taking place. The discussion is structured around two key aspects. First,
the key stakeholders, their collaboration across the lines and their varying political and
ideological approaches to addressing human trafficking are identified and investigated.
The anti-human trafficking movement in Greater Los Angeles is defined by a multi-
agency approach incorporating the local, state, and federal governments, community
agencies, legal advocates, law enforcement agents, survivors of human trafficking,
human-rights groups, shelters, faith-based communities, immigrant rights organizations,
and ethnic communities. Second, the chapter examines how the community addresses and
meets the extensive needs of survivors of human trafficking. A closer look at the
campaigns and programs reveals the overall challenges anti-trafficking activists are
facing in working with survivors including tight funding resources and cultural barriers.
The Stakeholders
Federal money for local coalitions
In spite of the movement's young history, Greater Los Angeles has recently been bustling
with organizations and agents from different backgrounds dedicated to lending a helping
hand to addressing the problem of human trafficking in the region (Figure 6.1). The
graphic is not representative of every anti-trafficking agency operating in the region, but
rather identifies those I was able to approach and witness regularly by attending their
meetings. At the center of the local movement are three federally-funded, though locally-
led, coalitions and task forces that function as a platform for strategic planning and the
169
exchange of resources and experiences for both governmental and non-governmental
organizations. The Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force (OCHTTF) was
founded in 2004 and is the central body of anti-human trafficking work in Orange
County. A collaborative effort of law enforcement, faith-based organizations, non-
governmental organizations and the community, the OCHTTF has the mission to “ work
together to protect victims, prosecute offenders, and prevent further perpetration of
human trafficking in the county” (OCHTTF 2010). The core members are the
Westminster Police Department, the Community Service Programs Inc. Victim
Assistance Program (both chair the task force), the Assistant United States Attorney, the
Federal Bureau of Investigations, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the
Salvation Army (non-profit social services), and the Public Law Center (non-profit legal
services).
Its counterpart in Los Angeles County is the L.A. Metro Task Force on Human
Trafficking (LAMTF-HT), which was founded in 2005 and states that its purpose is to:
increase the identification of trafficking victims through proactive law
enforcement tactics and cooperation, to increase the successful prosecution of
traffickers through multi-jurisdictional law enforcement cooperation, to develop a
practical service protocol, to develop and provide training and support for law
enforcement to proactively identify, rescue, and place victims with service
providers, and to ensure victim safety and access to needed services. (LAMTF-HT
2010)
170
Figure 6.1. Overview of major agencies involved in anti-human trafficking work in
Greater Los Angeles.
171
The LAMTF-HT is chaired by the Los Angeles Police Department Robbery-Homicide
Division and the members are federal, state, and local law enforcement, as well as social
service and victims organizations and prosecution agencies. The LAMTF-HT came about
when the Los Angeles City Council under the leadership of Council Member Tony
Cardenas reacted to a case of Mexican women and girls who were being trafficked and
forced into prostitution in South L.A. in 2004 (for full story see Landesman 2004). The
City Council instructed the Commission on the Status of Women, an L.A. City
department, to assess the extent of human trafficking in Los Angeles and to create a
multi-agency task force of federal, city, and state agencies with the focus on training for
first responders, establishing a hotline, creating a protocol between the agencies, and
establishing services for victims. Later, the Commission on the Status of Women was
charged with overseeing the newly created Human Trafficking & Child Prostitution Task
Force. In these early days, the Commission on the Status of Women also chaired the
LACUC (see below for details), however, ideological differences on how best to
approach human trafficking and personal discrepancies among certain members
eventually led to a disagreeable split (Hunnicutt 2008; Chan 2008). To this day, the
community is working on reconciling differences and mending the bridges that were
burned in these early days of organized anti-human trafficking work in Los Angeles
County.
The OCHTTF and LAMTF-HT are among 40 task forces in the nation currently funded
by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) and the Office for Victims of Crime (OVD)
172
under the Department of Justice (Figure 6.2.) The main goal for the BJA is to offer
technical assistance and training to local task forces in order to further their abilities to
identify and rescue victims, proactively investigate trafficking, successfully prosecute
traffickers, and raise awareness in the public about human trafficking. As of 2008, BJA
identified three leadership task forces that, “have developed effective proactive
investigation strategies” and agreed to share their expertise with other task forces in in-
depth training sessions around the country (BJA 2010). Neither of the Southern
California task forces is among the leadership task forces. However, Sandie Morgan, the
administrator of the OCHTTF, is eager to point out that her task force was invited to a
congressional hearing as the only task force in the nation and “the only West Coast
agency” in Fall 2008 (Morgan 2008). The slightly competitive undertone in this message
is no coincidence, as resources and funding for human trafficking and social justice work
in general have been tight over the past years and strong communication channels with
Washington DC help secure funding for another period of time. At the time of the
interview with the OCHTTF administrator, the three-year contract with the BJA had just
expired and whether the task force would have to go into the future without federal
funding was still uncertain.
173
Figure 6.2. Map of 40 human trafficking task forces in the United States funded by the
Department of Justice/Bureau of Justice Assistance. Source: Department of
Justice/Bureau of Justice Assistance. 2010. Available at:
www.ojp.usdoj.gov/BJA/grant/40HTTF.pdf.
Besides the two task forces, the third major party in the anti-trafficking sector in Greater
Los Angeles is the Los Angeles County Unity Coalition (LACUC). Largely funded
through the Rescue and Restore Campaign by the Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS), the mission of the LACUC is “to end human trafficking in Los Angeles
County by uniting and empowering communities to locate those victimized by modern
day slavery and restore their dignity and human rights” (LACUC 2010a). Initially
administered by the Commission on the Status of Women, the LACUC is currently
chaired by the Jewish Labor Committee. LACUC is a member of the Unity Coalition of
174
Southern California, which also includes the OCHTTF
19
and the Bilateral Safety Corridor
Coalition (BSCC) in San Diego. To clarify, the OCHTTF poses a special case as the
institution unites a BJA-funded task force as well as a HHS-funded unity coalition under
its wings. The implications of this particular set-up for the work on human trafficking is
discussed at a later point. The LACUC is an independently operating entity, but the grant
supervisor for the Department of HHS in Southern California, Tobi Aclaro, emphasizes
that “the purpose of the unity coalitions is to really unite all the efforts of all three
counties [in Southern California],” to share and multiply resources, and to optimize help
for the victims (Aclaro 2008). Marisa Ugarte (2009), the director of the San Diego Unity
Coalition concurs and likes to point out at every opportunity that the traffickers are united
and connected in their business, and therefore a united front is required to counter the
traffickers' criminal operations successfully. The LACUC lists a membership of about
200 non-profit organizations and individuals. While the emphasis in the task forces is on
identifying victims, prosecuting traffickers, and training law enforcement and other
personnel, the unity coalitions focus on outreach and public awareness in the
communities as contracted by the federal grants. The LACUC also functions as an
intermediary between federal dollars and local non-profit organizations. For instance in
2008, LACUC distributed about $140 000 to eight local faith-based and human rights
organizations conducting outreach and providing help and services to survivors of
trafficking (LACUC 2010b). At the time this research ended in spring 2009, no organized
anti-human trafficking work in the form of coalitions and funded programs existed in the
19
The OCHTTF receives funding from both, the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and
Human Services.
175
counties of Ventura, San Bernardino, and Riverside. This absence causes great concern to
activists, who view these counties as bedroom communities with the potential to provide
substantial hidden trafficking situations (Kreyman 2009). At the same time, Sandie
Morgan (2008) receives regular phone calls from colleagues in neighboring counties who
make requests for help and assistance with training and services for victims they have
already identified.
Human rights based and victim-advocacy organizations
The three institutions function as umbrella organizations for a large pool of highly diverse
agencies. In the following, several key agencies are briefly introduced, representing the
diversity of agents in the field. The Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking in Los
Angeles, mostly referred to as CAST, is a non-profit organization and coalition of
organizations for labor rights, immigrant rights, and human rights in the region
20
. CAST
is considered a local leader with national impact in the fight against human trafficking in
the United States. The City of Los Angeles praised CAST as an expert in anti-trafficking
advocacy in 2008 and Ben Skinner (2008a), journalist and author of A Crime So
Monstrous, praises CAST as “the most mature organization working on human
trafficking on a local level.” Established in 1998 in the wake of the El Monte sweatshop
case, CAST adopted a human rights and victim-centered approach in its work to end
human trafficking in Los Angeles and elsewhere. The organization provides legal and
20
The CAST coalition members include the Legal Aid Found of Los Angeles (LAFLA), Koreatown
Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), Coalition of Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA),
Central Am. Resource Center, Para Los Ninos, National Hispanic Media Coalition, Thai Community
Development Center, Pilipino Workers Center, East West Players, Lideres Campesinas, California Rural
Legal Assistance Indigenous Farm Worker Project (CAST LA 2010a).
176
social services to its clients, but also engages in “broad community outreach on local,
state and national and international levels – via advocacy, the media, public education,
leadership development, and coalition building” to highlight the issue of human
trafficking (CAST LA 2010a). CAST runs one of the first established shelters in the
United States solely dedicated to survivors of human trafficking. Lastly, by
acknowledging the experiences of survivors as the basis for their policy work and in an
effort to empower survivors, CAST launched the Survivor Advisory Caucus in 2003 as a
leadership development program where members of the Caucus organize to speak
publicly on behalf of other survivors of trafficking (CAST LA 2010b). CAST is an active
member of the LAMTF-HT.
CAST closely collaborates with the Thai Community and Development Center (Thai
CDC), one of its founding members and another grassroots and human rights-based
advocacy group involved in the anti-human trafficking movement in Greater Los
Angeles. The Thai CDC is a non-profit organization dedicated to serving the economic
and social needs of the Thai community in Los Angeles. As the leading agency fighting
for the victims' rights in the El Monte case in 1995, the Thai CDC primarily works with
economically disadvantaged populations like immigrants and victims of human
trafficking (Thai CDC 2010). An extensive analysis of the Thai CDC's work and
organizational structure is offered as part of a case study on successful localized and
community-based human trafficking work in Chapter Seven. Similar to the Thai CDC,
the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles , or CHIRLA, has a long
177
history of community-based work in Los Angeles and primarily serves low-income
immigrant populations and refugees in order to empower and protect the workers' labor
and human rights. Over the past couple of years, CHIRLA has proactively started
educating its clients and target populations about the risks of human trafficking for
immigrants and has became partners in local coalitions including the LACUC and the
LAMTF-HT (Mesa 2009). Another rights-based organization is the Legal Aid Foundation
of Los Angeles, or LAFLA, which offers legal assistance for a broad range of issues,
including human trafficking. From 2006 to 2008, Polaris Project Los Angeles, or PPLA,
a small human-rights based, non-profit agency was also a member of the local anti-
trafficking movement, but had to close its doors due to a lack of secured funding and
support from its East Coast based parent organization. PPLA was the Southern California
branch of national Polaris Project in Washington, D.C., a renowned and veteran
organization on human trafficking issues in the country. Run by two recent UCLA
graduates, PPLA was a valuable addition to a slowly emerging platform of human rights-
based advocates dedicated first and foremost to advancing the rights of and providing
services to survivors of human trafficking. The rise and fall of PPLA showcased the
challenges involved in getting a small, non-faith-based organization in a narrow and little
understood field of work off the ground in a time of decreased social spending partly due
to the enormous costs involved in funding two international wars with federal funding.
In Orange County, the Public Law Center and the Community Service Programs Inc.
Victim/Witness Assistance Program, or CSP, are two human rights-based and victim-
178
centered agencies with a strong presence in anti-human trafficking work in the county.
The Public Law Center is a pro bono law firm “committed to providing access to justice
for low income residents,” mostly immigrant workers (Public Law Center 2010). Kirsten
Kreymann, the Center's pro bono director and a second generation immigrant herself,
represents the Public Law Center at the OCHTTF and is a vocal and competent advocate
for securing justice and access to legal help for survivors of human trafficking. The CSP
is a leading member of the OCHTTF, which the organization co-chairs with the
Westminster Police Department. The CSP provides services for victims and witnesses of
crimes, including forced labor, and “encourages their cooperation in the investigation of
the case and prosecution of the offender” (CSP 2010). Established in 1978, the CSP has
good standing in Orange County, which is one of only two counties in California where
victim and witness services are provided by a non-profit organization. In most other
counties, these services are either part of the district attorney's office or probation
services (Thi 2009). The trust and confidence of the community in the process of fighting
human trafficking successfully is crucial, as shall be seen in the discussion below.
Faith-based organizations
Faith-based organizations, mostly Christian faith groups, ranging from charitable
veterans like the Salvation Army to local churches in suburban L.A. make up a
significant part of the anti-human trafficking community in Greater Los Angeles. The
leader among the faith-based agents is the Salvation Army. Headquartered in the UK, the
Salvation Army is an evangelical Christian church known for its charitable work and
179
currently operating in more than 120 countries around the world. Rohida Kahn from the
Salvation Army in Long Beach claims her organization's human trafficking work actually
goes back right to the inception of the agency in the UK in the 1800s. Monica Carrasco
(2009), formerly working with the Salvation Army, explains that
William Booth, the founder of Salvation Army, was on the streets of
London and he saw that there was a lot of young women being prostituted,
and that's how he started the Army, to save these women, take them off the
streets and give them something positive to have been the first taking up
slavery work in the 1800s.
Notably, in the Salvation Army's view, prostitution equals human trafficking, a fact that is
greatly disputed by rights-based activists (see Chapter Four for a more detailed discussion
on this matter). The Salvation Army in Greater Los Angeles focuses on a wide variety of
issues including homelessness, disaster services, and human trafficking. Based on an
established, strict, and very broad organizational structure, the Salvation Army is one of
few organizations that has access to resources and funding that enables it to implement
more sustainable and extensive programs on human trafficking. For instance, Rohida
Kahn, director of the anti-human trafficking program for the Western United States with
headquarters in Long Beach, solely focuses on offering training and technical assistance
in all states of the Western Territory. In addition, the organization has published an
extensive training program, including a 100-page manual and CD-roms. In comparison,
most other organizations have to limit their training materials to an occasional CD-rom
and mostly paper copies and fliers.
180
A similar story, but on a smaller scale, is that of OASIS USA, a Christian organization
started in 1985 in inner-city London with the opening of a homeless youth shelter. Over
the years, OASIS Global has taken on a number of social justice issues with “a vision for
transforming urban communities and to help the most marginalized experience freedom
and the fullness of life” (OASIS Global 2010). Operating programs in ten countries
around the world, OASIS USA is locally mostly known for its Stop the Traffik Campaign
to raise awareness about human trafficking. OASIS USA is based in Pasadena, Los
Angeles and is a member of the LACUC and the LAMHT-TF. A different kind of faith-
based anti-human trafficking organization operating in Greater Los Angeles is Nightlight
International. Nightlight International runs a jewelry business, employing and supporting
women in Bangkok, Thailand who come out of the sex industry. Nightlight USA
functions as the organization's marketing and sales agent in the United States, but is also
involved in direct outreach and in mobilizing communities “to become abolitionists in the
campaign against slavery” (Nightlight International 2010). Having adopted its name from
a biblical quote
21
, Nightlight USA primarily focuses on combating prostitution and sex
trafficking in an effort to intervene in and transform their clients' lives. Lastly, a spin-off
of Nightlight USA is Project Exodus, a student-run, Christian abolitionist group that
“passionately believe[s] that through Christ anyone [original printing] can seek justice”
(Project Exodus 2010). Started by a recent graduate from Pepperdine University, Project
Exodus largely mobilizes students to engage hands-on in an effort to address human
trafficking and has emerged as a vigilante group on behalf of human trafficking victims
21
“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of
death a light has dawned.” Isaiah 9:2
181
in Greater Los Angeles. In its early days, Project Exodus mostly operated independently,
but has recently established partnerships with local human trafficking coalitions and now
sits on the LAMTF-HT.
Federal, state and local governmental organizations
No fewer than seven federal U.S. Government Agencies are involved with anti-
trafficking programs in the United States. The responsibility for implementing these
programs in the US and abroad is shared by the Department of State, Justice, Labor,
Defense, Health and Human Services (HHS), Homeland Security (DHS), and the U.S.
Agency for International Development (USAID) (Fig. 4). The central agency responsible
for coordinating human trafficking work is the Department of State's Office Office to
Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (OMCTP). The Office was established in
October 2001 as a result of the passing of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000
and is in charge of investigating and creating programs to prevent human trafficking. The
office also publishes the annual Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP Report), which aims
to raise awareness about human exploitation and trafficking nationally and
internationally. The OMCTP has no physical representation in Greater Los Angeles,
however, the TIP Report is locally widely referenced. USAID also lacks a local presence,
though it runs anti-trafficking trainings and programs internationally, and the Department
of Defense, which runs a website on human trafficking activities in the country and has
provided training to all members of the department.
182
Figure 6.3. Federal agencies involved in addressing human trafficking nationally and
internationally. Source: GAO 2006, p. 7.
The Department of Labor is the only federal agency that monitors child labor and
enforces child labor laws in the United States and abroad. The Department's Wage and
183
Hour Division (WHD) is an active member of human trafficking task forces throughout
the country, including Greater Los Angeles. Its mission is to protect the rights of all
workers independent of their legal status by enforcing federal labor laws. The agency has
even set up five regional trafficking coordinators, who oversee the efforts to address the
rights of victims of human trafficking. The agency's belief is that securing the wages to
which victims are legally entitled is an important aspect of prosecuting traffickers and
bringing restitution to the victims. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
focuses on providing services to victims of human trafficking. A key responsibility is to
assist victims in becoming eligible to receive state benefits and services to help establish
stable lives in the country. In addition, HHS has launched the Rescue & Restore
campaign to raise awareness on human trafficking, help increase the number of identified
victims, and assist in coordinating services for the victims on the ground. A critical
component of the campaign is the creation and funding of Rescue & Restore coalitions
throughout the country, of which the LACUC and the OCHTTF are a part. In addition,
HHS has set up a national 24/7 human trafficking hotline, whose number is widely
advertised on the campaign's brochures and materials through local coalition members.
The national hotline is currently administered by Polaris Project, a non-profit anti-human
trafficking organization in Washington D.C.
The priorities of the Department of Justice with regard to human trafficking are
prosecuting traffickers and rescuing victims of trafficking. The DOJ, too, has set up a
national hotline, the Trafficking in Persons and Worker Exploitation Task Force
184
Complaint Line, and offers social services to survivors of trafficking in the transition
period of their rescue or first contact with law enforcement and their certification for
benefits through the Department of HHS. As discussed earlier, the Bureau of Justice
Assistance under the DOJ is responsible for orchestrating and supervising a large number
of human trafficking task forces throughout the country, including the local OCHTTF and
LAMTFHT. The local representative and investigative body of the DOJ with regard to
human trafficking is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which sits on both the
Orange County and Los Angeles County task forces. Ironically, in its very early days, the
FBI's first official task was to observe brothels in preparation for enforcing the “White
Slave Traffic Act,” also known as Mann Act, which was passed in 1910 and, among other
things, aimed at containing the prostitution of women and men with European ancestry.
In partnership with the U.S. Attorney's Office, the FBI not only advises victims of human
trafficking of their legal rights, but also assists in meeting their social and other needs.
The agency participates in the Human Smuggling Trafficking Center (HSTC), a joint
venture of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Attorney
General, which functions as an analysis and research center on human trafficking and
smuggling.
Lastly, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency under the Department of
Homeland Security has a strong presence in the anti-trafficking world in the United States
and is known as the largest investigative body of human trafficking in the country. ICE, a
member of the local human trafficking task forces, has a special human trafficking
185
division and runs local offices in Los Angeles and Orange Counties. In L.A. county, the
ICE section has two branches with eight employees each working on fraud or human
trafficking and human smuggling (Abend 2010). In its own words, published on the
official website, “ICE has developed highly successful initiatives that focus on attacking
the infrastructure that supports smuggling organizations as well as the assets that are
derived from these criminal activities. This might include seizing currency, property,
weapons, and vehicles.” Furthermore, ICE states the agency adopted a victim-centered
approach in their work on human trafficking, a claim largely disputed by victim-
advocates in the movement.
On the local level, city police departments play a central role in anti-human trafficking
work. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is the lead law enforcement agency of
the LAMTF-HT. Its Robbery and Homicide Division is in charge of investigating all
incidents of human trafficking occurring in the City of Los Angeles. The division also co-
chairs the task force and administers the Department of Justice grant. Its counterpart in
Orange County is the Westminster Police Department (WPD), which co-chairs the
OCHTTF. Finally, the Los Angeles and Orange County Sheriff's Departments are both
involved in the local task forces. The federal prosecuting agency on human trafficking in
Greater Los Angeles is the United States Attorney's office in Los Angeles, Orange, and
Riverside County. On a state level, the District Attorney's Office and the Office of the City
Attorney are responsible for prosecuting human trafficking cases. However, by the end of
this research, the California State law on human trafficking had yet to be applied in a
186
human trafficking case.
Independent warriors and victims' voices
Apart from the pool of agents who collaborate on human trafficking through task forces
and coalitions, many independent agents contribute to the anti-human trafficking
movement in Greater Los Angeles. To highlight a few: one is a former Wall Street banker
who, one day in her secluded, up-scale neighborhood in Orange County, heard on the
news about human trafficking happening in her county and made the decision on the spot
to do something about it. Assisted by her husband and friends, the activist raised several
thousand dollars and produced a public service announcement on human trafficking for
the OCHTTF, which was screened to more than 10 000 people on human trafficking
awareness day (January 11) in 2009. Another activist is a member of the Los Angeles
Human Trafficking Meet Up, a volunteer group raising awareness, who got invited to
conduct training on human trafficking in the Chinese community. The Community-
Labor-Environmental-Action Network (CLEAN) campaign, on the other hand, was a
multi-agency coalition that addressed the labor rights of car wash workers in Los
Angeles, most prominently at the Vermont Car Wash. Yet, another one is Phyllis
Daugherty, the director of the Animal Issues Movement in Los Angeles, who works with
the District Attorney's Office and trains law enforcement in pit bull and dog fighting.
Daugherty has become vocal in educating animal control officers on the issue of human
trafficking, as they oftentimes have a legitimate reason to enter a premise “ without a
warrant for excellent circumstances” and may witness a human trafficking situation
187
(Daugherty 2009).
The non-profit organization Children of the Night, founded in 1979 and recently featured
on the Dr. Phil show, is dedicated to “rescue[ing] girls and boys from prostitution and the
domination of vicious pimps” (website). Children of the Night is known in the anti-
human trafficking community in Los Angeles as an agency, who “do their own thing”
(Chan 2009) and work completely independently. Their independence shows in their
funding base, which is entirely supported through private donations and apparently comes
from donors as curious as the Playboy mansion (Chan 2009). The organization
Sweatshop Watch in Los Angeles had a short life-span. Founded in 1995 (the year of the
El Monte case) as a coalition of over 30 labor, community, civil rights, immigrant rights,
women's rights, religious, and student organizations, Sweatshop Watch was determined to
eliminate workplace exploitation in local factories. Until its recent closure, Sweatshop
Watch was a vocal advocate in the anti-human trafficking movement. Probably the most
unusual character in the local anti-human trafficking world is Aaron Cohen, a self-
proclaimed “slave-hunter” subcontracting for the United States government as a NOC,
non-official cover. Largely operating as a one-man show, Cohen's mission brought him
to countries like Sudan, Cambodia, and Myanmar, but he also “rescues” workers in
forced labor situations in Southern California— not to the liking of all local law
enforcement agencies. Cohen's involvement as a civilian in a human trafficking
investigation in Westminster and later portrayal in the Orange County Registry as a savior
especially angered the local ICE branch, which got involved in the investigation long
188
after Cohen sailed to local stardom in Orange County. Notably, with the exception of the
CAST Survivor Caucus, the voices of survivors of human trafficking are largely missing
in the local movement. The reasons are probably obvious, as many survivors of a crime
naturally want to move on with their lives and are eager to bring a dark chapter of their
life to a close. However, I am convinced that a great deal can be learned from listening to
the stories of survivors. Their tragic insights into the world of human trafficking is an
invaluable resource for creating anti-trafficking policies and programs.
Negotiating common ground
The anti-human trafficking movement is a motley crew of agents who bring a variety of
agendas to the table. Consequently, inter-agency collaboration comes in all forms and
shades and by no means is an always smooth and successful process. This section
assesses key components of anti-human trafficking cooperation in Greater Los Angeles.
A total of seven federal agencies and their local representatives hold responsibilities for
addressing human trafficking in the United States and abroad. Generally speaking there is
nothing wrong with having experts and resources from various fields and institutions
involved in addressing one of the most complex human rights issues of our times.
However, while the federal agencies have certain mechanisms in place to coordinate their
work and exchange information and resources, having several major government
departments in charge of successfully combating human trafficking is grounds for
reasonable concern. The Government Accountability office assessed in a 2006 report that,
“the U.S. government has established coordination mechanisms, but they do not include a
189
systematic way for agencies to clearly delineate roles and responsibilities in relation to
each other, identify needs, or leverage activities to achieve greater results.” This lack of
coordinated strategy translates into anti-human trafficking work on the base level, which
is manifest in a number of issues. First, at least three federal agencies, the FBI, ICE, and
the HHS, run their own hotline numbers on human trafficking, and these do not include
several local hotline numbers in Greater Los Angeles. Apart from the cost factor involved
in running a 24/7 hotline that ideally comes in multiple languages and offers up-to-date
expertise, following up on calls, coordinating efforts, and connecting the dots in an
investigation is significantly harder when incident reporting happens through multiple,
unconnected channels, and is especially confusing to the person seeking help.
Second, the split of responsibilities on the federal level has resulted in a division of anti-
human trafficking work in Los Angeles County. While in Orange County the federally
funded unity coalition (HHS) and task force (DOJ) on human trafficking is united in the
OCHTTF, which is the exception, Los Angeles County and other counties nationwide
have two independently operating and funded agencies. Notably, there are other
significant reasons for this bisection of anti-trafficking work in LA county, which I
discuss later. However, the lack of a substantially coordinated strategy by federal
agencies has an impact on how work is done on the ground. A unification of the law
enforcement branch with social service providers for human trafficking victims would
ultimately increase the number of identified trafficking cases and prosecutions, as shown
in the example of the OCHTTF. Third, and most importantly, the task and responsibility
190
of meeting the varied needs of victims of human trafficking is distributed among several
major agencies. Numerous challenges are involved in providing meaningful services to
trafficking survivors in such bureaucracy. It is literally impossible to maneuver the
system and secure access to available benefits without real and seasoned expertise, which
is in short supply in the current local anti-human trafficking movement.
Fourth, and last, a certain institutional rivalry among the agencies involved in anti-human
trafficking work plays a role in how well survivors are served. For instance, Mark Abend,
an LA-based ICE agent, laments a lack of satisfying collaboration between the local ICE
and FBI offices. In Orange County, where he was previously stationed, a Memorandum
of Understanding determined the relationship between the two agencies. He explains, for
instance, that before a planned raid of a facility, one would notify the other about the
pending investigation in order to “double resources” (Abend 2010). In Los Angeles
County, such a rapport has yet to be developed, a fact that Abend calls “problematic for
building bridges” and serving the community. Local agencies, however, know the value
of good relationships among the agencies to achieving successful investigations. In a
meeting following the successful conviction of several traffickers involved in the so-
called Long Beach elder care trafficking case, Kimberly Agbonkpolor (2009), the
administrator of the LAMTF-HT, expressed thanks “for great collaboration between the
FBI, ICE, and the Department of Labor” in bringing the traffickers behind bars. The fact,
though, that no local law enforcement agency was thanked is no surprise. In fact, a
member of the movement called the relationship of local and federal law enforcement
191
similar to episodes from the popular TV series “Law and Order.” Local police
departments in particular do not hide their frustration with being the “weaker,” smaller
brother of their federal counterpart. Federal agents by law hold more enforcement and
investigative authority and thus the issue of “taking a case away” from the locals and
prosecuting it on the federal level has been a concern to local law enforcement agents
working on human trafficking (Marsh 2008). Los Angeles County also seems to struggle
with bureaucratic glitches, as demonstrated in the effort to launch a local awareness
campaign. In 2007, the LAMTF-HT passed a decision to create a campaign centered
around billboards, bumper stickers, and a website featuring the main agencies involved in
the task force and resources and information about human trafficking valuable to the
community. Two years later, the task force launched its website, as administrative hurdles
like signing off content for the website by higher authorities or making available
webspace to launch the website repeatedly delayed the process. By the time the website
was made public, some content about member profiles was already out-dated (e.g.,
Polaris Project). Equally frustrating was the introduction of the bumper stickers on local
police cars. A total of 50 000 stickers were printed and ready for use, however
bureaucratic protocol only allowed new stickers on new police cars and thus thousands of
bumper stickers are sitting in storage waiting to get matched up with a brand new black
and white (Agbonkpolor 2008).
Awakening awareness for the importance of close collaboration, but also of the nuances
of institutional rivalry among agencies have emerged as important themes in analyzing
192
the local anti-human trafficking movement. A showcase for successful and fruitful
teamwork among local anti-human trafficking agencies is the OCHTTF under the
leadership of Sandie Morgan. The task force has succeeded in bringing a large number of
different kinds of agencies to the table and developing and maintaining a rapport of
collaboration among its lead agencies representing law enforcement, social and legal
service providers, and victim advocates, leading to a larger than average number of
rescued and serviced victims. However, participating agencies confirm that collaboration
was not easy in the early days. Non-profit organizations in particular have, for very good
reasons, fostered serious distrust toward law enforcement agencies when it comes to the
needs of a crime victim. Kristin Kreymann (2009), a full-blooded human rights activist
and lawyer with the Public Law Center in Orange County, put it this way:
Never in a million years in my entire life did I ever think I'd be working with law
enforcement. [However,] I think building relationships with ICE agents and other
members of federal law is key. I can't do my job without having a good
relationship with ICE, I cannot. And so a large part of what I've been able to do in
terms of assisting victims is because of the relationships that I've built with the
agents. And [these are now] people that I can go forward to and I know that
they're not gonna deport my client.
Similarly, law enforcement has come to realize that a trustful relationship with
community-based organizations tremendously facilitates their work and helps to “crack
ICE baggage, [and] break the mistrust of the community” (Abend 2009). The L.A. ICE
office, for instance, organized a joint outreach and information event with Salvation
Army, which has a long-term relationship and good standing with local communities.
Following the event, a community member apparently commented to the ICE agent,
saying “good to speak to you, the guy we're afraid of” (OCHTTF General Meeting (25
193
February 2009). Trust among the agents and the victims of human trafficking is of the
utmost importance and is a central theme of a case study of successful anti-human
trafficking work in Los Angeles, as described in Chapter Seven.
Apart from good teamwork, the OCHTTF is simply well run from an administrative point
of view. The leadership skills of Sandie Morgan, the task force's administrator, are largely
responsible for a well-structured protocol by which the task force is run. This skill is
manifest in meetings that start and end in a timely manner, the regular appearance of
members and guest speakers from the field at meetings, and the diligent effort to expand
and solidify membership. Meetings are open to the public, and transparency is valued.
Morgan is a well-known speaker on human trafficking and invited widely to events
throughout Greater Los Angeles. However, a certain territoriality exercised by other
bigger players in the field convinced Morgan to work within the Orange County
parameters whenever there is good reason to believe she might stir political tensions. A
good example of potential tension came with the invitation to speak at an awareness
event at a high school in Watts, Los Angeles in January 2009. Knowing from experience
and afraid of stepping on somebody's toes in Los Angeles county (with its own human
trafficking task force and unity coalition in place), Morgan declined the invitation and
recommended an L.A.-based law enforcement agent instead. At previous occasions,
Morgan was informed that she had trespassed onto someone else’s territory with her
work. Where such territoriality originates is difficult to determine. However, the battle for
federal funding, which also is based on performance acts (number of talks, outreach
194
events) and numbers of victims served probably is of relevance. On the other hand,
simple politics may also play a role. The LAMTF-HT has its own administrator, whose
job description includes public speaking and outreach. Why go invite someone from
outside, when you have expertise on your hometurf?
This lack of collaboration among agents is not restricted to the inter-county level. While
Morgan has been running a smooth show in Orange County, for years her L.A.
counterpart has been caught up in a philosophical debate that has significantly hampered
any sort of collaboration. In fact, the L.A.-based human trafficking unity coalition and
task force have only recently started to share resources and expertise in the fight against
human trafficking. The main reason for an almost five-year silence between the coalitions
lies in a principle philosophical difference about how to view and address human
trafficking. Basically, Los Angeles witnessed a local battle of the global war between the
abolitionists and the rights-based advocates in the anti-trafficking world. The abolitionists
view any form of prostitution as a form of human trafficking, whereas the rights-based
advocates distinguish between voluntary and involuntary prostitution (for a more detailed
discussion on this issue see Chapter Four). I have yet to meet an organization in Greater
Los Angeles that openly advocates for the legalization of prostitution, the main issue with
which the abolitionists charge their rights-based counterpart. Nevertheless, the two
factions cut ties after a philosophical and personal fall out of some of the leaders several
years back and since then have organized themselves around their respective
philosophical stances. Roughly speaking, the Los Angeles County Unity Coalition is
195
home to the abolitionists and the L.A. Metro task force to the rights-based advocates.
Meanwhile, several non-profit agencies have crossed the lines and sit on both coalitions.
And, until very recently, no law enforcement agency is represented at the Unity Coalition.
A truce finally came with a change of leadership in both coalitions. Accordingly,
Kimberley Agbonkpolor, the administrator of the task force, participated in coalition
meetings and in return invited the coalition leader to her task force meeting.
This kind of restricted cross-border collaboration based on philosophical differences is
petty and counterproductive and certainly not in the best interest of the victims of human
trafficking. But it does not come as a surprise when one looks at the bigger picture of the
human trafficking world, i.e., how the funding of the movement determines what kind of
work is done on the ground. Funding and resources are powerful and efficient tools for
promoting a certain agenda. In the case of human trafficking, the biggest funder of anti-
human trafficking work in Greater Los Angeles is the federal government. Several non-
profit agents have lamented the fact that in the Bush-era, which more or less covered the
first decade of the anti-human trafficking movement in the United States, human
trafficking was largely framed as a moral issue focusing on sex trafficking and thus, in
the eyes of abolitionists, prostitution. Chancee Martorell (2009) from the Thai CDC
explains that rights-based minded people were “beaten down over the eight years of the
Bush administration [who had] bought into the abolitionists' stories and arguments.”
Namju Cho (2009), former policy director at CAST, remembers that the federal funding
agency “forced some of the non-profits to sign some kind of pledge that we weren't going
196
to be using any of the funds to promote or advocate for prostitution or the legalization of
prostitution.” The Department of Justice provides funding for research and the evaluation
of human trafficking nationally and internationally; however, the application form clearly
states that funded research must focus on issues centered on sex trafficking and that, “no
funds made available under this solicitation may be used to promote, support, or advocate
the legalization of prostitution or practice of prostitution” (quote from application form
sl000887). Former U.S. President George W. Bush devoted the larger part of his 2003
address to the United Nations General Assembly on highlighting the “evil” involved in
the sex trade (DoJ 2010). Martorell (2009) confirmed the president's agenda and
explained, “the mandate of the Bush administration was to focus on sex trafficking.”
Obviously the sexual exploitation of any person is a degrading crime. By all means, the
victims of such crime have to receive any form of help and services that are available and
the perpetrators have to be brought to justice and hindered from becoming repeat
offenders. However, viewing human trafficking primarily as sex trafficking and
demonstrating an obsession with sex trafficking as a matter of prostitution deprives the
actual majority of victims of human trafficking (namely of labor trafficking) from access
to justice, services, and resources they desperately need. In light of the prostitution
approach, a dilution of the overall human trafficking mission has unfolded under the
Bush-administration, a fact that is of concern to rights-based organizations. which serve
all victims of human trafficking.
197
Apart from the funding avenue, the federal government also shapes the local anti-
trafficking movement through the presence of the nation's largest human trafficking
investigation agency on the ground, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
agency. First up, any outside observer may rightly become alert when learning that the
nation's major immigration law agency also operates on the forefront of anti-human
trafficking work that largely entails rescuing victims of human trafficking who are
oftentimes undocumented migrant workers from around the world. This double duty
raises reasonable concerns about who was responsible for outlining the ICE agent job
description. After all, is it not a contradiction that the very same agency responsible for
searching, finding, and deporting thousands of undocumented migrants each year is also
in charge of searching, finding, and rescuing members of the same population but whose
basic human rights have been violated in a labor exploitation situation? The reasons for
this policy are simple. ICE plays a significant role in anti-human trafficking work,
because, following the events of 9/11, the United States dramatically shifted its
worldview and opted to evaluate and strategize on a number of policy issues, including
human trafficking, based on a national security threat model. Accordingly, human
trafficking has been framed as a threat to the nation's safety, and ICE, as part of the
Department of Homeland Security, was charged with a major responsibility in the fight
against human trafficking. The official ICE website states that,
[h]uman trafficking and human smuggling represent significant risks to homeland
security. Would-be terrorists and criminals can often access the same routes and
utilize the same methods being used by human smugglers. U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement's Human Smuggling and Trafficking Unit works to identify
criminals and organizations involved in these illicit activities. (ICE 2010)
198
Framing human trafficking as a national security threat is a claim that still needs to be
proved by sound research. Nevertheless, the federal government structured the narrative
of human trafficking around the issue of national security, and thus buttressed a strong
presence of ICE in the anti-trafficking world in Greater Los Angeles and other parts of
the country.
Rights-based anti-trafficking organizations struggle with the government's prostitution
and especially terrorist approach, justifiably claiming that ICE involvement may
jeopardize the rights of their clients, many of whom are deported for lack of substantial
evidence proving that they have experienced a severe form of human trafficking.
However, some local groups make an effort to counter the federal impact on the local
anti-trafficking agenda by deploying different strategies. As mentioned earlier,
organizations are aware that they rely on law enforcement to help their victims prosecute
their traffickers and also to obtain state benefits and legal status. Thus, an attempt to
reconcile differences with law enforcement and to find common grounds by building
trustful relationships has worked as a strategy for some agencies (Kreyman 2009).
Another strategy is exploring funding strategies other than applying for federal funds that
usually comes with a lot of “red tape,” i.e., stipulations that direct and curtail the kind of
work organizations are entitled to do (Norman 2008). Private donations, for instance, are
less bureaucratic and not tied to a political agenda. CAST, a local rights-based anti-
trafficking leader, on the other hand, has a history of lobbying in Sacramento and
Washington D.C. for a more rights-based approach in the national human trafficking
199
debate and was instrumental in the passage of the Trafficking of Victims Protection Act
in 2000. Given the dismal funding situation for social justice issues in general, the
necessity of a law enforcement component in the anti-trafficking work, the relative
newness of the issue, and the rather small pool of expert agents in the anti-trafficking
world, the actual leeway for creating and implementing an alternative viewpoint on how
best to frame and address human trafficking is limited. However, local agencies hoped
for a change of climate with the new federal administration. At least Chancee Martorell
from the Thai CDC was hoping that the federal government would finally prosecute
several of labor trafficking cases that had gathered dust on the desks of prosecutors
operating under the sex trafficking mandate of the Bush-administration (Martorell 2009).
Rolling out the campaigns
As varied as the anti-human trafficking landscape in Greater Los Angeles is and as
fundamentally different as the philosophical approaches are, the agencies largely agree
that the ultimate goal is to rescue victims from situations of forced labor, be it sex
trafficking or labor trafficking, and to prosecute the traffickers. After passing a number of
laws on the federal and state level, generating and providing funds, and forming
coalitions between local and federal agents, developing and implementing programs to
identify, help, and serve victims is the number one priority. And the movement has
implemented a whole range of programs to reach that goal, some of which are
highlighted below. Basically, the pillars of anti-trafficking programs in Greater Los
Angeles are awareness, outreach, and training; identifying and rescuing victims; social,
200
health, and legal services; and policy and research.
Getting the message out – awareness, outreach and training
A core challenge that anti-trafficking activists encounter is raising aw areness and
educating the public about human trafficking. Compared to other social issues like
domestic violence, human trafficking is a rather new and little known phenomenon, and
activists soon realized that educating and informing the public and anyone else
confronted with human trafficking, most importantly potential victims themselves, is key
to successfully combating the problem. Raising general awareness is essential because
the everyday person has emerged as the number one reporter of cases of human
trafficking and is thus an invaluable source to law enforcement and other agencies. The
difference between awareness events and outreach activities is that in the first case, basic
information on the issue is distributed, whereas, in the second case, the activist takes the
information in the form of brochures and PSAs to community events that are not directly
dedicated to human trafficking, but to a related issue (OCHTTF 2010). For example, a
typical awareness event is a guest speaker invited to a school to talk about human
trafficking. On the other hand, an outreach activity is CHIRLA going out to a day laborer
center in Los Angeles and distributing fliers listing the human trafficking hotline number.
A strong force in informing the public and communities about human trafficking is the
faith-based community in Greater Los Angeles. Religious groups have taken up the issue
of forced labor in a variety of ways and integrated the topic into a larger context of social
201
justice issues. Not only, but mostly, Christian-based churches throughout the counties
have held special human trafficking awareness events and invited agents from the field as
guest speakers (Tsui 2008; Yang 2009). Others have organized and offered community
space for training sessions on human trafficking (Still 2008) or transformed their
churches into viewing areas for public service announcements on National Human
Trafficking Awareness Day (January 11). Local faith-based communities are a valuable
partner in the anti-human trafficking movement. On the one hand, they come with an
established infrastructure, a good standing with the community, and a solid membership
base, ingredients that are essential in implementing awareness events and reaching out to
people. In addition, this set-up facilitates the process of generating necessary funds in the
form of donations and other goods. Sandie Morgan (2008), the OCHTTF administrator,
enthuses about lectures she has been invited to give at local churches because they are the
“perfect audience,” with lawyers, politicians, nurses, and law enforcement agents sitting
in the room and able to take in the message without being distracted by the nuances of
everyday life. On the other hand, faith-based institutions are important partners because
faith is a strong component for survivors of human trafficking in the process of healing
and putting their lives back together. Haidee Cuasim (2009), Director of the CAST
human trafficking shelter in Los Angeles, states that, “faith is one of the best things for
many to sustain them. [Thus] CAST encourages them by providing info on churches,
which function as important outside communities.”
202
However, faith-based human trafficking activism has faced some substantial criticism,
especially from the rights-based side. Criticism is rooted in the kind of framework
utilized in delivering the message about human trafficking to the public. In the case of the
Christian faith-based community, the message has been largely based on moral values
instead of on the belief in every individual's basic rights. Charles Song (2009), a legal
expert on human trafficking, puts it this way:
the focus should be on the victim first, getting them out, preventing the situation
[from happening again]. For the majority of the agents [i.e. faith-based groups],
though, the focus is on their moral values, ideals and [thus] it's more about them
than the survivors. [Their message is] “whether you like it or not, I'm going to do
this to you, because it's for your own good.''
Others share this uneasiness with the Christian missionary approach (Cho 2009), which,
given the nature of such belief, frames human trafficking primarily through the lens of
sex trafficking, and hence prostitution. In practice, the Christian missionary approach can,
for instance, be seen in the work of Nightlight USA, a faith-based and partly federally
funded human trafficking organization operating in Los Angeles. Nightlight USA
organizes weekly outreach sessions in immigrant neighborhoods in downtown Los
Angeles. Groups of mostly women walk the streets of this neighborhood and distribute
materials provided by the Department of HHS's Look Beneath the Surface Campaign.
The activists approach security guards, valets, taco trucks, but also women who in their
eyes look like potential victims of labor exploitation, i.e., prostitutes. Once such a person
has been identified, the group requests permission to pray over them, as the guiding
principle of their outreach is the belief that human trafficking is not a material issue, but a
spiritual one. Thus, members of Nightlight USA believe that if the community prays hard
203
enough and has spiritual ownership over specific areas, it can create change in the
“prayed over” neighborhood and human trafficking will be brought to an end. Nightlight
USA and similar groups follow this model practiced on the East Coast, where according
to Christian-based groups, drug busts by the police were the result of extensive prayer
sessions (see, for instance, Persichette 2010). This approach to raising awareness on
human trafficking is questionable on several grounds. First, profiling “victims” according
to their outer appearance and based on cultural stereotypes is problematic, especially
because the profilers are mostly educated, well-off white American women. Second, the
choice of the neighborhood as the activity field for outreach work is again based on
unfounded assumptions that the targeted neighborhood is “this place of mess, and chaos
and madness and nightlife, exploitation and undocumented everything” (Shih 2009). No
research is available that supports the assumption that immigrant communities are more
prone to human trafficking than other neighborhoods. On the contrary, several high-
profile cases in Greater Los Angeles show that forced labor is an issue occurring in all
socio-economic spheres. Third, and last, with all due respect to religious practices,
framing human trafficking largely as a spiritual issue and claiming significant change can
be brought about by intense communal prayer sessions has yet to deliver believable
proof. Until then, victims of human trafficking will have to continue to rely on more
earthly means to help them escape and recover from their abuse.
A less polarized approach to raising awareness is implemented by the Los Angeles Fight
Human Trafficking Meetup, a congregation of volunteers and people from all walks of
204
life sharing an interest in spreading the word about human trafficking and supporting
established anti-trafficking organizations in their work. Accordingly the group has held
presentations at schools and churches, organized a yard sale in Santa Monica as a double
event for raising funds and distributing brochures on human trafficking, screening human
trafficking documentaries for the community or advertising seminars, fundraisers, and
community events on the group's website. Survivors of human trafficking, too, take
responsibility in informing the public about the existence of forced labor in today's
society. Members of the CAST Survivor Caucus publicly speak about their experiences at
numerous events, including a monthly talk at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
January 11 is the National Human Trafficking Awareness Day in the United States and an
annual occasion for the local movement to organize awareness and outreach events
throughout Greater Los Angeles. In 2008, the LAMTF-HT organized an Educational Fair
on human trafficking in the center of Downtown Los Angeles, while the OCHTTF
produced and broadcast to more than 10 000 people a short PSA on the existence of
human trafficking along with a discussion toolkit in 2009. The CAST launched a month-
long public awareness campaign and emergency support program in early 2010 that
ended with an Emancipation Concert on Abraham Lincoln's birthday to symbolize that
slavery is not history. Interestingly, in 2008 the outreach committee of the LAMTF-HT
opted out of organizing an awareness event commemorating National Human Trafficking
day expressing concerns that the community is not prepared to accommodate a large
number of victims that might be rescued in the aftermath of the event. While the shelter
situation to house human trafficking survivors is indeed extremely problematic in Greater
205
Los Angeles, other activists disagree with this approach and instead argue that the more
victims are rescued, the more awareness will be raised, and the more funds will be
generated in the long run.
Bringing the news about human trafficking to local schools has proven to be more
difficult as shown through several attempts to obtain permission to enter classrooms in
schools in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Of primary concern to the schools'
administrators has been the touchy nature of the issue. Reporting from personal
experience, the headmaster of a large primary and secondary school in Downtown Los
Angeles made it clear that if I wanted to educate the pupils in her school about human
trafficking, I had to refrain from making any reference to or use of the words “sex” and
“slavery.” Clearly, talking about human trafficking without talking about sexual
exploitation and slave-like conditions in forced labor situations deflates the entire
enterprise. A main reason why talking to young people about the dangers of human
trafficking makes a lot of sense is that girls in their early teens are a prime target group
for domestic traffickers and instilling a message of caution early can prevemt greater
danger at a later time. Sandie Morgan had had similar encounters in Orange County and
circumvented the bizarre situation by going to schools and talking about enslaved
children picking coco beans in West Africa instead of sexual exploitation in Los Angeles.
A wonderful exception has been an awareness event in a high school in the neighborhood
of Watts, Los Angeles that was initiated by a school administrator. At the center of the
event, which was attended by more than 700 students, was a play performed by students
206
depicting quite realistically various ways that a young person may end up a victim of
human trafficking. The approach was fresh and unconventional, and the students at a
minimum took away the message that human trafficking is serious and a real danger—
even in their Watts neighborhood. College and university students are equally active in
educating their communities about forced labor and have organized awareness events in
Irvine, Pomona, Long Beach, Pepperdine University, USC, and UCLA, to name a few.
Throughout the field, the bulk of information material used to educate audiences about
forced labor mostly comes from the Look Beneath the Surface Campaign created by the
Department of HHS. The materials are easily accessible to anybody interested in
obtaining them by ordering directly from the Department of HHS. Campaign materials
include fact sheets, education brochures, posters, DVDs, and pocket assessment cards,
and are available free of charge to the public. As for the campaign's slogan, the expert on
human trafficking may disagree that human trafficking happens just underneath the
surface— in fact forced labor occurs in plain view, but is just not recognized as such by
the public. At the same time, some forms of trafficking are hidden behind home and
factory walls and not easily detectible to the public. Nevertheless, the campaign materials
provided and developed by the federal government are a valuable tool for the local anti-
human trafficking movement, especially since the otherwise obvious bias towards sex
trafficking at the federal level is not as apparent in the materials provided.
207
Apart from raising awareness and reaching out to the communities, training law
enforcement agencies and other first responders to cases of emergency, including
professionals working in and with the public such as nurses, teachers, mail women and
men, or gardeners, is an essential component of educating the public sector about human
trafficking. Unlike raising awareness, the training component provides the audience with
a more substantial understanding of the issue and equips the personnel with knowledge
and tools designed to help them recognize signs of forced labor situations. Greater Los
Angeles has made great strides over the past decade in training law enforcement agencies
on human trafficking. According to Kimberley Agbonkpolor (2009), administrator of the
LAMTF-HT, all officers, i.e., almost 10 000 officers, at the Los Angeles Police
Department (LAPD) have been trained on human trafficking. In December 2006, it was
mandatory that during every roll call LAPD officers were to be shown a human
trafficking video and given a lesson plan three weeks in a row. Similar training was
provided to all L.A. county sheriffs and over 1000 law enforcement agents in cities like
Long Beach, Culver City, and Beverly Hills. It was not possible to obtain the materials
from the LAPD to assess how human trafficking was framed for the training. However,
based on several interviews with law enforcement agents, it is probably safe to argue that
the emphasis has been put on identifying and directing resources on sex trafficking cases.
Given the national discourse on human trafficking, this focus is not a surprise. Sgt.
Estrada (2009) from the L.A. County Sheriff's Department states that his agency almost
exclusively comes across sex trafficking situations. Similarly, Lt. Marsh (2008) from the
Westminster Police Department explains that his department focuses more on sex
208
trafficking, because,
it’s a lot easier for [him] to tell [his] guys: 'Look, there’re people who may be
forced into prostitution. Fix that!' And [he] has [his] guys behind me 110%.
Whereas if [he] says there’re some people who may be forced to work against
their will, it has less of an appeal, even though it’s also egregious.
Still, non-profit organizations have repeatedly pointed out that more in-depth training of
local law-enforcement is needed in order to overcome “the sexist attitude among law
enforcement when dealing with prostitutes” who may be potential victims of human
trafficking (Song 2009).
Less biased in this regard, but problematic in different ways, is the work of the local ICE
branches on human trafficking, which also investigates labor trafficking cases. At the
present time, the Department of the Commission on the Status of Women in the City of
Los Angeles solely focuses on training the city's employees, which includes anybody
from first responders to meter readers of the utility departments (Hawkins 2009). The
task force in Orange County has been similarly active, and apart from law enforcement
training has reached out to more than 80 health clinics to provide the necessary training
on human trafficking to nurses and other clinic personnel. Again, it is striking that no
such established training protocol exists in the other three counties of Greater Los
Angeles. Instead, the counties of Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura are still in the
awakening phase. Due to a lack of expertise on the ground, authorities have invited guest
speakers for training purposes from the other counties. In one such case, Sandie Morgan
appeared at a training session for about 100 city workers in the city of Ontario in spring
209
2009.
Hollywood has also discovered the issue of human trafficking, which serves as the
subject of a number of movies and documentaries featuring high-profile actors like
Academy Award Winner Kevin Kline in the movie Trade, Liam Nesson in Taken, or Mira
Sorvino in the HBO series Traffic. Thematically, all three productions follow one of the
two mainstream approaches to human trafficking in the United States. Taken and Trade
depict the stories of young girls becoming victims of sex trafficking, and thus are
consistent with the notion of human trafficking as primarily the sexual exploitation of
young women and children. Traffic, on the other hand, portrays human trafficking in the
light of a threat of a terrorist attack on American ground and consequently corresponds to
the framing of forced labor as a national security issue. A celebrity of a different kind
participating in the mission to spreading the word about human trafficking is California's
first lady, Maria Shriver, who moderated a forum on ending human trafficking as part of
the Annual Border Governors Conference in Hollywood, Los Angeles in 2008.
Identifying potential victims
Given the high number of estimated potential human trafficking victims in the region,
who would have thought that identifying and finding these victims poses a difficult task
to local anti-trafficking agents? Finding victims covers a wide variety of avenues. For law
enforcement agencies, a proactive way of identifying persons in forced labor situations
mostly centers on raids of public and private facilities. The L.A. County Sheriff's
210
Department, for instance, regularly conducts raids of local in-call/out-call massage
parlors, which are considered potential sites for prostitution and sex trafficking (Estrada
2009). Similarly the LAPD vice unit embarks on busts of massage parlors, checking
business licenses and observing any suspicious activities (Agponkolor 2008). Local ICE
units have established a memorandum of understanding with certain non-profit
organizations like CAST, agreeing to notify their non-profit partners of factory raids in
advance and giving them a rough estimate of expected victims. Kimberly Agponkolor
(2008), from the LAMTF-HT, however, makes clear that very seldomly do victims of
trafficking “knock on [their] door,” and thus law enforcement relies substantially on the
community and non-profit partners for potential tips and leads in trafficking cases.
Informants on trafficking cases can be anybody from arrestee, another victim, a teacher,
or a nurse. Sandie Morgan (2008) from the OCHTTF enthusiastically reported that a
victim was identified by a nurse in a clinic in Orange County one day after a task force
member conducted a training at the clinic where the woman was employed. In the case of
the Egyptian girl in Irvine, an attentive neighbor called the Department of Social Services
reporting his suspicions after watching a news report on human trafficking. A taxi driver
brought to the attention of law enforcement the sex trafficking case of Guatemalan girls
in Greater Los Angeles. On the other hand, CAST worked with a client who was rescued
after an American woman was invited for dinner to a family's home where she realized
the family held a young woman as a domestic slave, and consequently helped her to
escape (Deutsch 2009). Several tips have also come through the national human
trafficking hotline. Lastly, some victims are able to escape their trafficking situation
211
themselves and seek help from local service providers. However, this scenario happens
rarely, as victims oftentimes are not aware of their rights or of available help in the
outside world. Many times they are surrounded by other victims, making the forced labor
situation almost appear normal. Cultural habits and practices further such acceptance and
make victims stay in a forced labor situation. In cases where traffickers exert violence
against their victims, fear of retaliation and fear for the safety of loved ones lives also
plays a role.
As pointed out earlier, primarily law enforcement agencies actively investigate and
search for tips and leads on people in forced labor situations. In fact law enforcement and
other agencies strongly discourage the public from undertaking any personal investigative
activities in the pursuit of trafficking victims primarily because of the danger of personal
harm involved in such endeavors (Agponkolor 2008; Abend 2009; Morgan 2008). After
all, human trafficking is first and foremost a lucrative business generating substantial
amounts of money, and thus traffickers take big strides in preventing unwelcome
attention and making sure business is going as usual. Most non-law enforcement agencies
abide by this recommendation and leave the investigative part to trained government
personnel. Nightlight USA, for instance, notifies the LAPD about its weekly outreach
activities in Downtown L.A. and reports any tips to the agency (Marquis 2008). However,
peculiar exception exists among the agencies in Greater Los Angeles. Project Exodus is a
small Christian abolitionist organization funded and run by former Pepperdine University
graduates. Among other programs, Project Exodus offers its volunteers an opportunity to
212
get hands-on experience in actively investigating potential human trafficking sites in
Santa Monica and other cities in L.A. County. Based on the belief that the county's law
enforcement body lacks the necessary resources required to gain substantial ground
investigating human trafficking in the cities, the group decided to lend a helping hand and
organizes weekly outreach events centered on observing suspicious places for any signs
of human trafficking. Project Exodus' ultimate goal is to establish a database and map of
observed places, which at a later point should be handed over to the local police
departments for further investigation. The group regularly conducts observations of
massage parlors in downtown Santa Monica, documenting sightings on electronic devices
and debriefing at the end of the night at a local fast food restaurant. At one such outreach
event, the group identified one man leaving the massage parlor as a suspect of possible
misconduct because he was seen tightening his belt when leaving the massage parlor. In
many respects the group has adopted a vigilante and missionary approach to addressing
human trafficking, which is highly questionable and problematic on grounds of racism,
sexism, and other issues. Most importantly, though, while the group certainly shows good
intentions and a great commitment to addressing a significant problem, Project Exodus'
outreach and observation activities bear potential danger for everyone involved, a fact
Kimberly Agponkolor tried to convince the leadership team of at an awareness event at
Pepperdine University. Agponkolor urged the group to abstain from observation
activities, and invited Project Exodus to become a participant in the local task force and
to contribute their resources in a less endangering way.
213
Meeting the needs of survivors
Once victims of forced labor situations escape their ordeals, their needs are enormous
and, depending on the case, may include anything from help with housing, employment,
counseling, immigration status, social reintegration, to attention to mental and other
health issues. In many regards, the rescue is not necessarily the end of a painful
experience, but rather the beginning of a life-long healing and recovering process that
requires a tremendous amount of assistance and endurance on behalf of the survivor and
the service provider. The following section discusses an overview of services offered to
survivors of trafficking in Greater Los Angeles and related challenges.
Social and health services
Among the most basic needs a survivor of trafficking has is housing and shelter. And the
availability of suitable shelters in Greater Los Angeles is a substantial problem. No clear
numbers exist on shelter beds, but estimates suggest about 200 beds are available at any
given time in Los Angeles County (Rosen 2009). The shelters are run by different
organizations and are mostly domestic violence shelters, only three of which take in
survivors of human trafficking (Rosen 2009). Several victim advocates have expressed
concerns about housing survivors of human trafficking in domestic violence or other
shelters, because of the special needs their clients have. Domestic violence shelters have
rigid protocolrules, including mandatory group therapy sessions, an aspect that is difficult
for a trafficking victim who has not been in a personal relationship with the perpetrator
but rather in a business transaction with legal consequences (Cuasim 2009). In addition,
214
clients at domestic violence shelters have to obey the rule of a curfew: a 72-hour stay at
the shelter without leaving and no contact whatsoever to the outside world. For a survivor
of trafficking who may have been confined and locked away by the trafficker for a long
period, this additional lack of freedom upon rescue is counterproductive and
inappropriate. To accommodate their clients, social service providers like CAST have
made special arrangements with shelters that amended their specifications for human
trafficking clients, i.e., the shelter staff received training on human trafficking and clients
are allowed to use cell-phones to stay in contact with their lawyers, law enforcement
agents, and family members (Cuasim 2009). Victim advocates also use homeless shelters
for transitional overnights (Yoshioka 2009) and, if worse comes to worst, special
arrangements with local hotels help to alleviate an immediate need for housing (Thi
2009). The most appropriate housing solution for survivors of trafficking is, of course, a
shelter solely dedicated to human trafficking. Los Angeles is fortunate to have one,
which is possibly to this day, the only human trafficking shelter in the country. Provided
by the congregation of the Sisters of Notre Dame and run by CAST, the shelter— in the
words of its director Heidi Cuasim (2009)— is designed “to be more than a safehouse
where people can go to heal and feel physically and psychologically safe.” The shelter
offers programs tailored to the clients' needs and is also available to clients who are not
residents. One such program is a gardening project that especially appeals to clients from
agricultural backgrounds and which helps them reconnect with positive experiences from
their lives (Cuasim 2009).
215
Creating a sense of normalcy and daily routine in the survivors' lives is key to the
recovery and healing process. Survivors face the challenge of learning to navigate an
outside world that is completely strange to them and to increase their independence from
their social worker and other support systems. Oftentimes, they have to learn very simple
and basic things they, such as making a decision about daily aspects. Heidi Cuasim
(2009) from the CAST shelter remembers that she asked a client what she would like to
eat and got the response, “What you give me is fine.” For months, sometimes for years,
survivors were denied the ability to make decisions about their bodies and daily lives, a
“skill” that often has to be relearned after their rescue. To help them in that process,
Cuasim has become very creative and, for instance, makes survivors in the shelter write
their own grocery list. Making one’s self familiar with the city’s public transportation
system, opening a bank account, sending mail, making international phone calls, seeing a
doctor, or taking language classes are other daunting tasks that survivors confront. Social
service providers have developed so-called life skills manuals to assist survivors in
gaining ground in the new world and in developing a sense of confidence in their abilities
(Chan 2009). Outside communities including churches function as essential support
systems especially when survivors transition into a more independent and self-sustained
life. Depending on their status, some survivors are employable and eager to get back into
the job market right away. Many others entered the country without proper
documentation or their visa has expired, and thus their legal status hinders them from
taking on a job and sustaining themselves, which is problematic especially in cases where
survivors are the sole breadwinners for families in their homecountry (Thi 2009).
216
Not every survivor of trafficking wants to stay in the United States, some want to return
to their home country and reunite with their families. However, if survivors are unable to
go back home for security or other reasons, their level of cultural familiarity with the
American way of life has a significant impact on how fast and well a they transition into
society and adopt local cultural habits. Language is a key component in this process and
poses a notable challenge to social service providers, but also to law enforcement agents
involved in investigating and prosecuting a trafficking case. More often than not,
survivors of trafficking only speak their mother tongue, and thus translation services for
therapy sessions or interrogations are in high demand in the anti-human trafficking sector.
While Spanish is of a lesser problem, language cases involving Asian or African victims
are referred to respective ethnic community centers when available. Victim advocates
and social workers encourage their clients to take English language classes, but learning a
language for everyday purposes takes time, a resource many do not have. One could
argue that Los Angeles, with its incredibly varied landscape of immigrant communities,
is a hospitable place for a survivor to delve into a new cultural and social life. However,
Haidee Thi (2009) from the CSP points out that, “some of the communities are very
closed, and so we don't necessarily want to use a translator that was in the home or on the
scene of the crime when working with a client.” As the case of the Indonesian survivor of
forced labor in Beverly Hills has shown, the Indonesian community was too small place
to provide a safe environment for the survivor (Yoshioka 2009).
217
Many survivors are psychologically and physically traumatized by their experiences in
forced labor situations, especially when they have been subjected to physical, sexual, and
emotional abuse. Mental and physical health services are thus essential in providing help
and assistance to survivors, as the sooner the survivor is healing mentally and bodily, the
sooner progress in the “other departments from visa, to job, to housing, to saving money”
will be made (Chan 2009). Organizing help for physical “repair” may take time, but is
less of a challenge for social service providers. One Indian woman required a complete
teeth removal, as every single tooth was decayed. Her case worker recalls that, “the
woman must have been in horrible pain for ten years living in this situation” (Yoshioka
2009). The process lasted three months because they were dependent on a “kind-hearted
dentist” who agreed to do the job for free in off hours (Yoshioka 2009). Arranging
professional, culturally sensitive and appropriate mental health is difficult for several of
reasons. First, only a few therapists are familiar with the issue of human trafficking, and
thus training is required before a survivor can be securely placed in a therapy session.
Second, in order to provide meaningful services, therapists need to be made familiar with
the survivor’s background situation, as
a lot of clients' initial anxieties are about logistics, e.g. here to live? Am I going
back home? Where am I going to find money? They are not concerned about a
relationship if they don't know where their next meal is coming from. (Thi 2009)
Third, therapy is a cultural taboo in many parts of the world and thus rejected as a “waste
of time” by survivors (Thi 2009). An issue closely related is the survivor's concern for
the safety and well-being of family members either in the United States or abroad.
Haidee This asserts that her organization also extends help to family members, but given
218
the enormously tight resources available to properly serve the survivor population, this
extra help for dependents is rather marginal. Probably also underestimated is the
substantial impact a forced labor situation can have on the entire family of a victim,
especially if children are involved. In the case of Wendy Barnes, a survivor of sex
trafficking in the United States, all of her children as well as her mother were traumatized
and suffered enormously from the consequences of Wendy’s year-long experiences,
however, none was able to receive long-term counseling to come to terms with the family
history.
Providing essential and long-term social services to victims requires sustainable funding,
which certainly is in very short supply in the local anti-human trafficking movement. In
addition, federal dollars appropriated for such services are designed more around the idea
of quantity and less about the quality of the service provided. Once a human trafficking
victim is pre-certified by the appropriate federal agency, the social service provider
enrolls the victim in a program and arranges assistance for personal care, housing, or
food. The difficulty is that local service agencies have to put up all the upfront cost and
be reimbursed by the federal agency afterward. Cash flow for local non-profit social
service providers runs very thin, and thus this model is not in the best interest of
survivors because social services agencies can only afford small items such as giftcards
or bedding (Martorell 2009). From the funder's point of view, the number of victims
served has priority. However, from a social worker's point of view, this approach is
counterproductive, as many survivors of human trafficking need comprehensive, long-
219
term, intensive management help, which under the current model is not possible to
implement. The situation was different in the early days of the movement, before the
attacks of September 11 diverted money away from social issues toward funding wars.
Back then, CAST was known for developing and implementing an intensive case
management model of which the local shelter was a part (Yoshioka 2009). More
established organizations, like CSP, that have a long history of providing multi-pronged
services to their communities are in a better position to serve survivors more
comprehensively. Haidee Thi (2009) from the CSP acknowledges that,
it's very easy for [her] to make a referral to the sexual assault unit right here or a
domestic violence unit there, because [her agency] services the whole county.
[And] it is nice to be able to tell a client or someone reporting a case that [her
agency offers all these services].
Legal services and prosecution
The list of legal issues many survivors of trafficking require assistance with is almost
endless and impossible to meet without seasoned legal experts. At the center of the legal
component are the survivor's legal status in the country, as well as criminal and civil
litigations against the trafficker. For many victims, escaping a trafficking situation is a
matter of life and death simply because they are unable to return to their homecountry as
the trafficker threatens to harm or even kill them or a family member— particularly if
they agree to cooperate with law enforcement. For that reason, immigration benefits are
especially important for trafficking victims. The primary benefit in this regard is the so-
called T-Visa, which grants recipients temporary residency for four years with the option
to apply for permanent residency and even citizenship afterwards. The visa allows for
220
derivatives to migrate to the United States as well, if those dependents face serious
threats by the trafficker in their homecountry. In the eyes of Charles Song (2009), one of
a handful legal experts on human trafficking issues, the T-visa is a “double edged sword,”
because while it is “one of the most generous benefits in immigration,” it is also difficult
to obtain— a fact that is proven by the total number of visas issued since the law passed
in 2000 (out of 5000 T-visas available per year, only a little over 1500 visas were granted
over the course of 10 years). The reason why the T-visas are only rarely granted is
twofold. One, in order to obtain this benefit, the victim has to provide certification from
law enforcement documenting that they have reasonably cooperated in the investigation
against the trafficker. Since the primary investigator of trafficking cases in the United
States is ICE and, at the same time, the larger part of the trafficking victim population is
undocumented immigrants, many victims shy away from coming forward and
cooperating with the very same agency that has the authority to deport them to their
homecountry. Two, the T-visa is only available to victims who can “show extreme
hardship if they were removed from the country,” which is sometimes difficult to prove
(Kreyman 2009). If law enforcement does not certify a person as a victim of human
trafficking, other benefits and options are available for some survivors to stay in the
country legally. Additional legal remedies available are potential litigation in the civil
law system including suing the trafficker for back wage on hour claims, torture claims, or
the infliction of emotional distress (Kreyman 2009). Maneuvering the legal system and
locating available benefits are a bureaucratic nightmare and applicants heavily rely on
non-profit legal aid organizations such as the Public Law Center in Orange County or the
221
Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA) in Los Angeles County.
Legal advocates working with victims of trafficking play a particularly crucial role in the
prosecution process against the traffickers through the United States Attorney's Office.
CAST, for instance, regards an important component of their work to be helping law
enforcement agents understand their client and consequently to make the client a better,
more stable, and less fearful witness in the trial against the trafficker (Cuasim 2009). Lt.
Marsh (2008) from the Westminster Police Department concurs and states that, “the
federal government has wiretaps, and does traces of phone calls and things like that. We
can even go through people's accounts. But the reality is, survivors of trafficking are
probably the best source to understand the dynamics” behind a particular trafficking
situation, and thus the most valuable asset in building a strong case against a trafficker.
However, convincing a survivor of trafficking about the importance of open collaboration
with law enforcement is a challenge, as survivors and their advocates often have
reasonable doubts about law enforcement's true intentions (Kreyman 2009). Situations
centered on a lack of trust between the parties involved in an investigation makes legal
representations for survivors by attorneys like Charles Song or Kristin Kreyman all the
more important in order to safeguard their clients' basic rights. They make sure to prepare
the survivor for the proceedings and coach them on speaking clearly, remembering
details, and making sure the prosecutor is not taking advantage of their client (Song
2009).
222
To the great dismay of many non-profit organizations, it is rare that a case of human
trafficking is actually prosecuted by the Attorney's Office in Greater Los Angeles.
According to Lt. Marsh from the Westminster Police Department, except for the case of
the Egyptian girl who was trafficked in Irvine, not a single case of human trafficking has
been prosecuted in Orange County. Victim advocate Haidee Thi (2009) argues that the
reason lies in the difficulty of building a strong, convincing case and providing enough
evidence against the trafficker that can be proved in front of a jury. Some in the anti-
trafficking movement are less lenient and view things more in the light of local politics
and speculate that unless prosecutors get delivered a “hot” and tight-knit case of human
trafficking, like the commercial sexual exploitation of a young person, chances are the
case will not be picked up and the perpetrator will not be charged for human trafficking.
After all, in an anti-immigrant political climate, what gains can be made by a prosecutor
taking on a labor trafficking case involving undocumented farm workers from Central
American countries? From humane point of view, prosecuting the trafficker may not be
the ultimate goal for the survivors of a trafficking situation. As Charles Song (2009) puts
it, traffickers have “stolen years of their victims' life,” so “what price do you pay for 5
years of your life, or entire childhood?” Nevertheless, civil litigation against the trafficker
is still important, as it may compensate for some of the lack of freedom the survivor
experienced by restituting back wages and thus forming a financial basis for a more
sustainable life.
223
Policy and research
Agency resources and work allocated to policy development in the local anti-trafficking
movement appears to be taking a back seat. Given the overall resource situation, this
situation does not come as a surprise, as advocating for a certain cause with legislators in
Sacramento, California, and Washington D.C. is a time and fund-consuming endeavor.
However, Kay Buck, executive director of CAST, is known in the community as an
arduous campaigner for human trafficking causes in the capitals, and consequently CAST
and its coalition partners have been instrumental in shaping and passing the
reauthorization of the TVPA in 2008. A different way of participating in making human
trafficking policy by local organizations comes in the form of invitations to congressional
hearings (e.g., OCHTTF in 2008) or to briefings at the United Nations (e.g., Maria
Suarez in 2009). An aspect completely missing on the local scale is research and
assessment programs evaluating local needs and developing policy instruments
specifically tailored towards the geography of Greater Los Angeles.
Falling short
The chapter so far has provided an overview of the who, the how, and the what in the
anti-human trafficking movement in Greater Los Angeles. In a nutshell, a large number
of agents has taken on the issue of human trafficking and implemented a variety of
programs focusing on educating the public, identifying and serving victims, and
prosecuting traffickers. At the center of activities are several coalitions comprising non-
profit and governmental agencies dedicated to sharing resources and developing
224
programs for addressing human trafficking in the region. The coalitions are largely
funded by federal dollars through the Department of Justice and Health and Human
Services and are part of a nationwide network of similar task forces and coalitions.
Members of the task forces and coalitions, as well as independent activists, have emerged
from different fields, but are largely grouped around the rights-based camp and the
abolition camp. While the abolitionists adopt a more moralistic approach, considering
any form of prostitution as sex trafficking, rights-based groups base their work on the
protection of human rights and distinguish between voluntary and involuntary
prostitution, labeling only the latter a form of forced labor. Over the past decade, the
abolitionist groups have received powerful support from the federal government (mostly
under Bush), which opted first and foremost to frame human trafficking as a moral, i.e.,
prostitution, issue. A third stance to addressing human trafficking comes in the form of
the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), which views forced labor of
migrants in the United States as a national security threat, much to the concern and worry
of victims and victim advocates.
In general, organizations with a long track record of social justice work and good
standing in the community fare better in the scarcely funded anti-human trafficking world
than organizations that have only recently started out and that solely focus on human
trafficking. An important exception here is CAST, the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and
Trafficking, in Los Angeles, which has been an important member in the movement since
the early days and runs one of the very few human trafficking shelters in the nation.
225
Collaboration among agents is functioning, but not thriving— yet. An issue of significant
concern is a lack of trust between law enforcement agencies and victim advocates, who
rightly argue that at the end of the day law enforcement agencies (especially ICE) have to
do their job and enforce laws, a fact that may not at all be in the best interest of the
advocate's client, who may face deportation or other negative legal consequences. Still,
over the years, a general awareness that law enforcement and social service providers are
mutually dependent in their mission to address human trafficking has led to an effort to
find common ground on both sides and to yield promising results. Meeting the needs of
survivors of trafficking is a daunting task, mostly because they may need assistance in
literally every aspect concerning their personal life. In theory, some expert agents have an
in-depth understanding of what these needs are and how best to meet them in a culturally
sensitive, holistic, and sustainable way. In practice, however, social service providers
only rarely are able to implement the full package and serve their clients
comprehensively. Instead, survivors of trafficking many times are just assisted in their
most basic needs of housing, legal services, or acute health issues. Strikingly, no
organized anti-trafficking work whatsoever currently exists in the counties of Riverside,
Ventura, and San Bernardino, in spite of several known cases of human trafficking
discovered in these areas.
A lot has happened in the anti-human trafficking movement in Greater Los Angeles in the
past ten years. At this point, the question how successful these efforts have been is
warranted. Thousands of law enforcement agents, nurses, and other first responders have
226
been trained on the issue, and tens of thousands of residents in the counties have been
informed and educated about human trafficking through screenings, awareness events,
and community speakers. Several high-profile cases have been prosecuted, and victims
identified and served. Agents in the movement have generated governmental and private
funds for anti-trafficking work and contributed to the passage of key legislation on the
federal and state level. But how does the movement fare in view of the most important
question in this regard, namely how many victims were rescued and served and how
many traffickers prosecuted? In light of the efforts outlined above, the answer is: way too
few. In fact, the statistics are disappointing and raise some important questions. No
overall data has been available that precisely numbers the victims rescued and the
traffickers prosecuted in Greater Los Angeles. However, bits and pieces of information
provided by the agents draw a discouraging picture. Lt. Marsh pointed out that his agency
sometimes goes weeks or months without working on a single human trafficking case in
Orange County and, to his knowledge, not a single one of its cases had been prosecuted
either on the federal or state level. Between 2006 and 2009, the OCHTTF served about
60 potential victims of human trafficking and Nighlight USA had identified the most
potential victims of all member organizations of the LACUC in 2008— namely 4! Out of
the 50 000 available T-visas allocated by Congress to survivors of trafficking over the
past 10 years, only about 1500 have actually been granted nation-wide. If it is true that
the number of identified victims is only the tip of the iceberg and tens of thousands more
are out there— a fact that experts across the board agree upon— then the statistics
representing the outcome of current local anti-human trafficking work pose a serious
227
question: why are not more victims identified?
A whole new chapter can be written about analyzing this issue. For the purpose of the
given discussion, however, only a few basic ideas as possible answers are introduced.
Most likely, a combination of issues has led to the given outcome of anti-trafficking work
in Greater Los Angeles. On the one hand, with seven federal agents sharing
responsibilities in addressing human trafficking and consequently shaping programs and
action on the ground, probably too many cooks have spoilt the broth, as is shown in the
lack of a coordinated and well-thought out strategy about how best to address the issue of
forced labor. On the other hand, the issue of human trafficking is still fairly new and the
movement to tackle it is young. Consequently, it will probably take another decade of
learning and adjusting to achieve more results in fighting one of the most complex and
challenging social justice issues of the 21
st
century. Funding and expertise are in short
supply and most definitely need to be ramped up by the federal government. As
mentioned earlier, having an immigration law enforcement agency be the primary
investigator of a crime that, to a larger extent, affects undocumented immigrant
communities is a stark contradiction and certainly a core problem the movement is
facing. Lastly, a most important aspect explaining the outcome of current anti-trafficking
work is that the federal government has underutilized local, community-based
organizations as strong partners in their mission to combat human trafficking more
successfully. In fact, I argue that a more substantial localization of anti-trafficking work
in the form of empowering and strengthening grassroots agents in their anti-trafficking
228
work, with the federal government taking a back seat, would better address the challenge
of identifying, serving, and empowering victims and prosecuting traffickers.
229
Chapter 7
The dynamics of place in anti-human trafficking work
“Victims need help to transform from victimhood to advocates marching at the forefront
of the movement.”
Chancee Martorell, Executive Director, Thai CDC Los Angeles
Thinking grassroots
The U.S. federal government has asserted a decisive position in fighting human
trafficking in Greater Los Angeles and elsewhere in the country. Not only do federal
dollars make up a substantial part of the anti-trafficking funding base on the ground, and
thus determine the outlook on and nature of the work that is implemented, but also a
federal agency – namely ICE - has emerged as the lead investigator of human trafficking
in the region. The analysis has also shown that to date, the resources spent and
investigations conducted into human trafficking have not produced the anticipated
outcome. Thus, a reassessment of the overall approach to tackling the problem is
warranted. By adopting a spatial analytical approach, I argue for reassigning
responsibilities and suggest that the federal government take a back seat and instead
empowers local community organizations on the ground in their work of fighting human
trafficking. As this chapter shows, small, community-based organizations with a strong
victim-centered approach and established social and cultural roots in their communities
have been able to identify more victims, to organize adequate and necessary assistance,
and to seek justice for their clients. With the help of a case study featuring the Thai
230
Community Development Center (Thai CDC) in Los Angeles, the following discussion
analyses the dynamics of place in anti-human trafficking work and shows why a
grassroots-based approach to fighting human trafficking needs substantial federal
promotion.
Anatomy of a successful anti-human trafficking mission
22
In early August 1995, Chancee Martorell received a call from an official at the State of
California Labor Commission, indicating an on-going investigation of suspected forced
labor of Thai workers in an apartment complex in suburban El Monte and requesting
Martorell's help in a possible raid to take place the next morning. The official called
Martorell, as she had just one year previously founded the Thai Community Development
Center, or Thai CDC, a grassroots organization with the mission to assist Thai
immigrants in Greater Los Angeles with social and economic needs. The Thai CDC had
organized a group of garment workers and tried to raise awareness around sweatshops,
labor conditions, and workers' rights in Los Angeles. The federal INS (Immigration
Naturalization Services, now ICE) had known about the El Monte compound for three
years prior and even charged an agent with investigating the case. The INS agent, in the
words of Martorell (2009), a “genuine do-gooder and renegade within his organization,”
who knew Thai and had lived and worked in Thailand, went to great lengths in his
investigation. He occupied a room next door for surveillance and entered the suspected
building in disguise as an electrician. However, when submitting the evidence to his
22
If not otherwise indicated, all information pertaining to the organization and work of the Thai CDC
stems from an interview with the agency's executive director, Chancee Martorell.
231
superiors, he was treated with suspicion and disbelief that forced labor even exists in the
United States and a federal judge dismissed the collected evidence as not strong enough
to issue a search warrant. At one point it was even suggested the agent only wanted to
advance his own career. The case was closed and the staff reassigned.
The suspected compound had been in existence for seven years and most workers were
held captive and forced to work for the entire time. Only ten workers had managed to
escape the situation earlier. One of them tried to move on with his life and took a job with
a garment factory in Downtown Los Angeles. When one day the State of California
Labor Commission conducted a routine labor inspection at the factory, a friend of the
worker who knew about the El Monte situation confided in the state officials that people
were kept against their will in the El Monte compound. This clue was the beginning of
the investigation that eventually led to the rescue of 72 workers and to the beginning of
the anti-human trafficking work in Greater Los Angeles and the nation.
In the early hours of the morning on August 2, 1995, a multi-agency task force, including
the Department of Labor, the Occupational Safety Housing Administration, Federal
Marshalls, and the State of California Labor Commission, prepared for the raid on the El
Monte compound. The Labor Commissioner told Martorell about potentially 70 workers
of Thai nationality in the El Monte compound and invited her organization to provide
social services and shelter. Martorell immediately agreed, but only with the guarantee that
the workers would be given over to Thai CDC's care and not to immigration officials.
232
Martorell had learned her lesson from previous cases, where immigration officials got
involved and criminalized the victims, who ended up getting deported without receiving
justice. This time she wanted to make sure the workers were treated like victims and not
undocumented immigrants. At 10pm the night before the raid, the Labor Commissioner
called Martorell and confirmed the promise to hand the workers over to the care of Thai
CDC. Throughout the night, law enforcement agencies, the Labor Commission, Thai
CDC, and other agencies strategized about how best to conduct the raid of the compound
and to prepare for the immediate needs of the victims. Two raids were planned for the
next day. One of the compound in El Monte, and another at a downtown factory that
functioned as the frontstore of the traffickers' business. Thai CDC joined the El Monte
Police Department, which led the raid of the apartment complex in the city. The goal was
to first sort out the traffickers, who also lived on the premises. The traffickers were a
family of long-term Thai immigrants. Two of the brothers got wind of the happenings and
managed to escape authorities. They are evading arrest until this day, hiding along the
Laotian-Thai border. US and Thai authorities both located the two brothers, but because
of a lack of cooperation on the Thai side, they have never faced charges. The other family
members, however, were detained and sentenced to several years in prison.
The trafficker family had rented a row of duplexes on a residential street in El Monte,
each housing 12 workers at the top of the building. The bottom level served as factory
floor for sewing machines. The compound even had a little shop where workers could
make purchases that were added to their debt. The items, though, were outrageously
233
overpriced with $12 for a bar of soap. The windows were boarded, leaving only a slip for
ventilation. The doors were locked from outside. The workers were denied any form of
social interaction with each other and barbed wire around the complex prevented anyone
from fleeing or making contact with the outside world. Instead, the workers were forced
to work from 6am to midnight, while the six family members and guards armed with
machetes, guns, and weapons terrified them with threats of beatings and retaliation
against their families in Thailand. While it was only Thai workers who were held in the
El Monte compound, the downtown factory employed Latino workers. This site was also
where retailers and manufacturers placed their orders and inspected the work floor, never
knowing about the underground factory in El Monte.
Figure 7.1. Thai workers outside the El Monte compound after the raid in 1995. Source:
Photograph by R. Meyer in Watanabe 2008.
234
Shortly after the traffickers were arrested and the victims escaped from the compound,
Chancee Martorell's worst case scenario became reality. In spite of an express of
promises, the Labor Commissioner reneged his earlier promise of handing the victims
over into Martorell's care and called in immigration officials, who took the workers into
detention. Consequently, “hell broke lose.” Martorell started frantically mobilizing civil
rights, immigrant rights, and worker's rights organizations throughout Los Angeles (some
are CHIRLA, APAC, KIWA), and for nine days straight demanded 24/7 access to the
workers in detention and held press conferences condemning immigration for re-
victimizing the victims. In her eyes, the workers went from one form of incarceration to
another, but this time at their own government's hands. Just as Martorell had expected,
the workers were first and foremost seen as immigrants who had violated immigration
law. Against her hopes, a Memorandum of Understanding between the Department of
Labor and the Immigration law enforcement determining that the Department of Labor
would only focus on enforcing labor laws and not concern itself with immigration did not
materialize. Instead, the Labor Commissioner argued that too many individuals were
involved in the El Monte case and thus detention was considered the safest place for
them, a move that was inexcusable to Martorell. The workers were in shackles while
transported back and forth between the court in downtown and the detention center where
they were held. In Martorell's words (2009), the workers were “frightened out of their
wits, and thought it's all their fault.” But pressure was building up on officials. The U.S.
attorney eventually decided to prosecute the trafficker under slavery, thus using slavery
laws that had not been used since the 1800s. The key question that then evolved was how
235
to build a case against the traffickers around the issue of slavery. The U.S. attorney
decided to utilize the workers as witnesses and put a $5000 bond on each of the workers,
an amount none of the workers nor the coalition partners was able to provide in order to
set them free. Thus, Martorell and her coalition partners approached the judge and
requested that the court release the workers into community care. After agreeing with the
magistrate on a signature bond for $500 per person, the federal government turned the
workers over to the coalition of agencies that had formed over the nine days since the raid
had taken place.
In many respects, the real work and rescue only then began, as immediately the coalition
partners had to find and provide housing, clothing, food, and health services to more than
70 victims traumatized by years of forced labor in the El Monte compound. The coalition
succeeded in this task and also arranged for emergency relief, resettlement assistance, and
counseling. A year later, the case had been prosecuted and the traffickers sentenced to
prison terms, however, the question surfaced about what to do with the workers, who still
lacked proper legal status and had not received any financial remuneration or other
remedy for their sufferings. The first idea officials discussed was to deport them, a
motion widely criticized in the coalition as disrespectful towards the workers, who had
cooperated with authorities, risked their lives, and jeopardized their families' lives while
two fugitives were still on the loose. Martorell and her coalition partners went straight to
the U.S. attorney and President Clinton, arguing that deporting the workers would set a
bad example for other victims, as it would show that by coming forward and reporting on
236
abuse, workers get deported. The renegade in the immigration agency proposed helping
the victims to get so-called S-visas, which are usually given to people who cooperate
with federal agents in prosecuting drug traffickers. The plan worked and all workers were
able to obtain S-visas, which are good for three years and may lead to permanent legal
residency afterward. Other benefits that come with the S-visa are a work authorization, an
ID, and a social security number, which are important administrative elements for starting
a more stable and legal life in the United States. Through the S-visa, many workers were
also able to bring family members to the United States and thus escape possible
retaliation by the traffickers. The T-visa that Congress passed in 2000 is modeled after the
S-visa.
Figure 7.2. Thai workers of the El Monte case in a Downtown Los Angeles courtroom.
Source: Photograph by B. Cary in Watanabe 2008.
237
The El Monte case produced repercussions reaching far beyond the L.A. county lines and
was reported on around the world. Among other things, the Thai CDC, in collaboration
with Sweatshop Watch, Korean Immigrant Worker's Advocates, and UNITE, launched
the Retailer Accountability Campaign and helped pass state legislation against
manufacturers and retailers to require monitoring and a set code of conduct in factories.
The idea was to establish a link between slave labor and the profits retailers made. Up
until then, retailers largely refused to assume responsibility and argued it was the
subcontractors' liability. With the help of media and press coverage, however, the Thai
CDC and its partners stirred public outrage and succeeded in making the retailers and
manufacturers liable. The coalition made sure that the manufacturers and retailers could
not claim impunity by showing the prosecutors that it was impossible to produce the
amount of clothes solely with the work capacity at the downtown factory. The retailers in
the El Monte case eventually agreed to a $4 million dollar settlement.
Over the course of the next few years, Thai CDC and its partners successfully achieved
what to Martorell is the centerpiece of her organization's anti-human trafficking work: To
help the victims achieve justice and empower them to go on and “lead independent and
productive lives” (Martorell 2010). One such success story is that of Win Chuai Ngan and
his partner Sokanya Sutthiprapha, both of Thai descent and former victims in the El
Monte garment factory case. Chuai Ngan was one of ten workers who escaped the
traffickers by climbing a 7-foot wall and running off into the darkness. This escape was
before the perpetrators hired armed guards and set up barbed wire around the compound.
238
He met Sutthiprapha after the raid in 1995. Both returned to the garment trade, but soon
decided to take a leap in the dark and realize their dream of opening their own restaurant
in California. The couple saved whatever money they could and eventually found a Thai
restaurant in Van Nuys that the owner sold for $10 000. With limited English language
skills and no entrepreneurial experience under their belts, Chuai Ngan and Sutthiprapha
closely worked with the Thai CDC to obtain the necessary city permits and to place ads
in local newspapers. The Asian Pacific Islander group assisted the couple in negotiating a
lease with the building's landlord. Finally, in fall 2000, the couple opened the doors to
Win's Thai Food restaurant in Van Nuys. A year later, Win's Thai Food was honored as
the Asian Pacific Islander Small Business Program's small business of the year.
Sutthiprapha still recalls the anxiety they felt on the first day of business, which only
generated $150. However, business picked up soon and ten years later, Chuai Ngan and
Sutthiprapha expanded their business and opened Win's Thai Food 2 in Hollywood. The
restaurants are open seven days a week and the couple puts in 11-hour work days, but
Sutthiprapha and Chuai Ngan, in a 2001, interview expressed pride of ownership and
point out a subtle but substantial difference between their work days in enslavement and
now: “In here, we can stop and rest any time we want. […] And we can go anywhere we
want” (Robinson-Jacobs 2001).
The El Monte case was only the beginning of a series of human trafficking cases
affecting Thai workers that the Thai CDC was involved with over the past 15 years. In
the so-called Global Horizons case, several hundred Thai men were located throughout
239
the United States to provide farm work for Global Horizons subcontractors. Initially, the
case was not recognized by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland
Security as human trafficking. However, after the change of administration in Washington
in 2009, Martorell received a phone call from the DoJ confirming that the agency
intended to then take on and prosecute the farm labor trafficking case— with only a six-
year delay. Several dozens of the workers in this case have already received their T-visas
and went through a comprehensive service program with the Thai CDC. Among other
things, clients participated in the Thai CDC Sweat Equity Program, which provides
survivors with entrepreneurial training and financial literacy classes, as well as a 2:1
match for clients who have saved money to start their own business. The goal is to
involve the client in “planning for long-term economic self-sufficiency” (USCCB 2009).
Another big case of human trafficking for the Thai CDC was that of 48 Thai welders,
who came to America, the “fairy tale place” (Watanabe 2006), in 2002, to work on
construction at the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, but instead found themselves
working 13-hour days at a restaurant in Long Beach with a pay of $220 in three months.
The workers were housed in apartments without gas, electricity, or furniture, their
passports were confiscated and they were threatened by their perpetrators to get sent back
to Thailand facing enormous debt if they complained. The case was settled by the U.S.
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Trans Bay Steel Corp. of Napa for
$1.4 million. Through the settlement, each worker received between $5000 and $7500 in
personal injury damages and additional financial help for housing, education, and other
expenses (Watanabe 2006).
240
A year after the El Monte case, five victims emerged from another garment factory case
and, in 1997, the Thai CDC dealt with its first sex trafficking case, involving 6 survivors.
Four more victims of sex trafficking received help from Thai CDC in 1998. Probably one
of the most disturbing cases of human trafficking that the Thai CDC came across was that
of a little Thai boy who was “rented out” by his mother, a human trafficking victim
herself in Thailand. The mother, who was forced into prostitution and was the girlfriend
of a Chinese trafficker, rented her two-year old son to the trafficker who planned to traffic
another woman to Japan by travelling as a young family on vacation in disguise. The boy
was discovered during their travels by U.S. customs authorities and turned over to the
Thai consulate, who then handed the boy over to the care of the Thai CDC. The case
provoked a legal battle among the Thai CDC, the Department of Justice, and INS and
Thai officials and ended with the little-boy being the first recipient of the T-visa in the
United States.
In sum, the Thai CDC has handled a significant number of trafficking cases and helped
bring justice and restitution to a large number of survivors of trafficking since its
inception as a community-based organization in 1994. The success stories of many of the
survivors (FIG with prostesters/former El Monte workers), who managed to rebuild their
lives and embark on an economically sustainable path due to Thai CDC's commitment,
providing ample evidence of the organization's fruitful and deliberate anti-human
trafficking practices. With its involvement in the El Monte case, the Thai CDC was part
of the very beginning of the national and local anti-trafficking movement in the United
241
States. However, one of the most telling indicators of why the Thai CDC is an
exceptionally successful anti-human trafficking agent in the movement is the number of
T-visas the organization has secured for its clients. Over the years, the Thai CDC has
served more than 400 victims of human trafficking, the majority of whom received a T-
visa that allowed them to stay legally in the country for three years and obtain a work
authorization and afterwards apply for permanent residency in the United States. As
pointed our earlier, Congress has allocated 50 000 T-visas for survivors of human
trafficking in the United States over the past 10 years, however only about 1500 of these
visas have been actually issued to trafficking survivors. Thus, the Thai CDC clients
received a significant number of T-visas ever granted in the United States. This result is
remarkable and warrants a closer analysis of the Thai CDC’s best practices that led to this
success. The following discussion particularly focuses on the issues of a community-
based and victim-centered approach, extensive collaboration, and a multi-angle approach
to human trafficking.
Ingredients for success
Roots in the local community
The Thai CDC is a true community-based organization serving the particular needs of the
Thai population in Los Angeles. The organization has developed an in-depth
understanding of the community's cultural context and thus has gained the trust of Thai
immigrants, an aspect that, in many cases, has proven to be key for a successful
investigation of a forced labor situation. Founded in 1994 in response to the Los Angeles
242
riots that greatly impacted Thai businesses, Martorell along with other Thai activists
intervened in the course of this crisis and managed to secure federal money to help
rebuild Thai businesses. The Thai community then was a young immigrant group and to
Martorell was still invisible to society and faced substantial unmet needs. Based on these
preliminary observations, the group around Martorell conducted a needs-assessment
study focusing on social and human service needs, demographics, geographical
distribution, and the socio-economic characteristics of the Thai population in Los
Angeles County. According to this study, a little fewer than 80 000 Thais lived in
Southern California, about half of them in east Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley
in Los Angeles County. Martorell used the study as an advocacy tool to make the Thai
community visible to policymakers and funders. Shortly after the project was finished,
Los Angeles got hit by the Northridge earthquake, which prompted emergency relief,
resettlement, and business rebuilding in the Thai community. Having encountered the
needs of the community during these two crises, Martorell and her partners
institutionalized their efforts and created the Thai CDC with a mission to address the
economic mobility and self-sufficiency of the Thai immigrant community in Los
Angeles.
Initially their efforts concentrated on building affordable housing, raising capital for
small businesses, and launching the Thai town campaign using culture tourism as a basis
for socio-economic development. Over the years, however, the Thai CDC broadened its
scope of programs and especially took on worker's rights and labor rights as a pillar of
243
the organization's work. Martorell explains that Thai immigrants faced significant
cultural and language barriers upon their arrival in Los Angeles. Immigrants who arrived
after the 1980s were mostly unskilled, had low education attainment, and thus soon lost
the legal status, which made them particularly vulnerable to exploitation in the
workplace. The Thai CDC set up legal clinics focusing on employment, immigration, and
housing issues. Later, programs dedicated to pre-natal care, parenting care, youth
services, senior services, and breast cancer awareness were added to an already very
comprehensive and multi-social service agency. For 10 years, the Thai CDC was the
primary institution for the Thai community in the city. However, in 2004 the organization
faced fiscal and other capacity strains. Having significantly diverted from their initial
mission, Martorell and her partners reevaluated the organization's work and decided to
refocus on their original goal to create economic mobility and opportunity. Most service
programs were outsourced to other agencies. The only service not eliminated was the
assistance and help provided to survivors of human trafficking, as no other culture-
specific program of that kind was— and, to this day, is— available to this population. By
then, the staff at the Thai CDC knew from experience that human trafficking was
oftentimes a matter of life and death and required extensive help and substantial
intervention.
Susceptibility to cultural nuances and habits of certain ethnic populations is a key aspect
of productive service provision to victims of human trafficking. As discussed earlier,
many victims face language barriers, have a culturally determined skepticism toward
244
remedies for mental health problems, or struggle with class and gender power relations as
being practiced in their home countries. Because the Thai CDC is strongly rooted in the
local Thai community, the organization succeeded in building a vital rapport with Thai
neighborhoods and local businesses as well as in establishing substantial knowledge and
expertise about this population's specific habits and needs. This understanding of the
overall cultural context is a valuable tool in better analyzing the dynamics responsible for
creating labor exploitative situations for Thai immigrant workers in Los Angeles as well
as for creating meaningful services to this population. Martorell (2009) experienced in
several cases that, “Thai traffickers used Thai culture against Thai workers.” She explains
that Thai culture operates within a rigid hierarchy. A person's place and ranking in that
hierarchy determines how one is treated and accepted in Thai society. As a result, a
person ranked low naturally accepts his position as fate and endures any experienced
hardship as an inevitable given. In the case that this person ends up working in a labor
exploitative situation, this circumstance is accepted and not questioned. The traffickers in
the El Monte case used this particular cultural characteristic as a means of luring the
workers to the United States and exploiting them. The workers saw themselves as poor
Thai peasants who aimed for bettering their own and their families' future, and when
forced to work in the El Monte factory, many of them accepted the situation as their fate.
The perpetrators showed no hesitation in taking advantage of the workers' culturally
determined submissiveness.
245
On the surface, the plot line of the El Monte trafficking situation is consistent with the
general narrative of how people end up in forced labor, i.e., a socio-economically
disadvantaged worker is sought out by an opportunistic and ruthless person for an
iniquitous and criminal business transaction. The El Monte traffickers regularly visited
garment factories in rural provinces in Thailand advertising jobs in the United States,
promising potential workers a legal position, and advancing payments for travel and
housing that the workers agreed to work off once arrived in the U.S. For the interview at
the U.S. embassy, they dressed the workers up in fancy business attire. Many times,
though, the workers traveled to the U.S. with faked papers, i.e., another person's visa. The
traffickers accompanied the workers on the whole trip, carrying their passports for the
entire time and dealing with customs. As soon as they arrived at LAX, a van picked them
up and drove them directly to the compound, where all the workers' identification papers
were appropriated. To the average anti-human trafficking activist, this story sounds
familiar, as it is similar to human trafficking cases around the globe. The difference with
the Thai CDC and the El Monte case, however, is that Martorell and her group made an
effort to dig deeper and get a more nuanced picture of the circumstances that led to the
enslavement of the Thai workers in Los Angeles. Through that effort, the organization
gathered valuable knowledge, throwing light on specific aspects of the trafficking
situation that eventually helped them to draft more meaningful and culturally sensitive
programs for the Thai human trafficking victims. This culturally apt and in-depth
approach, paired with a broad spectrum of economic and social services, has greatly paid
off as it empowered many of the Thai CDC clients not only to rebuild their lives, but also
246
to seek justice and become vocal labor rights activists at the forefront of the movement.
Thai CDC's culturally sensitive approach has simply helped the organization to better
understand its clients' needs and to gain their trust, an issue that poses one of the biggest
challenges for anti-human trafficking activists in the post-rescue phase-- especially when
law enforcement agencies get involved. As discussed in more detail below, a victim's
trust not only is essential in helping them cope with their experiences, but also is crucial
in preparing the survivor for a potential investigation and prosecution against their
trafficker. In addition, a sense of transnational cultural dynamics is essential to grasping
the root causes of the problem and creating long-term preventive measures.
Establishing productive relationships
From day one, the Thai CDC has reached out to other agencies in its effort to serve the
survivors of the El Monte case, and later other human trafficking victims. The
organization immediately recognized that the needs of human trafficking survivors are
multi-faceted and complex and that no individual agency would be able to satisfactorily
address the issues in the long-term, especially if it involved a large number of survivors
as in the garment factory case. Instead, the Thai CDC formed partnerships with other
labor rights and immigrant rights organizations and social service providers in Greater
Los Angeles in order to offer the broadest and best possible assistance to its clients. After
tackling the first series of human trafficking cases in this format, Thai CDC received an
invitation from Kathryn McMahon at the California State University, Long Beach to join
the Women's Project and help develop a strategy for victim service provision that in
247
Martorell's (2009) words, “would be pioneering in the human trafficking arena.” At that
time, no other agency in the country provided the comprehensive social services to
victims the way the group around McMahon and Martorell envisioned it to be. The Thai
CDC brought extensive experiences about the victim's needs to the table and elaborated
to the discussion partners that a “continuum of care network” is required in order to assist
survivors of trafficking in a meaningful way. As a result of the deliberations, the group
initiated a series of trainings and provided education about the issue to law enforcement
agencies and other social service providers, especially domestic violence shelters that, at
that time, were not aware of the special needs of the human trafficking population. The
goal was to distribute the services provided to survivors to a network of agencies that
eventually became a coalition of service providers. At that time in 1998, CAST, the
Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking in Los Angeles was born. To this day,
CAST is a leader in the local anti-human trafficking movement and unites social service
providers, advocacy groups, and law enforcement agencies under its wings. Martorell has
seen CAST grow over the past 12 years and is still serving on its board of directors.
The Thai CDC not only established partnerships with non-governmental organizations,
but also collaborated with law enforcement authorities, even though Martorell quickly
points out that building bridges to law enforcement agencies— especially on the state and
federal scale— has been difficult. Her cautious attitude towards state officials is rooted in
the disappointment experienced at the hands of the State Department of Labor in the early
hours of the El Monte case. Back then, the Labor Commissioner's broken promise almost
248
led to the deportation of the Thai garment workers. Martorell also talks about a “lot of
incompetence” on the part of State Labor Commission in the garment factory case.
Among other things, the agency failed to secure the premises on the day of the raid,
which allowed the perpetrators to flee, and failed to obtain all property items and assets,
such as cars, that should have been part of the restitution to the survivors. In addition,
when the restitution settlement was reached, state officials intended to present the
paychecks to the survivors publicly, a plan that was immediately rejected by the
survivor's advocates as inappropriate and morally questionable. Instead, Thai CDC
accepted the checks on behalf of their clients in order to divert any public interest in their
financial status.
Particularly problematic has been the Thai CDC's relationship with the federal
immigration law enforcement agency (then INS, now ICE). Not only did the agency treat
the El Monte workers as undocumented immigrants, but also in the case of the small Thai
boy, the INS intended to return the boy to his mother in Thailand, who in the opinion of
Thai CDC, should have been deemed unfit to parent her child, as she was the one who
trafficked him in the first place. When Thai CDC became temporary custodians and
guardians of the boy, he was malnourished and suffered from AIDS/HIV . The boy's father
had committed suicide after he got infected with AIDS/HIV from his wife. He also faced
charges for raping a Burmese woman while serving as a Thai soldier along the
Burmese/Thai border. Sending the boy back to his homecountry would have meant to
send the boy to his death. However, regardless of his endangerment and serious health
249
issues, the INS, backed by the federal government, intended to send the boy back based
on the argument that the boy was a Thai national and the Thai government wanted the
boy sent back. A legal battle between “David and Goliath” ensued when the Thai CDC
decided to seek a restraining order against the INS in federal court to prevent the boy
from being deported. Luck was on the side of the local community organization, as a
conservative but pro-child welfare judge ruled in favor of the Thai CDC and stopped the
deportation process. A lawsuit between the Thai CDC and the Department of Justice
followed. The Thai CDC pleaded for the boy's safety and had all arguments in their favor,
including state-of-the-art AIDS treatment for the boy in the United States and a well-
educated family who was ready to adopt the boy. The efforts paid off. Then U.S. Attorney
General John Ashcroft himself came to meet with Thai CDC and present the first T-visa
to the boy.
Not all encounters with law enforcement agencies have been reason for frustration,
though, as Martorell and her group have also had fruitful collaborations with law
enforcement agencies. Knowledge, education, and human empathy on the law
enforcement side have made all the difference in these cases. Most notably, is the
successful relationship with the INS renegade of the El Monte case, who assisted the Thai
CDC in other human trafficking cases. Local law enforcement involvement, according to
Martorell, “has been up and down, but mostly good.” In 1998, for instance, the Thai
CDC worked on a sex trafficking case with the Westminster Police Department, which
exercised a sensitive approach and treated the victims as such. In sum, conducting anti-
250
human trafficking work is a seriously politicized endeavor as many different agents are
involved in the complex process of investigating a forced labor situation and assisting
survivors in all their needs. Each agency is driven in its work by a particular agenda that
may or may not be in the best interest of the victims of a trafficking situation.
Practicing a true victim-centered approach
A central question for social service providers in human trafficking cases is how to
handle law enforcement without compromising the client's interests and status. As a
matter of fact, law enforcement takes on an important role in bringing justice to the
victims either through restitution, granting legal status, or prosecution of the trafficker.
For victim advocates like the Thai CDC it is thus crucial to protect their clients' interests
when dealing with law enforcement, but at the same time to exploit all possible legal
means to achieve justice. To succeed in this mission, Thai CDC and other organizations
have adopted a strong victim-centered approach in their anti-human trafficking work, i.e.,
the long-term well-being and interests of their clients are at the center of their work. A
well-proven way to maneuver delicate encounters between law enforcement and
survivors of human trafficking has been to involve a victim advocate or immigration
attorney from an early point to prepare the survivor for an encounter with law
enforcement and to make the best decision given the legal and other circumstances.
Charles Song (2009), a seasoned legal expert in anti-human trafficking remedies and
former Thai CDC collaborator, strongly recommends, “to first contact an attorney before
calling in law enforcement” for an investigation. Speaking from extensive experience, he
251
refers to a Michigan farm worker case that originated in Greater Los Angeles in which
authorities did not identify the workers as victims of forced labor and thus failed to
secure them legal benefits and instead deported them back to their home countries.
This case depicts the crux of the problem when law enforcement becomes involved in a
human trafficking case. This case embodies why Charles Songs cautions about
communicating with law enforcement, as at the end of the day, government authorities
oftentimes take an immigration-centered and trafficker-centered approach and use
survivors as witnesses in a criminal prosecution of the employer before they are turned
over to ICE and get deported. Working with an immigration attorney is also essential, as
they understand best how to coach a survivor in becoming a better and more efficient
witness for the prosecution (Thi 2009). Not all survivors are willing to come forward and
speak out against their traffickers out of fear for retaliation against them or their families.
In this case, an immigration attorney is a valuable resource for exploring alternative legal
options that may assist survivors in rebuilding their lives. Trust in law enforcement
agencies, or a lack of such, not only plays an important role once a survivor is in the care
of a social service provider. Rather, people's trust in government authorities is key in
identifying potential forced labor situations. This relationship is especially true for
immigrant communities in Greater Los Angeles, who have every reason to think twice
about coming forward and reporting a case or seeking help to escape a trafficking
situation when they are facing potential deportation by such an act. In this regard, Thai
CDC is in a great position, as the organization developed a strong rapport with the local
252
Thai community and proved to the people over and over again that they are first and
foremost interested in the protection and safety of survivors of human trafficking and not
the enforcement of certain immigration laws. This approach clearly has come to fruition
as is shown in the substantial number of Thai victims identified and served.
Heidi Thi, victim's advocate with the Orange County Community Service Program, is
optimistic and suggests that law enforcement has learned its lesson and increasingly
acknowledges the value of a true victim-centered approach and sound collaboration with
non-profit organizations as a productive means of getting access to and gaining the trust
of local communities and trafficking victims. Thi explains that in her position as a victim
advocate she functions as mediator between the two parties and assists in finding
common ground for a productive investigation against the trafficker. However, easing
interagency tensions and distrust on the victim's side through mutual respect and
acknowledgement has its limits, especially when the federal ICE becomes involved in a
human trafficking investigation. An ICE agent himself acknowledged a central dilemma
of his anti-human trafficking work, namely the “I” in his job title. Immigration authorities
are well aware of the distrust of local communities, especially immigrant communities,
against their agency. When I was invited to speak at an event in Watts, Los Angeles
alongside Mark Abend and his ICE partner, Abend suggested ahead of the event that I
contact school officials and inform them about an ICE agent being part of the
presentation. The Watts high school, where the event took place, has a large immigrant
student population and Abend wanted to make sure the school is properly informed about
253
the guest speaker's background. In a previous similar event, Abend explained, half of the
students in a predominantly immigrant school failed to show up at the human trafficking
awareness event, because he appeared as an immigration and law enforcement agent.
Abend assured me that his agency considers schools and churches as sanctuaries and that
they refrain from enforcing immigration law on these sites. Instead, he expressed sincere
concern for educating young people about human trafficking. Still, witnessing him talk
about the dangers of human trafficking to 700 predominantly immigrant students in Watts
had me wonder whether it is only me who thinks it is extremely odd that the country's
prime immigration law enforcement agency, which is responsible for hundreds of
thousands of deportations, is also the number one investigator of human trafficking, a
crime that primarily effects migrant workers in the United States. Quickly I remembered
that an evaluation of this situation largely depends on the kind of framework utilized to
analyze the problem of human trafficking. And, as pointed out elsewhere, ICE has taken
on an immigration and national security-centered approach in tackling human trafficking.
Viewed through this lens, though not backed by any research, the strong ICE involvement
is in theory at least explainable. However, on the ground the problem of distrust persists.
This lack of confidence in law enforcement agencies was clearly revealed in the Q&A
that followed our presentation at the Watts high school event. Abend encouraged students
to keep an eye out for suspicious occurrences in their environments and asked them to
reach out to him and his agency to report any incident that could indicate a forced labor
situation. Promptly, a Latino student in the audience raised his hand and asked Abend:
“Are you the guys deporting Mexicans?” Abend showed frustration about this comment,
254
as by coming out to the event he intended to show his agency’s commitment to reaching
out and working with local communities on addressing the issue of human trafficking.
However, the exchange between the ICE agent and the Latino student made obvious the
philosophical abyss shaping the local-federal trafficking movement. In spite of the good-
natured intentions of individual immigration officers, ICE's task is to track down and
deport violators of U.S. immigration law. Thus the reality is that undocumented
immigrants who become a victim of a forced labor situation and are detected by
government authorities walk a very thin line. It is probably sheer luck whether they end
up as victims in the care of a social security provider, or as an alleged perpetrator of
immigration law in a deportation center. Education on the law enforcement side and a
strong victim advocate with a profound understanding of the complexity of human
trafficking and a good standing in the community may make the difference between life
and death for a victim of human trafficking. By adopting a victim-centered approach, the
Thai CDC has grown into and taken on this important role as mediator, advocate, and
supporter of hundreds of survivors of human trafficking over the past 15 years. As
discussed earlier, many of Thai CDC's clients have transformed from victimhood to
advocate and emerged as organizers of the local movement against labor exploitation.
Tackling the problem from several angles
The fourth distinguishing the Thai CDC as a superior agent in the local anti-trafficking
world is the organization's holistic and all-encompassing approach to tackling human
trafficking. Not only did Thai CDC and its partners immediately recognize the profound
255
complexity of the issue, but also they grasped the overwhelming needs of survivors and
the necessity to provide in-depth and long-term care to victims in order to help them get
back on their feet. Thai CDC implemented a series of steps to meet this goal. First, to
address the needs of victims in a comprehensive way, as discussed above, Thai CDC
established a coalition of service providers, legal institutions, advocates, and law
enforcement agencies. Second, Martorell and her organization adopted a broader
definition of human trafficking than currently practiced by the federal government. This
broader approach has allowed them to work with clients who, in the eye of the federal
government, do not meet the criteria of a severe form of human trafficking. Over the past
years, the federal government has mostly discriminated against male victims of labor
trafficking. Against the government bias towards sex trafficking cases, Thai CDC has
worked with both labor and sex trafficking victims, and has also provided help to victims
subjected to “less severe” forms of human trafficking. Most interestingly, though the
federal government largely frames human trafficking as a problem primarily effecting
women and children, Martorell pointed out that initially they mostly worked with women,
but now have more male clients seeking help from her organization. In case a victim
would not qualify for government benefits under the human trafficking definition, Thai
CDC has made a significant effort to exhaust other legal resources. One strategy has been
filing civil charges against the trafficker through the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC). This approach proved to be very successful as shown in the worker
compensation achieved in the previously discussed welder case and farm worker case.
256
Third, Thai CDC's success in serving its victims can be ascribed to an unswerving
persistence in the pursuit of providing the best possible service and care for its clients.
The organization has weathered political pettiness and administrative hurdles, and
smartly maneuvered interagency and, at times, intergovernmental power struggles in an
attempt to stick to its victim-centered mission. Martorell and her small grassroots
organization did not even shy away from taking on the federal government in an attempt
to protect a client's basic human rights. Fourth, Thai CDC also helped set a number of
precedents in the legal arena. Before 2000, the way state authorities dealt with human
trafficking victims was that they “were not being dealt with.” Instead, victims were
mostly treated as undocumented migrants and deported. The El Monte case was the first
time that federal prosecutors used anti-slavery laws that have been in the books and not
used since the legal abolition of slavery in the United States in 1860. Thai CDC’s work
on several human trafficking cases in the mid-to-late 1990s led to the creation of the
TVPA in 2000. Five years laster, Thai CDC and CASt were also instrumental in passing
state legislation addressing human trafficking.
Implications: Upgrading the toolkit for combatting human trafficking
Since its inception, the Thai CDC has come a long way. The analysis has shown that one
can fairly agree with Martorell's claim that the Thai CDC has “single-handedly
transformed the process of dealing with persons in exploitative labor situations and
changed the view from perpetrator to victim-centered and empowering approach.” If it
were not for Thai CDC's persistence in fighting for the El Monte workers' rights in the
257
early days after the raid of the compound, the public may never have learned about the
scope and nature of forced labor in the United States and hundreds of victims would
never been rescued. Thai CDC was instrumental in creating an anti-trafficking movement
in Greater Los Angeles, establishing coalitions, prosecuting traffickers, serving victims,
and training law enforcement and other agencies. As argued in this chapter, its roots in
the local community and its understanding of its clients' cultural background have helped
Thai CDC to become one of the most successful anti-human trafficking agencies in the
country-- not only measured by the number of T-visas obtained for its clients. The federal
government may be well advised to learn from organizations like Thai CDC and
empower immigrant rights and worker's rights organizations on the ground in order to
accomplish more for the dollars spent on anti-human trafficking programs in the country.
Still, the problem of human trafficking is too complex as to be successfully tackled solely
from the ground. Forced labor is one of the most substantial social justice problems of
our times and requires short-term programs providing immediate social and legal
remedies as well as overall long-term structural changes. Of course, any proposal for a
structural adjustment in addressing human trafficking once again depends on the lens
through which the issue is analyzed. However, by this time it should be clear that human
trafficking is first and foremost a human rights and immigrant rights problem and thus
requires a rights-based and immigration-based solution. One such proposal for a
structural change was introduced by CHIRLA in 2009, which argued that, “if we properly
protect people's human rights, we wouldn't have to deal with human trafficking” (Mesa
258
2009). Charles Song (2009) argues that we have a classist and racist immigration system
in place throughout the world, whereby people get denied their basic rights to find food
and shelter and to move to different places legally. This system pushes many migrants
into illegal territory as they decide to move and travel to countries without proper
documentation and thus exist in the shadows of society where they become more
vulnerable to threats and exploitation without access to any help and benefits.
Thus, CHIRLA and its partners have proposed the legalization of migrant work as a
powerful means of fighting human trafficking. CHIRLA argues for a shift of immigration
enforcement dollars to labor law enforcement in order to protect vulnerable workers. The
reasoning behind this proposal is the frustration with the current system, in which the
majority of resources goes into factory and other raids and deportations of undocumented
workers. In the eyes of worker's rights advocates, to “knock on people's doors or stop
them in their cars on the streets” is not a solution. This approach clearly empowers the
trafficker over the victim. The legalization of the migrant worker and a stronger
enforcement of labor laws would not only empower workers and make them more
efficient and willing witnesses against traffickers, but would also weaken the position of
the perpetrator. The goal is to shift the focus onto the real criminals, i.e., the traffickers
and the profiteers, who are taking advantage of vulnerable people. In a nutshell, CHIRLA
argues, “less immigration laws equals less vulnerability.” This approach would greatly
facilitate the work of anti-human trafficking agents, not only because it empowers the
victim, but also because it would level the play field and nurture more fruitful and trustful
259
relationships between victim advocates in the non-governmental world and state
authorities. An overhaul of immigration law as a means of fighting human trafficking is a
formidable political endeavor and its implementation requires convincing powerful forces
like the federal government and other agencies. To this day, no substantial progress has
been achieved in this regard, however, if one may trust the current administration's
political agenda, CHIRLA, Thai CDC, and the many victims of forced labor have room
to be hopeful.
The Thai CDC and CHIRLA represent several components making up a powerful toolkit
for combatting human trafficking that primarily concerns international migrant workers.
However, these tactics may not be suitable in dealing with other forms of human
trafficking, especially the trafficking of children for commercial sexual exploitation,
which to a large extent also effects national citizens. Addressing this problem requires a
modified, though still community-based, approach. Following the idea that, “prevention
is the best protection,” agencies have proposed to educate children at school about the
dangers of human trafficking. Bringing the message about the matter into classrooms,
however, has proven to be more difficult than expected. In particular, talk about sex-
related issues has led to closed doors. For instance, a principal in a local school was open
to the idea of organizing a special awareness event around human trafficking, however,
she made it clear that such presentation had to refrain from using the words “sex” and
“slavery.” To circumvent such moral hurdles, Sandie Morgan from the OCHTTF decided
to wrap the message about human trafficking in chocolate. More specifically, she has
260
spoken to school children throughout Orange County about the background story of plain
and simple chocolate. She educated her audience about the millions of child workers in
Western African countries, who many times are forced to work the coca bean fields
without receiving any compensation and without having the chance of attending school.
The goal is to sensitize young people to the fact of child abuse, child exploitation, and
mistreatment, even as far away as Africa. Morgan also makes children aware of fair trade
chocolate that helps alleviate the problem of forced child labor.
Back in Greater Los Angeles, a young and dedicated school administrator in Watts was
more successful in bringing the news about human trafficking of children to her school.
Single-handedly, she organized a two-day awareness event about the issue, reaching out
to 700 students, who— if nothing else— took the message home that commercial sexual
exploitation of adults, but especially of children exists, also in their neighborhoods, and
that programs are in place to help victims in such situations. This idea brings us to
another important piece of anti-human trafficking work. In more than one case, this
research has revealed that superb leadership on behalf of a single person or a small group
has proven to be of utmost importance in implementing anti-trafficking policies. The
reason is that the complexity and overwhelming nature of the issue tends to deter agents
from taking on an in-depth approach to dealing with human trafficking. Having a
dedicated and knowledgeable person in charge is thus key to maneuvering this politically
charged and chronically underfunded effort. Strong leadership is also important, as a
trafficking investigation usually involves a large number of agencies displaying
261
oftentimes contradicting interests in the case, thus making it even more essential for an
agent to show a firm position.
262
Chapter 8
Reflections on human trafficking
Summary
Human trafficking is one of the most difficult and complicated humanitarian challenges
of our time. Many attempts have been made to capture the essence of the issue. However,
competing stances and frameworks continue to confound activists, researchers, and
politicians alike. The analysis of human trafficking is entangled in a web of political
debates ranging from immigration regulation and national security, to questions of
voluntary participation in prostitution. Of importance is the difference of how human
trafficking is framed in the international sphere and in the United States. While the
United Nations' definition of human trafficking offers a broader, looser framework,
emphasizing the exploitation of a person under use of force, the United States’ approach
to human trafficking is strongly based on historic forms of slavery in the country and
suggests a narrower framework that focuses on severe forms of human trafficking, i.e.,
labor exploitation under significant use of coercion or force. Generally, the understanding
of human trafficking in the United States has changed over the past decade and is now
increasingly addressed in the context of transnational crime-prevention and national
security. Conspicuously, the voices of survivors of human trafficking are largely missing
in the public trafficking discourse. Hence, the argument has been made for a
humanization of human trafficking and a rescaling of the discourse back to the individual
263
and a focus on the preservation of the individual's human rights. Whether human
trafficking is a modern form of slavery, a term widely and interchangeably used to refer
to trafficking in persons, depends on the definition upon which slavery is based. From a
legal standpoint, it is not permissible to refer to human trafficking as a modern form of
slavery, as the institution was abolished in almost every country of the world. However, a
broader understanding of slavery as a reference to any form of unjust exploitation of the
labor of a person under use of force allows for a terming of human trafficking as a
modern or contemporary form of slavery.
Against the backdrop of national and international legal documents defining human
trafficking, this study understands human trafficking as the trade and exploitation of a
person under conditions of coercion and force. This stance derives from the notion that
human trafficking first and foremost is a severe violation of an individual's human rights,
and thus calls for a survivor-based and human rights-based approach to addressing the
problem. This consideration is based on the belief that any other framework applied to
defining human trafficking is discriminatory against a certain victim population that is
consequently denied services, justice, and rehabilitation. In the case of the United States,
for instance, human trafficking, defined as it is, only concerns severe forms of labor
exploitation and thus denies access to legal or social assistance to any victims of less
“severe” forms of human trafficking.
264
Having clarified definitional matters, this dissertation explored the nature and scope of
human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles. It quickly became clear that achieving an
accurate numerical assessment of the scope of the problem is close to impossible. The
reasons are largely a lack of substantial accurate data on human trafficking due to the
hidden and underground nature of the crime. In addition, officials and other agencies in
the field struggle with the fact that victims are hesitant to come forward in fear of
experiencing retaliation from the trafficker or deportation through immigration officers.
Oftentimes, victims also are not aware of laws, rights, customs, and thus tend to accept
their situation as the normal state. The difficulty of making a good assessment of human
trafficking is shown in the fact that even the U.S. government faces challenges in giving a
more accurate picture of human trafficking nationally and internationally, as indicated by
the several revisions of published estimates over the past decade. The forms of human
trafficking occurring in Greater Los Angeles are manifold. This chapter only highlighted
major forms of labor exploitation and by no means provided a holistic overview of each
case of human trafficking that authorities in the region have come across. Each case of
human trafficking is unique, however they share common factors, an understanding of
which is essential to exploring more effective strategies to address the problem. While
domestic service, construction, factory work, agriculture, and forced prostitution are
common areas of labor exploitation, other areas impacted include work in restaurants and
hotels, and the newly emerging phenomenon of servile marriage or children forced to sell
candy. Notably, what qualifies as a human trafficking case depends greatly on what
definition of the issue is applied to a labor exploitation situation. S eldom do authorities
265
come across a clear-cut human trafficking case. More often than not, a potential
trafficking case overlaps with other workers rights and human rights issues, such as
workplace mistreatment, human smuggling, or failed payment. Regularly, non-profit
organizations encounter cases that they identify as potential trafficking incidents based on
a broader definition of what constitutes a forced labor situation. Ultimately, however, the
case is not investigated as a trafficking case by authorities in the United States because it
does not fulfill the requirement of a severe form of human trafficking under force, fraud
or coercion.
The study further provided an outline of the major dynamics underlying the emergence of
Greater L.A. as a prime destination and transit hub for human trafficking in the U.S.
Focusing on Los Angeles as a stronghold of immigrant communities and an economic
powerhouse that generates a high demand for cheap labor, the analysis showed how these
factors create ample opportunities for labor exploitation on a small and larger scale. Even
though experts believe transnational organized crime in the border region plays a
significant role in the trafficking of persons, in the majority of investigated cases the
traffickers operate independent of established criminal structures and networks. In this
regard, small-scale traffickers are criminals of opportunity. They take an opportunity and
implement a business idea, only that in this case they exploit and play with the fates and
lives of vulnerable workers.
266
To address the issue of human trafficking in the region, a small, but vibrant movement
consisting of law enforcement agencies, non-profit organizations, and concerned citizens
has emerged in Greater Los Angeles over the past decade. This dissertation has provided
an overview of the who, the how, and the what in the anti-human trafficking movement in
Greater Los Angeles. In a nutshell, a large number of agents has taken on the issue of
human trafficking and implemented a variety of programs focusing on educating the
public, identifying and serving victims, and prosecuting traffickers. At the center of
activities are several coalitions comprising non-profit and governmental agencies
dedicated to sharing resources and developing programs to address human trafficking in
the region. The coalitions are largely funded by federal dollars through the Department of
Justice and Health and Human Services and are part of a nationwide network of similar
task forces and coalitions. Members in the task forces and coalitions, as well as
independent activists, have emerged from different fields, but are largely grouped around
the rights-based camp and the abolition camp. While the abolitionists adopt a more
moralistic approach, considering any form of prostitution sex trafficking, rights-based
groups base their work on the protection of human rights and distinguish between
voluntary and involuntary prostitution, labeling only the latter a form of forced labor.
Over the past decade, the abolitionist groups have received powerful support from the
federal government, which opted first and foremost to frame human trafficking as a
moral, i.e., prostitution issue. A third stance to addressing human trafficking comes in the
form of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), which views the
forced labor of migrants in the United States as a national security threat, much to the
267
concern and worry of victims and victim advocates.
In general, organizations with a long track record of social justice work and good
standing in the community fare better in the scarcely funded anti-human trafficking world
than organizations that have only recently started out and solely focus on human
trafficking. An exception here is CAST, the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking,
in Los Angeles, which has been an important member in the movement since the early
days and runs one of the very few human trafficking shelters in the nation. Collaboration
among agents is functioning, but not yet thriving. An issue of significant concern is the
lack of trust between law enforcement agencies and victim advocates, who rightly argue
that at the end of the day law enforcement agencies (especially ICE) have to do their job
and enforce laws, a fact that may not at all be in the best interest of the advocate's client,
who may face deportation or other negative legal consequences. Still, over the years a
general awareness that law enforcement and social service providers are mutually
dependent in their mission to address human trafficking successfully has led to an effort
to find common ground on both sides and has yielded promising results. Meeting the
needs of survivors of trafficking is a daunting task, mostly because they may need
assistance in literally every aspect of their personal lives. In theory, some of the expert
agents have an in-depth understanding of what these needs are and how best to meet them
in a culturally sensitive, holistic, and sustainable way. In practice, however, social service
providers only rarely are able to implement the full package and serve their clients
comprehensively. Instead, survivors of trafficking many times are just assisted in their
268
most basic needs of housing, legal services, or acute health issues. No organized anti-
trafficking work whatsoever currently exists in the counties of Riverside, Ventura, and
San Bernardino, in spite of several known cases of human trafficking discovered in these
areas.
Overall, a lot has happened in the anti-human trafficking movement in Greater Los
Angeles in the past ten years. Thousands of law enforcement agents, nurses, and other
first responders have been trained on the issue, and tens of thousands of residents in the
counties have been informed and educated about human trafficking through screenings,
awareness events, and community speakers. Several high-profile cases have been
prosecuted and victims identified and served. Though not nearly enough, agents in the
movement have generated governmental and private funds for anti-trafficking work and
have contributed to passage of key legislation at the federal and state level. However,
when glancing at the numbers of victims rescued and served and the numbers of
traffickers prosecuted, one sees a not so promising picture, and cannot help but concur
that current anti-human trafficking programs in Greater Los Angeles and elsewhere in the
country have not yet produced the anticipated outcome. Most notably, of 50 000 available
T-visas allocated by Congress to survivors of trafficking over the past 10 years, only
about 1500 have actually been granted nation-wide. If it is true that the number of
identified victims is only the tip of the iceberg and tens of thousands more are out there--
a fact experts across the lines agree on-- then the statistics representing the outcome of
current local anti-human trafficking work pose a serious question: Why are not more
269
victims identified?
This study provided a preliminary assessment of this question and suggested that most
likely, a combination of issues has led to the given outcome of anti-trafficking work in
Greater Los Angeles. On the one hand, with seven federal agencies sharing
responsibilities in addressing human trafficking and consequently shaping programs and
action on the ground, probably too many cooks have spoilt the broth, as is shown in a
lack of coordinated and well-thought out strategy of how best to address the issue of
forced labor. On the other hand, the issue of human trafficking is still fairly new and the
movement to tackle it is young. Consequently, it will probably take another decade of
learning and adjusting to achieve more results in fighting one of the most complex and
challenging social justice issues of the 21
st
century. Funding and expertise are in short
supply and most definitely need to be ramped up by the federal government. In addition,
having an immigration law enforcement agency be the primary investigator of a crime
that to a larger extent affects undocumented immigrant communities is a deep
contradiction and certainly a core problem the movement is facing. Lastly, a most
important aspect explaining the outcome of current anti-trafficking work is that the
federal government has underutilized local, community-based organizations as promising
partners in their mission to combat human trafficking more successfully. In fact, I argue
for a more substantial localization of anti-trafficking work, in the form of empowering
and strengthening grassroots agents in their anti-trafficking work, and for the federal
government to take a back seat as one way to better address the challenge of identifying,
270
serving, and empowering victims and prosecuting traffickers.
This dissertation conducted a case study featuring the Thai Community Development
Center, or Thai CDC, a local community-based agency that has an impressive track
record of anti-human trafficking work in Greater Los Angeles. The analysis has shown
that the agency has helped make history with its involvement in the El Monte garment
worker case in 1995. If it were not for Thai CDC's persistence in fighting for the El
Monte workers' rights in the early days after the raid of the compound, the public may
never have learned about the scope and nature of forced labor in the United States and
hundreds of victims would never been rescued. Thai CDC was instrumental in creating an
anti-trafficking movement in Greater Los Angeles, establishing coalitions, prosecuting
traffickers, serving victims, and training law enforcement and other agencies. As shown
in this chapter, Thai CDC’s roots in the local community and its understanding of its
clients' cultural background have helped it become one of the most efficient anti-human
trafficking agencies in the country-- not only measured by the number of T-visas obtained
for its clients. This study thus proposes that the federal government learn from
organizations like Thai CDC and empower immigrant rights and worker's rights
organizations on the ground in order to accomplish more for the dollars spent on anti-
human trafficking programs in the country.
Still, human trafficking is too complex an issue to be effectively tackled from one angle.
Forced labor is a substantial social justice problem and requires short-term programs
271
providing immediate social and legal remedies as well as overall long-term structural
changes. Of course, any proposal for a structural adjustment in addressing human
trafficking once again depends on the lens through which the issue is analyzed. However,
human trafficking is first and foremost a human rights and immigrant rights problem and
thus requires a rights-based and immigration-based solution. One such proposal for a
structural change was introduced by CHIRLA in 2009, which called for an overhaul of
the immigration system in the country as a means of decreasing the vulnerability factor of
migrant workers and bringing to the center of attention employers who hire forced labor.
CHIRLA and others advocate the legalization of migrant work and a shift of immigration
enforcement dollars to labor law enforcement in order to protect vulnerable workers from
being trafficked. This approach would greatly facilitate the work of anti-human
trafficking agents, not only because it empowers the victim, but also because it would
level off the play field and nurture more fruitful and trustful relationships between victim
advocates in the non-governmental world and state authorities.
The Thai CDC and CHIRLA represent several components making up a powerful toolkit
for combatting human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles. Other effective tactics
discussed include the education of young people about the risks and implications of
forced labor in neighborhoods of Greater Los Angeles, but also in regions as far away as
Africa. Creative solutions like promoting the concept of fair trade products has helped
agents to overcome hurdles with local school administrations. In addition, this research
has revealed that superb leadership on behalf of a single person or a small group has
272
proven to be of utmost importance in implementing anti-trafficking policies. The reason
is that the complexity and overwhelming nature of the issue tends to deter agents from
taking on an in-depth approach to dealing with human trafficking. Having a dedicated
and knowledgeable person in charge is thus key to maneuvering this politically charged
and chronically underfunded territory. Strong leadership is also important, as a trafficking
investigation usually involves a large number of agencies displaying oftentimes
contradicting interests in the case and thus makes it even more essential for an agent to
show a firm position.
Looking ahead
When asked to project about the status of the anti-human trafficking sector ten or fifteen
years down the road, most interviewees who participated in this research offered an
optimistic view. The general hope is that by then human trafficking will have taken center
stage in the public mind and that policies and strategies will be established in a way that
enables productive collaboration among the agencies involved. To reach this place,
several agencies suggested that today’s anti-human trafficking movement can learn a
great deal from other social movements in the past, most notably the AIDS/HIV or
domestic violence movements. Both movements literally started from scratch to create a
cultural revolution in public perception of the issues. Thirty years later, AIDS/HIV is a
socially accepted medical issue and persons concerned are not stigmatized. Historically,
domestic violence was considered a private matter, but today it is unacceptable and if
noticed leads to a legal investigation. This status is what the young anti-human trafficking
273
movement is thriving for: having the public consider human trafficking an inhumane and
socially unacceptable phenomenon that calls for massive actions. In order to achieve this
goal, substantial efforts and deliberations still have to be made.
An obvious and important strategy to curtail human trafficking is prevention. Up to now,
prevention has taken a backseat in the anti-human trafficking world in Greater Los
Angeles and the United States in general, which has primarily focused on the protection
of victims and the prosecution of traffickers. However, as long as supply and demand are
the dominating rules in the trafficking world, rescued victims will be easily replaced by
other victims. Protection and prosecution only seldom cut the chain of trafficking.
Preventive measures need to be utilized more. Sandie Morgan (2008) from the OCHTTF
shares the following story of a mental health institution in rural India.
“The director of the institution was asked how he can tell that a patient is
ready to leave the institution. The doctor answered that they take a bucket
and put it under the faucet. They give the patient a teaspoon and ask them
to empty the bucket. If the patients start emptying the bucket without
turning the faucet off, they have to stay in the institution.”
Morgan is suggesting that the world has to turn off the faucets of forced immigration and
other flows in order to address and prevent human trafficking. Again, prevention has to
take different forms for different trafficking scenarios. For instance, up to 200 000 youth
are at high risk of being trafficked for sexual exploitation in the United States annually.
Probably one of the best preventive measures to curtail trafficking of these children is
well-funded and extensive afterschool programs or social and financial assistance to
young families. On the other hand, in the case of the labor exploitation of migrant
274
workers, a more meaningful preventive measure is establishing ways for legal migration
and the enforcement of labor and workers rights.
This dissertation makes an important contribution to scholarly work on human
trafficking, particularly because it is one of the first studies that offers a grassroots and
place-based analysis of human trafficking in one of the country's primary trafficking
destinations. However, the work has its limits. A major shortcoming is a lack of
comparative analysis with other urban centers. Since the underlying assumption is that
every place works on its own terms and conditions, only a comparative study with other
city-regions in the United States will reveal whether the spatial toolkit developed in this
study can be replicated in other urban settings. Another limitation of this study concerns
the primary focus in the case study on a specific immigrant community. Future research
will have to investigate other powerful strategies of anti-human trafficking work in
Greater Los Angeles in order to provide a more comprehensive overview of in-depth
activism and to further expand the anti-human trafficking toolkit. In addition, a closer
look at failed cases of anti-human trafficking work will enhance an understanding of the
challenges involved and offer a basis for strategic reconsiderations. This research has
shown that for instance institutional rivalry between federal and local governmental
agencies hampers a good rapport necessary to increase efficiency of law enforcement
work. At the same time, territorial rivalry between county coalitions exposes missed
opportunities to share resources and expertise. Similarly, substantial resources flow into
the philosophical rivalry between the pro-legalization and anti-prostitution camps.
275
Instead, it is recommended to refocus on shared ideas and collaborate on the common
goal to serve victims of forced sexual exploitation. Finally, this research is based on
uncertain factual grounds, simply because methodologically sound research on the scope
and nature of the problem is scarce. Reliable data and statistics are not only essential for
the production of meaningful academic work, but also, more importantly, are a powerful
tool in generating public and political support and resources to address human trafficking.
Future research into this area is thus recommended.
276
Bibliography
Abend, M. 2009. Interview. January.
Aclaro, T. 2008. Interview. October.
Africans in America. 2010. Historical Documents: Emancipation Proclamation 1863.
Public Broadcasting Service. Available at:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h1549.html.
Agbonkpolor, K. 2008. Interview. November.
Albano, L. 2009. Car wash owners targeted by City Attorney, union groups. Neon
Tommy. Annenberg Digital News. Available at: http://www.neontommy.com/2009/02/car-
wash-owners-targeted-by-ci.
Alimurung, G. 2009. Enslaved in suburbia: Inside the world of trafficked indentured
servants and the visa violators who care for our old. LA Weekly. February 9.
Altered Dimensions. 2010. MS13 gang. Altered Dimensions.com. Available at:
www.altereddimensions.net/crime/MS13Gang.aspx .
Anderson, J. 2007. Little girl sold, and other tales of the sex trade. New York Times. 11
November.
Andreas, P. 2000. Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico divide. Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press.
———. 1998. The paradox of integration: Liberalizing and criminalizing flows across
the U.S.-Mexico border. In C. Wise, ed. The post-NAFTA political economy: Mexico and
the western hemisphere. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State
University Press.
Anti-Slavery International. 2010. What is trafficking in people? Available at:
http://www.antislavery.org/english/slavery_today/trafficking.aspx.
Arreola, D. D. 2004. Hispanic spaces, Latino places: Community and cultural diversity
in contemporary America. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.
Bales, K., and S. Lize. 2007. Investigating human trafficking. FBI Law Enforcement
Bulletin 76 (4): 24-32.
Bales, K. 2007. Ending slavery: How we free today’ s slaves . Berkeley, Calif.: University
of California Press.
277
-------. 2005. Understanding global slavery. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California
Press.
———. 2000. Disposable people: New slavery in the global economy. Berkeley, Los
Angeles and London: University of California Press.
Barnes, W. 2009. Interview. March.
Batstone, D. 2007. Not for sale: The return of the global slave trade - and how we can
fight it. New York: Harper.
BBC News. 1999. First lady: End prostitution trade. BBC News Online Network.
Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/471002.stm.
Beeks, K. and D. Amir. 2006. Trafficking and the global sex industry. Lanham: Lexington
Books.
Berman, J. 2010. Biopolitical management, economic calculation and trafficked women.
International Migration. 48(4).
----- 2006. The left, the right, and the prostitute. The making of U.S. anti-trafficking in
persons policy. Tulane Journal of International and Comparative Law. 14 (2).
BJA. 2010. Anti-human trafficking task force initiative. Bureau of Justice Assistance.
Available at: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/BJA/grant/httf.html.
Bowman, S. and C. Willis. 2003. We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of
news and information. Thinking Paper. The Media Center at the American Press Institute .
Available at: www.hypergene.net/wemedia/download/we_media.pdf.
Bridget, A. 2003. Is trafficking in human beings demand driven? A multi-country pilot
study. Geneva: IOM Migration Research Series.
Brohman, J. 1996. Popular development. Rethinking the theory and practice of
development. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.
Brown, C. 1997. Globalization and human rights. In J. Baylis and S. Smith, eds. The
Globalization of world politics: An introduction to international relations . Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Brysk, A. 2002. Introduction. Transnational threats and opportunities. In Brysk, A. ed.
Globalization and human rights. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press.
278
Buchanan fears Mexico to seize Southwest. 2000. San Diego Union Tribune. A 11.
Buckland, B.S. 2008. More than just victims: The truth about human trafficking. Public
Policy Research. 15(1).
Buckley, M. 2009. Public opinion in Russia on the politics of human trafficking. Europe-
Asia Studies. 61(2).
California Alliance to Combat Trafficking and Slavery. 2007. Human trafficking in
California: Final report. California Attorney's General Office. Available at:
www.homeland.ca.gov/.../Human_Trafficking_in_CA-Final_Report-2007.pdf.
Camacho, A. S. 2005. Gender violence and the denationalization of women's rights in
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The New Centennial Review. 5 (1): 255-92.
Carmalt, J. C. 2007. Rights and place: Using geography in human rights work. Human
Rights Quarterly. 29 (1): 68-85.
Carrasco, M. 2009. Interview. March.
CAST LA. 2010a. Key stats. Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking in Los Angeles .
Available at: http://www.castla.org/key-stats.
------ 2010b. V oices of Change. Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking in Los
Angeles. Available at: http://www.castla.org/key-stats.
Castells, M. 1996. The rise of the network society. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Castles, S. and M.J. Miller. 1998. The age of migration: International population
movements in the modern world. New York: Guilford Press.
Caucus of Survivors. 2010. John. CAST LA. Available at: http://www.castla.org/john.
Chacon, J. M. 2006. Misery and myopia: Understanding the failures of U.S. efforts to
stop human trafficking. Fordham Law Review. 74 (6): 2977.
Chan, K. 2009. Interview. March.
Chavez, L. R. 2001. Covering immigration: Popular images and the politics of the
nation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cho, N. 2009. Interview. April.
279
Chuang, J. 2006a. Beyond a snapshot: Preventing human trafficking in the global
economy. Indiana Journal of Global Legal. 13 (1): 137-163.
----- 2006b. The United States as global sheriff: Using unilateral sanctions to combat
human trafficking. Michigan Journal of International Law. 27 (2): 437.
CIA. 2010. The World Factbook. Trafficking in persons. Central Intelligence Agency.
Available at: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/fields/2196.html.
CIA Factbook. 2010. The World Factbook. GDP (Official exchange rate). Central
Intelligence Agency. Available at: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/fields/2195.html.
City-data.com. 2010. Los Angeles: Economy. City-data.com. Available at:
http://www.city-data.com/us-cities/The-West/Los-Angeles-Economy.html .
Clapham, A. 2007. Human rights: A very short introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
Clark, I. 1999. Globalization and international relations theory . New York: Oxford
University Press.
Climate change and the poor: Adopt or die. 2008. The Economist. September 11.
Coles, J. 2009. Interview. March.
Convention for the suppression of the traffic in persons and of the exploitation of the
prostitution of others. 1949. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human
Rights. Available at: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/trafficpersons.htm.
Cooper, A. 2006. Human trafficking and sex trade on border often involve children.
Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees. February 3. Available at:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0602/03/acd.02.html.
Cooper, M. 2006. Dead in their tracks. , February 22, 2006.
Cornelius, W. A. 2001. Death at the border: Efficacy and unintended consequences of
U.S. immigration control policy. Population and Development Review 27, (4): 661-85.
----- 1998. The role of immigrant labor in the U.S. and Japanese economies. San Diego:
Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies, UCSD.
280
Craig, T.J. and R. King. Asia and global popular culture: The view from He Yong's
Garage Dump. In T.J. Craig and R. King, eds. Global goes local: popular culture in
Asia. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press.
Cretin, S. 2005. Rights on the line: Vigilantes at the border. Brooklyn, New York:
Witness. Available at: http://www.witness.org/index.php?
option=com_rightsalert&Itemid=178&task=story&alert_id=43.
CSP. 2010. Victim/witness assistance program. Community Service Programs Inc.
Available at: http://www.cspinc.org/victimwitness.html.
Cuasim, K. 2009. Interview. May.
Davis, M. 2000. Magical urbanism: Latinos reinvent the US city. London, New York:
Verso.
Daugherty, P. 2009. Interview. April.
Dear, M. 2009. Los Angeles and the American Dream. Lecture. University of Southern
California. April 6.
Dear, M. and A. Burridge. 2005. Cultural integration and hybridization at the U.S.-
mexico borderlands. Cahiers De Geographie Du Quebec. 49 (138): 1-18.
Dear, M., and G. Leclerc. 2003. Introduction: The postborder condition. In M. Dear and
G. Leclerc, eds. Postborder city: Cultural spaces of Bajalta california . New York,
London: Routledge.
Derks, A. 2002. Combating trafficking in South-East Asia . Geneva: International
Organization for Migration.
DeTroy, H'R. 2009. Sudan's female genital mutilation countered by henna-dyed hands.
NYCity News Service. July 28. Available at: www.huffingtonpost.com/nycity-news-
service/sudans-female-genital-mut_b_246333.html.
Deutsch, A. 2009. Interview. April.
Dicken, P. 2000. Globalization. In The dictionary of human geography. Ed. Johnston,
R.J., et.al. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers: 315-316.
----- 1994. Global-local tensions: Firms and states in the global space-economy. In T.J.
Barnes, J. Peck, E. Sheppard and A. Tickell, eds. Reading economic Geography. Malden,
USA: Blackwell Publishing.
281
DoJ. 2010. Trafficking and sex tourism. Child exploitation and obscenity section.
Department of Justice. Available at:
http://www.justice.gov/criminal/ceos/trafficking.html.
Donovan, L.H. 2009. Interview. April.
Dougherty, M. E. 2006. Preying on the margins - combatting human trafficking. America.
194 (3): 18.
Douglas, P. 2003. Sex trafficking in Cambodia. Victoria, Australia: Monash University
Press.
Dunn, T. 2001. Border militarization via drug and immigration enforcement: Human
rights implications. Social Justice. 28 (2): 7-30.
——— 1999. Military collaboration with the border patrol in the U.S.-mexico border
region: Inter-organizational relations and human rights implications. Journal of Political
and Military Sociology. 27: 257-77.
——— 1996. The militarization of the U.S.-mexico border, 1978-1992. Austin: CMAS.
Dwyer, J. 2010. Descent into slavery, and a ladder to another life. New York Times. June
20.
Ellingwood, K. 2009. In Ciudad Juarez, young women are vanishing. Los Angeles Times.
August 9.
Eltis, D. 2007. A brief overview of the trans-atlantic slave trade. Voyages: The trans-
atlantic slave trade database . Available at:
http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/essays-intro-01.faces.
Erie, S. P. 2002. Los Angeles as a developmental city-state. In: M. Dear, ed. From
Chicago to L.A.: Making sense of urban theory. Thousand Oaks, London, New Dehli:
Sage Publications.
——— 2004. Globalizing L.A.: Trade, infrastructure, and regional development.
Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Eschbach, K., J. Hagan, N. Rodriguez, R. Hernandez-Leon and S. Bailey. 1999. Death at
the border. International Migration Review. 33 (2): 430-54.
Esparza, A. X., B. S. Waldorf, and J. Chavez. 2004. Localized effects of globalization:
The case of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Urban Geography. 25 (2): 120-38.
282
Espenshade, T. J., and K. Hempstead. 1996. Contemporary American attitudes toward
U.S. immigration. International Migration Review. 30 (2): 535-70.
Estes, Richard J. and Neil A. Weiner. 2001. The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of
Children in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The University of Pennsylvania School of
Social Work. Available at: http://caster.ssw.upenn.edu/~restes/CSEC.htm.
Estrada, Sgt. 2009. Interview. April.
Farrell, A. 2006. State Human Trafficking Legislation. Marshaling Every Resource: State
Level Responses to Human Trafficking. Princeton University. Available at:
www.princeton.edu/prior/events/conferences/.../pub_2_43.pdf.
Farrell, A. and S. Fahy. 2009. The problem of human trafficking in the U.S.: Public
frames and policy responses. Journal of Criminal Justice. 37: 617-626.
Falcon, S. 2001. Rape as a weapon of war: Advancing human rights for women at the
U.S.-mexico border. Social Justice. 28 (2): 31-50.
Falk, R. 2002. Interpreting the interaction of global markets and human rights. In A.
Brysk, ed. Globalization and human rights. Berkeley Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Feingold, D. 2005. Think again: Human Trafficking. Foreign policy. Available at:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2005/08/30/think_again_human_trafficking.
Fernandez, C. and L. R. Pedroza. 1982. The border patrol and news media coverage of
undocumented Mexican immigration during the 1970's: A quantitative content analysis in
the sociology of knowledge. California Sociologist 5: 1-26.
Finley, B. 2005. Immigrant workers are tricked, then trapped. Denver Post. March 27, A-
01.
Flowers, R. B. 2001. The sex trade industry's worldwide exploitation of children. The
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 575 (1): 147-57.
Fox, C. F. 1996. The fence and the river: Representations of the US-Mexico border in art
and video. Discourse. 18 (1): 54-83.
Free the Slaves and Human Rights Center. 2004. Hidden slaves: Forced labor in the
United States. Report. Human Rights Center UC Berkeley. Available at:
www.law.berkeley.edu/files/hiddenslaves_report.pdf.
283
Freed, W. 1996. Commercial sexual exploitation of women and children in Cambodia: A
psychological perspective. Boston: Physicians for Human Rights.
Friedmann, J. World Cities. In J. Lin and C. Mele, eds. The Urban Sociology Reader.
New York: Routledge.
Friedman, R. I. 1996. Sexual slavery and political corruption are creating an AIDS
catastrophe. April 8.
Gallagher, A. 2002. Trafficking, smuggling and human rights: Tricks and treaties. Forced
Migration Review. V ol 12.
GAO. 2006. Human trafficking: Better data, strategy and reporting needed to enhance
anti-human trafficking efforts abroad. Government Accountability Office. Available at:
www.gao.gov/new.items/d06825.pdf.
George, S. 2001. Another world is possible. Dissent. Winter.
------- 1999. A short history of neoliberalism. Conference on economic sovereignty in a
globalising world. March 24-26. Available at:
http://www.globalpolicy.org/gloabliz/econ/histneol.htm.
Glind, v. d. H. 2005. Girls for sale: Preventing trafficking within China . Guizhou, China:
ILO.
Global Insight. 2008. U.S. Metro economies: GMP – the engines of America's growth.
United States Conference of Mayors and the Council for the New American City. Global
Insight: Lexington, MA.
Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. 2001. Human rights and trafficking in
persons: A handbook. Bangkok, Thailand: Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women.
Glover, S. 2009. 5 found guilty in sex case. Los Angeles Times. February 12.
Google News Archive. 2010. Human Trafficking. Available at:
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22human+trafficking%22&ie=UTF-
8&oe=UTF-8&btnG=Search+Archives.
Gorman A. and T. Watanabe. 2009. Illegal immigrants again in the budget spotlight. Los
Angeles Times. July 10.
Gozdziak, E. and M. MacDonnell. 2007. Closing the gaps: The need to improve
identification and services to child victims of trafficking. Human Organization: Journal
of the Society for Applied Anthropology. 66 (2): 171.
284
Greenpeace. 2008. Poisoning the poor: Electronic waste in Ghana. Greenpeace News.
Available at: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/poisoning-the-poor-electroni .
Guefack, J. 2007. Statistics on biodiversity. Workshop on environmental statistics. Addis
Ababa: Union Mondiale Pour la Nature. 16-20 July.
Hall, S. 2009. Talk. April.
Haraway, D. 1991. Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature . New York:
Routledge.
Harper, D. 2001. Slave. Etymology Online Dictionary. Available at:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=slavery&searchmode=none.
Hawkins, K. 2009. Interview. May.
Held, D. 2000. The global transformations reader: An introduction to the globalization
debate. Malden, Mass: Blackwell.
Held, D. and A. McGrew. 2000. 'The great globalization debate: and introduction'. In D.
Held and A. McGrew, eds. The global transformations Reader: An introduction to the
globalisation debate. Cambridge: Polity.
Heyman, Josiah McC. 1998. State effects on labor exploitation: The INS and
undocumented immigrants at the mexico-united states border. Critique of Anthropology
18, (2): 157-180.
Hicks, W. 2009. Interview. March.
Hiebert, M. 2004. Red light for sex tourists. April 22.
Hirst, P. and G. Thompson. 1996. Globalization in question: The international economy
and the possibilities of governance. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
History of Slavery. 2010. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery.
Hochschild, A. 2010. Kristof's silver linings: Why the New York Times columnist has
hope. Mother Jones. April.
Hubbard, P., R. Kitchin, B. Bartley, D. Fuller. 2005. Thinking geographically: Space,
theory and contemporary human geography. London: Continuum.
Hughes, D. 2000. The 'Natasha' trade: The transnational shadow market of trafficking in
women. Journal of International Affairs. 53 (2): 625-52.
285
Human Rights Center. 2005. Freedom denied: Forced labor in California. Report. Human
Rights Center UC Berkeley. Available at: hrc.berkeley.edu/pdfs/freedomdenied.pdf.
Human Rights Watch. 1994. A modern form of slavery: Trafficking of Burmese women
and girls into brothels in Thailand. Available at:
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1993/thailand/.
Hunnicut, S. 2008. Interview. October.
Huspek, M., R. Martinez, and L. Jimenez. 1998. Violations of human and civil rights on
the U.S.-Mexican border 1995-1997. Social Justice. 25 (2): 110-130.
ICE. 2009. 5 defendants convicted of sex trafficking for forcing Guatemalan girls and
women into prostitution. News releases. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Available at: http://www.ice.gov/pi/nr/0902/090211la.htm.
---- 2010. Human trafficking and human smuggling. U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement. Available at:
http://www.ice.gov/pi/investigations/publicsafety/humantrafficking.htm.
ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability. 2009. U.S. cities and their citizens
working together to address global warming . Available at: www.kyotousa.org.
ILO. 2005. A global alliance against forced labor. International Labor Organization.
Available at: www.ilo.org/public/english/standards/relm/ilc/ilc93/.../rep-i-b.pdf.
ILO. 2007. Unemployment statistics. Laborsta Internet. International Labor
Organization. Available at: http://laborsta.ilo.org/STP/guest .
ILO. 2009. The cost of coercion. International Labor Organization. Available at:
http://www.ilo.org/global/What_we_do/Officialmeetings/ilc/ILCSessions/98thSession/Re
portssubmittedtotheConference/lang—en/docName--WCMS_106230/index.htm.
ILO. 2010. Forced labor. International Labor Organization. Available at:
http://www.ilo.org/global/Themes/Forced_Labour/lang—en/index.htm.
----- 2005. Girls for sale: Preventing trafficking within china. 64.
IMF International Monetary Fund. 2007. World economic outlook: Globalization and
inequality. Available at: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2007/02/.
286
IOM International Office of Migration. 2009. Identifying international migrants.
Available at: http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/about-migration/developing-migration-
policy/migration-stat-data/identify-intl-
migrants/cache/offonce;jsessionid=FCD606A42921F8D5BC942D0EECC68011.worker0
2.
Johnston, R.J. 2000. Slavery. In The dictionary of human geography. Ed. Johnston, R.J.,
et.al. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers: 745.
Jones, L., D. W. Engstrom, T. Hilliard, and M. Diaz. 2007. Globalization and human
trafficking. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare. 34 (2): 107-122.
Kara, S. 2009. Sex trafficking: inside the business of modern slavery. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Katayama, L. 2005. Sex trafficking: Zero tolerance. Mother Jones. Tuesday, May 3.
Available at: http://motherjones.com/politics/2005/05/sex-trafficking-zero-tolerance.
Kearney, M. 1995. The local and the global: The anthropology of globalization and
transnationalism. Annual Review of Anthropology. 24: 547-566.
Kempadoo, K. 2005. From moral panic to global justice: Changing perspectives on
trafficking. In K. Kempadoo, with J. Sanghera and B. Pattanaik. Trafficking and
prostitution reconsidered. New perspectives on migration, sex work, and human rights .
Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Khan, R. 2009. Interview. May.
Kinney, E. C. M. 2006. Appropriations for the abolitionists: Undermining effects of the
U.S. mandatory anti-prostitution pledge in the fight against human trafficking and
HIV/AIDS. Berkeley Women's Law Journal. 21: 158-194.
Korten, D. C. 1995. When corporations rule the world. West Hartford, Conn.: Kumarian
Press.
Koser, K. 2007. International migration: A very short introduction. New York: Oxford
University Press.
———2001. The smuggling of asylum seekers into western Europe : Contradictions,
conundrums, and dilemmas. In D. Kyle and R. Koslowski, eds. Global human smuggling:
Comparative perspectives. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press.
--------2000. Asylum policies, trafficking and vulnerability. International Migration.
Special Issue 2000/1: 91-111.
287
Kreyman, K. 2009. Interview. April.
Kropp, P. S. and M. Dear. 2003. Peopling Alta California. In M. Dear and G. Leclerc,
eds. Postborder city: Cultural spaces of Bajalta California. New York London:
Routledge.
Kulish, Nicholas. 2007. Joining trend, Bulgaria won't allow prostitution. New York Times.
October 6, A6.
Laczko, F. 2005. Data and research on human trafficking: A global survey. Geneva:
International Organization for Migration.
L.A. County Online. 2010. Living wage program. County of Los Angeles. Available at:
http://doingbusiness.lacounty.gov/living_wage.htm.
Lacosa, L. 2008. Interview. November.
LACUC. 2010a. About us. Los Angeles County Unity Coalition. Available at:
http://www.lahumantrafficking.org/index.html.
------ 2010b. Awards and grants process. Los Angeles County Unity Coalition . Available
at: http://www.lahumantrafficking.org/grants.html.
LAMTFHT. 2010. Mission statement. Los Angeles Metro Task Force on Human
Trafficking. Available at: http://lapd.phantomdesign.com/about/.
Landesman, P. 2004. The girls next door. New York Times Magazine. Available at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/the-girls-next-door.html.
Leone, R. 2007. Investigating human trafficking. American Journalism Review 29, (1): 8.
Levitt, P. and D. Lamba-Nieves. 2010. “It's Not Just About the Economy, Stupid” - Social
Remittances Revisited. Migration Policy Institute. Available at:
http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?ID=783.
Lim, K. 2008. Interview. November.
Loo, J. 2006. Fashion's dirty laundry: A brief history of sweatshops. In K. Wong and J.
Monroe, eds. Sweatshop Slaves: Asian Americans in the Garment industry. Los Angeles:
UCLA Center of Labor Research and Education.
Lorey, D. E. 1999. The U.S.-Mexican border in the twentieth century. Wilmington,
Delaware: SR Books.
288
Los Angeles Almanac. 2010. Racial and ethnic demographics by city. Los Angeles
County, 2000 Census. Available at: http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po16a.htm.
Loustaunau, M. O. 1999. Life, death and in-between on the U.S./Mexico border: Asi es la
vida. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing GroupLoustaunau.
Macarro, S. and R. A. Carter. 2002. From conversation to corpus. In A. Sanchez-
Macarro, ed. Windows on the world: Media discourse in English. Valencia: University of
Valencia Press.
Madden, J. 2005. Slavery in the Roman Empire. World History Blog. Available at:
http://www.worldhistoryblog.com/2005/06/slavery-in-roman-empire.html.
Maher, K. H. 2002. Who has a right to rights? Citizenship's exclusions in an age of
migration. In A. Brysk, ed. Globalization and human rights. Berkeley Los Angeles:
University of California Press.
Markon, J. 2007. Human trafficking evokes outrage, little evidence: U.S. estimates
thousands of victims, but efforts to find them fall short. Washington Post. September 23.
Marquis, C. 2008. Interview. October.
Marsh, D. 2008. Interview. October.
Martin, P. L. 1994. The United States: Benign neglect toward immigration. In W.A.
Cornelius, P.A. Martin and J.F. Hollifield, eds. Controlling immigration? A global
perspective. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Martin, P., M. Abella and C. Kuptsch. 2006. Managing labor migration in the twenty-first
century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Martorell, C. 2010. Martorell: human trafficking requires a global response. Pasadena
Star-News. August 6. Available at: www.pasadenastarnews.com/opinions/ci_15697506.
-------- 2009. Interview. March.
Massey, D. 1994. Space, place and gender. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
——— 1991. A global sense of place. Marxism Today. June: 24-29.
Massey, D. S. 2005. Five myths about immigration: Common misconceptions underlying
U.S. border-enforcement policy. Immigration Policy. 4 (6): 1-10.
289
Massey, D. 2006. Social capital and international migration. Talk. University of Southern
California.
Maston, M. 2009. Interview. April.
Mattar, M. Incorporating the five basic elements of a model antitrafficking in persons
legislation in domestic laws: From the United Nations protocol to the European
Convention. Tulane Journal of International and Comparative Law. 14 (2).
Maxey, Ian. 1999. Beyond boundaries? Activism, academia, reflexivity and research.
Area. 31 (3): 199-208.
McDowell, L. 1999. Gender, identity and place: Understanding feminist geographies.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mehan, H. 1997. The discourse of the illegal immigration debate: A case study in the
politics of representation. Discourse and Society. 8 (2): 249-70.
Mesa, M. 2009. Interview. May.
Metclaf, P. 2002. Hulk Hogan in the Rainforest. In T.J. Craig and R. King, eds. Global
goes local: popular culture in Asia. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press.
Metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas and principal cities. 2010. U.S. Census
Bureau. Available at:
http://www.census.gov/population/www/metroareas/lists/2008/List2.txt .
Miers, S. 2003. Slavery in the twentieth century: The evolution of a global problem.
Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira press.
Miko, Francis T. 2007. International human trafficking. In Transnational threats:
Smuggling and trafficking in arms, drugs, and human life., ed. Kimberley L. Thachuk,
36-55. Westport, Connecticut; London: Praeger Security International.
Moorehead, Caroline. 2007. Women and children for sale. The New York Review,
October 11.
Morgan, S. 2008. Interview. October.
Mountz, A. 2002. Feminist politics, immigration, and academic identities. Gender, Place
and Culture. 9 (2): 187-194.
Musto, J. 2009. Interview. April.
290
Myers, D. 2002. Demographic dynamism in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and
Washington, DC. In M. J. Dear, ed. From Chicago to L.A.: Making sense of urban theory.
Thousand Oaks, London, New Dehli: Sage Publications.
Nagan, W. and A. de Medeiros. 2006. Old poison in new bottles: Trafficking and the
extinction of respect. Toulane Journal of International and Comparative Law. 14 (2):
255-268.
Nami, O. and H. Keiko. 2009. Japanese perceptions of trafficking in persons: An analysis
of the demand for sexual services and policies for dealing with trafficking survivors.
Social Science Japan Journal. 12(1).
Nevins, J. 2007. Dying for a cup of coffee? Migrant deaths in the U.S.-Mexico border
region in a neoliberal age. Geopolitics. 12 (2): 228-247.
——— 2003. Thinking out of bounds: A critical analysis of academic and human rights
writings on migrant deaths in the U.S.-Mexico border region. Migraciones
Internacionales. 2 (2): 171-90.
——— 2002. Operation gatekeeper: The rise of the 'illegal alien' and the making of the
U.S.-Mexico boundary. New York: Routledge.
Nightlight International. 2010. About us. Nightlight International. Available at:
http://nightlightinternational.com/about/unitedstates/.
Nieuwenhuys, Celine, and Antoine Pecoud. 2007. Human trafficking, information
campaigns, and strategies of migration control. American Behavioral Scientist 50, (12):
1674-1695.
Norman, C. 2008. Interview. November.
OASIS Global. 2010. The Oasis story. OASIS Global. Available at:
http://www.oasisusa.org/index.php/about-oasis-usa/the_oasis_story/.
OCHTTF. 2010. What is the OCHTTF? Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force .
Available at: http://www.egovlink.com/ochumantrafficking/faq.asp.
-------. 2009. Training manual.
Ohmae, K. 1990. The borderless world: power and strategy in the interlinked economy .
New York: The Free Press.
Ollada, Y. 2008. Interview. November.
291
Oloruntoba, B. 2009. Mauritania, the slave vote. A bombastic element. Blog. July 17.
Available at: http://bombasticelements.blogspot.com/2009/07/mauritania-slave-vote.html.
O'Neill, P. 1997. Bringing the qualitative state back into the economic geography. In T.J.
Barnes, J. Peck, E. Sheppard and A. Tickell, eds. Reading economic Geography. Malden,
USA: Blackwell Publishing.
Ono, D. 2010. Counterfeit goods fund violent gang activity. Streetgangs.com. Available
at: http://www.streetgangs.com/news/061110_counterfeit_goods_fund.
Oxman-Martinez, J., J. Hanley, and F. Gomez. 2005. Canadian policy on human
trafficking: A four-year analysis. International Migration. 43 (4): 7-29.
Palermo Protocol. 2008. Protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons,
especially women and children, supplementing the United Nations convention against
transnational organized crime. Status 26/09/2008. United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime. Available at: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/treaties/CTOC/countrylist-
traffickingprotocol.html
——— 2000. Protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially
women and children, supplementing the United Nations convention against transnational
organized crime. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Available at:
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/treaties/CTOC/index.html.
Persichette, C. 2010. NYPD busts alleged drug seller at retail stores. MyFox. Available at:
http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/news/local_news/brooklyn/nypd-busts-alleged-drug-
sellers-at-retail-stores-20100406.
Pitney, N. 2009. Iran uprising blogging. Huffington Post. Available at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/09/iran-uprising-blogging-th_n_228454.html.
Polaris Project. 2010. Human trafficking statistics. Available at: www.polarisproject.org.
Polaris Project. 2010. Survivor Testimonies. Available at:
http://actioncenter.polarisproject.org/the-frontlines/survivor-testimonies?start=20.
Pogge, T. 2007. Reframing economic security and justice. In A. Held and D. McGrew,
eds. Globalization theory: Approaches and controversies. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Port of Long Beach. 2010. Facts at a glance. Port of Long Beach. The Green Port.
Available at: http://www.polb.com/about/facts.asp.
292
Price, M. and L. Benton-Short. 2007. Counting immigrants in cities across the globe.
Migration Policy Institute. Available at:
http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?ID=567.
Project Exodus. 2010. So you want to end slavery? Project Exodus. Available at:
http://sites.google.com/site/projectxodus/.
Proposal for a comprehensive plan to combat illegal immigration and trafficking of
human beings in the European union. 2002. Official Journal of the European
Communities Information and notices. 45 Part 142: 23-36.
Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Air and Sea, supplementing the
United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. 2000. United
Nations Office of Drugs and Crime. Available at:
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/treaties/CTOC/index.html#Fulltext.
Public Law Center. 2010. Our mission and work. Public Law Center. Available at:
http://publiclawcenter.org/general.php?
category=About+Us&headline=Our+Mission+and+Work.
Pulido, L. 2008. FAQs: Frequently (un)asked questions about being a scholar activist. In
C.R. Hale, ed. Engaging contradictions. Berkeley, California: University of California
Press.
Quinones, S. 2003. The dead women of Juarez. In L. H. Crosthwaite, J. W. Byrd and B.
Byrd, eds. Puro border. dispatches, snapshots & graffiti from la frontera. El Paso, Texas:
Cincos Puntos Press.
Richard, A. 1999. International trafficking in women to the United States: A
contemporary manifestation of slavery and organized crime . Center for the Study of
Intelligence.
Richards, K. 2004. The trafficking of migrant workers: What are the links between labour
trafficking and corruption? International Migration. 42 (5): 147-68.
Robinson-Jacobs, K. 2001. From virtual slavery to being boss. Los Angeles Times.
October 25. C-1.
Roby, J.L. and J. Tanner. 2009. Supply and demand: Prostitution and sexual trafficking in
Northern Thailand. Geography Compass. 3(1).
Rodriguez, T. 2007. The daugthers of Juarez: A true story of serial murder south of the
border. New York: Atria Books.
293
Rosen, G. 2009. Interview. May.
Roseneau, J. N. 2002. The drama of human rights in a turbulent, globalized world. In A.
Brysk, ed. Globalization and human rights. Berkeley Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Ruggie, J.G. 1998. Constructing the world polity: Essays on international
institutionalization. New York: Routledge.
Russo, T. 2010. Reflecting on national slavery and human trafficking prevention month.
The Justice Blog. Department of Justice. Available at:
http://blogs.usdoj.gov/blog/archives/576.
Sabagh, G., and M. Bozorgmehr. 1996. Population change: Immigration and ethnic
transformation. In R. Waldinger and M. Bozorgmehr, eds. Ethnic Los Angeles. New
York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Saez, E. 2009. Striking it richer: The evolution of top incomes in the United States.
Huffington Post. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/14/income-
inequality-is-at-a_n_259516.html.
Salt, J. 2000. Trafficking and human smuggling: A European perspective. International
Migration. 38 (3): 31-56.
———1997. Migration as a business. The case of trafficking. International Migration.
35 (4): 467-495.
Sandoval, L. 2009. Interview. March.
Sassen, S. 2006. Cities in a World Economy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
Sax, R. 2009. Human trafficking: a problem of language? Huffington Post. August 21.
Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-sax/human-trafficking-a-
probl_b_264789.html.
Schauer, E. and E. Wheaton. 2006. Sex trafficking into the United States: A literature
review. Criminal Justice Review. 31 (2): 146-169.
Seiko, K. 2008. Interview. November.
Selby, D. 1987. Human rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sen, B. 2006. Legalizing human trafficking: WTO negotiations threaten to worsen the lot
of migrant workers worldwide. Dollars & Sense 265, : 22-26.
294
Sharma, N. 2005. Anti-trafficking rhetoric and the making of a global apartheid. NWSA
Journal 17, (3): 88-111.
Shi, E. 2009. Interview. April.
Shigekane, R. 2007. Rehabilitation and community integration of trafficking survivors in
the United States. Human Rights Quarterly. 29 (1): 112-136.
Shogren, E. and R. Marosi. 2005. Efforts to reinforce border creates divide. Los Angeles
Times. January 30.
Singer, A. and S. Hardwick, C. Brettell. 2008. Twenty-first century gateways: Immigrants
in suburban America. Migration Policy Institute. Available at:
http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?ID=680.
Skeldon, R. 2000. Trafficking: A perspective from Asia. International Migration. Special
Issue. 2000/2001. 38 (3): 7-30.
Skinner, B. 2008a. Human Trafficking. Talk. Zocalo Public Square. Museum of
Contemporary Art. Los Angeles. September 16.
-------. 2008b. A crime so monstrous. A shocking expose of modern-day sex slavery,
human trafficking and urban child markets. Edinburgh, UK: Mainstream Publishing
Company.
Slavery Convention 1926. 2010. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Human Rights. Available at: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/slavery.htm.
Socio, d. M. and C. Allen. 2002. Irredentism in MexAmerica. Military Review.
September, October: 68-80.
Soderlund, G. 2005. Running from the rescuers: New U.S. crusades against sex
trafficking and the rhetoric of abolition. NWSA Journal. 17 (3): 65-87.
Song, C. 2009. Interview. April.
Spener, D. and K. Staudt. 1998. The U.S.-mexico border: Transcending divisions,
contesting identities. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Srikantiah, J. 2007. Perfect victims and real survivors: The iconic victim in domestic
human trafficking law. Boston University School of Law. 87 (1): 157.
State and county quick facts. 2010. U.S. Census Bureau. Available at:
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/0644000.html .
295
Steger, M. B. 2009. Globalization: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Still, J. 2008. Interview. November.
Stoecker, S., L. Shelley, and L. Shelley. 2005. Human traffic and transnational crime:
Eurasian and american perspectives. Lanham: Rowman & LittlefieldStoecker, S.
Stolz, B. A. 2007. Interpreting the U.S. human trafficking debate through the lens of
symbolic politics. Law & Policy. 3: 311-338.
Straughan, J., and P. Hondagneu-Sotelo. 2002. From immigrants in the city, to immigrant
city. In M. Dear, ed. From Chicago to L.A.: Making sense of urban theory. Thousand
Oaks, California: Sage Publications.
Suarez, M. 2009. Talk. April.
Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions
and Practices Similar to Slavery. 1956. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner
for Human Rights. Available at: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/slavetrade.htm.
Swyngedouw, E. 1997. Neither global nor local: 'Globalization' and the politics of scale.
In K.R. Cox, ed. Spaces of globalization: Reasserting the power of the local . New York:
Guilford.
Taibbi, M. 2009. The bailout: How Goldman Sachs runs Washington. Rolling Stone. July
9-23. 1082/1083.
Takahashi, G. 2008. Interview. November.
Terrazas, A. and J. Batalova. 2009. U.S. in focus: Frequently requested statistics on
immigrants and immigration in the United States. Migration Policy Institute. Available at:
http://www.migrationinformation.org/USFocus/display.cfm?ID=747#6.
Thachuk, Kimberley L. 2007. Transnational threats: Smuggling and trafficking in arms,
drugs, and human life. Westport, Connecticut; London: Praeger Security International.
Thai CDC. 2010. About us. Thai Community Development Center. Available at:
http://thaicdchome.org/cms/about-us/.
Thi, H. 2009. Interview. March.
Thomas, A. 2009. Interview. March.
296
Thompson, K. 2009. Senate backs apology for slavery. Washington Post. June 19.
Available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2009/06/18/AR2009061803877.html.
Torg, C. S. 2006. Human trafficking enforcement in the United States. Tulane Journal of
International and Comparative Law. 14 (2): 503-520.
TIP Report. 2009. US Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in
Persons. Available at: http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2009/.
——— 2008. US Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in
Persons. Available at: http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2008/.
——— 2007. US Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in
Persons. Available at: http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2007/.
——— 2006. US Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in
Persons. Available at: http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2006/.
——— 2005. US Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in
Persons. Available at: http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2005/.
——— 2004. US Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in
Persons. Available at: http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2004/.
——— 2003. US Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in
Persons. Available at: http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2003/.
——— 2002. US Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in
Persons. Available at: http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2002/.
——— 2001. US Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in
Persons. Available at: http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2001/.
Troubnikoff, A. M. 2003. Trafficking in women and children: Current issues and
developments. Hauppauge: Nova Science Publishers.
Tsui, W. 2008. Interview. November.
TVPA. 2000. Trafficking Victims Protection Act. U.S. Department of State. Available at:
http://www.state.gov/g/tip/laws/index.htm .
Ugarte, M. 2009. Interview. May.
297
UN Office on Drugs and Crime. 2006. Trafficking in persons: Global patterns. United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Available at:
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/publications.html .
USCCB. 2009. Newsletter. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. October.
USEU. 2005. U.S. Cooperates with Europe to combat sex trafficking. Bureau of
International Information Programs. The United States Mission to the European Union .
Available at: http://useu.usmission.gov/Article.asp?ID=9B7A69F1-A6B3-48C8-9736-
E9A52392B477.
Van den Anker, C. 2004. The political economy of new slavery. Basingstoke and New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Varsanyi, M. W., and J. Nevins. 2007. Introduction: Borderline contradictions:
Neoliberalism, unauthorised migration, and intensifying immigration policing.
Geopolitics. 12 (2): 223-227.
Vergara, V. B. M. 2007. Looking beneath the surface: Illinois' response to human
trafficking and modern-day slavery. University of Toledo Law Review. 38 (3): 991-1010.
Waldinger, R. and M. Bozorgmehr. 1996. Ethnic Los Angeles. New York: Russell Sage
Foundation.
Warner, B. 2008. Barack Obama and slavery. American Thinker. September 26. Available
at: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barack_obama_and_slavery.html.
Watanabe, T. 2006. Trafficking case ends for 48 Thai welders. Los Angeles Times.
December 8.
Wechsler, J. and O. H. Huerta. 2005. Let's leave a trickle for birds without borders. Los
Angeles Times. June 19.
Weissmann, D. M. 2005. The political economy of violence: Toward an understanding of
the gender-based murders of Ciudad Juarez. North Carolina Journal of International Law
and Commercial Regulation. 30 (4): 795-867.
Wheaton, E.M., E.J. Schauer and T.V . Galli. 2010. Economics of human trafficking.
48(4).
Whitmarsh, G. 2004. Modern day slave story a common tale in Los Angeles. Santa
Monica Daily Press. September 3.
298
Williams, P. 1999. Illegal immigration and commercial sex: The new slave trade.
London: Frank CassWilliams, P.
World Development Report. 1999/2000. World Bank. Available at:
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/EXTWDR
S/EXTWDR19992000/0,,menuPK:740931~pagePK:64167702~piPK:64167676~theSiteP
K:740880,00.html#.
Wright, M. W. 2004. From protests to politics: Sex workers, women's worth, and Ciudad
Juarez modernity. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 94 (2): 369-86.
Yang, L. 2008. Interview. November.
Yeung, B. 2004. Trafficked: How three attorney's rescued a former sex slave from
deportation. California Lawyer. December. 30-35, 60.
Yoshioka, S. 2009. Interview. April.
Zinn, H. 2003. A people's history of the United States. 1492 – present . New York: Haper
Perennial.
299
Appendix A
Questions submitted to USC's IRB
_______________________________________________________________________
My dissertation will examine the emergence of the anti-human trafficking movement in
Southern California in recent years. To do this I must first explore the different
understandings of human trafficking in the public and governmental sphere. Conducting a
media content analysis of major print media and online news sources, I will outline the
dominant themes defining the crime of human trafficking in the public discourse.
Having established a common definition of human trafficking, I will conduct my
fieldwork in Los Angeles and Orange County. I will use interviews, participant
observation and content analysis to identify strategies, policies and legislation developed
to address human trafficking in the region. A key aspect of my research will be to
examine the dynamics between local and federal agencies involved in the fight against
human trafficking. Preliminary analysis suggests that grassroots agents are the driving
force in the implementation of anti-human trafficking policies due to their presence on
the grounds, access to communities, and their means to form unbureaucratic partnerships.
I will be interviewing members of key governmental and non-governmental agencies
involved in the movement. These include social service providers, lawyers, policy
makers, public outreach coordinators, immigration officers, and local and federal law
enforcement agents.
I will not ask questions about the persons themselves, only about their organization's
history and operations: origins of anti-human trafficking work, services offered,
partnerships formed, legal and political obstacles faced, funding resources, and shelter
capacity.
Participant observation will be at public meetings such as conferences, task force
meetings and awareness and fundraising events only. No private data will be collected on
audience members.
300
The study will:
1) define human trafficking through the lens of migration, borderlands and human
rights literatures
2) define human trafficking through content analyses of online and print news media
3) identify the dimensions of human trafficking in Southern California through
analyses of media reports, statistics, governmental reports, and legal documents
4) explore strategies developed to address human trafficking through interviews,
participant observation
Interview questions:
1. Is your agency a member of the local human trafficking task force? If yes, to what
extent is your organization's work linked to the task force? How does this
cooperation inform your organization's work?
2. Has your agency formed partnerships with other governmental and non-
governmental organizations? If yes, what is the nature of these partnerships?
3. What structural and operational hurdles does your organization face in terms of
your anti-human trafficking work?
4. Does your organization - and if yes, to what extent - cooperate with local
governments?
5. How and to what extent does your organization collaborate with federal and state
institutions involved in anti-trafficking efforts?
6. What are the funding structures and resources of your organization? Independent
or governmental?
7. How does your organization frame and understand human trafficking?
8. Does the current legislation provide an efficient tool for law enforcement to
address and combat human trafficking?
9. What kind of social and legal services does your team provide to survivors of
human trafficking?
10. What are your most successful programs and campaigns? And why?
11. What is the ethnic composition of your agency's client population?
301
12. How many victims has your organization served?
13. How many traffickers have been indicted because of your organization's efforts?
14. How and to what extent does your organization inform state and federal
trafficking policies?
15. How has the movement changed since its beginnings in the late 1990s?
302
Appendix B
List of organizations and agencies approached
ACRC, African Community Resource Center, Los Angeles
Animal Rights Issues, Los Angeles
BSCC, Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition, San Diego
Captive Daughters, Los Angeles
CAST, Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, Los Angeles
CHIRLA, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles
Commission on the Status of Women, City of Los Angeles
Community Service Programs, inc., Orange County
CSI, Christians for Social Issues, Los Angeles
Department of Labor - Wage & Hour, Los Angeles
ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Los Angeles and Orange County
i-Sanctuary, Orange County
Jewish Progressive Alliance, Los Angeles
Jordan High School, Los Angeles
LACUC, Los Angeles County Unity Coalition
LAFLA, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles
Los Angeles Metro Task Force on Human Trafficking
Los Angeles Police Department
Lydia Today Foundation, Orange County
303
National Council of Jewish Women, Los Angeles
Night Light, USA
OASIS, USA
OCHTTF, Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force, Orange County
Polaris Project, Los Angeles
Program for Torture Victims, Los Angeles
Project Exodus, Los Angeles
Public Law Center, Santa Ana
Salvation Army, Long Beach
Sex Workers Outreach Project, Los Angeles
Sisters of Notre Dame, Los Angeles
Sheriff's Department, Los Angeles County
Soroptimist International, Orange County
Sweatshop Watch, Los Angeles
Thai Community and Development Center, Los Angeles
United States Attorney's Office, Los Angeles
Westminster Police Department, Orange County
Zonta Newport Harbor, Orange County
304
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
This research provides a spatial analysis of the local anti-human trafficking movement that has emerged in Greater Los Angeles since the discovery of the El Monte case in 1995. Over the past 15 years, the U.S. government has allocated substantial funds and resources to fighting human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles and elsewhere in the country. Non-governmental and governmental institutions have launched a series of awareness campaigns, established coalitions of agencies, developed and implemented rescue strategies and social service programs, and educated tens of thousands of law enforcement members and local communities on the issue of human trafficking. So far, these federally led anti-human trafficking efforts have struggled to yield their expected outcome in terms of the number of victims identified and traffickers prosecuted. Deploying a variety of ethnographic and qualitative methods, this study investigates how and in what form a localization of international and national anti-human trafficking responses through local agents has emerged as an essential but often neglected factor in effectively combating human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles. The study identifies key agents operating in the anti-human trafficking sector and analyzes the forms in which local agents create space for meaningfully and effectively translating national anti-trafficking policies into specific local contexts. Results show that community-based organizations embracing the dynamics of place and adopting a strong victim-centered approach have produced better outcomes in terms of identifying victims, organizing adequate and necessary assistance, and seeking justice for survivors of human trafficking.
Linked assets
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
Conceptually similar
PDF
Globalization in curricular elements and instructional practices in California schools: A case study
PDF
Fighting old‐time slavery in modern‐day L.A.
PDF
A multilevel communication approach to understanding human trafficking prevention behaviors in Indonesia
PDF
Human trafficking prevention education and public school leadership: an exploratory study
PDF
An analysis of garment manufacturing in the Los Angeles area
PDF
Mining the intangible past of Virginia City's Chinese pioneers: Using historical geographic information system (HGIS) to document, visualize and interpret the spatial history of Chinese in Montan...
PDF
Marketing women: representations of working women in early modern London
PDF
The significance of The Last Frontier casino in American history
PDF
Examining the effectiveness of the Why Try Program for children receiving residentially based services and attending a non-public school
PDF
The significance of zones and boundaries in the urban community with special reference to the Los Angeles Area
PDF
The Korean community in Los Angeles County
PDF
Reconstructing the climate variation of eastern Peru over the last millennium
PDF
The role of CD1d transmembrane and cytoplasmic tail domain in CD1d trafficking pathway
PDF
Eyez: Spatial perception in videogames
PDF
Image(a)nation: dance and the parapolitics of being in the Republic of Macedonia
PDF
Experimental analysis of the instructional materials in behavioral college instruction using a marketing management course
PDF
From structure to agency: Essays on the spatial analysis of residential segregation
PDF
Adjustment of large downtown and boulevard churches in Los Angeles to socio-cultural factors in the community
PDF
Chinese government’s role in crisis management: case studies of three major crises in recent years
PDF
Fall related injuries among older adults in the Los Angeles region
Asset Metadata
Creator
Holzer, Jacqueline W.
(author)
Core Title
A spatial analysis of human trafficking in Greater Los Angeles
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Geography
Publication Date
11/19/2010
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
global vs. local,human rights,human trafficking,migration,OAI-PMH Harvest,social movement
Place Name
California
(states),
Los Angeles
(counties),
Orange
(counties)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Dear, Michael J. (
committee chair
), McKenzie, Roderick C. (
committee member
), Sanasarian, Eliz (
committee member
)
Creator Email
holzer.jacqueline@gmail.com,jholzer@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3539
Unique identifier
UC1208854
Identifier
etd-Holzer-4100 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-424318 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3539 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-Holzer-4100.pdf
Dmrecord
424318
Document Type
Dissertation
Rights
Holzer, Jacqueline W.
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Repository Name
Libraries, University of Southern California
Repository Location
Los Angeles, California
Repository Email
cisadmin@lib.usc.edu
Tags
global vs. local
human trafficking
migration
social movement