Super Bowl a magnet for under-age sex trade

From MSNBC:

ATLANTA — Pimps will traffic thousands of under-age prostitutes to Texas for Sunday's Super Bowl, hoping to do business with men arriving for the big game with money to burn, child rights advocates said.

As the country's largest sporting event, the game between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers will make the Dallas-Fort Worth area a magnet for business of all kinds.

That includes the multimillion dollar, under-age sex industry, said activists and law enforcement officials working to combat what they say is an annual spike in trafficking of under-age girls ahead of the Super Bowl.

"The Super Bowl is one of the biggest human trafficking events in the United States," Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott told a trafficking prevention meeting in January. Girls who enter the grim trade face a life of harsh treatment and danger, according to a Dallas police report in 2010.

Few who emerge are willing to speak about it. Tina Frundt, 36, is an exception. Now married and living in Washington D.C., Frundt was lured into sex work at 14 after she fell for a 24-year-old who invited her to leave home in 1989 and join his "family" in Cleveland, Ohio. That family consisted of the man and three girls living in a motel.

When Frundt declined on the first night to have sex with her boyfriend's friends they raped her. "I was angry with myself for not listening to him, so the next night when he sent me out on the street and told me ... (to earn $500) I listened," she said in a telephone interview. Frundt paced the streets for hours and finally got into a client's car.

When she came home in the morning with just $50, her pimp beat her in front of the other girls to teach them all a lesson and sent her back onto the street the next night with the warning not to return until she had reached the quota.

Read the full story here. To learn more about outreach and awareness efforts surrounding the Superbowl 2011, visit Traffick911 and read about their I'm Not Buying It campaign. For a calendar of events around the Superbowl, click here.

To read Laura C's post about trafficking and the Superbowl, click here.

The Super Bowl and Human Trafficking

The 2011 Super Bowl in Dallas, Texas will bring thousands of people to the city in the hopes of witnessing greatness. Sadly, in the shadows of all the glitz and glamour, as many as a few thousand children will be trafficked as sex slaves, bought and sold countless times throughout the event.

In 2009, the Florida Department of Children and Families assisted 24 minors who were trafficked as sex slaves for the Super Bowl. Texas State Attorney General, Greg Abbott, is taking initiative, and announced plans to send 12 individuals from his human trafficking task force to help Dallas law enforcement fight human trafficking. A number of organizations, such as Traffick 911 and Free the Captives, are mobilizing ground efforts in Dallas to raise awareness and support prevention efforts in the area.

The awareness campaign is assisted by Dallas Cowboy player, Jay Ratliff, who recently filmed a public-service announcement for Traffick 911’s I’m Not Buying It Campaign. Watch the PSA here:

This Super Bowl Sunday there is more at stake than who wins the game on the field. The countless lives destroyed by trafficking reveal the true victory comes when we stop the commercial sexual exploitation of children off the field.

Photo courtesy of the United Methodist Women.

The Lost Girls

From the Texas Monthly by Mimi Swartz

Most people who are aware of the existence of human trafficking think that it happens in faraway places, like war-torn countries in the former Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, or Eastern Europe. Few can imagine that slaves are brought into the U.S. to work in restaurants, factories, and sexually oriented businesses (SOBs to those in the know). In fact, across the country, tens of thousands of people are being held captive today. Depending on whom you ask, Houston is either the leading trafficking site in the U.S. or very near the top, along with Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans, and New York City. . .

In recent years there have been several high-profile arrests and prosecutions in Harris County, which has some of the toughest anti-trafficking laws in the country and one of the country’s most innovative anti-trafficking task forces. In 2005 police brought down Maximino “El Chimino” Mondragon, who ran one of the nation’s largest sex-trafficking rings, in which young women from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mondragon’s native El Salvador were forced to work as prostitutes. That same year, a sixty-year-old man named Evan Lowenstein was arrested for operating at least a dozen brothels stocked with women from Eastern Europe who had been brought into the U.S. with promises of legitimate work. He got probation and disappeared. . .

But each time a case is made, the business simply morphs and grows in a new way. Case in point: When officers in the FM 1960 area set up a task force and began shutting down massage parlors that did not have legitimate licenses to operate, the traffickers began circumventing state regulations by reclassifying their operations as “tea parlors” and, in a novel twist, “art galleries.” “We could have fifty people doing this 24/7 and still not have enough manpower,” says Skip Oliver, a captain in the Harris County Constable’s Department in Precinct 4. “You can punch a button here and get a girl from Thailand in the pipeline. We’re nibbling at a piece of the problem. We don’t even see the whole picture.” . . .

Many rescuers know that women who wind up as trafficking victims were usually abused earlier in their lives, often by a family member or a spouse; that’s what makes them so vulnerable to the traffickers’ feigned affection and false protection. But the repeated rapes that captive prostitutes endure can turn someone with low self-esteem into someone with a serious psychiatric illness. Many suffer from severe dissociative identity disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder is usually a given. Some are bipolar. Many of these conditions have similar symptoms: extreme highs, harrowing lows, paranoia, drug or alcohol abuse as self-medication, and various forms of self-destructive behavior, including self-mutilation. . .

Usually trafficking victims are profoundly ashamed of what they have been doing or believe they have failed at it, disappointing the families who depend on them for survival. Like battered spouses, they often return to their abusers. Many have no other way to make a living. . .

“They break people beyond repair,” Dottie [Lester, coordinator for the Trafficked Persons Assistance Program for YMCA International Services] says of traffickers. “If I shattered a glass and then put it back together, it wouldn’t hold water.”

Read the Full Article

Arresting traffickers, rescuing victims, and prosecuting cases are the more high profile ways to fight human trafficking. As this article points out, though, such efforts are only first steps at best. Trafficking victims and survivors require long-term services and support beyond escape and rescue. High-profile arrests and shutting down SOBs do not address the root causes or trafficking and in many cases do little to address demand. While these efforts are important, and I strongly believe we need to advocate for increased prosecution of traffickers, these efforts must not exist in isolation but instead need to be part of a holistic anti-trafficking strategy. Otherwise, they are stop-gap measures at best and potentially counterproductive or harmful at worst.

Photograph by Van Ditthavong for the Texas Monthly

New Texas Law Establishes State Task Force and Victim Assistance for Domestic Victims of Trafficking

From Governor Perry's Office:

AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry today ceremonially signed House Bill (HB) 4009, which establishes a human trafficking taskforce in the Attorney General's Office that will develop policies and procedures for the prevention and prosecution of human trafficking crimes.

"The taskforce created by this bill will focus state efforts on ending this criminal activity that primarily targets women and children," Gov. Perry said. "Human trafficking is a serious problem, and this legislation sends a message to those who would profit from exploiting others in this fashion – Texas won't stand for it."

HB 4009 directs the task force to report on the numbers of trafficking victims and convictions, how victims are transported into the state and routes taken, and the factors that create a demand for the services that victims are forced to provide. The taskforce is to present its reports to the Legislature and governor every even numbered year. The report will also include recommendations on training law enforcement to recognize and handle human trafficking, efforts to combat human trafficking, and ways to increase public awareness and bring offenders to justice.

"Texas has always been, and continues to be, a leader in the modern day abolitionist movement, and this legislation is the first of its kind in the United States," Rep. Randy Weber said. "Most people think human trafficking happens elsewhere in places like Thailand and Cambodia, but the reality is that it is happening in our own backyard. In fact, the vast majority of the victims identified within Texas are actually our own citizens."

The taskforce will work with U.S. attorneys, border patrol agents, and the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards to develop and conduct training for law enforcement personnel, judges and their staff, examine law enforcement agency training protocol, and develop recommendations for strengthening state and local efforts to prevent human trafficking.

According to the U.S. State Department, nearly one in five victims of human trafficking in the U.S. travels through Texas, with Houston and El Paso listed among the most intense trafficking jurisdictions in the country. Between 14,500 and 17,500 people are trafficked into the U.S. each year, 80 percent of them women and 50 percent of them children. Victims of human trafficking are recruited, harbored and transported for labor or services through the use of force, fraud or coercion, and are subjected to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, slavery or forced commercial sex acts.

We will undoubtedly be seeing more of these types of state legislation being signed over the next couple of years. Upon reading the bill itself, the highlight is probably Subchapter J-1, which is a provision for assistance to domestic victims of human trafficking (US citizens and permanent legal residents), which is currently not covered by federal legislation. The Task Force itself seems to apply to all victims, however the subchapter provides a grant program and specific resources for domestic victim services. It also includes a provision for the study of how to fund victim assistance programs, including the possibility of the use of assets seized from traffickers. The bill also includes the possibility of a study of alternatives to the juvenile justice system for children who engage in acts of prostitution.

Texas Human Trafficking Convictions

From Chron.com:

By Ana Ley
August 21, 2008

HOUSTON — Five people linked to an immigrant smuggling operation run by the infamous Ortiz family pleaded guilty to trafficking charges on Thursday, prosecutors said.

U.S. Attorney Don DeGabrielle said in a news release that Porfirio Ortiz, 37, Calixtro Ortiz, 52, Bernardino Ortiz, 49, and Sandra Ortiz, 32, all relatives living in Bryan; and Christopher Gene Torres, 24, of Kingsland, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transport undocumented immigrants for commercial advantage or private financial gain.

Lawyers for Porfirio Ortiz, Calixtro Ortiz and Sandra Ortiz did not respond to messages left by The Associated Press on Thursday. Bernardino Ortiz's lawyer declined to comment.

Torres' lawyer said his client is not as involved with the operation because he is only facing punishment for the transportation of two illegals in separate cases in 2004.

"My client is probably not looking at much time," said attorney Francisco Javier Montemayor, adding that Torres would probably serve a year or less under a plea bargain. "We're happy with the way things turned out."

The smugglers can each serve as many as 10 years in jail, face a maximum $250,000 fine and a term of supervised release of up to three years. Sentencing is set for Nov. 20.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement began investigating the group in January 2005 when Border Patrol agents found a group of illegal immigrants hiding behind a pile of hay inside a horse trailer as they crossed a checkpoint en route to Hebbronville.

The driver, 28-year-old Tyler Ross Severn, told agents Porfirio Ortiz hired him to drive the truck and trailer to Rio Grande City and loaded the five immigrants into the trailer. The immigrants were to pay Porfirio Ortiz $2,500 each, of which Severn was to receive $300 per person.

Severn told authorities he had made numerous trips transporting illegal immigrants for the Ortiz family. Calixtro Ortiz served as a guide for the immigrants and would deliver immigrants to Severn at a house in Rio Grande City, DeGabrielle said. Severn would then transport the immigrants to Bryan, where Porfirio or Bernardino Ortiz would pay him.

Read the full article