Shandra Woworuntu came to the United States from Indonesia when she was 24 years old, expecting to work in the hotel industry. She had lost her job as a financial analyst and trader at an international bank in Indonesia after the 1998 Asian financial crisis, and she needed money to support her three-year-old daughter. She found a hospitality job in the United States through a newspaper advertisement and planned to work there for six months—just enough time to save some money and then move back to Indonesia to continue raising her daughter. But when Woworuntu landed at the JFK airport in New York City in 2001—800 miles away from the hotel she was supposed to work at in Chicago, Illinois—she was met by a man named Johnny, who took all of her documents, including her passport, and led her to a car with two other women. Woworuntu was passed into another car in Flushing, Queens, and four drivers later, she arrived at a house in Brooklyn. The house was a brothel. On her first day in the United States, Woworuntu was forced to have sex. Her handlers told her she owed them $30,000, and she would have to have sex with hundreds of men to pay them back. She was trafficked up and down the East Coast over the following months, while being forced to take drugs at gunpoint.1
Human trafficking victimizes an estimated 24.9 million people globally, according to the U.S. Department of State’s 2019 Trafficking in Persons report.2 Human trafficking is defined as both sex and labor trafficking that includes force, fraud, or coercion of the victim—although that aspect is not necessary if the victim is under the age of 18 and involved in commercial sex. Historically, it has been difficult for law enforcement to prove force, fraud, or coercion—victims can be reticent to accuse their abusers, admit to involvement in illegal activity, or bring shame to themselves and their families.
This year is the 20th anniversary of the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), which is the first comprehensive U.S. federal statute to address “trafficking in persons” and equip the anti-trafficking forces in the United States with the tools to combat human trafficking worldwide. The TVPA allows for victims who participated in illegal activity like prostitution or immigration fraud to be protected, rather than punished, by the law. The TVPA and its subsequent amendments, along with other international anti-human trafficking legislation, U.S. federal legislation, and U.S. state laws against human trafficking, provide the necessary legal groundwork to bring human traffickers to justice and protect victims. While the number of trafficking convictions in the United States has risen over the years, law enforcement still faces three main challenges in fighting human trafficking: victim identification, proactive engagement, and targeted action with limited resources.3
Challenges
Victim identification is one of the toughest human trafficking-related challenges facing law enforcement, according to an IACP guidebook on human trafficking identification and investigation.4 Victims can be U.S. citizens, immigrants who are legally in the United States on work or student visas, or undocumented immigrants. They can be individuals involved in prostitution, victims of assault or domestic violence, forced to shoplift, or forced to labor. Often, they hesitate to speak with law enforcement due to fear of further abuse, indebtedness to their overseers, or cultural shame.
Polaris, a nonprofit that works to combat human trafficking, has identified eight characteristics that can make people vulnerable to human trafficking: an unstable living situation, a history of domestic violence, a caregiver or family member with substance abuse issues, a background as a runaway or involvement in the foster care or juvenile justice systems, poverty, sexual abuse, addiction, and undocumented immigration.5
While knowing these characteristics can help law enforcement identify individuals at risk of being trafficked, law enforcement typically uses these indicators in a more reactive rather than proactive way. “The problem that law enforcement has is that they get a tip from someone in the community or they just stumble across an ad or something advertising sex at one of these places,” said Jim Isajewicz, an analyst manager at Thomson Reuters Special Services (TRSS) who helped develop a method to build networks of potential human trafficking victims and facilitators in the illicit massage business (IMB) industry.
They go there, they get solicited, they shut the place down. They arrest the people in there—most of the time the women are charged with prostitution, wind up getting nolle prossed or acquitted. And three weeks later, the place opens back up again. So, it was Star Massage. Now it’s New Star Massage.6
If law enforcement can identify human trafficking networks as opposed to one-off cases, this allows for smarter targeted action with law enforcement’s limited resources. TRSS analyst Andrew Workman, who has worked with Isajewicz on the human trafficking project, points out,
A lot of times it’s really easy to get the low-hanging fruit, the things that you can see every day or conduct easy investigations on. But at the end of the day, while that might make some headway in solving the problem, it’s not really getting at the underlying issues as to what’s causing the trafficking, or it’s not getting at the larger targets or traffickers that are facilitating the problem.7
However, by understanding networks of traffickers, law enforcement officers can begin to identify the most important players and shut down those centralized actors first.
Solutions
Understanding victim characteristics; identifying networks of victims, traffickers, and involved organizations; and engaging in targeted action based on those networks are all vital for law enforcement to make a dent in the human trafficking scene. How exactly can law enforcement accomplish this?
It starts with open-source research and data analytics. TRSS, for example, used public records and data from public websites to put together lists of (1) characteristics of known bad actors and victims; (2) other individuals who fit those characteristics (specifically in the Asian IMB industry, where victims are often women from China between 35 and 55 years old); and (3) addresses and phone numbers of IMBs. Using these data, analysts built networks on top of networks and eventually mapped the entire network of Asian massage parlors in the United States. These networks showed that parlors tend to clump together in groups of five or seven, acting as franchises that are independently owned and operated but occasionally work together. They also showed that the top three states for quantity of IMBs are, in order, New York, California, and Florida. Additionally, there are numerous connections to larger Asian organized crime networks involved in money laundering, drug trading, and gang activity. Knowledge of these broader networks is indispensable to law enforcement for proactive targeting.
Image 1:TRSS Network Analysis.
Collaboration across all levels of society is also important in the fight against human trafficking. That begins with awareness of the scope of the problem. “It’s a huge issue within our borders,” said Derek Benner, executive associate director, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and acting deputy director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).“It’s a lot to get our arms around from a law enforcement standpoint because it is so broad and international in scope, and the organizations that are involved in these crimes are global in nature,” he said.8 HSI developed the Strategic Trafficking Outreach Program (S.T.O.P.) last year to educate people, raise awareness, and explain how to report instances of suspected trafficking, reaching more than 50,000 people at 600 events in its first year of programming. Right now, S.T.O.P. focuses on three key sectors where victims are often located: hospitality, transportation, and medicine. In the future, Acting Deputy Director Benner said it would be beneficial to do outreach to municipal code enforcement officers so they know what to look for when doing inspections.
It is also important for state and federal law enforcement agencies to coordinate with one another and with victim service providers (VSPs), which include rehabilitative programs, cultural consultants, and interpreters. Including service providers can help encourage victims to give witness statements, as VSPs can make victims feel more comfortable in their surroundings when speaking with law enforcement and more willing to talk about their experiences.
Other private sector players need to take action to prevent and respond to human trafficking as well. Traffickers exploit legitimate businesses across multiple sectors, e.g., using hotel rooms for their operations, rental cars and ridesharing apps for moving victims, social media for recruitment, and financial institutions for making transactions.9 Many banks and credit card companies have designed systems for identifying potential human trafficking, and, since 2018, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has included a checkbox for human trafficking on its Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs). In 2018, there were 177 SARs filings for human trafficking. In 2019, the number of SARs filings jumped to 3,384. And, as of July 2020, there were already 1,176 filings, mostly from depository institutions, as in previous years.10 While this is progress, TRSS President and former Senior Vice President at U.S. Bank James Dinkins says there is much more work to be done.
While the financial institutions are becoming more aware, and many are being more aggressive, they still have competing regulatory responsibilities that are often more focused on checking the compliance box than spending the time investigating potential human trafficking cases, which can be complex and take more time.11
Still, Acting Deputy Director Benner noted that most people and organizations agree more needs to be done in this small subsection of law enforcement. “Rescuing victims and identifying and dismantling trafficking organizations, everybody’s on board with that, so we just need to continue to maximize our way of thinking in terms of how do we get everybody involved that has some expertise so that we can do a better job,” he said.
Red Flags in Illicit Massage Industry
TRSS identified a number of red flags for law enforcement to be aware of specifically when investigating IMBs. Some of these factors could also be applied to other industries where human trafficking occurs.
- The individual is a woman from China (particularly an economically depressed area of China) and between the ages of 35 and 55 years old.
- An individual’s address on her/his driver’s license is the same as the address of the massage parlor where she/he is working or the address of whoever owns the massage parlor.
- A well-dressed woman speaks to law enforcement only in the presence of an older subject.
- The individual has entered the United States on a B2 visitor visa but switches to a dependent of whoever got her/him here upon arrival.
- An individual has massage therapist licenses in multiple states that are far apart from each other, indicating the individual may be prepared to be shipped throughout the United States.
- There are instances of explicit outward force, such as where an individual is moved by handlers from an apartment to a van to a massage parlor and back again.
Future Action
While the 20th anniversary of the TVPA and all the accomplishments in anti-human trafficking in the past two decades are to be celebrated, a lot of work remains to be done. In recent years, the U.S. Congress has passed several new anti-human trafficking laws, including amendments and reauthorizations of the TVPA and a law targeted at technology platforms that intentionally promote or facilitate prostitution. Additionally, DHS expanded the number of victim assistance specialists and forensic specialists who work alongside human trafficking investigators in the United States by 70 percent in 2019, and the U.S. Department of Justice provided $23.1 million in fiscal year 2018 to 17 state and local law enforcement agencies and 17 victim service providers, compared to $2.8 million in fiscal year 2017.12
“Law enforcement needs to continue and increase its coordination with all sectors of society . . . to raise awareness of the problem [of human trafficking] and aid in victim rehabilitation.”
The focus moving forward should be on bringing open-source research, data analytics, and network analysis to other industries in which human trafficking, especially labor trafficking, occurs, with the goal of dismantling larger networks. The U.S. Advisory on Human Trafficking noted in its 2019 report that labor trafficking victims are an underserved population, as there are more awareness, focus, and resources devoted to identifying and supporting sex trafficking victims and perpetrators.13 Global estimates suggest that labor trafficking could be more prevalent than sex trafficking, according to former Polaris CEO Bradley Myles. “The largest form of trafficking is getting the smallest slice of the attention, and the smaller form of trafficking is getting the lion’s share of the attention,” he said.14 There are multiple industries in the United States—beyond IMBs—in which labor and sex trafficking occur that could benefit from a similar methodology to the one TRSS used in investigating IMBs. Polaris analyzed more than 32,000 cases of human trafficking documented between December 2007 and December 2016 and found 25 industries in which trafficking cases most frequently occurred. These include domestic work, restaurants, and construction.15
“There’s a target-rich environment of areas in the field that need better data and better analytics and better measurement. And bringing a much more sophisticated data approach to the field is something that the field has lacked,” said Myles.
In addition to building out networks in collaboration with the private sector, law enforcement needs to continue and increase its coordination with all sectors of society, from VSPs to nonprofits and financial institutions, to raise awareness of the problem and aid in victim rehabilitation.
Shandra Woworuntu—the human trafficking victim who came to the United States from Indonesia in search of a decent job to support her family—eventually escaped her captors. A stranger helped her take her case to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who got in touch with the New York City Police Department. Police officers raided the brothel in Brooklyn with Woworuntu’s help and charged and convicted three perpetrators. The FBI connected Woworuntu with Safe Horizon, a New York-based organization that helps human trafficking survivors and other victims of crime and abuse, which helped her stay in the United States and find a legitimate job. Woworuntu gained permanent residency in the United States in 2010, and her daughter now lives with her. Woworuntu shares her story around the world to work on the behalf of human trafficking victims.
Notes:
1 “Shandra Woworuntu: My Life as a Sex-Trafficking Victim,ʺ BBC Magazine, March 29, 2016.
2 U.S. Department of State (DOS), Trafficking in Persons Report, June 2019.
3 The U.S. Department of Justice initiated a total of 282 federal human trafficking prosecutions in fiscal year (FY) 2017, an increase from 241 in FY 2016, and charged 553 defendants in FY 2017 compared to 531 in FY 2016, according to the DOS 2018 Trafficking in Persons Report. The DOS 2019 Trafficking in Persons Report also reports an increased number of human trafficking convictions in the United States.
4 IACP, The Crime of Human Trafficking: A Law Enforcement Guide to Identification and Investigation (Alexandria, VA: IACP).
5 Polaris, “Recognizing Human Trafficking: Vulnerabilities and Signs of Recruitment.”
6 Jim Isajewicz (analyst manager, Thomson Reuters Special Services [TRSS]), interview with author, January 30, 2020.
7Andrew Workman (analyst, TRSS) interview with author, February 7, 2020.
8 Derek Benner (executive associate director, Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and acting deputy director, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), interview with author, March 12, 2020.
9 Polaris, On-Ramps, Intersections, and Exit Ramps: A Roadmap for Systems and Industries to Prevent and Disrupt Human Trafficking (2018).
10 Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, “Suspicious Activity Report Statistics.”
11 James Dinkins (president, TRSS) interview with author, April 13, 2020.
12 DOS, Trafficking in Persons Report, 2019.
13 DOS, United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking Annual Report 2019.
14 Bradley Myles (former CEO, Polaris) interview with author on February 27, 2020.
15 Polaris, The Typology of Modern Slavery: Defining Sex and Labor Trafficking in the United States (2017).
Please cite as
Kaitlin Lavinder, “Big Data, Networking, and Societal Coordination Can Help Combat Human Trafficking,” Police Chief Online, November 4, 2020.
