By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
Call it prostitution, sexual slavery, or human trafficking — whatever the term, it must end, said Urmi Basu, the director of the New Light Center in Kolkata, India, who asked 130 activists, health workers, and concerned citizens at Mercer Island’s Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation on April 13 to get involved in her mission to rescue the children and young women who are victims of this crime.
Speaking via a live Skype feed from Calcutta at 3 a.m. local time, the founder of New Light, a shelter that houses boys and girls from ages 5–18 who would otherwise be selling their bodies on the street for sexual favors, said she won’t stop this work until it’s ended.
“In this day and age, nobody should be a slave anymore,” Basu told a rapt crowd at Herzl-Ner Tamid. “These young girls and women who are sold into prostitution are nothing better than slaves. It is our fight and we have to do it until the last person, the last girl is free.
“This is a question of humanity,” Basu said. “These are really joyous girls on their way to having joyous lives. We cannot let anybody — a child, a woman, or a man — sell their bodies for survival or be sold as slaves.”
No One Should Be Forced: An Interfaith Dialogue on Modern Slavery was co-hosted by Herzl-Ner Tamid and the Mercer Island Presbyterian Church, and cosponsored by 17 other groups that included the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Mercer Island Ward, St. Monica’s Catholic Church, Emmanuel Episcopal Church and three other local churches.
Temple B’nai Torah, Temple Beth Am, and Congregation Beth Shalom also signed on as co-sponsors, along with the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, the Stroum Jewish Community Center, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the American Jewish Committee.
Although many victims of human trafficking are forced to work in prostitution or the sex industry, trafficking also includes exploitative labor.
The U.S. State Department’s 2010 Annual Trafficking in Persons Report has determined that there are over 12 million children and adults who are enslaved globally in “forced labor, bonded labor, and forced prostitution around the world.”
In Washington State, an anti-trafficking law prohibits the “recruitment, transport, or sale” of humans for forced labor, either coerced through violence or threats of violence. Any activity proliferated by exploiting vulnerable groups against the person’s will is prohibited. The H-NT meeting focused mainly on sexual slavery.
“I’ve been reading a lot about this for four or five years,” Herzl-Ner Tamid’s rabbi, Jay Rosenbaum, told JTNews.
While on sabbatical last year, Rosenbaum volunteered at New Light for two weeks. He taught English to the students — mostly boys — played games with them, and read to them.
“A lot of these boys don’t have men in their lives, at all,” Rosenbaum said. “If this group of young men grows up with a different attitude towards women, it changes everything. You have to change their attitude.”
During his time at the New Light Center, Rosenbaum found that almost everyone he worked with had mothers and grandmothers who had worked as prostitutes. They all came from desperately poor backgrounds and had tragic stories to tell, he said.
Pastor Sheila Houston, director of Outreach Services for New Horizons Ministries in Seattle, knows firsthand how this exploitative business goes on day after day right here in the Emerald City.
At the age of 5, Houston’s last memory of her father before he deserted his family was a gift he gave her, a “pleather” coat. This memory, she said, and the pain of watching him walk away, later became the bittersweet connection that recaptured her heart as a 15-year-old girl with the wrong man.
Today, she leads a team of men and women who go into the streets and neighborhoods of Seattle every Friday night and every other Saturday night to help the women who work for sex.
Houston said that to understand these women, it is important to learn about the psychology of a sexual trafficking victim, which is most often rooted in a basic need for parental love, acceptance, and closeness.
When she was 16, Houston married the man who was already coercing her to sell her body for the money they needed to live, and demanding it as a sign of her love for him.
“Her father was a man who always promised and never fulfilled his promises,” Houston said, concealing her identity as the child in this story until the end of her remarks. “She didn’t understand her father’s love because he was no longer in her life, and so she would go out into the streets.’
Houston said some girls are unwittingly recruited by boyfriends and husbands while others are introduced to prostitution though mothers, sisters, aunts, or other relatives. In addition, runaways become vulnerable to the risks inherent in life on the streets. Others follow the lifestyles of their parents. Houston said she sees some young girls on the streets with mental health issues as well.
In addition to providing spiritual support to the women they meet, New Horizons tries to minimize the danger these women face by distributing a weekly “bad date list,” documenting the names of men who were violent with them in the past.
Compounding this problem, said Houston, is a biased legal system that favors the men who buy sex and arrests the women who sell it. In 2005 in Seattle, 49 men were arrested compared to 400 female prostitutes who were charged.
A U.S. State Department report echoed the same result. Of the 12.3 million victims documented in the 2010 report, only 4,166 successful trafficking prosecutions were won in 2009.
“We need men who want to mentor young men,” Houston said.
Washington is one of four states in the country that has adopted the Safe Harbor Act, a law that protects from prosecution underage girls and boys who are trafficked for sex.
Still, each week, hundreds of girls in Washington State and around the world sell their bodies for sexual favors to survive and make money for someone else, usually their pimp or trafficker. But it’s not all bad news.
“Things are changing in our city and moving in the right direction,” Houston said. “Seattle is on the cutting edge.”