March 22, 2008
Human trafficking is focus of women’s conference
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
Socorro Vasquez, president of the diocese’s Women’s Commission, said the commission plans to hold a conference each year in March to focus on concerns the commission has dealt with during the year, such as domestic violence, human trafficking and other issues. Julie Sly/Herald photo
A 15-year-old girl in Wisconsin walked to a park near her home. She met a young man. The two young people talked, flirted, laughed. The young man offered marijuana to the girl.
In this case, as related by FBI special agent Minerva Shelton, the joint was probably laced with another drug. The man raped the girl. She blacked out, regaining consciousness in Chicago, where the man forced the girl into prostitution. She traveled between Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Her pimp moved her to Sacramento when she was 16.
Domestic human trafficking, as illustrated by this case, was the focal point of the first annual Catholic Women’s Conference held March 2 at the Diocesan Pastoral Center in Sacramento.
The conference’s theme was the dignity and vocation of women. Speakers included Timi Poeppelman, a journalism professor at California State University, Sacramento, who spoke on the image of women in the media, and Sacramento Police Department Sgt. Dave Cropp, supervisor of the department’s domestic violence section. Cropp described the ways that police officers understand and deal with domestic violence calls.
But the conference’s central issue was the retrieval and treatment of children working as prostitutes in Sacramento.
Sacramento Police Sgt. Pamela Seyffert, detective Kristi Morse, and FBI agent Shelton, all members of the Sacramento Police Department’s Task Force on the Sexual Exploitation of Minors, presented the facts of life for girls ages 11 to 17 living on the streets.
As an FBI agent, Shelton focuses on children who are moved across state lines. She emphasized that girls are forced into prostitution in many different ways. “All of these girls have a story,” she said. Some are abducted. Some are lured into liaisons with men through contact on the Internet, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
But a common thread running through their stories is that many of the girls are runaways. Some are even, as Seyffert puts it, “thrown aways.” They have little or no self-esteem. They’ve lived with physical or sexual abuse or severe neglect. They are looking for ways to survive.
According to Seyffert, a girl who runs away from home more than three times has an 80 percent likelihood of being taken in by a pimp and working as a prostitute. Underage girls have no legal means of supporting themselves and they can’t rent apartments or sign legal documents.
Seyffert explained that the pimps are men who can rent apartments and hotel rooms, buy cell phones, and drive cars. They refer to prostitution as “the game” and share tips with one another on how to emotionally manipulate and physically control the girls. Many Sacramento pimps call themselves “rappers” and describe themselves as in the entertainment business. The pimps provide “protection and affection” that the girls earn by selling their bodies for sex. The children working for a pimp call him “Daddy.” The youngest girl working for a pimp in Sacramento has been 12 years old. The average age is 14.
Shelton said pimps routinely move the girls to maximize the children’s earning potential. Sacramento-area pimps take their girls to Reno to work the crowds at the yearly “Hot August Nights” car show and to cash in on the casino trade.
The Sacramento Police Department treats sexually exploited children as crime victims and prosecutes pimps to the full extent of the law. But changes in the ways pimps operate have made it increasingly difficult for law enforcement to recover the girls from the pimps, Seyffert said.
Seyffert explained that prostitution is moving away from streetwalking and onto the Internet. Pimps are taking pictures of the girls, often heavily made up to look older than they are, and then posting ads on Web sites. The two most popular sites for online prostitution are Craigslist.com and Myredbook.com.
In her presentation, Seyffert urged all of the women at the conference to look at the Web sites so they will be aware of the extent of child prostitution. “I won’t arrest you for looking at pornography on the Internet,” Seyffert said. “Just go online and see for yourselves what is happening. These are children who need adult intervention. They absolutely cannot get out of the situation by themselves.”
When asked why she wanted the women at the conference to look at the Web sites in question, Seyffert noted: “Because for some people, once they see this, they can’t not do something about it.”
The Web sites are not for children. Warnings and disclaimers ask that anyone viewing the Craigslist site be at least 18 years old and to “report suspected exploitation of minors to the appropriate authorities.” When a viewer clicks on the link, Craigslist maintains that the viewer thereby “release(s) Craigslist from any liability that may arise from (his or her) use of this site.”
Such disclaimers are “the first line of defense” against liability for online businesses, observed Poeppelman of CSUS in a post-conference interview with The Herald. But, she added, “the Internet is so new that these disclaimers haven’t been tested.”
Legally prohibiting Craigslist from posting offensive material “is a sticky wicket,” Poeppelman said, since the prohibition would involve curtailing free speech. “But if (Craiglist’s owner) thinks that his customers will stop patronizing his site, he’ll probably shut it (the erotic services section) down.” It may take a while, she said, but when a business’s bottom line is affected, the business makes the changes. “Sometimes things are so outrageous that people can’t be silent,” she said.
Shirley Franklin, the mayor of Atlanta, Ga., is outraged. Upon learning that 85 percent of the child prostitution trafficking in her city resulted from Craigslist and similar site postings, Franklin sent a letter to Craigslist in August asking that Craigslist remove the sex ads from their Web site, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She called on other city mayors to make the same request.
A Nov. 28 Reuters News Service story quotes Craigslist chief executive officer Jim Buckmaster replying that “we do not monitor the content of more than 25 million free postings Craigslist users self-publish each month.”
Craigslist did not respond to The Herald’s e-mail requests for comment on child prostitution trafficking.
The buying and selling of human beings is a global phenomenon, Shelton noted, and people usually think of it as human beings transported across international boundaries or state lines. But human trafficking also happens in Sacramento, she said. The pimps are 20 to 40 year old men, expert in isolating, shaming, controlling and beating minors. Other men buy the girls’ services and the girls have no way out, she added.
All three members of the task force commented that despite their best efforts and the full support of their lieutenant and the Sacramento Police Department, the legal system still loses the girls. Once they recover a girl, the police do not have a locked facility where they can keep her safe and “de-program” her without charging her with a crime.
They can put a girl in juvenile hall, but that means charging her with prostitution when she is in fact the underage victim of a sex crime. Or they can place her in the Sacramento Children’s Receiving Home, which is not a locked facility. The girls will do what they know how to do, which is run away.
“It’s a national issue and it’s also local,” Shelton said, “and the way we’re going to solve it is by people coming together to help. I’m glad that the Catholic Church is aware of the problem and taking interest.”
Raising awareness is the purpose of the Sacramento Diocese’s Women’s Commission. Initiated by Bishop William K. Weigand in March 2000 and endorsed by the Council of Priests, the commission is a consultative and advisory group to the bishop charged with the mission to “help raise and promote an awareness of and sensitivity to the equality of all women and men as created by God.”
Mercy Sister Katherine Doyle, director of adult education at Holy Spirit Parish in Sacramento, opened the conference with a presentation of “Muleris Dignitatem,” Pope John Paul II’s 1988 encyclical on the dignity and vocation of women. She also quoted Pope Paul VI on the special dignity of women in Christianity.
Sister Doyle noted that because people are made in the image and likeness of God they have a moral obligation to defend the dignity of the human person.
“We are called to follow the Gospel model of Jesus” in showing respect toward each other, she said. “Jesus sees with God’s eyes, not with the eyes of the cultural norms of his time.”
Socorro Vasquez, a member of St. Charles Borromeo Parish in Sacramento and current president of the commission, said the commission plans a conference each year on the first Sunday of March, to focus on the most pressing issues that the commission has dealt with during that year. The commission chose March for the yearly conference in honor of the Feast of the Annunciation, to celebrate Mary’s saying “yes” to God. “Mary is our model of the dignity and vocation of women,” Vasquez said.
For more information of the work of the diocesan Women’s Commission, call the Secretariat for Pastoral Ministry at the Diocesan Pastoral Center at (916) 733-0190 or Socorro Vasquez, chairwoman, at (916) 684-0182.
