Women Suffer Modern Slavery
Over the last two years, while up to 100,000 victims poured into the United States, where they were held in bondage, federal officials estimated that the government prosecuted cases involving no more than 250 victims.
NEW YORK, April 1, 2000
(AP) As many as 50,000 women and children from Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe are brought to the United States under false pretenses each year and forced to work as prostitutes, abused laborers or servants, according to a CIA report, The New York Times reported Sunday.
The 79-page report "International Trafficking in Women to the United States: A Contemporary Manifestation of Slavery" paints a broad picture of this hidden trade and of the difficulties that government agencies face in fighting it, the Times said.
Completed in November, the report is based on more than 150 interviews with government officials, law enforcement officers, victims and experts in the United States and abroad, as well as investigative documents and a review of international literature on the subject.
Law enforcement officials have seen episodic evidence for years of trafficking in immigrant women and children, some as young as 9 years old.
But the report says that officers generally do not like to take on these cases because they are difficult to investigate and prosecute. What is more, it says, the nation does not have sufficient laws aimed at this problem, meaning that the penalties often are insubstantial,
according to the newspaper.
While the report is not classified, it has not been made public. Another government official who wanted the report's findings publicized provided a copy to the Times.
Two years ago, Attorney General Janet Reno chartered an interagency task force, saying, "We are not interested in containing modern-day slavery; we want to eradicate it."
The report mentions many efforts to fight the problem, but also many barriers to doing so.
Over the last two years, while up to 100,000 victims poured into the United States, where they were held in bondage, federal officials estimated that the government prosecuted cases involving no more than 250 victims.
The report describes case after case of foreign women who answered advertisements for au pair, sales clerk, secretarial or waitress jobs in the United States but found, once they arrived, that the jobs did not exist.
Instead they were taken prisoner, held under guard and forced into prostitution or peonage. Some of them were, in fact, sold outright to brothel owners, the report says.
Frank E. Loy, undersecretary of state for global affairs, told a Congressional subcommittee in February: "It seems incomprehensible that at the dawn of the 21st century, the primitive and barbaric practice of buying and selling human beings occurs at all. Yet international trafficking in persons, predominantly women and children, is widespread and, by all indications, a growing reality."
The countries that are the primary sources for traffickers are Thailand, Vietnam, China, Mexico, Russia and the Czech Republic, the report says.
Copyright 2000 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.