In Front of Our Eyes Human Trafficking is all around us in Sacramento … somehow medicine has just been blind to it.
By Ron Chambers, MD EMILY, AGE 13, SOLD for sex from age 5, was the first human trafficking victim I encountered. She was first sold for sex by her parents in a basement, later by numerous foster families, and finally by a trafficker in hotel rooms around Sacramento. A typical day of her life was servicing 10 or more “Johns.” These purchasers of sex are generally common, employed, middle class, married males with a family. Emily was easily located via websites containing numerous posts, all containing semi-nude photographs and provocative inviting messages from young women “eager to please,” all arranged by the trafficker. Between “dates,” the victim would be mentally, sexually, and physically abused, but would never be left with a scar on the face that would damage the trafficker’s “property.” Her life was one of continuous torture, beatings and rape … a series of events strewn together that represented the deepest, darkest aspects of mankind. Emily had never known a caring person. She was physically scarred and mentally broken. She did not sit during the exam with me, and made no eye contact. Her PTSD was palpable. She was not the Pretty Woman Hollywood depiction of prostitution. Emily was, truly, a modernday slave. A local community organization, struggling to get medical care for its victims from health care providers who were educated and trained in human trafficking and would not re-traumatize them, referred Emily to me. Inadvertent re-traumatization is a common scenario. Since that first day seeing Emily, I have, unfortunately, come to know that her
story is not unique or even uncommon. I have seen scores of young women and men, scarred by an incredibly-prevalent, public health crisis, largely unaddressed by the medical field. I began to realize that I had been seeing these victims throughout my life. They were on the streets I walked, in the neighborhoods I lived in, in line at 7-Eleven, in the hospital, in my clinic. I just wasn’t recognizing them. Many people have the false vision that the typical trafficking victim is someone illegally brought to the U.S. and sold on the black market. Human trafficking, as defined by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, includes the inducement, recruitment, harboring, transportation, obtaining, or providing of a person by force, fraud, or coercion for commercial sex or labor services. A caveat is that persons under the age of 18 involved in commercial sex are automatically considered victims of human trafficking − for example, a 16-year-old dancing nude in a strip club. It is a definition, primarily, of exploitation, not movement, of people. Domestic sex workers are the most common category of trafficking victims identified in the U.S. In our clinic, most victims we see were born and raised in the Sacramento region. Although the vast majority of our patients are survivors of sex trafficking, we also see trafficked patients who worked around our community in restaurants, construction sites and hotels. Controversy surrounds the statistics, as the illegal and underground nature of the problem lends itself to inherently poor data collection. The United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) Report estimated that
July/August 2017
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