by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago, on Tuesday,
May 28, PBS aired a fascinating Frontline episode called “Sex Trafficking in America,” which in some ways was
what you’d expect and in some ways wasn’t. In 2012 and 2013 I went to a few
events, including a film screening in East County, about what was being done
about sexual trafficking in San Diego County, though in some ways what was
being talked about then was pretty old-school: pimps or their representatives
cruising the bus stations and other places teenage runaways from out of town
might be arriving, talking to them, ingratiating themselves, seducing the
runaways to fall in love with them and then slowly, gradually turning them into
prostitutes — usually by preposterous lines like, “If you really love me,
you’ll have sex with this friend of mine who wants you.” The film PBS showed
last night was centered around Phoenix, Arizona and opened with the 2015 Super
Bowl about to take place there — and, like other big events that attract a
large number of 1-percenters, including 1-percent males who want to get their
rocks off into any convenient female orifice (boys get sex-trafficked, too, but
somewhat to my disappointment this show depicted only heterosexual trafficking),
a Super Bowl dramatically drives up the demand for prostitutes in the city in
which it takes place. Most of the show depicted a new approach being taken by
the Phoenix Police Department — which wasn’t exactly “new” since the meetings
I’d gone to in San Diego and the film I’d seen also mentioned it — which
involves reconditioning local line police officers to stop seeing prostitutes
as criminals and start seeing them as victims. If anything, with the rise of
the Internet the process of recruiting teenage girls for sex trafficking has
become quicker and more brutal than the stereotype of the seductive pimp
attracting a young girl, convincing her he’s in love with her and spending
about three to five weeks “seasoning” her (the term I’m using actually comes
from the term slavemasters used in the U.S. to describe the process of breaking
down the resistance of newly trafficked Africans and psychologically
bludgeoning and terrifying them into accepting their status as human property)
into turning tricks and giving him all or most of the money therefrom.
Now they
do it quicker: Kat, a trafficking victim who got out of “the life,” got her
life back and is the real heroine of this show, recalled that she met her
trafficker (actually one member of a gang of at least three) online through a
site called MeetMe and, after a brief online “courtship,” agreed to meet him: “He offered to give me a ride up to Phoenix, and with
everything in my head, I was like, ‘You know what? It’s just a ride, you know.
Nothing is going to happen.’ When he got here I climbed out of my bedroom
window and got into his car. He was like, "I’m not dropping you off.’ And
I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ He covered my eyes so I couldn’t see
where we were going. It was really dark.” Her three traffickers — Rafael Quiroz
(the one who’d cruised her online), Jesse Cisneros (the one who picked her up and gave her the
first clue something was wrong when he wouldn’t drop her off where she asked him
to), and Bryant Flemante (whom Kat described as “the enforcer”) — drove her to
a motel and, Kat said, “That’s where Jesse explains, ‘You have a client.’ And I
was like, ‘What are you talking about, I have a client?’ He was like, ‘You’re
going to have sex with this man. … You’re going to tell him you’re 19 and your
name is Rose.’ And this stranger comes in, he did those things to me, he puts
the money in the drawer and then he leaves.” The show didn’t make clear just
how long Kat was stuck in “the life” or how she got away, but it did mention that she had an unusually good memory not only for
faces but also for locations — she recalled the address of the motel and the
room number in which she turned her first trick — which was helpful to the cops
in busting her traffickers. What wasn’t
helpful was the sheer delay in the court proceedings after the men were arrested; they dragged out the case for three
years and demoralized Kat to the point where she wasn’t sure anymore whether
she would have the psychological strength to take the witness stand against them.
Fortunately, in the end she didn’t have to: all three cut deals with
prosecutors and plea-bargained the cases away in exchange for pretty hefty
prison terms (one got 10 years, one 16 and Jesse got 24).
The show, produced by
Lauren Mucciolo, directed by Jezza Neumann and narrated in the warm, comforting
tones of Frontline’s resident narrator,
Will Lyman (also a spokesperson for BMW in their car commercials), discusses
other strategies in the war against human trafficking, including busting the
prostitutes’ customers (the Phoenix Police Department and other law-enforcement
agencies successfully lobbied the Arizona legislature to change the law so that
“johns” weren’t just given tickets and sent home, they were actually forced to
spend at least a night in jail and often had to deal with the shame and
humiliation of having to call their wives from jail to bail them out) and
taking down Web sites like Backpage that featured thinly veiled ads for
prostitution. When the show mentioned Backpage in its earlier stages Charles,
who was home and watching it with me, said, “That’s a mistake. Closing down
Backpage just drove it more underground and turned them back onto the streets.”
Surprisingly, by the end the filmmakers were making that point themselves:
closing down Backpage and similar, relatively visible sites for prostitutes to
meet potential customers has forced a lot of prostitutes back onto the streets
(where they’re in danger both from pimps and other baddies trying to rob or
rape them) and the online hookups are now taking place at less centralized,
harder-to-find sites on the so-called “dark Web” (i.e., sites deliberately set
up not to appear on standard search
engines) where it’s harder for police to pose as prostitutes to entrap johns.
(This is a long-standing law enforcement tactic against the sex industry but it
became easier with the rise of the Internet, which meant police decoys didn’t
have to disguise themselves as prostitutes and physically pick up johns to
arrest them. Instead the decoys could be not particularly attractive women, and
not necessarily women at all.)
While I can’t watch any heartfelt media
denunciation of human trafficking without recalling the comment of late-19th
century investigative journalist Lincoln Steffens that doing exposés of “white
slavery” (as sex trafficking was called then, an interesting turn of phrase
that suggests a mindset that being enslaved was an O.K. fate to visit on Black
people but not on whites) was one way
lazy publishers and reporters could appear to be fearless investigators without
risking doing anything that would impose on the economic and social powers that
be — and I also can’t help but wonder if the late activist Gloria Johnson had a
point when she said the way to put the traffickers out of business was to
legalize, license and regulate prostitution (she got into a lot of arguments with other feminist women about that one!),
treating naïve girls (and I deliberately call them “girls” instead of “women”
because they’re generally young and immature, desperate to get out of bad
family situations — and try as they might to portray them as sympathetic
victims in their own right, Kat’s parents as depicted in the film look pretty
creepy and you can understand why she wanted to get away from them in the first
place!) as hardened criminals instead of victims was a huge law-enforcement
mistake and it’s nice that that, at
least, is finally being corrected.
