Caught in Traffic
By John Allen
Jessica Sewall Ebbeler ’03 had been in Africa less than a month
before she had her first opportunity to buy a human being.
She was staying at the YMCA in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, and like many YMCAs, it offered a temporary home in an area that was both inexpensive and crime-ridden. Still, Ebbeler felt safe enough in the neighborhood, even though, with her blond hair, fair skin, and Midwestern accent, she was obviously not a local. Most people in Lagos, she maintains, are very friendly. “I was walking down the street one morning,” she says, “and I saw a man with a little baby, and I told him I thought she was beautiful. He was standing a few yards off, but he called out hello and came over. He told me that the baby’s mother was dead and that he couldn’t take care of her on his own. And then he asked me if I would take her — for a price.”
Jessica Sewall Ebbeler ’03 had been in Africa less than a month
before she had her first opportunity to buy a human being.
She was staying at the YMCA in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, and like many YMCAs, it offered a temporary home in an area that was both inexpensive and crime-ridden. Still, Ebbeler felt safe enough in the neighborhood, even though, with her blond hair, fair skin, and Midwestern accent, she was obviously not a local. Most people in Lagos, she maintains, are very friendly. “I was walking down the street one morning,” she says, “and I saw a man with a little baby, and I told him I thought she was beautiful. He was standing a few yards off, but he called out hello and came over. He told me that the baby’s mother was dead and that he couldn’t take care of her on his own. And then he asked me if I would take her — for a price.”
This was a problem. Not so much because buying a child is illegal — Ebbeler had few qualms with violating the letter of the law, when the moment called for it. She’d bribed her first police officer on day three in Nigeria, after the machine-gun-toting cop had threatened to impound the car that she and two colleagues were driving. The law wasn’t the problem — her mission was. She’d gone to Africa specifically to fight trafficking in humanity, not to take part in it. But faced with an actual person offering to sell another, she froze.
“I bolted,” she says. With a polite No, thank you, she turned and walked away as quickly as she could. It was not, she reflects now, her most shining moment — though she’s far from certain of what a better course would have been.
“Maybe I should have accepted the baby,” she says. “I could have taken her to some service so that she wouldn’t have been with a guy who was trying to pawn her off on strangers. On the other hand, I don’t even know if his story was true — or if the baby was even his. I guess I kind of freaked out. I’m a little ashamed of that.”
Uncertainty seems to be the watchword when it comes to the crime of human trafficking — defined by the United Nations as the taking, transferring, or receiving of people by force or fraud for purposes of exploitation, whether sexual, financial, or in some other manner. The only thing people agree about is that it’s terrible. Congress calls it “an evil requiring concerted and vigorous action.” President George Bush has declared it “a form of modernday slavery” and says that “future generations will not excuse those who turn a blind eye to it.”
“I bolted,” she says. With a polite No, thank you, she turned and walked away as quickly as she could. It was not, she reflects now, her most shining moment — though she’s far from certain of what a better course would have been.
“Maybe I should have accepted the baby,” she says. “I could have taken her to some service so that she wouldn’t have been with a guy who was trying to pawn her off on strangers. On the other hand, I don’t even know if his story was true — or if the baby was even his. I guess I kind of freaked out. I’m a little ashamed of that.”
Uncertainty seems to be the watchword when it comes to the crime of human trafficking — defined by the United Nations as the taking, transferring, or receiving of people by force or fraud for purposes of exploitation, whether sexual, financial, or in some other manner. The only thing people agree about is that it’s terrible. Congress calls it “an evil requiring concerted and vigorous action.” President George Bush has declared it “a form of modernday slavery” and says that “future generations will not excuse those who turn a blind eye to it.”
According to a 2006 report from the U.S. State Department, between 600,000 and 800,000 people are taken across international borders against their will each year, and “these numbers do not include the millions of victims around the world who are trafficked within their own national borders.” Some 80 percent of those victims are female; as many as half of them are children. In all, the State Department estimates that there are somewhere between 4 million and 27 million people in the world who are currently enslaved.
But no one really knows for certain. Not only are traffickers considered criminals, but quite often, so are their victims. They may be seen as undocumented migrant laborers or illegal aliens or one of the many euphemisms that often veil prostitution: mail-order brides from Russia, massagy girls in Japan, jinateras in Cuba. With both perpetrators and victims suspicious of authority, the crime is almost impossible to gauge in any way.
But though accurate numbers are hard to come by, there’s a growing perception, both in the United States and abroad, that human trafficking is on the rise, due perhaps to an increasingly globalized economy, or rising sophistication in organized crime, or the crumbling structure of poor states — or perhaps all three. In recent years, various organizations have made efforts to crack down on trafficking. Congress passed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act in 2000, and the same year, the UN adopted the Palermo Protocols, which include an agreement to prevent, suppress, and punish trafficking in persons. Yet the State Department’s numbers are no lower than the ones Congress cited seven years ago, indicating that these changes have had little effect.
But no one really knows for certain. Not only are traffickers considered criminals, but quite often, so are their victims. They may be seen as undocumented migrant laborers or illegal aliens or one of the many euphemisms that often veil prostitution: mail-order brides from Russia, massagy girls in Japan, jinateras in Cuba. With both perpetrators and victims suspicious of authority, the crime is almost impossible to gauge in any way.
But though accurate numbers are hard to come by, there’s a growing perception, both in the United States and abroad, that human trafficking is on the rise, due perhaps to an increasingly globalized economy, or rising sophistication in organized crime, or the crumbling structure of poor states — or perhaps all three. In recent years, various organizations have made efforts to crack down on trafficking. Congress passed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act in 2000, and the same year, the UN adopted the Palermo Protocols, which include an agreement to prevent, suppress, and punish trafficking in persons. Yet the State Department’s numbers are no lower than the ones Congress cited seven years ago, indicating that these changes have had little effect.
Still, Ebbeler and many like her are determined to do what they can to fight trafficking. The individuals introduced here aren’t trying to solve the whole problem. Rather, each is trying to eliminate a different element of uncertainty in the hope of creating a world where babies aren’t sold on street corners.
Victim Recovery
Jessica Sewall Ebbeler
For Jessica Sewall Ebbeler, the greatest challenge of trafficking lies in helping its victims find a path to recovery. “They’ve lost their connections to family, education, community, and livelihood,” she says. “It’s almost impossible for them to reintegrate to society.”
But when she went to Africa in the summer of 2006, she wasn’t aiming to reintegrate anyone. Instead, her official goals were quite modest. With her UW degree in international relations and political science, and as a graduate student at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute, she took a job with a Washington-based human-rights organization called the Advocacy Project. That organization gave her the assignment of serving as a combination intern, adviser, and advocate for WOCON, the Women’s Consortium of Nigeria, which tries to educate and rehabilitate the victims of trafficking. “My job was to help with their public relations,” she says. “I was supposed to prepare press releases, set up outreach programs, and create a Web site to help them get their message out.”
Ebbeler’s work for the Advocacy Project ran into problems almost immediately. With only three employees to organize its efforts in more than twenty countries, the Advocacy Project has extremely limited resources, and so Ebbeler’s pre-trip preparations were “pretty short and sweet, as far as training goes,” she says.
As English is Nigeria’s official language, she’d learned none of the local tongues — of which there are more than five hundred. Nor was she prepared for the difficulties of setting up a Web site in a country where Internet service is spotty at best, and where there are only about 5 million Internet users, less than 4 percent of the population.
For Jessica Sewall Ebbeler, the greatest challenge of trafficking lies in helping its victims find a path to recovery. “They’ve lost their connections to family, education, community, and livelihood,” she says. “It’s almost impossible for them to reintegrate to society.”
But when she went to Africa in the summer of 2006, she wasn’t aiming to reintegrate anyone. Instead, her official goals were quite modest. With her UW degree in international relations and political science, and as a graduate student at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute, she took a job with a Washington-based human-rights organization called the Advocacy Project. That organization gave her the assignment of serving as a combination intern, adviser, and advocate for WOCON, the Women’s Consortium of Nigeria, which tries to educate and rehabilitate the victims of trafficking. “My job was to help with their public relations,” she says. “I was supposed to prepare press releases, set up outreach programs, and create a Web site to help them get their message out.”
Ebbeler’s work for the Advocacy Project ran into problems almost immediately. With only three employees to organize its efforts in more than twenty countries, the Advocacy Project has extremely limited resources, and so Ebbeler’s pre-trip preparations were “pretty short and sweet, as far as training goes,” she says.
As English is Nigeria’s official language, she’d learned none of the local tongues — of which there are more than five hundred. Nor was she prepared for the difficulties of setting up a Web site in a country where Internet service is spotty at best, and where there are only about 5 million Internet users, less than 4 percent of the population.
But the Advocacy Project did give her contacts with WOCON and with the National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons (NAPTIP), the governmental group that operates Nigeria’s six shelters for trafficking victims.
Ebbeler began talking with victims, who, she says, were more open with her than they were with NAPTIP’s employees. “The counselors didn’t do much actual counseling,” she says. “It was more like babysitting. They just let the girls watch TV. One [counselor] actually told me that [the victims’] problem was that they were overconfident and needed to be tamed.”
As she listened, she began to collect trafficking narratives. She heard the stories of how victims were transported to Europe — driven north across the Sahara desert to Morocco, where small boats would carry them across the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain. There, if they were spotted by police or customs or immigration officials, they might be arrested, or their boats might be driven back to Africa.
If traffickers successfully evaded or bribed officials, they could then easily move their human cargo across Europe’s open borders. The victims Ebbeler spoke with had been found not just in Spain but also in Italy, Germany, and Denmark.
Some might be placed under the control of a family or a farm or — most often — a pimp. And then the victims were lost to the world, knowing that any attempt to appeal to public authority would likely end in their arrest and deportation.
Ebbeler began talking with victims, who, she says, were more open with her than they were with NAPTIP’s employees. “The counselors didn’t do much actual counseling,” she says. “It was more like babysitting. They just let the girls watch TV. One [counselor] actually told me that [the victims’] problem was that they were overconfident and needed to be tamed.”
As she listened, she began to collect trafficking narratives. She heard the stories of how victims were transported to Europe — driven north across the Sahara desert to Morocco, where small boats would carry them across the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain. There, if they were spotted by police or customs or immigration officials, they might be arrested, or their boats might be driven back to Africa.
If traffickers successfully evaded or bribed officials, they could then easily move their human cargo across Europe’s open borders. The victims Ebbeler spoke with had been found not just in Spain but also in Italy, Germany, and Denmark.
Some might be placed under the control of a family or a farm or — most often — a pimp. And then the victims were lost to the world, knowing that any attempt to appeal to public authority would likely end in their arrest and deportation.
“One woman I spoke with was held in Turin [Italy] for ten years,” Ebbeler says. “When she arrived, she was basically given a short miniskirt and a bra and told to go out on the street and bring in at least $100 a day. If she didn’t bring that money back, she would be beaten and her family back in Nigeria was threatened — her mother actually died of a heart attack after one of these attacks.”
Told that she would make more money if she worked without condoms, the woman eventually contracted HIV, and when she was deported back to Nigeria in 2004, her family would have nothing to do with her.
“It’s very challenging to do rehabilitation with victims,” says Ebbeler. “They’ve suffered a great deal, and they’re afraid of the consequences of talking to people about what’s happened to them.”
But such rehabilitation is vital if victims are to be kept from falling into the hands of traffickers again. This was made clear to Ebbeler by a twenty three-year-old woman who didn’t want her help at all.
Arrested on her first attempt to get to Europe, she was determined to sell herself to traffickers again. When Ebbeler asked her what she hoped to do, the woman indicated that her only plan was to return to prostitution.
“I’m a woman,” she told Ebbeler. “What do you expect?”
Told that she would make more money if she worked without condoms, the woman eventually contracted HIV, and when she was deported back to Nigeria in 2004, her family would have nothing to do with her.
“It’s very challenging to do rehabilitation with victims,” says Ebbeler. “They’ve suffered a great deal, and they’re afraid of the consequences of talking to people about what’s happened to them.”
But such rehabilitation is vital if victims are to be kept from falling into the hands of traffickers again. This was made clear to Ebbeler by a twenty three-year-old woman who didn’t want her help at all.
Arrested on her first attempt to get to Europe, she was determined to sell herself to traffickers again. When Ebbeler asked her what she hoped to do, the woman indicated that her only plan was to return to prostitution.
“I’m a woman,” she told Ebbeler. “What do you expect?”
Counting Questions
Laura Antuono
“A major obstacle [in combating human trafficking] is in finding a way to quantify it,” says Laura Antuono MA’06. “There’s no universal standard record. To even estimate, you’ve got to sift through the different reporting systems of different governments and nongovernmental organizations.”
For Antuono, this uncertainty poses a danger — a threat that trafficking won’t be taken seriously. She’s spent much of her short professional life researching trafficking, and for her, the first step in the fight is coming up with accurate numbers.
Credibility is in short supply when it comes to measuring the modern slave trade. “Due to its clandestine nature,” reports the UN’s Global Programme Against Trafficking in Human Beings, “accurate statistics on the magnitude of the human trafficking problem at any level are elusive and unreliable.”
The State Department’s estimates on the total number of victims — from as low as 4 million to as high as 27 million — illustrate how difficult it is to find reliable statistics. With a range so broad, how can one believe the numbers at all?
Credibility, Antuono knows, is a key to making people understand the importance of the trafficking problem. A former employee of the UN’s Office for Project Services, she saw her first victims of human trafficking while researching labor rights in Serbia in the aftermath of the Kosovo conflict.
While driving down the street in a town south of Belgrade, Antuono and a co-worker spotted a woman on a street corner. Antuono, who had never seen a prostitute, wondered aloud if that was what she was. Her colleague told her no, not a “normal prostitute,” Antuono says — she was a slave. “I said I’d never heard of anything so horrible. My coworker just kind of rolled her eyes as though I’d had my head in the clouds not to see this.”
“A major obstacle [in combating human trafficking] is in finding a way to quantify it,” says Laura Antuono MA’06. “There’s no universal standard record. To even estimate, you’ve got to sift through the different reporting systems of different governments and nongovernmental organizations.”
For Antuono, this uncertainty poses a danger — a threat that trafficking won’t be taken seriously. She’s spent much of her short professional life researching trafficking, and for her, the first step in the fight is coming up with accurate numbers.
Credibility is in short supply when it comes to measuring the modern slave trade. “Due to its clandestine nature,” reports the UN’s Global Programme Against Trafficking in Human Beings, “accurate statistics on the magnitude of the human trafficking problem at any level are elusive and unreliable.”
The State Department’s estimates on the total number of victims — from as low as 4 million to as high as 27 million — illustrate how difficult it is to find reliable statistics. With a range so broad, how can one believe the numbers at all?
Credibility, Antuono knows, is a key to making people understand the importance of the trafficking problem. A former employee of the UN’s Office for Project Services, she saw her first victims of human trafficking while researching labor rights in Serbia in the aftermath of the Kosovo conflict.
While driving down the street in a town south of Belgrade, Antuono and a co-worker spotted a woman on a street corner. Antuono, who had never seen a prostitute, wondered aloud if that was what she was. Her colleague told her no, not a “normal prostitute,” Antuono says — she was a slave. “I said I’d never heard of anything so horrible. My coworker just kind of rolled her eyes as though I’d had my head in the clouds not to see this.”
When she returned to the United States, Antuono was determined to do something to fight the slave trade. She entered the La Follette School of Public Affairs, working toward a degree in international public affairs. In 2005, she secured an internship at the State Department office that is tasked with producing annual Trafficking in Persons Reports; that year’s report came out shortly before Antuono began her work, and she was on staff while numbers were being compiled for the 2006 report, which came out last summer. Her experiences there provided material for an article she’s preparing on the methods of gathering statistics on trafficking.
“I started trying to chart it at one point, making ticks on a big map of the world for each origin country and destination country, but eventually I gave up,” says Antuono. “It seemed aimless. There were no discernible patterns — victims were coming from just about everywhere and being sent everywhere.”
That lack of clarity has undermined the ability of people like Antuono to raise public attention about trafficking. Now a political analyst in another branch of government, she continues to agitate for action.
“People wonder why I make such a big deal about trafficking when there are other problems to face,” Antuono says. “My co-workers talk about terrorism, war, and drug trafficking, and they don’t give a high priority to human trafficking. They think I’m a bit obsessed. And I guess they’re right.”
“I started trying to chart it at one point, making ticks on a big map of the world for each origin country and destination country, but eventually I gave up,” says Antuono. “It seemed aimless. There were no discernible patterns — victims were coming from just about everywhere and being sent everywhere.”
That lack of clarity has undermined the ability of people like Antuono to raise public attention about trafficking. Now a political analyst in another branch of government, she continues to agitate for action.
“People wonder why I make such a big deal about trafficking when there are other problems to face,” Antuono says. “My co-workers talk about terrorism, war, and drug trafficking, and they don’t give a high priority to human trafficking. They think I’m a bit obsessed. And I guess they’re right.”
Defining the Problem
Araceli Alonso
Accurate numbers are so difficult to come by in part because it can be hard to define exactly when a person is a victim and when one isn’t. Sexual exploitation — such as Laura Antuono saw in Serbia and Jessica Sewall Ebbeler heard about in Nigeria — is a particularly difficult field. Are prostitutes, for instance, free-acting sex workers, or are they trafficking victims?
For Antuono, trained at the State Department, the answer is straightforward.
“There are those who say that women have a right to work in prostitution,” she says. “They see the key problem as one of proper government oversight — that if prostitution is well-regulated to keep it free from criminal influence, then trafficking can be fought separately. But even in places where prostitution is legal and regulated, such as the Netherlands, traffickers do a booming business supplying sex workers. Our government’s position is that prostitution and trafficking are inherently linked, and I identify with that.”
In such a vision, no anti-trafficking program can be effective if it condones prostitution. But others feel there’s room to see nuances.
“In theory it’s quite simple,” says Araceli Alonso, a lecturer in the women’s studies department. “Prostitution is work, and sexual trafficking is slavery. The former implies consent, freedom of choice. The latter doesn’t.”
Properly defining the problem, Alonso believes, is the first step in solving it — and she’s hoping to teach UW students to carefully consider that definition. She created a course in sex trafficking in the summer of 2006, and it has been renewed for the summer of 2007.
Accurate numbers are so difficult to come by in part because it can be hard to define exactly when a person is a victim and when one isn’t. Sexual exploitation — such as Laura Antuono saw in Serbia and Jessica Sewall Ebbeler heard about in Nigeria — is a particularly difficult field. Are prostitutes, for instance, free-acting sex workers, or are they trafficking victims?
For Antuono, trained at the State Department, the answer is straightforward.
“There are those who say that women have a right to work in prostitution,” she says. “They see the key problem as one of proper government oversight — that if prostitution is well-regulated to keep it free from criminal influence, then trafficking can be fought separately. But even in places where prostitution is legal and regulated, such as the Netherlands, traffickers do a booming business supplying sex workers. Our government’s position is that prostitution and trafficking are inherently linked, and I identify with that.”
In such a vision, no anti-trafficking program can be effective if it condones prostitution. But others feel there’s room to see nuances.
“In theory it’s quite simple,” says Araceli Alonso, a lecturer in the women’s studies department. “Prostitution is work, and sexual trafficking is slavery. The former implies consent, freedom of choice. The latter doesn’t.”
Properly defining the problem, Alonso believes, is the first step in solving it — and she’s hoping to teach UW students to carefully consider that definition. She created a course in sex trafficking in the summer of 2006, and it has been renewed for the summer of 2007.
Alonso’s interest in trafficking, and in the distinction between free and enslaved prostitution, began during research she conducted in Cuba. An anthropologist by training, Alonso went there to study how women’s roles and conditions had changed during the five decades of Fidel Castro’s rule. One of the most striking things she noticed was how common prostitution was, even though it was nominally illegal.
“Castro’s government had held up prostitution as a symbol of the corruption of capitalism, but I was surprised at how widespread it was,” she says. “Cuba has a thriving sex tourism industry, and some of the women I worked with were highly qualified professionals, and yet they were engaging in prostitution to supplement their income.”
In some ways, her experience in Cuba helped form her view that prostitution, “when it doesn’t involve or imply force or slavery,” ought not to be defined as trafficking, and she attempted to impress that distinction on her students.
However, Alonso’s experience in Cuba also served to open her eyes to the difficulties of the issue. While the distinction between prostitution as a freely chosen profession and sexual slavery may be clear in a classroom setting, in the real world, it’s far more cloudy.
“A woman may become a prostitute by her own free will, then over time find herself bound by debts or by violence into a state of slavery,” she says. “The whole issue is very complex.”
“Castro’s government had held up prostitution as a symbol of the corruption of capitalism, but I was surprised at how widespread it was,” she says. “Cuba has a thriving sex tourism industry, and some of the women I worked with were highly qualified professionals, and yet they were engaging in prostitution to supplement their income.”
In some ways, her experience in Cuba helped form her view that prostitution, “when it doesn’t involve or imply force or slavery,” ought not to be defined as trafficking, and she attempted to impress that distinction on her students.
However, Alonso’s experience in Cuba also served to open her eyes to the difficulties of the issue. While the distinction between prostitution as a freely chosen profession and sexual slavery may be clear in a classroom setting, in the real world, it’s far more cloudy.
“A woman may become a prostitute by her own free will, then over time find herself bound by debts or by violence into a state of slavery,” she says. “The whole issue is very complex.”
Eyes and Ears
Shihoko Fujiwara
Nowhere is the confusion over definitions more profound than in Japan, where the adult entertainment industry is vast, including not only pornography, sex shops, and nominally illegal prostitution, but also “hostesses” — women employed in bars to pour drinks, make conversation, and occasionally date customers. Such dates may or may not include sex in one form or another — and the choice doesn’t always belong to the hostess.
According to the International Labour Office, Japan’s adult-entertainment industry accounts for as much as 10 trillion yen ($84 billion) a year.
“By some estimates, as many as a quarter of the women in Japan between the ages of twenty and twenty-four have worked or currently work in the adult-entertainment industry,”says Shihoko Fujiwara ’03, director of the Japanese Campaign Against Trafficking. It’s a spectacular — and not entirely credible — number. But official documentation makes it clear that Japan is a destination for adult-entertainment workers. As recently as 2004, more than 82,000 women from the Philippines alone were granted “entertainer visas,” which enabled them to work in Japan as hostesses.
Nowhere is the confusion over definitions more profound than in Japan, where the adult entertainment industry is vast, including not only pornography, sex shops, and nominally illegal prostitution, but also “hostesses” — women employed in bars to pour drinks, make conversation, and occasionally date customers. Such dates may or may not include sex in one form or another — and the choice doesn’t always belong to the hostess.
According to the International Labour Office, Japan’s adult-entertainment industry accounts for as much as 10 trillion yen ($84 billion) a year.
“By some estimates, as many as a quarter of the women in Japan between the ages of twenty and twenty-four have worked or currently work in the adult-entertainment industry,”says Shihoko Fujiwara ’03, director of the Japanese Campaign Against Trafficking. It’s a spectacular — and not entirely credible — number. But official documentation makes it clear that Japan is a destination for adult-entertainment workers. As recently as 2004, more than 82,000 women from the Philippines alone were granted “entertainer visas,” which enabled them to work in Japan as hostesses.
“Some of the women know what they’re getting into,” Fujiwara says. “But others think they’re coming to be singers. They often end up forced into prostitution.”
For her, the most important way to fight human trafficking is to build public awareness of the practice and its victims so that her countrymen will see and hear its effects.
A native of Tokyo, Fujiwara grew up in a culture that, she says, feels an equal obsession and social distaste for sex, a combination that feeds the nation’s thriving trade in human flesh.
“Sexual issues and gender issues are taboo here,” Fujiwara says. “No one talks about them, but sex is a huge part of the entertainment industry. Yet when I was growing up, I didn’t even notice it — I couldn’t see it clearly until after I’d left.”
At the age of seventeen, Fujiwara came to the United States for an education at the UW, where she earned a degree in international studies. On her occasional returns, she would notice the prevalence of sex shops and brothels — businesses she had seen many times but never recognized for what they were. “As a woman,” she says, “it was shocking to me, and I felt ashamed that I hadn’t seen it.”
For her, the most important way to fight human trafficking is to build public awareness of the practice and its victims so that her countrymen will see and hear its effects.
A native of Tokyo, Fujiwara grew up in a culture that, she says, feels an equal obsession and social distaste for sex, a combination that feeds the nation’s thriving trade in human flesh.
“Sexual issues and gender issues are taboo here,” Fujiwara says. “No one talks about them, but sex is a huge part of the entertainment industry. Yet when I was growing up, I didn’t even notice it — I couldn’t see it clearly until after I’d left.”
At the age of seventeen, Fujiwara came to the United States for an education at the UW, where she earned a degree in international studies. On her occasional returns, she would notice the prevalence of sex shops and brothels — businesses she had seen many times but never recognized for what they were. “As a woman,” she says, “it was shocking to me, and I felt ashamed that I hadn’t seen it.”
That sense of shame is part of what drove her to seek a job with the Polaris Project, a Washington-based organization devoted to combating human trafficking. In 2004, she returned to Tokyo to launch Polaris’s first overseas initiative, the Japanese Campaign Against Trafficking. Under Fujiwara’s leadership, the campaign has launched a multilingual hotline for victims, providing counseling in Japanese, Korean, Thai, Chinese, Tagalog, and English; it’s provided training for police and social service workers to help them recognize and aid victims of trafficking; and it’s launched a public awareness campaign to encourage Japanese citizens to see the harm that trafficking does.
And yet, she says, it’s been difficult to make progress in altering perceptions. Some 90 percent of the calls the hotline receives are from women involved in the sex industry, which sets her organization in opposition to the Japanese reticence to discuss sexual matters. As her organization is a nonprofit and depends on charitable donations for its ability to provide service to victims, it’s had a hard time meeting its potential. So far, she estimates that the hotlines have taken about two hundred calls.
“It’s been very difficult,” she says. “Most of our supporters have been from foreign countries. It’s a sensitive issue, and sometimes it takes a foreigner to see a Japanese problem.”
Despite the difficulty, Fujiwara feels that it’s important to keep fighting. “A lot of women my age say they can’t stop [sex trafficking], because in Japan, we have a huge demand for sex,” she says, and she notes that her country has few restrictions on its sex industry.
“Exploiting women and children through the sex industry is a low-risk, high-profit way of making business,” says Fujiwara. “But I don’t want my children to grow up seeing violence and sex workers everywhere.”
And yet, she says, it’s been difficult to make progress in altering perceptions. Some 90 percent of the calls the hotline receives are from women involved in the sex industry, which sets her organization in opposition to the Japanese reticence to discuss sexual matters. As her organization is a nonprofit and depends on charitable donations for its ability to provide service to victims, it’s had a hard time meeting its potential. So far, she estimates that the hotlines have taken about two hundred calls.
“It’s been very difficult,” she says. “Most of our supporters have been from foreign countries. It’s a sensitive issue, and sometimes it takes a foreigner to see a Japanese problem.”
Despite the difficulty, Fujiwara feels that it’s important to keep fighting. “A lot of women my age say they can’t stop [sex trafficking], because in Japan, we have a huge demand for sex,” she says, and she notes that her country has few restrictions on its sex industry.
“Exploiting women and children through the sex industry is a low-risk, high-profit way of making business,” says Fujiwara. “But I don’t want my children to grow up seeing violence and sex workers everywhere.”
