In my local newsrag 24 SEP 2007
Estimate of human trafficking wildly off
BY JERRY MARKON
Washington Post

WASHINGTON Outrage was mounting at the 1999 hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building, where legislators were learning about human trafficking.

A woman from Nepal testified that she had been drugged, abducted and forced to work at a brothel in Bombay. A Christian activist recounted tales of women overseas being beaten with electrical cords and raped.

A State Department official said Congress must act – 50,000 slaves were pouring into the United States every year, she said. Furious about the "tidal wave" of victims, Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., vowed to crack down on so-called modem-day slavery.

The next year, Congress passed a law, triggering a little-noticed worldwide war on human trafficking that began at the end of the Clinton administration and is now a top Bush administration priority. As part of the fight, President Bush has blanketed the nation with 42 Justice Department task forces and spent more than $150 million—all to find and help the estimated hundreds of thousands of victims of forced prostitution or labor in the United States.

But the government couldn't find them. Not in this country. The evidence and testimony presented to Congress pointed to a problem overseas. But in the seven years since the law was passed, human trafficking has not become a major domestic issue, according to the government's figures.

The administration has identified 1,362 victims of human trafficking brought into the United States since 2000, nowhere near the 50,000 a year the government had estimated. In addition, 148 federal cases have been brought nationwide.

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told Congress last year that a much lower estimate in 2004 – 14,500 to 17,500 a year – might also have been overstated.

Yet the government spent $28.5 million in 2006 to fight human trafficking in the United States, a 13 percent increase over the previous year. The effort has attracted strong bipartisan support.

Steven Wagner, who helped HHS distribute millions of dollars in grants to community groups to find and assist victims, said "those funds were wasted." "Many of the organizations that received grants didn't really have to do anything," said Wagner, former head of HHS's anti-trafficking program. "They were available to help victims. There weren't any victims."

Deja vu?

On June 25, 1910, President William Howard Taft signed into law the White Slave Traffic Act. Named for its sponsor in Congress: the Mann Act.

The bill was aimed at the criminal traffic in women. But it also served as a rallying point for the social purity movement. As one supporter argued, those in favor of the bill included "every pure woman in the land, every priest and minister of the living God, and men who reverence womanhood and who set a priceless value upon female purity." On the other side of the bill, "you would find all the whoremongers and the pimps and the procurers and the keepers of bawdy houses. Upon that other side you would find all those who hate God and scoff at innocence and laugh at female virtue."

Stanley Finch, one of the first heads of the Bureau of Investigation, used the hysteria to build a personal fiefdom within the federal government. After he became Special Commissioner for the Suppression of White Slavery, he told audiences, "It is a fact that there are now scattered throughout practically every section of the U.S. a vast number of men and women whose sole occupation consists in enticing, tricking, or coercing young women and girls into immoral lives. Moreover, their methods have been so far developed and perfected that they seem to be able to ensnare almost any woman or girl whom they select for the purpose. This is indeed an extraordinary statement, and one almost passing belief, but that it is absolutely true no one can honestly doubt who reviews any considerable portion of the mass of evidence which is already in the possession of the Attorney General's Bureau of Investigation."

There was only one problem: No one could find a widespread, organized traffic in white slaves.¹

And is it déjà vu all over again?

Later, the honorable J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly cited FBI statistics showing that the number of young women forced into sexual slavery in the US each year exceeded the number entering high school in each of the same years … …

¹ The Century of Sex, Petersen, 1999, ISBN 0-8021-1652-3