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Strategic linking of marriage brokers with human trafficking rings aids in gaining bipartisan support for a law intent on eliminating international Matchmaking companies and websites”. The Human Trafficking Lifetime movie series is an ideal venue for promoting this campaign
I wonder if anybody is familiar Congressional Testimony of Ms. Suzanne Jackson that established the relationship between "Mail-order-bride" industry and sex trafficking. This document was offered in Encounters Federal trial case as a proof that Encounters as part of this industry needs to be convicted.
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
HUMAN TRAFFICKING ISSUES - MS. SUZANNE JACKSON
Statement of Ms. Suzanne Jackson Associate Professor of Clinical Law George
Washington University Law School Washington, DC Committee on Senate Foreign
Relations
July 13, 2004
Thank you to Senator Brownback and to the rest of the Committee for the opportunity
to testify today. My name is Suzanne Jackson, and I am an Associate Professor of
Clinical Law at George Washington Law School. Before becoming a law professor, I
worked as an attorney here in the District of Columbia, representing immigrants and
refugees seeking to escape abusive relationships. Most of my clients did not speak
much English, and had to overcome many obstacles before they could be free of the
threat of domestic violence. Two of my clients had met their husbands through "mailorder
bride" companies, and it is because of the particular hardships they endured
within the legal system that I began to research the relationship between the "
mailorder
bride" industry and trafficking in women. The legal landscape has, on the
whole, improved significantly since those days, thanks in great part to the work of
this Committee in conducting hearings on and shaping the Trafficking Victims
Protection Act of 2000.
I will refer to the companies as international matchmaking organizations or IMOs
rather than "mail-order bride" agencies, even though the term IMO inaccurately
conveys gender neutrality and a "match" or some level of equality between the
parties. Nothing could be further from the truth: IMOs exist for the benefit of
their paying customers: men 1 from wealthy nations, including the United States,
Japan and Germany, who want access to women who, most often, have neither economic
nor social power. Marketing strategies used by IMOs advertise women as generic to
their ethnicity - all Russian women are X, all Asian women are Y, all Latinas are Z
- and emphasize that the women they offer (women who are in fact hoping to leave
their home countries) will all be "home-oriented" and "traditional" wives. Some
companies guarantee women's availability, others guarantee marriage within a year of
subscribing to their service, one even allows a man to remove a woman from the
website to prevent competition during a courtship: 'Select One, She's Yours,"
promises this company.
IMOs have been linked to criminal trafficking in several ways[/u].
They can be nothing
more than fronts for criminal trafficking organizations, in which adults and girls
are offered to the public as brides but sold privately into prostitution, forced
into marriage (including marriages to men who then prostitute them),3 or held in
domestic slavery.
Police in the United Kingdom found organized criminal gangs from Russia, the former
Soviet Union and the Balkans using the Internet to advertise women for sale to
brothels in Western Europe and also to men as"internet brides."4 A study by Global
Survival Network (GSN) found that
most mail-order bride agencies in Russia have
expanded their activities to include trafficking for prostitution. European
embassies have reported that a number of matchmaking agencies conceal organized
prostitution rings victimizing newly-arrived Filipina women. Asian groups have used
fiancee visas and marriage with a so-called "jockey" (an escort bringing women
across the U.S. border) to bring women into the U.S. for purposes of prostitution;5
jockeys have even included U.S. military personnel posted abroad.
IMOs are almost completely unregulated,
advertise minors for marriage, and fail to
screen their male clients for criminal histories. IMO practices exacerbate problems
with false expectations: they require women to complete long questionnaires asking
intrusive personal questions, encouraging disclosure by implying or stating that
false answers could lead to cancellation of any ensuing immigration benefits. Women
are also subjected to medical and background checks, and may assume that
participating men are evaluated with the same level of scrutiny. Women from other
countries often assume that all governmental agencies in the United States - a
country with extraordinary resources and technology - have access to information
held by other agencies, that facts asserted in applications for immigration benefits
would be checked, and that a man who had been convicted of serious violent crimes
would not be permitted to bring a spouse or fiancee into the U.S. from abroad. The
industry does nothing, however, to screen male customers: no detailed questionnaire,
no check for a criminal record for spousal or child abuse, no formal inquiry as to
whether men are already married. Until recently, the U.S. government also did not
conduct these inquiries.
An IMO can also be a useful tool of, and sometimes a knowing collaborator with, an
individual man who wishes to obtain control over a woman in order to exploit her. A
U.S. citizen can use isolation, domination, and threats of deportation to get an
immigrant woman to perform domestic and sexual services on demand. One commentator
in an Internet discussion of the pros and cons of paying for a"mail-order" bride,
pointed out that it can be much less expensive to purchase a wife than to pay for
prostitution services, which don't also include free housekeeping and cooking.
Men
have also used imprisonment and vicious violence to sexually exploit and prostitute
young women.One Honduran woman was kept a prisoner - together with the U.S. citizen's wife - in
a man's home by bars on the windows; another was kept in the house on an ankle
chain; one 17-.year old from the Phillipines was abused, sexually exploited, and
then pimped into prostitution.6 Because of these practices, the CIA found
that"[m]ail order bride brokers. . .are not traffickers per se; but, where there is
deception or fraudulent non-disclosure of known facts concerning the nature of the
relationship being entered into or the criminal or abusive background of the client,
the brokers should be liable as traffickers."7
Individuals using IMOs to find women whom they prostitute to others or use as their
own "personal prostitutes"8 or domestic servants should be criminally liable as
traffickers on the same theory. Knowing deception - fraud - used intentionally to
cause a woman or girl to travel to the U.S. and perhaps even to marry, in order to
mistreat and exploit her for personal profit or gain, is no less criminal
trafficking in persons when accomplished by an individual instead of an
organization. Although the Department of Justice is enforcing the criminal laws
against international travel for purposes of having sex with a child,
not one sex
trafficking case has been brought against an individual who has used a mail-order
bride organization to obtain and sexually exploit a vulnerable immigrant woman.9Abusive IMO-arranged marriages should be evaluated for evidence of criminal
trafficking. Consider the following examples:
A U.S. citizen puts new locks on the outside of his doors, and installs a security
system with keyed window locks. He searches the Internet for the youngest possible
girls available on mail- order bride Web sites. He pays a company's $4,500 fee,
travels abroad, proposes marriage to a young woman, and brings his prospective wife
to the U.S. with a fiancee visa. When they arrive at his home, he takes her down to
the basement and terrorizes her, keeping her locked there for weeks. When he
believes that she is too afraid to try to escape, he allows her out of the basement
but not out of the house, forcing her to do housework and have sex with him on
demand.
A U.S. citizen lives in a remote, rural area, and accomplishes the above with
repeated physical and sexual abuse, but without need for locks, as the nearest house
is thirty miles away
Add to the facts in both scenarios above that the citizen forces a woman to have sex
with other men who pay him for the privilege.
Add to the facts in any scenario that instead of using a fiancee visa to secure a
woman's entry into the U.S., the man marries her abroad and brings her to the U.S.
as his wife. These scenarios, distilled from actual cases,10 all fulfill the
elements of the federal crime of forced labor: domestic labor or sexual services
intentionally obtained by the use of physical restraint and threats of serious harm.
They should also satisfy the elements of criminal sex trafficking, if the required
element of 'commercial sex act" is interpreted on the basis of the statutory
language rather than a myopic intepretation focusing exclusively on brothel-based
prostitution or monetary transactions. Commercial sex is defined in the Trafficking
Victims Protection Act as "any sex act, on account of which anything of value is
given to or received by any person."
When an IMO sells a young woman for sexual purposes, as in a Web page openly
offering sex with fifteen- to seventeen-year old Thai girls, boasting that a girl
could be delivered "anywhere in the world," charging extra to deliver a virgin, and
also offered girls for sale outright - pay $4,000 more, the company promised,"and
then she is like your slave forever."11 - this is clearly commercial sex
trafficking. If both parties to the sale know that the person will be forced or
coerced to have sex, both are sex traffickers. The formality of a marriage or a
supposed engagement to marry should not blind us to the federal crimes of sex
trafficking, forced labor and involuntary servitude: when a citizen threatens to
revoke an application for a green card unless an immigrant submits to sex, the
valuable consideration of legal residency in the United States fulfills both the
"commercial sex" requirement and the coercion requirement of the criminal sex
trafficking statute. The same applies in the context of sexual exploitation of
domestic workers, migrant workers, sweatshop workers, or any instance where sex is
coerced or forced through threats of deportation, so that a person is led to believe
that on account of the sex act, the person will receive respite from threats of
deportation.12
The criminal penalties for sex trafficking should be brought to bear
against individuals who use IMOs to extort sex and domestic services from individual
brought into the U.S. through fiancee visas or through marriage.
IMOs also camouflage trafficking indirectly by inflating the number of visa
applicants, which reduces governmental resources to evaluate individuals' requests
for fiancee visas. Until recenty, U.S. immigration authorities conducted no
investigation of applicants for fiancee or spousal visas, not requiring any
background criminal check, not asking whether the petitioner is legally able to
marry, not even checking its own records to see if an applicant previously
petitioned for another person. During the 1970s and 1980s, an average of 5,300
fiancee petitions were filed each year, about 1,100 of which did not result in an
adjustment to permanent resident status. During the 1990s, however, the number of
fiancee petitions rose to 6,400 per year while adjustments remained the same. The
number of missing or rejected fiancees had apparently doubled in a decade, averaging
about 2,200 a year. A report by the INS noted that traffickers were interested in
sending women to the U.S. because fiancee visas were easy to obtain, but did not
observe that the rise in "missing" or rejected fiancees was itself evidence of
trafficking.13
Since the tragedy of September 11 th , the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration
Services has increased scrutiny of all petitioners and beneficiaries of petitions
for immigration benefits, including petitions for fiance visas and marriage-based
adjustment, and although implementation of these changes is only just beginning,
they have reportedly already found much of interest as a result of these
investigations. Senator Cantwell has made several excellent proposals to change the
process for obtaining a fiancee visa, which if enacted and implemented would place
minimal burdens on the IMOs and on the participants in the process, while likely
preventing some serious abuses of the system. But even enacting such a law will
accomplish nothing if Congress is not prepared to ensure that the laws are
implemented by the Executive Branch. This is not the first piece of legislation
recognizing and attempting to address problems in the IMO industry. So many serious
abuses were noted against "mail- order brides" in the U.S. that
Congress in 1996
ordered IMOs to provide information to their "recruits" on their rights under U.S.
laws. Eight years later, this law is still not implemented or enforced.14 The
comment period for the proposed regulation expired in 1997, yet the June 23, 2004
Federal Register announced that the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking will not be issued
until sometime in December of this year[/b] (Encounters was charged and convicted for supposedly not obiding to the law that had not been implemented at the time of the trial nor had it ever been emplemented since IMBRA replaced it altogether shortly after the trial. Added by the Moscownights). Senator Cantwell's legislation asks the
Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services to complete a study of the IMO
industry and the extent of its compliance with the new requirements within two years
of the legislation's enactment, but if the regulations are not in place to ensure
that Congress1 enactments have the force of law, this study and the other reforms
contemplated, will be meaningless.
Thank you for the Committee's efforts to combat trafficking and abuses of the
international matchmaking industry, for the invitation to appear before you today,
and for your consideration of my testimony.
