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EXPLOITING AMERICANS ON AMERICAN SOIL:

DOMESTIC TRAFFICKING EXPOSED

HEARING

BEFORE THE

COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND 

COOPERATION IN EUROPE

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

JUNE 7, 2005

Printed for the use of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe

[CSCE 109–1–11]

(

Available via http://www.csce.gov 
COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE 

LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS

House Senate

CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey, CoChairman 

FRANK R. WOLF, Virginia 

JOSEPH R. PITTS, Pennsylvania 

ROBERT B. ADERHOLT, Alabama 

MIKE PENCE, Indiana 

BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, Maryland 

LOUISE McINTOSH SLAUGHTER,

New York 

ALCEE L. HASTINGS, Florida 

MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina

SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas, Chairman 

GORDON SMITH, Oregon 

SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia 

CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut 

RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin 

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, New York 

VACANT 

VACANT 

VACANT

EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS

VACANT, Department of State 

VACANT, Department of Defense 

WILLIAM HENRY LASH III, Department of Commerce 

(II) 
EXPLOITING AMERICANS ON AMERICAN SOIL: 

DOMESTIC TRAFFICKING EXPOSED 

JUNE 7, 2005

COMMISSIONERS 

Page 

Hon. Christopher H. Smith, Co-Chairman, Commission on Security and

Cooperation in Europe ......................................................................................... 1

Hon. Benjamin L. Cardin, Ranking Member, Commission on Security and 

Cooperation in Europe ......................................................................................... 3

Hon. Mike McIntyre, Commissioner, Commission on Security and Cooperation 

in Europe .............................................................................................................. 38

WITNESSES 

Chris Swecker, Assistant Director, Criminal Investigative Division, Federal 

Bureau of Investigation ....................................................................................... 6

Susan Orr, Associate Commissioner, Administration on Children, Youth and 

Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services ............................. 9

Leisa B., survivor of domestic trafficking .............................................................. 22

Norma Hotaling, Executive Director and Founder, Standing Against Global 

Exploitation (SAGE) Project ................................................................................ 24

Frank Barnaba, President and Founder, Paul & Lisa Program .......................... 31

Ernie Allen, President and CEO, National Center for Missing and Exploited 

Children ................................................................................................................ 35

APPENDICES 

Prepared Statement of Hon. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Commissioner, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe ..................................................... 51

Prepared Statement of Chris Swecker ................................................................... 53

Prepared Statement of Susan Orr .......................................................................... 58

Prepared Statement of Norma Hotaling ................................................................ 62

Prepared Statement of Frank Barnaba ................................................................. 77

(III) 

(1)

EXPLOITING AMERICANS ON AMERICAN SOIL: 

DOMESTIC TRAFFICKING EXPOSED 

JUNE 7, 2005

COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE

WASHINGTON, DC 

The hearing was held at 2 p.m. in room 2237, Rayburn House 

Office Building, Washington, DC, Hon. Christopher H. Smith, CoChairman, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 

presiding. 

Commissioners present: Hon. Christopher H. Smith, Co-Chairman, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe; Hon. 

Benjamin L. Cardin, Ranking Member, Commission on Security 

and Cooperation in Europe; and Hon. Mike McIntyre, Commissioner, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. 

Witnesses present: Chris Swecker, Assistant Director, Criminal 

Investigative Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation; Susan Orr, 

Associate Commissioner, Administration on Children, Youth and 

Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Frank 

Barnaba, President and Founder, Paul & Lisa Program; Norma 

Hotaling, Executive Director and Founder, Standing Against Global 

Exploitation (SAGE) Project; Leisa B., survivor of domestic trafficking; and Ernie Allen, President and CEO, National Center for 

Missing and Exploited Children. 

HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, CO-CHAIRMAN,

COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE 

Mr. SMITH. The Commission will come to order, and thank you 

for being—thank you to our witnesses and thank you, all of you, 

for being here today. 

For almost a decade, the Helsinki Commission has pressed countries that participate in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe—and have pressed them very hard—to take decisive 

action to address the trafficking of human beings for labor and sexual exploitation. 

As a result of strong leadership from the U.S. Government at the 

Istanbul summit in 1999, the OSCE participating States committed 

‘‘to end violence against women and children, as well as sexual exploitation and all forms of trafficking in human beings.’’ All OSCE 

participating States, including the United States, are bound to implement that commitment. 

In the last 6 years, governments around the world have awakened to this thriving international trade based on the exploitation 

of human beings, the denial of human liberty, and the destruction 

of human dignity. Much of this progress has been spurred by legis-
2

lation which I authored, by the intense diplomatic efforts made by 

the State Department and by political commitment at the highest 

levels, including President Bush. 

Last Friday, the State Department issued its fifth annual ‘‘Trafficking in Persons’’ report, which is mandated by Congress in the 

Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, or Public Law 106–386. 

The U.S. Government estimates that, in addition to the 600,000 

to 800,000 women, children and men bought and sold across international borders every year and exploited for forced labor or commercial sex, many are trafficked internally within the borders of individual countries. When internal trafficking victims are added to 

the estimates, the number of victims annually is in the range of 2 

million to 4 million. 

Today the Commission continues its commitment to eradicating 

this human rights abomination by turning the spotlight on the 

problem of domestic trafficking, the trafficking of American citizens 

and nationals right here in the United States. 

As a result of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), foreign trafficking victims in the United States are by law required 

to be treated as victims rather than as criminals. The question before the Commission today is whether the same holds true in law, 

or in fact, for American citizen victims of trafficking. 

The TVPA and its reauthorization, which was enacted in 2003, 

created a comprehensive framework for combating trafficking in 

persons abroad, as well as trafficking of foreign nationals into the 

United States. 

In February, I introduced the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005, joined by my good friend and colleague, 

Mr. Cardin—H.R. 972. 

In addition to reauthorizing anti-trafficking programs here and 

abroad, the bill explicitly recognizes that trafficking in persons also 

occurs wholly within the borders of the United States. 

H.R. 972 uses the definition of trafficking created by the TVPA 

to define trafficking of American citizens and nationals within the 

United States as domestic trafficking. 

To address domestic trafficking, the bill would authorize new 

funds to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, authorize grants to 

State and local law enforcement for investigation and prosecutions, 

authorize grants for NGO victim service providers, establish a pilot 

program for residential rehabilitation facilities for domestic trafficking victims, and authorize a study of best practices and a pilot 

program for demand and reduction measures. 

Similar to what has been accomplished in the international 

arena, these measures would begin to shift the paradigm so that 

our own citizens who are exploited are seen and treated as victims 

of crime. 

Although anecdotal evidence is abundant, there are few statistics 

on the extent of domestic trafficking here in the United States. 

The little research that does exist focuses on child victims. The 

most authoritative research, done by Richard Estes and Neil 

Weiner at the University of Pennsylvania, estimated that 300,000 

children in the United States are at risk for commercial sexual exploitation, including trafficking, at any given time. 
3

The largest group of substantially at-risk children are runaway, 

thrownaway, or homeless American children who use survival sex 

to acquire food, shelter, clothing, and other things needed to survive on America’s streets. 

When we consider that according to the National Runaway 

Switchboard between 1.3 million and 2.8 million runaway and 

homeless youth live on America’s streets every day, it would not be 

surprising to learn that the number of children trafficked in the 

United States is actually much higher than 300,000. 

The findings from the University of Pennsylvania report are 

chilling and have been, in part, the impetus for today’s hearing. 

This research found, for example, that: like other groups of sexually exploited persons, street children are exposed to violence, drug 

abuse, rape and sometimes even murder at the hands of the pimps, 

the customers and the traffickers that make up their world. 

The sexual exploitation of children is not limited to particular racial, ethnic or socioeconomic groups, although children from poor 

families appear to be at somewhat higher risk of commercial sexual 

exploitation. In fact, most of the street children encountered in the 

study were Caucasian youths who had run away from middle-class 

families. One clear theme is the disproportionate number of street 

youth who have histories of recurrent physical or sexual abuse at 

home and took to the streets in a desperate effort to bring their 

abuse to an end. 

Many street youths use drugs to deal with the emotional pain of 

being sexually victimized at home, and once on the streets, by four 

to 10 ‘‘customers’’ a day. 

And last, according to these researchers, child sexual exploitation 

in the United States affects as many boys as girls, but boys are less 

well-served by social service and law enforcement systems because 

of the widespread belief that boys are better able than girls to fend 

for themselves. In time, research has shown many boys shift from 

being victims of sexual abuse to victimizing other boys and girls as 

pimps and traffickers. 

The trafficking of Americans, particularly children, is largely a 

problem hidden from the view of most Americans. I look forward 

to hearing the testimony of our distinguished witnesses who are 

providing a distinct service to this Commission and the public by 

shining a light on this horrific abuse of our own citizens and our 

own nationals. 

I’d like to yield, for any comments that he might have, to my 

good friend and colleague, Ben Cardin, the Ranking Member on the 

Helsinki Commission. 

HON. BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, RANKING MEMBER,

COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE 

Mr. CARDIN. Let me thank Chairman Smith for conducting this 

hearing. 

I think it’s very, very important for us to review our own status 

as it relates to trafficking. 

There has been no person in this world that has been more aggressive in fighting trafficking than our chairman, Chris Smith. 

I’ve had the honor of traveling with him to many places in the 

world where he has raised this issue and raised the consciousness 
4

of our civil society to the modern-day slavery of trafficking, and I 

want to congratulate him for his leadership on this critical issue. 

We have made a lot of progress. 

For those who wonder the value of the Helsinki Commission or 

the OSCE, I can tell you, you need only look at this issue and know 

that the work of our Commission, the work of our chairman, the 

work of all of our friends, has made a difference in the lives of literally hundreds of thousands of individuals, and we thank you for 

all that effort. 

We have made progress. 

The U.S. State Department issued its annual TIP report, ‘‘Trafficking in Persons’’ report—now covers 150 countries so that we 

have a good guide for what’s happening internationally on the trafficking. 

Remember, it takes at least two nations to be involved in trafficking from one to another, and sometimes we find that the problem is in receiving countries, sometime in the origin country, but 

we need to deal with both. 

We need to deal with the victims and we need to deal with those 

from the criminal element, and our policies have been aimed at 

that. 

I’m very pleased that the Department’s report also talks about 

international best practices, because that’s the important thing—to 

learn from each other, to get what will work effectively in trying 

to deal with the practical problems that we have in law enforcement, the practical problems we have in our communities, the practical problems that we have in international affairs. 

And I think that best practices is helping us in order to try to 

deal with that issue. 

The OSCE is much more sensitive today to trafficking issues as 

a result of the priority of this Commission, and we should be very 

pleased about how the Chair-in-office continuously mentions this as 

a priority as he travels around the world, travels around the states 

of the OSCE. 

Every meeting that we attend, we get a current report of the status of countries’ compliance with the trafficking commitments, and 

this is all as a result of the leadership of our nation and the leadership of our chairman, Chairman Smith. 

And I really do, again, underscore how one person has made a 

tremendous difference in the lives of so many. 

Mr. Chairman, it’s totally appropriate that we now look at our 

own country. 

I think it’s very important that we scrutinize our practice. I’m 

certain that we can do better, although I know we have done a tremendous priority by the administration, by Congress, by the Members of Congress, and by the NGOs and by the activists in our community, to try to do everything we can. 

I’m pleased that HHS and FBI are our first panel, because I 

think that’s appropriate to look at our agencies’ responses, which 

I think are exemplary and give us the standard that we can use 

to raise the bar internationally, to understand that the individuals 

involved in being trafficked are victims, they need to be treated as 

victims, and the individuals who are responsible for the trafficking 

are criminals and need to be prosecuted. 
5

And I think our nation understands that, and I look forward to 

our hearing so that we can get a better handle as to how we can, 

again, continue to be as active as possible internationally in this 

area. 

I’m going to need to make an apology early here. 

We have, of course, many conflicts, but one of our Commission’s 

priorities dealing with anti-Semitism will be on the floor of Congress very shortly—a resolution that I need to be on the floor for. 

But, again, I thank the witnesses for being here and for all of 

you being in attendance. 

Mr. SMITH. I want to thank Mr. Cardin for his great statement. 

But also, more importantly, we have worked as a team. There 

isn’t the slightest bit of difference between Mr. Cardin and I when 

it comes to these human rights issues, especially the trafficking 

issue. 

We do work as a team. 

This Commission is one of those unique creatures of Congress 

where you’ve got House Members, Senate Members, the members 

of the executive branch, but, most importantly, you have a real consensus as to what our mission really is. 

And we have made, as Mr. Cardin pointed out, trafficking a centerpiece issue within the OSCE countries. 

So I want to thank him for his comments and for his leadership 

as well. 

Let me first introduce our first panel, beginning with Mr. Chris 

Swecker, who became Assistant Director of the Criminal Investigative Division, or the CID, at the Federal Bureau of Investigation 

in July 2004. 

The Criminal Investigative Division is responsible for coordinating, managing and directing all criminal investigative programs 

nationwide. These investigations focus on financial, violent and organized crime, political corruption, violation of individual civil 

rights, corporate fraud and drug-related crimes. 

Mr. Swecker entered on duty with the FBI as a special agent in 

1982. He has served in the FBI field offices in North Carolina, 

Oklahoma and Florida, as well as the FBI Civil Litigation Unit at 

FBI headquarters. 

In November 1994, Mr. Swecker was designated as assistant special agent in charge of the Houston, Texas field office, where he 

was responsible for all organized crime/narcotics investigations, the 

liaison office to Mexico, all special operations resources, and several 

resident agencies. In February 1998, he was promoted to inspector, 

Inspection Division. 

Mr. Swecker’s varied experiences include acting as the on-scene 

commander of the FBI operations in Iraq, the dismantlement of the 

Hezbollah terrorist cell in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the investigation and capture of Eric Robert Rudolph. 

We will then hear from Dr. Susan Orr, who is the Associate 

Commissioner of the Children’s Bureau in the Administration on 

Children, Youth and Families, the Administration for Children and 

Families, at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

Prior to joining the Bush Administration, she was Senior Director 

for Marriage and Family Care at the Family Research Council and 
6

Director of the Center for Social Policy at the Reason Public Policy 

Institute. 

Dr. Orr previously served at the Administration on Children, 

Youth and Families during 1992 to 1998. She was a special assistant to the commissioner and a child welfare program specialist at 

the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. She has also been 

a high school principal and an adjunct professor at American University and Regent University. 

Welcome to you both. 

And, Mr. Swecker, if you could begin. 

CHRIS SWECKER, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIVE DIVISION, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION 

Mr. SWECKER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and good afternoon. 

I appreciate the opportunity to come here today to speak to you 

about the FBI’s efforts to address the exploitation of children and 

others in the United States. 

According to the 2002 National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Throwaway Children, 1.6 million children estimated to run away from home each year, and it is estimated that 

approximately 40,000 of those children will have some type of involvement in or brush with sexual trafficking. 

Many of these victims are abandoned or neglected children who 

are usually not reported as missing to law enforcement or are runaways from their homes or the foster-care system. 

Also, when arrested, many juvenile prostitutes have fraudulent 

identification and social security cards and are reluctant to help 

authorities determine their true age and identity. 

In addition, sexual trafficking, particularly of children, continues 

to move even further underground. With the increasing use of 

pagers, cell phones and the Internet, victims are even less visible 

today than they were in the past. 

The average age of a child first used in prostitution is 11 to 14, 

with some as young as 9 years of age. Children used in prostitution 

consist of both male and female victims and come from all ethnic 

and socioeconomic backgrounds. 

A large percentage of these children left home because of physical, sexual and psychological abuse. These children often have low 

self-esteem and are extremely vulnerable. These runaways become 

a prime target for sex offenders, pornographers and pimps. Prostitution is a continuation of the victims’ sexual exploitation, not the 

beginning. According to U.S. law and international agreements, 

children can never consent to prostitution. It is always exploitation. 

A review of current and historical intelligence regarding such juvenile criminal enterprise—or such criminal enterprises reveals juveniles are victims of trafficking for the purpose of prostitution in 

both major metropolitan areas, as well as smaller communities. 

Typically they’re transported to lucrative venues, including cities 

hosting major sporting or public events. These criminal enterprises 

are highly mobile and travel established routes throughout the 

United States. They frequently communicate with each other in 

order to set pricing for the services. They identify new locations 

being profitable, as well as discuss locations where law enforcement is active or lax. These criminal enterprises typically engage 
7

in multiple criminal activities and have extensive supporting networks. 

For example, approximately 55 percent of street gangs are involved in some degree in prostitution. 

In response to this growing problem, the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, Violent Crimes Section, in conjunction with the 

Department of Justice Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, 

and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, implemented a national initiative named Lost Innocence in June 2003 

to address child prostitution in the United States. 

Together we developed a multifaceted strategy to train personnel, establish task forces, share intelligence concerning pimps, 

juveniles used in prostitution and criminal enterprises, and support 

long-term investigations with the requisite personnel and financial 

resources. 

An intensive curriculum was developed for a weeklong training 

class entitled ‘‘Protecting Victims of Child Prostitution,’’ which was 

held at and sponsored by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. This program brings State and Federal law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, and social service providers from 

one city to the national center, where the group is trained together. 

This concept is designed to cultivate cooperation, partnership and 

an effective integration between the critical enforcement entities in 

each city. To date, a total of 263 individuals have received this 

training. 

All National Center for Missing and Exploited Children intake 

and CyberTip reports are maintained in the FBI’s automated case 

system data base to provide electronic access to field offices. 

In addition, the CID provides extensive onsite analytical support 

to pending large-scale child prostitution investigations, including 

intelligence assessments, link charts, cross case analyses, and to 

support the field office. 

Based on the initial review of the available intelligence on child 

prostitution collected from ongoing investigations, human source 

information, and information provided by numerous State and local 

law enforcement agencies, and the NCMEC, 14 FBI field offices 

were identified as having the highest incidence of children used in 

prostitution. The 14 offices were identified as Atlanta, Chicago, 

Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New 

York, San Diego, San Francisco, St. Louis, Tampa, and Washington, DC. 

According to the FBI’s Violent Crimes Section, in June 2003 all 

field offices were advised that crimes against children, and specifically the prostitution of children, were a high priority within the 

Violent Crimes Program and were directed to determine whether 

their divisions had a significant child prostitution problem and address it with the appropriate resources. These offices were further 

directed to focus their efforts on the identification, investigation, 

and prosecution of criminal enterprises, including gangs involved in 

child prostitution. 

Sexual traffickers or pimps debriefed by the FBI indicate approximately 20 to 40 percent of the victims recruited into prostitution are juveniles. 
8

As of today, 25 field offices are investigating child prostitution 

matters in support of the Innocence Lost National Initiative. 

The Enterprise Theory of Investigation is the standard investigative model that the FBI employs in these cases, and these cases require the investigation be intelligence-driven, they seek to discover 

the full scope of the criminal organization and its member activities, they require strategic planning and a long-term focus. 

During fiscal year 2004, the Criminal Investigative Division initiated 67 Innocence Lost investigations, which led to 118 arrests, 26 

indictments, and the conviction of 22 pimps and madams. 

To date, in fiscal year 2005, 31 additional cases have been 

opened, and there have been 163 arrests, 8 complaints, 13 indictments, and 10 convictions. 

Since the inception of Innocence Lost, 80 children have been recovered as a result of the national initiative. Two successful investigations and prosecutions highlight the impact of the Innocence 

Lost National Initiative. 

The Oklahoma City division conducted a large-scale child prostitution investigation focused on the interstate prostitution of children at truck stops and through call services nationwide in an investigation named Stormy Nights. 

A total of 11 arrest warrants and three Federal search warrants 

were executed in and around the Oklahoma City area. The case 

identified a total of 48 pimps, 24 of which were exploited juveniles. 

Sixteen juveniles were recovered as a result of this case, which 

has generated other cases. 

In United States v. Curtis on December 3rd, 2004, a seven-count 

indictment was returned charging Carlos Curtis with sex trafficking, transporting a minor in interstate commerce for prostitution, and production of child pornography. Following a 2-week jury 

trial, Curtis was convicted on July 2, 2004, and he faces up to life 

imprisonment. 

In addition to investigating those who exploit children, the FBI, 

through its Office of Victim Assistance, attempts to assist child victims of prostitution in FBI investigations. 

With the launch of the Innocence Lost Initiative, the FBI task 

forces have encountered significant problems in identifying and 

providing services for these victims. 

Juveniles who become involved in sexual trafficking face a myriad of obstacles and enormous needs if they want to leave that life, 

including very basic needs such as safe housing, subsistence and 

schooling. In addition, they may need drug treatment, medical 

treatment and mental health services. They may have problems related to victimization prior to their life on the streets. Most cannot 

return to their family of origin so they need help to prepare for 

independent living. 

The FBI’s civil rights program also addresses international trafficking of persons, elements of which occur in the United States—

international trafficking primarily involving aliens, immigrants 

and other economically disadvantaged individuals, particularly 

women and children. Most of these cases involve immigrants or 

aliens transported into the United States who are forced to work 

in poor, unsafe conditions as prostitutes, domestic servants, mi-
9

grant farm workers, laborers, or employees in restaurants and 

small retail shops. 

In June 2004, the FBI, in cooperation with other local, State, and 

Federal officials, to include Immigration and Customs Enforcement 

and Customs and Border Protection and victim-based national advocacy groups, began an Involuntary Servitude and Slavery/Trafficking in Persons Initiative to more aggressively combat this problem. As a result of that initiative, the FBI is now engaged in 21 

human trafficking working groups around the country. 

In addition, the National Hispanic Sex Trafficking Initiative was 

created by the FBI on December 8, 2004 in order to combat the sex 

traffickers who are bringing increasing numbers of female victims 

into the United States, primarily via Mexico and Central and 

South America. 

As a result of this awareness, these initiatives and increased emphasis and training in support of these initiatives, the FBI has expanded its efforts in investigating human trafficking. In fiscal year 

2003, the FBI opened 65 human trafficking investigations, of which 

17 cases have thus far resulted in convictions. In fiscal year 2004, 

20 convictions were secured thus far from the 86 cases that were 

opened, and in the first half of 2005 the FBI has already opened 

72 investigations, with six convictions. Out of these investigative 

numbers, the FBI has a total of 125 pending human trafficking investigations. 

In conclusion, sir, I’d like to thank you for the opportunity to appear here today, and I will be available here for questions. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you so much for your testimony. 

And, Dr. Orr, you can proceed. 

SUSAN ORR, ASSOCIATE COMMISSIONER, ADMINISTRATION 

ON CHILDREN, YOUTH AND FAMILIES, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF 

HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES 

Ms. ORR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the programs administered by the 

Administration for Children and Families, which may offer avenues 

for providing services to children and youth who are victims of domestic trafficking. 

The Administration for Children and Families is intimately familiar with the horrors associated with human trafficking. 

Our agency, under the direction of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, has responsibility for administering provisions from the Trafficking Victims Protection Act for tracking and certifying noncitizens trafficking victims and helping them access the benefits and 

services they need to rebuild their lives. 

Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery, and whether 

the victims are citizens or not, it is a scourge on society. 

I am the Associate Commissioner of the Children’s Bureau within the Administration on Children and Families and am responsible for assisting states in the delivery of child welfare services designed to protect children and strengthen families. 

We’ve just heard from Mr. Swecker, who explained the scope of 

the problem. I’d like to spend my time to discuss some of the child 

welfare programs that could serve domestic trafficking victims. I’ll 

also discuss service outlets that are available through the Runaway 
10

and Homeless Youth Program, another program that falls under 

the Administration for Children and Families. 

The Children’s Bureau is the oldest Federal agency for children. 

The bureau provides grants to states, tribes and community organizations who operate a range of child-welfare services, including 

child protection, family preservation and support, foster care, adoption, and independent living program services. 

When children are victims of domestic trafficking, a State child 

welfare agency might become involved under the following scenarios. 

If a child is discovered to have been trafficked for the purposes 

of sexual exploitation by a parent or primary caregiver, the State 

agency would most likely take custody of that child. Some State 

agencies, however, are responding in cases of child sexual abuse or 

exploitation even when the perpetrator is not a parent or primary 

caregiver. 

When minors are transported across State lines for the purposes 

of illegal adoption—selling babies—state agencies also may have a 

role in taking temporary custody until a suitable caretaker is 

found. If a private adoption agency is involved in the trafficking 

and selling of a child, the State would suspend or revoke its license 

to operate. 

Once a child who has been trafficked enters State custody, he or 

she would receive a variety of services, including medical and psychological examination and treatment, counseling, foster family or 

group home placement, and coordination with law enforcement and 

the courts for his or her return to appropriate caregivers or the 

placement into a permanent adoptive home. 

The Family and Youth Services Bureau provides services under 

the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act, which assists runaway and 

homeless youth. Through the programs, we work to establish and 

strengthen community-based programs that address the immediate 

needs of these youth and their families. 

The Runaway and Homeless Youth Act provides services to children who are victims of trafficking through the following programs 

at the community and local levels. 

Basic Center programs are short-term emergency shelter programs that are able to address the immediate needs of runaway 

and homeless youth and their families. The central purpose of 

these programs is to provide youth with emergency shelter, food, 

clothing, counseling, and referrals for health care. 

The centers seek to reunite young people with their families 

when possible or to locate alternative placements. Basic Center 

programs have the capacity to provide followup services to youth 

who return home as well. 

Under the Street Outreach Program, street-based outreach and 

education services for runaway and homeless youth and youth on 

the streets who have been or are at risk of being sexually abused 

and are exploited are provided. These private nonprofit agencies 

conduct outreach designed to build relationships with the youth on 

the street. 

The goal of these efforts is to help young people leave the streets. 

The local grantees provide a range of services directly or through 

collaboration with other agencies, specifically those working to pro-
11

tect and treat young people who have been or are at risk of being 

subjected to sexual abuse or exploitation. 

The National Runaway Switchboard is a national communications system designed to assist youth who have run away or are 

considering running away, and their families. The switchboard 

links youth and families to crisis counseling programs and resources that are appropriate. The goal of the system is to ensure 

that young people in crisis have a single source of information on 

the help available to them. In addition, the switchboard runs a 

runaway education program, which continues to educate the general public on runaway and homeless youth issues. 

The switchboard offers the following primary services to assist 

runaways and their families or guardians—a confidential toll-free 

hotline. Hotline staff and volunteers provide crisis intervention 

counseling to runaway and homeless youth, young people who are 

thinking of running away or in crisis, and their family members. 

The hotline operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Hotline staff 

responds to approximately 120,000 calls each year from throughout 

the United States and the territories. 

Referrals by hotline staff to community-based programs and services across the country, using an online national directory of youth 

service agencies. NRS maintains data on more than 16,000 youthrelated agencies and has access to information on 120,000 other organizations. 

They also provide message delivery services between youth and 

their family or guardians that enables estranged parents and children to establish communications through a neutral third party. 

Parents can also leave messages for their children. Conference calls 

among parents, youth and resource agency staff are also facilitated 

by hotline staff and volunteers. 

The Family and Youth Services Bureau’s work with the FBI’s Office of Victim Assistance illustrates how well services can work together with law enforcement in trafficking cases involving citizen 

children. 

OVA has been receiving an increasing number of emergency victim assistance requests for the purposes of reunifying adolescent 

victims of domestic trafficking with their parents or guardians. 

Family Youth Services Bureau has brokered a relationship between the Office of Victims Assistance and the National Switchboard that has resulted in the establishment of a collaborative effort to refer FBI agents to the appropriate agencies in the community or nearby that can provide services to the adolescent victim 

and his or her parents or guardian. 

The agencies provide food, clothing, medical care, counseling 

services for the victim and the family, and the agencies providing 

the services work with the adolescent victim and the parents or 

guardians to facilitate reunification. 

For example, the NRS is the sole administrator of the Home Free 

Program, which is a collaborative effort of Greyhound Lines, Incorporated, and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. 

Home Free provides free bus tickets for victims and/or one family 

member to travel to meet the victim. Adolescents over the age of 

15 can travel unaccompanied; however, the referral agencies work 

with the family around transportation issues. 
12

In closing, I hope I’ve provided a clear snapshot of some of the 

services that are currently available through programs administered by the Administration for Children and Families for human 

trafficking victims. 

Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for bringing greater attention to this important issue, and I’d be happy to answer any questions you have. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you, Dr. Orr. 

Thank you both for not just your testimony, but for the good 

work you’re providing for those who are at such great risk. 

I do have a few questions. 

Let me ask both of you, if you could. You know as part of the 

Trafficking Victims Protection Act we spent $10 million for HHS, 

$10 million at the Justice Department for the international side. 

Can you give us a ballpark estimate, or maybe a precise number, 

as to how much we are indeed spending on the Federal level for 

the law enforcement piece, as well as the detective piece? 

Mr. SWECKER. Would you repeat that question? 

Mr. SMITH. Yes. 

How much is the FBI—if you were to count all the work that you 

are doing—expending on law enforcement efforts to mitigate and 

hopefully end this cruelty of child trafficking? 

And to Dr. Orr: What are we spending over at HHS for the same 

initiatives? 

Mr. SWECKER. Mr. Chairman, all I can tell you is the number of 

agents that we have working. It’s somewhere in the 40 to 50 agent 

range nationwide with these task forces. That doesn’t include the 

task force members that are State and local law enforcement and 

other Federal law enforcement. 

So from my standpoint, not being a budgeteer, I’d have a hard 

time putting an actual cost figure for you. 

Mr. SMITH. Is that something that you could get back to us with, 

just a sense of what it is? Because I always have believed that resources equals how high or low we prioritize. 

And one of the concerns—before I go to Dr. Orr—that we had 

was that when—obviously when 9/11 hit, and 59 people in my own 

district were killed in the Twin Towers, so it’s something that was 

felt very closely by my constituents and by myself—I know many 

of the widows—and we know that many resources at FBI and all 

law enforcement were necessarily diverted to try and prosecute the 

war on terror. Obviously there are some gaps, then, that could 

have developed, and if there are additional needs, if 40 to 50 is not 

enough, who’s looking at that to determine whether or not we have 

the right kind of assets being deployed in this war against trafficking? 

Mr. SWECKER. We do a yearly assessment, intelligence assessment and analysis, that cuts across all criminal programs. And of 

course, in my testimony I talked about the criminal intelligence assessment that was done in the cities that were identified as being 

the problem areas, and that’s our—that has been our focus. 

I mean, we—additional agents are—you know, we can always 

put additional agents on a problem. We’re trying to do it in a way 

that is intelligence-driven and that puts them in the right places 
13

at the right time and doing a much more focused dedication of resources. 

So I can get back to you on whether there are additional needs 

there, but I think for the time being, with the—I believe there were 

some additional agents provided in the 1905 budget, which we put 

to use. 

And with what we have right now in the task force setting, 

where we leverage resources in the task forces, I think we’re—you 

know, the budget that’s been submitted is adequate. 

But I can get back on that. 

Mr. SMITH. If you could provide that for us——

Mr. SWECKER. Yes, sir. 

Mr. SMITH. —because one of the concerns that I have had, some 

of our U.S. Attorneys, when it comes to trafficking, have made this 

a priority. 

Christopher Christie, from my own State of New Jersey, has 

made trafficking a top priority for him and for his colleagues. There 

are other U.S. Attorneys that don’t seem to have even gotten a 

memo on this yet. 

And, you know, resources, I think, sharpens the mind, and if it 

comes from the very top, as it has with Bush’s rollout, Rescue and 

Restore efforts on the international side—and obviously that has, 

I think, an impact on the domestic side—it seems to me that we 

probably could use more, but you want to do it smart, and so any 

additional insights you can give us. 

One of our Commissioners, as you know, is Congressman Frank 

Wolf, who chairs the Subcommittee on Appropriations and I’m sure 

would be very, very keen to get that information, as to what some 

additional resources might do in this——

[Crosstalk.] 

Mr. SWECKER. I will say, sir, it’s a high—it’s one of our highest 

priorities in the—both—because it cuts across several program 

lines, it’s one of our highest priorities, particularly when it relates 

to children, and those are areas that we don’t want to leave 

unaddressed. 

So I can get back to you on that. 

Mr. SMITH. I appreciate that. Thank you. 

Dr. Orr? 

Ms. ORR. In the Office of Refugee Resettlement, each year they 

spend about $3.5 million in grants, which is service grants, and 

then an additional $1.8 million for outreach, and then the Rescue 

and Restore Program is $9.9 million per year. 

For those children that are domestically trafficked and end up in 

our—not in our care but in the custody and care of child welfare 

agencies, it wouldn’t be a service delivery problem because it’s an 

entitlement, and so if you’re in foster care you’re entitled to all the 

services that you would need. 

And we just—we have no ability to count those children, because 

it wouldn’t show up in the way that we collect the data, so we 

couldn’t figure out how to be able to even give you a guesstimate 

as to how many children are in the United States. 

Mr. SMITH. Do you have any estimate as to how many beds exist 

for shelter for trafficking victims? Not internationally, but the domestic victims? 
14

Ms. ORR. In foster care, we just don’t—we don’t count—we know 

generically why children come into care, but it might be counted 

as sexual abuse, but that would not necessarily mean that the child 

was a trafficking victim—it could be an intrafamilial sexual exploitation problem. 

Mr. SMITH. Do we have designated shelter beds federally funded? 

Ms. ORR. It’s an entitlement, so if you’re entitled to receive foster 

care services, you get placement. And——

Mr. SMITH. Some of these traumatized victims might need something that foster care might not necessarily be able to provide. One of the things our bill does is set aside $5 million for a pilot 

program to focus on such shelters. Is that something that the administration would support? 

Ms. ORR. I don’t believe our department has taken an official position, but I’m sure we’d be happy to give you technical assistance. 

Mr. SMITH. If you could, that would be very—maybe five’s not the 

right amount, maybe it’s 10, maybe it’s four and a half. I don’t 

know. 

We arrived at that thinking, that there’s certainly an unmet 

need there, or at least we believe there is. When we first did the 

Trafficking Victims Protection Act and we arrived at $10 million, 

again, it was our best estimate or guesstimate as to what could be 

used and absorbed, and we have found that, that has been inadequate, frankly, and that we could use much more. 

Let me just ask you, if I could, Mr. Swecker. You mentioned in 

your needs that have been identified by the FBI, safe housing, obviously, medical care, mental health—you went through a list—better training, Social Security numbers, life skills. 

But one of those that you—and, again, foster care wouldn’t lend 

itself to this either—was that a range of placement options including locked facilities—you point out that many of these youngsters 

would—these juveniles would walk if you didn’t have a locked facility. Again, underscoring the need, I would think, for a very, very 

focused safe house for these women. 

What happens now with these young girls? Do they go to regular 

detention, where they suffer the indignity of arrest and perhaps 

being further hurt? 

And matter of fact, in her prepared statement, Norma Hotaling, 

who will be speaking in the second panel—and I would just like to 

read you her quote and get your response to it. 

And I quote her: ‘‘Our approach to the sexual abuse of children 

within prostitution rarely involves the creation of resources that 

truly enable healing and recovery rather than punishment and 

stigma. The Office of Victim Compensation and other resources intended to meet the needs of crime victims deny resources to children abused through child prostitution based on the misdefinition 

of these children as criminals.’’

She goes on to say, ‘‘This means that resources are rarely available in any venue that does not involve the humiliation and vulnerability of arrest and incarceration. If the child is arrested, she or 

he is cycled through the criminal justice system, sometimes repeatedly, intensifying the shame, pain and vulnerability that make 

children easy prey to pimps and abusers and decreasing the possibility of successful intervention.’’
15

That seems to be a very serious criticism of the way we are doing 

business right now. 

How do you respond to that? 

Mr. SWECKER. Yes, we try to avoid the lockup-type facility at all 

costs. 

Of course, our Office of Victim Assistance is in sort of a casemanagement mode, a crisis case-management mode, when we first 

come across one of these victims. And we have very well-trained 

staff, we have victim witness coordinators around the country and 

assist—specialists around the country, and they understand that 

the lockup option—I shouldn’t even call it an option. 

They’re very careful about where they try to place these children, 

because they’re brokering services and we’re actually paying for the 

services during that time period that they’re under our case management, and they do—we do not want to go into—put them into 

the criminal justice system just like a normal criminal process. 

So they’re very—they’re trained in that area. That’s the last—it’s 

not even—I shouldn’t even call it an option. 

But, as you know, across the country, social services are sort of 

a patchwork quilt of different services available in different states, 

and they’re relying in many instances on local services, and that’s 

not consistent around the country. 

But there needs to be much more education in the local system 

as to how to deal—particularly law enforcement aspect of it—in 

how these children should be treated when they come across them 

as victims and not treat them as criminals. 

Mr. SMITH. Could I ask you, how do we initiate a hurry-up offense in that regard? 

As you’re answering, if you could, say a young girl is picked up 

by the police; she has been trafficked, she has been abused. How 

quick is she to get the kind of services—I mean, her mental state, 

her emotional trauma that she’s suffered, her physical well-being 

is at grave risk from STDs and God knows what else. How quickly 

does the whole system react to her and her very unique needs? 

Mr. SWECKER. If the FBI is involved, it’s immediate. 

And I think you’ll find that there’s very, very professional treatment—not treatment, but professional case management and approach to it from the very beginning. 

But I can’t answer for circumstances where they fall into a local 

or State sting operation or something, or they’re actually initially 

picked up in some type of operation by a local vice squad. That I 

would defer probably to somebody who’s much more experienced in 

this area and has that expertise. 

Mr. SMITH. Are there thoughts or is there any planning whatsoever being done at Justice or at the FBI on that issue to ensure 

that at the local level, where they’re more likely to be picked up 

by law enforcement, that they understand and get it? 

Mr. SWECKER. I’d have to get back to you. 

I can consult real quick while Dr. Orr answers her part of the 

question and I can get back to you when she finishes answering. 

Ms. ORR. Just to make sure that you understand, not all of these 

children would go to a family foster home. 

We do have institutionalized care, so if they—or if they need a 

therapeutic care, somebody who’s been given training to address 
16

someone who has been sexually exploited either through domestic 

trafficking or intrafamilial. 

Through the Rescue and Restore Program, which I know you’re 

familiar with, they are referred to services. 

So it would not—while the Rescue and Restore wouldn’t pay for 

services of a domestic person, the service agencies that we work 

with all take care of those kids no matter—if they won’t fall under 

the Rescue and Restore Program, they all provide services to those 

children. 

Mr. SMITH. Let me ask you in terms of the sea change that all 

of us believe needs to take place in the minds and hearts of particularly law enforcement with regards to treating the women as 

victims rather than criminals—the first bill that we did, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, that was the major hurdle we had 

to get over, that everyone still had the so-called prostitute trafficking victim so designated that she indeed was a criminal. 

Has that sea change of attitude taken hold here in the United 

States the way it ought to, among law enforcement? 

Ms. ORR. From the Rescue and Restore efforts, we’re certainly 

seeing an uptick in victims. 

It probably—it’s not a national rollout, it’s a city-by-city rollout, 

and that was exactly the purpose, was to get them to see what you 

think of as a criminal is actually a victim. 

I think it’s too soon to see whether—how well it’s being permeated throughout the law enforcement community. 

Mr. SWECKER. Yes, I think, at least federally, as I mentioned, 

there are services that are relatively mature in terms of how we 

deal—over the years our victim witness assistance has matured to 

the point where we—I think, as I said, we get very professional 

and very timely services. 

But when you get to the State systems, sir, I think there are 

quite a few victim witnesses programs out there with local police 

departments, depending on the size of the department. 

And there may be an initial time period especially that’s very 

critical when a victim first is picked up in a sweep and then identified as a child where they may get the same treatment that any 

other criminal or prostitute would get when they’re first arrested, 

and that is a critical time period, and I think that needs to be addressed through training, training programs, and perhaps through 

the Justice Department’s various programs that they have. 

Maybe that’s an area where that service could be delivered if you 

want to go on a national scale rather than sort of a hit-or-miss 

scale, you know, hit-or-miss approach varying from one locality to 

the next. 

Mr. SMITH. Let me just ask you regarding the lockup again, the 

idea that some of these girls would leave as soon as the door can 

be opened. 

Is there anything that you’ve seen in your own law enforcement 

career where some kind of benign lockup could be put into place 

for their own sake while they’re getting over this sense that they 

want to get right back out on the street, back to, you know, the 

cycle of abuse, which hasn’t been broken yet, in their own minds? 

I’m not talking about incarceration in any typical sense but——

Mr. SWECKER. Right. 
17

Mr. SMITH [continuing]. Something where——

Mr. SWECKER. Something that’s more therapeutic. 

Mr. SMITH. Yes. 

Mr. SWECKER. I have run across hospitals that have a very—I 

mean, mental treatment facilities or local social service facilities 

that do have locked doors. 

In fact, there are a lot of private facilities that do have that, and 

they’re very—it’s not a traditional lockup-type environment, the 

doors just stay locked, and there’s not unrestricted access, ingress 

and egress. 

But it’s not a prison-type environment, and I think that—I think 

there are quite a few places around the country that have that capability, but again, it’s sort of hit or miss around the country as 

to whether the local services can deliver that type of service. 

But I go back to sort of the initial stages of when law enforcement comes across one of these victims, and those are the critical 

stages where they need to triage and make sure they get to the 

right kind of facility. If it’s Federal, we’re able to do that. If it’s a 

State or local arrest, then it’s going to be—it’s going to be hit or 

miss, really. 

Mr. SMITH. Dr. Orr, let me ask you. You mentioned some of the 

public service work, you have the education that’s being done by 

HHS. Has any effort been made to get public service announcements on television, where the youth who might be most affected 

by the traffickers could see it, like an MTV, VH1, to get that message out? 

We know in other countries some of the ads have been very, very 

effective. That coupled with curriculum, teacher training, you 

know, maybe the NEA and AFT and everyone else could be brought 

in so that—you know, they—sometimes the teacher can be that line 

of first defense, recognizing the student who’s drifting and who 

could be very vulnerable to a trafficking scenario. 

Is that being done with both the educational establishment, elementary and secondary school, and through public service announcements like with the—what do you call it—the Ad Council 

and the like? 

Ms. ORR. I am not sure, but I will get back to you. 

I know that this is the first anniversary of the rollout, and I 

know the first target was trying to talk to people who saw these 

children every day and didn’t realize what they were seeing. 

And it certainly seems to me that educators would be the next 

follow-on obvious——

Mr. SMITH. If we could, then maybe work cooperatively together 

on a plan. 

And I do want to commend you on the Rescue and Restore. 

I went to the rollout that was held in Newark, New Jersey, 

under the auspices of the Archdiocese of Newark, and not only was 

Chris Christie there, the U.S. Attorney, a number of prosecutors, 

law enforcement, NGOs—it was a true success. 

I had one prosecutor from a large county come up and say he had 

no idea this was going on and would now refocus and recalibrate 

his law enforcement efforts, which I took as a very, very positive 

thing. 

So congratulations for that. I think it’s an outstanding initiative. 
18

But I think, going forward, there might be some things we might 

do, especially given the magnitude. 

One trafficked woman is one too many, but when you have tens 

of thousands, maybe 300,000 of our own youth, coupled with all the 

internationals that are being brought in, that’s absolutely unconscionable. 

So there are some other things that I think we might do. 

I’d like to yield to Maureen Walsh, our general counsel for the 

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, for any comments, statement, questions. 

Ms. WALSH. Thank you. 

I’d actually like to ask just a couple of questions of our witnesses. 

Mr. Swecker, for you first. Your statement today has largely focused on the issue of sexual exploitation of children, commercial 

sexual exploitation and trafficking of children. 

I’m interested to know if American citizens are vulnerable to 

being trafficked within the United States, are there also instances 

of American citizens being trafficked abroad for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation or some form of forced labor? 

Mr. SWECKER. You mean taken outside the country from within 

the United States? 

Ms. WALSH. Yes. 

Mr. SWECKER. We don’t see as much of that certainly as we do 

the reverse, but it does exist. 

And we do see—what comes to mind is instances where women 

have been lured outside the country in various ways and then are 

pressed into either sexual or some type of other service, but it’s not 

a very common violation. 

I actually checked around before I came over here to see if we 

had cases of that nature, and we don’t have any cases pending of 

that nature right now. 

Ms. WALSH. And then a follow-on to that. 

In terms of other forms of domestic trafficking in the United 

States, there have been cases—one example, in 2001 a man pled 

guilty to involuntary servitude for trafficking homeless men in 

Florida to work on his citrus fields and used threats and force to 

compel their labor. 

Does the FBI investigate those types of cases, and if so, can you 

discuss the extent and the character of these forced labor forms of 

trafficking which involve American citizens? 

Mr. SWECKER. The short answer is, yes, we do see instances of 

forced involuntary servitude. 

We actually treat it as a civil rights violation and we do have an 

inventory of cases that involve just that, where U.S. citizens, and 

sometimes not even U.S. citizens, but resident aliens who are here 

legally are pressed into some type of involuntary servitude, whether it’s sexual or domestic service or some type of service. 

We work those cases and we work them very aggressively as civil 

rights matters. 

Ms. WALSH. Do you have any estimates on the numbers of people 

who would fall into that category? 

Mr. SWECKER. You mean as far as that we are addressing 

through investigations or the universe of exposed——
19

Ms. WALSH. The number of people who would be—resident aliens 

or American citizens who would be trafficked within the United 

States for the purpose of forced labor, not for the purpose of sexual 

exploitation. 

Mr. SWECKER. I’m not aware of any studies. 

I can tell you how many cases we have—I can get back to you 

and tell you how many cases we have that involve involuntary servitude domestically within the United States. 

Ms. WALSH. That would be helpful. 

Mr. SWECKER. OK. 

Ms. WALSH. And one question for Dr. Orr, please. 

According to a prepared statement that I read from one of our 

witnesses on the second panel, Frank Barnaba, he mentions that 

getting medical, psychiatric or educational support to victims is 

often delayed, sometimes for months, because the victims cannot 

provide valid identification. 

When a victim of trafficking appears broken and bruised at the 

door of a social service provider, should the response really be, ‘‘no 

ID, no service?’’ It seems like a bureaucratic obstacle that we 

should be able to find a resolution to and I wonder if you have 

some suggestions. 

Ms. ORR. I will have to get back to you on an answer, because 

I’m not aware of the problem. 

Ms. WALSH. OK. 

And then one other question. Again, according to your testimony, 

you mentioned that some of the State child welfare agencies are responding to cases of child sex abuse or exploitation even when the 

perpetrator is not a parent or primary caregiver. 

What I take from this statement is that there are some State 

child welfare agencies that will not respond unless the perpetrator 

is the parent or primary caregiver. 

And if you could please explain that a little bit further, why isn’t 

it mandatory for any victim of trafficking, any child who has been 

sexually exploited, to be assisted regardless of who the perpetrator 

was? 

Ms. ORR. It’s not a question of assistance. 

It’s a question of their mission. 

Child welfare agencies were established to take child abuse and 

neglect, unless it’s a particularly heinous crime, out of the criminal 

and treat it as a social service problem. So they deal with 

intrafamilial problems, sexual abuse being a subcategory of them. 

Sometimes in State code, statutory rape and extrafamilial is also 

under the purview of the social services, but it’s not something that 

we have in the Children’s Bureau, through Title IV–E, statutory 

authority over. 

Ms. WALSH. Thank you. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. SMITH. Let me just ask one final question to you, Dr. Orr. 

One of our witnesses, Ms. Hotaling will be talking in her testimony about the Johns School with a focus on trying to affect the 

demand side. 

Just parenthetically, one of the things we found when President 

Bush so wisely instituted the zero tolerance policy within our military was that a lot of it came down to education. And we had a 
20

hearing of the Commission. As a matter of fact, we heard from 

General LaPorte, our Supreme Allied Commander in South Korea, 

who came and testified and talked about the work that he and his 

staff are doing within the military. 

And so much of it came down to sensitizing the 18-, the 19-, and 

the 20-year-olds who are deployed in South Korea, who until recently had, in such close proximity to Camp Casey and other military installations, houses of prostitution filled, overflowing with 

Filipinos who had been trafficked, Moldovans, Russians and others, 

including indigenous South Koreans. 

But once the effort of zero tolerance was put into effect, and 

training of our men in uniform was effectuated, the places closed 

up, especially when they worked in cooperation with the government to get rid of the entertainment visa and the other things that 

they have done. 

It just—it made all the difference in the world, but a lot of it had 

to do with training. 

And as the SAGE Project is doing with the first offenders program, these men are made aware of what it is that they’re exploiting: these broken young women, many of whom have had horrible 

histories of abuse as very young girls. And all of a sudden, the 

glamour turns into what it is—real cruelty. 

And it seems to me that the concept of a Johns School—particularly for those first offenders—might break what would then become a cycle. It seems to me a very prudent thing. 

Is that something that the department is looking at as an option? 

I noted in her testimony, which I read just a little while ago, that 

she has lost some of her funding from the city within which she 

resides, again, diminishing her ability to do this very vital work. 

What do you think of that? 

Ms. ORR. I’m intrigued. 

I’m not sure where at HHS we could do it, but I’m willing to take 

it back to the department and find out if there are streams of funding that we could access for this purpose. 

Mr. SMITH. OK. 

And one of the things we’re trying to do at this hearing, and 

frankly with the new bill and working in partnership with the executive branch, is to find best practices and roll out without delay, 

because delay is denial to the woman who will be exploited, and 

I know you agree with that. 

Anything you would like to add before we conclude? 

Mr. SWECKER. Just the thought came to mind, when you were 

talking about training and delivery of that type of awareness training, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has always been a good resource. They’re a private organization, as you 

know. 

I’m on the board. I can’t speak for them, but I would say that, 

that might be an option as a delivery vehicle for training. 

They do get to a lot of State and local officers, as well as other 

ancillary social services that get involved in missing and exploited 

children. That’s the exploited part of it. 

Mr. SMITH. Sure. 

We will hear from Ernie Allen shortly, but I agree with you. 
21

Thank you so much for the great work you’re doing, and look forward to working with you going forward. 

Appreciate it. 

Our second panel will begin with the testimony of Ms. Leisa B., 

herself a survivor of domestic trafficking for sexual exploitation. 

I want to express my deep appreciation for her willingness to 

share her personal experience with the Commission at this public 

setting. 

I would like to ask members of the press—and I know you’ve 

agreed to this already—not to photograph her, only from the back 

so she will not be identifiable. 

Our next witness will be Norma Hotaling. 

Since 1996, Ms. Hotaling has served as the Executive Director of 

the Standing Against Global Exploitation, or SAGE, Project. She is 

an expert in the areas of criminal justice treatment programs, drug 

abuse treatment, systems of prostitution and sexual exploitation, 

domestic and international trafficking of women and girls, and the 

demand side of prostitution. 

Ms. Hotaling also serves as the health educator and program designer of the First Offender Prostitute Program, better known as 

the Johns School, in which she designed, implemented and now facilities a program to discourage customers of prostitutes from being 

further involved with prostitution. 

A key aspect of the program is that the funds paid by these customers, when they are arrested for prostitution offenses, are being 

redirected to help children and adults exit prostitution. 

Ms. Hotaling has also designed and implemented both youth and 

adult prostitution treatment and prevention programs. 

Ms. Hotaling has participated in a number of investigations into 

the psychological, as well as physical affects of prostitution. She is 

currently the co-principal investigator in a research project sponsored in part by the Bay Area Homelessness Program, studying violence and recruitment into prostitution, and assessment of needs. 

We will then hear from Frank Barnaba, who is a recognized authority in the field of child and adult sexual exploitation. 

As Founder and President of the Paul & Lisa Program, Mr. 

Barnaba has more than 25 years of experience working with sexually exploited girls and women, and is conducting training programs and education presentations for school systems. 

Through the programs and services of the Paul & Lisa Program, 

he has brought worldwide recognition to the existence and devastating affects of commercial sexual exploitation and the victimization of youth and young adults. 

Mr. Barnaba has served on numerous task forces and working 

groups and has testified at several hearings on child sexual exploitation. 

He has received numerous awards, including in 1988 when thenPresident Ronald Reagan awarded Mr. Barnaba the National Victims of Crime Award for his outstanding contributions in assisting 

runaway, missing and exploited children. 

Recently, Mr. Barnaba also focused his efforts on the identification of illegal immigrants being prostituted and trafficked in Manhattan and across the boroughs of New York City. 
22

And finally, we will hear from Mr. Ernie Allen, who is President 

and Chief Executive Officer of the National Center for Missing and 

Exploited Children. He was co-founder of the private, nonprofit 

center which has helped recover some 95,000 children, while increasing its recovery rate from 62 percent in 1990 to 96 percent 

today. 

Mr. Allen brought technology and innovation to the center, including computerized age progressions of long-term missing children, an award-winning Internet Web site, and a CyberTip line 

that has handled 320,000 reports regarding child pornography and 

sexual exploitation resulting in the arrest and prosecution of hundreds of adult predators. 

He has launched a new international center and is building a 

global network to track missing children, which now includes 16 

countries. Through his leadership, the international center has entered into formal partnerships with Interpol, the Organization of 

American States and the Hague Conference on Private International Law. 

Mr. Allen is an active spokesman for the cause, having made numerous appearances on national television. He came to the center 

after public service in Kentucky as Chief Administrative Officer of 

Jefferson County, Director of Public Health and Safety for the city 

of Louisville, and Director of the Louisville-Jefferson County Crime 

Commission. He is also an attorney. He has held adjunct faculty 

positions at several universities. 

I’d like to begin now with Leisa, if you would. 

LEISA B., SURVIVOR OF DOMESTIC TRAFFICKING 

Ms. LEISA B. Thank you for the opportunity to share my story 

and to shine a light on the other side—the side of the victims. 

I was 9 years old and I went on a family vacation to DC. I loved 

the city, the diversity, the people, the beautiful architecture. In my 

mind, DC was the perfect place to live; I had no idea that in a few 

short years I would become a slave to it. 

I began my decline into insanity in Atlanta, GA, where I was residing with my parents in a well-off, upper middle-class neighborhood. At this time in my life I was 17, I had already established 

a pretty good reputation for being out of control and unruly. 

On a local phone chat line, I had connected with a guy that sold 

me dreams of fancy cars, expensive clothes, lavish homes, and the 

freedom of running around in an adult’s world. 

I was on the first Greyhound to DC with the impression of happiness. Although the bus ride was a short one, the life it led me to 

would scar me for life. 

After only a few months on the streets of DC, I became familiar 

with the lay of the land and was constantly moving from DC to 

Maryland and Virginia and back—partially to avoid arrest, and 

also the crowd of people I was around was consistently changing. 

In August 2002, I was arrested for solicitation of an undercover 

and was placed in a juvenile detention center for a month, with the 

intention of going right back to the streets. 

The streets were all that I knew at this point. 

About a month after my release I began to work for another 

pimp, who explained how much more money I would make in 
23

Miami. So we began a long drive from DC to Florida, just me, my 

pimp and one of his drug buddies. 

I worked in Florida for 3 weeks before I was again arrested for 

solicitation. I was incarcerated under a fake name, for I was only 

17-years-old, and released again a week later to the same streets 

I was arrested on. 

Shortly after, I began to work for a new pimp out in Miami, traveling from various parts of the State to meet different dates. 

Miami was a difficult place to work—the rapes and beatings 

began to get harder and harder to deal with—so I bought a Greyhound bus ticket and returned back to DC to live with some 

friends. 

The vicious cycle continued when I had met yet another pimp 

that I began to work with who was worse then the others, so again 

I ran from the situation. I would most likely take the train back 

and forth from Maryland, never staying in one place long enough 

to be known. 

A few days after my declaration of retirement from the game, I 

noticed that I was once again broke and knew only how to solve 

the problem. 

I contacted my first pimp who was now living in Brooklyn, NY, 

and told him to come pick me up in DC. He left his four other girls 

in New York and drove to DC to come get me. We stayed a night 

in DC so I could work; then we drove to Brooklyn, where I would 

work for another month or so. 

During this time in New York, we would make random trips to 

Atlantic City during the big fighting events. 

Our pimp hired drug dealers to drive four of us in a van, while 

he followed behind with another girl in his car. He used to say it 

would look hot if there was five white girls and a black man driving a nice truck. 

Once again, working got old, so I made the choice to call my parents and ask for help. They paid for a Greyhound ticket over the 

phone to pick me up in Manhattan and return to Atlanta. 

I was then introduced to the program, who I was with while I 

was pregnant for about 5 or 6 months—gave me housing while I 

was in a homeless shelter. They loved me, gave me counseling. 

It was comforting to know people knew what I was talking about 

and I wasn’t just a weird kid that was just bad, and they knew I 

was a victim and they treated me as such. 

Feel free to ask any questions at the ending. 

Mr. SMITH. Leisa, thank you so much for your willingness to 

come and present that to the Commission, because what we’re 

fighting for is you. 

Ms. LEISA B. Right. 

Mr. SMITH. And you’ve made it very clear, and having met with 

you previously with Paul and with Pat Trueman who used to serve 

as Chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section in the 

DOJ Criminal Division. Attorney General Meese had established a 

‘‘strike force’’ to prosecute obscenity cases. Mr. Trueman, a distinguished lawyer and attorney, headed up this very, very effective 

unit but regrettably it was disbanded when the Clinton administration came in. 
24

But that unit busted up many child porn and other obscenity 

rings throughout the country and did an incredible job unheralded. 

I want to thank Pat, too, for ensuring that I and my staff met 

you. 

And thank you, again, for your courage to be here. 

Ms. LEISA B. Thank you. 

Mr. SMITH. Ms. Hotaling? 

NORMA HOTALING, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND FOUNDER, 

STANDING AGAINST GLOBAL EXPLOITATION (SAGE) PROJECT 

Ms. HOTALING. Thank you, Chairman Smith. 

And thank you for your 10 years or more working on behalf of 

exploited women and girls throughout the world. Many people have 

benefited from your work and we all appreciate it. 

And thank you, Maureen Walsh, for all the hard work putting 

the bill together, the reauthorization, and this Commission hearing 

today. 

It’s extremely important. It’s the first one on Americans being 

trafficked in America. 

I remember meeting you and talking to you at the Second World 

Congress in Yokohama, Japan, and you stating then that, as you 

were putting together the TVPA in 2000, you started hearing about 

all these girls in the United States and you couldn’t believe that 

this was actually happening on American soil. 

So here we are today, and describing the horrendous situations 

and hopefully some solutions. 

It was at the First World Congress Against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation, after hearing representatives from almost every 

country throughout the world talk about the horror and terror and 

death that children were suffering through commercial sexual exploitation, that I was sick to the point of being almost unable to 

walk. 

Testimony after testimony described the long effects of commercial sexual exploitation, including the mental heath disease, substance abuse, stigmatization, homelessness, and ill treatment by 

law enforcement and service providers. 

I was witness to stories of hundreds and thousands of children 

who were having their childhoods brutally ripped away. 

They were left to fend for themselves as they grew into adults 

and become the thousands of women and girls and men we serve 

each year at the SAGE Project in San Francisco. 

The toss-aways, the throw-aways, the ones who are blamed for 

their own victimization—these are the women and girls today in 

the United States, my sisters, my brothers, my friends, who are 

missing and buried in shallow graves. They’re being beaten, raped, 

kidnapped, tortured, recruited, trafficked and killed. They’re laying 

unidentified, unrecognized and thus renamed as Jane Does in city 

morgues and in burial plots. 

I founded SAGE 16 years ago as I was exiting the criminal justice system. I had been going to juvenile halls, jails, psychiatric 

hospitals, emergency rooms and drug treatment programs since I 

was 12. 
25

No one ever asked me about my life, about prostitution, about 

being raped, beaten, kidnapped. I was just a whore, a dope fiend 

and a criminal. 

How could I get out of that lifestyle? 

No one ever treated me like a person. Nobody asked me if I hurt 

or why. 

Today, under the TVPA, I would be considered a trafficked victim—I was trafficked into prostitution when I was a child. 

Today at SAGE we provide a myriad of services and we’ve done 

it by scratching and clawing and putting pennies and our will together—our will that we used on the streets to survive, because 

SAGE is a survivor-run organization. 

We have the STAR Center, which is the SAGE Trauma and Addiction Recovery Center. We have wellness programs, because most 

of our clients come in with HIV, hepatitis C, all kinds of other 

physical and emotional ailments—mental health services, which is 

trauma-focused psychotherapy. 

We reach out to every drug treatment program in San Francisco 

and provide sexual exploitation prevention, early intervention and 

crisis counseling through our Satellite Sexual Trauma Counseling 

Program. 

We have a youth component which has life skills trauma, addiction recovery, education and advocacy. 

Secure House for Girls, we’re happy to announce, is going to open 

next week, or next month—July. We’re ready, we’re licensed. 

We have a family preservation program that we decided, because 

the girls are in the juvenile justice system, because they’re the 

focus of the attention, they’re looked at as criminals and the perpetrators, that their families never come to the table. They’re not 

in family court, so we decided to provide the extensive services that 

their families need. 

We have men’s services for the male hustlers and the boys that 

are on the street: early intervention prostitution programs; the 

First Offender Prostitution Program, which is the first program 

that funded a wide array of services because no one was giving us 

money for services that were so badly needed, so we decided to take 

it from the johns. And we decided at the same time to give them 

services. 

And we’re proud to say in San Francisco that we’re counted as 

one of the cities in the country that arrests more men than women. 

Vocational and peer education—vocational training is a very, 

very big part. You do the substance abuse counseling, the trauma 

training and counseling, and then you want to give their lives back, 

so vocational training is so important. 

STOP (ph) is our program funded for international trafficking 

victims under the TVPA. 

We have replication and we have begun the SAGE Institute of 

Training, which is working with cities throughout the country and 

countries throughout the world. 

I founded SAGE because like 90 percent of our clients, I experienced sexual abuse and rape as a child through prostitution, and 

like 82 percent, I’ve been brutally assaulted. Like 84 percent, I was 

homeless. 
26

Like most of my clients, I suffered severe post-traumatic stress 

disorder and I wanted desperately to get out of prostitution and a 

life that made no sense to me. 

Many of the problems facing women and girls in prostitution are 

similar to those addressed in other marginalized populations: finding affordable housing, financial planning, creating safe environments and relationships, and escaping and healing from emotional 

and physical effects of violence, engaging in treatment for drug and 

alcohol addictions, resuming educational and vocational training. 

These problems, however, may be exponentially compounded by 

longstanding, widespread myths and misunderstandings about 

prostitution. 

On one hand, it’s glamorized and romanticized, and on the other 

hand, women and girls have been viewed as criminal sexual deviants, socially inept and mentally deficient. 

Women trying to escape prostitution, many already traumatized 

by long-term physical and sexual violence, routinely endure listening to jokes about whores and hookers—jokes that diminish, belittle and even idealize the pain. 

Would we consider jokes about prison rape funny? 

Pimps and hoes have become part of our popular culture, as seen 

in the Pimps Ball and the popular singer Nelly’s ‘‘Pimp Juice.’’

Where’s Nelly when his brothers and sisters are facing long prison terms, and his sisters have burns and whip marks from head 

to toe, or dead in ditches? 

The data—I put in my report data that goes back to the 1980’s—

it’s relevant now because it’s been ignored and it’s not been used 

to create solutions. 

Mimi Silbert, who said back in 1982 that the average entry of 

prostitution is 13 and 14—she recently testified in San Francisco 

before the Board of Supervisors. She was part of our task force that 

helped make the Safe House possible. In 1982, when she published 

this data, no one cared and the problem has only gotten bigger and 

worse. 

Historically, procurers, or pimps and traffickers target runaway 

girls that hang out with crowds, breaking and bending even the 

simplest of rules—kids that smoke, they cut class, they’re adopting 

acting-out behavior associated with trauma, girls that come from 

abusive backgrounds who have low self-esteem and confidence. 

They befriend the girls and then calculate a romantic connection. 

The strategy of befriending and love is designed to fit the 

vulnerabilities of its potential victim. 

A procurer’s goal is to find naive, needy teenage girls or young 

women, con them into dependency, and season them into fear and 

submission, and turn them out into the sex trade. 

Today, because trafficking in women and girls is determined to 

be more profitable than trafficking in guns and drugs, all you have 

to be is a girl or a young woman. 

Before it was the abused girl, it was the homeless, the runaway, 

the ones that we really can consider or have considered—not can, 

but have considered the toss-aways, the throw-aways. 

But I’m here to tell you that it’s any girl. It’s your girl, it’s our 

girls. 
27

Guerrilla pimping—we talked about that in Cincinnati, or in Boston recently. 

People come up behind girls now. They pick them up from behind. They throw them in trunks. The traffickers use severe and 

immediate violence to force the victim to participate in the sex industry. 

A common theme found in guerrilla pimping is that a woman or 

a girl is physically picked up, thrown into a trunk, transported to 

cities throughout the United States. 

SAGE Project and the Paul & Lisa Program has rescued individuals who do not know what city they are in and what cities they 

have been trafficked through while being forced to work in the sex 

trade, including strip clubs, escort services, the streets, Internet 

sites, and sites such as Craig’s List, and sites created by pimps 

themselves. 

They are sold on the back pages of alternative newspapers and 

sex trade magazines, and they have been kept and transported in 

trunks of cars, isolated in out-of-the-way hotels and motels, singleroom occupancy hotels and throughout the country while being brutalized, raped, tortured and sold to all who demand them. 

We have the smooth-talker pimps. 

Those are the traditional ones. They come in. They start developing a relationship by listening. They’re great listeners. They systematically break down their prey by socially isolating them, taking 

them away from their family and friends, and embroiling them in 

a social system that involves living in transient hotels close to hostels, traveling from city to city, and socializing with transient persons usually also involved in the sex trade. 

A critical step in seasoning a girl is changing her identity. 

She’s given a new name and any necessary papers with false 

driver’s license, social security cards and birth certificates, so that 

the police will not be able to trace her real identity or determine 

her true age. More importantly, the stripping of the girl’s identity 

removes her past and makes her the property of the pimp. 

What a pimp wants is a girl’s mind more than her body. 

It’s love, loyalty and obedience he requires, as well as the capacity for self discipline. 

There’s a quota put on the girls. We’ve heard from $350 to $1,500 

to $2,000 a night. If she’s acting out, if she’s not obeying, if she’s 

not doing what he says, he pimps her harder, which means her 

quota goes up and she stays out on the street or she’s sold over the 

Internet for longer and longer hours. She’s broken and broken and 

broken. 

Psychological paralysis—back in 1980, Mimi Silbert coined this 

term, and it’s so important. It’s a term that says there is no longer 

any aspect which the girl feels she has any control over in her life, 

and that usually comes after the most brutal rape, but then before 

the brutal rape, there’s been a series of violence and exploitation. 

We have girls that are told to kneel on rice for 8 hours because 

it’ll numb them out. They’re beat with heated coat hangers and 

with lighters. The abuse goes on and on. 

They are told when they can pluck their eyebrows, when they 

can shave their legs. Every bit of that money goes to that man, and 

if she wants a piece of gum, she has to ask for it back. If he finds 
28

her eating gum, he’ll rape her, he’ll digitally penetrate her to find 

out if she’s hiding any other money. Chewing a piece of gum indicates that that girl might be hiding money from that man, and 

that’s an indication that he’s going to find out where she’s hiding 

the money. The girls that report that they’ve made between $500,000 and $1 

million—when they’re asked why they’re involved in prostitution, 

they say for the money. 

When you ask them how much money they have—how much, 

Frank? 

Mr. BARNABA. Zero. 

Ms. HOTALING. Zero. 

So psychological paralysis is a very, very important part of knowing—you need to know about that if you’re providing services for 

these girls, because you have to break down their goals and what 

they can achieve into very, very small compartments and then help 

them achieve that. And then there’s a whole other series of trauma 

and abuse interventions that need to happen. 

Recruitment, the supply and the demand—recruitment into prostitution flourishes in proportion to an increased demand. 

The demand for trafficked women and girls increases due to a 

variety and a combination of factors that include normalizing rape 

and sexual abuse of children and the exploitation of women by 

viewing the demand as normal men with normal sex needs being 

met through prostitution. 

In actuality, we are sanctioning training grounds for men to 

learn the practice of pedophilia. 

The girls who are preyed upon become untreated, abused and 

traumatized women. 

Learned and accepted exploitation and violence—if men can 

learn it, they can unlearn it. 

Collusion and protection with exploiters, especially the demand—

and I just had a long conversation with someone about this. 

It’s very hard for police officers to arrest men that look like 

them, men that have families, men that have children at home, 

men that have jobs. And what the main approach has been is to 

go after the trafficker and the procurer, but not the demand. They 

don’t want to ruin their lives—‘‘Go home, buddy. What are you 

doing out here with this whore?’’

So the men are never, usually never, ever arrested, and especially never arrested for exploiting a child and never arrested for 

a very serious sexual offense, such as sexual abuse or statutory 

rape. 

Loosened social norms concerning the sex industry—profitability 

by individuals, organized groups, and governments, accessibility to 

and the promotion of the multibillion dollar sex industry. 

There’s a huge marketing campaign. Think of it as like cigarettes. They’re going after the men. The pimps have a lot of money, 

and they’re putting it into magazines like Maxim that’s focusing, 

that’s targeting 18- to 24-year-olds and all kinds of other things—

dial this 900 number and your dreams will come true, or go to this 

strip club or whatever—and they’re putting a lot of money into this 

marketing. 

So why aren’t we doing something to counter that? 
29

Non-existent, weak or unenforced legal interventions to combat 

the demand and the traffickers—criminal justice systems that 

focus on arresting and prosecuting women and girls involved in 

prostitution, but not their male counterparts. 

In 2002, police arrested 23,446 men and 67,000 women. 

Additionally, men being arrested for soliciting paid sex vary 

enormously by geography. 

In San Francisco and Detroit, men accounted for 75 percent of 

all the prostitution-related arrests. But in Las Vegas, it was only 

14 percent. In Boston, it was 12. 

Since its inception in 1995, over 7,000 men have attended our 

Johns School in San Francisco. We boast a 98 percent success rate, 

2 percent recidivist rate, and on top of that, it funds a wider range 

of services for women and girls. 

My first recommendation would be, though existing laws indicate 

that men should be charged with sexual abuse and statutory 

rape—all over the country we have these laws—looking at prostitution laws is good, but why aren’t we using sexual abuse and statutory rape laws? Why? 

Even though they exist, police rarely if ever investigate, arrest, 

and prosecute the so-called Johns. At most and very rarely, the police cite the men as users of adult prostitutes. 

If a young woman admits her real age or if police know her to 

be under the age of 18, she’s taken to jail and the man is let go. 

He’s let go Scot-free. They’re often told, ‘‘Go home, buddy. It’s your 

lucky day.’’ Never once thinking of the life of the child that’s ruined 

and changed forever. 

We ignore the abuse. We misdefine it, and the people that are 

mandated reporters are not reporting this. 

A girl can come into a probation officer, sit next to him for a 

prostitution-related arrest and he will never call anyone, anyone 

that is there to serve her as a victim. And in fact, when we ask 

them to do it, they fight with us, saying ‘‘Why are you trying to 

create this girl as a victim? She’s a perpetrator.’’

When we try to get them into Victims of Crime, they fight with 

us over that. We encourage the perpetrators by focusing on the behavior—supposed wrongs—of the children, and ignore the perpetrators. 

We don’t give the kids a way out. There’s no safe houses. We’re 

working in crisis mode rather than on prevention. 

The TVPA Reauthorization Act continues the important work of 

the original TVPA. 

We’d like to suggest some language around giving the TIP Office 

more tools to fight the legalization of the so-called sex industry 

throughout the world. 

And the reason we need this is because the United States is 

deemed the moralist country, and the TIP Office is really, really 

doing a very good job at defining the demand and the importance 

going after the demand, and the importance of not legalizing prostitution, because all the men that come through my program, their 

justification for being involved in prostitution is, ‘‘Oh, it’s just legal 

in Amsterdam or Germany or Nevada.’’
30

The two-tiered system of severe forms of trafficking and simple 

sex trafficking for prostitution should not be imported into the domestic portion of the TVPA. 

I know I speak for all the members of our survivor-centered approach to trafficking, as well as others who oppose the creation of 

the two-tiered system of deserving and undeserving victims in the 

United States. 

We believe that services should be provided to all who walk 

through our door, not just those who prove force, fraud or coercion. 

Making a distinction between victims of severe form of trafficking and victims of trafficking would be disastrous and nothing 

less than a continuation of victim-blaming and withholding of lifesaving services. 

SSEEN, which is the Survivor Services Education and Empowerment Network, which is made up of SAGE, Breaking Free in St. 

Paul, MN, Kathleen Mitchell, Dignity House in Phoenix, AZ, and 

Veronica’s Voice, strongly supports the End the Demand Act. 

However, we have some changes to that Act also—that technical 

assistance should draw from and be delivered by a network of survivor-centered providers who have a proven track record of designing and implementing services for decades. 

It’s essential that survivors be included in all aspects of the 

work. We’re the experts, right? We should be integrated in all the 

aspects to stop trafficking and commercial exploitation, including 

services, replication of models, model programs, policy development 

and implementation, creating standards of care and other protocols 

and trainings. 

In conclusion, both the TVPA Reauthorization Act of 2005 and 

the End Demand Act are important pieces of legislation and they 

have different goals and are not mutually exclusive. 

In fact, the supporters of the TVPA Reauthorization, many of 

them also support the End the Demand Act, and vice versa. 

Create a real escape for children and women through appropriate 

social services and recovery. Replicate programs that work such as 

SAGE and the First Offender Prostitution Program and the Johns 

School. Support survivor-run services. Do not make services for 

women and girls contingent on testifying against abusers and traffickers. 

Withholding services from individuals who have suffered the 

worst of human rights abuses is inhumane and only continues the 

abuse by giving a person no place to escape or heal. 

Don’t use protection and safety as an excuse to build more and 

better services for those youth in detention and in the adult criminal justice system. 

Victims of violent crime resources need to be redirected toward 

the rehabilitation efforts of these children and women. Focus on 

prevention. Provide all interventions in unison. Take bold steps to 

respond to the years of neglect and look to the true experts for 

guidance and answers. 

Survivors with proven track records have created a web of service and a network of support that serves thousands per year with 

little or no financial help. Tap into this network and other survivor-run groups. 
31

Health and human services should be taking the lead providing 

child protection. Coordination of substance abuse services and 

treatment for torture survivors should be coordinated when it 

comes to this population. 

Don’t just focus on children. 

Childhood histories are ignored as the individual ages, and more 

blame, criminalization and withholding of services is the norm and 

not the exception. 

Define the issue. 

The public needs education in order to better recognize child sexual abuse in and out of prostitution. Reform legislative, investigative and prosecutorial practices. We must utilize our existing child 

abuse and statutory rape laws, as well as child abuse prevention 

and treatment resources. There needs to be a mechanism to move 

a child from juvenile systems into family court. 

Build coalitions and provide trainings. 

There are many laws that have been created on the Federal level 

and on the State level. However, though laws exist, they are not 

being proactively enforced. 

Existing State laws regarding the use of children for sexual purposes vary in context and in penalties imposed on the offenders. 

Enforcement and coordination among local, State, and Federal law 

enforcement officials is sporadic at best, so we need to build the 

coalitions and provide the training and support. 

Thank you for giving me this time and this little extra time also 

to complete my testimony. 

Mr. SMITH. Ms. Hotaling, thank you very much for your very, 

very extensive testimony filled with recommendations that are absolutely pertinent, because as you know, the legislation has been 

marked up in one subcommittee—mine—the Africa, Global Human 

Rights and International Relations Subcommittee. 

We hope to move it to the full committee very shortly. We’re in 

consultation with all the committees of jurisdiction to which it has 

been referred. So you make a number of very timely interventions 

here and I am most appreciative for that, and we are, so thank 

you. 

And the wealth of information you’ve conveyed to us is extraordinary. 

Ms. HOTALING. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do 

that and get it in the Congressional Record. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you. 

And we will—as you know, this record will be very—when it’s 

fully printed gets a very wide dissemination, not just in this country but throughout the world, so I do thank you. 

Mr. Barnaba? 

FRANK BARNABA, PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER, PAUL & LISA 

PROGRAM 

Mr. BARNABA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

First of all, I want to say that it’s always—I have followed 

Norma two or three times in different presentations, and I must 

say, she is a remarkable human being. 

I want to thank you, Mr. Chairman—you have been outstanding 

in helping the victims of child prostitution—and also Congressman 
32

Frank Wolf that has provided the dollars to get this program really 

moving. 

And you mentioned Pat Trueman, and I don’t mean to embarrass 

Pat, but he has been really a gentleman that has done so much for 

these children through the years. 

Young Leisa here, about a year and a half ago, I would have 

never thought there was any potential for her ever getting off the 

streets. 

She was a very distressed, a very disturbed young lady. She has 

been an inspiration to myself, to my victim’s director, Lisa Grahn, 

and her new little daughter—we are proud to say that we are godparents to her. 

So thank you, Leisa. 

I am here today representing Paul & Lisa to provide testimony 

on domestic human trafficking. 

The statistics are frightening, but there are human stories behind every number. These are the tragic stories we see every day 

at the Paul & Lisa Program. 

Trafficking of human beings is on the rise despite anti-slavery 

conventions and American laws such as the Victims of Trafficking 

and Violence Protection Act of 2000. 

Victims are transported across the United States by sex-for-profit 

groups and then integrated into the commercial sex industry. 

Traffickers look for vulnerable children in malls, on the Internet, 

in fast-food restaurants, in arcades, everywhere kids congregate. 

The Paul & Lisa Program remains committed to providing prevention and assistance to these victims, but continued support from 

the private sector and government is still very much needed. 

A 2001 University of Pennsylvania study suggests there are 

300,000 children working as prostitutes in the United States. 

To understand and combat this issue, I’d like to convey how the 

landscape of human trafficking has changed. 

The Paul & Lisa Program has just marked its 25th anniversary 

this year. 

A lot has changed in the last quarter century. 

We’re really facing new demons now armed with new weaponry. 

Twenty-five years ago, we didn’t have sexual predators entering 

our children’s bedrooms through the Internet; we didn’t have television programs with explicit sexual content aimed at younger 

viewers; we didn’t have violence in our music lyrics like we see 

today in popular music. 

Sexual predators today are bolder and smarter than they were 

25 years ago. We have a proliferation of addictive drugs in our 

small towns like I have never seen before. 

And I’m going to deviate here. 

This past weekend I spent all weekend, 2 days working with a 

valedictorian from a very, very prominent Connecticut town who 

was lucky to come back alive. She was badly cut up, badly bruised, 

badly beaten. We are seeing this more and more in our own State 

of Connecticut, where kids that are all from upper middle-class 

families that I’ve been working with and that are being—pimps 

coming right into their homes, as they did with this young lady. 

Just startling to me. 

Human trafficking is a huge and profitable business. 
33

What is sometimes called the oldest profession is now the most 

vicious. Much of the sex business is tied to organized gangs. For 

the victims, it’s a business of virtual slavery. 

And the victims are getting younger. 

In 1990, the average age of prostitutes that we would see at Paul 

& Lisa was 16 years of age; now we see them as young as 9. 

And I had a tragedy that befell me, myself in Los Angeles about 

10 years ago when a man in the street, in a car, offered us, myself 

and my friend, a 5-year-old boy who was playing with a doll in the 

car. It was really something beyond belief. We got the cops, but he 

was long gone before they got there. 

The traffickers and pimps have become much more sophisticated. 

They’re making use of today’s technology by trolling for younger 

victims in Internet chat rooms. 

According to a 2001 Pew Study, 89 percent of sexual solicitations 

were made in either chat rooms or via instant messages. 

Traffickers are savvy business people and they aren’t all men. 

Many now we are seeing are women getting involved in the business. We’ve actually run into women pimps just of late in the New 

York City area. 

Pimps aren’t always the gold chain-clad older men we used to be 

able to identify. These days many traffickers look like an ordinary 

business person and some of them are by day. We’re also seeing a 

proliferation of younger pimps, 16 and younger, much younger in 

some cases—very disturbing trend. 

Like other good businesspersons, traffickers of today have multifaceted businesses. Many live in one house with their victims and 

provide a multitude of services ranging from prostitution, pornography, phone sex, drug dealing, escort services, massage parlors 

and nude dancing. Matter of fact, in Bronx, New York, we came 

across one house where all of this was going on at one time. 

Traffickers are getting harder to catch because often they don’t 

operate out of one city. Many take a van full of women and travel 

throughout the country. 

A typical starting point could be Vermont and its small towns. 

The victims are then taken to prostitute in the streets of Boston, 

Hartford, New York City, Atlantic City, Washington, Las Vegas, 

and Miami, as Leisa had mentioned. 

Many take advantage of sporting nights that are going on, like 

fight nights—that’s a big thing—and they bring in the kids to 

work. 

This situation makes capturing the traffickers difficult, but it 

also hinders the opportunity for rehabilitation for the victims. 

Rehab is a lengthy process. 

In years past, we knew at which street corner to find our victim 

and could provide daily outreach and counseling. Now we might 

only work with a victim for a few weeks before she is taken to another city by her pimp. 

Traffickers are no longer demons of the big city. They are infiltrating the small towns of America, as I have just mentioned. 

This next statistic is my own, of working with kids in Connecticut. 

Seventy-five percent of the Paul & Lisa victims we see are from 

upper middle-class families living in rural areas. These young peo-
34

ple are more vulnerable to exploitation and less streetwise than 

their city peers. 

The traffickers reel their victims in with drugs, promises of a 

more glamorous life. 

Once traffickers have a victim, they often threaten harm to the 

victims’ family. This is very prevalent—this happens all the time. 

If they attempt to escape, soon the victims become dependent on 

their pimps for the basic necessities of life—food, clothing, money. 

Sometimes they become emotionally tied to their captor, believing the victimizer is their only link to survival. Out of fear, they 

remain loyal to the person they fear most. Out of shame, they can’t 

go home. 

In rural areas, the police, parents, hospital and social workers 

have had virtually no training on the danger signs of trafficking, 

and the pimps know it. 

I interviewed one pimp who said, ‘‘Small town cops are easy. 

There aren’t—they ain’t—many of them that don’t even know we’re 

there.’’

We need to provide more education, more training. Clearly, 

knowledge is power in this instance. 

Training should include mandatory safety education programs to 

begin at the middle school and probably younger than the middle 

school. I think that would be valuable. 

These programs are entirely different than sex education programs. The curriculum would include training on safe Internet 

usage, warning signs of a trafficker’s presence, the role of drugs in 

commercial exploitation and the consequences of running away. 

The Paul & Lisa Program currently has a model court program, 

as well as a school education program. Both have been extremely 

well received. 

Our Paul & Lisa Outreach Team, which is headed by our director, Lisa Grahn—on the streets, Lisa and her team foster an environment of trust and provide support to many victims. 

Over the years, the program has brought hundreds of victims 

into the safety pipeline where they receive much-needed social 

services. 

One of the problems we face, Mr. Chairman, however, is a bureaucratic one. 

Social security programs only provide immediate support to victims with ID. 

Victims of trafficking are usually always without a birth certificate, without Social Security card, without identification. It sometimes takes us months to provide medical, psychiatric or educational support to these victims. 

Very critical that they get services immediately. We need to provide support immediately if we’re going to make a difference. 

The landscape of trafficking has indeed changed. 

We cannot ignore the devastating consequences to our nation’s 

young people. 

With proper education and training, we can reduce the number 

of victims. With programs like Paul & Lisa and access to social 

services, there is hope for those victims to become stable, contributing members of their communities. 
35

I’d like to recommend that we do something as soon as we possibly can on the ID-ing of these children—it is enormously important—so that we can get services right then and there for them. 

Special housing—there truly is no housing for these youngsters. 

These are special kids with very special needs. 

And my own experience, for many years, most social service 

agencies don’t even want them within their confines, because their 

needs are so great. So we do need to really have some special programs that can deal with these youngsters. 

I can’t tell you how many times in New England, State police 

and police have asked for training. They constantly say, ‘‘We don’t 

know what we’re looking for. There’s only a few of us in our town. 

These guys can come in and run gunshot over us. We just don’t 

know what we’re looking for or who these people are.’’

So that’s pretty much what I have to say. 

And again, I want to commend you for what you’re doing here. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you very much for your testimony and for the 

great work that you are doing, and it’s extraordinary and hopefully 

will be an inspiration so that there will be many more programs 

like yours proliferating throughout the country. 

Mr. BARNABA. Thank you. 

Mr. SMITH. And when we get to questions, I do have a couple of 

specifics I’d like to ask you. 

Mr. Allen, please? 

ERNIE ALLEN, PRESIDENT AND CEO, NATIONAL CENTER FOR 

MISSING AND EXPLOITED CHILDREN 

Mr. ALLEN. Mr. Chairman, Members of the Commission, Mr. 

Barnaba’s comment a few minutes ago regarding law enforcement, 

the child who said, ‘‘Many of them don’t even know we’re there,’’ 

reminded me of something a police commanding officer said to me 

about this issue many years ago. He said, ‘‘The only way not to find 

this problem in any community is simply not to look for it.’’

Because of you, and because of the leadership of people like you 

and these extraordinary people who are out there making a difference, the good news is America’s begun to look. 

This Commission is asking the question about the extent of this 

problem in America and I have a few basic points I want to make. 

First of all, it has become abundantly clear that children have 

become a tradable commodity. This is a global phenomenon. There 

is abundant evidence, however, that this phenomenon is not limited to the Third World, that it has come to the streets of America’s 

cities and it has been here a long time. 

TASS, the Russian news service, a couple of years ago reported 

that organized crime, terrorist and extremist groups are increasingly moving into child trafficking and child pornography as a way 

to generate revenue. The article raised a very basic question—

Why? And the answers were five-fold. 

First, that children are easily accessible. Two, the product is very 

inexpensive to produce and deliver. Three, there is a huge consumer market for it. Four, it is enormously profitable. And five, 

there’s virtually no risk—far less risk than the traditional commodities, drugs, guns, tobacco. 
36

So around the world and in this country, increasingly people are 

looking to kids as a way to generate revenue. 

Ms. Walsh asked me to talk a little bit about the breadth of the 

problem. 

I think you’ve heard in a very compelling way from Ms. Hotaling 

and from Leisa, and from Mr. Barnaba about child prostitution and 

what’s being done to kids in this country. 

I would submit that this is even a broader issue, and I want to 

raise a couple of points in that regard. 

Mr. Barnaba mentioned that the victims are getting younger. 

Let me talk about the use of children in child pornography, because what we are seeing is that no longer is this a phenomenon 

of purely teenage kids, but the victims are becoming younger and 

younger, the material is becoming more graphic and more violent, 

including the use of infants and very young children. 

I was stunned a couple of years ago with a case in which we handled a lead through our CyberTip line which led to the operators 

of a child pornography Web site in Texas. The Dallas police and 

Federal authorities investigated it, arrested the operators who 

were husband and wife entrepreneurs. When that Web site was 

shut down, they had 70,000 customers paying $19.95 a month and 

using their credit cards to gain access to graphic images of 4-,

5-, and 6-year-old children being sexually assaulted. 

Now, that’s one Web site out of an estimated 100,000. 

One international organization has suggested that there are 

100,000 child pornography Web sites today, more than 4 million 

pornography Web sites on the Internet. 

So if we had this discussion 10 years ago, I would have told you 

that the issue of child pornography is primarily the province of a 

small, hard-core group of fixated pedophiles who trade images 

among each other and access kids. 

What we are seeing today is that there is a huge and growing 

consumer market for this product and that is driving the fact that 

the exploitation of children and the trafficking of children, as Ms. 

Hotaling indicated, has become a multibillion dollar industry, not 

only in the United States but around the world. 

The Congress in 1998 asked our center to create a kind of 911 

for the Internet, a CyberTip line to take leads from the public and 

from Internet service providers regarding child sexual exploitation. 

We’ve handled, as you mentioned, more than 325,000 reports, including 112,000 reports last year alone. While most of those, almost 

300,000 of them are child pornography reports, we’ve handled 

14,000 reports regarding the online enticement of children, the recruitment of children online, as Mr. Barnaba and Ms. Hotaling 

talked about. We’ve handled more than 2,900 reports as a result 

of our Innocence Lost Project with the FBI to target child prostitution and bring more of the perpetrators to justice. 

There is no scientific data or research that we have to quantify 

the extent of this. But I wanted to respond to a couple of basic 

questions. 

Who are the perpetrators? 

One of the things we’re trying to do, working with the FBI and 

Homeland Security’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and 
37

the Postal Inspection Service, is to identify the children whose images are appearing on these child pornography sites. 

Now, to date—and I don’t suggest that this is a cause for celebration, but we’ve identified 353 children and have developed enough 

information to know who took the photographs, who victimized 

them and how their pictures got to the Internet. 

Not surprisingly, I’m afraid, in 44 percent of the cases, the offender was the child’s own parent or guardian. In another 9 percent it was another relative. 

So in more than half of these cases, the perpetrator is a family 

member who is sexually assaulting their own child, photographing 

the act and then selling the images. 

However, in almost half of the cases, the perpetrator was not a 

family member. In 27.9 percent, the perpetrator was a family 

friend or acquaintance, but in 18.6 percent, it was a pure stranger. 

So the reality is, there are people preying upon our children for 

profit, gaining access to those kids. 

And I submit, under the language of any statute I’m aware of, 

that’s trafficking. That is misusing in an illegal way a child for unlawful purposes. 

Where is the problem? 

Second question, since we have some sense about who the perpetrators are. 

The National Criminal Intelligence Service in the United Kingdom reported in 2003 that half—that the number of child pornography Web sites have doubled worldwide and that half of those 

sites are hosted in the United States. 

So our experience in looking at this issue gives me confidence in 

telling you two things. 

One is that the United States is the consumer engine of the child 

exploitation and child pornography industry worldwide. We are the 

consumers. We are keeping this industry alive more than any place 

else in the world. 

And second, that most of the victims being used in the child pornography industry around the world, wherever the server is located 

and wherever it’s being distributed, are American children. 

So this is a global issue, but it’s an issue whose roots are planted 

deeply in this country. 

And our hope is that through your Commission and through the 

Congress, we can do far more. 

Now, let me make a couple of closing comments—and you’ve 

heard it, I think, in a very convincing sense from the other witnesses. 

One of the great challenges is that this is an issue that law enforcement doesn’t particularly like to deal with. This is an issue 

that historically has been left to those who are perhaps less 

trained, less experienced. This is an issue that screams for specialization and training and developing specialized units to focus on, as 

Ms. Hotaling said, not just children, and I want to echo that, but 

children and adult women. 

But it requires specialization. It requires training. It requires different approaches, the use of police-social work teams. Too often 

our disciplines somehow pass in the night and the kids get caught 

in the tracks. 
38

Second, I think there is a huge opportunity to enhance the Federal role. It’s hard to imagine very many of these cases that don’t 

meet the requirements of interstate commerce, that could not have 

a stronger Federal presence. 

Mr. Swecker of the FBI talked about Innocence Lost and its extraordinary impact. In partnership with the FBI and the Justice 

Department’s Child Exploitation Obscenity Section, we’ve been 

doing training of law enforcement around the country trying to 

build knowledge and awareness and expertise. This is something 

that needs to happen worldwide. 

And in partnership with Interpol, we’ve been doing training and 

have trained law enforcement officials on these kinds of crimes in 

75 countries. 

But in too many places, as I said when I opened, the law enforcement attitude is, ‘‘That doesn’t happen here.’’

So unless you have that expertise, unless you have that focus, 

you’re just not going to look. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. SMITH. Mr. Allen, thank you for your very compelling testimony, your recommendations and for the great work you and the 

Center are doing. It is extraordinary as well. 

I’d like to yield to Mr. McIntyre, fellow Commissioner, for any 

comments he might have or any questions. 

HON. MIKE McINTYRE, COMMISSIONER, COMMISSION ON 

SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE 

Mr. MCINTYRE. Thank you. 

And I want to thank each of those who are here testifying today. 

And I know today’s an unusual day in transition with folks coming back on airplanes, as I just got back and have other meetings 

pending, but I felt like this issue was so important, I wanted to 

come by for the time that I could to hear the testimony that I 

could. 

And as you know, Mr. Allen, our Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children here on Capitol Hill has been one that I’ve been 

a member of and several others who share these kind of concerns. 

So I hope what you’ve said is correct, that with the interstate 

ties, that Congress can take jurisdiction in areas that would be of 

great benefit to helping fight this problem and resolve some of the 

difficulties that otherwise law enforcement might face. 

And I commend you on all the many public appearances you’ve 

done on behalf of this issue, and your work with Interpol particularly, because we know this is a problem that is right here in our 

neighborhoods, but also that crosses State boundaries within the 

United States and, of course, obviously crosses international boundaries. 

So thank you for being here. 

Thanks to all of our panelists. 

And thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you very much, Mr. McIntyre. 

Let me just—you know, I asked the earlier panel, particularly 

Mr. Swecker about the resources issue, whether or not we’re deploying sufficient resources to really win this battle and for the 

sake of the victims, to try to reach out to them in their pain. As 
39

you know in our bill pending, we have $5 million for a residential—

a safe house, safe houses I should say. Because I believe that there 

just aren’t those resources out there and I would ask all of you if 

you think we are doing enough. 

In looking at the legislation, are there gaps? I know, Ms. 

Hotaling, you gave a number of very specific recommendations and 

every one of them will be looked at very, very carefully. 

But if you could, with Mr. Swecker we talked about, you know, 

40 to 50 FBI agents. When you’ve got a war against our children, 

are we—Mr. Allen, it looks like you would like to——

Mr. ALLEN. No, I hate to speak for the FBI, but the answer is 

no. That’s not enough. 

You’re right, Mr. Chairman. This is a war, and for many years 

we’ve talked about this as a problem of hidden victims, and I believe that is still the case today despite all the progress. 

So we would like to see the FBI get significantly greater resources to expand on Lost Innocence and bring that enhanced Federal role into attacking this problem across America. 

Mr. BARNABA. Mr. Chairman, I want to back Ernie and Norma 

on that extensively. 

We’ve tried many times for a great deal of help. 

I have wonderful agents that I work with and everything, but 

they are so busy in so many different areas that this is not something that they can just drop. 

It is a war. 

I would say that if you 100 times increased the Bureau, that still 

wouldn’t be enough. There is just billions being made on children 

and we need a special force to deal with this problem and as quick 

as we possibly can. 

Mr. SMITH. Ms. Hotaling? 

Ms. HOTALING. You asked a couple of questions, and it involves 

the answer of looking at resources. 

And one is that resources can’t be provided to children without 

the ID, and that is that they can’t draw down money for AFDC. 

They can’t get the schooling dollars and everything until they get—

that they have proper ID, that they’re wards of the court, that they 

also get assessed for being able to apply for those funds. 

So if a child comes in, they’re held in juvenile justice system for 

three to 4 months before any of that is put into place. And we’re 

facing that with our girls, with our house. Our house is going to run a deficit of at least $250,000 a year, 

and if we want to take in children and youth that do not have all 

their funding streams in place, then the deficit’s going to be higher 

because we’re not going to get paid for that bed for that day, and 

they’re going to sit in Youth Guidance Center, which costs a lot of 

money to have them there. 

So if there could be some type of switch and money provided for 

the kids that don’t have IDs and don’t have funding in place, that 

would be really, really important. 

And I think when you’re looking at expanding FBI and the criminal justice approach to this, you really need to put an approach in 

for going after the demand. 

I wonder what happened to the 70,000 men that were using their 

credit cards. 
40

If you put half of those, one-quarter of them, 10,000, 5,000, 500 

away for a really long time and publicized it really well, the next 

man that’s going to put his credit card in is going to think twice 

and another—and a victim is going to be spared. 

So when you’re looking at enlarging your criminal justice efforts 

on this, go after the demand and go after them hard and put legislation in there that has the biggest teeth on it possible, because 

just look at the demand—they have big teeth right now and we’ve 

helped them grow them. 

Mr. SMITH. Let me just ask—Frank had said earlier about the 

threat of harm to families. We’ve heard that internationally. That’s 

one way—once the girl has been trafficked to the United States, 

you know, they say, ‘‘We know where your family lives in St. Petersburg, Russia or Kyiv, Ukraine.’’

Two questions. 

Do you have any indication as to how often they carry out those 

threats? And is that a common—I mean, obviously the girl cares 

about her sister, or sisters and brothers, and her parents. Does it 

work? 

And second, another question would be on—both of you, you and 

Leisa mentioned the Atlantic City fights. Atlantic City is in my 

State and like Las Vegas, it is an area where fights are frequently 

staged. 

Is there any effort being made to try to alert, educate, not only 

fight-goers but conventioneers at these large magnets like Las 

Vegas, like Miami to say, ‘‘Outside this door is a 15-year-old and 

someone’s going to tell you, you can have a good time with her. 

She’s a trafficked girl and if we catch you, you’re going to jail and 

you’re going to do real time’’? Is there any effort to both sensitize 

and also scare these conventioneers? 

And third, another question would be, how much of this domestic 

abuse of these trafficked girls is by the locals, somebody who lives 

like in Atlantic City as opposed to someone who is there away from 

everybody, you know, a good, safe distance from anybody who 

might know him and therefore he can act with a certain sense of 

impunity while he’s there? 

[Crosstalk.] 

Mr. BARNABA. And you get involved with me on this, if you can, 

all right? 

As far as—that was a very interesting comment. 

Let me take the second question first. 

The fight groups, the convention groups and everything—no. No 

effort has been put on that issue, and I think that’s a very interesting issue, Mr. Chairman. 

Something that might really pay off is to work with some of 

these convention people, with the fight people. 

Leisa, were you the one that told me about the enormous 

amounts of money that are made after these? What was it you told 

me? 

That was really interesting. 

Ms. LEISA B. I have only been a few times, so I don’t have too 

much experience, but the nights that we went, we were leaving 

with at least $10,000 between three girls and this was a period of 

like 2, 3 hours—we’d go and leave. 
41

The question is if people know about it—I highly doubt it, because we’re moving from casinos to the streets to hotels. We’re constantly switching casinos. I’m not too sure, if they knew about it, 

how much they could stop it. 

Prostitution in Atlantic City is huge—in the casinos and on the 

streets. 

And if I could, sir, answer your question about the funding—I 

think that the biggest problem is there isn’t a lot of these programs, and the ones that there are, they’re very limited in their 

funding so they can only go so far. 

For instance, the Paul & Lisa program is in Connecticut—we can 

only reach out so far. There’s still DC and there’s still Miami and 

there’s still New Orleans, and there’s still all these places that 

can’t be touched because we don’t have enough funding. 

I guess it’s all trafficking. You can’t assume these same girls, 

these same kids are still going to be in New York 3 weeks later. 

They’re going to be in a different area and fast. 

So I’m not sure of a number, but I don’t think, for the amount 

of girls that are out there, it’s not enough. 

Mr. BARNABA. Thank you, Leisa. 

The first question, as far as the threats to the families, just recently I had one case in San Francisco, as a matter of fact, where 

the pimp did come to the house and threaten to kill the daughter, 

this woman’s child that was in prostitution. Most of the time they 

are very severe threats, but they are very, very—taken very, very 

seriously by the family. They’ve never experienced anything like 

this before. 

I had a pimp that told me, he said, ‘‘The greatest tool I’ve got’’—

he said, ‘‘I’d never do it, because I’m not a fool, but the greatest 

tool I got is to call a mother, call a father, call a sister, or tell my 

girl that if you dare, dare go back home, I’m going to come kill your 

parents, or worse, I’m going to hurt your sister or your brother.’’

So I think it’s more of a fear tactic, but——

Ms. HOTALING. And it works. 

Mr. BARNABA. And it works. It works very, very well. 

Your last question on who are these customers—are they local or 

are they from other areas? 

My experience, working New York City as much as we’ve done, 

most of them are from out of town, don’t live in New York City. 

Sure, we have some that live in New York City. At one point we 

had a tremendous amount of high school boys coming from Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, every Friday night, Saturday 

night because there were so many girls on the street. 

So I hope that answers that question. 

There’s so much money involved—I wanted to bring out one 

thing. When we talked about older women, I have two Ivy League 

girls that we’ve been very successful with, and they’re out and 

they’re doing well. 

But when you see what they make per hour, it’s staggering. I 

had one girl making $5,000 an hour and another young lady making $8,000 an hour, and an escort—you can keep half of that 

money. And these are Ivy League girls who are well educated. So 

that’s big money. 

Ms. HOTALING. Just a bit on the children and men traveling. 
42

We have a lot of local men that exploit the children on the 

streets of San Francisco and also Oakland. 

Oakland is a huge—well, every city is a huge mecca for children. 

And when we asked a few hundred men in our program how they 

justify having sex with a child, they told us that they didn’t have 

to justify it because they knew that there were no consequences. 

So it’s time to make them justify it and know that there are big 

consequences. 

I think World Vision might be a good resource for that also. 

Mr. BARNABA. Another thing, Norma. 

We constantly hear—I know we both do—‘‘I didn’t know she was 

13. I didn’t know she was 12.’’

Ms. HOTALING. I hear from police that they say, ‘‘She said she 

was 18. What are we going to do?’’

I’ve had to educate police, as I’m sure you have, in that age is 

not a defense. 

Mr. SMITH. Let me just ask you about guerrilla pimping. 

How often does that take place, Ms. Hotaling? 

Guerrilla pimping, as you mentioned in your testimony, is that 

becoming more widespread? Do you have any idea how often that 

happens? 

Ms. HOTALING. I’m not sure how often it happens, but Frank is 

seeing it in other parts of the country. 

Mr. BARNABA. I saw it in Connecticut, actually, 2 years in Norwich, Connecticut, where a girl was just taken away that way. 

Ms. HOTALING. Yes, and we have girls that get out of prostitution 

that are in our life skills program, and then they have to team up 

with gang members because other pimps and other girls of pimps 

are trying to get them back in the business by doing that, by just 

coming up and taking them and kidnapping them. So it’s like they 

have to get bodyguards on the streets. So it is becoming more and 

more common. 

Mr. SMITH. Just ask you about the use of drugs as—Frank, you 

mentioned this earlier, about the use of drugs with these upper 

middle-class kids. 

Mr. BARNABA. Oh Lord, yes. 

Mr. SMITH. What drugs are we talking about? Are they already 

on drugs? 

[Crosstalk.] 

Mr. BARNABA. Well, yes, they start off with marijuana and things 

like that. 

But the drug of choice has been heroin this past year and a half. 

All of these upper middle-class kids that I’ve been working with in 

Connecticut, the Shoreline area, have been using heroin, and that’s 

a pretty rugged drug. 

Go ahead, Leisa, you wanted to say something? 

Ms. LEISA B. I’d just add, also I know like the pills, ecstasy, like 

OxyContin. 

Even when I was in high school a few years ago, cocaine was 

really big. Cocaine’s coming back hard. 

There’s lots of drugs. That’s where the money is in the upperclass towns. 

Ms. HOTALING. A lot of times pimps won’t let their girls use 

drugs, right, Leisa? 
43

You would assume that with all the violence and exploitation on 

the street that the young women would be on drugs, but it’s later 

that they get into drugs when they have no more options, they’re 

older, the pimps don’t want them anymore, they’ve been kicked out 

of the stable. They don’t have as much status in the stable and 

then they start using drugs. 

But really, a lot of the young women are what we call immaculate around not using drugs and not drinking. 

Mr. BARNABA. That’s the way it used to be in the New York-Connecticut area, but I’m really seeing a lot of changes recently. And 

it’s maybe because of the targeted areas that the dealers and the 

pimps are going after some of these upper middle-class kids and 

the only way they can reach them is by selling them drugs. 

Ms. HOTALING. They’ll do whatever it takes. 

Mr. BARNABA. But you’re right, it used to be pristine. 

In our first Justice Department program back in the 1980’s, we 

had a 92.5 no drugs at all for every girl working in Manhattan that 

we dealt with, and we dealt with over 500. That’s vastly changed. 

Mr. SMITH. Let me just—Mr. Allen, you mentioned how the Innocence Lost Program needs to be expanded. 

Could you elaborate on best case, how much money, what do we 

need to do to really grow that program so it really has the impact 

you and all of us desire? 

Mr. ALLEN. Well, and I hate to project how much money the FBI 

needs without any sort of basis, but I think, you know, you’re right, 

45, 50 agents—I would like to see that multiplied, you know, at 

least five or six times. You know, so I think if we created—this is 

a big country and the FBI is a limited resource, so I think there 

needs to be certainly multiples of that, agents available to do the 

followup and work these cases. 

Because these are not quick and easy cases to work. They take 

time. They take investigative expertise. The courts aren’t always 

terribly receptive. So they have to be done properly. 

Mr. SMITH. Your point about the nexus with terrorism—our legislation, the pending bill does have a requirement for a study. We’ve 

been asking that it be done without the compulsion that comes by 

being directed by a piece of legislation, but haven’t gotten it yet, 

so we’re going to tell them they have to do it. 

Mr. ALLEN. Well, we believe it. 

I can’t tell you that there are smoking guns, but I know that law 

enforcement in Eastern Europe believes it as it relates to sort of 

the whole Russian-Chechen issue. 

Whether it relates to al-Qaida and other things, I don’t know. 

But I think there’s a common sense to it, where there’s little or no 

risk and you have easy generation of money, it’s hard not to participate. 

Mr. SMITH. Ms. Hotaling, let me ask you, in terms of the success 

stories of many of the girls—how long did they have to be in a safe 

environment before they were able to be reintegrated? And are 

other programs throughout the country following your lead? I think 

length of care is part of the equation here. 

We found even with the homeless veterans—I used to chair the 

Veterans’ Affairs Committee and wrote a Homeless Victims Comprehensive Assistance Act that created more therapeutic care facili-
44

ties, because one of the things that had to be relearned was life 

skills. The concern with the veterans was not a prostitution issue 

or question of exploitation; it was a substance abuse and homeless 

issue. 

But it took 4 and 5 months minimally for someone to come back 

to reality and learn how to take control of his or her life again. 

What has been your experience? 

Ms. HOTALING. Nine months is really quick. 

That’s where, you know, you have a really motivated young 

woman, she hasn’t been involved in prostitution very long and she 

wants to move through the program. 

We’re seeing more like a year and a half or 2 years, and then 

after-care, because then they go out on their own and then a lot 

of other issues come up for them. 

So the after-care program is what we’re finding is really, really 

important also. 

Mr. SMITH. How do you implement the after-care? 

Ms. HOTALING. I’m sorry. 

Mr. SMITH. How do you implement after-care? Do you have someone who has part of their cases, these individuals? 

Ms. HOTALING. Right. 

Mr. SMITH. That she stays in contact with? 

Ms. HOTALING. Comes back, gets support, reintegrates into the 

group. 

Sometimes becomes mentors for other girls, so we give them the 

opportunity to give back as part of their healing also. But we help 

with housing, job training, vocational training. 

They might have tried to get a job, lost a job, you know, some 

other psychological issues are coming up since they’re going out 

there. Right, Leisa? 

Ms. LEISA B. It’s been about 2 years for me now, and to this day 

I still struggle. 

The only reason I haven’t is because of my daughter, but I’m 

pretty sure without her it would have been a bigger struggle. But 

I think it’s not so much—I mean, you have to adjust to a whole 

new life. It’s not like, you know, you’re out of the game and now 

it’s easier to adjust. 

Everything is new again, so you have to relearn everything—

small things like getting used to making minimum wage at a job 

and dealing with it, conversating with people for things besides 

money, integrating back into your family and not feeling ashamed, 

feeling embarrassed. 

And emotionally, to this day, it’s tough. 

Mr. BARNABA. That’s really good. 

I agree with Norma. 

Our average is about 2 years, 21⁄4. Some of the successes even 

startle me, though. 

We have a medical doctor who is in New York. I worked with her 

for a long time when she was 14 and you would never think this 

kid would have gotten to become a doctor. And we have a psychologist on the West Coast. We have two plant managers in Connecticut. It goes on and on. A nurse in Florida. 

And come Christmas time is really a very rewarding time for all 

of us at the agency and at my home. Calls just pour in from people 
45

that we’ve helped 15, 20 years ago, and now we’re seeing a lot of 

the women, where their children are graduating from high school 

and they say that would have never happened if it wasn’t for 

everybody’s help. So it’s important to do that. 

Ms. HOTALING. We’ve been able to hire and train girls now that 

have gone through our program. But we have a problem, after they 

get trained, public health comes along and hires them——

[Laughter.] 

Ms. HOTALING. —at like $10,000, $15,000 more than what we 

can pay them, or they move back to their families, and that’s rewarding and it tears our heart out at the same time. 

But they go back with a lot of training. There’s a young woman 

that’s working in a group home that’s 18 up in Portland, and she’s 

back supporting her sister so her sister doesn’t get involved in the 

lifestyle she was in. 

And we just had a young woman who went through our program 

and got the training, and she just got hired by the Department of 

Public Health to provide services to 18- to 24-year olds, and she’s 

18. 

So there’s just so much potential, you know, when you start 

working with these young women. 

Mr. SMITH. Let me ask you a question. 

You heard, probably with the previous panel, I asked them about 

public service announcements. And one of the things I think we 

will look to add to our bill when we go to full committee mark-up 

would be a provision to provide X amount of dollars—maybe $3 

million, I’m not sure what the number will be, whatever it takes—

to do public service announcements. 

And it seems to me—we’ve heard about the fights, we’ve heard 

about, you know, where there needs to be a focus maybe on some 

of the women’s networks, there could be a different series of advertising so that women who might be watching this could be alerted. 

We’ve done this on drugs and, of course, it’s a very difficult uphill 

battle on drugs. I know the Missing and Exploiting Children has 

done great work on advising people about that issue. 

But this remains, you know, not noticed by police and by everyone else. And perhaps ESPN would carry one of those series, because they have so many fights on that channel. 

But let me ask your thoughts about that. We’ll work to put something like that into our legislation. 

And I think even before the bill gets enacted, and I do think it 

will, perhaps we could craft a letter and ask for, not only your 

input on the letter, but your signatures as well that could go to 

President Bush and go to others—but I think he would be the 

prime one—to take a lead on this, that we have a war that we need 

to prosecute here at home and we’re not doing it to the extent that 

we are fighting in a way so as to win. 

Mr. Allen? 

Mr. ALLEN. Mr. Chairman, I think it’s a terrific idea. 

I think the single greatest challenge that we have with this issue 

is good people, average people, don’t know that it even exists, and 

unless you can bring this home, unless you can take it into America’s living rooms and make ordinary people outraged about it and 
46

demand that more be done, my suspicion is that not enough is 

going to be done. It’s been done over and over again. 

And I think there’s a huge opportunity to enlist the networks in 

this. 

We’ve tried to do some things. We had a family of a victim that 

owned an advertising agency that created a still campaign for us 

that we got placed in magazines that included three or four ads 

specifically on this issue that we developed in partnership with the 

FBI. 

But it’s—you’ve got to change minds and change hearts, so we 

support it enthusiastically. 

Mr. SMITH. I appreciate it. 

Ms. Hotaling? 

Ms. HOTALING. I really believe that you can’t prosecute your way 

out of this, but you can advocate, educate and prosecute your way 

out of it. 

And the men in our program have clearly said that if they knew 

that they were going to be arrested for a very serious sexual offense, that they were not going to take the risk. And so you really 

have to define for them, you know, what that means. It means that 

even if a girl gives you an ID that says she’s 18, age is not a defense, that she could look over 18—she’s going to tell you she’s over 

18. 

But you have teams in that area. You have criminal justice 

teams that are ready to arrest you, and you’re not going back to 

your homes and you’re going to register as sex offenders. 

And that’s the real—I really see a change in the men that even 

believe that they have stopped their prostitute use as a part of 

being in our program. When we tell them that, they go, ‘‘We’re not 

going to take the risk.’’

And so that’s really important. 

And then just a little piece of levity. 

We have thought of many campaigns, and maybe at fight night 

this would be good, but we’ve thought of—I don’t know if I should 

say this—but little rings of educational material that goes around 

urinals that says, ‘‘Buy a kid, go to jail,’’ you know, or something 

like that. But we’ve thought of a lot of different things. 

Mr. SMITH. Got to be creative. 

Mr. BARNABA. Also, Mr. Chairman, a lot of people have been asking for street-outreach training, and it is a unique business—street 

outreach. You have to be very careful and not do foolish things if 

you want to come back in one piece. 

But there’s very few people that have the knowledge of outreach 

and there’s so many communities that want it, so I think that 

would be a good part of the bill. I really do. 

And most important is education of children at a young age so 

they understand who these perpetrators are. I really believe that 

very strongly. 

[Crosstalk.] 

Ms. LEISA B. One thing. For letting it be known to the public, 

as well as letting it be known to the girls—for example, myself, I’m 

from Connecticut. I was in DC. I had no way of knowing of these 

services. If it’s possible to put these in places such as a police sta-
47

tion, a hospital, places that we will go to, that we know of, that 

can help us. 

Also, I do think that MTV and things that kids watch is very 

educational, because, I mean, obviously, most of the time we’re 

glued to it. 

So if it’s just—I mean, they have things on there telling you stories about, you know, these kids’ lives. If we have something involving this subject, hopefully it would be more prominent and we’d 

know more about it. 

Mr. SMITH. Well, certainly, 30-second TV ads have revolutionized 

political campaigning and they have the ability, or otherwise you 

wouldn’t see Presidential candidates spending tens of millions on 

them, as well as congressional candidates, so we will pursue that. 

And thank you for supporting it, but we need your help in making sure it gets done. 

And we’ll have that letter done very shortly, within a week or so. 

Finally, let me ask you, Mr. Allen. You mentioned on the children and the child porn, just one brief question about—what was 

it—15 percent are strangers? Was that the number? Are they abducted children? 

Mr. ALLEN. Our analysis suggests that—as I suspect—the problem is largely that, even with smaller children, it tends to be more 

seduction than abduction. So that there is still a process of wooing, 

of gaining access to a child. 

We just worked a case in which we identified a perpetrator in 

Georgia who was victimizing very young children and he was a 

neighbor who basically sought legitimate access to the children. 

So probably it would not meet the elements of the crime of kidnap, but it has the same effect. 

So we don’t have hard evidence, though we certainly believe that 

there is some extent of these sex rings that take children involuntarily and then use them for sexual purposes. We’ve certainly 

heard it from our international colleagues and counterparts, but 

again, we are at the very beginning of building a kind of data base 

of understanding on this. 

Mr. SMITH. You know, Ms. Hotaling mentioned, when you mentioned the Texas firm, where credit cards were used? 

Mr. ALLEN. Yes. 

Mr. SMITH. What was it, $20 a month? Are they going to prosecute those people who——

Mr. ALLEN. Yes. 

The challenge is these 70,000 customers were all over the world. 

For example, there were 7,000 customers in the United Kingdom 

alone, and the Metropolitan Police, who were the national hightech crime squad at the time, had three officers to do the followup 

investigations on those 7,000 perpetrators. 

But yes, we’re trying to prosecute everybody, because it’s a violation of law. 

Mr. SMITH. Do they now go on a watch list? 

Mr. ALLEN. Excuse me? 

Mr. SMITH. Particularly the internationals, do they go now on a 

watch list when they try, if they try to come to the U.S.? 

Mr. ALLEN. Well, the answer is, I don’t know. 
48

I know certainly in the United States that becomes a registerable 

offense, if you’re convicted. 

One of the challenges in the problem of child pornography is that 

many of the countries of the world, it is not even illegal to distribute or possess child pornography. 

So one of the things we’re working on with our international 

counterparts is to create a model law and try to persuade the rest 

of the world to enact such statutes. 

Mr. SMITH. We have a provision in our bill that is like the 

Megan’s Law, and Megan was a young girl who was killed by a 

pedophile that lived across the street. Megan was from my hometown, Hamilton Township, NJ. 

Mr. ALLEN. Right. 

Mr. SMITH. And we put that in there so that for internationals 

coming in the disclosure would have to occur. 

In followup to your revelation about these being internationals, 

we’re going to make sure that we have it written in a way that captures them so that they would be registerable. 

Mr. ALLEN. I think that would be a major step forward. 

Mr. SMITH. I appreciate that. 

I do have one final question, Ms. Hotaling, on the Johns School. 

To your knowledge, are there any other municipalities that have 

a program similar to yours? Have you inspired any others? 

Ms. HOTALING. We’ve replicated all over, all throughout the 

United States. 

The survivor-run organization Breaking Free runs a Johns 

School in St. Paul, MN. Dignity House, also survivor-run, runs a 

program in Phoenix. Veronica’s Voice, Kansas City. There is a 

small one here in DC. Fresno has one. Modesto is looking at one 

right now. 

And we’re starting one in South Korea. We have really been 

working in partnership with them for about 3 years, and just had 

a meeting. And as a result of that partnership, they have changed 

significant laws in South Korea. It is now illegal to purchase a 

woman, a person through prostitution, and you can be arrested. 

And they are being directed to a Johns School, so we’re helping 

with curriculum in that. 

And they have put $30 million toward the rehabilitation of 

women, including shelters, trauma recovery programs, debt bondage being paid off, and no-interest loans. 

And so we’re working with the State Department, hopefully, to 

finalize a grant so that we can continue the cross-training with 

them. 

And we really think it’s certainly a model for that region to 

break out of that kind of gender-role, stereotype role, of the woman 

being subordinate and the gender inequality and everything, and 

to really put forward these programs. 

And there are many other programs. 

Canada has implemented our program all throughout Canada. 

And they’ve said—one of the classic statements that I heard is, 

‘‘Before the Johns School, there were no services. Now there’s services throughout all of Canada.’’ Because the model is to funnel that 

money back into services. 

Mr. SMITH. Maureen? 
49

Ms. WALSH. Thank you all for your testimony today. I just have 

a couple of questions. 

You’ve talked about the lack of resources for victim’s services. 

Clearly, you’re scratching and clawing for whatever funding you 

can get while the traffickers are making huge amounts of money. 

Are you aware of any jurisdiction which has been willing to use 

some of the seized assets of traffickers that they have been able to 

take custody of and funnel some of that money back into victim’s 

services? 

Ms. HOTALING. Not that I’m aware of. 

We have a State law right now that’s pending on trafficking and 

part of that is asset seizure, but I’m not sure if it’s going to then 

fund victim services. And usually when you mention that to police 

or criminal justice, they are not in favor of that at all. They want 

to keep it in their own budgets, which is usually where asset seizure money goes. 

So it’s important. Like the Johns School is up front on any legislation that you put that in up front, because trying to get the 

money back or after it already goes into the general fund or something is impossible. 

Ms. WALSH. I would suggest it’s a mind set that we could work 

to try and change—the mindset that, that money should not be 

made available in any amount for victim services. Because clearly, 

just as the Johns are helping to fund the services, traffickers who 

have engaged in the exploitation should do so—seems to me a very 

fitting penalty as well. 

Ms. HOTALING. I agree. 

I look forward to the first car we auction off. [Laughter.] 

Ms. WALSH. One other question. 

Norma and Frank, you’ve both worked with both foreign and domestic victims of trafficking. And the Trafficking Victims Protection Act is well known for having established the system of benefits 

for foreign victims. 

In your experience, how does the system of benefits compare 

today for domestic victims to that which is available for foreign victims in the United States? 

Mr. BARNABA. That’s a good question, Maureen. 

I think that the overseas are much better funded to help victims 

than we are here in America. It’s very, very difficult to get any 

kind of aid for any of these girls here. 

And yet, I’ve talked to people in Australia, I’ve talked to people 

in the Netherlands and everything, and they seem to have certain 

programs for some of these women. But they’re not much—no. 

They’re not good at all, as a matter of fact. But we don’t either. 

Ms. HOTALING. I think here’s my answer—is that we have less 

victims that have been found through the international, the TVPA, 

as it applies to international trafficking victims. 

But our local or United States providers have been more creative 

in finding services and providing services for victims here in the 

United States. You know Frank Barnaba has been the leader in 

that. 

And we struggle here and there and we put, you know, every 

penny together for services that we feel are correct and—like at 

SAGE, we serve 1,800 people a year, 325 a week. That’s what we 
50

want the money for. We don’t want the money to have to go 

through a whole configuration of figuring out if they’re really a victim to serve them; we just want to serve the people that need it. 

Ms. WALSH. Thank you. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you, Maureen. 

Anything to add before we adjourn, any of you? 

You’ve been most generous with your time and your insights will 

really help us craft, I think, some very wise, hopefully wise policy 

going forward, and some changes already will be written into this 

proposal based on your recommendations. 

So thank you so much for coming and for your very, very enlightened testimony. 

Mr. BARNABA. Thank you. 

Mr. SMITH. The hearing is adjourned. 

Ms. HOTALING. Thank you. Thank you very much. 

[Whereupon the hearing ended at 4:46 p.m.]
51

A P P E N D I C E S 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, 

COMMISSIONER, COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE 

I’d like to thank the chair and co-chair of the commission, Senator Brownback and Representative Smith, for convening this hearing to examine the issue of domestic trafficking. Your leadership in 

this area over many years, including your sponsorship of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and its subsequent reauthorization, 

is greatly appreciated. I look forward to continuing our cooperative 

efforts to remedy this problem both the United States and around 

the world. 

I’d also like to thank all those providing testimony today. Among 

our witnesses, we have a survivor of trafficking, and I would especially like to commend her for her courage in sharing her story 

with the Commission. 

I am extremely proud of the work that the Commission has done 

in raising awareness about the problem of trafficking, and welcome 

the opportunity as a Commissioner to continue the work I began 

as First Lady. The initiatives we started in the Clinton Administration, including the launch of a significant anti-trafficking effort at 

the 1999 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe 

(OSCE) Summit, have been championed and carried forth by my 

colleagues here on both sides of the aisle, and I thank them for 

their efforts. 

Today’s hearing is especially timely, coming as it does right after 

the State Department’s release of the 2005 Trafficking in Persons 

Report. This report is the outgrowth of the first official estimates 

on global trafficking that were begun by the Clinton administration, and the threat of economic sanctions linked to this report has 

inspired many countries to ramp up their efforts to combat trafficking within and across their borders. 

However, I’m pleased to report that the 2005 report shows that 

there has been progress—of the 46 countries appearing on a January 2005 ‘‘watch list’’ of countries with severe trafficking problems, 

31 have been found to have attained significant improvement in 

addressing this issue within their borders. 

But while we have made progress, especially in cooperation with 

other member states of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, we must continue to build upon the foundation of 

the Clinton Administration’s comprehensive strategic framework 

known as the ‘‘3 P’s’’—prevention of trafficking, protection of trafficking victims, and prosecution of traffickers 

The United States must do more to combat trafficking within our 

own shores. Trafficking victims exist in our midst, in towns large 

and small. We must target resources on training and equipping law 

enforcement authorities to identify trafficking victims and help 

them gain access to appropriate services. 

I applaud and support state initiatives to combat trafficking. In 

the future, we should strengthen such initiatives by encouraging 

increased cooperation between states and federal authorities, so 

that state efforts augment and complement our ongoing federal efforts. 
52

We must ensure that federal, state and local law enforcement authorities have the financial and human resources necessary to prosecute these crimes and mobilize against trafficking, from the top 

tiers of global organized crime to the police working to protect our 

neighborhoods. 

We must provide funding for the many nongovernmental organizations working on the front lines of trafficking in the United 

States to provide care and legal assistance to victims of all forms 

of trafficking. 

And we must do more to tailor specific responses to the unique 

needs of children who are trafficked and exploited—the vulnerable 

population of over one million of runaway and homeless youth in 

the United States. The origins of these situations, including factors 

like abusive home environments, must be addressed. 

Whether it occurs on the international or domestic level, trafficking is an egregious human rights violation, and we must do everything in our power to bring it to an end. In the fight against 

trafficking in persons, patience is simply not an option. 

We are making progress, but there is still so much more to be 

done. I look forward to working with my fellow Commissioners to 

improve compliance with international frameworks and strategies 

on both the international and domestic level, so as to ensure that 

this epidemic of modern-day slavery will no longer afflict our most 

vulnerable populations. Thank you.
53

PREPARED STATEMENT OF CHRIS SWECKER, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIVE DIVISION, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION 

Good afternoon Mr. Chairman and members of the Commission. 

I appreciate the opportunity to speak before you today about the 

FBI’s efforts to address the exploitation of children and others in 

the United States. 

According to a study by the University of Pennsylvania, a child 

is defined as any male or female under the age of 18, and with 

that, they have detailed there are approximately 300,000 youth 

currently at risk of becoming victims of commercial and sexual exploitation. Other organizations have estimated this number is as 

high as 800,000. 

We do not currently have a definitive number for the serious 

problem of child prostitution itself, although judges, police and outreach workers report both the increase in the numbers and a decrease in the ages of the children involved. Unfortunately, we know 

of no studies to date that specifically and primarily address juvenile prostitution. Accurately quantifying the existing problem of 

victimized children (as opposed to ‘‘at risk’’) is difficult for a variety 

of reasons. For example, in the case of children exploited through 

prostitution, many of the prostituted youth are charged with some 

other offenses such as substance abuse; thus data that relies on 

crime reports masks the true prevalence of the problem. 

According to the 2002 National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Throwaway Children (NISMART II), 1.6 million children estimated to run away from home each year, and it 

is estimated that approximately 40,000 of those children will have 

some type of involvement in or brush with sexual trafficking. Many 

of these victims are abandoned or neglected children who are usually not reported as missing to law enforcement or are runaways 

from their homes or the foster care system. Also, when arrested, 

many juvenile prostitutes have fraudulent identification and social 

security cards and are reluctant to help authorities determine their 

true age and identity. In addition, sexual trafficking, particularly 

of children, continues to move even further underground. With the 

increasing use of pagers, cell phones and the Internet, victims are 

even less visible today than they were in the past. 

The average age of a child first used in prostitution is 11 to 14, 

with some as young as 9 years of age. Children used in prostitution 

consist of both male and female victims, and come from all ethnic 

and socioeconomic backgrounds. A large percentage of these children left home because of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. 

These children often have low self-esteem and are extremely vulnerable. These runaways become a prime target for sex offenders, 

pornographers, and pimps. Prostitution is a continuation of the victim’s sexual exploitation, not the beginning. According to U.S. law 

and international agreements, children can never consent to prostitution; it is always exploitation. 

A review of current and historical intelligence regarding such 

criminal enterprises reveals juveniles are victims of trafficking for 

the purpose of prostitution in both major metropolitan areas as 

well as smaller communities. Typically, they are transported to lucrative venues including cities hosting major sporting or public 
54

events. These criminal enterprises are highly mobile and travel established routes throughout the United States. They frequently 

communicate with each other in order to set pricing for services; 

they identify new locations deemed profitable as well as discuss locations where law enforcement is active or lax. These criminal enterprises typically engage in multiple criminal activities and have 

extensive supporting networks. For example, approximately 55 percent of street gangs are involved to some degree in prostitution. 

In response to this growing problem, the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division/Violent Crimes Section, in conjunction with both 

the Department of Justice/Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children 

(NCMEC), implemented a National Initiative named Innocence 

Lost in June of 2003 to address child prostitution in the United 

States. Together, we developed a multi-faceted strategy to train 

personnel, establish task forces, share intelligence concerning 

pimps, juveniles used in prostitution and criminal enterprises, and 

support long-term investigations with the requisite personnel and 

financial resources. An intensive curriculum was developed for a 

week long training class entitled Protecting Victims of Child Prostitution which was held at and sponsored by the NCMEC. This program brings state and federal law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, and social service providers from one city to the National Center where the group is trained together. This concept is designed 

to cultivate cooperation, partnership and an effective integration 

between the critical enforcement entities in each city. To date, a 

total of 263 individuals have received this training. 

The Criminal Investigative Division reviews and analyzes all intelligence received by the NCMEC thru their Intake and CyberTip 

reports. This information is in turn disseminated to the appropriate 

field offices. All NCMEC Intake and CyberTip Reports are maintained in the FBI’s Automated Case System database to provide 

electronic access to field offices. In addition, the Criminal Investigative Division provides extensive on-site analytical support to 

pending large-scale child prostitution investigations, including Intelligence Assessments, link charts, cross case analyses, and to support the field office. 

Based upon an initial review of the available intelligence on child 

prostitution collected from ongoing investigations, human source 

information, information provided by numerous local and state law 

enforcement agencies, and the NCMEC, 14 FBI field offices were 

identified as having the highest incidence of children used in prostitution. The 14 FBI offices identified were: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New 

York, San Diego, San Francisco, St. Louis, Tampa, and Washington, D.C. 

Task forces or working groups were subsequently established in 

Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Honolulu, Houston, Indianapolis, 

Miami, Newark, New York, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Portland, 

San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Efforts are ongoing to establish task forces and/or working groups in all field offices in which 

our intelligence supports a significant investigative increase into 

the exploitation of children whom are engaged in prostitution. According to the FBI’s Violent Crimes Section, in June of 2003, all 
55

field offices were advised that crimes against children, and specifically the prostitution of children were a high priority within the 

Violent Crimes Program, and were directed to determine whether 

their divisions had a significant child prostitution problem and address it with the appropriate resources. These offices were further 

directed to focus their efforts on the identification, investigation 

and prosecution of criminal enterprises, including gangs, involved 

in child prostitution. Sex traffickers or pimps debriefed by the FBI 

indicate approximately 20-40 percent of the victims forced/recruited 

into prostitution are juveniles. As of today, 25 field offices are investigating child prostitution matters in support of the Innocence 

Lost National Initiative. 

The Enterprise Theory of Investigation is the standard investigative model the FBI employs in these cases. This approach requires 

the investigation be intelligence driven, seeks to discover the full 

scope of the criminal organization and its member activities, requires strategic planning and a long-term focus. Evidence must be 

gathered that identifies the predicate crimes of the organization, 

demonstrates the existence and structure of the organization, identifies the individuals commanding and controlling the organization, 

and dismantles the organizations through successful prosecution of 

its members and seizing the economic resources of the enterprise. 

These investigations are manpower intensive and make use of sophisticated investigative techniques. 

During FY 2004, the Criminal Investigative Division initiated 67 

Innocence Lost investigations which led to 118 arrests, 26 indictments, and the conviction of 22 pimps and madams. To date in FY 

2005, 31 additional cases were opened and there have been 163 arrests, eight complaints, 13 indictments, and 10 convictions. Since 

the inception of Innocence Lost, 80 children have been recovered as 

a result of this national initiative. 

Two successful investigations and prosecutions highlight the impact of the Innocence Lost National Initiative. The Oklahoma City 

Division conducted a large-scale child prostitution investigation focused on the interstate prostitution of children at truck stops and 

through call services nationwide in an investigation named, 

STORMY NIGHTS. A total of 11 federal arrest warrants and three 

federal search warrants were executed in and around the Oklahoma City area. The case identified a total of 48 pimps, 24 of which 

exploited juveniles. Sixteen juveniles were recovered as a result of 

this case. The people used in prostitution were recruited from 

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and traveled to truck stops and known 

prostitution areas in Denver, Colorado; Miami, Florida; and Houston and Dallas, Texas. Nine defendants were charged with sex trafficking of minors and transporting juveniles for use in prostitution. 

Eight defendants pleaded guilty and a ninth was convicted at trial 

in 2005. Sentenced defendants have received prison terms of up to 

210 months. 

In United States v. Curtis (District of Columbia), on December 

3, 2004, a seven-count indictment was returned charging Carlos 

Curtis with sex trafficking, transporting a minor in interstate commerce for prostitution, and production of child pornography. Curtis 

and other associates recruited a 12-year-old girl in Times Square 

in New York and brought her to a hotel room in Brooklyn, where 
56

he photographed the girl engaged in sexually explicit conduct with 

an adult used as in prostitution. A superseding indictment was returned March 31, 2004 charging Curtis with obstruction of justice 

as a result of his efforts to get the victim to change her testimony 

at trial. Following a two-week jury trial, Curtis was convicted on 

July 2, 2004. He faces up to life imprisonment. Sentencing has 

been continued to 2005 with no date set. 

In addition to investigating those who exploit children, the FBI, 

through its Office of Victim Assistance, attempts to assist child victims of prostitution in FBI investigations. With the launch of the 

Innocence Lost initiative the FBI task forces have encountered significant problems in identifying and providing services for these 

victims. Juveniles who become involved in sexual trafficking face a 

myriad of obstacles and enormous needs if they want to leave that 

life, including very basic needs such as safe housing, subsistence, 

and schooling. In addition, they may need drug treatment, medical 

treatment, and mental health services. They may have problems 

related to victimization prior to their life on the streets. Most cannot return to their family of origin, so they need help to prepare 

for independent living. Some of the needs identified by the FBI 

through involvement in prior cases include: • Safe housing away from traffickers and their associates while 

their cases moves through the system. • Medical care and substance abuse treatment • A range of placement options including locked facilities. Our 

experience shows us that the majority of the juveniles placed in unlocked treatment facilities will walk away or runaway within a 

very short period of time. In many instances they runaway, leaving 

the state and we never find them again. Many return to the individuals who exploit them because they have so few options. • Specialized mental health treatments for these victims, since 

traditional counseling modalities have little success with these victims. • Assistance with transportation to access specialized programs 

and with local transportation to medical services, counseling, interviews, and court. 

• Life skills and vocational training. 

• New Social Security numbers, since traffickers often keep birth 

certificates, drivers’ licenses, and Social Security cards of the victims and use these documents to track their whereabouts when 

they flee. 

• Better training for law enforcement officers, mental health providers, juvenile justice officials, and child protective services workers on the dynamics of sexual trafficking and needs of victims. 

The FBI’s Civil Rights Program also addresses International 

Trafficking of persons; elements of which occur within the United 

States. International Trafficking primarily involving aliens, immigrants and other economically disadvantaged individuals, particularly women and children. Most of these cases involve immigrants 

or aliens transported into the United States, who are forced to 

work in poor, unsafe conditions as prostitutes, domestic servants, 

migrant farm workers, laborers, or employees in restaurants and 

small retail shops. The rate of immigrants who fail to report these 

types of crimes is underreported, because they fear deportation or 
57

are afraid of violent retaliation against themselves or their families. 

In June of 2004, the FBI, in cooperation with other local, state 

and federal law enforcement agencies, to include Immigration and 

Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection 

(CBP), and victim-based national advocacy groups began an Involuntary Servitude and Slavery/Trafficking in Persons Initiative to 

more aggressively combat this problem. As a result of this initiative, the FBI is now engaged in 21 Human Trafficking working 

groups around the country. 

In addition, the National Hispanic Sex Trafficking Initiative was 

created by the FBI on December 8, 2004, in order to combat the 

sex traffickers who are bringing increasing numbers of female victims into the U.S. primarily from or via Mexico, Central and South 

America. A primary focus of this initiative is the collection, analysis and dissemination of intelligence from all pending and recently 

closed cases targeting Hispanics involved in sex trafficking to identify major players, organizations and locations of Human Trafficking activities and to determine the degree of communication, coordination, and/or connection between these trafficking groups. 

Major United States cities such as Miami, Los Angeles, San 

Diego, Charlotte, Phoenix, New York and eleven additional cities, 

will serve as the focal points of the FBI’s intelligence collection, 

analysis and assessments. The resulting intelligence will be used to 

further drive and focus our investigative efforts in this area. 

As a result of this awareness, these initiatives, and increased 

emphasis and training in support of these initiatives, the FBI has 

expanded its efforts in investigating Human Trafficking. In FY 

2003, the FBI opened 65 Human Trafficking investigations, of 

which 17 cases have thus far resulted in convictions. In FY 2004, 

20 convictions were secured thus far from the 86 cases that were 

opened, and in the first half of FY 2005, the FBI has already 

opened 72 investigations and secured 6 convictions. Also, out of 

these investigative numbers, the FBI has a total of 125 pending 

Human Trafficking investigations. 

The FBI also participates in the Human Smuggling Trafficking 

Center (HSTC), signed into existence by the Secretary of State, 

Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Attorney General in July 

2004. It was established as a fusion center to bring together analysts, officers, and investigators from various agencies, including 

DHS, FBI, CIA, and the Department of State, ensuring information 

sharing on human smuggling and trafficking, especially smuggler 

support of clandestine terrorist travel. The FBI has two analysts 

from its Criminal Intelligence Section assigned to the HSTC. 

In conclusion, I want to thank you again for the opportunity to 

appear here today and speak to you about the FBI’s investigative 

efforts, in conjunction with other government agencies and community partners, to address some of our programs to identify, investigate and prosecute those responsible for victimizing and exploiting children and trafficking in human misery.
58

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SUSAN ORR, PH.D., ASSOCIATE 

COMMISSIONER OF THE CHILDREN’S BUREAU, ADMINISTRATION FOR CHILDREN AND FAMILIES, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF 

HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES 

Mr. Chairman and members of the Commission, thank you for 

the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss programs administered by the Administration for Children and Families which 

may offer avenues for providing services to U.S. citizen children 

and youth who are victims of human trafficking in the United 

States. The Administration for Children and Families is intimately 

familiar with the horrors associated with human trafficking. Our 

agency, under the direction of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, 

has responsibility for administering provisions from the Trafficking 

Victims Protection Act for tracking and certifying non-citizen trafficking victims and helping them access the benefits and services 

they need to rebuild their lives. Human trafficking is a form of 

modern day slavery and whether the victims are citizens or noncitizens, is a scourge on society. 

I am the Associate Commissioner of the Children’s Bureau within the Administration for Children and Families and am responsible for assisting States in the delivery of child welfare services 

designed to protect children and strengthen families. I would like 

to spend my time today discussing some of the child welfare programs that could serve domestic trafficking victims. I also will discuss service outlets that are available through the Runaway and 

Homeless Youth Program, another program administered by the 

Administration for Children and Families in the Family and Youth 

Services Bureau. 

Before discussing the services provided by these programs, I 

would like to share some background on what we know about child 

victims that may include domestic victims of human trafficking in 

the U.S. 

BACKGROUND

The National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, 

and Thrownaway Children (NISMART 2) published by the Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, in 2002, estimated that 

there were 1.6 million youth who had experienced a runaway/

thrownaway episode in 1999. Of these youth, 1.1 million or 71 percent could have been endangered during their runaway/

thrownaway episode by virtue of factors such as substance dependency, use of hard drugs, sexual or physical abuse, presence in a 

place where criminal activity was occurring, or because of their extremely young age (13 years old or younger). An estimated 40,000 

runaways/thrownaways were at risk of sexual endangerment or exploitation by one or more of the following characteristics or behaviors during the episode: the youth was sexually assaulted, there 

was an attempted sexual assault of the youth, the youth was in the 

company of someone known to be sexually abusive, or the youth engaged in sexual activity in exchange for money, drugs, food or shelter. 

In 2000, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children 

released a report entitled, Online Victimization: A Report on the 

Nation’s Youth. The report indicated that little is known about the 
59

incidence of ‘‘traveler cases’’ (where adults or youth travel to meet 

and have sex with someone they first came in contact with on the 

Internet), or any completed Internet seduction and Internet sexual 

exploitation cases, including trafficking in child pornography. 

We know these very serious victimizations occur and that lawenforcement officials are tracking down an ever-increasing number 

of such victims. In 2000, an informal survey of the FBI, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, newspapers, and 

other law-enforcement sources identified almost 800 cases, confirmed or under investigation, involving adults traveling to or luring youth they first met on the Internet for criminal sexual activities. Further, we are acutely aware of this problem based upon ongoing meetings and communication between Family and Youth 

Services Bureau staff and the FBI Office for Victim Assistance 

(OVA) staff that I will discuss in more detail later in my testimony. 

VICTIMS SERVICES

The Children’s Bureau (CB) is the oldest Federal agency for children. The Bureau provides grants to States, Tribes and community 

organizations to operate a range of child welfare services including 

child protective services (child abuse and neglect) family preservation and support, foster care, adoption and independent living program services. 

When citizen children are victims of trafficking, a State child 

welfare agency might become involved under the following scenarios: 

• If a child is discovered to have been trafficked for the purpose 

of sexual exploitation by a parent or primary caregiver, the State 

agency would most likely take custody of the child. However, some 

State child welfare agencies are responding in cases of child sexual 

abuse or exploitation even when the perpetrator is NOT a parent 

or primary caregiver. 

• When minors are transported across State lines for the purpose of illegal adoption (‘‘selling’’ babies), State agencies also may 

have a role in taking temporary custody until a suitable caretaker 

is found. If a private adoption agency is involved in the trafficking 

and selling of a child, the State could suspend or revoke its license 

to operate. 

• Once a child who has been trafficked enters State custody, he 

or she would receive a variety of services, including medical and 

psychological examination and treatment, counseling, foster family 

or group home placement, and coordination with law enforcement 

and the courts for his or her return to appropriate caregivers or 

placement into a permanent adoptive home. 

The Family and Youth Services Bureau (FYSB) provides services 

under the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act, which assist runaway and homeless youth. Through the programs for runaway and 

homeless youth, we work to establish and strengthen communitybased programs that address the immediate needs of runaway and 

homeless youth and their families. The Runaway and Homeless 

Youth Act programs provide services to children and youth who are 

victims of trafficking through the following programs at the community and local levels. 
60

• Basic Center Programs are short-term emergency shelter programs that are able to address the immediate needs of runaway 

and homeless youth and their families. The central purpose of 

these programs is to provide youth with emergency shelter, food, 

clothing, counseling, and referrals for health care. The basic centers seek to reunite young people with their families, whenever 

possible, or to locate appropriate alternative placements. Furthermore, basic center programs have the capacity to provide follow-up 

service to youth who return home. • The Street Outreach Program funds street-based outreach and 

education services for runaway and homeless youth and youth on 

the streets who have been, or are at risk of being, sexually abused 

and/or exploited. These private, nonprofit agencies conduct outreach designed to build relationships between grantee staff and 

street youth. The goal of these efforts is to help young people leave 

the streets. The local grantees provide a range of services directly 

or through collaboration with other agencies, specifically those 

working to protect and treat young people who have been, or who 

are at risk of being, subjected to sexual abuse or exploitation. 

The National Runaway Switchboard (NRS) is a national communications system designed to assist youth who have run away, or 

are considering running away, and their families. The NRS links 

youth and families to crisis counseling, programs and resources, 

and each other, as appropriate. The goal of the system is to ensure 

that young people in crisis have a single source of information on 

the help available to them. In addition, the NRS Runaway Education Program (REP) continues to educate the general public on 

runaway and homeless youth issues and increase awareness of 

available resources. 

The NRS offers the following primary services to assist runaways 

and their families or guardians: 

—A confidential, toll-free hotline. Hotline staff and volunteers 

provide crisis intervention counseling to runaway and homeless 

youth, young people who are thinking of running away or are in 

crisis, and their family members. The hotline operates 24 hours a 

day, 365 days a year. Hotline staff responds to approximately 

120,000 calls annually from throughout the United States and its 

Territories. 

—Referrals by hotline staff to community-based programs and 

services across the country using an online national directory of 

youth-serving agencies. The NRS maintains data on more than 

16,000 youth-related agencies and has access to information on 

120,000 other organizations through hard-copy resource directories. 

—Message delivery service between youth and their families or 

guardians that enables estranged parents and children to reestablish communication through a neutral third party. Parents also can 

leave a message for their child. 

—Conference calls among parents, youth, and resource agency 

staff that are facilitated by hotline staff and volunteers. 

Our work with the FBI’s Office for Victim Assistance provides illustrates how well services can work together with law enforcement in trafficking cases involving citizen children. OVA has been 

receiving an increasing number of emergency victim assistance requests for the purpose of reunifying adolescent victims of domestic 
61

trafficking with their parents/guardians. FYSB has brokered a relationship between OVA and the National Runaway Switchboard 

that has resulted in the establishment of a collaborative effort to 

refer FBI agents to the appropriate agencies in the community or 

nearby that can provide services to the adolescent victim and his/

her parents or guardian. The agencies provide food, clothing, medical care, and counseling services for the victim and his/her family. 

The agency providing the services works with the adolescent victim 

and his/her parents/guardian to facilitate reunification services. For 

example, the NRS is the sole administrator of the HOME FREE 

Program, a collaborative effort of Greyhound Lines, Inc., and the 

International Association of Chiefs of Police. HOME FREE provides 

free bus tickets for victims and/or one family member to travel to 

meet the victim. Adolescents over the age of 15 can travel unaccompanied; however, the referral agencies work with the family 

around transportation issues. 

CONCLUSION

In closing, I hope I have provided a clear snapshot of some of the 

services that currently are available through programs administered by the Administration for Children and Families to human 

trafficking victims who are citizen children. Mr. Chairman, I want 

to thank you for bringing greater attention to this important issue. 

I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.
62

1The Centre to Combat Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children. 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF NORMA HOTALING, FOUNDER AND 

DIRECTOR, SAGE PROJECT, INC. 

PROTECTING OUR CHILDREN

Since the First World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC) held in Stockholm, Sweden in 1996, 

the world has become increasingly aware of the scope and horror 

of the buying, selling, trafficking and the use of children in prostitution and pornography. At the Second World Congress Against 

Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in Yokohama, Japan 

in December, 2001, one report after another stated that the number of children commercially sexually exploited has grown, and the 

age of those children has become younger and younger.1 It was at 

the First World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation 

of Children, after hearing representatives from almost every country throughout the world talk about the horror and terror and 

death that children were suffering through commercial sexual exploitation that I was sick to the point of being almost unable to 

walk. Testimony after testimony described the long-term effects of 

commercial sexual exploitation, including mental heath disease, 

substance abuse, stigmatization, homelessness, and ill treatment 

by law enforcement and social service providers. I was a witness 

to stories of the hundreds of thousands of children who were having their childhoods brutally ripped away. They are left to fend for 

themselves as they grew into adults and become the thousands of 

women, girls and men we serve every year at the SAGE Project in 

SF, the ‘‘toss-aways,’’ the ‘‘throw-aways’’ who are blamed for their 

own victimization. There are women and girls today in the United 

States, my sisters, my friends missing, buried in shallow graves, 

being raped, beaten, kidnapped, tortured, recruited, trafficked, 

killed and laying unidentified, unrecognized thus renamed as Jane 

Doe’s in city morgues and in burial plots. 

I founded SAGE Project 16 years ago, as I was exiting the criminal justice system. I had been going to juvenile halls, jails, psychiatric hospitals, emergency rooms and drug treatment programs 

since I was 12. No one ever asked me about my life, about prostitution, being beaten, raped or kidnapped. I was just a whore, a dope 

fiend, and a criminal. How could I get out? No one ever treated me 

like a person. No one asked me if I hurt or why. Today, under the 

TVPA, I would be considered a trafficking victim: I was trafficked 

into prostitution when I was a child. 

I work with the extraordinarily dedicated team who comprise 

SAGE. SAGE is a survivor-run, human rights organization formed 

in 1992 to provide services to girls, women, men, and 

transgendered individuals who have been exploited through the sex 

industry. SAGE seeks to effect change on two levels: (1) in the lives 

of the individual victims and (2) in the local, national and international community, by challenging societal attitudes that fosters 

ignorance and acceptance of sexual exploitation, trafficking of 

women and girls, while condemning them as criminals or ‘‘tossaways.’’ Additionally, SAGE provides training and technical assistance locally, nationally and internationally to build capacity in gov-
63

ernmental and non-governmental organizations and enhance the 

implementation of effective, client-centered prevention, early intervention and treatment services in integrated, outcome-based trauma and sexual exploitation recovery programs. 

I founded SAGE because: 

Like 90% of our clients, I experienced sexual abuse including 

rape as a child through prostitution 

Like 82%, I had been brutally assaulted 

Like 84%, I had been homeless 

Like most of my clients, I suffered severe symptoms of PTSD and 

I desperately wanted to get out of prostitution and a life that made 

no sense to me. 

Women and girls like myself, if left untreated, cycle endlessly, 

most often until they die, through medical, mental, social services, 

criminal justice systems as high users, costing cities billions. 

Many of the problems facing women in prostitution are similar 

to those addressed in other marginalized populations: finding affordable housing; financial planning; creating safe environments 

and relationships; escaping and healing from the emotional and 

physical effects of violence; engaging in treatment for drug/alcohol 

addictions; resuming educational or vocational training. These 

problems, however, may be exponentially compounded by longstanding, widespread myths and misunderstanding about prostitution. On the one hand, prostitution has been glamorized and romanticized, while on the other, the women themselves have been 

viewed as criminal, sexually deviant, socially inept and/or mentally 

deficient. Women trying to escape prostitution, many already traumatized by long term physical and sexual violence, routinely endure listening to jokes about ‘‘whores’’ and ‘‘hookers’’—jokes that diminish, belittle, or even idealize the pain. Would we consider jokes 

about prison rape funny? Pimps and ho’s have become part of popular culture as we see from the ‘‘Pimps Ball’’ and popular singer 

Nelly’s ‘‘Pimp Juice.’’ Where is Nelly when his brothers are facing 

long prison terms and his sisters have burns and whip marks from 

head to toe or are dead in ditches? 

Like Vietnam veterans, women in prostitution must overcome 

public denial about the truth of our experiences. Unlike veterans, 

however, individuals involved in the sex trade—even those who 

have been part of government-sponsored (military) commercial sex 

projects to benefit soldiers—are not considered courageous nor 

given benefits and honors. Once the ‘‘R & R’’ is over, women in 

prostitution are arrested, discarded, routinely barred from social 

services (like shelters for battered women), frequently raped, murdered, and otherwise made invisible. Despite growing interest 

among social service providers in marginalized populations and 

non-traditional interventions, women in prostitution have remained 

largely beyond the scope of humanitarian efforts and ethical considerations. (Boyer, 1995; Greenman, 1990) 

Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005

The TVPA Reauthorization Act continues the important work of 

the TVPA. It calls for new international and domestic measures for 

combating trafficking in Persons. It further strengthens aspects of 

prevention of trafficking, protection and services for victims, and 
64

prosecution of traffickers. It enhances U.S. efforts to combat trafficking in persons by adding additional criteria for monitoring and 

combating trafficking. For example, it provides that 

• Countries must take measures to address demand 

• Countries must punish peacekeepers who are involved in trafficking in persons 

• Countries must develop programs to combat sex tourism 

On the other hand, the TVPA Reauthorization could be further 

strengthened. Let me suggest two changes that would help: 

1. Add language that will allow the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons to include information about countries 

that have legalized prostitution in their criteria for assessing and 

rating countries. 

It is important for the TIP Office to have all the tools necessary 

to fight the legalization of the so-called sex industry in Belgium, 

Amsterdam, Germany and other countries. It has been proven in 

each of these countries trafficked individuals far outnumber those 

where it is not legal. In countries with legalized prostitution, governments become the real pimps profiting from the industry and 

the misery of women and girls. Pimps become legitimate ‘‘agents’’ 

and ‘‘businessmen.’’ The extremely lucrative profits from this socalled industry are then used to lobby legislators and government 

officials to legalize in other countries, states, and cities world-wide. 

Little or no services are provided to those in the individuals 

trapped in the legalized systems. Demand increases and men from 

these countries, with appetites wet, make up the greatest number 

of sex tourists that travel throughout the world and exploit children and women in countries other than their own. Unless the TIP 

Office has the ability to consider whether or not a country has legalized prostitution, it will not have full success in its work to abolish trafficking. 

2. The two-tiered system of severe forms of trafficking and simple 

sex trafficking (or prostitution) should not be imported into the domestic portion of the TVPA Reauthorization Act of 2005 definition. 

I know I speak for all those who are members of a survivor-centered approach to trafficking, as well as many others who oppose 

the creation of a two tiered system of deserving and undeserving 

victims in the United States. We believe that services should be 

provided to all those who walk through a provider’s door—not just 

those who can prove force, fraud or coercion, or those who cooperate with authorities. Making a distinction between victims of a severe form of trafficking and victims of trafficking would be disastrous and nothing less than the continuation of victim blaming and 

the withholding of life saving services. Remember, the woman or 

girl who is declared undeserving of our help is someone’s daughter. 

Their rapes, beatings, arrests, and historical blame and neglect are 

what qualifies them for our help and our compassion not some narrow definition. Are we saying that those who fall outside of this 

narrow definition are those who can still be terribly abused, terrorized, and even murdered through commercial sexual exploitation, 

and that this brutality is deserved? We know prostitution and trafficking are linked. The current definition in the TVPA Reauthorization will de-link them. We need to fix this. 
65

A SURVIVOR CENTERED APPROACH TO TRAFFICKING

Survivor Provided Services—The True Experts: 

Throughout the United States, there is a network of experts who 

have worked for decades designing, implementing and providing 

outreach, advocacy, prevention, early intervention programs and 

long-term supportive, highly effective and innovative trauma, mental health, substance abuse and housing services. They work on 

policy and to change ineffective laws and legislator’s ways of thinking. The individuals they help have been severely mis-treated, misdiagnosed, and very often arrested and jailed over and over again. 

These providers have created services that are survivor-centered. 

They work together with their clients to build heath, well-being, 

lives that are whole, independent and free from abuse and exploitation. This network of providers are the true pioneers and heroes. 

They have built this web of services piece by piece, inch by inch, 

penny by penny with very little or no local, state, federal or private 

support. To date, philanthropists run away from, not towards, 

these programs and the individuals building them. This network is 

dedicated to the voiceless, and the disappeared and it is built by 

sheer will of its founding members and members. That ‘‘will’’ that 

exists in this group of providers is what kept them alive in the 

most desperate and life-threatening situations and is now present 

in their daily lives fighting for their sisters and brothers. The 

Founding Members of the Survivor Services Education and Empowerment Network (SSEEN) are SAGE in San Francisco, CA; 

Breaking Free in St. Paul, Minnesota; Kathleen Mitchell, Dignity 

House in Phoenix, Arizona; and Veronica’s Voice in Kansas City, 

Kansas. This unprecedented collaboration of survivor-operated 

service providers and educators was formed to create a strong foundation for a national movement of commercial sexual exploitation 

survivors combating commercial sexual exploitation by using their 

experiences for good, having their experiences inform the work they 

do to help others like themselves. We have services that offer variety of options to those with similar histories and backgrounds. 

SSEEN will continue build on the work of the individual organizations by contributing to the design and implementation of policies 

and procedures for effective treatment as well as legislation that 

will compassionately address the needs of victims of commercial 

sexual exploitation and target the real perpetrators of sexual exploitation-the demand side, violent pimps and traffickers. We need 

the help of the federal government to make these services available 

across the United States. 

SSEEN supports new legislation 

SSEEN is a strong supporter of the End the Demand Act of 2005 

that will require annual surveys of the so called sex industry on 

the streets, in strip clubs, in massage parlors, on the internet and 

other venues. It will work to analyze what cultures are most at risk 

and danger here in the United States. It will give innovative grants 

law enforcement authorities to target the real perpetrators; the 

pimps, traffickers and the demand as an alternative to arresting 

and prosecuting the victims. It will provide real financial support 

to the groups like the members of SSEEN, survivor-centered pro-
66

viders who have proven track records, expertise, have struggled 

keep their doors open and keep others alive while offering support 

and safety. It will help to provide technical assistance and coalition 

building among groups throughout the nation to build services, investigate the real criminals, and end the demand. 

However, just as with the TVPA Reauthorization, the End Demand Act could be furthered strengthened. Let me suggest three 

changes: 

1. Technical assistance and training should be provided to create 

standards among groups receiving funding for services to victims of 

commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking. This technical assistance should draw from and delivered by the network of survivor-centered providers who have a proven track record of designing and implementing services for decades. 

2. At present, the bill only makes mention of soliciting survivor 

views. It is essential that survivors be included in all aspects of the 

work to stop trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation, including services, replication of model programs, policy development and 

implementation, creating standards of care and other protocols and 

trainings. 

3. Conferences, seminars, research and other aspects of policy 

and program development should be clearly survivor-centered. 

In conclusion, both the TVPA Reauthorization of 2005 and the 

End Demand Act are important pieces of legislation. They have different goals and are not mutually exclusive. In fact, many of the 

supporters of the TVPA Reauthorization also support the End Demand Act, and vice versa. With the changes I have suggested, both 

will be strengthened and both deserve to be passed. 

Trafficking and the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children 

The trafficking of children and adolescents into the sex industry 

is widespread around the world and the United States is no exception. An estimated 10 million children worldwide are already involved in the $20 billion-a-year sex industry. This number is increasing by about one million each year. ‘‘The prostitution of children and related health consequences has been accepted for too 

long. The time has come to make them unacceptable,’’ said Dr. 

Barry Levy of Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Lancet Medical Journal, May 2002. 

The young boys and girls used for prostitution are deprived of 

their basic human rights. In keeping with the international figures, 

the prostituted children in the U.S. face an increased risk of sexual 

and physical assault, suicide, pregnancy, abortions, and sexually 

transmitted diseases, including AIDS, post-traumatic stress disorder and death. Seventy-five to ninety-five (75–95%) of all 13–18 

year old girls in our justice systems have been victims of abuse. 

Many of these girls have been exploited for pornography or have 

suffered or witnessed physical and sexual violence. For these girls, 

the average of entry into prostitution is 13–14, an age at which 

these girls are entering an endless cycle of arrest, drug addiction, 

and violence. The result is traumatic and profound lack of self-esteem causing disempowered behaviors: dropping out of school, prostitution, addiction, selling of drugs, and violence. Their exploitation 

is perpetuated by continued reliance on the very people who have 
67

physically, emotionally, and sexually assaulted them. These children come from all of the populations though preponderance come 

from the least advantaged, isolated and disorganized segments. 

They are of all races and ethnic backgrounds. As a result of abuse 

and neglect, they have lost the valuable life-skills training that a 

healthy family and environment provide. As these children age, 

and chronologically become adults their situations remain unrecognized and untreated and they continue a downward cycle of drugs, 

re-victimization, jails and death. 

SSEEN strongly supports trauma, mental health, substance 

abuse, life skills, educational, vocational and housing services for 

all who have the courage to ask for them or escape into our arms 

confused and hurt. Each week, the members of SSEEN provide 

these services, working to restore the human rights to hundreds 

and thousands of women, children and men. 

What happens to women and girls who are recruited by pimps 

and sold to those who demand them? 

• Usually more recent statistics would be used to describe a 

problem. These statistics are still relevant because we have ignored 

the data, and the problem of abuse, rape and trafficking of children 

and women and not created viable solutions based on these and 

other data. Mimi Silbert, Ph.D., recently testified in San Francisco 

before the Board of Supervisors. She said in 1982, when she published these data, no one cared and the problem has only gotten 

bigger and worse. In San Francisco we used this data and other 

more recent data to support the need for a SAFE HOUSE for 

GIRLS exploited through prostitution. With the help of the San 

Francisco Department of Public Health, Mayor Gavin Newsom, 

District Attorney Kamala Harris, Supervisor Tom Amiano, Edgewood Services for Children and their Families, private foundations, 

and individual support, SAGE is due to open this house in July. 

• The average age of entry into prostitution is 13 years (Silbert 

and Pines 1982) or 14 years (Kelly and Weiseberg 1985). 

• Most of the 13 to 14 year-old girls were recruited or coerced 

into prostitution by abusive pimps who initially act as boyfriends 

or lovers (Gamache and Giobbe 1990). 

• The Council for Prostitution Alternatives, Portland, Oregon 

found that in a group of women studied, 63% were horribly beaten 

by pimps an average of 58 times per year. Most women deny that 

the men they are with are pimps, when SAGE first begins to counsel and connect with them. 

• Historically, procurers (pimps) and traffickers targeted runaways, girls that hang with the crowd breaking or bending the simplest of rules, kids that smoke, cut class, are adopting acting out 

behavior associated with trauma, and girls that come from abusive 

backgrounds who have low self-esteem and confidence. 

• The procurers begin by befriending the girls and young women 

and then calculate a romantic connection. 

• The strategy of befriending and love is designed to fit the 

vulnerabilities of its potential victim. 

• A procurer’s goal is to find naive, needy teenage girls or young 

women, con them into dependency, season them into fear and submission, and ‘‘turn them out’’ into the sex trade. 
68

• Today, because trafficking in women and girls is determined to 

be more profitable than trafficking in guns and drugs, all you have 

to be is a girl or young woman to be targeted. • Guerilla Pimping: Pimps are looking more towards suburbia 

for ‘‘naı ̈ve girls’’ and ‘‘guerilla pimping’’ has emerged as a means of 

kidnapping girls and women. These traffickers use severe and immediate violence to force the victim to participate in the sex industry. A common theme found in ‘‘guerilla pimping’’ is that a woman 

or girl is physically picked up, thrown into a trunk and transported 

to cities throughout the US. SAGE Project has rescued individuals 

who do not know what city they are in and what cities they have 

been trafficked through while being forced to work in the sex trade 

that including strip clubs, escort services, the streets, internet sites 

such as Craig’s list, or sites created by the pimps themselves. They 

are sold on the back pages of alternative news papers, and sex 

trade magazines. They had been kept and transported in trunks of 

cars and isolated in out of the way motels and single room occupancy hotels throughout the country while being brutalized, raped, 

tortured and are sold to all who demand them. • Smooth-talking Players: Some US traffickers, choose the 

‘‘smooth-talking player’’ role. They systematically and methodically 

break down their ‘‘prey,’’ by socially isolating them, taking them 

away from family, friends and embroiling them in a social system 

that involves living in transient hotels close to the ‘‘whore strolls’’, 

traveling from city to city, and socializing with transient persons 

usually also involved in the sex industry as prostitutes or pimps. 

Harsher methods may involve beating, raping, sodomizing, drugging and starving a woman before turning her out on the streets 

or over to a brothel. All of these women and girls are losing precious days, months and years out of their lives, as well as, losing 

the normal development and life skills afforded to young women 

who are going to school, building valuable and dependable and nonabusive social support systems, having after school jobs, opening 

checking accounts, renting apartments and even buying their own 

clothes. 

• A critical step in seasoning a girl is changing her identity. She 

is given a new name and any necessary papers, such as false driver’s license, social security card and birth certificate, so that the police will not be able to trace her real identity or determine her true 

age. More importantly, the stripping of the girl’s identity removes 

her past and makes her the property of the pimp. According to anthropologists Christina and Richard Milner, ‘‘A pimp wants a woman’s mind more than her body. It’s love, loyalty, and obedience he 

requires, as well as, a capacity for self discipline.’’ (Milder and 

Milder 1972) 

• More of the recruitment process involves attention and affection including pet names such as Foxy Lady, Star Lady, Sportin 

Lady, Hope to Die Woman. There is usually glamour and flash—

new clothes, jewelry and followed by the ‘‘turning out lines.’’ ‘‘Baby, 

if you really loved me . . .’’ ‘‘You only need to do it for a little 

while, till I get on my feet. For us.’’ ‘‘You just need to make some 

extra money until I get a settlement’’ or ‘‘until you get enough 

money for me to buy some stash, then I’ll take care of us.’’ Shortly 

after she turns her first date, the verbal, physical and sexual abuse 
69

begins. She turns over all her money to the pimp. He puts a quota 

on her, increases it over time, breaks her by calling her a ‘‘whore, 

nothing but a whore.’’ Telling her that no one else would have her. 

He begins to beat her into submission, raping her, making her 

work longer and longer hours, increasing her financial quota and 

only giving her ‘‘affection’’ after she has submitted to his almost insurmountable demands. Many young women SAGE works with 

have often made between $500.000 to $1,000,000. When asked how 

much they can access if they wanted to leave, it is never more than 

$20.00. If a pimp suspects a girl is hiding money, she is digitally 

searched, beaten, burned, raped, and publicly humiliated. Pimps 

watch to see if the girl is chewing gum or having ice cream as an 

indication that she might be keeping money, even one to two dollars. 

Mimi Silbert, Executive Director, Delancy Street Foundation 

with Ayala Pines (1981) conducted a study in 1981 of 200 individuals involved in prostitution and described an emotional process 

they called psychological paralysis. Psychological paralysis emerged 

as a major theme in the first phase of the study that was designed 

to explore the extent and nature of the problem of rape and juvenile sexual exploitation both prior to and since their involvement 

in the sex trade. Psychological paralysis was experienced by the 

subjects in dealing with their lives as a result of their excessive 

and senseless victimization. 

Sixty (60) percent of the sample were victims of incest and child 

sexual abuse and reported extremely negative emotional and physical impacts from the abuse. Victimization continued to be very 

high as a result of their involvement in prostitution. According to 

Silbert and Pines, three quarters of the prostitutes who participated were victims of rapes unrelated to prostitution. The study 

found that in addition to the physical and sexual abuse, in most 

cases the victims reported feeling there was absolutely nothing that 

they could do about the victimization. It was suggested that when 

excessive victimization is coupled with the lack of understanding of 

the causes of the abuse, as well as a sense of impotence to do anything to change the situation, then a sense of psychological paralysis develops. Silbert and Pines found that for the majority of the 

subjects, rape was the final awareness that there was no aspect of 

life over which they could exert control. This final lesson served as 

one more advancement of their psychological paralysis characterized by immobility, acceptance of victimization, feeling trapped and 

hopeless, and the inability to take the opportunity to change. One 

of the frustrations commonly cited by probation officers, police, and 

other field workers with individuals involved in the so-called sex 

industry or as I call it ‘‘the industry of destruction,’’ is the fact that 

they do not take advantage of opportunities for different lifestyles 

even though they claim to hate the life they are in. Programs designed to deal with individuals escaping prostitution should be designed to help develop a sense of control over one’s life, promote the 

ability to change their problems, and to break out of traps. According to Silbert and Pines, psychological paralysis occurs as an out 

growth of extended and repeated situations which lead to ‘‘learned 

helplessness’’ (Peterson and Seligman, 1983). A growing body of literature, in social science has shown that when people undergo a se-
70

2 Hotaling, Norma; Women and Prostitution, 1995. 

ries of negative events over which they have no control, the result 

is learned helplessness. At SAGE, we see this manifest in what we 

call, ‘‘Severe Traumatic Bonding with Perpetrators.’’

Silbert and Pines contend that when as a sense of psychological 

paralysis pervades the individuals in the sex trade population, the 

person becomes completely unable to leave the prostitution lifestyle, even when other opportunities are offered. They maintain a 

belief that bad consequences would occur no matter what new steps 

they take. They have lost any sense of control over their lives and 

have accepted feeling trapped and victimized (Silbert and Pines, 

1882). This helps to explain why 88% of the prostitutes in the 

study by Farley and Hotaling (1995) reported that they wanted to 

get out of prostitution but were unable to leave even when offered 

the choice.2

RECRUITMENT: SUPPLY AND DEMAND

Recruitment into prostitution flourishes in proportion to an increased demand. The demand for trafficked women and girls increases due to a variety and combination of factors including: 

• Normalizing the rape and sexual abuse of children and the exploitation of women by viewing the demand as normal men with 

normal sexual needs being met through prostitution. In actuality, 

we are sanctioning training grounds for men to learn and practice 

pedophilia. The girls who are preyed upon become untreated 

abused and traumatized women. 

• learned and accepted exploitation and violence 

• collusion with and protection of exploiters, especially the demand 

• loosened social norms concerning the sex industry 

• profitability by individuals, organized groups, and governments 

• accessibility to and the promotion of the multi-billion dollar sex 

industry 

• educational systems which lack interventions that promote 

equality between girls and boys/men and women and decrease misogyny • non-existent, weak, or un-enforced legal interventions to combat the demand and the traffickers • Criminal justice systems that focus on arresting and prosecuting women and girls involved in prostitution, but not their 

male counterparts. In 2002, police arrested 23,446 men out of the 

67,287 prostitution cases they reported to the FBI. Additionally, 

men being arrested for soliciting paid sex vary enormously by geography. In San Francisco and Detroit, men accounted for about 75 

percent of all prostitution-related arrests reported in 2002. By contrast, men accounted for only 9 percent of the prostitution arrests 

reported in Phoenix and Toledo, Ohio, just 12 percent of the arrests 

in Boston and only 14 percent in Las Vegas. • Since it’s inception in 1995, over 7000 men have attended 

‘‘Johns School,’’ which boast a 98% success rate and funds a wide 

array of services using the fines the men pay. 

We don’t connect the sexual abuse of children through prostitution to adult prostitution: 
71

3O’Connell, Julia, 1995, The Sex Exploiter, Available at http://www.usis.usemb.se?childre/csec/

thesexexploiter.html 

• Studies show that prostituted children tend to be concentrated 

in the cheaper end of the prostitution market, where conditions are 

the worst, and the concentration of customers of adults in the sex 

industry the highest. 

• Although some children are prostituted by and/or specifically 

for pedophiles and preferential abusers, the majority of the several 

million men who annually exploit prostitutes under the age of 18 

are first and foremost adult prostitutes users (adult men buying 

adult women) who become child sexual abusers through their prostitute use, rather than the other way around.3

• The world of prostitution, whether legal or illegal, provides an 

arena where laws and rules that constrain sex with minors can be 

evaded. Laws and social conventions make it difficult and dangerous for individuals to buy children for a sexual purpose in noncommercial contexts, but prostitution potentially provides instant 

access to a selection of children. 

• When asked how a person justifies having sex with an underage prostituted child, men surveyed in the First Offenders Prostitution Program (John’s School) in San Francisco and Fresno responded they ‘‘don’t even think about it.’’ They know that law enforcement efforts are focused on the youth/child and not on them. 

Broad-based media campaigns and prevention programs should 

offer the stern message: ‘‘age is not a defense, you will be prosecuted, jailed, and required to register as a sex offender after your 

release from prison.’’ In short, the message should be ‘‘your life will 

be over and your next victim will be spared.’’ After working with 

over 8000 men/johns, I have found that they know they have a lot 

to lose, such as jobs, marriages, children, and reputations and will 

change their behavior when given the correct message backed by 

severe consequences. 

Though existing laws indicate that they should be charged with 

sexual abuse and statutory rape, police rarely, if ever, investigate, 

arrest, or prosecute the so-called ‘‘johns.’’ At most, and very rarely, 

the police cite the men as users of adult prostitutes. If a young 

woman admits her real age or if the police know it to be under the 

age of 18, she is taken to jail. The men get off scot-free. They are 

often told, ‘‘Go on home buddy, this is your lucky day,’’ never once 

thinking of the life of the child that is ruined and changed forever 

or of the young mind and body so brutally traumatized over and 

over. 

Traditionally, our social response to child sexual abuse through 

prostitution has been either complete denial, or the blaming and 

criminalizing of the child. We have documented instances of U.S. 

judges describing five year-old children as ‘‘provocative’’ or ‘‘promiscuous,’’ and our legal system has a long history of shaming girls 

and boys who are the targets of adult sexual violence. For most of 

our social and legal history, being sexually assaulted or violated 

meant that the victim, whether child or adult, acquired the status 

of ‘‘whore’’—someone who is, supposedly, without credibility, rights, 

or respect. We have begun to shift our relationship to children, to 

adult women, and to sexual violence. Policy makers, law enforce-
72

ment officials, and the general public are beginning to come to the 

understanding that rape is truly a crime—not solely in legal 

terms—but a crime against the human rights of the victim, and 

against all human beings who want to live in a safe and healthy 

society. 

Our shifting beliefs have been mirrored in practice: it is a crime 

for an adult to have sex with a child; it is a crime to have sex without consent. The perpetrators of these crimes can at least hypothetically be arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated. The victims of 

these crimes at least hypothetically are entitled to justice, victim’s 

compensation, and protection. We have begun to challenge the idea 

that a person’s appearance, dress, or social status defines whether 

or not she or he can truly be recognized as a victim, or the idea 

that some people are ‘‘deserving’’ victims. 

When it comes to prostitution in the United States, however, in 

ideology and practice, it’s as if no changes have occurred. As long 

as someone is labeled a prostitute—whether child or adult, we still 

say that it is OK to dehumanize, to mistreat, and to endanger that 

person. The children we call ‘‘prostitutes’’ are in reality the children who we have designated as acceptable and blame-worthy targets for sexual abuse. There is no law that states a child can consent to sexual abuse and by doing so be arrested. But still we arrest children and deny them services. 

Unfortunately, there are several ways in which we have created: 

1) a group of kids who it’s okay to sexually abuse and rape and 2) 

an arena for men to function as pedophiles and have their behavior 

ignored and/or normalized: • We ignore the abuse. We are mis-defining sexually abused children as criminals perpetrating a crime, rather than as individuals 

experiencing victimization. When a child tells a court-mandated reporter or police officer that an adult has had sex with them and 

paid them money, that reporter or officer is, and should be, legally 

bound to report the incident as an instance of child sexual abuse. 

Not only does this reporting not occur, the child is at risk of criminalization and punishment. 

• We encourage the perpetrators. By focusing on the behavior or 

supposed wrongs of children, we are ignoring the perpetrators. We 

rarely go after the pimps, and NEVER go after the ‘‘johns,’’ and 

thus, NEVER arrest and prosecute the men as sexual abusers. 

Even calling them ‘‘johns’’, rather than child sexual abusers continues the protection and misrepresentation of what’s happening 

and creates group of children it is acceptable to rape and abuse. As 

a society, we are encouraging and enabling the perpetrators of 

child sexual abuse; we are creating a group of men who are learning—through adult prostitution—how to be sex abusers of children, 

and often how to be torturers and batterers. Many of these men 

bring these behaviors home or into other social arenas, and most 

of them continue to prey on children within the sex industries. 

• We don’t give kids a way out. Our approach to the sexual 

abuse of children within prostitution rarely involves the creation of 

resources that truly enable healing and recovery, rather than punishment and stigma. The Office of Victim Compensation and other 

resources intended to meet the needs of crime victims deny resources to children abused through child prostitution, based on the 
73

mis-definition of these children as criminals. This means that resources are rarely available in any venue that does not involve the 

humiliation and vulnerability of arrest and incarceration. If the 

child is arrested, she or he is cycled through the criminal justice 

system, sometimes repeatedly, intensifying the shame, pain, and 

vulnerability that make children easy prey to pimps and abusers, 

and decreasing the possibility of successful intervention. • We are working in ‘‘crisis mode’’ rather than on prevention. Arresting children, women, or even arresting traffickers, pimps and 

the demand is a very far cry from preventing the problem. Rather 

than responding to the urgent needs of children who are being 

abused, we are still asking them to prove to us that they are not 

one of the ‘‘bad kids.’’ We must communally reject the myth that 

if a girl is on the street with lipstick and a mini-skirt on she can 

somehow consent to sexual abuse and that by consenting, she has 

committed a crime. When a child sexual abuser says ‘‘but she said 

she was 18,’’ we must realize that this is not a defense against 

child sexual abuse or statutory rape. This message must be accompanied by a strong public education campaign and rehabilitation 

options, or these men will simply seek new victims or take the abusive behaviors home. While it is important to address crises among 

abused youth, the long-term eradication of the problem will be 

achieved only by establishing prevention programs for boys, men 

and girls, and full criminal sanctions focused on the men/abusers/

buyers and the pimps and traffickers. • Health and Human Services Should be Taking the Lead Providing Child Protection. Coordination of substance abuse services 

and treatment for torture survivors should be coordinated when it 

comes to this population. The juvenile justice system and the adult 

criminal justice system as the first responder to the human suffering and abuses of these women children, sometimes by offering 

services but mostly to arrest and jail the victim. The sexual abuse 

of children through prostitution is made possible by a society that 

has created, sanctioned and institutionalized numbers of children 

for whom routine abuse, torture, rape, kidnapping, and often death 

is considered acceptable. In essence, what we the legislators and 

service providers, other professional and individuals are saying and 

enforcing through laws and inappropriate interventions is that children and youth are consenting to their own sexual abuse and that 

by consenting to this abuse, they are a danger to society. They are 

subject to arrest; they are viewed as perpetrators, not victims, and 

are denied any services for their victimization. I believe that here 

and now, we can end child prostitution by renaming and redefining 

it as child abuse and statutory rape. 

• Childhood histories are ignored as the individual ages and 

more blame, criminalization and withholding of services is the 

norm not the exception. 

The following are key components to the systemic change that 

must occur to successfully address trafficking, and the demand: • Define the issue. Court mandated reporters such as law enforcement personnel, probation officers, judges, and lawyers must 

be educated and required to correctly define and report child prostitution as child sexual abuse, to define the so-called prostitutes as 

abused children, and to define the so-called ‘‘johns’’ as child sexual 
74

abusers. Mandated reporters must have a clear understanding of 

what, when and how they are required to report sexual abuse and 

that to not report abuse is illegal. After receiving training, the 

mandated reporters must be held accountable. • The public needs education in order to better recognize child 

sexual abuse in and out of prostitution. We must recognize the 

clear links between child and adult prostitution on a global scale, 

and not presume that anyone labeled a prostitute is responsible for 

a system in which we allow people to buy human bodies. Only by 

transforming our relationships to all forms of sexual exploitation 

and abuse, whether child or adult, can we disempower a multi-billion dollar sex industry in which the average age of entry is 13-14, 

and a society in which many adult men are socialized, from boyhood, to feel entitled to sexual service. • Reform legislative, investigative and prosecutorial practice. We 

must utilize our existing child sexual abuse and statutory rape 

laws as well as child abuse prevention and treatment resources. 

There needs to be a mechanism to move a child from the juvenile 

system into the family courts. It is time to re-define child prostitution within its correct legislative framework: child safety. We need 

dramatic legislative reform, requiring total decriminalization of 

children and increased prosecution of pimps, and especially the 

people actually creating the demand for child sexual abuse, and 

making it profitable: the customers, i.e., sexual abusers and rapists. Adults who sexually abuse children in prostitution must face 

prosecution and consequences already afforded by our child protection laws, including becoming registered sex offenders. • Build coalitions and provide training. U.S. federal laws, such 

as the Mann Act, the Protection of Children from Sexual Predators 

Act, and the TVPA are intended to address the issue children 

abused through prostitution and of interstate trafficking in children for the purposes of prostitution and pornography. However, 

though laws exist, they are not being proactively enforced. Existing 

state laws regarding the use of children for sexual purposes vary 

in content and in the penalties imposed on offenders. Enforcement 

and coordination among local, state and federal law enforcement officials is sporadic at best. Furthermore, many child and youth-service public and private agencies do not have policies, procedures or 

resources in place to serve victims of commercial sexual exploitation, and are often unaware of federal laws or how to access the 

support of federal agencies. The results are both that children and 

youth are apprehended and treated as offenders/perpetrators and 

entered into the justice system where services typically do not exist 

or are not available to them, or that they are redirected to service 

agencies who are not prepared to provide the comprehensive treatment necessary to address the trauma surrounding sexual exploitation. 

• Create a real escape for children and women through appropriate social services and recovery. Replicate programs that work 

such as SAGE and the First Offenders Prostitution Program 

(John’s School.) Support Survivor-Run Services A web of peer-counseling services, which responds to the torture, kidnap and extremes 

of violence that characterize pimping, pandering and trafficking, 

absolutely must accompany legislative change. Without a safety net 
75

4 Becker, Lira, Castillo, Gomez, & Kovalskys, 1990; Therapy with victims of political repression in Chile: The challenge of social reparation. Journal of Social Issues 46: 133–49;Breton, 

1999; The relevance of the structural approach to group work with immigrant and refugee 

women. Social Work with Groups 22(2/3): 11–29; Egendorf, 1975; Vietnam veteran rap groups 

and themes of postwar life; Mantell & M. Pilisuk (eds.) Journal of Social Issues: Soldiers in and 

after Vietnam 31(4): 111–124;Martin-Baro, 1988; War and mental health. In Martin-Baro, A. 

Aron & Come, S. (Eds.) Writings for a Liberation Psychology. Cambridge: Harvard University. 

pp.108-121; Turner, F. (1996). Echoes of combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory. 

NewYork: Anchor/Doubleday;Figley, 1978; Stress Disorders Among Vietnam Veterans: Theory, 

Research and Treatment. New York: Brunner/Mazel;Lifton, 1978; Advocacy and corruption in 

the healing professions. In Figley, Charles R. (Ed.), Stress Disorders Among Vietnam Veterans: 

Theory, Research and Treatment. New York: Brunner/Mazel. pp. 209–230;Turner,1996; Lykes, 

1993 Human rights and mental health among Latin American women in situations of statesponsored violence. Psychology of Women Quarterly 17: 525–44. 

and resource base, taking children out of the criminal justice system only means returning them to pimps and perpetrators. SAGE 

is the first State Certified drug, trauma, and mental health program in the US that is entirely survivor centered and peer run. • Do not make services for women and girls contingent on testifying against abuser/trafficker. Withholding services from individuals who have suffered the worst of human rights abuses is inhumane and only continues the abuse by giving a person no place to 

escape or heal. • Don’t use protection and safety as an excuse to build more and 

better services for these youth in detention or in the adult criminal 

justice system. We need to be focused, vigilant, and logical in our 

approach. The critical importance and effectiveness of communitybased peer counseling programs has been documented for a number 

of marginalized populations, including immigrants, refugees, and 

survivors of state-sponsored violence, homeless persons, drug-addicted persons, HIV-infected individuals, and Vietnam veterans.4

Client-created and survivor-run programs in which providers address the social, political, and economic contexts of clients’ lives are 

the most effective. 

• Victims of Violent Crimes resources need to be directed toward 

the rehabilitation efforts of these children and women. When they 

are not, we are clearly saying that these children and youth are 

consenting to their own sexual and physical abuse and that is a 

crime for which they should be punished and denied services. Most 

adult women are untreated children and trauma survivors. They 

have suffered decades of bad and often unethical treatment by professionals and the criminal justice system. • Focus on prevention. We need a sustained attention to all the 

social causes of prostitution, including but not limited to: gaping 

problems in our social response to child abuse within families and 

communities; extremes of poverty; outdated legal doctrines and 

practices; gender inequality; racial stratification; and a horrifying 

societal tolerance for the definition of prostituted children as without value or rights. 

• Provide all interventions in unison. Take bold steps to respond 

to the years of neglect. SAFE HOUSES need to be created because 

now. our streets are not safe and there is not the safety needed to 

respond to the crisis created by years of neglect 

• Look to the ‘‘True Experts’’ for guidance and answers. Survivors with proven track records have created the web of services 

and the network of support that serves thousands per year with little help. Tap into this network and other survivor run groups. 
76

We need to ask ourselves how we can begin the process of socializing men and boys to prevent them from believing that it is OK 

to purchase women and girls. 

We need to ask ourselves how we can stop cities, counties, states 

and countries from benefiting from prostitution while funding the 

needed services for women and girls who are trafficked, or involved 

in the sex industry, including prostitution. 

As a survivor-advocate turned service provider, I am often expected by my colleagues in government to endorse, or participate 

in finding new ways to criminalize or increase the incarceration 

time of children and adults, supposedly in the name of protection. 

My sense of ethics, my experiential understanding of the issues, 

and my respect for the lives of children and all human beings requires that I reject the idea that people who are abused are de 

facto criminals. 

All people deserve dignity and respect, and deserve to free of 

commercial sexual exploitation. The crime we need to confront and 

immediately redress is the betrayal and scapegoating of the most 

vulnerable members of our society—by some of the most powerful.
77

PREPARED STATEMENT OF FRANK BARNABA, PRESIDENT 

AND FOUNDER, THE PAUL & LISA PROGRAM 

I am here today representing Paul & Lisa to provide testimony 

on domestic human trafficking. The statistics are frightening but 

there are human stories behind every number. These are the tragic 

stories we see every day at The Paul & Lisa Program. 

Trafficking of human beings is on the rise despite anti-slavery 

conventions and American laws such as the Victims of Trafficking 

and Violence Protection Act of 2000. Victims are transported across 

the United States by ‘‘sex-for-profit’’ groups and then integrated 

into the commercial sex industry. Traffickers look for vulnerable 

children in malls, on the Internet, in fast food restaurants, in arcades—anywhere kids congregate. The Paul & Lisa Program remains committed to providing prevention and assistance to the victims but continued support from the private sector and government 

is still needed. 

A University of Pennsylvania study suggests there are 300 thousand children working as prostitutes in the United States. To understand and combat this issue I’d like to convey how the landscape of human trafficking has changed. 

The Paul and Lisa Program marked its 25th anniversary this 

year. A lot has changed in the last quarter century. We’re facing 

new demons now; armed with new weaponry. Twenty five years 

ago we didn’t have sexual predators entering our children’s bedrooms through the Internet; we didn’t have television programs 

with explicit sexual content aimed at younger viewers; we didn’t 

have violence in our music lyrics like we see in today’s popular rap 

music. Sexual predators today are bolder and smarter than they 

were 25 years ago. We have a proliferation of addictive drugs in 

our small towns like we’ve never seen before. 

Human trafficking is a huge and profitable business. What is 

sometimes called the ‘‘oldest profession’’ is now the most vicious. 

Much of the sex business is tied to organized crime and gangs. For 

the victims it’s a business of virtual slavery. And the victims are 

getting younger. In 1990 the average age of prostitutes we’d see at 

Paul & Lisa was 16. Now we see them as young as 9. 

The traffickers and pimps have become much more sophisticated. 

They’re making use of today’s technology by trolling for younger 

victims in Internet chat rooms. According to a 2001 Pew Study, 

89% of sexual solicitations were made in either chat rooms or via 

Instant Messages. 

Traffickers are savvy business people and they aren’t all men. 

Many are women. Pimps aren’t always the ‘‘gold chain-clad’’ older 

man we used to be able to identify. These days many traffickers 

look like an ordinary business person and some of them are by day. 

We’re also seeing a proliferation of younger pimps—as young as 16. 

Like any good businessperson, traffickers of today have multifaceted businesses. Many live in one house with their victims and 

provide a multitude of sex services ranging from prostitution, pornography, phone sex, drug dealing, escort services, massage parlors 

and nude dancing. 

Traffickers are getting harder to catch because often they don’t 

operate out of one city. Many take a van full of women and travel 

throughout the country. A typical starting point for recruitment is 
78

Vermont with its small towns. The victims are then taken to prostitute in the streets of Boston, Hartford, New York City, Atlantic 

City, Washington, DC and Atlanta. During the height of the Miami 

tourist season, the group travels south. Next they head west to Las 

Vegas to take advantage of the influx of tourists for major events 

like ‘‘Fight Nights.’’ This situation makes capturing the traffickers 

difficult but it also hinders the opportunity for rehabilitation for 

the victims. Rehab is a lengthy process. In years past we knew at 

which street corner to find our victim and could provide daily outreach and counseling. Now, we might only work with a victim for 

a few weeks before she is taken to another city by her pimp. 

Traffickers are no longer demons of the big city. They’re infiltrating the small towns of America. Seventy percent of the Paul & 

Lisa victims we see are from upper-middle class families living in 

rural areas. These young people are more vulnerable to exploitation 

and less ‘‘street-wise’’ than their city peers. The traffickers reel 

their victims in with drugs or promises of a more glamorous life. 

Once traffickers have a victim, they often threaten harm to the victims’ families if they attempt escape. Soon the victims become dependent on their pimps for the basic necessities of life: food, clothing, money. Sometimes they become emotionally tied to their captor, believing the victimizer is their only link to survival. Out of 

fear, they remain loyal to the person they fear most. Out of shame, 

they can’t go home. 

In rural areas the police, parents, hospital and social workers 

have had virtually no training on the danger signs of trafficking 

and the pimps know it. I interviewed one pimp who said, ‘‘Small 

town cops are easy. There aren’t many and they don’t even know 

we’re there.’’ We need to provide more education and training. 

Clearly, knowledge is power in this instance. Training should include mandatory safety education programs to begin at the Middle 

School level. These programs are entirely different than Sex Education programs. The curriculum would include training on safe 

internet usage, warning signs of a trafficker’s presence, the role of 

drugs in commercial exploitation and the consequences of running 

away. The Paul & Lisa Program currently has a model court program as well as a school education program. Both have been extremely well received. 

Our Paul & Lisa Street Outreach Team is headed by Lisa Grahn. 

On the streets Lisa and her team foster an environment of trust 

and provide support to many victims. Over the years we’ve brought 

hundreds of victims into the safety pipeline where they received 

much-needed social services. One of the problems we face, however, 

is a bureaucratic one. Social Service programs only provide immediate support to victims with ID. Victims of traffickers are usually 

always without a birth certificate or social security card. Without 

identification it sometimes takes months to provide medical, psychiatric or educational support to these victims. We need to provide 

support immediately if we’re going to make a difference. 

The landscape of trafficking has indeed changed. We cannot ignore the devastating consequences to our nation’s young people. 

With proper education and training we can reduce the number of 

victims. With programs like Paul & Lisa and access to social serv-
79

ices, there is hope for these victims to become stable, contributing 

members of their communities.

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