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Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence
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The quest to find and help victims of trafficking has become so urgent that the Bush administration hired a public relations firm, a highly unusual approach to fighting crime. Ketchum, a New York-based public relations firm, has received $9.5 million and has been awarded $2.5 million more.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]"We're giving money to Ketchum so they can train people who can train people who can train people to serve victims," said one Washington area provider of services for trafficking victims, who receives government funding and spoke on condition of anonymity. "Trafficking victims are hidden. They're not really going to be affected by a big, splashy PR campaign. They're not watching Lifetime television."
Yet the anti-trafficking crusade goes on, partly because of the issue's uniquely nonpartisan appeal. In the past four years, more than half of all states have passed anti-trafficking laws, although local prosecutions have been rare.
"There's huge political momentum, because this is a no-brainer issue," said Derek Ellerman, co-founder of the Polaris Project. "No one is going to stand up and oppose fighting modern-day slavery."
A Matter of Faith
Throughout the 1990s, evangelicals and other Christians grew increasingly concerned about international human rights, fueled by religious persecution in Sudan and other countries. They were also rediscovering a tradition of social reform dating to when Christians fought the slave trade of an earlier era.
Human trafficking has always been a problem in some cultures but increased in the early 1990s, experts say.
For conservative Christians, trafficking was "a clear-cut, uncontroversial, terrible thing going on in the world," said Gary Haugen, president of International Justice Mission in Arlington, a Christian human rights group.
Feminist groups and other organizations also seized on trafficking, and a 1999 meeting at the Capitol, organized by former Nixon White House aide Charles W. Colson, helped seal a coalition. The session in the office of then-House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) brought together the Southern Baptist Convention, conservative William Bennett and Rabbi David Saperstein, a prominent Reform Jewish activist.
The session focused only on trafficking victims overseas, said Mariam Bell, national public policy director for Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries.
"It was just ghastly stuff," Armey recalled last week, saying that he immediately agreed to support an anti-trafficking law. "I felt a sense of urgency that this must be done, and as soon as possible."
A New Law
A law was more likely to be enacted if its advocates could quantify the issue. During a PowerPoint presentation in April 1999, the CIA provided an estimate: 45,000 to 50,000 women and children were trafficked into the United States every year.
The CIA briefing emerged from the Clinton administration's growing interest in the problem. First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton had been pushing the issue, former administration officials said.
