Traffickers Turn American Dream into Living Nightmare

Every Friday, the wood benches in a windowless Queens courtroom are packed with women arrested for prostitution. In 2016, 77 percent of these women arraigned in Human Trafficking Intervention Court were Asian.

Chinese nationals are heavily targeted by traffickers who leverage their immigration status and family debt owed to recruiters. Often lured here by false promises of lucrative job opportunities and education, the women end up in massage parlors, trading sex for the unrealized American dream.

Catherine Carbonaro, a public defender with the Legal Aid Society’s Exploitation Intervention Project (EIP), represents women in Queens charged with prostitution-related crimes and sex-trafficking cases in New York City. “In Queens, vice [officers]frequently raid massage parlors and arrest the workers for unlicensed massage while letting the buyers go,” she said.

Carbonaro’s experience on the front lines affirms the data collected by the Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) on women arraigned in Queens for prostitution. The charge EDN 6512 covers many professions including unlicensed massage but if you couple it with PL 230, the charge for prostitution, the picture becomes clearer and the numbers are staggering compared to other boroughs. The number of women arrested for sex crimes in Queens is more than 14 times greater than all of the other boroughs combined.

Raids on massage parlors in broad daylight call into question the city’s claims to be shifting its policing strategy towards perpetrators and buyers. In February, Police Commissioner James O’Neill held a press conference announcing NYPD’s Vice Enforcement Unit allocated additional resources and manpower to arresting johns, pimps and traffickers to combat human trafficking.

“The NYPD said they are going to stop arresting our clients and then that weekend and the next weekend and the next the arrest numbers were really high. It was just like any old weekend” said Carbonaro.

Carbonaro asserts that despite what the NYPD wants the public to think, the reality is “all these women are being picked up like animals. Nobody is concerned about the men who buy sex.”

Christine Edward is Assistant Deputy Counsel for Human Trafficking Intervention Court (HTIC), a diversion court for misdemeanor prostitution-related charges including unlicensed massage. She confirmed that those arrested for prostitution in Queens are predominantly Asian women. However, she cautions against drawing conclusions. “I’m not sure how reliable police officers are at documenting ethnicity at the time of arrest, said Edward. “Asian also covers an abundance of ethnic groups.”

Yet Carbonaro knows firsthand that most of her clients are Chinese foreign nationals. “They are easy targets,” said Carbonaro. “They often don’t speak any English and many do not have valid visas.”

Susan Liu runs the anti-trafficking program for Garden of Hope (GOH), a nonprofit serving victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking. Liu says 99 percent of the women referred to GOH by HTIC are from Mainland China and about 30% make it known that they were trafficked.

“Not all of them disclose what has happened to them because nobody wants to tell that they have to sell their bodies for money,” explains Liu. “Most of these women don’t even know what being trafficked means.”

Liu said that in some cases the recruiters in China are part of a trafficking ring. When the women arrive in the United States, the person picking them up at the airport is the trafficker and the grooming process begins.

“Many of these women believe the trafficker is their friend. That they are part of a family and the trafficker is just trying to help them.”

This confused relationship with the trafficker means victims are unlikely to report their abuse or collaborate with police. So when the police arrest the buyers, pimps and traffickers, they are likely to be released because their victims aren’t providing evidence to hold them, while the women are booked.

“The women don’t want to cause trouble. They may even know the trafficker’s children and feel bad because they need the money,” says Liu.

Out of 1,400 cases handled by Carbonaro and her colleagues since 2011, 35 percent of their clients reported having been trafficked into sex work and 20 percent were currently being trafficked. “When women are arrested and they are being victimized [by traffickers] it’s not like they tell the cops and they get help,” said Carbonaro. In fact, many of EIP’s clients say that the police never even bring up trafficking before or after they are arrested.

The NYPD says it has plans to provide training for officers in identifying victims of trafficking but meanwhile how these women report being treated while in police custody weighs heavily on Liu, “I could just cry. It’s unbearable to think about.”

“I had a client who was disabled from the abuse she received throughout the years. She went to get her disability at New York City’s Human Resources Administration and she was shooed away. The person who saw her said, ‘You’re telling me you worked for an employer for over a decade and never got paid? You shouldn’t tell people that because they are going to think your head isn’t right.’”

Liu explains that there is a gap between Human Trafficking Intervention Court and law enforcement or any public agency that associates with her clients, “There isn’t much understanding or compassion outside of HTIC,” she said.

To aid in preventing trafficking victims from further victimization by the criminal justice system, New York implemented the country’s first HTIC. The purpose of this court is not to resolve human trafficking, but to prevent the women arrested for prostitution-related crimes from being treated like criminals and connecting them to services such as counseling.

A Day in Trafficking Court

“What a cheerful color you are wearing. It makes me smile. We could use some cheer in this windowless courtroom” said presiding Judge Toko Serita to a defendant wearing a smart yellow trench coat during HTIC in Queens. She was recently arrested during a massage parlor sting and relied on a translator to communicate with the judge.

Judge Serita said in a New York Times article that “the trafficking court is a Catch-22: For people to feel less like criminals, they must first go through the criminal justice system.”

Carbonaro agrees this is a conundrum. “No one is really getting help from the police. We don’t want these women arrested. We don’t want them coming through the system. Whether they are trafficked or not, coming through the criminal justice system is never going to help them,” says Carbonaro.

Mary Cerpas is a member of the NY Anti-Trafficking Network (NYATN) and the Project Free Anti-Human Trafficking Manager for Womankind, a pan-Asian agency that serves both labor exploitation and sex-trafficked survivors. She agrees policing unlicensed massage doesn’t address the real problem and questions.

“Is the media’s emphasis on the massage parlors leading to hyper vigilance from the community? The NYPD says they are not targeting the women in Queens massage parlors, but responding to increasing community complaints. So it’s sort of chicken-and-egg scenario.”

This year there has been a dramatic uptick in arrests for unlicensed massage and prostitution in Brooklyn. Unlike in Flushing where massage parlors are in plain site, “in Brooklyn this activity is much more hidden,” said Liu. “So the police must be making it a priority.” While the increase in arrests could look like a shift in crime, service providers are skeptical.

​Coerced into the work or not, Cerpas says the women they serve are often abused physically and financially by their trafficker or their employer. So a criminal record can only do more harm than good for one of New York City’s most marginalized population. Instead, “The focus for these women needs to be on access to work that pays living wages,” said Cerpas.