Threatened/
use of law Demoralizing
Threats/ use of
violence disorienting Depriving/ Diminishing resistance
Deception concerning consequences Intimida- tion and control Agriculture (n = 23) 78.3 100.0 100.0 100.0 95.2 90.0 100.0 Hospitality (n = 12) 66.7 81.8 41.7 91.7 91.7 50.0 58.3 Restaurants (n = 17) 87.5 70.0 68.8 88.9 77.8 83.3 90.0 Private residence (n = 45) 90.7 97.6 93.2 100.0 76.5 95.2 95.2 Construction (n = 12) 77.8 100.0 77.8 100.0 77.8 66.7 100.0
Note: Some victims were trafficked in more than one industry.
According to our case analyses, victims who worked in private residences were less likely to interact with individuals outside the family members for whom they worked and thus had a higher likelihood (93 percent) of being physically abused. Horrific physical abuse and violence were documented in our interviews with survivors. These abuses ranged from being slapped in the face, head, and body to being stabbed and cut with knives and other sharp objects. The following quotations illustrate the types of abuse domestic servitude victims experienced:
Because I work from their house morning 6 o’clock to at night 12 o’clock, and I take care of two kids . . . and when she [the trafficker] come in from work and she every day, every night and she start yelling at me, abusing me, hitting me and all these thing. She don’t have any reason but I don’t do any wrong but she want to make me like scared, she want make me scared from her and stay inside, make sure I don’t go outside. Because after three month or six month, I think three month visa is, after finished that three month she start abusing me because she don’t want [that] I go outside. (site 2, survivor 3, female, domestic servitude)
[The trafficker took a spoon and hit me and I was] bleeding, I’m pray, I cry . . . [she] tell me, uh, “Your god no good, my god good, [my god] give me money, give children, give all, you[r] god no good,” [she] tell me, I cry and tell God, “Please uh take [me] out from here, no no finish the year it’s okay, please God give me take out from home here.” (site 1b, survivor 2, female, domestic servitude)
Interviewee: In her case, the other client who came from that family was the more brutal one. But in her case, it was a lot of verbal abuse, constantly. Around the clock. Torture where she wasn’t allowed to sleep. She would only be allowed to sleep for very short periods of time. Also, the mom would then give her her newborn. The mom had a lot of kids. And then she’d be with the newborn all night, so not even sleeping.
Interviewee: Yeah, they took all her stuff. Interviewer: Did she get paid at all?
Interviewee: They did not pay her. I think they ended up after 6 months paying her something. But not to her, they sent it to [country of origin] where she had extended family. She has had no pay for all the years she worked with them. They did a lot of other torture to her body—physical serious, serious, physical torture. (site 1, outside social worker 1)
Physical abuse and violence often constituted the extreme forms of victimization that labor trafficking victims experienced; more subtle and nuanced forms of coercion and fraud were more common. As shown in table 6.5, victims working in hospitality and restaurants were more often deceived and intimidated as opposed to beaten and physically abused. Service providers and law enforcement officials also saw more cases involving coercion and fraud than force involving physical abuse, which is harder to prove in court.
[We] get one or two cases where anybody was ever physically abused. I wouldn’t even say a couple of cases where people were pushed around and physically touched but not necessarily beaten. So the vast majority of what you are looking at or what we’ve seen is all psychological coercion. It’s so contextual. I think for your average person, whether it’s your juror in a civil case or law enforcement, who might even be more sophisticated about these things from training, there’s this real idea of a canonical way that people are trafficked. If they don’t fit that, it then gets questioned. That’s hard because with labor stuff there is always—I know sometimes with labor there are very clear cases. That’s what you hear about in the press. But my experience has been that it’s always borderline, and it’s hard because you get a sense of somebody who is being forced to labor involuntarily, but how that’s happening and why that’s happening can be difficult to prove and show. I guess this is true in most trafficking cases. A lot of times you don’t have corroborating evidence. (site 3, attorney 2)
One tactic traffickers commonly used regardless of industry was the threat of law enforcement involvement and deportation. Many labor trafficking victims came to the United States, often legally through work visas, to live the “American dream” and support their families back home. Most victims in our sample and survivors we interviewed had no previous encounters with law enforcement in their home countries or in the United States and were law-abiding individuals. Thus, the threat and fear of deportation, or the mere mention of law enforcement or ties to law enforcement, were enough to keep victims from running away or seeking help. When one victim asked her trafficker to return her
passport, the trafficker told her that the police might kill her, then deprived her of food for four days for asking for her passport:
Survivor: [The trafficker said,] “This your passport, it’s okay you take it, your passport. No good maybe you go to outside, maybe police kill you.” I said, “No! No [trafficker’s name] no! I have children I’m coming working get money for children, for my children!”
Survivor: Yes, [she then say], “I am no give you eat four day.” (site 1b, survivor 2, female, domestic servitude)
Deportation was often considered a sign of failure that would bring shame on the family and would prevent that person from reentering the United States and possibly prevent their family members from entering the United States. Also, in many cases, victims had accrued a debt back home (e.g., bank loans, property collateral) to come to the United States and would face a host of consequences if they were deported and unable to pay that debt back.
Several jurisdictions have found that threats of deportation and financial consequences have been sufficient for claims of forced labor under 18 U.S.C. § 1589. Courts have also recognized that threats of immigration and financial consequences would lead a reasonable person to believe they were in serious danger under § 1589(a)(4),37 thus illustrating that prosecutors and judges do not always need hard evidence to prove forced labor.
Despite the psychological and physical control that the traffickers had over their victims, only 18 percent of cases analyzed documented incidents of sexual abuse and attempted sexual abuse. Many service providers stated that it was rare for individuals to be sexually abused by their trafficker, but that when sexual abuse did happen, it was often directed toward domestic workers. In fact, almost all cases containing elements of sexual abuse occurred in private residences/domestic work.38 An attorney for a service provider discussed a case in which the husband of the wealthy family the victim worked for repeatedly sexually assaulted and threatened her, while she also had to cater to the wife’s every need and desire.
So her case, she was domestic servitude, she was brought by a recruiter from [home country] to Saudi Arabia, and was not paid. Nothing that she [was] told was going to happen happened, the man was sexually assaulting her. Before sexually assaulting her, he was like, “You can leave but take your best shot, you can’t go out without a burka, you can’t go anywhere, you’re a female, you can’t be unattended, good luck.” So she didn’t have a choice, she was stuck there. And so not only was she not being paid, constantly had to do work in the house, [but] she also was having to shave the wife, like brush her teeth for her, wipe her, like all kinds of demeaning cruel things. And he brought her to the States on their family vacation to go visit his son who lives here. So they brought her and she was able to escape one day when they left the house unlocked. So there is sexual assault there, it’s labor trafficking, it’s not sex trafficking, but it fits two things for me, so it’s definitely a trafficking case that works under OVC for labor trafficking and it works for me as also a sexual assault case because there are other issues that she is dealing with. (site 2, attorney 1)
Although very few cases (4 percent) we reviewed included elements of sex trafficking in addition to labor trafficking, service providers discussed the types of cases that involved an overlap between labor and sex trafficking. To pay back the huge smuggling debt that they had incurred to come to the
United States, many victims had to work in massage parlors, cantina bars, or, as the service provider explains below, brothels located above the restaurants where they worked during the day.
Interviewer: Can you explain how that works and what countries they are coming from? Interviewee: Those have been from China if that’s okay to say. They’ve worked in different restaurants. So they are not always just in the same restaurant. Sometimes they can find the job themselves, but either way they have this huge debt they have to pay. The person knows where they are working, and where they are getting their money from. They will work during the day, and upstairs they live and stay. A lot of times they have to do sex work at night. We haven’t seen a ton of these cases, but typically the ones I have worked with—it’s not commercial sex the way a sex-trafficked client—I hate to say it that way but—is working, this is their job around the clock. It will be more like sexual abuse and rape and sometimes they are paying—a smaller ring of people. It’s not just straight prostitution: four clients in an hour, every hour. It’s not like that. Interviewer: The clients they are serving are part of this trafficking ring to begin with, whether it be with friends or something?
Interviewee: Yes.
Interviewer: You said sometimes they are paid and sometimes they are not paid.
Interviewee: If they are paid, it’s to the trafficker. It’s straight trafficking. They don’t make any money themselves at all. (site 1, outside social worker 1)
We heard from one service provider who works with migrant farmworkers that sex traffickers transport women and girls to farms and worker camps where there are large groups of men with cash at hand. Farms and work camps make up an ideal venue for sex trafficking because they are typically isolated from populated areas and rarely include nonmigrant workers. As he explained,
Because if you think of it, in a sense, the migrant workers make the ideal [customers] for the pimps. They get paid every 15 days in cash. The visitors always know what the payday is. They are often young. They are without their partners, if they have partners. Some of them are single. Others have families back home. They are under extreme isolation with very little social contact with anyone outside of the camp, and it’s often all men. So it creates sort of an economy for that sort of tradition. But you begin to see that at all the camps. When you get into the bigger camps, you always get a certain segment, and this, I have found, is more particular to the Mexican population than people from other countries. I don’t know if it’s something that goes on in Mexico or what, but there is always going to be a segment of the workers who ask the suppliers or the visitors for younger girls, for underage girls. And there will always be a type of supplier or visitors who go out of their way to find those types of girls who obviously, under federal and state law, it’s not even a question of whether those women are there on their own accord or not. If they’re underage, there is no choice. So they’d technically be called traffickers to supply that demand.
And the benefit that we have is that, as certain as it is that a segment of the workers will be demanding the younger girls, there will also be an almost equal amount of workers who see it and find it reprehensible. And they will want to tell us about it, especially when they have some assurance that we’re not going to just raid their entire camp and get them all deported. We often rely on people like that to start gathering information about traffickers who are supplying
underage girls. More often than not, the visitors [trafficked women and girls] come on a regular schedule. So they’ll visit on one day of the week at a certain time. Usually it’s a strategic time. If it’s a bigger farm like the dairy farm where you guys went with night shift and day shift, they’ll arrive right during the shift change so that they’ll catch the workers who are on their way out and then the workers who come back in. And from what I understand, part of the reason they have a fixed schedule is because they have a fixed group. And they’ll visit entire farms, you know, groups of farms in an entire area every week. But obviously with those, it can be elusive because the motive is so powerful that just as soon as you take a few players out of the game, they get replaced by others. It really goes to show how big these networks are. Another hint we get that these are organized networks is that they will often bring different girls every week, so they are definitely going back to supply centers of the major urban areas: Boston, New York, and Montreal, where they are sort of strategically swapping out the girls so that it’s harder to track them and give them help. Because if you have the same girl visit the same camp every week, someone might take pity on them and begin to help them or get them in touch with enforcement. But if the same girl is getting moved around to a different, you know, part of the state or a different state every few months, it makes it much more difficult for them to seek help. Those are some of the challenges. (site 4, VS 4)
In this particular case, law enforcement was aware that women and girls were being brought into the labor camps for prostitution but were not interested in pursuing investigations into potential sex trafficking. Although claims about the connection between migrant labor camps and sex trafficking are not new, more research is needed to better understand the extent and nature of such practices.