[House Hearing, 106 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN THE INTERNATIONAL SEX TRADE
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON
INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS AND HUMAN RIGHTS
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
SEPTEMBER 14, 1999
__________
Serial No. 106-66
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on International Relations
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
63-274 CC WASHINGTON : 2000
COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York, Chairman
WILLIAM F. GOODLING, Pennsylvania SAM GEJDENSON, Connecticut
JAMES A. LEACH, Iowa TOM LANTOS, California
HENRY J. HYDE, Illinois HOWARD L. BERMAN, California
DOUG BEREUTER, Nebraska GARY L. ACKERMAN, New York
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American
DAN BURTON, Indiana Samoa
ELTON GALLEGLY, California MATTHEW G. MARTINEZ, California
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida DONALD M. PAYNE, New Jersey
CASS BALLENGER, North Carolina ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey
DANA ROHRABACHER, California SHERROD BROWN, Ohio
DONALD A. MANZULLO, Illinois CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY, Georgia
EDWARD R. ROYCE, California ALCEE L. HASTINGS, Florida
PETER T. KING, New York PAT DANNER, Missouri
STEVE CHABOT, Ohio EARL F. HILLIARD, Alabama
MARSHALL ``MARK'' SANFORD, South BRAD SHERMAN, California
Carolina ROBERT WEXLER, Florida
MATT SALMON, Arizona STEVEN R. ROTHMAN, New Jersey
AMO HOUGHTON, New York JIM DAVIS, Florida
TOM CAMPBELL, California EARL POMEROY, North Dakota
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts
KEVIN BRADY, Texas GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York
RICHARD BURR, North Carolina BARBARA LEE, California
PAUL E. GILLMOR, Ohio JOSEPH CROWLEY, New York
GEORGE P. RADANOVICH, California JOSEPH M. HOEFFEL, Pennsylvania
JOHN COOKSEY, Louisiana
THOMAS G. TANCREDO, Colorado
Richard J. Garon, Chief of Staff
Kathleen Bertelsen Moazed, Democratic Chief of Staff
------
Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey, Chairman
WILLIAM F. GOODLING, Pennsylvania CYNTHIA A. MCKINNEY, Georgia
HENRY J. HYDE, Illinois ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American
DAN BURTON, Indiana Samoa
CASS BALLENGER, North Carolina EARL F. HILLIARD, Alabama
PETER T. KING, New York BRAD SHERMAN, California
MATT SALMON, Arizona WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts
THOMAS G. TANCREDO, Colorado GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York
Grover Joseph Rees, Subcommittee Staff Director
Douglas C. Anderson, Counsel
Gary Stephen Cox, Democratic Staff Director
Nicolle A. Sestric, Staff Associate
C O N T E N T S
----------
WITNESSES
Page
Hon. Harold Hongju Koh, Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of
Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, United States Department of
State.......................................................... 8
Theresa Loar, Director, President's Interagency Council on Women,
United States Department of State.............................. 13
Laura J. Lederer, Research Director and Project Manager, the
Protection Project, Harvard University, Kennedy School of
Government..................................................... 36
Gary A. Haugen, President and Chief Executive Officer,
International Justice Mission.................................. 40
Anita Sharma Bhattarai, Trafficking Survivor, Nepal.............. 35
APPENDIX
Hon. Christopher H. Smith,a U.S. Representative in Congress from
the State of New Jersey, Chairman, Subcommittee on
International Operations and Human Rights...................... 56
Mr. Harold Hongju Koh............................................ 60
Ms. Theresa Loar................................................. 72
Dr. Laura J. Lederer............................................ 87
Mr. Gary A. Haugen............................................... 92
Ms. Anita Sharma Bhattarai....................................... 98
Additional material:
Additional comments submitted by Mr. Koh......................... 103
Statement of Dr. Valora Washington, Executive Director, Unitarian
Universalist Service Committee................................. 104
TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN THE INTERNATIONAL SEX TRADE
----------
Tuesday, September 14, 1999
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on International
Operations and Human Rights,
Committee on International Relations,
Washington D.C.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 1:05 p.m. In
Room 2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Christopher H.
Smith (Chairman of the Subcommittee) Presiding.
Mr. Smith. Good afternoon, and thank you for coming to
today's hearing. Today's hearing is to investigate one of the
modern world's most serious and most widespread human rights
problems: The trafficking of women and children for the
international sex trade.
Each year up to a million innocent victims, of whom the
overwhelming majority are women and children, are brought by
force and/or fraud into the international commercial sex
industry. Efforts by the U.S. Government, international
organizations and others to stop this brutal practice have thus
far proved unsuccessful. Indeed, all the evidence suggests that
instances of forcible and/or fraudulent sex trafficking are far
more numerous than just a few years ago. Every day we read of
news accounts of women and girls who are abducted in places as
diverse as Burma, Kosovo, and Vietnam, and sold into sexual
slavery in countries from Thailand to Israel, from China to the
United States.
Part of the problem is that current laws and law
enforcement strategies, in the United States as in other
nations, often punish the victims more severely than they
punish the perpetrators. When a sex-for-hire establishment is
raided, the women, and sometimes children, in the brothel are
typically deported if they are not citizens of the country in
which the establishment is located. Deportation is imposed
without reference to whether their participation was voluntary
or involuntary and without reference to whether they will face
retribution or other serious harm upon return. This not only
inflicts further cruelty on the victims, but also leaves nobody
to testify against the real criminals and frightens other
victims from coming forward.
In order to reverse this cruel and ineffective approach, I,
together with my colleague Marcy Kaptur, my good friend from
Georgia, Ms. McKinney, and 25 other bipartisan cosponsors, have
introduced H.R. 1356, the Freedom from Sexual Trafficking Act.
This legislation is designed to protect and assist the victims
of sexual trafficking while inflicting severe and certain
punishment on the perpetrators. On August 4th, H.R. 1356 was
marked up and reported favorably by our Subcommittee and will
be soon moving to the full Committee.
The central principle behind the Freedom from Sexual
Trafficking Act is that a person who knowingly operates an
enterprise that profits from sex acts involving persons who
have been brought across international boundaries for such
purposes by fraud or force should receive punishment
commensurate with that given to those who commit forcible rape.
This would not only be just punishment, but we believe also
would be a powerful deterrent.
H.R. 1356 would implement this principle across the board.
First, it would modify U.S. criminal law to provide severe
punishment, up to and including life imprisonment, for persons
convicted of operating such enterprises wholly or partly within
the United States.
H.R. 1356 would also prohibit nonhumanitarian U.S.
assistance to governments that continue to be part of the
problem rather than part of the solution to forcible and
fraudulent sexual trafficking, unless this prohibition is
waived by the President, and there is a very generous waiver
provided in the bill.
The bill also provides victim assistance and protection.
This includes grants to shelters and rehabilitation programs
for victims of forcible and/or fraudulent sexual trafficking.
It also includes relief from deportation for victims,
provided it is established that they really were innocent
victims, and that they have not unreasonably refused to assist
in the investigation and prosecution of the perpetrators, and
that they would face retribution or other hardship if removed
from the United States.
The bill also makes clear that trafficking victims are
eligible for the Federal witness protection plan and provides
them with a private right of action against those who have
profited by the harm that was done to them.
Finally, the bill authorizes grants for training for law
enforcement agencies in foreign countries in the investigation
and prosecution of international sex trafficking, as well as
for assistance in drafting and implementation of
antitrafficking legislation.
H.R. 1356 has attracted widespread support and enthusiasm
from across the political spectrum, but it has also found its
share of critics. For example, the Administration and others
contend that it is wrong or counterproductive to impose
sanctions or even threaten to do so against foreign governments
that condone sex trafficking. But nobody really believes that
we should never sanction bad behavior by foreign governments.
Rather, the question is how bad the conduct has to be in order
to merit the sanctions and whether the sanctions are carefully
tailored to deter the evils that they address.
I would just note parenthetically, we were late in starting
today because there was a vote on the floor dealing with East
Timor and the fact that we are encouraging the President, and
the language is even weaker than I would like to see, to
further distance ourselves with regard to our military
cooperation with the Government of Indonesia because of their
ongoing, egregious problems with their military and the use of
torture by their military, which Cynthia and I and others on
the Subcommittee have heard repeatedly on hearings on that
question. There are some times when behavior crosses the line
and action needs to be taken, and again, there is a generous
waiver contained within this legislation.
H.R. 1356 contains smart sanctions, not dumb ones. It would
give the President the opportunity but not the obligation to
cut U.S. taxpayer subsidies to governments that condone or
support sexual trafficking. There are no trade sanctions in
this bill, only limitations on foreign aid. Humanitarian aid is
explicitly exempted, and we have adopted a generous definition
of humanitarian aid.
Finally, even this very limited sanction against offending
governments may be waived by the national interest waiver by
the President. Remember, the legislation also authorizes new
foreign assistance to governments that are making efforts to
punish perpetrators and protect victims. So we provide both
carrots and sticks, incentives and disincentives.
We believe this bill provides a more balanced, moderate and
flexible approach than a bill that would provide all carrots
and no sticks. We give the President all the tools that we hope
will be necessary to stop this unspeakable exploitation of
women and children, not just some tools, and then it is up to
the President to decide which tools he wants to use in each
case.
The Administration and some of its supporters also argue
that antitrafficking legislation should be designed to stop not
only the forcible and fraudulent trafficking of women for the
international sex trade, but also other forms of trafficking
such as the transportation of workers for sweatshops or other
substandard working conditions. I can tell you I sympathize
very deeply on some of those important points.
Our bill explicitly recognizes that international sexual
trafficking is not the only form of traffic in persons.
Innocent people are lured, pressured, and lied to every day all
over the world in all kinds of situations, and I take second
place to no one in my commitment to ending all labor practices
that are coercive, deceptive, or otherwise improper, or even
when they involve labor that is not in and of itself inherently
degrading.
The problem with addressing all of these evils in one bill,
the idea that one size fits all, is that they involve wide
range of different situations which may call for an equally
broad range of solutions. So we decided to start by attacking
the most brutal form of trafficking, I believe, the use of
force and deception in the systematic degradation of millions
of women and children, and singling it out for swift and
certain punishment.
We believe that by focusing on this particularly egregious
practice, the forcible or fraudulent trafficking of women and
children for commercial sex purposes, we can stop it sooner
than if we had tried to address the far broader range of evils.
H.R. 1356 is far tougher on the criminals and far more generous
to victims than would be appropriate if we were trying to
legislate about working conditions in legitimate industries
rather than to punish rapists and protect rape victims.
In comparison, even though I know the bill has been
introduced, it clearly shows our bill would provide for life
imprisonment, which makes it very clear that we are serious.
Put these people away, lock them up and throw the key away,
seems to me the only way to deal with the question of those who
commit these heinous crimes. I also believe that this
legislation to end sexual trafficking will also command a far
broader consensus in Congress, among the American people, and
around the world, than legislation that would address a much
wider range of problems and then do a lot less about them. If
the Administration wants to get behind this legislation and
then followup with legislation on related issues, I will be
there, willing to work with them.
But while we are working on shaping an approach to these
other problems and on building the necessary consensus for
addressing them, we must not delay even for a single day the
effort to save these millions of women and children who are
forced every day to submit to the most atrocious offenses
against their persons and against their dignity as human
beings. Forcible and fraudulent trafficking of women and
children for the commercial sex trade is a uniquely brutal
practice. It is commercial rape, and it cries out for its own
comprehensive and immediate solution. We must act to end it
now, and I hope that we will have the support as we move this
through the House and the Senate.
[The statement of Mr. Smith appears in the appendix.]
Mr. Smith. I would like to yield to my good friend Cynthia
McKinney, the Ranking Member of our Subcommittee.
Ms. McKinney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First of all, I
would like the thank you for your personal efforts to bring to
the forefront this issue of sexual trafficking, a practice that
involves tens of thousands of women all around the world. I
join the Chairman in his concern for this grave abuse of women
and children that has not received the attention it deserves by
the Administration or the international community. I truly wish
to work with him on curtailing this outrageous activity. The
Chairman and I can move this issue to the forefront and work
together to develop a viable bill that can pass the Congress
and get signed into law.
Women and children are forced into the illegal commercial
sex trade. Efforts to place limits on this barbarous practice,
as Chairman Smith has so correctly pointed out, has not been
successful. This bill is not a perfect bill, but it can be made
better as it works its way through the Committee process.
However, I do believe that this bill is an important first step
in the right direction. I would like the Chairman to know that
we are not that far apart on this issue, and I would join him
in cosponsoring this legislation.
I am deeply grateful for the testimony submitted by the
witnesses today. In particular, Ms. Anita Bhattarai, a survivor
of sexual trafficking from Nepal, is extremely courageous to
step forward today and tell us her heart-wrenching story. It
personally pains me to know that at least four other witnesses
were scheduled to testify today but at the last minute backed
out. Who can blame them, women who have been forcibly raped are
forced to relive the tragedy in order to bring charges against
their attackers? The embarrassment and humiliation never go
away, even with the passage of time. Therefore, Ms. Bhattarai,
I thank you for being willing to share your story with us today
so that all the world may know we must act so that your story
is not repeated over and over and over again.
Personally I would like to expand the scope of this bill. I
have procedural concerns that labor issues are not specifically
addressed in this bill. In certain countries it is a well-known
practice to import laborers as servants. The master of the
house then proceeds to lift the passport from the employee's
possessions, pays them less than the prevailing wage, and in
many cases sexually exploits the worker. While in theory this
bill would cover this practice, I am not so sure that these
particular circumstances are fully addressed. Mr. Chairman, we
should have our staffs working together to see what we can do
on this one issue to try and broaden the scope of this bill
just a little bit.
H.R. 1238, the International Trafficking in Women and Child
Protection Act, introduced by Congresswoman Louise Slaughter,
of which I am also a cosponsor, addresses some of the concerns
regarding slavery and sexual exploitation by employers. We have
to look at this legislation and try to see what we can do to
address the issue of sexual exploitation of workers by
employers.
I don't want to ignore the other victims of trafficking;
however, I am of like mind with the Chairman that we cannot
develop a broadly scoped bill addressing all issues of
international human trafficking that could realistically pass
this Congress. H.R. 1356 is a first step, and it is an
important first step.
I want to work with the Chairman to protect the women and
children, victims of human sexual trafficking throughout the
world.
The strengths of H.R. 1356 include a modification of U.S.
law to provide severe punishment, up to a life sentence, for
persons convicted of sexual trafficking. It addresses the issue
of transporting persons across international borders for this
practice. It addresses the issue of engaging in the sale of a
person for this practice as well as addressing the enterprise
of sexual trafficking itself.
On the other hand, my colleagues at the Department of State
have told me they oppose the creation of an office for the
protection of victims of trafficking. This office will file an
annual report on foreign countries that fail to criminalize and
appropriately punish international sexual trafficking. While I
have concerns about creating a separate office, I would like to
ask the Department of State officials how they can address our
concerns without the creation of a separate office.
I asked in my previous remarks of August 4th, if there is a
creative way to increase our emphasis on this issue without
creating more bureaucracy, and I have not had an adequate
response from the Department of State on this question. In
light of the nonresponse from DOS, perhaps there does need to
be an approach similar to the approach followed by our
Chairman.
Further, the bill provides victim assistance and
protection, provisions for grants to rehabilitation centers and
grants to shelters. I support these provisions. The bill limits
the deportation of victims to determine whether or not they
were forced into sexual trafficking, and this bill clears the
way for victims to participate in the witness protection
program as long as they cooperate with Federal authorities to
break up the organized sex trade rings. These are good points
in the legislation.
The Department of State is opposed to the sanctions
provisions in the bill. The argument is that it is
counterproductive to impose sanctions. In light of the
sanctions against Iraq, I find this argument incredulous. The
Secretary of State has said that the deaths of 5,000 Iraqi
children each month is a price that she is willing to pay. For
what? A nonexistent Iraqi policy? I think all arguments put
forward by the Department of State should be measured by this
statement by Secretary Albright. In light of the fact that
right now the U.S., Japan, and the IMF are arguing for economic
pressures to be used against Indonesia, I would like to know
what the alternative measures being proposed by this State
Department are to eliminate this heinous practice. We should
work to put an end to the international exploitation of women
and children.
The bill does provide the President with a waiver. The
sanctions in this bill do not kill women and children by
denying them food and medical aid as is the case with some of
our other misguided policy. This legislation, like the Chairman
has mentioned, uses a carrot-and-stick approach. We reward
those who comply with accepted international standards, and we
use very limited sanctions against governments who do not
comply.
In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, the Smith bill and the
Slaughter bill are not necessarily at odds with each other. I
want to offer you this opportunity for us to work together to
produce a viable bill. This cause is noble and just. I hope we
can work with the Administration to address their concerns, and
I have instructed my staff to work closely with your staff on
this very important international issue.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The information referred to appears in the appendix.]
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much, I say to my friend from
Georgia, for your excellent statement and for your good, strong
support for this. One of the areas of bipartisanship that goes
underreported and underheralded is in the area of human rights.
we have worked with you and with your predecessor Tom Lantos,
who also was Ranking for a number of years and Chairman of this
Committee before me, in a very cooperative way, because we all
believe in the human dignity of people. So I want to thank you
for your fine statement.
The gentlelady from California, Ms. Lee.
Ms. Lee. Thank you very much, and I want to thank you and
our Ranking Member Ms. McKinney for your very stellar and very
consistent work on behalf of human rights throughout the world.
Let me just say to you that this is an issue that we all have
to address and we all have to deal with. People in my district
really don't even believe this takes place in the world right
now. So these hearings are very, very important to raise public
awareness with regard to the whole issue of the sexual
trafficking and the abuses that women and children in 1999 are
subjected to throughout the world.
I just want to thank you for this bold action, for this
bold piece of legislation, and I look forward to the hearing.
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much, Ms. Lee.
Mr. Smith. Mr. Faleomavaega.
Mr. Faleomavaega. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank and commend
you for not only calling this very important hearing, but also
introducing legislation that addresses this very serious
matter. In the years that I have served with you on this
Committee, Mr. Chairman, I certainly want to commend your
leadership, and I say outstanding leadership, in our Nation in
leading the forefront, the problem of human rights violations
throughout the world, and I think that this legislation is an
excellent start. I am sure the concerns raised by our good
friend, the gentlelady from Georgia will be addressed
accordingly, and there is a lot of time that we can do this
constructively.
If I might be so bold, Mr. Chairman, in not taking away the
spirit of the hearing this afternoon is we are talking about in
this legislation addressing the problems of sex for sale and
women and children. I come away very concerned, and I certainly
want to thank you again.
Over the years we have been holding hearings about human
rights violations in this place called East Timor, and when we
talk about if there is none other in the times of war or
whenever there is a revolution, whenever there is a military
takeover--which, by the way, Mr. Chairman, that is exactly what
happened. Twenty-five years ago the Indonesian military came
over and massacred, literally massacred, over 200,000 East
Timorese men, women and children before they were finally
supposedly annexed by the Indonesian Government, and to this
day not only does the United Nations not recognize this act by
the Indonesian military, but our own country never recognized
this takeover that was done 25 years ago. So all of the sudden
it seems like, hey, what is happening there? It has been there
the last 25 years. We turned our backs on these people, and all
these years that we have neglected to face up to the issue.
This is not an Asian issue, Mr. Chairman. It is a human.
These people are human beings. They may not be Europeans in
Kosovo or in other places in Europe, but they are human beings,
and we ought not to forget them.
Again, I commend you for this, and I look forward to
hearing from our good friend, the Assistant Secretary, and the
associate here, for this hearing this afternoon. Thank you
again, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much, Mr. Faleomavaega. I would
like to introduce our very two distinguished panelists, and we
thank the Administration for making your time available to be
here.
First of all, I would like to introduce Ms. Theresa Loar,
whom I have known for 30 years. We have been good friends. We
went to high school together, and she now is in a very, very
important position as Senior Coordinator for International
Women's Issues at the State Department, a position she assumed
in July 1996. She also serves as the Director of the
President's Interagency Council on Women. Previously Ms. Loar
served on the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Fourth World
Conference on Women, as well as in diplomatic posts in both
Mexico and Korea.
I would also like to welcome a man whose reputation
preceded him for his work on human rights, Harold Koh. He was
appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human
Rights, and Labor in 1998. Before that appointment, Mr. Koh
served as both a professor of international law and as the
Director of the Center for International Human Rights at Yale
Law School. Assistant Secretary Koh, who earned both his BA and
law degrees from Harvard, has authored numerous articles on
international law and human rights. He is also a fellow
Commissioner on the Commission on Security Cooperation in
Europe, and it is kind of nice because very often he sits right
up here and gets to quiz all the witnesses as well, and does a
great job. I am looking forward to working with him on the
upcoming Istanbul summit.
I would also like to note for the record that Anita Botti
has done great work on this issue as well and previously had
testified before the Helsinki Commission, She did a masterful
job on the issue, and we are grateful for her good work day to
day on that issue.
Mr. Smith. I am told that protocol suggests Secretary Koh
goes first, so I would like to yield the floor to him.
STATEMENTS OF HON. HAROLD HONGJU KOH, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF
STATE, BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR, UNITED
STATES DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Mr. Koh. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Members of the
Committee, for holding today's hearing on the worldwide problem
of trafficking of persons. You should be commended for shining
a spotlight on this important human rights issue. Hearings such
as this demonstrate the interest of the U.S. Government in
combating these egregious practices and send a clear signal to
traffickers that they will not be tolerated.
Mr. Chairman, this past July, as you know, the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe unanimously passed a resolution
condemning sexual trafficking, a success for which you played a
very large role, and I applaud you and your colleagues on the
U.S. Delegation for your leadership in agreeing to this
resolution which urges participating States to punish
traffickers even while raising public awareness of the crime of
trafficking.
Mr. Chairman, my friend and colleague Theresa Loar,
Director of the President's Interagency Council on Women and
Senior Coordinator for International Women's Issues at the
State Department, has joined me here today to discuss how we
can all work together to address this crucial issue. By
appearing together we send the message that the entire
Administration shares your determination that we must stop
those who profit from the tragedy of trafficking, and we must
help those who are its victims once again find dignity. This is
an issue that has touched my life personally and
professionally, both in my work as a private human rights
attorney and now as Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human
Rights and Labor.
As you know, as a private refugee attorney I represented
thousands of Haitians, Cubans, and Chinese citizens who took
the small boat seeking safe haven in the United States. Some of
them no doubt were victims of traffickers. I also was co-
counsel in New York in a well-publicized case involving a group
of hearing-impaired Mexican workers who were victims of a
heartless trafficking scheme that was designed to rob them of
their money, livelihood and, most important, their dignity.
Since coming to the State Department, I have worked to make
sure that the Administration addresses all forms of
trafficking. This past March I traveled to Chiang Mai,
Thailand, with Secretary of State Albright, where we visited
the Hill Tribes Institute which has worked diligently to
educate indigenous people and to create economic alternatives
to the dangers of sex trafficking.
Mr. Chairman, some of the young girls in that institute
were no older than my daughter, who is only 13 years old. That
experience reminded me that trafficking hits us so hard because
it so often involves children like our own. That so many around
the world would resort to the exploitation of innocence for
personal and monetary gain must be regarded as one of the most
brutal forms of evil that we confront today.
With these children in mind, I present my testimony with
regard to this trafficking issue. All too often we think of
trafficking as a faceless problem, a criminal problem, an
economic problem, an immigration problem, a health problem, but
let me speak about it not as a multibillion dollar industry,
although it is, nor as an immigration or health problem,
although it is also that. Let me speak about it from the
perspective of a human rights lawyer who sees in trafficking
the very antithesis of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights.
I would argue that trafficking represents one of the most
comprehensive challenges to human rights today, for it involves
the very denial of the humanity of its victims. Traffickers
abuse virtually the entire spectrum of rights protected in the
Universal Declaration. By their acts they deny that persons are
born free and equal in dignity and rights. They deny their
victims freedom of movement, freedom of association, and the
most basic freedom to have a childhood. Traffickers profit from
arbitrary detention, slavery, rape, and cruel, inhuman and
degrading treatment. They regularly violate any human right
that gets in the way of a profit. Most fundamentally, they do
not respect any of these rights because they view their victims
as objects, chattel to be bought and sold as needed.
Trafficking is truly a global plague that may appear in
Denver as well as Delhi, in London as well as Lagos. It takes
many forms, from forced prostitution to bonded domestic
servitude, from coerced sweatshop work to the pressing into
service of child soldiers. It involves women and children, yes,
but also men, victims from every walk of life, every culture,
every religion.
Following my prepared testimony, Theresa Loar and I would
be happy to discuss particular examples of trafficking from
numerous countries around the world. In my capacity as the
Assistant Secretary of State, we present annually country
reports on human rights practices, and in the report we
presented this past February, we identified at least 60
countries in which trafficking takes place. This was a
conservative estimate that represents nearly a third of the
countries in the world. But before turning to the specifics,
let me get to the broader scope and complexity of the problem.
Practices vary from region to region and according to type
of trafficking, as the Chair has noted, but it is possible to
make some generalizations about the scope of the problem.
Trafficking involves a vicious cycle in which victims are
forced or lured from their home countries. They are shuttled
across international borders and enslaved, with human rights
violations occurring every step of the way. In source countries
where trafficking originates, and this can be in any part of
the world, including the United States, victims of trafficking
can include men, women and children of every age group,
although a majority are women and girls under the age of 25.
Some respond to employment agencies fronting for traffickers.
Some are sold to traffickers because their families can't
afford it. A few are tricked into traveling with so-called
family friends only to discover that they have been kidnapped
or ensnared into slavery. In almost every situation traffickers
prey upon the hopes and fears of their victims. They offer them
shelter and sympathy in the case of the runaway, a false way
out of debt in the case of the poor, and a false hope of a
better life for those seeking transit abroad.
In many cases victims are sent to transit countries where
traffickers make it clear that they have no choice but to
accept prostitution, debt bondage or other forms of involuntary
servitude. Once the person is in the trafficker's hands, the
trafficker regularly uses any and all means to ensure their
cooperation, including drugs, violence and sexual assault, and
threats to the victims and their families. If they have
identity papers, the trafficker often seizes or destroys them
to ensure compliance, and once money has been exchanged,
victims are often told that the cost of transport is greater
than expected, and they will have to work for years or months
to pay the trafficker back.
Traffickers frequently move victims from safe house to safe
house, city to city, or country to country, and once victims
arrive in a receiving country, they are often kept in squalid
conditions in the state of virtual house arrest. In their
world, violence, drugs, and threats about the authorities are
part of a brutal, daily routine, and long hours of forced
servitude in a brothel as a prostitute, at gunpoint as a child
soldier or at a sewing machine as a sweatshop worker. What
little compensation comes their way is usually only a tiny
percentage of their actual earnings, with the balance claimed
by the trafficker to cover so-called costs or to repay so-
called loans.
In cases involving prostitution and pornography, victims
are forced to continue working regardless of disease, which
means that many work throughout pregnancies and despite having
contracted sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.
Indeed, the HIV crisis has only fueled the expansion of sex
trafficking, with pimps seeking increasingly younger girls and
boys in an effort to market them to customers as clean. Health
care is nonexistent or provided only by fellow victims, leaving
most victims at high risk of further health complications and
ensuring that many children born to trafficking victims while
in captivity will themselves be trafficked, usually through
adoption rings, and thus ensuring that this vicious cycle will
continue.
With this background of this vicious cycle of trafficking
sketched, let me now turn to the issue of possible legislation,
in particular, H.R. 1356, the Freedom from Sexual Trafficking
Act of 1999. Mr. Chairman, we could not agree more with your
statement before the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, it is time to
aggressively attack this contemporary manifestation of slavery,
and there is no other word for it. As my colleague Theresa Loar
will testify, our Administration has taken a strong stand
against trafficking in persons and has involved many agencies
in a cooperative effort to combat the problem no matter where
it may occur, but at the same time we recognize that this
Congress, like the administration, has focused greater
attention on this horrifying practice than any predecessor.
The Administration strongly supports the bill's objective
of combating trafficking and appreciates the efforts of
Chairman Smith and the other bill sponsors to try to craft
legislation that reflects our shared goals, preventing
trafficking, prosecuting those who engage in these terrible
crimes and protecting trafficking victims. We are committed to
working with you and other Members to fight trafficking through
a variety of means, and we believe that joint Congressional-
Administration attention will send a strong message worldwide
about the seriousness of the U.S. Government effort.
For that reason, we also agree on the need for statutory
protection of aliens in the United States who are victims of
trafficking and in strengthening our own criminal laws to help
bring traffickers to justice. We agree that reporting on all
forms of trafficking of persons as a violation of international
human rights is crucial to determining the nature and extent of
the problem. The first step in deterring trafficking and
bringing traffickers to justice is to identify and break the
vicious cycle I have described in countries of origin, transit
countries and receiving countries.
At the same time, however, we do not believe in reinventing
the wheel. In our judgment new reporting requirements are
unnecessary and would further burden the already overworked
staff members of my bureau's Office of Country Reports and
Asylum Affairs, who, after submitting to Congress in February a
5,500-page report, filed an 1,100-page document on religious
freedom just last week.
I would argue that the best framework within which the
Administration can report on trafficking already exists in our
annual Country Report on Human Rights Practices, which is the
principal human rights document by which the government reports
to Congress and this Committee on all human rights conditions
worldwide. By using these existing, well-established and well-
respected reports as the method of choice to spotlight the
trafficking issue as an important human rights concern, we can
ensure that reporting on trafficking will not be marginalized,
but rather, fully integrated into our broader yearly human
rights reporting.
To expand both the breadth and depth of our coverage in the
country reports, I am pleased to announce today that we have
made a commitment this year to add a new subsection on
trafficking in each of the 194 country chapter reports in 1999
reports under section 6, which is entitled ``Worker Rights.''
In the same vein, we believe the draft legislation best
serves our goal when it consolidates and strengthens existing
response mechanisms rather than creates new cumbersome
mechanisms in their stead. The draft bills we have seen focus
almost solely on trafficking in women and children for sexual
purposes, but as I have described, the phenomenon is much
broader and is better described as the problem of trafficking
in persons.
Moreover, the draft bills choose to address the issue by
imposing new reporting requirements, by creating one or more
new layers of bureaucracy and creating mandatory sanctions
requirements that target government actors. Even private
traffickers bear major responsibility for the problem where
creation of economic alternatives to trafficking, not
punishment of State entities, is most likely to provide relief
for the victim.
Given the scope and magnitude of the problem, I fully
understand the temptation to search for a new legislative
approach or mechanism to address these problems. The new
reporting, new offices and new sanctions are not solutions in
themselves, nor do we think they would yield a quick fix for
what is a massive and complex global problem. To address the
problem effectively, we need to focus on recurring features of
the generic problem, to support existing response mechanisms,
and then to do everything in our power to break this vicious
cycle of human violations that are occurring.
Mr. Chairman, we already have a human rights bureau with a
global mandate. As Theresa Loar will tell you, we already have
the President's Interagency Council to help coordinate the
Executive Branch response. We already have human rights
reporting on trafficking, which, as I have said, will be more
thorough and comprehensive on this issue, from this year
forward. We already have a range of diplomatic tools at our
disposal to address the issue, including essentially all of the
sanctions discussed in the various draft bills. Most
importantly, we already have the political will to address the
question.
What we need is not new institutions and new bureaucratic
requirements, but sufficient capacity for existing offices that
already recognize the problem and have a mandate to deal with
it.
The draft bill from the House side appears to be modeled on
the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, particularly
its emphasis on mandatory sanctions. But for three important
reasons we believe that the Religious Freedom Act represents an
inappropriate paradigm for anti trafficking legislation. First,
unlike religious persecution which tends to occur within a
single country, trafficking in persons represents a
transnational problem involving the forced movement of people
across borders. As a result, mandatory sanctions targeted
against any one country will not likely have the desired
impact.
Second, targeted sanctions against specific states are far
less effective when the prime moving force behind the problem
are not national government officials or policies, but nonstate
actors. Traffickers, like their counterparts in international
organized crime and narcotics, avoid national criminal
penalties by shifting their base of operations across borders
to reap the highest level of profit. Trafficking tends to be a
bottom-up, not a top-down, problem. The root causes usually
rest in private greed and economic and social conditions, not
government micromanagement.
When foreign government officials are involved or complicit
in trafficking, it is usually at the provincial and local level
where the blunt instrument of sanctions has decidingly less
impact. Similarly, unlike victims of religious persecution,
victims of trafficking rarely belong to organized groups and
don't enjoy the protection of established transnational
institutions, like organized religion, who are capable of
speaking out on their behalf.
As the admirable NGO advocates who will testify later will
tell you, there is no corresponding private organization to
support the acts of victims of trafficking that can work
together with the effect of sanctions, and without such private
institutional supports, the sanctions are less likely to
succeed.
Finally, because trafficking is a burgeoning problem, Mr.
Chair, as you know from your own work with the OSCE
parliamentarians, governments around the world are increasingly
concerned about the issue and starting to address it. A great
many affected governments want to deter trafficking but lack
the resources to do so. But if we implement the legislation as
proposed, almost all countries could find themselves in default
of some mandatory statutory requirement and, hence, be subject
to mandatory sanctions.
A unilateral sanctions regime that targets even those
countries who are starting to address the issue could end up
discouraging rather than encouraging effective international
cooperation and the emerging international regime to address
the problem. For example, mandatory sanctions could seriously
undermine our efforts to negotiate the Trafficking in Persons
Protocol.
In sum, new legislation should not, in our view, focus on
developing unnecessary new institutions or establishing onerous
new requirements that address only the symptoms and pathology
of the problem. Instead, we hope the Congress and the
Administration can work together within the Department's
existing legislative framework to find ways to address the root
causes of the problem and to break this vicious global cycle of
trafficking.
We look forward to working with you and other Members of
the Committee to identify the most effective means and
mechanisms to strengthen our mutual commitment to break this
vicious cycle. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would now like to
turn the floor over to my colleague and your old friend Theresa
Loar, who has played such a key role in facilitating the
Administration's response on this important issue.
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much, Secretary Koh, and I put
you down as undecided on sanctions, by the way.
Mr. Smith. We have been joined by on the panel for the by
Congressman Tom Tancredo, who has been a very active Member of
the Human Rights Subcommittee. Tom, do you have any opening?
Mr. Tancredo. No statement. I will have questions when we
get to them.
Mr. Smith. I would like to yield to my good friend Theresa
Loar.
STATEMENT OF THERESA LOAR, DIRECTOR, PRESIDENT'S INTERAGENCY
COUNCIL ON WOMEN, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Ms. Loar. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and Members of the
Committee. On a personal note, more than 25 years ago, when we
walked the halls of St. Cecilia's Grammar School and St. Mary's
High School as students together, I never could have imagined
that today I would have the privilege and the opportunity to
testify in the halls of Congress before my fellow classmate and
friend, the Honorable Chairman.
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, my colleague and
friend Harold Koh and I want to thank you for the invitation to
testify on the problem of trafficking in women and children
around the world and the implementation of the U.S. strategy on
prevention, protection and prosecution. Of all the human rights
abuses to which the international community has turned its
attention, the trafficking of human beings, predominantly women
and children, is clearly one of the most egregious violations
of our time. The President, the Secretary of State and the
Attorney General have all shown tremendous commitment to this
issue, having made significant progress over the past year
using this strategy.
Mr. Chairman, your efforts to focus attention on this
important issue are welcome. Your advocacy during international
travel and your consistent attention to the needs of victims
will continue to be crucial as we work together to accomplish
our shared goals. We look forward to continue working closely
with Congress on legislation that will support and advance the
U.S. policy framework. As Director of the President's
Interagency Council on Women, I see the Council's work on
trafficking as part of our government's broader commitment to
eliminate violence against women around the world.
As senior coordinator for international women's issues my
work on trafficking is a vital part of my mandate to promote
women's human rights within U.S. foreign policy. We have been
mobilizing the Federal Government to combat trafficking. We
coordinate the efforts of various Federal agencies and several
State Department bureaus. We have focused on ways to
institutionalize the treatment of trafficking and U.S.
Government initiatives.
Mr. Chairman, we gratefully acknowledge your efforts in
meeting with trafficking victims to deliver a strong message of
U.S. support and concern. Members of the Council Interagency
Team and I have also met face to face with trafficking victims
from countries such as Albanian, Ukraine, Nigeria, Mexico, and
Thailand. These encounters, always heartbreaking and at times
involving personal risk to the trafficking victims, have only
deepened our resolve to use the full force of our government to
combat this modern form of slavery.
Today, Mr. Chairman, I would like to share with you
information about the nature and scope of trafficking, the
three-part strategy of prevention, protection and prosecution,
and our work throughout the Department of State and the U.S.
Government, domestically and internationally. I will also
describe our partnership with the NGO community.
Trafficking in human beings is a form of modern-day
slavery. At its core, the international trade in women and
children is about rape, abduction, coercion, violence and
exploitation in the most reprehensible ways. Although this is
sometimes characterized as a women's issue, it is, in fact, a
global issue involving human rights, economics, migration,
transnational crime, labor, and public health. It is estimated
that there are over 1 million women and children trafficked
every year, over 50,000 into the United States.
Although this hearing focuses on the sex industry, it is
clear that this is merely one component of trafficking.
Traffickers themselves are often engaged in more than one kind
of trade because they follow the profits. For example, we see
cases where girls are lured from villages in South Asia, and
the traffickers force some of the girls to work in domestic
servitude or in carpet weaving, while others considered more
attractive are culled out and sold to brothels. These are some
of the practical reasons why the United States did not limit
its efforts to one form of trafficking over another.
What is it that drives trafficking in women and children?
Economic desperation. Children, and girls in particular, are
pulled out of school early because of financial hardship in a
family. This enhances the likelihood they will fall into the
hands of traffickers. In many cases, victims desperate for work
are lured into trafficking schemes through false promises of
employment as teachers, factory workers, nannies, sales clerks.
They are then forced into the sex industry or domestic
servitude.
For the traffickers it is primarily about high profits and
low risk. Profits are enormous, generating billions of dollars
annually. This is now considered the third largest soft source
of profits for organized crime, behind only drugs and guns.
We are implementing our comprehensive antitrafficking
strategy in the area of prevention, protection and assistance
for victims, and prosecution and enforcement against
traffickers. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has made the
issue of trafficking a priority. We have seen how powerful it
is to have the American Secretary of State raise this issue
with heads of government and her fellow foreign ministers. She
has used her role as Chair of this Interagency Council to
mobilize a strong governmentwide response.
As a result of her meetings with several world leaders and
in several international arenas, we have developed concrete
partnerships, advancing all three of our strategies, all three
parts of our strategies. In Ukraine, we have economical
alternative programs for victims. We have seen some results,
and there is new legislation that has been enacted. With Italy
and the Holy See, we are learning from them about protection
for victims. With Finland, we are collaborating on prevention
in the Baltics. The U.S. and the Philippines will launch a
regional initiative in March 2000 in Manila.
We also have several multilateral initiatives. The U.S.,
led by the State Department Bureau of International Narcotics
and Law Enforcement and my colleague Jim Puleo, are leading
U.N. Negotiations on a protocol as part of a transnational
organized crime convention. This will be an international
instrument of cooperation.
As my principal deputy, Anita Botti testified at your June
Helsinki Commission hearing, the OSCE is proving to be an
excellent forum in which to address trafficking. Your
leadership has helped to put this issue high on the OSCE
agenda.
In many countries, we are using law enforcement training
to, among other things, protect victims. I present to you today
training manuals and brochures that have been developed by the
Department of State. There are other brochures as well and
manuals that have been developed by the Department of Justice.
Mr. Chairman, the issue of trafficking first came to my
attention through the advocacy of NGO's in the United States
and overseas NGO's, who have been strong advocates. They have
courageously convened forums and produced moving documentaries
to tell the stories. At the Vital Voices, Women in Democracy
Conference in Vienna in July 1997, we met networks of NGO's
working under very difficult circumstances in the former Soviet
Union and here in the United States. We heard from Ukrainian
grandmothers who told us in tears of their anguish when young
women from their villages were tricked into trafficking
schemes.
I would like to affirm our intention to continue a close
partnership with NGO's as we move forward. Our partnership with
the NGO community over the past 2 years has been open and
transparent. We conduct quarterly briefings at the State
Department on a range of issues, including trafficking.
My colleague Harold Koh has discussed our views on
trafficking in detail. I would like to add that the
Administration is looking forward to working with Congress to
put a piece of legislation that will institutionalize all of
our work in place.
We have aggressively led the U.S. Government response in
combating trafficking and protecting its victims. Mr. Chairman,
we want to work with you and Members of the Committee to do
more. We must get the world's attention to achieve a global
consensus as we head into the 21st century that trafficking,
modern-day slavery, is unacceptable.
Thank you.
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much, Ms. Loar, for your
excellent statement and for the good work you do on behalf of
those who are abused in this fashion. I look forward to working
with you and Secretary Koh and others within the Administration
and my friends on this panel.
Mr. Smith. Just a few opening questions, and then I will
yield to my colleagues for any questions they may have.
If we look at the issue as Secretary Koh or you pointed
out, prevention, prosecution, protection, using that as a
backdrop as we ought to, are we truly preventing, are we truly
prosecuting to the greatest extent possible? Are we providing
protection for the victims?
When you look at the competing bills that are on the table,
it would seem to me that even a cursory look, but certainly a
more detailed look, would suggest that we are not doing all
that we can, and, just when you come to the sanctions that are
contained in the bills--and I would ask you if you could on the
record or perhaps get back to us, indicate whether or not the
Administration would support the life imprisonment that we are
seeking in this. U.S. Attorneys, as we all know, all have
prosecutorial discretion, and they get to pick, to a very large
extent, based on their mix of what they feel ought to be done
in their area, of course looking for advice and guidance from
headquarters, so to speak, as to what they ought to be really
focusing on.
We certainly made drugs in this Nation a high priority, and
some of the results, particularly in terms of interdiction, are
very promising, but it is an ongoing problem. As you pointed
out, Ms. Loar, it is No. 3. I have heard No. 2. But wherever it
is, it is really high up in terms of the high profits, low
risks about which you spoke of.
If the Russian or the Ukrainian or any other Mafia and
their counterparts here in the U.S. feel that they are facing a
potential slap on the wrist that someone who is deceived into
getting into a sweatshop situation, which are horrific--and we
have had hearings here, we have had four on the whole issue of
child labor and the abuse. I have had five bills myself that I
have introduced, one of which passed the House. Regrettably it
did not make it over on the Senate side. We have worked to beef
up the ILO contributions. So I really believe that is an area
for an all-out assault to try to mitigate that problem, if not
eliminate it.
But when you get to this tidal wave--we are facing a
hurricane right now, and people are getting ready for a
difficult situation. We have a tidal wave that probably could
not have been anticipated by anyone in Russia or the Ukraine
especially where these Mafiosos have stepped in through
intimidation, through high profits, and they are just
exploiting the daylights out of these young girls and boys and
young women, and it calls for an extraordinary response.
When we start getting convictions in my area, in your old
area, New York city, metropolitan New Jersey, Philadelphia and
all of the major centers for this exploitation, we will then
begin to say crime doesn't pay. If we go with the Wellstone
bill and Slaughter bill, and we are talking about a maximum of
10 years, they will look askance when they say this is not a
priority with the U.S. Government or with the Congress, which
is why I think our central core of this legislation is that we
have got to throw the book at them.
I would hope that if you would, if you could relay whether
or not you would support--as you know we have a tier each with
fraud or deception, but also with girls under the age of 14, it
is assumed that those who commit crimes against those women and
force them to be raped each and every day, they get life
imprisonment or up to life imprisonment, and for those 14, 18
they could get up to 15 years.
So you know, we do recognize for anyone, if there is a 13-
year-old being--and as I think you said, Secretary Koh--they
are increasingly being used because they might not have
sexually transmitted diseases or AIDS. So they are of a higher
premium. All the more reason why our response has to be all the
more severe in terms of certain punishment.
When we start putting these people away, I think we are
going to put a real dent in these operations, and hopefully as
we saw, and Tom Tancredo helped out on this big time when we
were in St. Petersburg, hopefully we will also see the other
Western powers who are the destination points for these abused
women, children, they too will pick up the gauntlet and really
run with it and the baton.
Let me conclude and yield to you for an answer, that unless
we punish sex traffickers more than just a labor law violation,
we will not stop this. Again, this is no cast on the Clinton
Administration or any previous one. This is something that,
again, I don't think anyone could have anticipated. All of us
had extremely high hopes for Russia which have not been
realized and probably will not be realized in the foreseeable
future. So extraordinary crimes call for extraordinary
responses.
One final footnote. What got me the most, and I think got
all of us, and John Shadduck and others, Secretary Koh, your
predecessor, the most about the killing and the ethnic
cleansing in Bosnia was, one, the mass murders, but also the
use of rape as a means of statecraft, of trying to demoralize
the ethnic Bosnians, the orthodox--the Muslims, I should say,
by raping and destroying. Here we have it being done for
profit, and, when we were in--and Tom heard the lady from
MiraMed, Dr. Engel, tell us that the average woman now
fetches--and I hate that word, but that is the word that was
used--$24,000 in this process to get into an exploitation and
rape in a brothel against her will, $24,000, and that is just
the beginning, and then she becomes a money marker for these
bums as time goes on.
Life imprisonment, does the Administration support that?
Can you support it?
Ms. Loar. Mr. Chairman, let me say that we agree with you
that the bad guys are way ahead of this, way ahead of us
because the profits are so enormous, and we agree that
penalties must be strengthened to reflect the severity of the
crime. This is part of our Administration review of proposals
on the best way to address this. I can't give you a definitive
answer now, but this is under review.
Mr. Smith. I do hope, because then the U.S. attorneys in
any subsequent Administration will have their marching orders,
and they also will self-select and will pick out those cases
and go after these people. It should not be left to the whim or
caprice of the U.S. Attorney who says, we are going to get 2
years out of this. Life is for drugs, why don't we do it?
Mr. Koh. Mr. Chairman, if I could address the underlying
thrust of the question, I think there are many other points
that you made just now both about the nature and the scope of
the problem with which we obviously agree. I think that we in
the Administration have been working hard on an approach that
combines reporting, prevention, prosecution, and protection.
The big issue, should, from our perspective, is not whether
private traffickers get stiff sentences, which, of course, we
think they should. We think you should treat them as they are,
as criminals. Nor do we deny that this needs to be publicized
and the facts need to be gotten out. Also, we do believe that
protection for those who have been the victims, particularly by
the granting of special visas, is an appropriate way to begin
to address the protection problem.
The question, though, as Representative McKinney has
pointed out, is to what extent ought the problem can be
addressed, by a new layer to a bureaucracy that is already
fragmented on the issue of human rights, very strapped with
regard to the work that it is already doing and with the use of
a mandatory sanctions regime. With regard to governments,
governments may not be the core factor or only one of many
factors in this complex problem. Many of them are working in a
cooperative effort to try to address the problem through
developing an emerging international regime.
Those are the issues on which we express hesitation.
Although we are well aware that the International Religious
Freedom Act combined elements, as I tried to define and set
forth in our testimony, what may be an appropriate solution in
one area may not be an appropriate solution for a different
kind of problem.
Mr. Smith. Let me just ask you, Secretary Koh, you
mentioned being strapped. We are trying to beef up the number
of people, personnel that would be deployed or designated to
work under your bureau. I do think if it is a matter of
personnel, we need to be upping the ante in terms of more
people so that this issue could be prosecuted more effectively
to help those women.
In terms of the ``mandatory sanctions'', I think it should
be underscored in the record that there is a very generous
waiver. This could be more closely compared to the
International Narcotics Control Act of 1986, which may be a
very difficult pill for the Administration to swallow each
year, particularly vis-a-vis Mexico, but it does at least get
the attention of the governments in question. Since it would
apply to every government, those that are transiting countries
as well as those that are originating countries would all be
looked at under the same microscope. So in terms of just moving
operations, it is less likely if all countries are being looked
at in the same way, especially when we are in ascendancy mode
with regard to the seriousness of this issue. It is bad and
getting worse, rather than the other way around. I think it
calls for extraordinary responses.
You did mention it often, the idea that these sanctions are
mandatory. There is also this very generous national interest
waiver, and we are trying to provide several arrows in the
quiver of the Clinton Administration and any subsequent
Administration, to say the U.S. Government is so serious about
this that when it comes to nonhumanitarian aid, we want your
attention. What are you doing? These are your daughters.
When I was in Russia, I met and talked to the Duma speaker
and to the Ukrainians and others. They were in denial that this
is even happening in their own countries. I said, these are
your daughters, these are people that you should be putting
sandbags around, to protect them. They just dismissed it as,
``Not here, certainly not to the extent that you are talking
about.''
So either there is complicity, or there is denial occurring
there, and one good way to get their attention is to say here
are some more arrows in your quiver, Mr. President there is an
escape hatch. You have all these things on the table. You can
decide to use them or not in order to get an effective outcome.
Mr. Koh. Mr. Chairman, I think my point with regard to our
human rights policy, is--and I have made this from the first
time I appeared before this Committee in January after the
U.S.-China human rights dialogue--we adopt an inside-outside
approach, which means we use all of the tools available, both
diplomatic persuasion and various forms of external pressure,
to try to bring about improvement in human rights conditions.
So certainly sanctions are part of that package of tools.
What we are saying here is we have those arrows in our
quiver already. Our need here is not so much for additional
arrows that on the one hand would be made mandatory and then
waived in a process that would consume a lot of bureaucratic
energy. Our need is for greater capacity for our existing
mechanisms which are seizing the problem and focused on the
issue. We are eager to work on it. One of the worst-case
scenarios we could envision would be a whole new set of
mandates unaccompanied by the resources. Then we would have a
situation in which we are doing all of our work less well
rather than bringing the kind of targeted approach to bear that
we know that we all want.
Ms. Loar. Mr. Chairman, if I might take a look at the
sanctions issue from my personal experience in raising this
with other governments and the experience of my boss Secretary
Albright. I think we have created an environment where
countries are willing to come forward and ask for help. I have
seen this in a number of countries where they clearly have this
problem. They are ashamed of it, and they are willing to
acknowledge it, and this has started some of the relationships
we have that involves very in-depth programs of economic
alternatives and training for the border police, fraud
training, and anticorruption training. What I have seen in
other experiences on other issues is that when a sanction
regime is in place, countries clam up. They do not want to work
together. They are afraid of being accused of something, and I
have seen that with Secretary Albright raising this, offering
help in a way that treats the countries as if they want the
help, and then they do.
We have really made some progress on this. We obviously
have much more to go, much further to go, but it is more than
the issue of personnel. I think we also want resources to
address this. We have asked for 30 million more in INL training
for narcotics and law enforcement. We are looking at a number
of prevention programs. Our concern is that a sanctions climate
will back-pedal, take us away from the environment where we can
raise this in OSEAN meetings and OECD meetings and OSCE
meetings. The model you are working toward and that you put in
in OSCE is one that encourages cooperation. The people have to
open up for it and have to say they want it, and I think we
have that climate. If we have been working on this for 10
years, then let us take a look to see if sanctions are
necessary, but at this point it is too new, and it is too
involving, I think, to lay these on at this point.
Mr. Smith. Gary Haugen is going to be testifying, the
president of the International Justice Mission, and I would
just like to read one paragraph from his testimony and ask you
to respond. He points out on page 4, ``As it turns out U.S.
Policy toward a country could have a powerful effect upon the
priorities of a Nation's most senior authorities, the
authorities who sit on top of local law enforcement's chains of
command. Here it must be observed that these public officials
will move an issue from the good idea column into the urgent
priority column only when they think something bad will happen
if they don't. This is why senior government authorities may be
pushed to the point of making forced prostitution an urgent
priority through a sense that something bad is going to happen
in their relationship with the U.S. Government if they don't.''
Again, carrots and sticks.
He has certainly done yeoman's work on this issue, as you
well know. Look at President Habibie. I mean, it was a
nonstarter that the international peacekeepers would be
allowed, but when government-to-government, military-to-
military was not just threatened but was cutoff or suspended,
it certainly got Wiranto's and everyone's attention in the
chain of command.
We are talking about tools. They don't have to be used, but
they are there to be used, and there is enough warning, enough
of a shot across the bow that they are there that you are less
likely to use them, I would submit, and I take your point. I am
a great believer in cooperation, in trying to persuade, but I
can tell you both our personnel in St. Petersburg talked about
how they had met with brick walls when raising this issue with
the Russians, and the Russians themselves that we met with,
Duma members, including the speaker, were in denial or
something worse when I raised it with them and when members of
our delegation raised it, and the Ukrainians laughed. One of
their delegation heads laughed and said, ``prostitutes,'' as if
to say ``who cares about them.'' Even if they are it in
voluntarily, we should care about it, but when it is forced,
and we are talking about rape now, I think it ought to be at
the highest priority. I yield.
Mr. Koh. Congressman, the question is what is the best
approach given the resources we have. Here, obviously, our
overriding request is for full funding of the Department's
budget so that we can address these questions and give them and
other human rights issues the attention they deserve. We are
convinced that a trickle down approach which imposes sanctions
at the top that eventually works down to local officials which
then may or may not impact on the incentives of private
traffickers who are moving their operations across borders is
not necessary the best way to go. It may well be, and our view
is that these sanctions are available. The information is
available. The tools that you are proposing to give us we
believe that we already have, and the question is how do we
mobilize those resources best to approach the problem.
Our concern, and I think it is one that Representative
McKinney noted, is that the bureaucratic apparatus may end up
blunting the effectiveness of our approach, particularly when
we are searching for cooperation among countries who are
serving as transit, receiving or source countries. Does
unilateral sanctions being imposed against any of those
actually promote the cooperation we are trying to develop?
Mr. Smith. I thank you.
Ms. McKinney.
Ms. McKinney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You can correct me
if I am wrong on this, but it seems interesting to me that the
Assistant Secretary in his testimony talks about not having
sufficient capacity to absorb the additional requirements of
this language, but if I can recall correctly, we boosted funds
for the Bureauin the American Embassy Security Act, and the
State Department fought us each step of the way. So now my
conclusion at that time was that the area of jurisdiction of
Assistant Secretary Koh was just not important to this
particular State Department. Now, without this legislation, how
can we be assured that this issue and issues of democracy,
human rights and labor issues in general will be an important
consideration in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy?
Mr. Koh. Representative McKinney, if I had drawn that
conclusion, I wouldn't be in this job anymore. My view is that
these are critical issues that are critically important to the
Secretary who has expressed her commitment both on human rights
issues centrally and on trafficking issues.
I think you put it well when you said in your opening
remarks that this is an issue which involves human rights,
democracy and labor, and it ought to be addressed in the
context of all of those issues.
The question is raised by your inquiry is to what extent
can those parts of the U.S. Government that already have a
mandate, focus and an interest in the issue bring that energy
to bear in the way that we all like? Is creating yet another
office, another layer of bureaucracy, the best way to approach
the question? Is that going to give the kind of energy on the
issue that we are all looking for? Our view is that an approach
that emphasizes protection, prevention and prosecution, that
expands reporting and gives greater support to existing
resources and institutions is a better way to go.
Ms. McKinney. It just seems interesting to me that the
State Department could fight us giving you more money, and then
you come here and say that you don't have enough to meet these
additional responsibilities. It just seems that there is a
disconnect there, and I cannot understand for the life of me
why this State Department would fight giving more money to your
bureau, which is doing very important work consistent with the
values of the American people.
I believe that takes us directly to Ms. Loar's testimony
where she has indicated that there has been a lot of meetings
going on. I would like to know what the result of these
meetings has been in tangible proof that our legislative
approach is incorrect.
Ms. Loar. The meetings that have gone on, Congresswoman
McKinney, have really taken a look at how we work with other
governments, which I think was something you suggested we take
a look at, how we work in the international areas, how do we
work in our own government, and we have had some great
successes. Successes mean that governments are willing to take
this on; it means they are willing to work with us.
I use the example of the Government of Ukraine because it
is an area where so many young women are being tricked into
trafficking schemes and are being lured into leaving their
countries because of the economic situation there. Through a
series of interventions--you could call them meetings, but when
Secretary Albright sits down with the head of a government,
they are really very important meetings. When Secretary
Albright raised it with the Government of Ukraine, with Mr.
Kuchma, within a couple of days we had the Ambassador from
Ukraine in my office, we had our embassy in Ukraine working
with the Foreign Ministry. We have seen legislation passed.
In some countries we have much stronger protection against
victims. For example, we have seen this in Italy where the
Italian government is way ahead of us and has protections for
victims that we don't have. When Secretary Albright raised that
at a meeting that she had, within weeks we had visits from the
Italians sharing with us what they are doing on victims. We are
planning in the next few weeks to send over a group of American
NGO's, and if there are NGO's you would like us to consider to
part of this group, we would welcome that, and I extend that to
the Chairman as well. We are sending over American NGO's to
Italy to learn how we can as a government provide better
protection for victims.
We are working with the Government of Italy. Another thing
that came out of a meeting we had, first Secretary Albright's
meetings and the rest of us who pick up her ideas and carry
them forward, with the government of Italy was to work with the
Italian government on trafficking out of Nigeria. The Italian
government is very concerned about the number of Nigerian women
and girls, particularly young girls, who find their way through
terrible means into Italy. They are very concerned about that.
They want to stop it at the source. So our embassy in Nigeria
is working with the Italian Embassy in Nigeria to offer an
information campaign to warn off young women.
That is what we are doing with countries overseas. We have
had meetings throughout our government for the purposes of
getting our government to strengthen what we are doing. Our
Justice Department is an enormous place, almost as big as the
State Department, and the Justice Department in the areas of
the criminal area, in the Violence Against Women's office and
the Victim's Protection Office, they are all working on this
issue with us. That is the way things work, and I do think that
by raising the issue, by having our Secretary of State bring it
up in important meetings around the world, we have seen some
results, and there is a lot more we want to do.
Ms. McKinney. Thank you.
Ms. Loar. May I also make a comment, Mr. Chairman, about
Congresswoman McKinney's earlier concern about resources and
how we get this job done. I think our Secretary of State has an
effective mechanism in place. We can never be satisfied with
the work that has been done, but in the two positions that
exist at the State Department--and we have a number of bureaus
who are represented here and who are not here working on this,
to really bring the government along. My position as senior
coordinator for international women's issues was created by
Congress to promote women's human rights in foreign policy.
That is a permanent position that allows me to work within the
State Department. The Interagency Council is a task force that
gives me authority throughout the government. So I don't think
it is a mechanism that if we haven't seen all the results we
want, I don't think it is for lack of a good mechanism within
our government. I think the bad guys are moving at a very fast
pace, and that is what we are trying to catch up with.
Mr. Smith. Thank you, and thank you, Ms. McKinney.
Before yielding, we tried to double the amount of money. As
a matter of fact, our--both yours and mine, as chief cosponsor
and principal sponsor--bill is currently in conference. We
would provide $15 million earmarked for Secretary Koh's bureau,
which is a doubling of what resources are there this fiscal
year, but still, it is only one-half of a percent of the total
State Department budget. So we are trying to provide sufficient
resources to you, and wherever the glitch is, whether it be OMB
or somewhere else, it is not here. In this legislation we
provide $1 million authorization for doing just this very
issue. So we are trying to match resources and authorize
sufficient resources.
Ms. McKinney. Mr. Chairman, if you would yield. If I
remember correctly, the State Department incredibly came to me
and said that they would have a problem absorbing that much
money.
Mr. Smith. And they are still opposing it in conference.
Ms. McKinney. It is absolutely ridiculous the position that
the State Department has.
Mr. Koh. Representative McKinney, The State Department's
position is that we would like our budget to be fully funded.
That is the position the President took before the VFW. It is a
major issue with regard to the conduct of our foreign policy.
We are a country which is involved around the world on almost
every conceivable issue. We are at this point an indispensable
super power. The support that we all need from the Legislative
Branche is to recognize the importance of foreign policy, as
this Committee does, and to try to support the bureaucracies we
have and help them to be as effective as possible in addressing
we can across our legislative mandate.
Mr. Smith. It is also a question, if the gentlelady would
yield, of allocation, and we do believe human rights is an
allocation that should be second to none.
I would like to yield to Mr. Tancredo.
Mr. Tancredo. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Ms. Loar, apparently from your discussion, Italy is a
country that we would not have to apply sanctions against if,
in fact--even operating under the legislation that the Chairman
has offered. Apparently, the kind of situation that exists
there in terms of the government's willingness to cooperate
would certainly suggest that that they would not be a
candidate, Italy would not be a candidate. However, there are a
number of other countries, of course, that are not looking at
this issue in the same way and a number of other nations where
I believe there is complicity on the part of the government
itself and the traffickers, because of the, first of all, great
amount of money that can be and is made in this particular
activity.
I would ask you to be very specific and tell me what would
you do to stop the trafficking from Russia, I should say, and/
or the Ukraine. But let us just focus on Russia for the time
being. Evidently since you say you had the opportunity to apply
sanctions, you have chosen not to pursue that route, and from
listening to what you said in terms of the way in which you
would deal with this issue sans sanctions, I must admit to you
I don't understand how that would possibly work in a country
where almost every level of the government is actually
participating in this, either directly, frankly, or indirectly,
by suggesting that it is really not much of an issue, it is
sort of a cultural thing, and no big deal.
When you suggest that you need 10 years to see whether your
plan works, I would tell you that I am absolutely unwilling to
wait that long to determine the effectiveness of an operation
that has heretofore been fairly ineffective, especially when
you think about the phenomenon that we were told about, and
only told about, I did not observe this, of people who run
orphanages in Russia who are paid something like $12,000 and at
that point turn over to these traffickers children. They are
told they are going on a field trip, to McDonald's or
something, and a bus comes and picks them up. You expect me to
live with that thought for 10 years while we apply this other
way of handling it. I must tell you, ma'am, it just doesn't
wash with me.
What would you do specifically to get Russia to turn around
tomorrow?
Ms. Loar. Mr. Congressman, obviously 10 years was something
off the top of my head. I don't think any of us in this room
should sit by and watch this increased phenomenon of
trafficking continue, and we are not going to.
Now a couple of things I would like with the Committee
related to what we are doing with Russia. Russia is in many
ways a very big, complex, and from a U.S. foreign policy point
of view, a sometimes frustrating country. We have, however,
made some progress through a program with the ABA, lawyers
working in Russia. There is legislation on trafficking that is
ready to be introduced by support of members of the Duma,
obviously not the people you met with when you were there. We
would welcome the opportunity when they are here in the United
States on their next visit to give you a chance to tell them of
your support. We through our embassy do that, but we would like
to do that with our Members of Congress as well, to let them
know there are Americans who are watching this carefully, and
those of you who are stepping forward and being courageous, we
are going to support you.
Now, we know that legislation is the first step. This is
one of the reasons we are here in this room today. The
implementation will be very important. We have as well through
the U.N. worked the protocol that I mentioned, which is part of
the Transnational Crime Convention, which will be an
international instrument of cooperation, which is a very
important part of it, especially when you are looking at a
country like Russia, the Russians themselves. This is a
completely different ministry and completely different part of
the government than the Duma members who are looking at this
legislation and ready to sponsor it. They cosponsored this
resolution at the U.N. asking for the protocol.
There were some who wanted to lump together trafficking and
smuggling and various other issues, but the Russian members of
this U.N. delegation asked that they could cosponsor this
resolution, and we have seen a willingness on different parts
of the Russian Government to work on it.
It clearly is not enough, and it is something we need to do
more on, and we would welcome a way of doing that. We don't
think sanctions are the way to do that at this point. We have
worked with, through our information agency and through other
exchanges--we have bought to the U.S. judges and prosecutors
and nongovernment organizations all devoted to addressing
trafficking. We brought them to the United States. We have sent
people over to help them prosecute cases there. There are a lot
of different layers and in different parts of the government,
the judicial, the executive branch and the legislative branch,
but it is clearly not enough, and we don't want to wait 10
years to see some results. We want to move it on a much faster
pace.
Mr. Tancredo. I appreciate that, and I certainly hope that
that is the case. In a way it is a little difficult to also
understand your opposition to the sanctions aspect of the
legislation when, as has been stated here several times, there
is nothing mandatory about it. The President would be given the
opportunity to provide waivers, and I don't assume for a moment
that just because we would pass such legislation he would
choose to begin adopting a provision that he thinks or you
think he already has, that is the ability to apply sanctions,
but it would certainly hopefully indicate the strong position
of the Congress of the United States if we were to have that
aspect as part of the bill.
It again goes back to the problem, I guess, that I raised
with Russia, and that is that even taking for granted that
there are members of the Duma who support the approach that you
have outlined, when the country is as fractured as this one is,
and I mean, it is hard to even describe a legislative branch or
a judicial branch, especially, in a country like Russia, it
just doesn't give me any feeling of security that they would be
able to implement something as a result of the actions taken by
the small number of members of the Duma that might look good
for the public consumption but internally does nothing,
especially when there are so many people on the take. It just
seems like a more serious approach needs to be undertaken, but
I sincerely appreciate our observations. Thank you.
Mr. Koh. Congressman, our overall approach on human rights
has been designed to use a combination of internal mechanisms
of persuasion coupled with external mechanisms of pressure,
along with international standards, to try to bring about
internal change that can lead to concrete means of addressing
these problems within the countries that we deal with. The
larger, more powerful countries are the ones on whom our
sanctions have the least impact just because they are much
stronger and bigger.
The example of Ukraine which you have talked about is one
in which we are seeing some real results on this issue. The
President has developed an intergovernmental response to
address the issue with the Government of the Ukraine. The issue
has been added to the Gore-Kuchma enforcement working group. It
has been a subject of direct discussions between our Embassy
and the Ministry of the Interior. USAID has worked with the
Government of the Ukraine on anti-trafficking issuues. USIA has
developed a whole series of programs with the Ukraine, and what
this has led to is that the Ukraine Government has passed
further legislation with regard to domestic criminalization of
sexual exploitation. In February Ukraine announced a draft
national plan that involved 20 Ministries and local
governments, international organizations, donors and local and
foreign NGO's.
We are pursuing these kinds of initiatives with a whole
range of countries, as we have discussed, and I think in the
end it is a critical part of our overall human rights strategy.
It means using external standards to lead to internal change
that might lead to meaningful attack on the problem by those
countries that are either source countries, recipient countries
or transit countries.
Mr. Smith. Thank you, Mr. Tancredo.
Ms. Lee.
Ms. Lee. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate hearing from
you both with regard to the Administration's initiatives and
strategies with regard to what you are doing now, but it seems
to me that the heat needs to be turned up. I want to ask you a
couple of questions.
First of all, how long has this country really known about
sex trafficking? Second, since this is a commercial activity,
do we have estimates of how much revenue these atrocities bring
in? I mean, is this a multimillion-dollar industry? Is it a
multibillion-dollar industry?
Finally, let me just ask you about this whole certification
issue, because drug certification has been an effective tool in
cracking down on drug trafficking in some parts of the world,
and I guess I am wondering shouldn't we be as tough on those
private sector individuals and those governments who condone
these abuses and exploitation of women and children as we are
on the whole drug trafficking issue?
Ms. Loar. Congresswoman Lee, it is an incredibly lucrative
crimal activity. It is one of the things that through our new
and very effective information-gathering resources available to
the government, we have been able to take a look at it. We
estimate it as billions of dollars in profit, which is why it
is such a tough thing to tackle, I am afraid.
As to how long our government knew about this, I was
appointed to this job in July 1996, and I was invited to a
meeting in Moscow that--this is one of the fora I mentioned
took such courage to put together--where I was invited. Our
embassy had really pushed me to come out there. They wanted me
to meet with some Members, including some Members of the
government who were very low-key about their interest and their
willingness to look at this, but at some NGO's, some groups
from throughout the former Soviet Union, and that was in the
fall.
I mentioned the Vital Voices, Women in Democracy Conference
in July 1997 in Austria where we had women leaders from Russia
and Ukraine and where we saw for the first time real networks
emerging in that part of the world, networks with people who
are working and NGO's in protection areas in Ukraine and
Russia. I don't think the enormity of it hit us until we heard
more and more from NGO groups in our meetings around the world,
and we have seen this in U.N. meetings.
I would say that our desire to take this on and to really
get the full force of our government on this came out of our
meetings with victims and hearing from people whose villages
were wiped out because girls were being sold away.
Ms. Lee. It sounds like we have just had our head in the
sand on this.
Ms. Loar. I will tell you, what we have seen is a big
increase after the fall of the former Soviet Union. It is
something I think we were all aware of and has been documented
in South Asia and Southeast Asia. I think it hit home when the
numbers coming into the United States really increased in the
last few years and when we saw more visible areas of criminal
activity in the former Soviet Union.
Ms. Lee. Mr. Chairman, may I ask one more question, please?
Let me ask you then, we have heard Nigeria, Italy, and the
Soviet Union. What are, say, the top eight countries, the top
source, transit and receiving countries as you see them?
Ms. Loar. Russia and Ukraine are certainly the top source
countries, countries of origin from the former Soviet Union. I
can't name the eight or in any particular order, but in South
Asia a country that that one of your witnesses is from today is
one of the key source countries as well, Nepal, as well as
Pakistan. In Southeast Asia, the areas of Burma and Thailand
are also sending countries. I think if you take a look at
situations where there is economic desperation and deprivation,
that is where you see families who are desperate, and families
who can't keep their girls in school, and families looking to
send their children overseas or young women looking to go
overseas to work.
Ms. Lee. Maybe we ought to look at some conditions on IMF
funding.
Mr. Koh. Congresswoman, if I may chime in, I think as
Chairman Smith pointed out in his statement before the OSCE in
July, a lot of the problem was exacerbated by the collapse of
the Soviet Union. Our bureau, the Bureau of Democracy, Human
Rights and Labor, started to report on trafficking as a
distinctive human rights phenomenon in 1993.
You asked a good question about the relationship between
this and narco-trafficking. We use a certification process for
drugs, and so why not on this as a way of turning up the heat.
I think the answer is simple, which is that what we are talking
about here is a regime of prevention and prosecution, but more
fundamentally the protection of individuals who are being
trafficked.
In the drug context you have drugs which are growing in
stationary places. They are not themselves being moved, and we
are not trying to provide them with any kinds of protection.
But the key to what we are trying to do with regard to
trafficking of human beings is to develop a protection regime,
and particularly in situations in which people are traveling
across borders and often through a variety of means, which
include fraud, et cetera. It is not as simple as knowing that
you are buying drugs and that is illegal.
What is happening here is a combination of incentives,
tricks, frauds, coercion. For that reason, as we have
suggested, religious freedom requires a certain kind of
regulatory regime. The drug process has had its own
certification process which has evolved over a period of 20
years. We think that the fight against trafficking should move
toward an international protocol and an international regime.
It deserves its own distinctive set of tools, which is what we
are already doing in the Administration approach to the
problem.
Ms. Loar. If I might just add, Congresswoman Lee, just
going further on the point that I made earlier as to how we
started looking at this. Women's human rights were not always
in the mainstream of U.S. foreign policy, and I don't think the
issue of trafficking--as it emerged, it came out of a time when
we did have leadership to take a look at this and did have
leadership of Secretary Albright to figure out how it should be
done. So it is not a long-standing issue at this level and
growing at this pace, but it has come up at a time when we do
have the leadership to address it.
Mr. Smith. Ms. Lee, thank you very much.
Mr. Faleomavaega.
Mr. Faleomavaega. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I certainly want
to thank both the members of the panel for their very
comprehensive statements this afternoon.
I would like to compliment Secretary Koh for being very
diplomatic. I was going through your statement, but you did not
leave that one final statement to the effect of the
Administration does not support H.R. 1356. Am I correct on
this, Secretary Koh?
Mr. Koh. Sorry, I didn't hear you. I left it out of the
statement, or I left it out of what?
Mr. Faleomavaega. You were very nice about saying about you
have all the different institutional means to take care of
whatever problems that come about, especially as it relates to
sex trafficking, but I was hoping perhaps that you could be
more specific and say what exactly is the Administration's
position on H.R. 1356, which is the Chairman's bill, which I
cosponsor, in addressing this very specific issue, and I was
wondering, has the Administration submitted an official
response to the bill?
Mr. Koh. There are pieces of the bill, as I said, which
provide valuable additions to working on the problem, and other
parts that we think are either redundant of what exists or in
some way counterproductive. As we frequently do, when the
Administration approaches and various congressional approaches
all address the same issue We see it as an important
opportunity to get together with Congress, and try to work out
issues on agreed-upon principles.
There are a variety of legislative proposals on the table,
and as you well know, the process of legislation is one which
means drawing from them to achieve what we think is the best
result to address the problem that we all agree ought to be
addressed.
Mr. Faleomavaega. Mr. Secretary, I thank you very much. Now
I have a much clearer picture that we will be working together,
because the concern that I have, and as I was asking my good
friend, legislative counsel here, do we have currently any U.S.
laws in the books that address this very issue of sex
trafficking? If we do, my question is, is it strong enough, is
it too weak, do we need to beef it up a little bit?
Ms. Loar. There are a number of laws on the books that
handle different parts of trafficking. There isn't anything
that we think is comprehensive enough or strong enough across
the board to address this. It wasn't a long-standing issue here
in the United States. It wasn't a long-standing issue to the
degree that it is now internationally. So we do not think there
are significant enough pieces of legislation and laws that
address this.
Mr. Faleomavaega. I noticed in your statement, Ms. Loar,
that at minimal, that nearly or well over 1 million women and
children are affected by sex trafficking. Out of this, 50,000
of those women and children are affected here in the United
States. In doing so, what does this give you? It gives me the
impression that 950,000 women and children out in the world, we
have got some very serious problems with foreign countries.
Apparently, we are dealing with 50,000 that come to our
country, but what are we going to do with the 950,000 women and
children that are being affected in other countries of the
world?
I think this is the reason why we raised the question of
sanctions. I duly understand and appreciate the fact that some
of these countries don't have the resources, but if we don't be
very aggressive on this very issue, then what do we do, just
let the 950,000 go?
Ms. Loar. We are overwhelmed by the number, and we do think
it is a tragic number and a number that is increasing all the
time. But what we are doing is to work with those countries
that are the countries of source, the countries of origin, the
countries of transit, and in some cases, the countries come to
us and ask for help. In other cases, our Secretary raises it
because she sees an opening, she sees a willingness to take
this on.
There are a number of countries where there this is a long-
standing issue, but they have never had the modern tools of
technology, the Internet and open borders to facilitate this
criminal activity. So in some cases it has really crept up on
countries. They have not seen this coming, but when they do, in
more cases than not, they want to work with us, and they want
our help.
The United Stated is not alone in caring about this issue
and in responding as a government at the very high level. We
have partners in this in the Nordic countries, in the European
Union. Serious funding countries with significant overseas
assistance programs have come forward to work with us on this,
and we are going to continue to do that.
Mr. Faleomavaega. I think the Chairman, as well as the
gentlelady from Georgia, raised this issue previously. I get
the strong impression from both of your testimonies that the
Administration has the institutional means to do it, but at the
same time sounds like you don't have the tools to do it with.
You don't have the handles, you don't have the bullets, no
triggers to pull or not enough resources. Am I getting a double
signal here? Are you certain you have got the means to do the
work? With all due respect, my personal admiration for
Secretary Koh is going to be in this position, come next year
or some other time, maybe we won't have another Secretary Koh
that is as aggressive and knowledgable about human rights
violation and issues. So where do we go from there? That is the
reason why this proposed bill, I think, has a lot of merit, and
I would certainly hope that our friends in the Administration
would be supportive of this effort.
Mr. Koh. Congresswoman, before I was a bureaucrat I was a
professor focusing on issues of international law and issues of
international regime-building, which is the area that is the
solution to this problem. We have a transnational problem that
has to be addressed by global cooperation, reinforced by
treaties, protocols, national laws, changes of institutions,
and by aggressive diplomacy, as well as aggressive advocacy. It
is that process of building that global regime which is the
process that we are trying to do now.
Our position is that we need more resources to help us with
the tools. The question is, does another layer of unilateral
sanctions, mandatory or waiverable, which would be used against
those who are trying to participate in the regime, serve as an
additional tool that we should use?
Mr. Faleomavaega. I know my time is running. Has the
Administration taken any initiatives to call for an
international convention of countries to agree on this very
egregious--it is a multibillion-dollar industry. Has the
Administration taken the initiative to do this very thing that
you are talking about?
Ms. Loar. Yes.
Mr. Koh. There is a protocol.
Mr. Faleomavaega. Where are we at with this protocol at
this time?
Mr. Koh. We are working on the process of negotiating it.
Ms. Loar. I would second what Assistant Secretary Koh has
said. The protocol is a very powerful instrument, and our chief
negotiator is right here, Jim Puleo. He is dying to tell you
the kind of progress that has been made on that. It is a forum.
The U.N. Has taken this seriously. The United States is taking
the lead on this, but we had a lot of partners on this.
Mr. Faleomavaega. How long have we doing this protocol
proposal?
Ms. Loar. How long has it been in negotiation? In January
of this year, the U.S. introduced it with Russia as cosponsor.
Mr. Faleomavaega. So we just started this year then.
Ms. Loar. Within this Transnational Crime Convention, which
is a particular instrument to look at how to combat crime
internationally, the U.S. has decided to take a look at
trafficking separately, not to have it hidden within other
areas or have it buried under some other area.
Mr. Faleomavaega. I think my question is specific. The
protocol is specifically of sex trafficking; am I correct?
Ms. Loar. It is on trafficking in all its forms.
Mr. Faleomavaega. Can we just look at sex trafficking just
on its own, or do we have to put all other trafficking
together?
Ms. Loar. Our view is that it is very hard to separate one
from the other.
Mr. Faleomavaega. My problem is that once we put them all
there together, then we find problems with priority. Then if
you have got 10 different trafficking issues, where does sex
trafficking come into focus, or does it focus at all?
Ms. Loar. It does cover both. It does include that in it,
Mr. Congressman.
I would just say going back to your issue of resources, as
the lead in the U.S. Government on this, I certainly would
welcome more resources to the issue of trafficking, but I don't
think that the fact that this issue hasn't been resolved around
the world is from a lack of commitment from this
Administration. We have seen the increase in this as we learn
more about the issue and get more estimates from our community
and the government to provide this kind of information to us.
In 1995, we spent over $7 million around the world. Next year
we are moving it up to 20 million out of our foreign assistance
budget at the State Department. That doesn't count the work and
the programs that come out of Department of Labor and the
Department of Justice and other communities within the U.S.
Government that spend very significant resources on this issue,
but we haven't solved it, clearly.
Mr. Faleomavaega. I note in your statement the three
pillars of U.S. policy on sexual trafficking on the question of
prevention, the question of prosecution and the question of
protection. My question is, what is the current status of our
laws that addresses these three specific issues domestically?
Are our current laws strong enough to take care of these three
areas?
Ms. Loar. No, they are not.
Mr. Faleomavaega. That is one question. The second question
is--they are not? Thank you very much.
The second question is, in terms of prevention, prosecution
and protection, where is the Administration's position in terms
of our external problems in dealing with those countries that
either don't care at all, or if the proponents, they don't have
the resources, that maybe we could help them, give them the
resources?
Ms. Loar. As far as our domestic legislation is strong
enough, it is not, and that is why we have worked--our
Department of Justice----.
Mr. Faleomavaega. Could you please offer your
recommendations on behalf of the Administration to our Chairman
and see exactly how we can beef up our current laws so that we
make sure that these 50,000 victims, women and children, are
going to be addressed aggressively by our policymakers as well
as our prosecutors? Then maybe the other 950,000 women and
children, we will have to address that issue in some other way.
Ms. Loar. We will continue do that.
Mr. Faleomavaega. Thank you.
Mr. Koh. Congressman, might I add that with regard to the
question of whether the laws strong enough to protect the
victims, that is where we favor visa relief for victims of
trafficking. Are they strong enough with regard to punishing
private traffickers, we agree that stiffer sanctions are
appropriate.
Where we are disagreeing is with regard to the question of
whether a mandatory sanctions regime and a special office is
the best way to go. There are good things in this bill, and
there are things that are not so useful in terms of what we are
trying to accomplish. We will submit comments for the record
with regard to the revised draft protocol. A convention for the
suppression of traffic in persons was entered into force in
1951, but as the scale of the problem has gotten much worse in
the 1990's, there has been a new international treaty-making
effort. The last negotiating session was just concluded on July
9, 1999. We will submit for the record both the text of that
protocol and a description of how that process is moving.
Mr. Faleomavaega. Appreciate that.
[The information referred to appears in the appendix.]
Mr. Faleomavaega. Mr. Chairman, I know my time is up, but I
do appreciate some of the things that we have taken in our
dialogue, and I really do look forward to working together with
the Administration to resolve this. This isn't just 10 years.
This problem has been ongoing for the last hundred years, and I
think it is time we ought to take care of it. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
Mr. Smith. Mr. Hilliard.
Mr. Hilliard. I have no questions.
Mr. Smith. Thank you.
Just to conclude, unless any other Members have some final
questions, we could ask questions until the sun sets and still
not be done, and we will submit a number for the record, but I
do have a few follow-up questions I would just like to pose.
I would like to focus on the area of providing protection
for the women so they do not face immediate deportation, both
for their own benefit to avoid going back to a retribution
situation, and also so that they might then be available to
become part of a prosecution or at least evidence gathering.
The Wellstone bill, although it tries to parrot us on some of
the things, we all know the genesis of it. We spread our bill
around all over the Hill, and that bill came up pretty much as
a weakened version of our bill. It would only provide a 3-month
temporary residency type of deal for those women, and it would
seem to me, just standing in their shoes for 1 second, that if
I am just looking at a 3-month stay, and maybe it will be
extended, maybe I can apply for asylum, maybe, I am going to be
very hard-pressed to say, I am going to now cooperate. You
already have a potential mistrust of authority figures to begin
with. They may wonder, for example why New York City police are
any different than the police in their own countries. They
don't know who talk to who and where there might be collusion.
So our bill would provide a more durable protection for those
women where they could become permanent residents, and we would
provide a mechanism for that.
Again, we are erring on the side of protection, rather than
being less than generous and skimping in what we provide for
these women. They have already been through hell and back. Why
not provide some safe haven?
Can the Administration support our language, or does it
have a recommendation that would perhaps be better? We would
like to strengthen it further if you have a way of doing that.
I would yield to either of our two distinguished witnesses.
Mr. Koh. We prefer to submit comments on the bill as a
whole, but I do think with regard to the protection regime, you
make an extremely good point. The case that I worked on as a
private attorney regarding the hearing-impaired Mexican workers
who gave testimony against the people who had trafficked them
ended up with them eventually getting immigration relief, but
it was through a process of recommendation through the Justice
Department prosecutorial forces that went over to the INS . It
may well be that a scheme that relies on a legislative
protection as well as what has been called the T visa is a more
appropriate means to deal with that, as well as more fully
elaborated means of protection. But the focus on protection is
an important one that I think we strongly favor in all our
approaches on the issue.
Ms. Loar. Mr. Chairman, I have just confirmed that the
Department of Justice does have its own language developing in
areas of protection. It is one of the areas that they have
stepped forward on. They are working on that.
Mr. Smith. I hope they can provide that.
Ms. Loar. We will provide information on that.
Mr. Smith. As soon as possible if that can done. Maybe this
would be for the record, but we need to know to make an
informed decision and also to persuade our Members, House and
Senate, as to why this cries out for reform. The number of
prosecutions, what kind of prison sentences the international
pimps are getting, if there is any kind of guidance that has
been provided to the U.S. attorneys in terms of how prioritized
this is in the arsenal or in the list of bad behaviors that are
out there, if you could provide us with that. I am not sure if
you have that now, but that would be very helpful.
Ms. Loar. We will provide that, and the Department of
Justice has done training manuals that our Interagency team has
worked very hard on to help prosecutors prosecute cases. So we
will provide that for the record and followup.
Mr. Smith. I appreciate that. We provided money in this for
aid for foreign shelters, also for domestic shelters, under the
auspices of HHS. We are not sure if $10 million is right. We
are not sure if $20 million is right. I always believe you need
to justify need with resources to marry up the two. Any
insights you could provide into what could be done with that
money so it is used effectively, again erring on the side of
protecting the women, mostly women, although there are some
boys and men that are involved who are abused, but most of
these are women and young girls. I would be glad to hear if you
or my colleagues have any further comments on that.
Again, I want to throw the book at all traffickers, but
there are gradations of egregious behavior, and rape is at the
top. It seems to me that the other aspects of going after the
traffickers are fine, so long as they are in addition to but
not in lieu of these penalties I have serious concerns about
the Wellstone-Slaughter bill because it is seen as being in
place of. So in other words, no life imprisonment, up to a 10-
year ceiling max per charge for those who commit these crimes,
and again, we will get fewer of those folks in the end, and we
will have less protection for the women.
Again, not to overstate, but Gary Haugen's statement when
he talked about ``good idea'' versus ``urgent priority''
abroad, we all know how that works. I have been in Congress 19
years. I know when you get the attention and when you are just
going through talking points, and they are sitting there
listening, and, it is not as high of a priority that it could
be possibly.
Again, not to belabor the point, but I think at least
having the possibility of sanctions looming would help--whether
it be ``good cop, bad cop'', phrase it any way you want,
``Congress made me do it.'' It does give, I think, any
Administration more clout rather than less.
In terms of the office, and I said this yesterday to a
group, and I didn't elaborate on it much, and I won't now, but
there are so many different offices. We need a FEMA. We have
got a hurricane coming up our coast, FEMA goes into action. As
Ms. Loar pointed out so well, this is a relevantly recent
explosion. Mr. Faleomavaega, as you know, this was going on for
how many years, but now organized crime has said, hey, this is
a major profit-maker for us, and we can exploit the poverty of
these young women to the extreme, and then they are throwaways
when they have been abused in this fashion. So we need a FEMA
office, so to speak, to stop this rape. So I just encourage you
to keep that in mind.
Mr. Koh. Congressman, we appreciate the authorization, but
if the appropriation doesn't follow, we have the obligation to
establish and run new office and pay for it out of our present
budget.
Mr. Smith. I would also ask that the Administration then
make requests for it, like on the religious persecution bill.
Mr. Wolf, who was one of the prime originators of that
legislation, and our Subcommittee, which took the lead in
moving that legislation, were very discouraged when the money
wasn't asked for. So it is a two-way street. I don't blame you
or Ms. Loar for some of this. I think some of this is OMB. I am
not sure where it happens, but we can be team players on this,
I think.
Ms. Loar. We thank you for that spirit of cooperation. We
need that as we move ahead.
Mr. Smith. Thank you. Any further comments?
I want to thank our very two distinguished witnesses who
are spending their lives trying to do good for others, and I
look forward to working with you in the near future.
I would like to invite our second panel to the witness
table, and I would also like to remind our broadcast
journalists in particular, as we previously discussed, if they
could be sure not to broadcast identifiable images of Ms.
Bhattarai, because she still faces some dangers of retribution
for her testimony. We would note for the record, as I think one
of my colleagues pointed out earlier, at least one of our other
witnesses or victims decided not to come out of fear as well.
So even at this point, we are still dealing with people who are
willing to come forward, but have second thoughts about it, and
take their names off the witness list because of that fear. It
just underscores what we are talking about.
I would like to begin by introducing our witnesses in the
order that they will testify. Ms. Anita Sharma Bhattarai is a
survivor of sexual trafficking. Drugged and abducted from her
home in Nepal, she was transported to a brothel in Bombay,
India. Since her release, Ms. Bhattarai's testimony has
resulted in the release of six other forced prostitutes and the
incarceration of sex traffickers.
Second, we will be hearing from Laura Lederer, who is the
Director of The Protection Project of the Women and Public
Policy Program at the Harvard University Kennedy School of
Government. A graduate of the University of Michigan and the
University of San Francisco Law School, she has worked and
written on human rights and exploitation issues for over 25
years and has provided a tremendous wealth of information to
this Subcommittee as well as to the Commission on Security
Cooperation in Europe, which I also chair, on what is going on,
and what the responses ought to be to this rising tide of
exploitation.
Finally, Gary Haugen is the President of the International
Justice Mission, an international human rights agency that
addresses cases of human rights abuses referred by workers in
faith-based ministries around the world. An honors graduate of
Harvard University and the University of Chicago Law School,
Mr. Haugen previously served as a Senior Trial Attorney with
the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department and as
the officer in charge of the U.N.'s genocide investigation in
Rwanda.
Mr. Smith. Ms. Bhattarai, if you could begin your
testimony.
STATEMENT OF ANITA SHARMA BHATTARAI, TRAFFICKING SURVIVOR,
NEPAL
Ms. Bhattarai. [The following testimony was delivered
through an interpreter.] My name is Anita Sharma Bhattarai. I
am 28 years old, and I am from Nepal. One day I boarded the bus
to go to Daman where I had to collect some money, and I met one
man and woman who were on the bus and who also offered me a
banana. After eating the banana, I felt very dizzy, and I told
them, and they gave me some medicine and water, and after
taking that medicine I became unconscious.
When I gained consciousness, I didn't know where I was.
There were long buses--that she is referring to as trains--long
buses, and then I asked her where I was, and why I was brought
there. Then they told me not to make any sound, not to scream,
because they had strapped hashish, drugs, around my waist, so I
couldn't even call the police or just shout for help because I
was so scared. I couldn't return from there, and so I just
listened to them, and he told me--the man told me that we were
going to Bombay, and that would take about 5 days, and after
reaching there he would sell the hashish, and we would get
$20,000 rupees each.
After reaching Bombay, one lady came and met us at the
station. The man told that lady to take me with her to her
place, and that man also assured me that he would come and pick
me up at 4 o'clock in the evening, and so I went along with
that lady, who was called Renu Lama. So at Bombay I went with
her to her house.
Upon reaching the house, I then realized that it was a
brothel, but later on in the evening, when men started coming
in, I got to know that it was a brothel, and they forced me
into prostitution after that, and on the 3rd day I had to take
in my first client. I wasn't at all ready to do it, but that
man stripped off my clothes, and he also went and told the
brothel owners that I wasn't complying to his wishes. The
brothel owners came and hit me with the iron--metal rods and
also slapped me, and so I had to entertain him, but since I was
aware of the diseases that the girls have been telling me also
in the brothel, so I also told him to put on condoms. So that
was the first time I was in prostitution, and after that I had
to take in like about 2 to 4 men per day.
I am telling the story in a very short way, but it will
take a really long time if I have to go on and on. But from the
day I entered there, I just started thinking of running away
from there, and 1 day I succeeded, and with the help of Bob, I
have been able to also come here and share my stories with you
so that you could also help other girls like me who are still
in brothel. I am really proud to see that I have been able to
help about 7 to 8 girls with the help of Bob from IJM.
Thank you.
Mr. Smith. Thank you for your testimony and for your
courage and your willingness to relay your story to this
Subcommittee and, by extension, to the rest of the Congress. We
are indebted to you, and we will do everything we can, I can
assure you, to try to stop this horrible practice.
[The statement of Ms. Bhattarai appears in the appendix.]
Mr. Smith. Dr. Lederer.
Ms. Bhattarai. I am ever ready to help you to do anything
if you can help other girls.
Mr. Smith. Dr. Lederer.
STATEMENT OF LAURA J. LEDERER, RESEARCH DIRECTOR AND PROJECT
MANAGER, THE PROTECTION PROJECT, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, KENNEDY
SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT
Ms. Lederer. Mr. Chairman, Members of the Subcommittee, it
is a pleasure to be here. I am Laura Lederer, Director of The
Protection Project at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
University, and I am happy to share some of our preliminary
findings.
The purpose of The Protection Project is to build a
comprehensive data base of laws and related materials on the
commercial sexual exploitation of women and children. We are
documenting the laws on child prostitution, child pornography
and prostitution and surrounding activities, including pimping,
pandering, procuring, maintaining a brothel, corruption of a
minor, forced prostitution, trafficking, slave trade,
kidnapping, rape and other laws in all 220 countries and
territories worldwide.
We are also documenting the age of majority, the age of
consent to sexual relations, legal age for marriage and other
ages relevant to commercial sexual exploitation of women and
children, and we are examining the range of penalties, defenses
to the charges, sentencing patterns, extraterritoriality and
extradition treaties, law enforcement capability, victim
assistance programs that are government-mandated, and other
related matters. The collection of the data is taking place
through a series of questionnaires, and the preliminary data
base will be complete by the end of this year.
I am going to talk a little bit about what trafficking is
by telling the stories of some women who have been trafficked.
Trafficking is a global human rights problem of which the
majority of victims are women and children. Let me illustrate
what trafficking is by telling you Lydia's story, an
amalgamation of several true stories of women and girls who
have been trafficked in the Eastern European area in recent
years. Lydia was 16 and hanging around with friends on the
streets, and here you can fill in the name of any of the sender
countries, the Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, and
the Czech Republic, when they were approached by an older
beautifully dressed woman who befriended them and told them
that they were so nice-looking that she could get them part-
time jobs in modeling.
She took them to dinner. She bought them some small gifts,
and when dinner was over, she invited them home for a drink.
Taking that drink is the last thing that Lydia remembers. The
woman drugged her, handed her and her friends over to another
agent, who drove them unconscious across the border into, and
here you can fill in the name of any of the receiver countries,
Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, the Middle East, even as far
as Japan, Canada, and the United States.
When Lydia awoke, she was alone. She was in a strange room
in a foreign country. Her friends were gone. A while later, a
man came into the room, and he told her that she now belonged
to him. I own you, he said. You are my property. You will work
for me until I say stop. Don't try to leave. You have no
papers, you have no passport, you don't speak the language. He
told her if she tried to escape, his men would come after her
and beat her and bring her back. He told her that her family
back home was in danger. He told her that she owed his agency
$35,000 of which she would work off in a brothel by sexually
servicing 10 to 20 men a day.
Stunned and angry and rebellious, Lydia refused. The man
then hit her, he beat her, he raped her. He sent friends in to
gang rape her. She was left in the room alone without food and
water for 3 days. Frightened and broken, she succumbed, and for
the next 6 months she was held in virtual confinement and
forced to prostitute herself. She received no money. She had no
hope of escape.
She was rescued when the brothel was raided by police. They
arrested the young women and charged them with working without
a visa. They arrested the brothel manager and charged him with
procuration, but he was later released.
They did not attempt to arrest the brothel owners or to
identify the traffickers. The girls were interviewed, and those
who were not citizens of the country were charged as illegal
aliens and transferred to a women's prison where they awaited
deportation. A medical examiner found that Lydia had several
sexually transmitted diseases. In addition, she was addicted to
a potent form of cough medicine. She was physically weak. She
was spiritually broken. There was no one to speak for Lydia.
She feared the future because she knew her keepers. They had
networks, they had the power, they had the resources to track
her down, to kidnap her and bring her back again. She knew they
could hurt her family, and they had an interest in doing so.
Because unlike drugs where the product can be sold only once,
when you can modify a human being, she can be sold over and
over and over again. The risk is low, the potential profits are
high, and girls like Lydia are a real target.
There was no one who seemed to care about Lydia's life. The
authorities didn't have the resources or the interest in
tracking down the organizations of individuals in the
trafficking chain, from the woman who drugged Lydia to the
agent who brought her across the border, to the agent who broke
her will, to the brothel managers and brothel owners. In
addition, some corrupt law enforcement officials were obviously
involved because the process of getting Lydia and her friends
across the border and keeping the brothels running involved
payoffs to local visa officials, to police in the country of
origin, to border patrols for both countries and local police
in the destination country. Lydia is without protection. The
traffickers have bought theirs.
Now, take Lydia's story and multiply it by hundreds of
thousands, and you can get a picture of the scope of the
problem. UNICEF is estimating that 1 million children are
forced into prostitution in Southeast Asia alone and another
million worldwide. An estimated 250,000 women and children in
Russia, the Newly Independent States, Eastern Europe are
trafficked into Western Europe, the Middle East, Japan, Canada
and the United States each year. An estimated 20,000 children
from Central American countries such as Guatemala and El
Salvador are being trafficked for purposes of commercial sexual
exploitation.
You have the figure from the Department of State of over
50,000 women are trafficked into the United States, and then
there are the countless thousands of women and children in
Africa and Central and South America and other countries where
we have very little information on the scope of the problem.
Of the 155 cases of forced prostitution that were brought
to the courts in The Netherlands, 1 year, 1996, only four
resulted in convictions. Thousands more have not been brought
to the courts at all. The accounts of arrest that police have
made in North America show that women are being sold for as
much as 16,000 to brothel owners. When the rescued women tell
the stories of debt bondage and sexual slavery in which they
are forced to work off $10-, $20-, or $30,000 debt bonds by
servicing dozens of men a day, these numbers and the
accompanying accounts illustrate the trafficking of women and
children for the purposes of prostitution has become a
contemporary form of slavery, and the numbers may soon be on
par with the African slave trade of the 1700's.
The reason The Protection Project is documenting the laws
of individual countries is because trafficking is
international, but all of the laws addressing the problem are
national. There are virtually no international laws with
enforcement capability. The United Nations conventions, such as
the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on
the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women
and the other conventions, can play an important role in
setting international norms, but they do not have any
enforcement capability by themselves, even when the countries
adopt them into their Constitutions.
The countries have to draft and pass penal code statutes
that specifically address each of these commercial sexual
exploitation issues if they want their law enforcement people
to have tools to arrest, charge and prosecute traffickers. We
have found that countries often tell us that they have adopted
such and such convention, and so they have taken care of the
problem, and they don't go the next step, which is to actually,
draft and pass those statutes.
I don't know that I need to go over these three P's, the
prevention, prosecution and protection. I do agree that those
are three necessary ways to attack the problem. I just want to
say that if you take any one alone, it is not going to work. So
if you have lots and lots of protection programs like Italy is
doing, but you are not vigorously enforcing, you are not
prosecuting, you are just doing a mop-up job. So it has to be
all three at once or it won't work.
I will just conclude by saying that trafficking often
originates in countries with poverty and few opportunities for
women and few laws to prosecute traffickers, but that is not
the only thing. It is true that economic deprivation is part of
it, but there is also a large demand, and if there weren't that
demand, I think there wouldn't be as much of the kind of
kidnapping and abduction and trickery and deceit that we are
seeing. We have to deal with that demand issue as well as with
the fact that, that the women and children may feel like they
need to do this, or that their parents may be selling them into
it. There are all those customers on that other end there that
are creating the need for the supply.
Based on our preliminary findings, we expect the
trafficking will continue to increase in the absence of
specific enforceable laws aimed at prevention, prosecution and
protection. As someone who has worked in this field for 20
years, it is exciting to see this Subcommittee's work and
leadership on this important issue, and I am happy to see it
recognized as a major human rights priority. It is time to move
beyond the conferences and the meetings and the seminars and
the expressions of shock to a coordinated effort to criminalize
the conduct of these interlocking rings of businessmen, these
modern mafias, these corrupt government officials.
We are the people who can help the young women and girls
like Lydia. We can draw attention to their plight. We can help
nations strengthen their laws and ultimately find the ways to
prevent and protect young women and children from commercial
sexual exploitation.
I can tell you from where I sit, many countries are looking
for leadership from the United States. U.S. leadership is
important not only because of our human rights role, but
because it serves the American national interest. One of the
hallmarks of the 21st century is going to be the emancipation
of women worldwide, and the issue of commercial sexual
exploitation of women and children is one of the last,
unfortunately the last, even in the women's movement the last,
of the issues, but definitely not the least, to be examined by
our society. So your efforts, Mr. Chairman and Subcommittee
Members, will put America on the right side of history as women
gain power and dignity.
Thank you very much.
[The statement of Dr. Lederer appears in the appendix.]
Mr. Smith. Dr. Lederer, thank you for your comprehensive
testimony, but even more than that, for your daily commitment
and the information you provide. You not only have the right
instincts, but you also chronicle and systematically deal with
the issues so that it leaves very little room for making
mistakes, and I think the more information we have and the more
we create real policy with regard to prevention, prosecution,
and protection, and doing all three in tandem, which you have
admonished this Committee to do, the more apt we are to have
real success at the end of the day. The information that you
have been giving to the Subcommittee and to the Helsinki
Commission for many, many months now has been of tremendous
worth, and I want to thank you publicly for that.
Mr. Smith. Mr. Haugen, I would like to ask you to present
your testimony.
STATEMENT OF GARY A. HAUGEN, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE
OFFICER, INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE MISSION
Mr. Haugen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would indeed like to
thank you for inviting me to participate in this panel, but
more than that I would like to thank you first for inviting
Anita to share her story. I am sorry that other victims weren't
here. I am afraid it is almost impossible for you as members of
this panel to understand just how far away this room is from
where women like Anita, and children who are trafficked
sexually into forced prostitution, how incredibly distant and
far this place is from the living hell where they live every
day, and there is no way for us to engage this without
understanding their story. I am very grateful for you making
that possible.
I believe the American people are compassionate people, and
they will hear Anita's story, they will hear the story of those
950,000 others that you mentioned, Congressman, and over time,
it may not be today but tomorrow, sometime later, the American
people will hear the story, and they will respond. It would be
wonderful if that began here today.
Let me just explain, I am serving with the International
Justice Mission as its director. International Justice Mission
gets cases of human rights abuses referred from faith-based
ministries overseas. Churches deploy tens of thousands of
workers overseas to do humanitarian work and mission work, and
they see abuses in the field, and they turn to us to deal with
them.
One of the things that they are increasingly burdened by is
the plague of forced child prostitution, forced prostitution
that includes the trafficking of victims across international
borders. We are not public policy experts. We are active in the
field. We go into these areas. We use criminal investigators to
infiltrate the brothels. We use surveillance equipment to
detail where the children are being held, and then we work with
trusted police contacts in these countries to get the victims
out, and Anita represents one of those wonderful stories that
this is a life worth extending heroic efforts for in order to
give her a future.
I had not intended comment at all upon the Administration's
testimony today, but I did want to say one thing and that I
believe the power of words is overwhelming in these arenas, and
I believe, unless my hearing was off, that I think Assistant
Secretary Koh and Ms. Loar managed to get through their entire
testimony without saying the word ``sexual trafficking''. It is
hard and ugly to say and to distinguish it because it is indeed
about rape which, as a former lawyer at the Department of
Justice, we, understand rape to be sexual intercourse without
consent.
We have in criminal law the notion of assault, but we don't
consider it sufficient that we don't also have a notion of
sexual assault. We have a notion of child abuse, but we also
have a notion of child sexual abuse. There is trafficking, but
there is trafficking for sexual purposes. Our agency has dealt
in the South Asian subcontinent where Anita comes from, and we
have worked to release hundreds of children from bonded
slavery, but on top of the bonded slavery, it is as if those
children or women are then raped. That is the reality, I think,
that Americans will be continually ready to need to confront,
and it would be wonderful for our leadership in Washington to
take bold, courageous leadership in recognizing the facts.
Because one of the victims couldn't be here today, I want
just as part of telling the story to just give you a few facts
from her experience, a 17-year-old girl named Jayanthi from
India, who was sold into forced prostitution at the age of 14.
She was drugged, abducted off a train, sold into a brothel. She
was held in a windowless room for 3 days and beaten with iron
rods, plastic pipe, and electrical cords until she agreed to
have sex, and then she proceeded to have to have sex with about
20 customers a day over a 3-year period and was forced to have
three abortions over that time. Fortunately through the work of
our operatives we were able to identify where she was, get her
out of that brothel, and now she is receiving good aftercare,
but she is an emblem, I must tell you, of thousands and
thousands of women and children, which, if you cared to go with
us to any of these places in the world, we could purchase the
opportunity to rape a woman or girl for you with a very small
number of dollars. The numbers are overwhelming and should be a
matter of urgent compassion of the American people.
What have we learned about the way this works from trying
to deal with it in the field? The international sexual
trafficking is driven by what is permitted within the country
that allows forced prostitution. The men who trafficked Anita
into India, they weren't worried about whether or not there
would be someone who would buy her once she got there. They
were motivated by a complete sense of confidence that if they
could get her into the country, there would a flourishing
business of forced prostitution that would willingly buy her.
They wouldn't receive her with a sense of, oh, my goodness,
don't bring her, you forced her, we don't know what to do with
her, we will get into big trouble if we do that. No. There is
an overwhelming sense that this is the way things operate, and
there are not very serious sanctions available.
We have learned, therefore, because international sexual
trafficking is driven by the flourishing trade in forced
prostitution, one must do something about forced prostitution.
Forced prostitution is about coercion, and therefore, it can
only be dealt with if we impact law enforcement on the streets.
It is amazing how impervious brothel people are to
international covenants, U.S. policy, everything else, unless
it makes its way down to the street and affects their conduct
toward that brothel.
There are three things that impact law enforcement on the
street: political priorities of the people in the senior chain
of command, because that works its way down to the street. But
even if that is a priority, you can't do anything about it
unless there is clarity and comprehensiveness of law. So then
you need clear and comprehensive law. Third, you need resources
and training so that law enforcement on the street is
effective.
We see law enforcement on the street regularly pick up
their bribes. You can set your watch by it. We know that police
have to bribe their way within a jurisdiction in order to be
assigned to a red light district because that is where they can
make the most money. We see police delivering food to the
brothel so the brothel keepers don't have to let the children
out or the kids out to get food. There is in many situations
tremendous complicity. So you are not going to do anything
about forced prostitution which provides the magnet for
international sexual trafficking unless you affect law
enforcement on the streets.
This is why it is, from the U.S. policy perspective, we
believe, a carrot-and-stick approach. These sticks do, in fact,
affect what the priorities are of the senior leadership. This
shifting from the good idea to an urgent priority is usually
moved by a sense that something bad is going to happen. Then
you can make an urgent priority, but if you don't have clear
law, and if you don't have a supportive relationship with law
enforcement that trains them and resources them, you will not
be effective. That is why all the work we have done overseas,
we have done with positive law enforcement relationships,
because we cannot get the children out of the brothel without
the man who brings the force of the State.
Finally, you need to provide a safe environment for those
who are trafficked. There are indeed a mind-numbing number of
women and children around the world who are sexually
trafficked. I think it was Stalin who said that the murder of a
single person is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a
statistic. I hope that the statistics of the hundreds of
thousands of women and children who are raped for rent will not
become blurred through us, and I hope that the Committee hears
Anita's story, uncovers the other stories to be told, and takes
decisive action so that history will judge us well in our
response.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The statement of Mr. Haugen appears in the appendix.]
Mr. Smith. Mr. Haugen, thank you very much for the truly
life-saving work that you and your organization do for people
like Anita. It certainly is inspiring to hear you speak and to
know of your work. Thank you for giving us some additional
information and a moral imperative to act upon to try to get
not just this legislation, but any other legislative policies
and fixes that could advance the cause here.
When we talk about prevention, prosecution and protection,
obviously part of the protection side is healing both
spiritually and bodily, mind and soul, and I think you know one
of things that I or the Administration asked was how much more
money do we put forward here. Whether it be made available to
faith-based organizations or to others in a competitive grant
situation, whatever, it certainly seems to be a paltry sum
compared to what the real need is out there. This whole idea of
the collusion of the police forces, that whole culture has to
change, and that is one reason why we believe and why I read
your quote to our two previous witnesses to try to get a
response in terms of ``urgent priority'' versus ``good idea''.
We have got to get them to snap to and know that we are
serious. There is a waiver provided for the President in the
bill. It is very generous waiver, but it gives him tools, we
believe. If any of you would like to comment.
One thing I do find disturbing in the Wellstone
legislation, which is, for want of a better word, a competing
substitute to our bill, is that it was written in a way to try
to diminish the efficacy of our bill, to do less and suggest
that it is more because it covers a larger area. But it seems
to me, like you pointed out, Mr. Haugen, that we are talking
about rape, we are talking about a situation that is bad and
getting worse, and while we can approach and attack all
trafficking, it seems to me that this one is at the very top,
and should be, of any prioritization that we have.
I mean, this is mass rape. It was a war crime in Bosnia. It
is no less of a crime against humanity in New York City or
Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. It is a crime against humanity
and against individual women like Anita who have to suffer its
cruelty.
So perhaps all of you might want to comment on whether or
not we are proceeding down the right path by focusing on sexual
trafficking. That is not to diminish the outrage that we all
feel about other kinds of trafficking. But again--like I said
to Ms. Loar and Secretary Koh--if it is offered in lieu of, and
we get a substitute with a 10-year ceiling in terms of
punishment for perpetrators, that is a weaker substitute. That
is a dilution of our efforts, not a strengthening.
Ms. Lederer. I think I can speak safely for many women's
organizations when I say that they would believe that sex and
labor aren't the same and can't be equated. They need to be
separated, and if we deal with sexual trafficking and deal with
labor trafficking, I think that is the right approach.
Mr. Haugen. Of course, again, from the perspective of
operation in the field, without real broader public policy
expertise, we certainly do as law enforcement professionals
treat crimes that involve nonconsenting sexual activity as
being a special and distinct crime. Now, it seems to me a
rhetorical trick to try to say that because there are
distinctive features to a certain kind of crime that it is
somehow unfair pleading to name those distinctives, treat them
differently, focus upon them and deal with them; to suggest
that those who support that are somehow trying to diminish the
pain and suffering of those who suffer from different kinds of
crimes.
It is hard for me to know why someone would even suggest
that we would want to treat specialized problems as if they did
not have distinctive mechanisms, as if they did not have
distinctive outcomes, as if they did not have distinctive
consequences.
As I mentioned, we work as an organization focused on
problems of abuse of child labor, and that is only one issue,
and we have seen hundreds and hundreds of children delivered
from that, and it is an incredible thing. To see, for instance,
the millions of children who sit and roll beedie cigarettes or
sit in some other menial task, it is a crippling and horrible
thing. But to not treat what would happen if in that context
they were also raped? In the context of their forced labor, to
not treat that as a very serious problem and then also not to
deal with the enormous sex trade problem--it is ugly to talk
about, but there is an enormous trade in sex in the world, and
it has a huge monetary impact on people who then will abduct,
defraud, coerce other people to be sold into that market. They
are motivated by the power of the dollar, and the dynamics, I
think, are worthy of focus.
Mr. Smith. Let me ask, in your experience, is support by
government officials in sending, receiving, and transit
countries a major part of the problem, and what can the U.S. do
about such support? Specifically, would you favor assistance to
governments in efforts to enact effective antitrafficking laws,
punish traffickers, and protect victims, and would you also
support reductions in U.S. and other multilateral assistance to
governments that refuse to do these things, similar to what we
tried to spell out in our legislation? What other measures
might you suggest we undertake?
Ms. Lederer. I can't speak directly to any one specific
bill or approach, but I can say that I think we need as strong
and as effective mechanisms as we can possibly manage to deal
with this, and I do believe that removing aid can be--that a
negative incentive is an incentive; in other words, that if we
removed certain aids, it can be effective in getting the
government's attention.
Mr. Haugen. To elaborate, perhaps, on my earlier remarks, I
believe it is an effective carrot-and-stick approach that the
cop in the street does significantly manifest what are the
urgent priorities, not the good ideas, of his senior
commanders, but what are their urgent priorities, and urgent
prioritis are frequently the result of what those senior
political leaders think might happen to them if they didn't
elevate the issue to the level that was necessary.
I was in South Africa in the mid-1980's during the height
of the state of emergency in that country and saw the
incredible brutal oppression that took place in South Africa.
Of course, in those days the word also went up from different
quarters generally about how sanctions would have no effect;
that, in fact, if we just appealed only to the better angels of
the nature of the leaders of South Africa, that things would
change. It is difficult now to understand why the people who
understood the importance, not the exclusive importance of
negative consequences, but at least the plausible helpfulness
of negative consequences, can now deny that that is an
important part of trying to seek change.
On the other hand, efforts that completely isolate
relationships with law enforcement, that do not assist them,
that do not relate well to them, that do not appreciate their
good faith efforts and affirm them, then that is a bad course
as well. You all are the experts on how to do that in a
technical policy sense, but I do know that what ends up working
in the street is what matters to the senior political
authorities and what they are resourced to do.
Mr. Smith. For the record, I supported sanctions against
South Africa. I was one of those few Republicans, only one on
this Committee if my memory is correct, who supported them as a
tangible means to a good end, to get rid of apartheid. There
were people who made that very argument, but you don't hear
that argument made now in retrospect. I think the prudent use
of withholding nonhumanitarian aid, and not even sanctions in
the typical sense that that word is used of proscribing trade
or inhibiting trade--we are just saying money we might
otherwise give you, other than humanitarian aid, you are not
going to get, or we may withhold some or all of it. It seems to
me it is a very modest way, so I appreciate your point on that.
Let me just ask Dr. Lederer, you and The Protection Project
have compiled a data base with the laws of countries around the
world on sex trafficking and related issues. How would you
characterize progress so far in getting countries to notice
this problem and to take effective measures against it?
Ms. Lederer. Mr. Chairman, can I just go back for 1 minute
to your previous question? Mr. Haugen has said that it is
important to help countries and give them the resources for law
enforcement and training the law enforcement.But even before
that is the drafting of good laws, because if the good laws
aren't there, then the good law enforcement can't take place.
What we have found as we have collected these laws on sexual
trafficking, trafficking in slave trade, and kidnapping, is
countries who often--even when they are interested in improving
their laws--look around quickly and say, who can help us, who
can help us, and they take whoever is the closest who will give
them some pro bono help. So you see a series of laws have been
cobbled together, a little bit from France, from Germany, some
help from Brazil and not necessarily a well-thought-through
statute on trafficking.
The first thing that needs to happen is that countries that
are looking to improve and strengthen their laws need
assistance in that regard. That answers a little bit of this
next question which was--if you could repeat it.
Mr. Smith. It had to do with how well other countries--you
basically focused on how well are they in terms of drafting
their policies. Are they in denial, are they accepting it? How
far along are they? Again, let me just add to that in terms of
our own legislation. Remembering the adage ``know thyself'',
what have we done to fix our own house? As the testimony
indicated earlier, it isn't firm. It is in need of being fixed,
and it seems to me we have a remedy that at least gets very
serious about it, but any recommendations you might have in
terms of how we could improve it would be appreciated.
Ms. Lederer. We found that almost every country in the
world has some law that could be used to prosecute traffickers.
Some of them are very old. Some of them go back to the turn of
the century with the white slave trade and are related to that.
Some are procuration laws from the 1950's, and about 50--I
would say 50 to 60 countries--have newer laws that have been
drafted and passed in the last 10 or so years that specifically
address either sexual trafficking or trafficking generally.
I do think countries are beginning to be aware of the
problem. Certainly every country has heard from us many, many
times. I also think that there are countries that would prefer
not to deal with this. They know they have a problem, and they
are not ready to deal with it yet, and so they are, I wouldn't
say in denial, but they are certainly not dealing with it and
not cooperating. So I hope that is helpful.
Mr. Smith. Let me ask, Mr. Haugen: We have heard from NGO
working in Russia. As a matter of fact, we heard from them
directly in meetings we had during the Parliamentary Assembly
that parliamentarians--and I saw this in terms of their denial
themselves--are unwilling to recognize and address the issue.
Has IJM or have other NGO's working in South Asia had similar
experiences with governments and legislators in those
countries?
Mr. Haugen. We have not had the opportunity to work
directly with legislators or the policymakers of those
countries except to relate to the senior police command. We
will go into a jurisdiction, we will document where the
children are being held and take that information up to the
senior level of command. At that level we almost always see a
positive response to get those children assisted, but for that
to be an ongoing, urgent priority for them, they need to know
that they both have the support to do that, and they also have
the encouragement of their relationship with the United States
in that.
Mr. Smith. What do our own Ambassadors, U.S. Ambassadors to
those countries, and other diplomatic personnel do to assist
you when you are seeking to get an outcome, to free women like
Anita?
Mr. Haugen. To date we have had good relationships with
U.S. Embassies overseas that we apprise of what we are doing
and get a sense of the security situation from them. At this
time it has not been necessary to seek their intervention on
forced prostitution matters, although their help has greatly
assisted for matters of illegal detention or some other human
rights abuse. But I believe our overseas embassies are eager to
do something decisive about this, but I think need to be
empowered by the U.S. Congress and the Administration to do
what will be most effective.
Mr. Smith. I appreciate that.
Let me ask one final question before yielding to my
colleagues. You heard the earlier conversations about what kind
of protection would be best for the victims themselves who are
facing the high probability of deportation. One effort endorsed
by the Administration would be a 3-month temporary visa type of
deal. My argument is that that probably is not enough; why not
go the max in terms of providing protection with the
possibility of permanent residency here in the United States if
certain very minimal factors are met? Where would you come down
in terms of that side of it? Do these women actually go back to
bad situations in countries like Ukraine or Russia, or is that
much overstated, or in Asia?
Mr. Haugen. I don't know very much about what they go back
to in Russia or the Ukraine. I do know that certainly they go
back to situations in which there was a coercive force that was
willing to use violence in a criminal act, and so they go back
to potential vulnerability. But that is precisely what the
traffickers continually try to do is create a sense of fear not
only from the traffickers, but from these vague outside
sources; that the trafficker actually becomes the protector
because they place this victim in this environment which gives
them a sense that there are these other forces that are going
to hurt them, and usually the trafficker points to the foreign
government that they have been introduced to to say, OK, you
are now in a foreign country, if you get caught by the police,
if you cry out, if you do anything, they will capture you, they
will imprison you, and believe me, already their notion of what
law enforcement looks like can frequently be pretty brutal.
My perspective is that maximum effort must be extended to
create for them a safe environment. If you are going to get
them ever to cooperate in prosecution, the amount of effort it
takes to even get someone like Anita here to tell her story, to
let alone actually then participate with the adversarial
process of prosecution, that is an enormous amount of demand of
a human being. So my perspective, whatever is necessary to give
them a sense of protected environment afterwards, I believe we
should adjust our immigration laws on the principle that this
is what we would want to extend as a safe place for our
daughter if she were abducted, for our own children, and that
to me is sort of the master test.
If you come up with whatever your immigration law is, and
then you take it to the teenage girl you know best, and you get
her moral intuition as to whether or not that seems
sufficiently generous and protective of a person who had been
trafficked, then I would be willing to go with that moral
intuition.
Mr. Smith. Thank you.
Dr. Lederer, if you could make available to us--I know it
is not finished--but whatever preliminary information that
might be helpful to the Subcommittee as we move this
legislation forward, especially as it relates to these other
governments and their response to the problem in their own
countries, whatever data you can make available. I know end of
the year is your deadline, I believe, or time line. It would be
most helpful.
Mr. Smith. Again, I would like to thank all three of our
witnesses and especially Anita for her courage and willingness
to be here and to present us with the information, your story
that you have provided us. We are very, very grateful.
Mr. Faleomavaega.
Mr. Faleomavaega. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. If I could offer
just a friendly recommendation, Mr. Chairman, the next time, my
deepest regret is that we should have had these panel of
witnesses to testify first before hearing from the
Administration, for obvious reasons. I cannot believe that the
figures that the State Department and the Administration is
playing with on this very important issue of sex trafficking is
so disparate from what Dr. Lederer has just shared with us.
This is just abominable as far as I am concerned. If they don't
even have the accurate figures, how can they possibly declare a
policy that is accurate and correct as far as from our own
policymaking apparatus if it is not there?
Mr. Smith. Would the gentleman yield on that?
Mr. Faleomavaega. I yield.
Mr. Smith. We have often asked the Administration to either
stay or allow witnesses, especially when they have personal
stories to tell, to go first. As a matter of protocol, they
usually argue that they would like to go first. But if you
could join me and Mr. Hilliard as well in asking the
Administration to perhaps reverse the order. We have done that
in the Veterans Committee on occasion, when the veteran service
organizations come first and the Administration last, and they
hear things they might not otherwise hear that are most
helpful. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
Mr. Faleomavaega. I would say to the gentleman we are doing
it now for the Resources Committee; that we have had assistant
secretaries sitting there waiting until the ladies and the
gentlemen that we have invited to testify could be heard for
their testimony before hearing from government officials. I
thank the gentleman for sharing with me that similar concern.
I certainly want to thank Ms. Bhattarai for your courage
just to be here. This is not a very easy task for any woman
under the circumstances that she has had to go through in her
life.
Mr. Chairman, I submit I have a 13-year-old daughter, and
I wish that every parent, every father, every brother could
have a real sense of appreciation what women and children go
through. We are talking about rape and forced prostitution. As
far as I am concerned, they are the same thing. It is just
another fancy word or adjective saying sex trafficking. Forced
prostitution, as far as I am concerned, is rape, and that is
exactly what happened to this lovely lady, and I am just so
sorry to hear that this is the kind of testimony that Members
of this Committee have had to hear the reality of out there.
This is not an academic exercise or theory. This is reality out
there, not just to 1 million women and children. This is almost
4 million that are affected by this multibillion-dollar sex,
criminal offenses that are being committed by these pimps in
these foreign countries. This is just really, really beyond me,
Mr. Chairman. I am just very, very disappointed.
I think we have had enough meetings and conferences, as has
been stated earlier, by the Administration officials. I think
we need to put our foot down and come up with substance and not
just a lot of rhetoric and talk.
I noticed, too, Mr. Chairman, sex trafficking or forced
prostitution is among the most industrialized countries of the
world. You don't have to go to Nepal or India or other
countries. It exists in countries like Japan, the second most
powerful economic power in the world, and this goes on. It
seems to me, Mr. Chairman, if there are any protocols that will
have any sense of substance, we ought to deal with the
industrialized countries that come out with a protocol to
address this very specific issue.
I raised the question with the Administration about the
protocol because it has been worked upon for the past 9 months.
The problem that I have with this proposal, Mr. Chairman, is
sex trafficking is only one out of perhaps seven or eight other
forms of trafficking. It seems to me when you get into that
hodgepodge of other forms of criminal act or actions, then I am
afraid that it is going to be based on a low priority, just as
it is the implication that I gather from the Administration's
past, not just this Administration, sex trafficking is just not
on the radar screen in the minds of policymakers.
To this end, Mr. Chairman, I commend you for calling this
hearing, and I sincerely hope that we will proceed in getting
the Committee not only to pass the bill that I heartily
endorse, and I hope to work closely with you to get this thing
moving.
Just a couple of questions, if I may, on the issues that
have been raised by Dr. Lederer. I note here that 1 million
children under forced prostitution are in Southeast Asia alone.
I am most surprised that the State Department did not even take
any notation of that fact. One million children worldwide are
affected by this alone. I mean, this is just unbelievable.
I want to thank both Dr. Lederer and Mr. Haugen. I want to
thank both of you for your most comprehensive statements to
this issue, and I really, really sincerely hope, Mr. Chairman,
that we move on this legislation because I think in my personal
opinion there has been a lot of rhetoric expressed, a lot of
meetings, a lot of conferences, but I think we haven't
addressed in actually putting any teeth into the matter by
saying enough is enough, not only because we get 50,000 in this
forced prostitution here in our country, but what about the
other millions that are occurring in other countries of the
world.
I cannot for one, Mr. Chairman, use poverty as a valid
excuse for allowing this to happen, I don't care how poor a
country is. I would think that, as Ms. Bhattarai testified in
her eloquent testimony, it is just beyond me how strong the
culture and the values that they place, and where I come--if I
catch that guy, I would castrate him 10 times. I am sure that
even here in our own country, Mr. Chairman, this should not and
will not be tolerated. Here again, I just want to add my
commendation to your leadership, Mr. Chairman, and thank the
members of the panel.
Mr. Smith. There has been so little reporting and coverage
on this, but occasionally there is a breath of fresh air. Fox
Files recently did a piece on what is happening in the
Philippines, which I remembered when you mentioned the million
in that part of the world. Mr. Cuomo did the narration and
actually went out and talked to some of the worst of the worst
that were doing this, and it just seems to me that we need more
scrutiny like that show, which I think was a real wake-up call
to a lot of people, about what is actually happening around the
world, whether it be in Russia, the Ukraine, or Asia, in India
or Nepal or anywhere else.
This is an outrage. These are crimes against humanity and
particularly crimes against women, and we need to give real
tools to our policymakers and our law enforcement people, and
that is why this legislation has to be passed sooner rather
than later. Next week would be none too soon, from my point of
view. It is bipartisan, and I want to thank you, Mr.
Faleomavaega, for being one of the cosponsors of the bill.
Mr. Faleomavaega. I thank the members of the panel.
Mr. Hilliard. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let me thank the witnesses for their testimony, especially
the young lady who has been through this situation. Up until
today I had not been a cosponsor of this bill that you have,
Mr. Chairman, but I just told my aide about a half an hour ago
that he is to notify the Committee that I wish to become a
cosponsor, and I think we have really got to move forward. This
is a difficult situation. We should have done something about
this years ago.
I have a few technical questions I wanted to ask, and I
guess, Dr. Lederer, this probably would be for you and perhaps,
Dr. Haugen, I am not sure, but in your research, is there any
country that has a particular bill that is somewhat effective
or that works that you have seen?
Ms. Lederer. We are still in the stages of gathering all
the laws and of sifting through them and analyzing them. In
fact, that process, the analysis, has just begun. One of the
purposes of gathering the laws is to look at them and find the
best of the best, and, from the best of the best of those laws,
to create some model legislation, some international model
legislation that could be used by countries that want to
improve and strengthen their laws. That hasn't ever been
attempted before. We do have model legislation in the ABA
nationally, but we believe that with this issue we can create
some model legislation that will be effective, on an
international level.
So to answer your question, it is a little too early, I
think, to recognize any particular one, law or one statute in
any particular country, but we have noted that there are some
very innovative laws, and we are in the process of, setting
those aside for their examination.
Mr. Hilliard. Have you looked at the proposed legislation
here yet?
Ms. Lederer. In the United States?
Mr. Hilliard. Yes. The legislation.
Ms. Lederer. I am aware of the Smith bill; is that what you
are asking?
Mr. Hilliard. Yes.
Ms. Lederer. Yes, absolutely.
Mr. Hilliard. Will it also be taken into consideration as
you gather the laws?
Ms. Lederer. Yes. In fact, all of the bills that have been
introduced in the United States we have added, even though they
haven't passed. We are doing that in other countries also,
bills that have been proposed that haven't passed yet, that
look very, very good.
Mr. Hilliard. I will await your results. It is something I
think we really need to look at and we need to consider, and we
need to make sure that we get a decent bill that will be
effective the world over.
Let me go back, sir, to one of the answers you gave the
Chairperson when he was asking about the type of cooperation
you have gathered from our embassies abroad and our diplomats.
Tell me, have there been any countries now that have resisted
your work and your efforts in what you seek to do?
Mr. Haugen. I would say no, sir. In terms of our efforts to
deal with forced prostitution?
Mr. Hilliard. Yes.
Mr. Haugen. No. Where we have done what is actually kind of
the street-level law enforcement investigative work, and then
we have taken that data up the chain of command, we have seen
very, very good response. It is a sign of hope on our part that
these governments need to be encouraged in these worthy
efforts. They need to be supported in their law enforcement
efforts, and there is ways of bringing U.S. law enforcement
alongside in areas of resourcing and training that could be
very effective.
Our organization employs people of criminal investigative
and law enforcement background. They work well and relate well
with law enforcement overseas. I believe rather than
necessarily focusing on the terrible things that would be
interrupted in terms of relationships, if you have any sort of
negative consequences through sanctions, that generates a lot
of discussion, but not a tremendous amount of light. But I do
know that positive, cooperative relationships with law
enforcement can make a difference, but that many times those
activities in the street are dictated by the most senior
priorities, and that is when the broader relationship with the
U.S. Government matters.
Mr. Hilliard. Forced prostitution and forced rape is
something that really needs to be brought to the front burner
now. The press is very powerful. But you have got to have those
that are interested in keeping the subject alive, and you have
to have those that will continuously write about it, those that
would have the talk shows and the discussions about it, and it
might not be a bad idea if there is some type of bureau that
would be set up to document the abuses, to document those
countries that are worse off than others, and to document and
follow this and continuously keep the public informed about
what is happening here. This is atrocious. We should have done
something about it years ago.
How prevalent is the sex trade here in this country?
Ms. Lederer. I think your point about documenting is the
exact right point. We have so very little information on this
subject in this country and other countries, so very few facts,
and we have no mechanisms right now for gathering them. What we
are doing now is comparing apples and oranges. We have one NGO
that says it is this, and then in another country another NGO
that may be collecting facts in a very different manner.
So you really cannot get a global perspective or even a
perspective in any one country of what is going on. So you are
right on target, sir. We need more information. We do need a
way of gathering, fact-finding and researching.
Mr. Hilliard. I am sorry, before you answered I asked
another question, and excuse me, but is the sex trade prevalent
here?
Ms. Lederer. I think I am answering it by saying we don't
know. We don't know how prevalent it is.
Mr. Hilliard. I have often read about, especially those
persons coming from Russia who are forced here into
prostitution, plus coming from other Third World countries. It
is one of the things I read about and put it aside, but you
have really touched me today, and I want to know now where we
are and where we need to go.
Ms. Lederer. I think I can say that the State Department
does say that is a conservative figure, that 50,000 is
conservative. That is one they felt comfortable with, which
probably means it is more than that.
Mr. Hilliard. Is there anywhere in this country that you
know of, at any university or any public or nonprofit
corporation, where information is gathered and assimilated,
dealt with in this area?
Ms. Lederer. I can say that The Protection Project----.
Mr. Hilliard. The only one basically that you know of?
Ms. Lederer. That I know of, that is gathering in a
methodologically sound way. We are asking every country the
same set of questions, and we are also asking all the NGO's in
the various countries the same set of questions so that when we
get all of the information back, we will not have that apples
and oranges situation. We have got responses now from the 220
countries and territories, from about 180 countries. So we are
doing phenomenally well in terms of the countries responding to
us. Now it is a matter of taking and looking at that
information and seeing what we have got.
Mr. Hilliard. What about here in this country? From time to
time I read articles, stories, somewhat similar, not as brutal,
about people who have come here and who have to engage in
prostitution, forced prostitution, to pay for being here and to
pay for their fear coming here.
I would think that this is not just some individual act. I
understand that there are certain type, mobster type criminal
elements involved. I would think that somewhere in this country
there would be something, some law enforcement agency that
would keep this type of information, or ought to be. Do you
know of anyone here in this country keeping that information?
Mr. Haugen. Just to respond, our focus is entirely upon
international forced prostitution, but I would imagine that my
former colleagues at the Department of Justice and the FBI
would have some data on their view of the magnitude of the
sexual trafficking problem here in the United States. I am
quite confident of that.
Mr. Hilliard. My final question: Is there a list anywhere
that you have run across that shows in any detail those
countries that are worse off in terms of sexual trafficking?
Ms. Lederer. I think Ms. Lord did touch on a number of the
countries. I know I don't know of any lists. From the work we
have done, I believe that every country has a trafficking
problem, and it isn't only 10 or 12 countries. We really do
have to look at the seriousness of commercial sexual
exploitation in all its forms in every country.
Mr. Hilliard. When you start dealing with that list, there
is no country that is going to be want to be at the top. That
is one weapon you may want to think of down the road. We used
that during the civil rights movement. No city, no government,
no state wanted to be at the top.
Ms. Lederer. Good advice.
Mr. Haugen. The traditional human rights organizations have
done some work in trying to identify those countries that are
egregious violators of sexual trafficking and have done a good
job of raising that. It raises the stakes considerably when
that opinion of a country is rendered by an official body of
the U.S. Government.
Mr. Hilliard. Yes, I would think so. Thank you very much
for your testimony.
Mr. Smith. Thank you very much, and for cosponsoring the
legislation. One of the reasons we are at logger heads with the
Administration on the very office we hope to create is that the
very reason we heard in testimony today, the Administration is
unable because there is a dearth of data, to tell us who are
the dirty dozen, or the top 10 in terms of the offending
countries. We have inadequate information and we need to hyper
start this whole process. That is what our legislation in part
would seek to do. In addition to the penalty side, it would
also massively gather that information.
Like you said, it would take a model from civil rights, and
begin to say these are the worst offenders. If you want to get
off that list, there are things you can do. Stop exporting and
exploiting your women.
So the gentleman's point is well taken, and we do cover
that in the legislation. So I thank the gentleman for that.
I want to thank our witnesses as well for your great work.
Again, Anita, thank you for your courage in coming forward. You
have done the cause of trying to stop this horrible practice a
great service today. We are very, very grateful.
Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 4:07 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
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A P P E N D I X
September 14, 1999
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