Sex trafficking in the U.S. called ‘epidemic’

Victims say escaping nearly impossible


Children of the Night president Dr. Lois Lee speaks with 17-year-old "Jane," in the cafeteria at Children of the Night in Los Angeles, Thursday, April 21, 2011. "Jane" was rescued off the streets of Portland, Ore., two years ago when she was just 15. "This place has helped me so much. I was so different when I first got here," "Jane" said. She attends college classes now and wants to be a social worker where she can help people when she graduates. "I just want to help people like Lois has helped me." (Garrett Cheen/Special to The Washington Times)

By Chuck Neubauer

-

The Washington Times


10:42 a.m., Saturday, April 23, 2011
Mugshot“Jane’s” eyes are pictured here in a hallway at Children of the Night in Van Nuys, Calif., April 20, 2011. “Jane” was rescued off the streets of Portland, Ore., two years ago when she was just 15. “This place has helped me so much. I was so different when I first got here,” “Jane” said. She attends college classes now and wants to be a social worker where she can help people when she graduates. “I just want to help people like Lois has helped me.” (Garrett Cheen/Special to The Washington Times)



When she first showed up at Children of the Night, a privately-funded residential facility, Jane was angry. Arrested more than 20 times as a prostitute, she had been hardened by the street. She threw things at her counselors. Everyone was terrified in having to deal with her.

“She was just afraid. She was use to being treated so rough,” said Lois Lee, the Los Angeles group’s founder and president. “She didn’t know what to do with someone nice.”

Jane, not her real name, was just 14 when her life was hijacked in Seattle by a 36-year-old man who said he loved her and promised to give her a better life. It was an easy sell: The product of a troubled home, she was sexually molested by her father’s roommate — the abuse beginning when she was 4. She also was molested at the daycare center where she was taken every day.

“My mom was a junkie,” Jane, now 17, said in a recent interview. “I lived with my dad. He was up and down with his moods. He had a marijuana addiction — I can’t remember much of my childhood. I block it out.”

Jane said the molestation made her shy and when she finally told someone about it — her aunt — her father turned away from her. “I needed his support, but he started to shut down,” she said. “I figured he didn’t care anymore (about me) and so I didn’t care anymore. I just started staying away from my house.”


She ended up with a family friend, a woman who forced her to work as a prostitute and sell drugs. That’s when she met James Jackson, the man she called Jay, who convinced her to go with him to Portland, Ore. He promised to show her a better life, but moments after they arrived, Jackson told her she had to “sell her ass,” court records show. When she objected, he choked and punched her,
stopping only when she agreed to be a prostitute.

Jane is not the only young girl to fall victim to someone she trusted, but no one really knows how many others there are.

Sex trafficking is so widespread, said Nathan Wilson, founder of the Project Meridian Foundation in Arlington, which helps police identify traffickers and their victims, that “no country, no race, no religion, no class and no child is immune.” He said 1.6 million children under 18 — native and foreign born — have been caught up in this country’s sex trade. But, he said, the actual number of victims is hard to quantify because of the lengths to which traffickers go to keep their crimes hidden.

Most experts say the number of children sexually exploited in the U.S. or at risk of being exploited is between 100,000 and 300,000.

“We know it is a really large number,” said Anne Milgram, a former high-ranking federal prosecutor who tried and oversaw sex trafficking cases. “We know there are a lot of children being victimized. We just can’t tell you what number.”


‘Never-ending stream’

Rachel Lloyd said she has seen a “never-ending stream” of abused girls since she founded Girls Educational and Mentoring Services’ (GEMS) in New York City in 1997, which helps girls and women ages 12 to 24 victimized by sex traffickers.

“We don’t know the number, but we know it is happening. I am working with 300 girls now,” she said, adding that most came from troubled homes where there was either sexual or physical abuse. “For every single woman I have met that was exploited, you could tell why they ran away and why they were easy prey for a pimp. The pimp becomes their strongest connection in life.”

Ms. Lloyd speaks from experience: Sexually abused as a child in England, she ended up in Germany and at 17 was working in a strip club where she met an American she thought loved her but who “pimped me out.” She said he beat her to keep her working and when she finally escaped, she was “broken emotionally and physically” before putting her life back together.

The Washington, D.C.-based Polaris Project, which advocates stronger trafficking laws and provides help to victims, has said trafficking for sex and forced labor generates billions of dollars in profits by victimizing millions of people globally. It said the average age of entry into the sex trafficking industry in the U.S. is between 12 to 14 years old.

With an estimated annual revenue of $32 billion, or about $87 million a day, law enforcement authorities, government agencies and others say human trafficking is tied with arms dealing as the world’s second-largest criminal enterprise, behind only drugs. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the lead agency in trafficking investigations, has estimated that 800,000 people are trafficked into sex and forced-labor situations throughout the world every year.

U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein in Maryland said the sex trafficking of minors is a top priority of his office, but bringing offenders to justice has become more difficult in recent years. He said the traffickers’ use of the Internet has made it harder to locate their victims, meaning that many of the girls and young women are no longer on the street or at truck stops where law enforcement can see them.

Mr. Rosenstein helped create the Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force in 2007, which — working with state, federal and local law enforcement authorities, along with private agencies — seeks to rescue trafficking victims and prosecute offenders.

Since its creation, the task force has sent many traffickers to prison, including Lloyd Mack Royal, III, 29, of Gaithersburg, who received a 37-year sentence in July 2010 for using what prosecutors said was “physical violence, drugs, guns and lies” to force three girls under 18 into prostitution. A federal judge also ordered that after his release, Royal must register as a sex offender.

According to court records, Royal forced the girls to engage in sex; threatened to harm them and their families; hit the girls and held one of them at gunpoint; gave them cocaine, PCP, marijuana and alcohol before forcing them to have sex with customers; and, to assert his authority, forced them to “kiss his pinky ring.” The records show he drove the girls to hotels in Gaithersburg and Washington, D.C., to engage in sex.

Royal also gave the girls drugs before forcing them to engage in sex with him to test their “sexual aptitude,” according to the records.

Just last month, Derwin S. Smith, 42 of Glen Burnie, pleaded guilty in a task-force case to transporting a 12-year-old D.C. girl to Atlantic City, N.J., to work as a prostitute. She was rescued by the task force after she had called a relative.

Maryland task force members Amanda Walker-Rodriguez and Rodney Hill, Baltimore County prosecutors, said in an FBI law enforcement bulletin in March that 300,000 American children are at risk of becoming victims of sex traffickers. They said the children often are forced to travel far from home, and their lives revolve around “violence, forced drug use and constant threats.” They called sex trafficking in the U.S. a “problem of epidemic proportion.”

“These women and young girls are sold to traffickers, locked up in rooms or brothels for weeks or months, drugged, terrorized and raped repeatedly,” they said. “The captives are so afraid and intimidated that they rarely speak out against their traffickers, even when faced with an opportunity to escape.”

For many law enforcement officers, the crime can be deeply personal.

“When I heard what happened, I cried,” said Sgt. Chris Burchell, a 28-year veteran of the Bexar County, Texas, Sheriff’s office when he learned a 13-year-old girl had been kidnapped, raped and forced to work as a prostitute in a San Antonio crackhouse. He has since founded a nonprofit group called Texas Anti-Trafficking in Persons, which builds rapid response coalitions across the state.
In the San Antonio case, Juan Moreno, 45, was convicted in December and sentenced to four life terms. Prosecutors said he charged crack customers $25 to rape the teenage girl, who had come into
the house with a friend looking for drugs and was then held for more than a week.

“He threatened to kill her,” said Kirsta Melton, an assistant Bexar County district attorney who prosecuted the case. “She was literally tied to the bed. … A guy from the neighborhood recognized her and rescued her.” She said the neighbor had refused an offer of sex and “figured out a way to get her out.

“It never occurred to me how many child sex trafficking cases there were,” said Ms. Melton, now in charge of such prosecutions for the county.

Knows firsthand

Ms. Milgram, the former New Jersey attorney general, also knows firsthand about prosecuting trafficking cases. She tried two of the Justice Department’s biggest international sex trafficking cases and one of the first ever under the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. In that case, two sisters went to prison for 17 years for forcing Mexican girls, some as young as 14, into prostitution. Later, she became the lead prosecutor for sex trafficking cases.

Now teaching a course in human trafficking law at New York University, Ms. Milgram thinks prosecutors need to bring more cases, saying the 243 her Justice Department office brought between 2000 and 2009 were “a great start but not enough.” She also said local prosecutors were not getting the job done, adding that while New York City advocacy groups have identified hundreds of sex trafficking victims, New York police have made only a small number of arrests.

“We have to do better,” she said.

The issue of sex trafficking has attracted the attention of several elected officials. Earlier this month, Oregon passed a bill establishing harsher penalties for sex trafficking, as did Texas. Maryland passed three anti-trafficking bills this month to pay for training in schools, give law enforcement additional surveillance and wiretapping tools, and to remove prostitution convictions from sex trafficking victims’ records.

Similar laws have passed this month in Minnesota, Nevada, Missouri, Tennessee, New York and Michigan.

State Sen. Renee Unterman, a Republican from Gwinnett County outside Atlanta, has been pushing for years to strengthen Georgia’s sex trafficking laws. She said it has been “very very tough” to get men to talk about the issue, but added that people are starting to understand that the girls should not be treated as criminals but as victims. She said more services and facilities are needed to treat them, but it is “very costly to take care of these types of victims.”

Georgia passed a bill last month that toughens penalties for people who traffic children for sex. The bill is awaiting the governor’s signature.

‘I was not human’

Jane’s fall into the world of sex trafficking began in May 2008, just before her 15th birthday. Jackson, her pimp, had forced her to work as a prostitute in Portland and when she protested, he beat her.

“He made me believe I was not human and I was just for one thing — to make money for him,” she said, calling her life a nightmare and suffering bruises and scars from many beatings.

Asked why she didn’t leave, she said, “I had no where to go. I didn’t know anybody. Where was I to go? He threatened to kill me all the time.”

On one occasion when he got mad because she had not made enough money, she said he pushed her down and punched her in the face, saying, “You are going to die tonight.” She said she pleaded for her life, promising to do whatever he said: “Just don’t kill me. I thought I was going to die.”

Of that beating, the FBI later said, “She awoke to find Jackson holding a firearm at her head and swearing on his mother’s life that he would kill her.” The bureau also said that “several times a week,” Jackson choked her, pulled her hair, pushed her and struck her with his hands, a belt and a coffee pot, and that he tried to bite off her finger.

“I trusted him, even after all this stuff. After he abused me, I still thought it was love — I thought that this is how it was supposed to be. … Most of our arguments were about money,” she said, adding that she had sex with six men a day, sometimes eight or nine. “I was bringing him $600 a day, but he wanted more.”

Jane got out of that life when she was arrested in October 2008 and an FBI agent asked her if she wanted to go to Children of the Night, where she now lives. She said it was the first time she was treated like a victim instead of a criminal. “I had the FBI on my side. I could actually tell they were trying to help me,” she said.

She since has gotten her high school diploma, now attends college and is getting help at a place where, she said, “people actually care about me.” But the memories persist: “It still effects me — in a very, very scary way. I am scared when I walk out the door to walk to the bus to go to school. In class, I am scared to raise my hand. I am scared someone is going to hurt me. I am scared to sit in the front row because there are too many people behind me I can’t see.”

Jackson pleaded guilty in March. Sentencing is scheduled for June 3 in Portland, when he faces a minimum of 15 years in prison.

“Human slavery is alive and well — as cases like this make all too clear,” said U.S. Attorney Dwight C. Holton in Oregon in announcing the plea. “We have got to put an end to this violent trade in young women and girls.”

In Oakland, Redefining Sex Trade Workers as Abuse Victims

Jim Wilson/The New York Times



Oakland’s International Boulevard, where prostitution flourishes. More Photos »
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
Published: May 23, 2011

OAKLAND, Calif. — Dr. Kimberly Chang, a physician at a community clinic in Chinatown, will never forget the first young girl she suspected had been sold for sex.


A support group for girls and women vulnerable to the sex trade. More Photos »

Kalea, a 15-year-old Cambodian-American girl who grew up in Oakland, kept coming in to be examined for sexually transmitted diseases, the beginning of a grim cycle of diagnosis and treatment. “I started asking, ‘Are you having sex with new people?’ ” Dr. Chang, 37, recalled. “It was always, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ Eventually she confided that she was worried about ‘a friend.’ That’s when I asked, ‘Are you trading sex for money?’ ”

Emerging from a long, dark tunnel, Kalea slowly began to spill her stories. How her father beat her. The childhood rape. The out-of-control john who tied her up in a motel bathtub and filled it with scalding water.

Seven years and hundreds of patients later, Dr. Chang’s clinic, Asian Health Services, is in the vanguard of a new public health approach to treating American-born minors lured into the sex trade, a problem enforcement officials and child advocates say has exploded with the Internet.

Once viewed as criminals and dispatched to juvenile centers, where treatment was rare, sexually exploited youths are increasingly seen as victims of child abuse, with a new focus on early intervention and counseling. There is growing recognition that doctors can be first responders, intervening before long years of exploitation and abuse can take an even greater toll.

In Oakland, a handful of organizations that grew out of Asian Health Services have developed new programs for Southeast Asian minors that “take into account the complex culture of foreign-born parents and their American-born children,” said Dr. Sharon Cooper, a forensic pediatrician and child abuse expert at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 American-born children are sold for sex each year. The escalating numbers have prompted national initiatives by the F.B.I. and other law enforcement agencies, and new or pending legislation in more than a dozen states, most recently Georgia, which enacted a toughened human trafficking law this month.

The Oakland health clinic is confronting an underground within an underground — the demand for Asian-American girls, with Cambodian-Americans among the most vulnerable. Many immigrant Cambodian parents struggle with poverty compounded by the experience of genocide and its traumatic aftermath, depression. The emotional fallout is ricocheting through generations.

“Oakland is an open-air sex market for young children,” said Sharmin Bock, assistant in charge of special operations for the district attorney’s office in Alameda County, where Oakland is.

The abusers may be pimps, even brothers, who recruit or kidnap girls from the streets and market them online through sites, where they are featured in pulsating ads for massage parlors, escort services, strip clubs, even acupuncturists.

“Asian women are exoticized in our culture,” said Elizabeth Sy, the co-founder of a program for at-risk girls called Banteay Srei that grew out of Dr. Chang’s clinic. “Many Southeast Asian girls come from new refugee populations. Recruiters target these girls because they know they are struggling with issues of cultural identity.”

Girls from many Southeast Asian families chase “an Americanized idea of love,” Ms. Sy said, growing up in emotionally distant households in which, she said, “parents never ask ‘How was school today?’ or say ‘I love you.’ ”

They fall prey to abusers who are highly motivated: the Polaris Project, a national advocacy organization, estimates that a stable of four girls earns over $600,000 a year in tax-free income for the pimp. Drug dealers here are increasingly switching to prostitution, inspired by the bottom line and fewer risks.

“The person dealing drugs has a finite amount of product to sell,” said Jason Skrdlant, an officer with the Oakland Police Department’s vice and child exploitation unit. “But a girl is reusable.”

Over time, Dr. Chang and her colleagues became aware of a disturbing pattern: young patients coming in regularly would bring their friends to be checked for sexually transmitted diseases. To provide social support, Banteay Srei was started to provide peer counseling, classes in women’s health and exchanges with elders to strengthen cultural bonds, including cooking classes.

At the clinic in Oakland’s Chinatown, some 40 doctors, nurses, nurse-practitioners and physician’s assistants know that “a date” can refer to the exchange of sex for money — nuances “we didn’t learn in medical school,” said Dr. Chang, whose staff can speak 10 Asian languages.

Videography, especially child pornography and the advent of 3G and 4G cellphone technology, has arrived at an insidious juncture: puberty is occurring earlier. The combination of early physical maturation and technology “are a perfect storm,” Dr. Cooper said. “These hormonal changes can be exploited, making it harder to discern what is O.K., and easier to groom a child.”

Maxi, a patient of Dr. Chang, had a narrow escape from the sex trade: she grew up off of one of the West Coast’s most notorious streets: International Boulevard, a seven-and-a-half-mile-long strip in the Oakland flatlands.

“You can be kidnapped just walking down the street,” Maxi explained.

“It’s ‘hey girl,’ and the next thing you know you’re kicking with him or some girl will talk to you and then snatch you up,” she said, referring to the bottom, a girl dispatched to recruit girlfriends and inflict punishment — in her case, being choked with a cable wire.

Maxi’s older brother was a pimp who, starting when she was 9, had her guard the “trap house” where he lived with prostitutes, some in their teens. For nearly three years, Maxi stood watch.

“I loved him very much,” she said of her brother. “I always thought it was normal.”

In her early teens, Maxi was arrested on auto theft and robbery charges, and a worried friend took her to Banteay Srei. Maxi, now 22, says: “I didn’t understand Cambodian that much, and my mom never gave an explanation, full-on, about being a woman. I think if it wasn’t for them, I probably would have wound up dead.”

About half the domestic minors sold for sex still live with a parent, said Richard J. Estes, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an authority on child commercial sex exploitation. But families who have experienced historic violence and genocide “often have a fear of law enforcement and are less likely to reach out for help,” said Suzanna Tiapula, director of the National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse for the National District Attorneys Association in Washington. The clinics are “a point of access for these communities,” Ms. Tiapula said.

The district attorney’s office is now aggressively pursuing traffickers who once remained in the shadows, while providing counseling and housing for the minors. Feeling safe helps children face their abusers in court, Ms. Bock said. “It is difficult,” she said, “because many of the children are under the psychological control of the human trafficker.”

Dr. Cooper noted that medical evaluations in juvenile detention were generally confined to communicable or life-threatening diseases and did not include reproductive health, as they do at Asian Health Services and other clinics that work with sexually exploited girls.

Dr. Chang, at her family clinic, sometimes learns about an at-risk child during a check-up with parents, whose headaches and depression may reveal deep worry about a daughter or son. She asks that young patients return to the clinic, not just for medical reasons but “to restore their faith that there really are people out there they can trust,” she said.

They are girls who have never been in a swimming pool or on a swing. Among them is Veronica, 26, a Cambodian-Filipina community college freshman whose purse bulges with college papers. It also holds the red velvet heels she wears on weekends to make “out calls” in San Francisco for men who find her on the Internet.

When Veronica was 12, her stepfather, a custodian, would take her into empty buildings and touch her. On April 29, 2000, a date she remembers exactly, a man who flattered her persuaded her to become “occupied,” as she put it. He beat her repeatedly for seven years. “He would beat me for simple things, like not making enough money or worse, getting pulled over by a cop,” she said.

Although Veronica still works as “an independent” on weekends, she is studying business entrepreneurship. She hopes to become a wedding planner, though she says she will never marry. “I am afraid of relationships,” she said.

Kalea, who was a patient of Dr. Chang for five years, still struggles. She recently got her G.E.D. and has enrolled in dental hygiene school. “At a time when I felt I had no say in anything,” she said, “Dr. Chang listened.”

As she absent-mindedly smoothes her hair, she talks about yearning for the things she missed. She envies a little cousin, now in high school. Especially on spring evenings, she thinks about the gossamer dress she might have worn to her phantom prom.

But the Problem is World-wide.

A Brief Tour of the Cambodian Sex Industry

Is buying sex a better way to help Cambodian women than buying a T-shirt?
By Ken SilversteinPosted Thursday, May 19, 2011, at 7:34 AM ET

A brothel in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Click image to expand.A brothel in Phnom Penh, Cambodia"Is this a good job?"

That had to rank as one of dumbest questions in the history of modern journalism. I'd put it to a young woman who'd just served me a drink at Zanzibar, a hostess bar in Phnom Penh whose "staff of beautiful ladies … are always on hand to serve and satisfy your every desire." Hostesses are paid to be flirty and solicitous, but I had clearly tried this one's patience.

"You know that this is not a good job," she said, with a smirk that revealed her irritation.

But in Cambodia, where the regime of former Communist Hun Sen oversees a particularly vicious form of crony capitalism, economic options are severely limited and 40 percent of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day. For young women, work in the sex industry—which includes hostess bars, karaoke bars, massage parlors, and freelance prostitution—is one of the few alternatives to work in the apparel industry, which produces 90 percent of the country's export earnings. Many women find it a preferable, if distasteful, alternative.

The sex and apparel sectors draw from the same labor pool: young, poorly educated women from the impoverished countryside who send part of their earnings home to support their families. Almost all of the country's 350,000 apparel workers are women. Estimates of sex-industry workers range from about 20,000 to 100,000; the lower number is probably far closer to the truth as the latter comes from the hyperbolic, fundraising-driven claims of anti-trafficking organizations, which seem to assume that almost every sex worker is a "slave." A more likely estimate of the percentage of trafficked prostitutes is 10 percent.

There's a steady flow of workers between the two sectors: A 2009 U.N. Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking report found that in the aftermath of the steep global economic downturn, up to 20 percent of laid-off apparel workers found work in the "entertainment sector."

Apparel factories began sprouting up in Phnom Penh in the mid-1990s after Cambodia signed a bilateral trade deal with the United States that gave it privileged access to American markets if local factories upheld enhanced labor standards. Walmart, Nike, Target, and other major retailers soon began sourcing from Cambodia, and the country gained a reputation, in the words of USA Today, as "the sweatshop-free producer in a fiercely competitive global clothing market."
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New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof buffed this image, writing in a 2008 piece from Phnom Penh that, "a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty." Earlier, Kristof bought the "freedom" of two prostitutes/"slaves" and sent them home to their villages. One soon returned to her old line of work. In a 2009 column, Kristof called on the Cambodian government to "organize sting operations" against brothels, though in practice such raids have resulted in women being beaten or raped by police and sent to "rehabilitation centers" that Human Rights Watch describes as "squalid jails," including Koh Kor, a former Khmer Rouge detention facility.

The Western-oriented sex industry arrived in Cambodia in the early 1990s, in lockstep with the U.N. peacekeeping mission that oversaw elections after the fall of the Khmer Rouge and decades of civil war. (When asked in 1998 what the U.N. mission's legacy would be, Hun Sen replied, "AIDS." It further flourished with the flood of Western NGO workers, expats, and tourists that poured in after that. In his 1998 book Off the Rails in Phnom Penh, Amit Gilboa described Cambodia as "an anarchic festival of cheap prostitutes" where "you are never more than a few minutes away from a place to purchase sex."

Prostitution isn't quite as flagrant these days, but the temporal distance from paid sex is roughly the same. Streetwalkers can be found day and night along the perimeter of Wat Phnom, the Buddhist temple that is one of Phnom Penh's top tourist sites. There are numerous karaoke bars and massage parlors, and freelance prostitutes abound at bars and nightclubs catering to Westerners.

One night, I asked a tuk-tuk driver who spoke little English to leave me at the corner of 104 Street and Sisowath Quay, which runs along the Tonle Sap River. Instead, he dropped me in front of 104, a well-known hostess bar where he assumed I was headed.

Another night, I went to a nightclub on the Quay that was packed with a Cambodian crowd dancing to a band playing Asian pop. As soon as I ordered a beer, the manager, a woman, came over and began shouting to me over the music. I couldn't make out what she was saying, but a moment later, a young woman of about 20, dressed in a short black skirt, took the seat beside me. Now what the manager had been yelling became clear: "Do you want a girl?"

The young woman was quite beautiful, but she offered me a hand so limp and devoid of enthusiasm that it dampened any longing I could possibly have felt. One night, I paid the bar fine so a hostess I'd been talking to could go home early, and I gave her a large tip that she interpreted as a payment for sex. "Do you want to come with me?" she asked halfheartedly. She was clearly relieved when I declined.

Hostess bars, which are heavily clustered just off the riverfront and in a few other spots around the city, are the most visible component of the sex industry. Neon lights flash from the windows, and young women sit at tables out front waving at men walking by, urging them to come in. The soundtrack trends heavily toward 1960s and '70s rock; songs like "Brown Sugar" and "Whiskey Bar" ("Show me the way to the next little girl" are standards. Middle-aged Western men sit at tables talking to each other as hostesses drape themselves over their shoulders or in their laps or massage their shoulders.

There's no hard sell on sex, and not all of the women are available, though drinks are pushed heavily, because the hostesses get a commission (usually $1) on each one sold. Salaries are usually $60 to $70 per month, and with commissions and tips hostesses can make three times that. Those who have sex with customers make quite a bit more. I was offered rates of $10 an hour and $40 for the night. Cambodian clients pay far less, as do long-time expats familiar with local market prices.

One night, I went to 104 with two Cambodian women friends who do advocacy work with sex workers and textile unions. On my behalf, they questioned several hostesses, who were dressed in tight jeans and red tank tops. One 25 year old took the job after her mother died. (Her father had long ago abandoned the family.) She complained about aspects of the work, especially customers who felt entitled to paw her, but she said she was proud that she wasn't unemployed. "These jobs are hard to get," she said. "I'm not beautiful, and I don't speak English well, but the owner liked me and took pity on me."

Freelancers work at low-end joints like Martini, which the Wikitravel guide to Phnom Penh describes as "a place for lonely men and loose ladies," and Walkabout, which is also a guesthouse where rooms are available by the hour. Somewhat more upscale are places like Sharky's, which has pool tables and live music and attracts a more mixed crowd that includes women and couples, along with the usual Disco Stu types.

I went to Sharky's around 9 o'clock on a quiet weekday evening and sat on a balcony overlooking the street with a 24-year-old woman who had streaked blond hair and wore blue jeans and a silk shirt printed with red and pink hearts. She spoke little English, and we didn't get far beyond "What's your name?" and "Where are you from?"

"How long have you lived in Phnom Penh?" and "Who do you live with?" elicited blank stares. (She replied "yes" to the latter.) But one question was instantly recognized: "How much?" The answer: For a massage and "boom boom," $5 for an hour and $20 for the night.

My two Cambodian friends also took me to a karaoke bar whose customers were mostly Chinese and other Asian tourists. More than 100 women, some in short skirts and some in prom dresses with flowers in their hair, sat on couches lined up on both sides of the entryway. We took a room in back and asked for four women to join us. They soon arrived with trays bearing bowls of nuts and snacks; plates of grapefruit, grapes, and mangos; and bottles of warm beer served in glasses with ice. They sang along to videos, mostly Chinese and Cambodian pop.

One of the women, a 19-year-old whose education stopped at the fourth grade, wore a pink prom dress and barrettes in her long hair. She was paid $60 a month and made about the same amount per week in tips. She didn't sleep with customers, but colleagues who did could make $100 a night or even more if the client was "rich." She had an older brother who made $45 per month as a security guard, and an older sister who worked at a textile plant. "My mother doesn't like me working here, so I might have to leave, but I wouldn't work with my sister," she said. "The chemicals smell, her boss is always yelling, and she doesn't make much money."
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So how does pay for factory work compare with pay for sex work? Apparel jobs in Cambodia are not an escalator out of poverty, as Kristof would have it; they're a treadmill at best. Textile workers earn about 33 cents per hour, lower than anywhere except Bangladesh. Even with significant overtime, monthly pay rarely tops $80. They commute in, sometimes from villages hours away, or live four and five to a room in shanties outside the factory gates. A study by two International Labor Organization specialists said that apparel workers were rarely able to save any money, and few had "the opportunity to advance their career, either in the garment industry or outside."

Apparel workers are on their feet all day, other than for a short lunch break, and they work such long hours that they see little sunlight. The plants are hot and noisy, with the steady drone of the machines making conversation impossible. They are subject to strict workplace rules (i.e., asking permission to go to the bathroom), are pressured to meet high quotas, and, despite Cambodia's "sweatshop-free" reputation, growing numbers work on short-term contracts that deprive them of basic labor rights.

Hostesses also work long hours—typically late afternoon until 2 a.m.—but they usually eat at least one meal at work, hang out with friends, and watch television when business is slow. Some but by no means all of the hostesses whom I spoke with had sex with customers, and they were free to decline offers (though accepting clearly increases pay).

I'm not touting sex work as an attractive profession. HIV is an obvious risk, and prostitutes are subject to violence by customers, police, and at "rehabilitation centers." Most of the women I met ordered juice when they were with me, but some drink either at their own initiative or the insistence of customers. Sex work is just as much of a dead-end job as apparel work; when women get older, they either find something else to do or move from clubs and bars to the street. Still, 20 percent of Cambodian sex workers interviewed for the 2009 U.N. report said they took their jobs because of good working conditions or relatively high pay. (Fifty-five percent did so due to "difficult family circumstances." About 3.5 percent were lured, cheated, or sold into sex work.)

Are sex workers exploited? Absolutely. But so are textile workers. When I was in Cambodia in 2009 to report on the apparel industry, I obtained the "company profile" of a firm that produced T-shirts, trousers, and skirts for companies like Aeropostale and JCPenney. It said the plant's 1,000 workers produced 7.8 million pieces annually. Taking a rough estimate of $25 per piece retail, each employee generated approximately $195,000 in retail sales annually, for which she received about $750 in pay, factoring in typical overtime rates.

"A lot of women no longer want apparel jobs," Tola Moeun, a labor-rights activist with a group called the Community Legal Education Center, told me. "When prostitution offers a better life, our factory owners need to think about more than their profit margins."

http://www.slate.com/id/2293999/pagenum/1

Good thing Jane was rescued ealier, if not maybe she will be hopeless as years will pass by... I hope that there will be more young ones who are a victim of sex trafficking will be rescued...

Typical media hysteria

Women's Funding Network sex trafficking study is junk science

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2011-03-24/news/women-s-funding-network-sex-trafficking-study-is-junk-science/