Low Hanging Fruit: How Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking Erased Foreign-born Victims of Child Trafficking from Anti-trafficking Efforts in the United States

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Notes

¹ The term “studying up” comes from an influential 1972 essay written by Laura Nader, Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up. What Nader suggested in her essay was that anthropologists should also point their ethnographic eye up, to people who wielded power: corporations, the government, the wealthy, scientists, the police, and so on.

² Juan Louis Cadena-Sosa and several of his family members conspired to smuggle girls and young women to the United States from Mexico and hold them in involuntary servitude in brothels owned and operated by his family. He was sentenced on September 3, 2008 to 15 years in prison followed by three years of supervised release and ordered to pay jointly with his co-defendants $964,175.60 in restitution to the victims.

³ In July 1997, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Government of Mexico initiated an investigation on an organization involved in the smuggling and trafficking of 55 deaf and mute Mexican nationals and 9 U.S. citizen children. The organization forced the victims through violence and intimidation to work long hours begging and selling trinkets on the streets or at subways in New York City. The victims were found at two residences in Jackson Heights, NY after four of them sought help from police and led authorities to the Jackson Heights houses. Defendants Paoletti-Lemus and Paoletti-Moreda, both Mexican citizens, were arrested in August 1997. After serving their Mexican sentences, Paoletti-Lemus and Paoletti-Moreda were extradited to the U.S. to face U.S. charges. After a jury trial each of them was ordered to pay a total of $1.4 million dollars in restitution, to be shared out among the victims, along with prison terms. In addition, 18 members of the investigated organization were convicted in the U.S. and received sentences varying from one to 15 years.

⁴ In a footnote Richard cited a CIA briefing on “Global Trafficking in Women and Children: Assessing the Magnitude” as her source. Later on, it was discovered that the CIA estimates were methodologically flawed.

⁵ In 2006, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) supported the Vera Institute to create a screening tool to identify possible victims of trafficking and an accompanying guide for the tool’s administration. In 2011, the Vera Institute received further funding from NIJ to validate this tool in the field. In 2008 and 2009, ICF International published reports based on their assessment of programs, supported by the U.S. DHHS, serving victims of trafficking, in which they attribute difficulties in identifying victims to the hidden nature of the crime; fear of law enforcement and fear of retaliation; feelings of shame and disgrace; and lack of self-identification as a victim (Clawson & Dutch 2008; Clawson, Dutch, Solomon, & Grace. 2009). So far, none of these studies resulted in better identification outcomes.

⁶ These figures conflate cross-border trafficking with internal trafficking and do not distinguish between trafficked children and those at risk for trafficking. The Foundation invoked the already-cited report by Estes and Weiner without realizing that the authors were actually writing about children who are at risk for sexual exploitation not only in the United States, but also in Canada and Mexico.

⁷ Interviews conducted by author in the summer of 2014.

⁸ See Annual ORR Reports to Congress. Available at

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/orr/resource/annual-orr-reports-to-congress