West Side Story

Why are so many human beings still being bought and sold? And why is ‘the land of opportunity’ not immune? Indeed, the problem is rife in the sunshine state of California. Andrew Pederson investigates

Kevin Bales, professor of contemporary slavery at the University of Hull and lead author of the 2013 Global Slavery Index, estimates that 30m people live as slaves around the world, many of whom are coerced or tricked into servitude and then trafficked domestically or internationally for others’ profit. Globally, the marketplace for trafficked persons has an estimated annual value of $32bn, as profitable as the international drug trade and second only to the illicit arms trade.

The International Labour Organization marks the USA as one of the world’s top destinations for trafficked persons, and the California District Attorney finds that the Golden State is in the “top 4 destination states for trafficking human beings.” In California, the San Francisco Bay Area was recently recognized by the FBI as one of the nation’s top 13 locations for child sex trafficking, and Not For Sale, a San Francisco based international advocacy and services organization for trafficking victims, contends that 43% of California’s trafficking occurs in the Bay Area.

While California Attorney General Kamala Harris has emphasized efforts to link local and regional law enforcement agencies to battle human trafficking since 2007, little dependable information exists to describe the exact scope, scale and nature of the issue. In fact, a key finding of the Attorney General’s 2012 report on trafficking was that “California needs a central clearinghouse to coordinate and compile human trafficking information from local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies and governments, as well as non-governmental organizations.”

According to the report, the state has used federal grants to establish 9 regional task forces, up from 6 in 2007, and from 2010 to 2012, these task forces started 2552 investigations, found 1277 trafficked individuals and arrested 1798 suspects. Because there is no full context for these figures, however, it is difficult to determine how much concrete progress is being made. The report concedes that human trafficking remains “hidden and under-reported” and that arrest, conviction and victim statistics are often “unreliable.”

Closer to the problem, the Alameda County District Attorney’s office has a more concrete sense of the issue. According to Deputy District Attorney Casey Bates, head of the Human Exploitation Trafficking (HEAT) prosecution unit, HEAT has, since 2007, concluded 322 out of 388 cases with an 82% conviction rate, representing 46% of all prosecutions for human trafficking in California. While Bates notes that his office’s caseload has increased over time, he questions whether there has actually seen a rise in trafficking or whether the problem is simply becoming more visible as reporting and prosecution improve.

It is known that trafficking remains very lucrative. Meredith Dank’s research at the Urban Institute observed that the annual value of the underground commercial sex industry varied from $39.9m to $290 million across eight American cities, and Elizabeth M. Wheaton, Edward J. Schauer and Thomas V. Galli’s 2010 study, “Economics of Human Trafficking”, suggested that each trafficked individual could bring in as much as $13,000 annually to their captors.

According to Killian Moote, Not For Sale’s vice president of Social Enterprise: “Poverty, lack of opportunity and lack of income cut across the entire issue of trafficking. 95% of victims were unemployed at the time they were trafficked, and 75% to 80% lived in dire poverty.” As poverty pressures individuals to accept riskier informal employment, traffickers have more leverage to recruit them to meet demands for cheap labour across several different industries.

Research supporting the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act, passed in 2010 to require companies with over $100m in worldwide revenue to publicly disclose their efforts to eradicate slavery in their supply chains, found that most of California’s trafficked persons (84%) were concentrated in prostitution (45%), domestic servitude (24%) and sweat shops (15%).
Reflecting the industries where trafficking is concentrated, the Attorney General’s report found that most (74%) trafficked people in California are women. Notably, the report also showed that most of these victims (70%) are American citizens.
In Alameda County, Bates listed a revealing number of risk factors for trafficked sex workers: 99% of victims are female, 82% have a history as a runaway, 75% have experienced child abuse or neglect, 63% have been on juvenile probation, 60% have a history of prior victimization (especially rape), 51% have substance abuse issues, 39% were in foster care and 30% have significant mental health problems.

“This isn’t solely a prosecution or law enforcement issue,” says Bates. “We need to attack trafficking from many different angles, especially through more stringent criminal penalties for the purchasers who drive demand for underground sex workers as well as additional social services for at-risk populations and more efficient, better coordinated after-care for victims.”

NPR recently cited an FBI estimate that 100,000 to 300,000 children are sold for sex in the US each year, which means that in California alone, thousands of children could be living in forced prostitution.

Cutting off demand
Policy measures requiring corporate supply chain transparency do not directly address the multi-million dollar commercial sex industry where the highest portion of human trafficking occurs, and they are unlikely to have a profound impact on labour exploitation in agriculture or manufacturing.

Considering the strong link between poverty and trafficking, however, the private sector could contribute significantly by providing community funds for job training or other social services as well as employment for victims of human trafficking, many of whom are local residents in dire need of better economic opportunities. Since information on the scope and nature of human trafficking is limited, increased corporate and governmental transparency will also be vital to define and carefully monitor progress towards eradicating these heinous crimes.

Underground domestic sex work by exploited girls and women appears to account for a disproportionate amount of human trafficking, both nationally and in California. Addressing America’s persistent demand for commercial sex through radically modified policy frameworks is a logical, though still controversial, option.

For example, Samuel Lee at NYU’s Stern School of Business and Petra Persson at Columbia University’s Research Institute of Industrial Economics recently described a compelling framework to decriminalise and license commercial sex workers while imposing much harsher criminal penalties for both the operators who solicit unlicensed sex workers and the customers who frequent them.

This “hybrid” model addresses some frequent critiques of criminalizing sex workers, especially those who are victimized by traffickers.

As Casey Bates put it:“the most important thing we can do is to change the way we view the victims of these crimes. We’re not looking at a child prostitute, we’re looking at a victim of human trafficking. We can then see them for who they really are: children who need our help.”