By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
When law enforcement breaks down the door in a human trafficking raid, they are not greeted as superheroes with capes by the victims.
The teenager forced into domestic servitude, living in a basement, regularly raped, will tell them: “My life is perfect.”
That’s also what Russian teachers forced to become strippers would say. And what Honduran and Guatemalan men who worked in a meat packing plant near Buffalo, New York, for seven days a week, 16 hours a day, said, even after asked about stab wounds.
What they said was their detention was costing them money, $3.50 a week.
“We have victims that aren’t happy to see us,” said Amy Allen, a forensic investigator for Homeland Security Investigation division. “The first reaction is shock and denial.”
Getting the truth out — that the stab wounds are inflicted when they fell asleep, that when they do sleep it’s packed jigsaw like 16 in a room the size of a bathroom – takes a special kind of questioning, one that assumes from beginning that they are victims.
Allen has heard over and over. “My life is perfect.”
She knows the reasons behind the statement. She knows the experiences that lead up to it. She knows the fear and deprivation that leads to such acceptance. She knows what it takes to ease those fears and get to the truth so maybe they have a chance for a better life.
Allen was the first presenter in a symposium on Global Trafficking held Tuesday at Bowling Green State University. The symposium was hosted by the School of Cultural and Critical Studies.
In her career Allen has traveled around the world. Still even she was surprised that trafficking was so pervasive so close to home. That could be as close as the local nail salon or the home next door.
Allen said that when she joined Homeland Security eight years ago “I just didn’t have a grasp of the reality that’s right in our backyard.”
She recalled a case of a girl in Farmington Hills, Michigan. A neighbor was concerned and called child protection services to no avail. Truancy, which was the original concern, was handled by the police. That was news to the veteran detective, just a few days from retiring, who took the concerned neighbor’s call. The neighbor had talked to the girl who said she was “adopted” by the family and wanted to go to school but had to wait until she spoke English better.
Strange since she expressed all this in perfect English.
When the detective came to the door, she wouldn’t open it. Finally she let the detective in and her story slowly emerged.
Her family was so impoverished they “could not afford to keep her.”
By being “adopted” by this couple who would take her from Cameron to the United States, “she felt she was a relief to her family by accepting this adoption and coming to the United States.”
There she did house work and cared for three small children. Her “mother” beat her and her “father” raped her. But Allen said, “she had no outcry because she believed this was her life.”
She still wanted to go to school and become a journalist like the glamorous Diana Lewis she saw on TV. Now she is a spokesperson for efforts to fight global trafficking, achieving her goal of being a journalist.
Her case raised awareness of domestic servitude and trafficking in the area.
All this because a neighbor intervened.
“We need the community to be aware of what’s happening in the community,” Allen said. Victims will not seek out law enforcement. The number to report suspected trafficking is: 1-866-347-2423 or for victim support call 1-888-373-7888.
While most of the media attention goes to sex trafficking, people are brought into the country for all kinds of jobs, from work, meat cutting, hair braiding, construction, quarry work and tree cutting.
Some of the indicators that a person is victim are that “someone is not in possession of their own travel documents,” Allen said.
The victims are denied freedom of movement. Some sex trafficking victims lived in dog cages.
Typically they are denied food and medical attention. They are fed only the scraps left on family’s plates
Their wages are garnished, supposedly to pay for bringing them here.
Domestic servants tell Allen that “even though there’s areas of their house where they could live comfortably … they’re living in areas of the basement that’s not nice, cement without a bed, just a blanket and pillow.”
They are threatened as are their families back in their home countries. They feel that if they are found they will be prosecuted because they broke the law by agreeing to come to the United States.
But Homeland Security will grant victims “short term immigration relief while we build the case,” Allen said. And that relief is not contingent on their cooperation or testimony. Homeland Security’s first priority is to rescue the victim and then investigate.
In one case, she worked on, the FBI was investigating a large marijuana farm, “hundreds of acres,” Allen said.
They were working methodically to build a case and were about two weeks away from a raid when their undercover informant was told there was a 15-year-old sex slave being held.
They moved in. But didn’t find the girl. Just a box with feces in it.
She was located with the man she called “her boyfriend.” Her life, too, was “perfect,” until they got her story from her, Allen said.
She had bounced from foster home to foster home, finally landing in a group home. She ran away from the group home. But it wasn’t reported to the authorities for 48 hours because the home operators were afraid that would mean they’d no longer get placements and the income that generated.
In the meantime the girl went to a gas station to buy cigarettes. That’s where she met the operator of the marijuana farm who bought her cigarettes, promised her a job and secreted her away.
Allen said people have misconceptions about what constitutes a victim. If they or their parent initial consent, they can’t be a victim. And victims themselves share that belief. They believe “they just had a terrible life. They just made a bad decision. … They can’t understand what they’ve gone through.”
Allen said just because someone doesn’t try to escape, doesn’t mean their complicit. They are in fear.
Just as in rape cases, people want to find a way to believe that the victim was somehow at fault because that way they can tell themselves it won’t happen to them.
People think they would fight back, that they would escape. But they really don’t know what they would do if they were told their family was in danger, Allen said.
“We don’t know anything about what it’s like to be a trafficking victim in fear for your family,” she said. “We don’t know anything about what we would do, and we have to stop pretending that we would do.
”We have to honor what these victims are experiencing and trust what they say to us about their captivity and how they survived. We do that by listening to their stories and quit blaming them for things they were complicit with and they already regret.”
