Monday, January 19th, 2009 Testimony before the Judiciary House Committee of the 61st Legislative Assembly of North Dakota, on House Bill No. 1185, “A Bill For An Act To Create and Enact a New Chapter to Title 12.1 of the North Dakota Century Code, relating to Human Trafficking, and to Provide a Penalty”
Patrick J. Atkinson
Founder, International Executive Director
Institute for Trafficked, Exploited & Missing Persons
The GOD’S CHILD Project
Post Office Box 1573
Bismarck, North Dakota
www.ITEMP.org
www.GodsChild.org
I would like to begin by thanking you for allowing me for being here today. I know that your time is limited and very valuable, and I appreciate your consideration.
My name is Patrick Atkinson. I am a Bismarck, North Dakota native, and for the past 30 years I have worked directly with victims of human trafficking in Southeast Asia, Africa, Central America, The United States of America, and yes, right here in North Dakota.
My current work in this area is principally through the Institute for Trafficked, Exploited & Missing Persons and The GOD’S CHILD Project (www.GodsChild.org). In this, we work regularly with the Homeland Security, the United States State Department, different American Embassies, and national governments.
When we think of human trafficking, we think of something that happened a long time ago and in places far away. A lot of people, MOST people, perhaps, are under the impression that human trafficking ended with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on September 24th, 1862 when 4,000,000 slaves in America were set free.
In fact, it didn’t. To the contrary, human trafficking has grown to where today it is the 3rd most lucrative illicit business in the world, following only the international arms and drug trades
According to the International Labor Organization, today there are 12,300,000 people in forced sexual or labor servitude. It is a Sixty Billion Dollar industry in which $32 billion is earned annually from forced labor, and the sexual exploitation of women and children brings in an additional $28 billion.
In your consideration of House Bill 1185, you will hear a lot of numbers and some of them will be conflicting. Truth be told, no one knows the exact numbers involved because it is a publicity-adverse business that by necessity depends upon secrecy, corruption, and the disappearance of high-risk victims and witnesses.
Even though the statistics you will deal with are not always consistent, combined they paint a horrible picture of life for the children and adults who are unwillingly caught into one part or another of human trafficking’s web.
It is important to understand what human trafficking is, and what it isn’t. Human trafficking is not illegal immigration. It is not human smuggling. This is a point that is frequently confused, either accidentally or deliberately by special interest groups. In both illegal immigration and human smuggling, a participant and a transporter have entered into a free-will contract… the purchase of a service, so to speak… to move a willing participant across a border.
Human Trafficking is different. The Unite Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons defines it as:
… the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability (Article 3, Para 1)
In all of our work and when I speak to different groups, I have found it much easier to define Human Trafficking with just two words: Force or Fraud. Are people being forced, blackmailed, or tricked into doing something they didn’t want to do, or to go somewhere that they didn’t want to go? If so, then Human Trafficking… Modern Day Slavery… is present and has raised its ugly head.
Human Trafficking is not new. The earliest oral histories from around the world talk of nomadic tribes conquering one another; of the killing the men and taking the women and children back to be slaves.
Right here in the United States there were 4,000,000 enslaved African Americans by the mid-1800’s. Slavery was so widely accepted, and so natural, that it was considered just like our owning of cows and horses. Our nation’s founding father and mothers owned slaves. It was no big deal… people would go to the store, buy their animal, bring it home, and break it in. When they tired of it, or if they got a nice offer or needed the money, they traded it away or sold it.
Many people today think nothing of separating grown kittens from a mother cat. Viewed in historical context, slave traders thought nothing of separating mothers from their children.
When the civil war ended, the purchase price of a slave, in 1865 dollars, was $ 40,000. Today, the cost to purchase a slave is $ 70.
Today every 30 seconds another person becomes a victim of human trafficking somewhere in the world. This includes adults, mostly women, as well as children.
UNICEF estimates that this year alone, 1,200,000 CHILDREN will be forced into prostitution – not all of them girls. While we would like to think that this only happens in places like Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and countries far away, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has stated that 20,000 children and adults are involuntary brought INTO the United States each year.
In addition, the State Department estimates that 17,000 US passport-carrying Americans are trafficked ANNUALLY against their will. Some of these are American women and children who simply disappear into the night.
Sometimes these disappearances are more public as is the case of Natalee Halloway who is highly suspected to have been drugged and ferreted off of the island of Aruba and into forced prostitution.
Not many people know that seven years before Natalee disappeared from the Carlos & Charlies bar on the island of Aruba, 23-year old Amy Bradley from Alabama disappeared from that very same place. One year later a Naval officer told the FBI that he was at a brothel in the Barbados when an American girl working as a prostitute leaned in to him and whispered: "My name is Amy Bradley I need your help." The Naval officer set down his drink and walked away. Several months later this incident bothered him so much that he reported it to his superiors, and in turn, to the FBI. By then, unfortunately, the brothel was closed. Amy has not been seen since.
I first became personally involved in combating human trafficking in 1978 when I was a student at Minnesota State University Moorhead and working for the Center for Parents and Children. One of my job responsibilities was to speak at local schools in the Fargo area and encourage children to stay in school and not runaway.
It was while working at this Center that I became aware of what we called ‘The Midwest Pipeline’ (explain). It wasn’t uncommon for us to learn about young teenage runaways leaving towns and cities in North Dakota and stepping off interstate buses and into a life where they were tricked or lured into the sex industry in exchange for food, protection, or friendship.
Over the years, I am occasionally asked by concerned North Dakota parents to help them look for their runaway children. More than once I have been hired to track down their runaway children… to see if I can trace a child’s path from Bowman, Mott, Dickinson, or Bismarck as they moved from region to region, and even from country to country.
Most of the time, I found the children I had been looking for, but almost always they begged me to say that they had not been found. They were no longer their parents’ sons and daughters. They were no longer clean, young, and innocent. They had been picked up by someone they thought would be a friend, violated, photographed, drugged, and sold to others. They were dying inside and out, and they would have killed themselves before they would have gone back their parents this way.
The trafficking of people is happening today, and is more common than most people want to hear. Through our international work with the Bismarck-based Institute for Trafficked, Exploited & Missing Persons and The GOD’S CHILD Project, during 2008 we gave just under 100 anti-human trafficking presentations in places as far-reaching as Okinawa to Washington, D.C… from Little Rock, Arkansas to Grand Forks, North Dakota. Without exception, the # 1 comment we hear more than all others, is “I had no idea how prevalent human slavery is today.”
The need for the passage of House Bill 1185 is very timely and very important. While North Dakota does not have the high numbers or high-profile human trafficking cases that we see in Texas, California, New York, New Jersey, and Florida, we in North Dakota do have two very precious commodities that human traffickers are after: the physical beauty of our Midwestern youth, and their innocence.
Both of these are highly sought after commodities that bring the highest dollar imaginable from those who view children as sexual alternatives.
Here I refer to an earlier analogy I gave on how slave traders viewed African Americans as nothing more than beasts like cows and horses. Today’s slave traders… human traffickers… are no different. Physical beauty and innocence command the highest of prices for people who are interested in making the purchase. A North Dakota child is not a child to them; he or she is a piece of meat, like a cow or a horse… an investment that can be turned for a high profit margin.
Here in North Dakota we have a higher-than-average percentage of runaways. This means that our children sometimes choose to seek an alternative to a bored, abusive, or alcoholic-plagued home life by hitting the roads and hoping for a better life elsewhere. The pimps and the perverts who exploit these children know this. They can spot these children from hundreds of yards away.
In closing, I would like to offer three thoughts on House Bill 1185 for your consideration:
The first is that I see nothing in this bill that would penalize the actions of an individual who RECRUITS children or adults into situations from where they are trafficked. If it is found that Natalee Halloway was spirited into human trafficking from Carlos and Charlie’s Bar on Aruba, legal experts speculate there may be little that can be done to prosecute Dutch youth Joran van der Sloot for getting her drunk and walking her down to the beach.
Second, I strongly encourage you to expand your definition of victims of human trafficking to include VULNERABLE PERSONS. This would include, for example, adult women who are mentally disable and are made sexually available, albeit willingly, by 3rd parties who garner financial or another benefit.
And third, I encourage you to consider a provision which would allow for the prosecution of individuals who willingly or unwillingly take PHOTOGRAPHS OR VIDEOS of sexual partners or 2nd parties, and then distribute or post these photographs or videos materially or through the internet to 3rd parties without the knowledgeable consent of the person who was photographed or recorded.
We have seen many young people’s lives destroyed when what youth or adults thought was a moment of love or sexual intimacy was filmed and later distributed. I cannot recall the source, but I recently read in a professional journal that 90% of all photos on internet porn sites are there against the free-will consent of the participant. They were taken of obligated prostitutes, drug addicts, forced partners, human trafficking victims, or minors.
I appreciate your time, and thank you for allowing me to be with you today. Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance to this committee of this Legislative Session.
My best wishes for your successes.
(Patrick Atkinson)
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