Sex trafficking seldom prosecuted

CHAPEL HILL -- Sex trafficking is a crime mostly hidden -- even from the law enforcement officers charged with stopping it.

Government and advocacy agencies estimate that hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million, women and children are transported across borders and forced into slavery each year. Most end up as involuntary prostitutes. The Carolina Women's Center at UNC-Chapel Hill estimates that thousands are trafficked into the Southeast alone.

Yet law officers and legal advocates can count on their fingers the number of sex trafficking cases being investigated in North Carolina.

"We probably have not been attuned to seeing what could possibly be there," said Sabrina Garcia, a domestic violence and sexual assault specialist with the Chapel Hill Police Department. "We just don't know what to look for."

To raise awareness, Garcia and hundreds of other women -- and dozens of men -- participated in "Combating Sex Trafficking," a conference held Thursday and Friday at UNC-CH.

The conference featured academics, social workers, bureaucrats, lawyers and law enforcement. Also among the speakers were a former prostitute and an actress who played one on TV.

To start the conference, Kika Cerpa shared her story of being lured to New York from Venezuela as a young woman by a man who promised to care for her.

Instead, his female cousin took her passport and her $2,000 in life savings and forced her into a brothel, where she had sex with dozens of men every night while her captors collected the money.

"I felt wounded inside," Cerpa said.

She came to see police as enemies, as they not only patronized the brothel but also arrested the women and not the pimps or the johns. Cerpa ended up marrying a customer -- a man who had threatened her at gunpoint -- to escape the brothel.

Actress Sharon Lawrence, a Raleigh native and UNC-CH alumna who starred in "NYPD Blue," said playing prostitutes has helped her to understand that many are victims, rather than criminals, a main theme of the conference.

"It's allowed me the chance to investigate the kind of desperation and manipulation that goes along with women who are in that situation," she said.

John Price, a special agent with the FBI's Civil Rights Program in Charlotte, said Cerpa's story echoes those of the women his agency has rescued from forced prostitution. He said traffickers have brought Latin American, African and Asian girls as young as 15 to North Carolina to work as prostitutes.

"Nine times out of 10, they're made false promises to get them up here," said Price, speaking by phone from Charlotte. "We're dealing with the truly enslaved as opposed to the people who are willing participants."

Price said the FBI hasn't convicted any sex traffickers in North Carolina during his three years in Charlotte, nor has the state convicted any since passing an anti-trafficking law last year.

The story is the same in Illinois and New York, states that sent representatives to the conference to talk about their experience.

"We've been called in Chicago a hub of human trafficking, and we've identified 'several' victims of trafficking in the last two years," said Larry Sachs, director of grants management with the Chicago Police Department. The low success rate, he said, "has affected people's motivation to put a lot of time into this."

Not so hard to spot

But New York's Ken Franzblau, the only state director of human trafficking education in the United States, said prostitution rings and, by extension, the traffickers that enable them, are fairly easy to spot. Their ads are on popular Web sites such as MySpace and Craigslist, which has an "erotic services" section updated every few minutes that includes pornographic pictures of available prostitutes in every metropolitan area.

"[Founder] Craig Neumark is the biggest pimp in America," Franzblau said. "Uncovering this is not as hard as we've all made it out to be."

Last fall, Craigslist President Jim Buckmaster told the New York Times that his company discourages illegal activity but that his 24-member staff cannot patrol the constantly changing listings -- 20 million per month. It counts on viewers to flag objectionable ads, which are promptly removed.

Franzblau and other speakers said there's not enough "political will" to stop sex trafficking because many people view prostitution as "the oldest profession," assuming that demand is insatiable because "men will be men." There's a disconnect between public rhetoric and private behavior, embodied in disgraced New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who helped to pass that state's anti-trafficking law last year.

"There's probably been no better politician on this issue," said Franzblau, appointed by Spitzer before the governor admitted last month to hiring prostitutes. "Ultimately, he doesn't get it."