Numbers on the Rise

"Globalization’s Underside" Sex Trafficking in Brooklyn
by Claire Hoffman
August/September 2003


The pitch was like a dream come true. For $3,000 each, the three desperate young Indonesian women would receive falsified visas, airline tickets from Jakarta and restaurant jobs when they got to New York. A man named "Johnny" would meet them at the airport and arrange their housing.

But once the women got off the plane, it didn’t take long to see that Johnny had other ideas. He and his friends hustled them off to brothels, first in Connecticut and then in Brooklyn, while threatening to shoot them if they refused to be prostitutes. Over four lurid days, the women were repeatedly forced to have sex with men who paid their captors $140 for each 45 minutes. Johnny also told each woman that she owed him $30,000, and he started making arrangements to "sell" them to other brothels in New York and Boston.

As this case suggests, the sordid business of human trafficking, which includes enslavement in agricultural work, sweatshops, domestic labor and prostitution, is rapidly expanding. And with its growing immigrant population, experts say, parts of New York City, including Brooklyn and Queens, have become hotspots in a trade that the International Labor Organization has described as the "underside of globalization."

The State Department recently estimated that close to 700,000 people are moved through the global networks of human trade each year, and some officials believe that as many as 50,000 of those people are brought to the United States. And while authorities are trying to staunch the flow— "Johnny" and two of his confederates pleaded guilty to federal slavery charges last fall— critics say that the crackdown on visa violators since the September 11th terror attacks has made it harder to get victims and witnesses to come forward to talk about the slave trade.

"It is incredible how big of a business it is," said Christa Stewart, the director of SAFE Horizons, a Manhattan-based non-profit organization that has expanded its outreach from domestic violence victims to women who have been enslaved. She and other advocates said a fundamental tragedy of this crime is that the victims, like the Indonesian women initially were trying to change their lives, were hopeful and courageous enough to leave everything behind in search of a new life.
To read more of this article go to Website below:
http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/fea/20071001/202/2304