By Suzanne Sprague, KERA 90.1 reporter
Dallas, TX – Sprague: To the uninitiated, the numbers may seem startling. More than four million women and children world-wide are currently working against their will as prostitutes, domestics and sweat shop labor. The U.S. government estimates at least 50,000 thousand people are brought into this country illegally each year as modern day slaves. Many times, they have been tricked by human traffickers.
Dolly Warden, Victims of Trafficking Initiative: Let's say someone is coming here as a nanny. Then they find out that they're not really coming here as a nanny, once they get here. They're finding themselves put into prostitution. Sometimes the traffickers continue being their abuser, sometimes it's someone here.
Sprague: Dolly Warden is a Dallas legal assistant and activist. She explains that many trafficking victims don't contact local police because they're beaten into submission or are afraid of going to prison. So a year ago, Warden started the Victims of Trafficking Initiative to help stop what many say is the third most profitable business in the world, behind guns and drugs. Her Oak Cliff apartment is packed with boxes of files and newspaper articles documenting human trafficking cases throughout the world.
Warden: I could go here on my email and show you something like this for all over the world. Tons of them.
Sprague: Warden and others are especially concerned because officials with the U.S. Department of Justice say Dallas-Fort Worth has the seventh largest human trafficking volume in the country.
State Rep. Lon Burnam (D-Fort Worth): It's not one of those things that you readily see, but just because of the nature of commerce in North Texas, and because, particularly, of immigrant issues from Latin America, the Dallas-Fort Worth area is considered one of the major sex trafficking communities in the country at this point.
Sprague: Lon Burnam has followed the trafficking trends both as the director of the Dallas Peace Center and as a state representative from Fort Worth. In Burnam's district last year, more than 80 Honduran women and teenagers were picked up as prostitutes in a raid on several forth worth bars. Many of those arrested turned out to be victims of trafficking. So next week, Burnam will propose establishing an anti-trafficking task force in Texas, similar to ones in Illinois and Washington state.
Burnam: It's a matter of working together more intelligently, more effectively, the various service providers and law enforcement people that need to be involved in this and we're going to try to provide some tools that help make the job easier to get done.
Sprague: Burnam says one of the most important tools is better lines of communication between police and advocacy groups. Anne Dinh agrees. As the program director of the East Dallas Counseling Center, Dinh has been working with some of the women in the Fort Worth trafficking case.
Anne Dinh, Program Director, East Dallas Counseling Center: Because it's such a new issue, everything has been just kind of responding to the needs at the time, there's no set protocol and that's something that's definitely needed within the police department, the INS, etcetera.
Sprague: Law enforcement officials weren't available for comment. But many social service advocates like Anne Dinh point out that formalizing a procedure for handling trafficking cases would help the government as well as victims. A recent federal law provides victims of trafficking with U.S. work visas in exchange for testifying against their captors. But if the investigators treat trafficking victims like all other criminals, they may lose a valuable opportunity, according to Liz Cedillo, an attorney with Catholic Charities.
Cedillo, Attorney, Catholic Charities: I think even before the arrests take place, organizations like Catholic Charities need to be brought in because once that person is placed in a detention facility, you can imagine their fear and perhaps their reticence in speaking with anybody about what's gone on. So unless they're able to speak to someone who's not related to law enforcement, they may be fearful of coming forward to share their stories of what's actually happened.
Sprague: In fact, since 2000, when the federal law was passed, only about 300 work visas have been issued to trafficking victims nationwide because many haven't been properly identified. Liz Cedillo and Dolly Warden hope a conference this week in Dallas with representatives of law enforcement, legal services and social services, will promote cooperation and get victims the benefits the federal law allows. For KERA 90.1, I'm Suzanne Sprague.
***The Human Trafficking Conference, which is open to the public, begins today at the Adam's Mark Hotel in Dallas.***
To contact Suzanne Sprague, please send emails to ssprague@kera.org.