Family Research Council

State of Sex Trafficking In the States

by Family Research Council

March 22, 2011

In an address to the U.N. General Assembly President Bush said:

Each year, an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 human beings are bought, sold or forced across the world’s borders. Among them are hundreds of thousands of teenage girls, and others as young as five, who fall victim to the sex trade. This commerce in human life generates billions of dollars each year — much of which is used to finance organized crime. Theres a special evil in the abuse and exploitation of the most innocent and vulnerable. The victims of sex trade see little of life before they see the very worst of life, an underground of brutality and lonely fear. Those who create these victims and profit from their suffering must be severely punished. Those who patronize this industry debase themselves and deepen the misery of others. And governments that tolerate this trade are tolerating a form of slavery.

This tragic form of slavery is not just a problem over there, in third world countries far removed from us. On the contrary, it is happening right in our own backyard. Despite laws criminalizing it, sex trafficking is a huge problem in America.

In The National Report on Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking: Americas Prostituted Children, Shared Hope International affirms that at least 100,000 American children a year are victims of sex trafficking, and that number may be much higher. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) highlights the fact that sex trafficking of children is largely under-reported in their estimate that 1 in 5 girls are sexually abused or assaulted before they become adults and 1 in 10 boys, however less than 35% of those cases are reported. Researchers estimate that 1015 percent of children living on the streets in the United States are trafficked for sexual purposes according to the National Institute of Justice in their report Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children: What Do We Know and What Do We Do About It?.

And that question, What do we do about it? must be considered, both on an individual level and a state/federal government level. Legislatively speaking, both the federal government and many state governments have passed laws criminalizing human trafficking, and providing for its punishment (see figure 1 below). However, we are finding that this is not enough. Shared Hope International states:

Victims of domestic minor sex trafficking are frequently processed as juvenile delinquents or adult prostitutes. Prostituted juveniles are trained by their trafficker/pimp to lie to authorities and are provided with excellent fraudulent identification resulting in their registration in the arrest records as an adult… Due to the unique trauma bonding that occurs between a victim and her trafficker, these children often run from juvenile facilities right back to the person that exploited them.

The National Institute of Justice says it is estimated that 96 to 98 percent of victims are in need of basic amenities for survival: food, housing, transportation, etc. In response to this many states have introduced legislative initiatives to promote awareness and support to those brutalized by sex trafficking. The figures below will give you an idea of the state of sex trafficking laws in the states.

For a detailed explanation of each state law check out the Fact Sheet on State Anti-Trafficking Laws from US PACT [Policy Advocacy to Combat Trafficking] a program of the Center for Women Policy Studies.

For assistance or to report a sex trafficking case contact the National Human Trafficking Resource Center national hotline at: 1-888-3737-888 or go to the Polaris Project website.

To view a detailed US Department of State summary on human trafficking in the US and other countries click here.

New Video: Stop Sex Trafficking Where It Starts

by Carrie Russell

March 22, 2011

How can we stop sex trafficking where it starts? Pat Trueman, CEO of Morality in Media and Founder of PornHarms.com, joins Tony Perkins, President of FRC, to talk about what leads to Sex Trafficking, and how we can take steps to confront the problem at its origin.

You can view the entire webcast by clicking here.

Sex Trafficking in America: from The Boulevard to Planned Parenthood

by FRC Media Office

March 15, 2011

A special live video webcast hosted by Family Research Council brought together leading experts to shed light on a growing problem that affects every corner of our nation — from neighborhoods, playgrounds, and malls to the local Planned Parenthood clinic. During the webcast, learn what actions you can take to help restore these victims, and stop those who prey on them.

Webcast participants:

• Tony Perkins, President, Family Research Council
• J. Robert (Bob) Flores, former Administrator of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJD)
• Lila Rose, President, Live Action
• Pat Trueman, CEO, Morality in Media and Founder, PornHarms.com
• Samantha Vardeman, Senior Director, Shared Hope International
• Tina Frundt, Founder and Executive Director, Courtney’s House
• Lisa Thompson, Liaison for the Abolition of Sexual Trafficking at The Salvation Army

Planned Parenthood Prayer Vigil

by Carrie Russell

February 17, 2011

On Valentines Day 2011 pro life advocates united across the country to pray for victims of sex trafficking. The vigil was organized as a response to the recent release of videos connecting two very dark industries: abortion and sex trafficking.

From Washington DC to Orange County, CA, people took time from work to ask God to bring hope and healing and light into the lives of the victims of this most heinous crime.

Abortion and sex-trafficking are sinister and they rob people of their inherent dignity. But God is about truth, life, light, beauty, freedom and recognizing the dignity of the human person. He is all powerful and He hears our prayers, especially where groups are united. Lets join together to continue to pray that God will bring light and healing into even these darkest of situations.

A Twisted Philanthropy

by Rob Schwarzwalder

June 15, 2010

Joan Hinton was not a household name, but her work on the Manhattan project was historic. After earning her Ph.D. in physics in only two years, she was hand-picked to become a researcher on one of America’s most stunning technological achievements - the development and production of an atomic bomb.

Then she had an attack of conscience. In her obituary in today’s New York Times, she is quoted as telling National Public Radio, I did not want to spend my life figuring out how to kill people … I wanted to figure out how to let people have a better life, not a worse life.

So, she became a philanthropist who devoted her life to finding the cure to diseases. Well, not quite: Dr. Hinton moved to China and became a devoted Maoist Communist. I’m not making this up.

According to the Times, “For the past 40 years, she worked on a dairy farm and an agricultural station outside Beijing, tending a herd of about 200 cows.”

Did she regret her choice? Not in the least. The Times goes on to quote an interview she gave in 2008 to The Weekend Australian: “It would have been terrific if Mao had lived … Of course I was 100 percent behind everything that happened in the Cultural Revolution it was a terrific experience.”

Just how “terrific?” Minimally one million people died during the Cultural Revolution due to persecution by the infamous Red Guards. Religious persecution was intense, and the families of “running dogs” (Chinese whose devotion to Communism was deemed insufficient) were brutalized; there are even reports of the cannibalism of young children by some Red Guards.

In total, roughly 30 million Chinese (possibly as many as 70 million) died under Mao’s reign from enforced starvation or outright murder.

Through it all, American born Dr. Hinton remained a devotee of Chairman Mao. In an interview with NBC News in 2004, journalist Catherine Rampell wrote that “Hinton gushes fervent praise for the Cultural Revolution, Maos mass mobilization of Chinese youth to criticize party officials, intellectuals and bourgeois values, from 1966 to 1976.” Dr. Hinton even used archaic and ludicrous Maoist language to denounce the “renegades” and “capitalist roaders” - code terms for freedom-lovers who would not fully bend the knee to Beijing’s dictators.

Dr. Hinton now faces the Judge of all the earth, not the beatific images of Mao Zedong with which she festooned her apartment. How sad. How very sad.

FRC Statement on H. Res. 1064

by JP Duffy

June 4, 2010

Inaccurate internet reports have been circulating indicating that the Family Research Council lobbied “against” a congressional resolution condemning a bill proposed in Uganda. The Uganda bill would have provided for the death penalty for something called “aggravated homosexuality.” Unfortunately, those spreading these false rumors deliberately failed to obtain the facts first.

FRC did not lobby against or oppose passage of the congressional resolution. FRC’s efforts, at the request of Congressional offices, were limited to seeking changes in the language of proposed drafts of the resolution, in order to make it more factually accurate regarding the content of the Uganda bill, and to remove sweeping and inaccurate assertions that homosexual conduct is internationally recognized as a fundamental human right.

FRC does not support the Uganda bill, and does not support the death penalty for homosexuality—nor any other penalty which would have the effect of inhibiting compassionate pastoral, psychological, and medical care and treatment for those who experience same-sex attractions or who engage in homosexual conduct.

Trafficking and Prostitution of Children in the United States

by Family Research Council

May 19, 2010

Television anchor Dan Rather had an interesting piece in the Huffington Post yesterday drawing much needed attention to the growing problem of child trafficking and prostitution in the United States. He writes that throughout his 60 years of reporting, few stories have been more shocking:

How many children are being peddled on the streets of Portland and in other cities and towns, to say nothing of the Internet?…The most conservative estimates are that at least 10,000 American children are being victimized. Many experts say they believe it’s closer to 30,000 or more.

Rather talks with law enforcement to learn how it could be possible that so many young people are exploited in such an atrocious way.

… many of the children caught up in this are middle class kids from the area…The girls, sometimes as young as 12, often 13-16, are lured by a “front man” in his mid-to-late teens. He becomes her “boyfriend,” taking her to dinner, buying her nice things, sometimes meeting her parents. The girl eventually moves in with him. Then he says they need money to continue being together. First, she’s enticed to sleep with his friends to pay the rent. Soon she’s turning tricks for what police say is an endless supply of older men willing to pay top money for sex with very young girls. Other times convincing the young adolescent girls to sell themselves happens very quickly.

The Anti-Trafficking of Human Persons division at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services describe the various ways that children in the U.S. are exploited:

In the United States, children are subjected to human trafficking in many different sectors. Examples include prostitution on the streets or in a private residence, club, hotel, spa, or massage parlor; online commercial sexual exploitation; exotic dancing/stripping; agricultural, factory, or meatpacking work; construction; domestic labor in a home; restaurant/bar work; illegal drug trade; door-to-door sales, street peddling, or begging; or hair, nail, and beauty salons. Family members, acquaintances, pimps, employers, smugglers, and strangers traffic children. They often prey upon the childrens vulnerabilities their hopes for an education, a job, or a better life in another country and may use psychological intimidation or violence to control the children and gain financial benefits from their exploitation. Trafficked children may show signs of shame or disorientation; be hungry and malnourished; experience traumatic bonding (Stockholm syndrome) and fear government officials, such as police and immigration officers.

This same US government division provides numerous resources for people who might be victim to these crimes. One such resource is a 24-hour hotline that helps victims of trafficking by connecting them with local organizations that can provide help. The number is 1.888.3737.888. See the HHS website for more information on how to assist someone who could be a victim of trafficking or to learn more about this problem.

I am grateful to Dan Rather bringing this dark issue into the media light. Unfortunately, as pointed out by one commenter, the ad for Rathers story on the network’s website was ironically placed below another ad one with young girls in bikinis — for “Girls Gone Wild.” If nothing else, we can all agree that there is a deep need to continue to fight against the oversexualization of young girls and the many atrocious crimes that can accompany such objectification.

Incubators for Terrorists?

by Robert Morrison

November 18, 2009

I took a friend with me to visit a prisoner in a federal correctional institute last week. My friend is a former Ohio State prof, a published author, and a member of my Mens Bible Study. Weve been praying for several years for P, who is serving eight years for attempted murder.

The three-hour drive was a pleasant one, despite the lousy weather. The prof and I got to swap stories, talk about our families, how we met our wives, all kinds of interestingat least to usstuff.

When we arrived at last at the prison, we were confronted by a mocking prison guard. He very quickly told the prof he could not enter the prison. His paperworkdutifully filled outhad not yet been processed. Even though P had written me saying hed very much like to have the prof visit, that did not matter.

The guard looked me over suspiciously. He took an inordinate period of time to study my ID card. He quickly banned my cell phone and car keys. OK, I can understand why theyre not allowed. The prof would take them back to my car and wait there for me while I went in to see P.

Not so fast. I first had to take off my shoes, put my wallet and fountain pen in the basket to go through the metal detector. OK. Thats no different from getting on a commercial airliner these days. Stand here, the guard barked. NO, not there, here, he ordered pointing to a line on the floor.

Then, I had to have my hand stamped with an ultra-violet stamp. I coughed, but covered my mouth with the back of my hand. Thats not the way you do it, the guard lectured me, demonstrating coughing into his sleeve. His manner was patronizing. How could I be so dense?

If you give them any back talk, they can bar you from visiting. I finally got through this gantlet of humiliation and arrived in the prisons visiting room. The process had taken twenty minutes.

P greeted me joyfully. He eyes were moist. I realized that it was worth it to go through that degrading experience just to see the little happiness my visit could bring.

Although we write letters weekly, this was the first time Id seen P in a year. My May attempt to visit him had been barred by the guards. Even though Id submitted my paperwork weeks before, they hadnt gotten around to processing it.

The first thing I noticed was that P had lost three front teeth in that period. It was difficult initially to understand him. P fears he will lose all his teeth before he gets out. He is guilty. He acknowledges his guilt. But should his prison sentence mean no proper dental care? What if he were a detainee in Guantanamo Bay? Then, surely, hed get dental care.

We had a good two hours in that visiting room. P told me that many of his fellow prisoners were jihadists. They have been seething in their hatreds for years. P does not deny his own guilt, but he told me a disturbing story of one fellow prisoner.

This prisoner would normally have gotten 8-10 years for dealing drugs. But, because he refused to testify against some of the bigger drug kingpins in his inner city neighborhood, he was slammed with a 20-year sentence. This convicted drug dealer knew that to rat out the others would have meant a death sentence for him, and maybe as well for members of his family. Colombian drug dealers in Brooklyn made a practice of neck tying the family members of rival dealers. Thats where they slit the throats of wives or children and pull their tongues out.

As I prepared to go, P and I embraced. He was nearly in tears. So was I. I stood on the yellow line at the exit door and waited. And waited. Some 25 minutes passed until I was allowed to leave. A guard snapped her fingers and told me to stand on the second yellow line between the two prison buildings. She walked on ahead and told me to advance toward a third yellow line.

I have no idea why we have to toe the mark on any yellow lines except perhaps to make us feel that we, too, are prisoners. When we entered the last building, I was ordered to put my stamped hand under the ultra-violet scanner. Three bright letter Ms showed up on my hand. But no response came from the guards reading my hand. I stood. Not like that, like this, my escort instructed me, rotating her hand flat against the window, as if going in and out of prisons was something everyone should know how to do.

Back at the entry point, the original smart aleck guard ordered me back to the mark. You havent signed out yet. He pointed to the log book. I struggled to find my own name. There were thirty sign-ins after mine.

Noticing my college ring as I signed out, he sneered: Where did you get that? I told him it was from my school, and unable to resist firing back, I asked him if he had gone there, too. No, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

Back at the car, my friend the prof said he had tried to meet me at the appointed hour. When he asked the guard if Mr. Morrison had come out yet, the wise guy had made a joke of looking up at the ceiling, under the desk, in the corners. Nope, I dont see any Morrisons around here, he cracked. The prof told him he didnt appreciate the mockery.

Maybe thats why I was jerked around leaving the visiting room. Or maybe it was just freshman hazing.

I havent punched anybody since 1966, but I sure felt like it that day. Its not hard to see how our federal prisons can become incubators for terrorists. Jihadist clerics gain easy entry. They are chaplains who are allowed to meet regularly with enraged men behind bars. If I felt like committing violence in just a three-hour period, imagine what it must be like to go through that degradation day in and day out?

What is being corrected at these correctional institutions? And why would you want to bring detainees from Gitmo into this system? It seems like madness. Sen. Leahy thinks we have the finest judicial system in the world. Maybe Pat Leahy should try visiting one of our prisons before making such pronouncements.

D.C. Woman Leaves Baby to Die in Plastic Bag, Gets 13 years

by Cathy Ruse

October 15, 2009

How can anyone ignore the irony in this awful story reported in the Washington Post yesterday?

A young woman walks out into a field with a pink towel, scissors, and a plastic bag, gives birth to a daughter, cuts the umbilical cord and leaves the baby to die.

Of course she could have had an abortionist legally kill the child.

The Supreme Court case of Doe v. Bolton mandates that an abortion be legal even after viability if an abortion doctor cites emotional or familial reasons for the abortion. During a post-arrest interview the woman said she had been raped, and the prosecutor said the woman got rid of the baby because she was afraid the man she was living with, whom she considered her husband, would break up with her for having another mans child. Plenty of legal grounds for a late-term abortion.

Assistant State’s Attorney Renee Battle-Brooks argued that whether she was impregnated because she was raped was irrelevant. That doesn’t make [the baby’s] life any less valuable,” Battle-Brooks said. “That baby struggled for breath in that plastic bag. She was alone, she was cold and she was hungry.”

Last month a 33-year old Rhode Island woman was sentenced to 25 years for killing her newborn daughter.

The baby was found in a plastic garbage bag under a laundry appliance in the womans parents home. Judge Robert Krause of Providence County said, Not to impose a substantial jail sentence … would simply devalue the life of a child. Krause added: No civilized society is prepared to do that and neither am I.

My point in raising these cases is not to argue for criminal penalties for women who have abortions no one in the pro-life movement seeks that but to show the irony in our law, and the striking quotes from those in the legal system as they recognize and defend the humanity of the youngest of babies. They sound so much like pro-lifers. One day, God willing, everyone will speak this way about children, even before birth.

Eleven Days that Shook the World

by Robert Morrison

October 12, 2009

President Obama was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for 2009. His nomination had to have been entered by February 1st of this year. At that point, as many incredulous pundits have noted, he had been President for just eleven days. Fast work.

Many commentators have ridiculed the choice. Gobsmacked, wrote the Washington Posts serious liberal foreign policy columnist, Jim Hoagland. He employed a British slang term for slack-jawed in utter amazement. Liberal writer Ruth Marcus likened the award to Pee-Wee Soccer, where every child gets a trophy just for playing. The New York Times house conservative, David Brooks, jeered that Obama should have won all of this years prizes, including those for economics and literature. Even for chemistry. After all, Obamas personal chemistry may be his greatest contribution to the world.

Newsweeks Howard Fineman called Obama President of the Earth and said he would accept in Oslo in December. Even long-time Obama promoters were hard-pressed to see the award as anything but miraculous—an effort, perhaps, by the Nobel Prize selection committee—Norwegian Leftists all—to create their own version of the Burning Bush. Saturday Night Live had fun. Their Obama lookalike noted that he had only nine months of experience not being George Bush.

The idea behind all the jokes seems to be that the award was premature. Most Obama supporters think hes headed in the right direction. Their Left-wing predecessors used to describe communists as liberals in a hurry. Behind the guffaws and the gasps—the press claque in Oslo audibly gasped when the name was announced—is the shared view that Obamas new emphasis on the UN, on multi-lateralism, on disarmament, on an open hand instead of a clenched fist, on bowing before Saudi despots and on accepting mash notes from Latin American dictators, that Obama is taking the world where it truly wants to go. That road, that well-trod path, is being paved with their good intentions.

But eleven days is enough to shake the world. Ten days was once enough. In 1919, an American book appeared. Ten Days that Shook the World was the breathless chronicle of the Bolshevik Revolution written by John Reed. Young Jack Reed was a Leftist journalist, a 1910 graduate of Harvard, and a passionate supporter of the communists in Petrograd. Reed was on scene in Russias capital for some of the most important events of that bloody century. When John Reed died, Lenin ordered that his body be buried inside the Kremlin, the only American so honored.

Reed did not live to see what became of his Ten Days that Shook the World. The Bolshevik Revolution resulted in the greatest tyranny the world has ever known. The Heritage Foundation is currently showing a series of fifty paintings by Nikolai Getman. Getman was a Ukrainian prisoner who served eight years in the Gulag. Gulag is not a word that President Barack Obama has ever used in public. It is a Russian acronym for state administration for camps.

These camps, however, were not just summer camps. They were summer-fall-winter-spring camps. Some of them, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained in his majesterial Gulag Archipelago, were like islands within Lenins and Stalins Soviet Union, islands as big as France. Others were as small as a telephone booth. All of them had one thing in common: In the Gulag, a person was swallowed up whole. Tens of millions of people disappeared into the Gulag during the life of the Soviet Union.

Barack Obama is not the only one who has never mentioned the Gulag. The UN has never mentioned it. Nor has Hollywood.

The Heritage Foundations exhibit is stunning. Visitors can see the luminous painting of the artists brother, Alexander Getman, being led down the last mile by two NKVD officers. Young Alexander was shot on 1 December 1934. In his brothers depiction, young Alexanders eyes stare at the viewer, accusingly. He is barefooted, his white prison clothes glow as if Alexander is headed for his own Transfiguration. He is.

Some paintings depict diamond miners and gold miners. They are zeks, slaving away in sub-zero cold. Uranium mining, one of the captions tells us, is a death sentence. Those zeks will be killed by radiation. Zek is short for zaklucheniye—the locked up ones.

Waiting to be shot is another jarring painting. The zeks huddled in the prison yard are emaciated but show no panic. It is dark. We see only the back of the NKVD officer with the gun. The only spot of color in the painting is the incongruous sky-blue cap the killer wears.

It is not all horror. A young Chukchi prisoner must just have been sentenced. He is cheerful, smoking a cigarette, and warming himself by a camp fire. Chukchis are Asian tribesmen. This smiling lad has gotten ten years for saying Yankee is good. They may be the only Russian words this Siberian native knows. Were still waiting for Barack Obama to say Yankee is good.

The Nobel Committee has occasionally recognized men and women who stood up against Soviet tyranny. They gave Solzhenitsyn the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature—and may have thereby saved the dissident writers life. They awarded the Peace Prize to Andrei Sakharov, the Russian human rights advocate and to Lech Walesa, the leader of Polands first free labor union, Solidarity.

Too often, however, the Nobel Committee has dishonored itself by giving Peace Prizes to politically correct figures. Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam got it for a peace agreement that was being massively violated before the ink was dry. Tens of thousands of boat people were forced to leave Vietnam, willing to face death on the high seas rather than live under Le Duc Thos brutal communist masters. They would doubtless have filed a minority report on that Nobel vote.

The Nobel Committee also gave a Peace Prize to Yassir Arafat. Arafats citation fails to mention that he invented airline hijacking for terrorism, or that he personally ordered the murder of U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel. Ambassador Noel was not finished off with a quick shot to the head, either. Arafats henchman shot him in the legs, the groin, the gut, the chest, all the way up his body. There is some justice in the world. though. When Hamas terrorists overran Arafats home in Gaza, several years after his death, they stole his Nobel Peace Prize. They probably melted down the gold medal for guns.

Against all this terror and tyranny, murder and oppression, the UN has had little to say. The Nobel Prize Committee, at a loss, gave a Peace Prize to the UN and to Kofi Annan, who did nothing to stop genocide in Rwanda, who presided over the biggest money scandal in history, the infamous oil for food ripoff. At least they were not George Bush.

Barack Obamas first eleven days in January were not uneventful. He ordered U.S. taxpayers to subsidize International Planned Parenthood Federation, the worlds largest trafficker in abortion. Obama also ordered U.S. taxpayers to back the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). This outfit helps Chinas rulers to enforce their one-child policy. Throughout the world each year, fifty million abortions take place, with Planned Parenthood beating the drums. And in China since the 1970s, fifty million abortions have been done forcibly.

When you read what the UN has done, what the Soviet Union did, what the Nobel Prize Committee has honored, Barack Obamas Nobel Peace Prize does not seem so out of place. His eleven days were not so unproductive. It remains to be seen who will chronicle the rest of his rule.

Id like to take President Obama on a tour of the Gulag Collection at the Heritage Foundation.

Its just down the street from the White House and it might be the best thing he could do for peace.