Lawyers Manual - Unified Court System

370 Dorchen A. Leidholdt
Trafficking and Prostitution
You may learn that your client was subjected to trafficking and/or prostitution.
Trafficking in persons, in essence, is the reduction of human beings to commodities
bought and sold for sexual exploitation or forced labor. 1 While both sex
trafficking and labor trafficking are severe human rights violations, the former,
which typically involves rapes by multiple strangers on a daily basis, often for
years, is the most prevalent form of trafficking and the most devastating to
victims’ physical and mental health. Most victims of trafficking — the US
government estimates more than 80% — are women and girls. 2 For trafficked
women and girls labor trafficking may become sex trafficking: domestic
workers are often sexually exploited and abused by their male employers.
Many sex trafficking victims are recruited through fraudulent offers of
legitimate work as nannies or receptionists, and then forced into prostitution
through debt bondage and threats of violence. Traffickers often confiscate their
victims’ passports and other documents in order to solidify their control. Other
victims are driven into sex trafficking, not through fraud or coercion by a trafficker,
but as the result of pressure to provide income to their impoverished families or
an attempt to escape an abusive family member, usually a sexually abusive male
relative or battering spouse. Some trafficking victims are sold into sex slavery
by members of their families or communities. Trafficking victims may have
been exploited in local sex industries before being trafficking internationally. 3
Domestic violence victims have been induced into trafficking through all of
these routes. In one case handled by Sanctuary for Families, the New York Citybased
domestic violence service provider for which I work, 4 the client, a young
mother from Hungary, was brought into the United States by her abusive
husband who forced her to work in a strip club in the Bronx and give him all of
her earnings. He later returned to Hungary with their son and told her that she
would never see the child again if she didn’t continue to work in the club and
send him the money she earned. Another victim told her story at a conference in
Dhaka, Bangladesh organized by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women: 5
A battered wife in rural Bangladesh, she fled from her brutal husband to her
childhood home, only to discover that her family refused to take her back. With
few if any options, she acquiesced to the entreaties of traffickers and, resigned
to fate, agreed to enter a brothel in Dhaka.
The number of trafficking victims is hard to pin down because definitions
vary, trafficking is hidden, and most victims are afraid to report. The United
Nations has estimated that between 700,000 and 4,000,000 women and children
are annually trafficked across international borders. 6 In 2003, the US State