HUMAN TRAFFICKING
sfpublicpress.org // Spring 2012
POLITICS
California Voter Initiative Would Strengthen Penalties for Traffickers
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California group dedicated to stopping human trafficking is hoping to take its fight directly to voters this fall. In January, the nonprofit advocacy group California Against Slavery began circulating petitions to Story: get a measure on the Leigh Cuen November 2012 ballot // Public Press to strengthen the state’s human trafficking laws. The measure is called the Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act, and the campaign has mobilized hundreds of people around the state to collect the 800,000 valid signatures required for the measure to make the ballot. Among the harsher penalties on traffickers and provisions to protect victims, the act would: •Increase criminal penalties on human traffickers, require them to register as sex offenders and make them report private Internet access to law enforcement •Use criminal fines to support victim services •Require all police to undergo at least two hours of training on trafficking and how to treat victims •Prohibit evidence of a victim’s past sexual history from being used in a trafficker’s trial In 2009, Daphne Phung first learned about human trafficking in the United States from a TV documentary. “I was shocked by the lack of justice,” said Phung, who went on to found California Against Slavery. “We first circulated the petition two years ago, when the organization started, but couldn’t get all the signatures in five months.” The initiative is a joint effort. Authors include Sharmin Bock, who spent 23 years as a prosecutor in Alameda County, which the FBI has identified as a hotbed of domestic human trafficking. Chris Kelly, chief privacy officer and head of global public policy for Facebook, wrote the proposed law’s digital penalty. The Polaris Project, another anti-trafficking organization, reviewed the petition as well. Phung said more than 1,000 volunteers from across California have contributed to the campaign. The effort to put this measure on the ballot has some skeptics. “One gentleman told me the CASE Act wouldn’t pass — voters wouldn’t continue overcrowding prisons,” said Robert Joeger, a filmmaker from Orange County who volunteered his time creating videos for the organization. “But it’s not just going to be funded by tax dollars.” Some question the statistics the group has used to promote the cause. Much of the initiative was formed on the recommendations of a 2006 study that Phung now acknowledges was outdated. Last June The Village Voice in New York criticized the methodology used to gather the sta-
California Against Slavery volunteers are promoting a measure on November’s ballot to stiffen penalties on traffickers. They held an early signature-gathering effort in 2010. Sarah Terry-Cobo // Oakland Local
tistics. But backers of the initiative say they cannot wait for perfect studies. “Trafficking victims don’t raise their hand,” said Sandra Morgan, director of the Global Center for Women and Justice at Vanguard University, a Christian liberal arts college in Orange County. “No one with experience in this will give a flat number.” Morgan is also founder of Live2Free, a youth initiative against slavery and the former administrator of the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force, so she has seen many cases that don’t get officially counted. “Some crimes related to human trafficking never show up in the statistics,” she said. “For example, it might have been prosecuted as a gang case.” Morgan said more awareness is needed about labor trafficking and exploitation. “We find what we are looking for,” she said. “Sometimes immigrants fall through the cracks.” Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley is worried about the scope and implementation of the new voter initiative. “I’m leery of laws that come to us through initiative process,” O’Malley said, noting that once they are passed they are difficult to amend if found later to be flawed. “You can’t change the initiative.” Others in the legal system don’t share her concerns. “I’m not political, but anything that can help us fight against human trafficking is a step in the right direction,” said Holly Joshi, head of the Oakland Public Defender’s Office vice and child exploitation unit, which has five officers. “We are struggling,” Joshi said. “It’s the second-fastest-growing crime in the country. This crime has really gotten ahead of us. It has reached epidemic proportions.”
LEGAL VOICES
Weak State Law, Lack of Police Savvy Frustrate Attorneys Who Prosecute Traffickers
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hile California prosecutors mostly agree that the state’s human trafficking laws need strengthening, they also suggest that failure to recognize the crime itself remains a greater impediment in the fight. Story: State law is still relatively new. Dhyana Levey Assembly Bill 22 of 2005 creates // Public Press penalties specifically for human traffickers. But some attorneys say it has not been much help. A maximum jail time of eight years, coupled with the tough standard of proof regarding intent to traffic, has led prosecutors to pursue existing, related charges — pimping and pandering, forced imprisonment, etc. — to assure sufficiently tough convictions.
Some Girls Are Tricked by Pimps Who Call It Love NANCY O’MALLEY Alameda County DA’s Office Since 2006, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office has filed criminal charges in 180 cases originating from its human trafficking task force; those cases resulted in 140 convictions. The majority of these cases were for sex trafficking, she said. Alameda County is just beginning to focus on labor cases, which are difficult to uncover because they are hard to pick out from the general underground economy. But sex trafficking victims, especially minors, come with their own complexities that should be better addressed by law enforcement and legislation, O’Malley said. At first glance, a relationship between a young victim and a trafficker might start out looking consensual but then become unbalanced as the trafficker takes more control. “Some of these kids tell us they thought they were going to be the trafficker’s girlfriend,” she said. “Part of the challenge with the law is that it doesn’t clearly define that the human trafficking can be the result of coercing the minor.”
Law enforcement, service professionals in the field and activists said deep budget cuts have hampered their efforts. Joshi’s unit has no safe place for victims to stay, except for juvenile hall. She told of a young, domestically trafficked girl who was released from custody in 2008 to return to her family. The girl returned to her pimp, who killed her. Trafficking victims talk of negative experiences and a culture of distrust between them and law enforcement. Leah Albright-Byrd recalled her arrest at age 15, when she was already a victim of human trafficking. She described the tight clasp of handcuffs and how the police officer said she “looked like a hooker.” “I was treated like a criminal,” AlbrightByrd said. Had that officer known what kinds of questions to ask, Albright-Byrd might not have remained a victim of human trafficking for three more years after that arrest. When she was 14 a pimp convinced her that abuse and exploitation would be inevitable parts of her life. He told her that she “might as well get paid for it.” She recounted how he used words like “love” and “protection” as weapons. Today, Albright-Byrd is executive director of Bridget’s Dream, a nonprofit dedicated to advocacy, prevention and victim services. She works with California Against Slavery as a speaker and educator. Phung acknowledges that the two-hour police training the initiative requires would not by itself form bonds of trust with victims. “This is only the beginning of awareness,” Phung said. Yet offering more training for law enforcement had dramatic results in Orange County, said Live2Free founder Morgan. “They start to see cases that were there all along,” she said. “Now they are able to recognize and prosecute them.”
Law Should Treat Sex and Labor Trafficking Differently MARSHALL KHINE San Francisco DA’s Office Assembly Bill 22 of 2005 defines human trafficking in rather broad terms. It could be made more user-friendly for prosecutors by clarifying the difference between labor trafficking and sex trafficking, said Marshall Khine, assistant district attorney in San Francisco. Blurring the two categories appears to have resulted in the law leaving out a sex offender registration requirement for those convicted of sex trafficking, he said. But a conviction of pimping and pandering of a minor under the age of 16 can result in a lifetime registration. A human trafficking conviction is also harder to get because a prosecutor must prove the alleged trafficker’s intent. And even if convicted, the jail time for such an offender maxes out at eight years. “The penalties don’t really add much, if anything, for having to prove more,” he said, adding that human trafficking “should be considered more serious than it is.” Even when prosecutors are on their way to nailing down a solid conviction, a case can fall apart due to lack of victim cooperation, Khine said. Simply getting victims to testify can be challenging. Even if they are available as prosecutors build a case, there is no guarantee they will stick through it and remain cooperative. “Often the difficulty is getting our victims in a stabilized position to have them testify,” Khine said. “We have a lot of victims in the marginalized sections of society. We don’t always have a way of tracking them.”
Workplace Slavery Too Often Goes Unrecognized LYNETTE PARKER Community Law Center, Santa Clara University Just getting started on a case by finding and properly identifying human trafficking victims remains one of the largest roadblocks for prosecutors, said Lynette Parker, clinical supervising attorney for the Katharine and George Alexander Community Law Center, based at Santa Clara University. That is why law enforcement needs better and more consistent education on what a labor or sex trafficked victim looks like, said Parker, whose law center is part of the South Bay Coalition to End Human Trafficking. “New people come in and out of law enforcement agencies and it takes a while to be able to explain how everything fits,” she said. “When it’s for slavery, law enforcement doesn’t always see how they can respond, what their role is. Is it a crime they can respond to as opposed to something from the wage and hour division?” But of the roughly 45 trafficking cases her law center has dealt with, only a few involved sex trafficking. Labor trafficking, while less recognized, is a big problem in the Bay Area, Parker said. But getting the public to realize this has been a struggle. “It’s an education piece,” she said. “Most cases talked about in the media have been domestic or international sex trafficking. So it’s taken time and more cases being discussed and more training programs on what forced slavery looks like. I don’t think in this nation we really have an idea of how many people have been trafficked.”
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