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Vocabulary > Violence > Sex crimes, Rape, Prostitution >
USA
Steve Breen
The San Diego Union-Tribune
Cagle
20 April 2011
sex crimes
sex offender
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-11-18-homeless-offenders_N.htm
listing sex offenders on Internet registries
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-10-juvenile-offenders_x.htm
assault / sex assault
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/us/09assault.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-09-08-milwaukee-rape_x.htm
be sexually
assaulted
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/health/nearly-1-in-5-women-in-us-survey-report-sexual-assault.html
molest
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-08-05-teacher-accused_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-10-juvenile-offenders_x.htm
molester / pedophile
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-11-15-pedophiles_x.htm
molestation
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-15-child-ring_x.htm
abuse
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1886967,00.html
molestation
child molester
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/opinion/the-molester-next-door.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/national/01offender.html
child pornography
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/child_pornography/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/us/03offender.html
dogging
wilding
Bill Day
Tennessee
Cagle
1 November 2010
rape
rape
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/us/federal-rules-on-rape-statistics-criticized.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/nyregion/at-rape-trial-of-officers-woman-tells-of-hazy-violent-night.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/nyregion/after-strauss-kahn-case-fears-that-victims-wont-speak-up.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/us/09assault.html
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/12/15/us/AP-US-School-Rape-Investigation.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-01-12-texas-stepsonassault_N.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-17-dungeon-rapes_x.htm
statutory rape
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/statutory+rape
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/us/30bully.html
http://www.wwlp.com/dpp/news/local/teens-charged-in-phoebe-princes-death
gang-rape
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/10/27/us/AP-US-Homecoming-Gang-Rape.html
sodomize
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/nyregion/07mineo.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-01-12-texas-stepsonassault_N.htm
victim
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/nyregion/after-strauss-kahn-case-fears-that-victims-wont-speak-up.html
prostitution
prostitution ring
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/nyregion/10cnd-spitzer.html
hooker
escort
call girl
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Spitzer-Call-Girl.html
call girl ring
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-01-05-mansion-madam_x.htm
madam
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-01-05-mansion-madam_x.htm
brothel
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-01-05-mansion-madam_x.htm
pimp
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/opinion/kristof-not-quite-a-teen-yet-sold-for-sex.html
pimps and johns
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/opinion/kristof-not-quite-a-teen-yet-sold-for-sex.html
sex trafficking
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/opinion/kristof-not-quite-a-teen-yet-sold-for-sex.html
sex workers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/11/prostitution-women
sex party / orgy
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/opinion/nocera-power-sex-and-conspiracy.html
teen prostitutes
child-prostitution cases / child prostitution
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-26-prostitution-crackdown_x.htm
"Innocence Lost"
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-26-prostitution-crackdown_x.htm
crackdown
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-26-prostitution-crackdown_x.htm
face
charges of child molestation
lewd or lascivious acts with a child under age 14
Not Quite a Teen, Yet Sold for Sex
April 18, 2012
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
If you think sex trafficking only happens in faraway places
like Nepal or Thailand, then you should listen to an expert on American sex
trafficking I interviewed the other day.
But, first, wish her happy birthday. She turns 16 years old on Thursday.
She asked me to call her Brianna in this column because she worries that it
could impede her plans to become a lawyer if I use her real name. Brianna, who
grew up in New York City, is smart, poised and enjoys writing poetry.
One evening when she was 12 years old she got into a fight with her mom and ran
out to join friends. “I didn’t want to go home, because I thought I’d get in
trouble,” she said, and a friend’s older brother told her she could stay at his
place.
Brianna figured she would go home in the morning — and that that would teach her
mom a lesson. But when morning arrived, her new life began.
“I tried to leave, and he said, ‘you can’t go; you’re mine,’ ” Brianna recalled.
He told her that he was a pimp and that she was now his property.
The pimp locked her in the room, she recalled, and alternately beat her and
showed her affection. She says that he advertised her on Backpage.com, the
leading Web site for sex trafficking in America today, as well as on other Web
sites.
“He felt that Backpage made him the most money,” Brianna said, estimating that
half of her pimp’s business came through Backpage.
Backpage accounts for about 70 percent of America’s prostitution ads (many
placed by consenting adults who are not trafficked), according to AIM Group, a
trade organization. Backpage cooperates with police and tries to screen out ads
for underage girls, but that didn’t help Brianna.
Backpage is owned by Village Voice Media, and significant minority stakes have
been held in recent years by Goldman Sachs and smaller financial firms such as
Trimaran Capital Partners and Alta Communications. My research shows that
representatives of Goldman, Trimaran and Alta, along with a founder of Brynwood
Partners, all sat on the board of Village Voice Media, and there’s no indication
that they ever protested its business aims.
When I wrote recently about this, these firms erupted in excuses and self-pity,
and in some cases raced to liquidate their stakes. I was struck by the
self-absorption and narcissism of Wall Street bankers viewing themselves as
victims, so maybe it’s useful to hear from girls who were victimized through the
company they invested in.
I met Brianna at Gateways, a treatment center for girls who have been sexually
trafficked. It’s in Pleasantville, 35 miles north of New York City, on a
sprawling estate overseen by the Jewish Child Care Association. Gateways is
meant for girls ages 12 to 16, although it has accepted one who was just 11
years old. Virtually all the girls have been sold on Backpage, according to
Lashauna Cutts, the center’s director.
Gateways has only 13 beds, and Cutts says that the need is so great that she
could easily fill 1,300. “I have to turn away girls almost every day,” Cutts
told me.
The public sometimes assumes that teenage girls in the sex trade are working
freely, without coercion. It’s true that most aren’t physically imprisoned by
pimps, but threats and violence are routine. The girls typically explain that
they didn’t try to escape because of a complex web of emotions, including fear
of the pimp but also a deluded affection and a measure of Stockholm syndrome.
Once, Brianna says, she looked out her window — and there was her mother on the
street, crying and posting “missing” posters with Brianna’s photo. “I tried to
shout to her through the window,” she remembered. But her pimp grabbed her by
the hair and yanked her back. “If you shout, I’ll kill you,” she remembers him
saying.
“If I tried to run, I thought he might kill me, or I’d be hurt,” she said. “And,
if I went to the cops, I thought I’d be the one in trouble. I’d go to jail.”
Pimps warn girls to distrust the police, and often they’re right. Bridgette
Carr, who runs a human-trafficking clinic at the University of Michigan Law
School, tells of a 16-year-old girl who went missing. A family member found a
photo of the girl on Backpage and alerted authorities. Police raided the pimp’s
motel room and “rescued” the girl — by handcuffing her and detaining her for
three weeks.
That mind-set has to change. Police and prosecutors must target pimps and johns,
not teenage victims. Trafficked girls deserve shelters, not jails, and online
emporiums like Backpage should stop abetting pimps. Sex trafficking is just as
unacceptable in America as in Thailand or Nepal.
And let’s all wish our expert, Brianna, a joyous “Sweet Sixteen” birthday!
Not Quite a Teen, Yet Sold for Sex, NYT,
18.4.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/opinion/kristof-not-quite-a-teen-yet-sold-for-sex.html
Nearly 1
in 5 Women in U.S. Survey
Say They
Have Been Sexually Assaulted
December
14, 2011
The New York Times
By RONI CARYN RABIN
An
exhaustive government survey of rape and domestic violence released on Wednesday
affirmed that sexual violence against women remains endemic in the United States
and in some instances may be far more common than previously thought.
Nearly one in five women surveyed said they had been raped or had experienced an
attempted rape at some point, and one in four reported having been beaten by an
intimate partner. One in six women have been stalked, according to the report.
“That almost one in five women have been raped in their lifetime is very
striking and, I think, will be surprising to a lot of people,” said Linda C.
Degutis, director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which conducted the survey.
“I don’t think we’ve really known that it was this prevalent in the population,”
she said.
The study, called the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, was
begun in 2010 with the support of the National Institute of Justice and the
Department of Defense. The study, a continuing telephone survey of a nationally
representative sample of 16,507 adults, defines intimate partner and sexual
violence broadly.
The surveyors elicited information on types of aggression not previously studied
in national surveys, including sexual violence other than rape, psychological
aggression, coercion and control of reproductive and sexual health.
They also gathered information about the physical and mental health of violence
survivors.
Sexual violence affects women disproportionately, the researchers found.
One-third of women said they had been victims of a rape, beating or stalking, or
a combination of assaults.
The researchers defined rape as completed forced penetration, forced penetration
facilitated by drugs or alcohol, or attempted forced penetration.
By that definition, 1 percent of women surveyed reported being raped in the
previous year, a figure that suggests that 1.3 million American women annually
may be victims of rape or attempted rape.
That figure is significantly higher than previous estimates. The Rape, Abuse and
Incest National Network estimated that 272,350 Americans were victims of sexual
violence last year. Only 84,767 assaults defined as forcible rapes were reported
in 2010, according to national statistics from the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
But men also reported being victimized in surprising numbers.
One in seven men have experienced severe violence at the hands of an intimate
partner, the survey found, and one in 71 men — between 1 percent and 2 percent —
have been raped, many when they were younger than 11.
A vast majority of women who said they had been victims of sexual violence, rape
or stalking reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, as did about
one-third of the men.
Women who had experienced such violence were also more likely to report having
asthma, diabetes or irritable bowel syndrome than women who had not. Both men
and women who had been assaulted were more likely to report frequent headaches,
chronic pain, difficulty sleeping, limitations on activity, and poor physical
and mental health.
“We’ve seen this association with chronic health conditions in smaller studies
before,” said Lisa James, director of health for Futures Without Violence, a
national nonprofit group based in San Francisco that advocates for programs to
end violence against women and girls.
“People who grow up with violence adopt coping strategies that can lead to poor
health outcomes,” she said. “We know that women in abusive relationships are at
increased risk for smoking, for example.”
The survey found that youth itself was an important risk factor for sexual
violence and assault. Some 28 percent of male victims of rape reported that they
were first assaulted when they were no older than 10.
Only 12 percent of female rape victims were assaulted when they were 10 or
younger, but almost half of female victims said they had been raped before they
turned 18. About 80 percent of rape victims reported that they had been raped
before age 25.
Rape at a young age was associated with another, later rape; about 35 percent of
women who had been raped as minors were also raped as adults, the survey found.
More than half of female rape victims had been raped by an intimate partner,
according to the study, and 40 percent had been raped by an acquaintance; more
than half of men who had been raped said the assailant was an acquaintance.
The public release of the report was postponed twice, most recently on Nov. 28.
The findings are based on completed interviews lasting about 25 minutes each;
they were conducted in 2010 with 9,086 women and 7,421 men.
Nearly 1 in 5 Women in U.S. Survey Say They Have Been Sexually Assaulted, NYT,
14.12.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/health/nearly-1-in-5-women-in-us-survey-report-sexual-assault.html
The
Molester Next Door
November 7,
2011
The New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI
The
longest, most exhaustively researched article I ever wrote for a newspaper or
magazine was about a child molester who had sexually abused a little boy living
down the street. The abuse went on for more than two years, beginning when the
boy was 10.
This molester had a job. A house. A wife. Two kids of his own. And he gained
access to his victim not through brute force but through patience, play and
gifts: help with his homework, computer games, a new bike. To neighborhood
observers, including the victim’s parents, the molester’s attentiveness passed
for kindness, at least for a while. A molester’s behavior very often does.
The arrest on Saturday of a former Penn State University assistant football
coach — who is accused of sexually abusing eight pre-adolescent, adolescent and
teenage boys — brought this all back to me. I wonder if people who know the
coach and saw him working with kids will comment on how genuinely nurturing he
seemed and how this surely prevented or discouraged suspicions about him.
This is something that has come up repeatedly over decades — I wrote that
article back in 1991, for The Detroit Free Press — but that remains tough to
accept: the predator to watch out for is less likely to don a trench coat and
lurk behind a bush than to wear a clerical collar and stand near the altar or to
hold a stopwatch and walk the sidelines. And he (or, for that matter, she) works
with children as a function of being drawn to them for reasons beyond their
welfare.
The former Penn State assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, 67, founded and ran a
charity program for disadvantaged boys. That’s one of the ways he got to know
and interact so extensively with kids, some of whom received special favors
related to his college-football connections. His alleged abuse of them is said
to have occurred over a 15-year period ending in 2009.
He maintains his innocence of the charges against him. That’s important to note,
because sexual abuse of children is a crime so rightly enraging that the specter
of it has prompted unfair rushes to judgment in the past.
But true or not, the accusations against Sandusky, spelled out in great detail
in a 23-page grand jury report, bring to mind many proven cases in which a
molester occupied a position of trust, identified and gravitated to children who
were especially vulnerable, made them feel special and was by all outward
appearances their champion, which many molesters indeed believe themselves to
be.
In their own minds these molesters aren’t predators. They’re people whose
affinity for children just happens to have a sexual element, the satisfaction of
which they’ve convinced themselves isn’t such a big, harmful deal.
Parents face a tricky challenge. They need to be watchful but not paranoid,
because most clergy members, scout leaders, camp counselors and coaches aren’t
abusers in waiting and are improving children’s lives. They deserve the
opportunity to.
But parents should also remain conscious of an additional lesson suggested by
the Penn State story. Institutions do an awful job of policing themselves.
That has been true of the Boy Scouts, which has paid out tens of million of
dollars in response to lawsuits by former scouts molested by adults who
continued to work in the organization despite complaints or questions about
their behavior.
That has been true of the Roman Catholic Church, whose diocesan heads and
bishops repeatedly transferred abusive priests from one parish to another rather
than report them to law enforcement authorities. This cover-up spanned decades
and went all the way up the hierarchy of the church.
Many factors explain it, including a fear of scandal and desire to protect the
church’s image. The Boy Scouts, too, didn’t want messiness exposed.
Was that a dynamic at Penn State as well? Two university officials have been
indicted for not contacting the police after being alerted many years ago to the
possibility that Sandusky was abusing boys from his charity on university
premises.
And there are lingering questions about whether the university’s renowned head
football coach, Joe Paterno, was irresponsible.
According to an account in the indictment that he hasn’t disputed, a graduate
assistant in 2002 told him of inappropriate activity in a university shower
between a boy and Sandusky, who had already retired from his longtime job as the
coordinator of the football team’s defense. Coach Paterno relayed that to a
university official, then apparently moved on. And Sandusky continued to
interact with troubled boys.
Paterno absolutely should have followed up. Maybe he just couldn’t envision
someone like Sandusky — a distinguished professional, a seeming do-gooder — as a
molester. But it’s important that we all do.
The Molester Next Door, NYT, 7.11.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/opinion/the-molester-next-door.html
Federal
Rape Definition Too Narrow, Critics Say
September
28, 2011
The New York Times
By ERICA GOODE
WASHINGTON
— Thousands of sexual assaults that occur in the United States every year are
not reflected in the federal government’s yearly crime report because the report
uses an archaic definition of rape that is far narrower than the definitions
used by most police departments.
Many law enforcement officials and advocates for women say that this
underreporting misleads the public about the prevalence of rape and results in
fewer federal, state and local resources being devoted to catching rapists and
helping rape victims.
“The public has the right to know about the prevalence of crime and violent
crime in our communities, and we know that data drives practices, resources,
policies and programs,” said Carol Tracy, executive director of the Women’s Law
Project in Philadelphia, whose office has campaigned to get the F.B.I. to change
its definition of sexual assault. “It’s critical that we strive to have accurate
information about this.”
Ms. Tracy spoke at a meeting in Washington on Friday, organized by the Police
Executive Research Forum, that brought together police chiefs, sex-crime
investigators, federal officials and advocates to discuss the limitations of the
federal definition and the wider issue of local police departments not
adequately investigating rape.
According to the 2010 Uniform Crime Report, released by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation last week, there were 84,767 sexual assaults in the United States
last year, a 5 percent drop from 2009.
The definition of rape used by the F.B.I. — “the carnal knowledge of a female,
forcibly and against her will” was written more than 80 years ago. The yearly
report on violent crime, which uses data provided voluntarily by the nation’s
18,000 law enforcement agencies, is widely cited as an indicator of national
crime trends.
But that definition, critics say, does not take into account sexual-assault
cases that involve anal or oral penetration or penetration with an object, cases
where the victims were drugged or under the influence of alcohol or cases with
male victims. As a result, many sexual assaults are not counted as rapes in the
yearly federal accounting.
“The data that are reported to the public come from this definition, and sadly,
it portrays a very, very distorted picture,” said Susan B. Carbon, director of
the Office on Violence Against Women, part of the Department of Justice. “It’s
the message that we’re sending to victims, and if you don’t fit that very narrow
definition, you weren’t a victim and your rape didn’t count.”
Steve Anderson, chief of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, said that
the F.B.I.’s definition created a double standard for police departments.
“We prosecute by one criteria, but we report by another criteria,” Chief
Anderson said. “The only people who have a true picture of what’s going on are
the people in the sex-crimes unit.”
In Chicago, the police department recorded close to 1,400 sexual assaults in
2010, according to the department’s Web site. But none of these appeared in the
federal crime report because Chicago’s broader definition of rape is not
accepted by the F.B.I.
In New York City, 1,369 rapes were reported by the police department, but only
1,036 — the ones that fit the federal definition — were entered in the federal
figures. And in Elizabeth Township, Pa., the sexual assault of a woman last year
was widely discussed by residents. Yet according to the F.B.I.’s report, no
rapes were reported in Elizabeth in 2010.
In a recent survey conducted by the Police Executive Research Forum, almost 80
percent of the 306 police departments that responded said that the federal
definition of rape used by the Uniform Crime Report was inadequate and should be
changed.
Greg Scarbro, the F.B.I.’s unit chief for the Uniformed Crime Report, said that
the agency agreed that the definition should be revised and that an F.B.I.
subcommittee would take up the issue at a meeting in Baltimore on Oct. 18.
“Our goal will be to leave that meeting with a definition and a mechanism,” Mr.
Scarbro said. But he noted that law enforcement agencies would have to support
any change.
A more comprehensive definition of rape is used by the National Incident-Based
Reporting System, or NIBRS, started by the F.B.I. in 1988 to address
deficiencies in the Uniform Crime Report. But that system covers 28 percent of
the population and has not gained wide traction as a reporting method. If the
F.B.I. does adopt a broader definition, law enforcement agencies — especially
those that use the federal standard in their own counts — may find themselves
explaining a sudden increase in reported rapes.
“You can’t ignore the politics of crime,” said Charles H. Ramsey, commissioner
of the Philadelphia Police Department and the president of the police research
forum, who backs changing the federal definition.
“With the new definition it’s going to dramatically change the numbers,” Mr.
Ramsey said. Police chiefs will then need to explain to the public that the
increase represents an improvement in reporting, rather than a jump in actual
numbers of sexual assaults.
The Chicago Police Department uses a definition of sexual assault laid out by
Illinois statute. Currently, the Uniform Crime Report does not include any rape
statistics from Chicago; a footnote in the report says that the city’s
methodology “does not comply with the Uniform Crime Reporting Program
guidelines.” The Chicago Department plans to start reporting the subset of rapes
that meet the federal definition to the F.B.I., according to Robert Tracy, chief
of crime control strategies.
But Tom Byrne, chief of detectives in Chicago, told the participants at the
meeting on Friday that “Technically we’re going to be taking rapes off the
books.”
The gap between the federal counts and the real numbers reported to the police
may be most apparent in small towns, said Robert W. McNeilly, police chief in
Elizabeth Township, just outside Pittsburgh.
“When we have a sexual assault in a small town, people know about it, people
talk about it,” Chief McNeilly said. “But when the U.C.R. report comes out at
the end of the year and we report zero rapes, I think we lose credibility.”
In some cases, however, police departments contribute to the problem. The
Baltimore Police Department made sweeping changes in the way it dealt with
sexual assault after The Baltimore Sun revealed last year that the department
was labeling rape reports as “unfounded” at a rate five times the national
average.
The problem, said Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, was rooted in the
attitudes and lack of understanding of officers and detectives toward rape and
rape victims.
“We didn’t just suddenly veer off the road and strike a tree — this was a very
long process that led to this problem,” Commissioner Bealefeld said.
After making changes, the department saw an 80 percent reduction in “unfounded”
classifications. But because they were misclassified, Commissioner Bealefeld
said, those reports never reached the F.B.I. or appeared in the Uniform Crime
Report.
“When you unfound those cases, you take it off your U.C.R. numbers, as though
they never occurred,” he said.
Federal Rape Definition Too Narrow, Critics Say, NYT,
28.9.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/us/federal-rules-on-rape-statistics-criticized.html
After
Strauss-Kahn, Fear of Rape Victim Silence
August 24,
2011
The New York Times
By CARA BUCKLEY
She seemed
to be the perfect witness. She came forward right away, disclosing detail after
damning detail of a sexual attack that, backed by forensic evidence, seemed
airtight. She stuck to her story. But then her case fell apart after prosecutors
questioned her credibility. The charges against the man she accused, Dominique
Strauss-Kahn, were dropped.
Now, rape victims, women’s rights advocates, detectives and prosecutors are
sifting through the wreckage of the case of the accuser, Nafissatou Diallo,
trying to determine what it will mean for rape cases — already among the most
delicate in the criminal justice system — in the days and months to come.
Advocates for domestic violence victims said women who are raped would almost
certainly be more fearful of stepping forward, knowing that everything in their
past may be exposed; indeed, reporting of rapes usually drops in the aftermath
of high-profile sexual assault cases. This reluctance, experts said, will be
heightened for new immigrants, who are already fearful of authority, often
fleeing a sexually violent past.
“This is going to twist and turn things around,” said Susan Xenarios, head of
the Crime Victims Treatment Center at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center.
Other advocates said the dismissal relayed a chilling message that rich and
powerful men were more likely to get away with sexual assaults. Still others
said the facts of the Strauss-Kahn case were unique unto themselves.
Experts said rape crisis centers usually see a drop in reported cases in the
aftermath of high-profile sexual assault cases, especially those in which the
prosecution failed, like the case against Duke University lacrosse players; the
recent acquittal, on the most serious charges, of two New York police officers
who visited a drunk woman repeatedly in her apartment; and the William Kennedy
Smith case in the 1990s.
More rapes go unreported than not: according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest
National Network, 6 in 10 sexual assaults are not reported, and just 6 percent
of rapists serve jail time.
Michael J. Palladino, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, said
the publicity of this case would unquestionably be a deterrent for some women.
“I’m sure some will hesitate,” he said. “They’re really dragged through the mud,
and they’re victimized a second time.”
That thought was echoed by Richard Emery, a longtime civil rights lawyer, who
said: “The victim is terribly, terribly tortured, at every level. First by the
crime itself. And secondly by the system. There’s no escaping.”
Lynn Hecht Schafran, senior vice president of Legal Momentum, a nonprofit legal
advocacy organization for women and girls, said the Diallo case did have its
uncommon aspects. The Manhattan district attorney’s office, she noted, went to
“unique lengths” to explain its reasoning in dropping the case. The unusual
background, including prosecutors’ contention that Ms. Diallo repeatedly lied
about her past, should not be a deterrent to other women, she said.
“Victims do not have to be pristine to be believed in court,” Ms. Schafran said.
None of the women’s advocates interviewed expressed doubt in Ms. Diallo’s claim
that she was assaulted. And they said her initial account of a gang rape in her
home country — which she later admitted was false, contributing to the undoing
of her case — could be explained by her anguished state and troubled past,
several advocates said.
Dorchen A. Leidholdt, director of the center for battered women’s legal services
at the Sanctuary for Families, a nonprofit group that works with victims of
domestic violence, noted that a vast majority of Guinean immigrant women had
suffered from female genital mutilation, and many were forced into early
marriages.
“Erratic responses are something that we see over and over again,” Ms. Leidholdt
said. “Her behavior was consistent with a trauma victim.”
Women from tightly knit West African communities in New York were especially
focused on the dismissal, saying it lent credence to entrenched beliefs that
governed behaviors and attitudes among Muslim immigrants here: that in the event
of a sexual attack, a woman is still to blame.
“In Africa, if something happens to you, you have to shut your mouth,” said a
35-year-old former saleswoman from West Africa, who left a job as a home
attendant after a charge in her care made sexual advances, and who did not want
her name published for fear of community retribution. “But when you come here
from Africa, you think that there’s protection for women’s rights.”
Still, several women said they were inspired by Ms. Diallo.
A 23-year-old graduate student who is from Guinea and lives in the Bronx said
Ms. Diallo’s allegations emboldened her to lodge a complaint against a professor
who had made sexual advances and offered her a higher grade if she complied. The
woman, who requested anonymity for fear of community stigmatization, was raped
by a family member years ago, she said, yet until recently never told anyone.
She said the dismissal in the Diallo case suggested to her that people in power
would always be protected.
“I feel more vulnerable,” she said.
As for Ms. Diallo, the young graduate student said the former hotel worker had
already been ostracized among New York’s Guineans for being an “unlucky woman.”
“This situation,” the young woman said, “is going to make things worse.”
After Strauss-Kahn, Fear of Rape Victim Silence, NYT,
24.8.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/nyregion/after-strauss-kahn-case-fears-that-victims-wont-speak-up.html
A Woman. A Prostitute. A Slave.
November 27, 2010
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Americans tend to associate “modern slavery” with illiterate girls in India
or Cambodia. Yet there I was the other day, interviewing a college graduate who
says she spent three years terrorized by pimps in a brothel in Midtown
Manhattan.
Those who think that commercial sex in this country is invariably voluntary —
and especially men who pay for sex — should listen to her story. The men buying
her services all mistakenly assumed that she was working of her own volition,
she says.
Yumi Li (a nickname) grew up in a Korean area of northeastern China. After
university, she became an accountant, but, restless and ambitious, she yearned
to go abroad.
So she accepted an offer from a female jobs agent to be smuggled to New York and
take up a job using her accounting skills and paying $5,000 a month. Yumi’s
relatives had to sign documents pledging their homes as collateral if she did
not pay back the $50,000 smugglers’ fee from her earnings.
Yumi set off for America with a fake South Korean passport. On arrival in New
York, however, Yumi was ordered to work in a brothel.
“When they first mentioned prostitution, I thought I would go crazy,” Yumi told
me. “I was thinking, ‘how can this happen to someone like me who is
college-educated?’ ” Her voice trailed off, and she added: “I wanted to die.”
She says that the four men who ran the smuggling operation — all Chinese or
South Koreans — took her into their office on 36th Street in Midtown Manhattan.
They beat her with their fists (but did not hit her in the face, for that might
damage her commercial value), gang-raped her and videotaped her naked in
humiliating poses. For extra intimidation, they held a gun to her head.
If she continued to resist working as a prostitute, she says they told her, the
video would be sent to her relatives and acquaintances back home. Relatives
would be told that Yumi was a prostitute, and several of them would lose their
homes as well.
Yumi caved. For the next three years, she says, she was one of about 20 Asian
prostitutes working out of the office on 36th Street. Some of them worked
voluntarily, she says, but others were forced and received no share in the
money.
Yumi played her role robotically. On one occasion, Yumi was arrested for
prostitution, and she says the police asked her if she had been trafficked.
“I said no,” she recalled. “I was really afraid that if I hinted that I was a
victim, the gang would send the video to my family.”
Then one day Yumi’s closest friend in the brothel was handcuffed by a customer,
abused and strangled almost to death. Yumi rescued her and took her to the
hospital. She said that in her rage, she then confronted the pimps and
threatened to go public.
At that point, the gang hurriedly moved offices and changed phone numbers. The
pimps never mailed the video or claimed the homes in China; those may have been
bluffs all along. As for Yumi and her friend, they found help with Restore NYC,
a nonprofit that helps human trafficking victims in the city.
I can’t be sure of elements of Yumi’s story, but it mostly rings true to me and
to the social workers who have worked with her. There’s no doubt that while some
women come to the United States voluntarily to seek their fortunes in the sex
trade, many others are coerced — and still others start out forced but
eventually continue voluntarily. And it’s not just foreign women. The worst
cases of forced prostitution, especially of children, often involve home-grown
teenage runaways.
No one has a clear idea of the scale of the problem, and estimates vary hugely.
Some think the problem is getting worse; others believe that Internet services
reduce the role of pimps and lead to commercial sex that is more consensual.
What is clear is that forced prostitution should be a national scandal. Just
this month, authorities indicted 29 people, mostly people of Somali origin from
the Minneapolis area, on charges of running a human trafficking ring that
allegedly sold many girls into prostitution — one at the age of 12.
There are no silver bullets, but the critical step is for the police and
prosecutors to focus more on customers (to reduce demand) and, above all, on
pimps. Prostitutes tend to be arrested because they are easy to catch, while
pimping is a far harder crime to prosecute. That’s one reason thugs become
pimps: It’s hugely profitable and carries less risk than selling drugs or
stealing cars. But that can change as state and federal authorities target
traffickers rather than their victims.
Nearly 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s time to wipe out the
remnants of slavery in this country.
A Woman. A Prostitute. A
Slave., NYT, 27.11.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/opinion/28kristof.html
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