 Dr. Robert Sanborn has been a leader, advocate and activist for children for most of his career. With a doctorate in education from Columbia University, he has used his energies to improve education and education policy in a variety of settings. For the past five years, he has also been the president of Children at Risk, an organization that has been around for nearly 20 years. Its focus has been on changing the quality of life for children in Texas (TX). That involves everything from ensuring quality public schools to making sure that TX provides health care and safety for all its children. In the last few years, Children at Risk has been working in the area of human trafficking, which affects many children in the United States. Texas is often the gateway for those children and Houston, specifically, has become a hub for international human trafficking. Children at Risk has worked on passing a great deal of legislation and its lawyers have written a lot of legislation. Dr. Sanborn was in Austin a few days ago when the Governor signed an omnibus human trafficking bill, a big accomplishment for them and others in the field.
Through your work, what have you learned about the human trafficking problem at the
US-Mexico Border? Who are the victims-age range, sex?
In terms of a Mexican border, what’s interesting is that human trafficking has become very lucrative. We hear from sources like the FBI and the United Nations that it’s either the 2nd or 3rd most lucrative crime, drugs being number 1. Some people say that the international arms trade is 2nd, but others will say human trafficking is 2nd. So, it’s either 2nd or 3rd in terms of being the most lucrative.
One of the reasons we did this press conference in Brownsville is because people often confuse the whole idea of trafficking with immigration and even smuggling. Smuggling is when people pay money and then the ‘coyotes’ take them across the border. Once they’re across the border, they’re there to have a better life. From the immigrants’ viewpoint, that’s what they’re trying to do. Trafficking is being lured across the border under false pretenses. So in most of these cases, at least when we’re talking about children, they weren’t even thinking of crossing the border. It’s a matter of, “hey, let me bring your daughter across the border. I can get her a really good job [cleaning houses or babysitting] and she’ll send money back home.” Once they get across, they realize that they were lured not into a really good job, but often into a life of sexual slavery, into a life where they no longer have any control.
What’s also interesting is that a lot of people think these are young Mexican girls but really, the majority is from other countries. Mexico is 3 or 4—it’s Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. We were down there and we saw girls from Africa who’d been trafficked across the border and girls from Asia. So, it’s a much bigger problem. When it becomes lucrative, and trafficking is increasingly lucrative, it’s no longer a matter of, and this is another thing we hear, “well if you just close the borders, this would be another problem we could stop.” Well, when something is lucrative, it’s not a matter of closing the borders. Do we think the drug trade would stop if we closed our borders? It wouldn’t, and neither will trafficking. Traffickers are making so much money that they will figure out a way to bring young girls into our country, and part of it is demand.
Can you tell us why you would have Africans and Asian come across the Mexican border?
Traffickers pick the easiest route. A lot of trafficking happens, for instance, when young girls come in on student visas into major airports. We find that sometimes, with Asian trafficking victims, they come in on boats and they just sort of beach on the (California) coast, but then we also find that people find it’s easy to fly to Mexico and then drive up to the border. Texas has the biggest of all the borders. There are many parts where there is no fence, so a lot of crossing goes on. There’re about 18,000 victims that come into our country every year. That is a very small number compared to people who come to work in the United States, but still. That porous border allows this to happen. But my point is that even if we did put up a fence, even if we did have censors, it’s so lucrative that they’d find another way around. That just happens to be the easiest way right now.
Who are “they?” Who are the traffickers?
We asked the same question of the border patrol and some of the key people down in the Valley. The same answer seems to come up: organized crime is moving into this area. They find that as opposed to drugs—where you sell your drugs and then you need to have more drugs—if you sell trafficking victims for sexual purposes, you sell sexual acts. And they’re still there to sell again and again and again. In that sense, it’s horrible, but very lucrative for the traffickers. So you see more and more organized crime groups, gangs and so forth, getting involved. But still, there are a lot of what the border patrol calls the ‘Mom and Pop’ operations. They’re very small—people who just bring a couple girls in. They bring them into the market and they sell them.
The typical way an organized crime group would do this is that someone would go down to a town in Latin America and they would go to the mayor. They’d introduce themselves to the mayor as a businessman from the United States and they’d say, “here’s 500 bucks. Please introduce me around town as your good friend from the United States who’s here to supply jobs for some of your daughters.” Then he does some interviews, meets some of the parents. The parents say, “Oh, this is a buddy of the mayor. He must be an ok guy.” They take a couple of the prettiest girls—between 12, 13 and14 years old. Then they bring them up across the border. Once they get across the border, the girls increasingly realize what’s happening. Usually, it’s once they get to a place like Houston or Dallas, but Houston is really the hub, they’re brought to a house. There are these homes in Houston where they’re beaten, drugged, raped into submission, until they are really broken. Then they are sent to clandestine bordellos all over the United States. We heard from different groups that there’s even sometimes a trade going on where a pimp in Washington, DC will trade for a Latina girl for a black girl—all sorts of really sordid type stuff that goes on.
Do the parents of these girls have any idea what’s going on?
I think they have no idea. I really don’t. These are parents and parents the world over are not that different when it comes to their kids, apart from some horrible stories. For the most part they trust this person. They know people go to the United States to make a living. These are often people with not a lot of education, and they know their daughter who’s 12 or 13, she can work, she can probably clean houses. She can probably babysit. They understand that the Gringos up there, they’re completely helpless. They need help. So let’s send her and we’ll make some money. It seems very easy from their perspective. They see how it works.
What happens to the victims when they are found? What are the penalties for the clients?
Historically, a lot of these girls don’t want to return home. Some do, but many of them feel a lot of shame. They feel like they can’t go home. They think their parents will disown them. So there is a Visa, it’s called a T1 Visa. They can get that and it would enable them to stay in the United States. When Joe Biden was Senator, he sponsored a federal piece of legislation—Trafficking Victims Protection Act. It allows this to happen and it offers some money for the victim, as well. A few places around the country have been designated as places that will help these girls with counseling, give them a place to live, sort of give them some orientation to get back to a semblance of normal life. It’s really just a little bit of money, a little bit of time, and at least a place for them to start their lives again. If they’re minors they can be entered into the foster care system. The number of those cases, I have to tell you, is quite small. It’s not like they’re finding and restoring to normal life a lot of those girls.
Now the traffickers or the johns, that’s one of the things that we’ve really geared a lot of our effort toward. Three years ago, in the last legislative session, we were able to begin to change the law. It used to be that to prosecute a trafficker, we had to catch them in transportation of someone who was about to be sexually exploited. Now, for children, we just have to find someone in custody and suspect that it’s for sexual purposes in order to prosecute. So it’s a big difference. The key words used in trafficking are “force,” “fraud,” or “coercion.” If anyone is forced, defrauded or coerced into doing something they don’t want to do, they can be considered trafficked victims. For children, you don’t even have to prove that. You just have to prove that they’ve been taken out of their routine for what you suspect would be illicit purposes.
Do you think the numbers of young people being trafficked is increasing?
Absolutely. We think the numbers are going up. We examine a lot of data at Children at Risk. One of the things we did was to pass a piece of legislation in the last session, in which every bar in the state of TX that did not serve food—so basically any bar that could possibly be there for illegitimate purposes—had to post a sign in English, Spanish and Vietnamese, with an 888-3737-888 number as a trafficking hotline. There’s a large Vietnamese population in TX. So, immediately after they were posted, the hotline number, based in DC, at the Polaris Project , started receiving calls. 30% of all the phone calls they received in the first month were from TX. 90% of those were from Houston. So that was good data for us. We just went to Dallas and we were able to post 48 billboards with the same number on it. I saw the guy from Polaris yesterday and he said the numbers from Dallas have just exploded, as well. So any time we get that number out, we start getting all these phone calls. Polaris then screens them and sends them to local law enforcement, to the local task force in each of the cities. It’s a sort of a multi-jurisdictional task force and they work together.
What do you think the responsible factors are?
Two things come to mind. We had a press conference in Dallas and a woman started talking about how girls dress and the how the media is creating a message. I get a little squeamish when I hear that, but there is a little bit of truth in it. In the United States, everything has become more sexualized. I think that has led to people sort of discounting the idea of prostitution a little bit more, it’s the idea that maybe this is a victimless crime.
The second thing, which is more powerful tool, is that when you have the Internet and places like Craig’s List—you know Craig’s List has become a major mover of human trafficking. When sex is so readily available, and when you have our country becoming increasingly sexualized, people start thinking everything should be handy. We’re an impatient society, you know. If I need sex, where do I go for sex? If I go to Craig’s List and it looks like these are just people who want to make a little extra money, maybe that’s ok. But the fact of the matter is that we know a lot of traffickers, a lot of pimps, are actually using Craig’s List and other similar types of avenues to push human trafficking. So that’s why, when we look the world over and we looked at what are the countries that are leading in the demand for trafficking victims, the United States is number 1—we have the most demand. Part of that is that we have wealth, but another part of that is that we’ve become a sexualized society, in many ways. I never put much credence in the culture stuff, so it’s hard for me to talk about that, but there are little grains of truth in some of that.
You mentioned the passing of a new omnibus bill. Can you spell out a few of the key issues that are covered and how they help law enforcement and children’s advocacy groups like yours?
Historically, law enforcement would see a victim, if you’re border patrol and you find a 14-year-old girl, you just figure she’s coming over here to work and say, lets deport her. If you’re police, you find a 14-year-old girl, you assume she must be a teenage prostitute and an illegal alien, and say, let’s deport her or if you’re a domestic victim who’s a teenage prostitute or runaway, you’d say, let’s send her back, let’s put her in jail because she’s probably a bad kid. So, one of the provisions of the bill is to start training law enforcement to understand that there’s no such thing as a 14-year-old girl wants to be a prostitute or a sexual slave, whether she’s American or Latina or from outside the country. There’s no such thing as a 14-year-old girl, of her own free will, saying I want to be a prostitute.
We begin through this law to train law enforcement to understand the avenues they need to take as they encounter these young girls or young victims of all types. That’s a very important thing. So over the course of the year or years, as law enforcement get their continuing legal education or education for whatever branch of law enforcement they’re going to join, human trafficking has to be a part of that. That’s a huge victory for us and law enforcement worked with us and supported it. Another thing this law mandates is that the Attorney General’s Office of the State of Texas do a statewide taskforce, a coordinated taskforce of law enforcement and all other groups working in the area of human trafficking, so that everyone can begin to work together to stop it. Those are really important parts of the bill.
We’ve also changed, as part of the bill, some of the state’s statutes to match federal statutes so that the US Attorney’s office as well as the District Attorneys can work together on some of these trafficking issues.
The last thing I’ll mention is that we’ve changed the law so that a trafficking victim can now sue her trafficker or her pimp. I think that will open up some new doors to stopping the crime. Those are probably some of the major elements with regard to the bill.
What do you see as your role?
We do policy and law. We have lawyers that work with us. Now if a big case came up that would be impact litigation, or change the law in some way, we would take on a case like that, but we don’t do individual cases. We don’t do direct service. We’re just involved in changing the policy. We deal directly with all the areas of each individual organization that does do direct service. They look to us to help carry the legislative, advocacy and some of the awareness efforts. That’s sort of our role.
Any last thoughts?
Well, boys can be a whole other conversation, by the way. Nothing is being done for boys. So even in domestic trafficking, they are treated in a completely different way than girls are. It’s very a sad thing. Their numbers are smaller. But even in the whole conversation, we marginalize boys. Federal enforcement, they do anything with boys. There’s no recovery in terms of boys. But that’s another discussion.
In the end, awareness is an important thing and when I speak to groups of all types here, it’s always a big surprise to people that human trafficking is happening. It’s one of the big jaw dropping things that this is happening. So, awareness is very important. It’s happening in all of our cities. Domestic trafficking is another thing we haven’t gotten to, in terms of girls that run away and then are pimped out. I think we’re just beginning this fight. It’s very early. It is a form of modern day slavery. There’s a long way for us to go. We’ve just entered into the fight. Hopefully, what we do find is that it has not become a partisan issue. We have both Republicans and Democrats working with us on it. So, that’s a good thing.
Additional Resources:
Lives For Sale
To Purchase the DVD Click here
Past Close Up Articles
Odilia Romero, Binational Women’s Issues Coordinator FIOB (Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales)
Walt Staton, olunteer, No More Deaths, Tucson, Arizona
Raman Vaid, Former President of the Federation of Indian Students of Australia (FISA)
Ray Ybarra, Activist and Lawyer, PUEBLO, Center for Legal and Human Rights
Astrid Bant, Anthropologist, Advisor to the Latin America Division, Oxfam Novib, The Netherlands
Jessica Devi Chandrashekar, Media Coordinator
Canadian Humanitarian Appeal for Relief of Tamils (Canadian Hart)
Harmit Atwal, Editor, Institute of Race Relations
Avy Skolnik, Network Coordinator, National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs
Senem Doganoglu, Attorney for Pembe Hayat (Pink Life)
Leonardo Crippa, Staff Attorney, Indian Law Resource Center
Jim Harrington, Director, Texas Civil Rights Project
Prof. Brian Levin, Director, Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism
Juliana Rotich, Program Director, Ushahidi.com
Christina Iturralde, LatinoJustice PRLDEF
Anene Ejikeme Assistant Professor, Trinity University
Alexander Verkhovsky, Director, SOVA Center for Information and Analysis (Moscow)
Innokenty Grekov, Human Rights First
Paul St. Clair, Executive Director, Roma Community Centre
Rev. Allan Ramirez, Latino Advocate
Dr. Agapito López, M.D.
Bill Habern, defense attorney
Anya Cordell, activist
Rais Bhuiyan, survivor
Allison Moore, Volunteer
|
|
