OT CIA Finds Foreign Women in Bondage in US

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http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000402/ts/rights_cia_2.html

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The CIA has found that as many as 50,000 women and children a year are tricked into coming to the United States and forced to work as prostitutes, sweatshop laborers or servants, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

The report on the abuse of Asians, Latin Americans and Eastern Europeans is not classified but has not been made public, the Times said on its Web site and in Sunday editions.

It said a government intelligence analyst working on assignment for the CIA had prepared the report and another official, who wanted the findings made public, had given the newspaper a copy.

The exhaustively researched 79-page document, titled ''International Trafficking in Women to the United States: A Contemporary Manifestation of Slavery,'' painted ``a broad picture of this hidden trade and the difficulties that government agencies face in fighting it,'' the Times said.

The report, based on more than 150 interviews with government officials, law enforcement officers, victims, and experts in the United States and overseas, was completed in November.

It found that in the past two years, as many as 100,000 women and children, some as young as 9, had come to the United States and been held in bondage.

The Times said federal officials estimated that over the same period, the government had prosecuted cases involving only about 250 victims. Victims' inability to speak English and their fear of law enforcement officers sometimes made it hard to ascertain the facts, the CIA found.

The Times said the report described many cases in which foreign women answered advertisements for jobs as au pairs, sales clerks, secretaries or waitresses in the United States, only to find, once they were smuggled into the country, that the jobs did not exist.

Instead, the women were held prisoner and forced into prostitution or peonage. Some were sold outright to brothel owners.

The primary sources for the traffic in women and children were Thailand, Vietnam, China, Mexico, Russia and the Czech Republic, the report found. The newspaper quoted government officials as saying that the problem seemed to have worsened in recent years as traffickers from Russia and the former Soviet Union aggressively entered the business.

-- viewer (justp@ssing.by), April 02, 2000

Answers

This thread ties in nicely to the question of security of identity documents. In my agency, we see many, many social security numbers with multiple names and employers attached on our quarterly wage reports. No-one seems interested. Not to difficult to investigate docuemented instances of "error". Could there be a connection?

-- another government hack (keepwatching_2000@yahoo.com), April 02, 2000.

Dear God......

-- May burden be (nomoreth@nwecan.bare), April 02, 2000.

The yahoo article contained a link to the original report, which I've been plugging through. This has been going on for a long while; I'm puzzled that they're choosing to examine it and to release information about it just now.

Another, it must surely be illegal for more than one person to use a social security number; wouldn't it be impossible for your agency to accept a number that has more than one name attached?

My guess would be that many of the women forced into the sex trade do not have social security numbers at all. Certainly the children wouldn't have one.

-- viewer (justp@ssing.by), April 03, 2000.


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