Quotes from

The Girls Next Door

By Peter Landesman (NYT)

The New York Times Magazine, 25 January 2004

The house at 12121/ 2 West Front Street in Plainfield, N.J., is a conventional mid-century home with slate-gray siding, white trim and Victorian lines. When I stood in front of it on a breezy day in October, I could hear the cries of children from the playground of an elementary school around the corner. American flags fluttered from porches and windows. The neighborhood is a leafy, middle-class Anytown. The house is set back off the street, near two convenience stores and a gift shop. 

On the door of Superior Supermarket was pasted a sign issued by the Plainfield police: ''Safe neighborhoods save lives.'' The store's manager, who refused to tell me his name, said he never noticed anything unusual about the house, and never heard anything. 

But David Miranda, the young man behind the counter of Westside Convenience, told me he saw girls from the house roughly once a week. 

[...]

 Cars drove up to the house all day; nice cars, all kinds of cars. Dozens of men came and went. 

''But no one here knew what was really going on,'' Miranda said. 

And no one ever asked.

On a tip, the Plainfield police raided the house in February 2002, expecting to find illegal aliens working an underground brothel. What the police found were four girls between the ages of 14 and 17. They were all Mexican nationals without documentation. But they weren't prostitutes; they were sex slaves. 

The distinction is important: these girls weren't working for profit or a paycheck. They were captives to the traffickers and keepers who controlled their every move. 

[...]

The police found a squalid, land-based equivalent of a 19th-century slave ship, with rancid, doorless bathrooms; bare, putrid mattresses; and a stash of penicillin, ''morning after'' pills and misoprostol, an anti-ulcer medication that can induce abortion. The girls were pale, exhausted and malnourished. 

It turned out that 1212 1/2 West Front Street was one of what law-enforcement officials say are dozens of active stash houses and apartments in the New York metropolitan area  --  mirroring hundreds more in other major cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago  --  where under-age girls and young women from dozens of countries are trafficked and held captive. Most of them  -- whether they started out in Eastern Europe or Latin America -- are taken to the United States through Mexico. Some of them have been baited by promises of legitimate jobs and a better life in America; many have been abducted; others have been bought from or abandoned by their impoverished families.

Because of the porousness of the U.S.-Mexico border and the criminal networks that traverse it, the towns and cities along that border have become the main staging area in an illicit and barbaric industry, whose ''products'' are women and girls. On both sides of the border, they are rented out for sex for as little as 15 minutes at a time, dozens of times a day. Sometimes they are sold outright to other traffickers and sex rings, victims and experts say. These sex slaves earn no money, there is nothing voluntary about what they do and if they try to escape they are often beaten and sometimes killed.

[... ...]

In fact, the United States has become a major importer of sex slaves. Last year, the C.I.A. estimated that between 18,000 and 20,000 people are trafficked annually into the United States. The government has not studied how many of these are victims of sex traffickers, but Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves, America's largest anti-slavery organization, says that the number is at least 10,000 a year. 

John Miller, the State Department's director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, conceded: 

''That figure could be low. What we know is that the number is huge.''

Bales estimates that there are 30,000 to 50,000 sex slaves in captivity in the United States at any given time. 

Laura Lederer, a senior State Department adviser on trafficking, told me, 

''We're not finding victims in the United States because we're not looking for them.''

ABDUCTION

In Eastern European capitals like Kiev and Moscow, dozens of sex-trafficking rings advertise nanny positions in the United States in local newspapers; others claim to be scouting for models and actresses. 

[...]

Some of these young women are actually tricked into paying their own travel expenses -- typically around $3,000 -- as a down payment on what they expect to be bright, prosperous futures, only to find themselves kept prisoner in Mexico before being moved to the United States and sold into sexual bondage there.

[... ...]

In October, I met Nicole, a young Russian woman who had been trafficked into Mexico by a different network. 

'I wanted to get out of Moscow, and they told me the Mexican border was like a freeway,'' said Nicole, who is now 25. 

[...]

Donna M. Hughes, a professor of women's studies at the University of Rhode Island and an expert on sex trafficking, says that prostitution barely existed 12 years ago in the Soviet Union. 

[...]

But in the first years after the collapse of Soviet Communism, poverty in the former Soviet states soared. Young women -- many of them college-educated and married -- became easy believers in Hollywood-generated images of swaying palm trees in L.A. 

[...]

The girls' first contacts are usually with what appear to be legitimate travel agencies.

[...] 

Oblivious and full of hope, the girls get on planes to Europe and then on to Mexico. 

Every day, flights from Paris, London and Amsterdam arrive at Mexico City's international airport carrying groups of these girls, sometimes as many as seven at a time, according to two Mexico City immigration officers I spoke with (and who asked to remain anonymous).

One of them told me that officials at the airport -- who cooperate with Mexico's federal preventive police (P.F.P.) -- work with the traffickers and 

''direct airlines to park at certain gates. Officials go to the aircraft. They know the seat numbers. While passengers come off, they take the girls to an office, where officials will 'process' them.''

[...]

But Mexico is not merely a way station en route to the U.S. for third-country traffickers, like the Eastern European rings. It is also a vast source of even younger and more cheaply acquired girls for sexual servitude in the United States. 

While European traffickers tend to dupe their victims into boarding one-way flights to Mexico to their own captivity, Mexican traffickers rely on the charm and brute force of ''Los Lenones,'' tightly organized associations of pimps, according to Roberto Caballero, an officer with the P.F.P. 

[...] 

Like the Sicilian Mafia, Los Lenones are based on family hierarchies, Caballero explained. The father controls the organization and the money, while the sons and their male cousins hunt, kidnap and entrap victims. The boys leave school at 12 and are given one or two girls their age to rape and pimp out to begin their training, which emphasizes the arts of kidnapping and seduction. 

Throughout the rural and suburban towns from southern Mexico to the U.S. border, along what traffickers call the Via Lactea, or Milky Way, the agents of Los Lenones troll the bus stations and factories and school dances where under-age girls gather, work and socialize.

They first ply the girls like prospective lovers, buying them meals and desserts, promising affection and then marriage. Then the men describe rumors they've heard about America, about the promise of jobs and schools. Sometimes the girls are easy prey. Most of them already dream of El Norte. But the theater often ends as soon as the agent has the girl alone, when he beats her, drugs her or simply forces her into a waiting car. 

[...]

Before I left Mexico City for Tenancingo in October, I was warned by Mexican and U.S. officials that the traffickers there are protected by the local police, and that the town is designed to discourage outsiders, with mazelike streets and only two closely watched entrances. [...] I traveled in a bulletproof Suburban with well-armed federales and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

On the way, we stopped at a gas station, where I met the parents of a girl from Tenancingo who was reportedly abducted in August 2000. The girl, Suri, is now 20. Her mother told me that there were witnesses who saw her being forced into a car on the way home from work at a local factory. No one called the police. Suri's mother recited the names of daughters of a number of her friends who have also been taken: ''Minerva, Sylvia, Carmen,'' she said in a monotone, as if the list went on and on.

[...] 

Sex-trafficking victims widely believe that if they talk, they or someone they love will be killed. And their fear is not unfounded, since the tentacles of the trafficking rings reach back into the girls' hometowns, and local law enforcement is often complicit in the sex trade.

One officer in the P.F.P.'s anti-trafficking division told me [...], 

''Some officials are not only on the organization's payroll, they are key players in the organization,'' an official at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City told me. ''Corruption is the most important reason these networks are so successful.''

[... ...] 

Gary Haugen, president of the International Justice Mission, an organization based in Arlington, Va., that fights sexual exploitation in South Asia and Southeast Asia, says: 

''Sex trafficking isn't a poverty issue but a law-enforcement issue. You can only carry out this trade at significant levels with the cooperation of local law enforcement. In the developing world the police are not seen as a solution for anything. You don't run to the police; you run from the police.''

BREAKING THE GIRLS IN

Once the Mexican traffickers abduct or seduce the women and young girls, it's not other men who first indoctrinate them into sexual slavery but other women. The victims and officials I spoke to all emphasized this fact as crucial to the trafficking rings' success.

[...]

Traffickers understand that because women can more easily gain the trust of young girls, they can more easily crush them. 

[... ...]

The young women are typically kept in locked-down, gated villas in groups of 16 to 20. The girls are provided with all-American clothing -- Levi's and baseball caps. They learn to say, ''U.S. citizen.'' They are also sexually brutalized. Nicole told me that the day she arrived in Tijuana, three of her traveling companions were ''tried out'' locally. The education lasts for days and sometimes weeks.

For the Mexican girls abducted by Los Lenones, the process of breaking them in often begins on Calle Santo Tomas, a filthy narrow street in La Merced, a dangerous and raucous ghetto in Mexico City. Santo Tomas has been a place for low-end prostitution since before Spain's conquest of Mexico in the 16th century. But beginning in the early 90's, it became an important training ground for under-age girls and young women on their way into sexual bondage in the United States. 

When I first visited Santo Tomas, in late September, I found 150 young women walking a slow-motion parabola among 300 or 400 men. [...]

Some of the girls looked as young as 12. Their faces betrayed no emotion. Many wore pendants of the grim reaper around their necks and made hissing sounds; this, I was told, was part of a ritual to ward off bad energy. 

The men [...] were buyers and renters with an interest in the youngest and best looking. They nodded to the girls they wanted and then followed them past a guard in a Yankees baseball cap through a tin doorway.

Inside, the girls braced the men before a statue of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, and patted them down for weapons. Then the girls genuflected to the stone-faced saint and led the men to the back, grabbing a condom and roll of toilet paper on the way. They pointed to a block of ice in a tub in lieu of a urinal. 

Beyond a blue hallway the air went sour, like old onions; there were 30 stalls curtained off by blue fabric, every one in use. Fifteen minutes of straightforward intercourse with the girl's clothes left on cost 50 pesos, or about $4.50. For $4.50 more, the dress was lifted. For another $4.50, the bra would be taken off. Oral sex was $4.50; ''acrobatic positions'' were $1.80 each. Despite the dozens of people and the various exertions in this room, there were only the sounds of zippers and shoes. There was no human noise at all.

Most of the girls on Santo Tomas would have sex with 20 to 30 men a day; they would do this seven days a week usually for weeks but sometimes for months before they were ''ready'' for the United States. If they refused, they would be beaten and sometimes killed.

[... ...] 

Jonathan M. Winer, deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration, says, 

''The girls are worth a penny or a ruble in their home village, and suddenly they're worth hundreds and thousands somewhere else.''

CROSSING THE BORDER

In November, I followed by helicopter the 12-foot-high sheet-metal fence that represents the U.S.-Mexico boundary from Imperial Beach, Calif., south of San Diego, 14 miles across the gritty warrens and havoc of Tijuana into the barren hills of Tecate. The fence drops off abruptly at Colonia Nido de las Aguilas, a dry riverbed that straddles the border. Four hundred square miles of bone-dry, barren hills stretch out on the U.S. side. 

I hovered over the end of the fence with Lester McDaniel, a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. [...] 

It is here that thousands of girls and young women -- most of them Mexican and many of them straight from Calle Santo Tomas -- are taken every year, mostly between January and August, the dry season. Coyotes -- or smugglers -- subcontracted exclusively by sex traffickers sometimes trudge the girls up to the cross and let them pray, then herd them into the hills northward. 

A few miles east, we picked up a deeply grooved trail at the fence and followed it for miles into the hills until it plunged into a deep isolated ravine called Cottonwood Canyon. A Ukrainian sex-trafficking ring force-marches young women through here, McDaniel told me. In high heels and seductive clothing, the young women trek 12 miles to Highway 94, where panel trucks sit waiting. 

[...] 

One girl who was trafficked back and forth across that border repeatedly was Andrea.

''Andrea'' is just one name she was given by her traffickers and clients; she doesn't know her real name. She was born in the United States and sold or abandoned here -- at about 4 years old, she says -- by a woman who may have been her mother. 

(She is now in her early to mid-20's; she doesn't know for sure.) 

She says that she spent approximately the next 12 years as the captive of a sex-trafficking ring that operated on both sides of the Mexican border. Because of the threat of retribution from her former captors, who are believed to be still at large, an organization that rescues and counsels trafficking victims and former prostitutes arranged for me to meet Andrea in October at a secret location in the United States.

In a series of excruciating conversations, Andrea explained to me how the trafficking ring that kept her worked, moving young girls (and boys too) back and forth over the border, selling nights and weekends with them mostly to American men. She said that the ring imported -- both through abduction and outright purchase -- toddlers, children and teenagers into the U.S. from many countries.

[... Quotes from Andrea ...]

Andrea told me she was transported to Juárez dozens of times. During one visit, when she was about 7 years old, the trafficker took her to the Radisson Casa Grande Hotel, where there was a john waiting in a room. The john was an older American man, and he read Bible passages to her before and after having sex with her. 

Andrea described other rooms she remembered in other hotels in Mexico: the Howard Johnson in León, the Crowne Plaza in Guadalajara. She remembers most of all the ceiling patterns. 

[... Quotes from Andrea ...]

Another trafficking victim I met, a young woman named Montserrat, was taken to the United States from Veracruz, Mexico, six years ago, at age 13. (Montserrat is her nickname.)

[...]

Montserrat's trafficker, who called himself Alejandro, took her to Sonora, across the Mexican border from Douglas, Ariz., where she joined a group of a dozen other teenage girls, all with the same dream of a better life. They were from Chiapas, Guatemala, Oaxaca -- everywhere, she said.

The group was marched 12 hours through the desert, just a few of the thousands of Mexicans who bolted for America that night along the 2,000 miles of border. Cars were waiting at a fixed spot on the other side. Alejandro directed her to a Nissan and drove her and a few others to a house she said she thought was in Phoenix, the home of a white American family. 

''It looked like America,'' she told me. ''I ate chicken. The family ignored me, watched TV. I thought the worst part was behind me.''

IN THE UNITED STATES: HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT 

A week after Montserrat was taken across the border, she said, she and half a dozen other girls were loaded into a windowless van. 

[...]

At each drop-off there was somebody waiting. Sometimes a girl would be escorted to the bathroom, never to return to the van. They drove 24 hours a day. 

[...]

When they arrived at the apartment, Alejandro left, saying he was coming back. But another man appeared at the door. 

[...]

Montserrat said that she didn't leave that apartment for the next three months, then for nine months after that, Alejandro regularly took her in and out of the apartment for appointments with various johns.

Sex trafficking is one of the few human rights violations that rely on exposure: victims have to be available, displayed, delivered and returned. Girls were shuttled in open cars between the Plainfield, N.J., stash house and other locations in northern New Jersey like Elizabeth and Union City. 

[...] 

Andrea named trading hubs at highway rest stops in Deming, N.M.; Kingman, Ariz.; Boulder City, Nev.; and Glendale, Calif. Glendale, Andrea said, was a fork in the road; from there, vehicles went either north to San Jose or south toward San Diego. The traffickers drugged them for travel, she said. 

[...]

In the past several months, I have visited a number of addresses where trafficked girls and young women have reportedly ended up: [...] 

These places all have at least one thing in common: they are camouflaged by their normal, middle-class surroundings.

[...]

But border agents and local policemen usually don't know trafficking when they see it. The operating assumption among American police departments is that women who sell their bodies do so by choice, and undocumented foreign women who sell their bodies are not only prostitutes (that is, voluntary sex workers) but also trespassers on U.S. soil. 

No Department of Justice attorney or police vice squad officer I spoke with in Los Angeles -- one of the country's busiest thoroughfares for forced sex traffic -- considers sex trafficking in the U.S. a serious problem, or a priority. A teenage girl arrested on Sunset Strip for solicitation, or a group of Russian sex workers arrested in a brothel raid in the San Fernando Valley, are automatically heaped onto a pile of workaday vice arrests.

[...] 

IMPRISONMENT AND SUBMISSION 

The basement, Andrea said, held as many as 16 children and teenagers of different ethnicities. She remembers that it was underneath a house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood on the West Coast. Throughout much of her captivity, this basement was where she was kept when she wasn't working. 

[... Quotes from Andrea ...]

''At Disneyland there would be people doing drop-offs and pickups for kids. It's a big open area full of kids, and nobody pays attention to nobody. They would kind of quietly say, 'Go over to that person,' and you would just slip your hand into theirs and say, 'I was looking for you, Daddy.' Then that person would move off with one or two or three of us.''

[...]

Montserrat said that she was moved around a lot and often didn't know where she was. [...] because the door to the apartment Alejandro kept her in was locked from the outside. She says she was forced to service at least two men a night, and sometimes more. [...] 

All the girls I spoke to said that their captors were both psychologically and physically abusive. Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist's patient or the obedient daughter. 

Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners -- toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens -- as well as what she called a ''damage group.'' 

''In the damage group they can hit you or do anything they wanted,'' she explained. ''Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it's always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.

[...]

Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves says: 

''The physical path of a person being trafficked includes stages of degradation of a person's mental state. A victim gets deprived of food, gets hungry, a little dizzy and sleep-deprived. She begins to break down; she can't think for herself. Then take away her travel documents, and you've made her stateless. Then layer on physical violence, and she begins to follow orders. Then add a foreign culture and language, and she's trapped.''

[...] 

''There's a vast misunderstanding of what coercion is, of how little it takes to make someone a slave,'' Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission said. ''The destruction of dignity and sense of self, these girls' sense of resignation...'' 

He didn't finish the sentence.

In Tijuana in November, I met with Mamacita, a Mexican trafficking-victim-turned-madam, who used to oversee a stash house for sex slaves in San Diego. Mamacita (who goes by a nickname) was full of regret and worry. She left San Diego three years ago, but she says that the trafficking ring, run by three violent Mexican brothers, is still in operation. 

''The girls can't leave,'' Mamacita said. ''They're always being watched. They lock them into apartments. The fear is unbelievable. They can't talk to anyone. They are always hungry, pale, always shaking and cold. But they never complain. If they do, they'll be beaten or killed.''

In Vista, Calif., [... a] local health care worker had heard rumors about Mexican immigrants using the reeds for sex and came down to offer condoms and advice. She found more than 400 men and 50 young women between 12 and 15 dressed in tight clothing and high heels. There was a separate group of a dozen girls no more than 11 or 12 wearing white communion dresses.

''The girls huddled in a circle for protection,'' Castro told me, ''and had big eyes like terrified deer.''

I followed Castro into the riverbed, and only 50 yards from the road we found a confounding warren of more than 30 room-like caves carved into the reeds. It was a sunny morning, but the light in there was refracted, dreary and basement-like. The ground in each was a squalid nest of mud, tamped leaves, condom wrappers, clumps of toilet paper and magazines. Soiled underwear was strewn here and there, plastic garbage bags jury-rigged through the reeds in lieu of walls. One of the caves' inhabitants had hung old CD's on the tips of branches, like Christmas ornaments. It looked vaguely like a recent massacre site. 

It was 8 in the morning, but the girls could begin arriving any minute. Castro told me how it works: the girls are dropped off at the ballfield, then herded through a drainage sluice under the road into the riverbed. Vans shuttle the men from a 7-Eleven a mile away. The girls are forced to turn 15 tricks in five hours in the mud. The johns pay $15 and get 10 minutes. It is in nearly every respect a perfect extension of Calle Santo Tomas in Mexico City. Except that this is what some of those girls are training for.

If anything, the women I talked to said that the sex in the U.S. is even rougher than what the girls face on Calle Santo Tomas. 

[...]

She [Rosario] said that she believed younger foreign girls were in demand in the U.S. because of an increased appetite for more aggressive, dangerous sex. Traffickers need younger and younger girls, she suggested, simply because they are more pliable. In Eastern Europe, too, the typical age of sex-trafficking victims is plummeting; according to Matei of Reaching Out, while most girls used to be in their late teens and 20's, 13-year-olds are now far from unusual.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., are finding that when it comes to sex, what was once considered abnormal is now the norm. They are tracking a clear spike in the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet.

''We've become desensitized by the soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit,'' says I.C.E. Special Agent Perry Woo. 

[...] 

Special Agent Don Daufenbach, I.C.E.'s manager for undercover operations, brought [a web site] up on a screen. A hush came over the room as the agents leaned forward, clearly disturbed. ''That sure looks like the real thing,'' Daufenbach said. There were streams of Web pages of thumbnail images of young women of every ethnicity in obvious distress, bound, gagged, contorted. The agents in the room pointed out probable injuries from torture. 

[...]

But the supply of cheap girls and young women to feed the global appetite appears to be limitless. And it's possible that the crimes committed against them in the U.S. cut deeper than elsewhere, precisely because so many of them are snared by the glittery promise of an America that turns out to be not their salvation but their place of destruction.

ENDGAME 

Typically, a young trafficking victim in the U.S. lasts in the system for two to four years. After that, Bales says: 

''She may be killed in the brothel. She may be dumped and deported. Probably least likely is that she will take part in the prosecution of the people that enslaved her.''

[...]

Even Andrea, who was born in the United States and spoke English, says she never thought of escaping [...].

And if the girls are lucky enough to escape, there's often nowhere for them to go. 

''The families don't want them back,'' Sister Veronica, a nun who helps run a rescue mission for trafficked prostitutes in an old church in Mexico City, told me. ''They're shunned.''

[...] 

Correction: 

February 8, 2004, Sunday An article on Jan. 25 about sexual slavery referred erroneously to the film ''Scary Movie 2.'' A Mexican woman who was being held as a sex slave in the United States could not have been taken to see it by her captor; by the time the movie came out in 2001, she had already escaped and returned to Mexico.

Editors' Note: 

February 15, 2004, Sunday ''The Girls Next Door,'' an article about the importing of women and girls to the United States for sexual slavery, has generated much discussion since it appeared in The Times Magazine on Jan. 25. In response to questions from readers and other publications about sources and accuracy, the magazine has carried out a thorough review of the article. 

On the issue of sources, the writer, Peter Landesman, conducted more than 45 interviews, including many with high-ranking federal officials, law enforcement officers and representatives of human rights organizations. Four sources insisted on anonymity to protect their professional positions. A magazine fact checker also interviewed all relevant sources, many of them both before and after publication. 

Some readers have questioned the figure of 10,000 enforced prostitutes brought into this country each year. The source of that number is Kevin Bales, recommended to the magazine by Human Rights Watch as the best authority on the extent of enforced prostitution in the United States, who based his estimates on State Department documents, arrest and prosecution records and information from nearly 50 social service agencies.

In the course of this review, several errors were discovered in specific details. One, an erroneous reference to the release date of ''Scary Movie 2,'' was corrected in the magazine last Sunday.

On the question whether women imported through Cottonwood Canyon, Calif., could have been wearing high heels, the original source, when pressed, acknowledged that his information was hearsay. The article should not have specified what the women were wearing, and the anecdote should have been related in the past tense, since the trafficking ring was broken up in 2001.

The woman in her 20's known to her traffickers as Andrea recalled an incorrect name for the hotel to which she was taken in Juárez, Mexico. The Radisson Casa Grande had not yet opened when she escaped from her captors.

After the article was published, the writer made an impromptu comment in a radio interview, noting that Andrea has multiple-personality disorder. The magazine editors did not learn of her illness before publication. Andrea's account of her years in slavery remained consistent over two and a half years of psychotherapy. Her therapist says that her illness has no effect on the accuracy of her memory. Her hours-long interview with the author, recorded on tape, is lucid and consistent.

An independent expert consulted by the magazine, Dr. Leonard Shengold, who has written books and papers about child abuse and the reliability and unreliability of memory, affirms that a diagnosis of multiple-personality disorder is not inconsistent with accurate memories of childhood abuse. Because multiple-personality disorder has been associated with false memory, however, the diagnosis should have been cited in the article.