United States 

- Latina Women and Children at Risk

Dynamics of Prostitution and Sex Trafficking from Latin America

into the United States

Cultural background, dynamics of exploitation, sex trafficking, impacts upon the United States, recommendations for professionals.

 © 2003 Charles M. Goolsby, Jr.  All Rights Reserved

(This document may be reproduced for non-profit use.)

INTRODUCTION

Modern human slavery is a growing global phenomenon that currently entraps an estimated 2 million victims, and generates $7 Billion in criminal profits annually, rating third in profitability only after drugs and arms sales for the Mafia, yakuzas, cartels and similar international criminal organizations. The U.S. CIA estimates that approximately 50,000 persons are trafficked into slavery in the United States annually. A large majority of those victims are forced into prostitution. In is estimated that 30,000 sexual slaves die each year around the world from torture, neglect and diseases including HIV/AIDS.

In this paper we focus upon the mass sexual exploitation of girl children and women from Latin America who are kidnapped or who are convinced with false promises of work to voluntarily be transported across international borders into the United States. In either case, upon arrival in the United States victims are threatened and forced to prostitute themselves in a strange land, typically without pay. The U.S. CIA estimates that 15,000 enslaved Latin-Americans are trafficked into the United States each year. This paper elaborates on the cultural background of Latin American trafficking victims and describes Latin America’s growing crisis of impunity in the sexual abuse and exploitation of women and specifically girl children.

As organized sex trafficking expands rapidly across the diverse cultural communities within the United States, an array of public and private institutions are working to understand this problem, quantify it and develop effective responses. These response activities typically involve international, federal and local law enforcement; medical and mental health professionals; religious institutions; academics; social service agencies, immigrant advocacy and other community based organizations; and federal, state and local legislators and policy makers. International and regional agencies and national governments have recently engaged in major collaborations with academics and victim advocates to provide a leadership role in response to this problem. The United Nations, UNICEF, The U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Justice, other agencies of the U.S. government, the European Union and the Organization of American states are all actively working on this issue. Together with leading academics and other subject matter experts, these organizations have developed protocols, treaties, legislation, international working groups and major international research studies to define and respond to the growing sex trafficking crisis.

At the local level public safety and trauma professionals are beginning to interact with children and women who have been the victims of domestic and international sex trafficking schemes. This interaction is likely to grow as sex trafficking expands in the United States, and as the American criminal justice system begins to focus increasing law enforcement attention on the problem. The judicial system and trauma practitioners will face an increasing need to develop effective protocols to respond to this victim population. In the context of Latin American sex trafficking victims, the development of culturally appropriate responses are especially important. Language barriers, American/ Latino cultural differences and significant, country and region-specific nuances need to be taken into account in dealing with Latin American girl and women sexual exploitation victims.

Sex trafficking affects hundreds of thousands of women across Latin America. We focus here upon the largest component of the Latin America to U.S. problem, the trafficking of girls and women from Mexico and Central America across the U.S. border, and their subsequent sexual exploitation through forced prostitution in the United States.

A CULTURAL BACKGROUND

Accurately defining the dynamics of sex trafficking from Latin America into the United States requires that we understand the cultural differences and social dynamics involved. This requires that Americans suspend domestic assumptions about the standards of equality that women and children can expect from men in society.

Persons born and raised within mainstream American culture live within a diverse range of cultural norms that have evolved from America’s unique history. The interaction of America’s various cultures during the past several centuries has resulted in a general consensus about what is normal and appropriate social behavior. Generally, Americans take for granted their assumptions regarding the rules governing social and sexual interactions between men and women and between adults and children. These customs and freedoms have derived significantly from those declared in the Magna Carta, English Common Law and the U.S. Constitution. Centuries of popular agitation demanding equality have expanded the basic rights of women and marginalized ethnic populations. 

Latin America has evolved along a similar but different cultural path during the past five centuries. Both English and Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese) conquered regions of the Americas went through profound social change at the time of their conquest of indigenous nations. The differences between English and Spanish cultures were significant. The way in which men in these cultures interacted with women and with the indigenous and African populations present also diverged. Aspects of Latin American history have had a major impact upon the norms of treatment encountered by women and children in their respective cultures. Differences between the limited rights granted to women in the Napoleonic (Roman) code governing Latin American legal systems, and those found in English common law represent one aspect of such differences. An understanding of these social dynamics is critical to arriving at an appreciation of the problem of sexual exploitation in the modern Latin American social context.

Historically, English and other Northern European colonists and later immigrants to the U.S. came as nuclear family units. Such immigrants tended not to intermarry widely with other ethnic groups in the U.S. due to the social attitudes of the times and an adequate availability of women of their own ethnicity with whom to marry. The experience in Latin America diverged significantly from this American and Canadian pattern.

The Spanish conquest of Latin America occurred at the end of Spain’s 800 year occupation by Moorish armies of the Muslim Ottoman Empire (one third of the modern Spanish language derives directly from Arabic). Previous to the Muslim occupation, Spain’s diverse tribal ethnicities (Castillians, Catalans, Basques, etc.) were conquered by the Roman Empire. As part of the Mediterranean region, Spain experienced the repeated conquest and re-conquest, enslavement and counter-enslavement that gave the region a long social history of remorseless and highly patriarchal human exploitation.

A diverse, multi-ethnic collection of Spain’s many indigenous ethnicities, Roman descendants, Moors, Arabs and Jews all migrated to the New World seeking to expand Christian Spain’s recent conquest of the Muslims, and also seeking to find a better future for themselves. Many non-Christians came to the Americas to escape the religious oppression of the Inquisition that followed the defeat of the Moors.

Unlike the English migrants to Canada and the United States, the majority of early migrations from Spain to Latin America involved only men. Continuing in the traditions derived from their own multi-ethnic roots, the conquistadors intermarried extensively with the local indigenous and (enslaved and free) African women with whom they co-existed. The Latin American race currently reflects these multi-ethnic roots.

The status of women throughout Latin American history has been impacted by these many cultural factors. The imposition of Roman and later Moorish conquests on Spain imported common Mediterranean attitudes of women as the property of men, to be guided, controlled and limited in their freedom throughout life by fathers, brothers and husbands. In modern Latin America, this ideology is commonly known as machismo.

From the time of Christopher Columbus to the present, machismo has guided social relations between men and women in Latin America. While a form of machismo was imposed upon Northern Europe during the Roman Empire, surviving into the feudal period, those western societies and their former 16th and 17th century colonies in the Americas have evolved towards acceptance of expanding freedoms for women. In the other cultural source of Spanish machismo, the Muslim world, social change has been much slower. The differences in women’s rights and freedoms between the West and the Muslim world fall into stark contrast in the highly visible examples of Iran, (Taliban controlled) Afghanistan and Northern (Muslim) Nigeria, where, for example, women have continued to be stoned or jailed for infidelity. Falling somewhere in the ideological middle, the largely rural and traditionalist feudal cultures of Latin America have preserved machismo’s power over the lives of women and girl children.

Having arrived in the Americas without women, the Spanish conquistadors proceeded to integrate with indigenous and African women through a variety of ways. The following is a stark description of Spanish interactions with indigenous women recorded by Spanish priests working under Friar Bartolomeo de las Casas in the Caribbean islands in 1520:

"Each of them [the foremen] had made it a practice to sleep with the Indian women who were in his work-force, if they pleased him, whether they were married women or maidens. While the foreman remained in the hut or the cabin with the Indian woman, he sent the husband to dig gold out of the mines; and in the evening, when the wretch returned, not only was he beaten or whipped because he had not brought up enough gold, but further, most often, he was bound hand and foot and flung under the bed like a dog, before the foreman lay down, directly over him, with his wife."

Wars and massacres against indigenous cultures occurred throughout Latin America from the 1500’s until the late 20th century. In many of these conflicts, women and girl children were the only significant indigenous survivors of large-scale massacres. In other conflicts, indigenous leaders offered conquering Spanish or Portuguese armies their often pre-pubescent girl children as sexual peace offerings. In both cases girl children and women survivors became a sexual commodity to be exploited by the conquistadors.

Throughout the post-colonial period, indigenous and mestiza (mixed-race) women and girls have remained the target of intensive sexual exploitation. On rural plantations in most Latin American countries, for example, such women are by custom obliged to sleep with the plantation owner and his majordomos (foremen, supervisors). This is reminiscent of Roman traditions such as Primer Nocht in post-Roman England, where commoner brides were forced to have sex with the local lord on their wedding night, and is equal to the oppression faced by Caribbean indigenous women under Spain’s control in 1520. These feudal traditions continue to exist in many still-rural cultures across Latin America. In one protest against these and related practices, over 1 million indigenous Ecuadorians went on strike in 1990 demanding an end to the modern plantation system.

A significant body of Latin American literature has expressed the fact that a culture-wide internal social conflict exists within men in Mexico and other Latin American countries.

Typically being of both Spanish and indigenous ancestry (genetically and culturally), many men have internalized the socially accepted mistreatment of women and girl children that was originally reserved for the indigenous victims of the conquistadors (their rape victims and wives). Latin America’s socially conservative cultures still reflect this conflict of the convergence of Mediterranean machismo and the sexual oppression of conquered indigenous women and children in numerous ways.

Feudal machismo contains a component which, as many men describe it, obliges men to seriously dedicate themselves to protecting and managing the lives of women in their family group. This aspect of machismo is commonly referred-to by men who seek to defend, in the American dialog, the concept of machismo’s social validity. In a cruder male expression of machismo’s role within the family, Honduran men have a saying that "Women are like shotguns; they should be kept loaded [pregnant] and indoors.

Latin American women almost universally refer to machismo attitudes in men as the culprit when discussing the domestic violence and sexual abuse that men submit them to in daily life. Under either definition of machismo, outside of the family group, modern machismo gives men social permission to engage in open, blatant and aggressive sexual harassment and sexual exploitation in public spaces.

Importantly, and consistent with traditional practices found on rural plantations since the times of their ancestors in the Roman Empire, machismo also grants sexual privileges over all married and single women and girl children under one’s supervisory authority in any workplace setting. As social change, improving female educational opportunities (for some urban women), faltering national economies and single motherhood have allowed or forced women to enter the modern urban workplace, feudal sexual privilege is still demanded by men who supervise working women and underage girls. This is true across Latin America, and it is an often-hidden criminal practice that is imposed with impunity upon Latin American immigrant women and girl children employed in the U.S. labor force. Commercial office cleaning, hotel maintenance, and restaurant, factory and farm work are all labor categories that are severely affected by these practices.

Government, religious and other social institutions have reinforced these attitudes for centuries. National laws in many Latin American countries continue to restrict the rights of women and girl children. Most of these countries allow a rapist to evade prosecution, even for raping a 13 year-old girl, provided that the rapist’ marry the victim. In some cultures, the girl’s family will encourage such marriages. Physical and sexual violence against women is rarely responded to and typically puts a heavy burden of proof on the victims (there must be a third party witness to prosecute rape in Ecuador, for example). The Colombian government continues to require women to present their husband’s written permission before they are granted international travel visas, even if the couple is legally separated. Mexico only granted the right to vote to women in the 1950’s.

The data regarding the physical and sexual mistreatment of women and children from across Latin America is tragic. In many cases, girl children are born into an environment that is openly hostile to women’s equal rights. Across Latin America, an estimated 20% to 40% of women are raped on an annual basis. In Ecuador, 80 percent of married women face spousal violence. A social service agency study in Ecuador found that secondary school teachers had raped 8% of their girl students in the country’s largest city, Guayaquil. Tens of millions of women, and at least two million children across Latin America survive through prostitution. In Brazil alone, studies have determined that between 500,000 and 2 million children under the age of 16 survive by engaging in prostitution. In the Northeastern region of Argentina, an estimated 500,000 children under 16 prostitute themselves. An estimated 100,000 women and girls are sex trafficked in Latin America each year, with at least 15,000 of those being mostly young Mexican girls who are trafficked into the United States as sexual slaves.

Child prostitution is a major problem in every Latin American country. Girl children also face higher levels of (at times intentional) malnutrition, violence and under-education than males in their respective societies. The phrase "why should she get an education, all she is going to do is get married at 16 and have children" was widely stated in past generations. In Mexico, 60% of female fatalities occur in girls under 13 years of age. Across Latin America, 80,000 children die annually from family violence meted out from within the child’s own home. The sexual abuse of children in the home is a major problem, driving girls as young as 10 into street prostitution by the thousands in any given Latin American country.

Machismo’s social acceptance by society’s most important institutions reinforces the power that men feel as beings who consider themselves to be literally superior to women (a major tenant of the most conservative forms of machismo). This has brought about a condition of impunity and the open sexual and physical abuse of women and girl children without remorse. The reality of exploitation with impunity represents perhaps the largest cultural schism between norms in the United States and those in Latin America. The United Nations Children’s Fund’s director stated the problem this way in a 1999 speech:

"Society’s silence is the main accomplice in allowing widespread impunity. Latin America and the Caribbean face enormous challenges in the prelude to the twenty-first century. The region will have to bring out into the open this increasingly disturbing reality; and it will have to struggle against the high degree to which society tolerates or practices inconceivable forms of aggression against the most vulnerable individuals in society. In commemorating International Women’s Day, Executive Director of UNICEF Carol Bellamy said that "it is everywhere, among rich and poor -- at home, in school, in the workplace and in the community. Yet on the eve of the 21st century, the vast scale of this outrage is still not widely acknowledged, nor even truly understood".

The above described social conditions in Latin America have created generations of women who have not been allowed to obtain an education, who have typically married very early, who have not been expected until recently to enter the workforce, and who are expected to depend upon men to support them. They are also expected to be faithful marriage, obedient to men’s wishes, and to endure abuse from men in silence, while at the same time allowing men to be unfaithful and polygamous. Machismo has created generations of men who view women as property, and who view women on the street and in the workplace as being legitimate targets of aggressive sexual harassment and conquest.

In its worst form, machismo drives men to have children with as many women as possible, and to feel free to abandon those women and children without remorse. This one factor has created the mass impoverishment of women across Latin America.  Women face abandonment, under-education, workplace wage and job discrimination and highly discriminatory attitudes from potential suitors who detest the idea of caring for the children of any other man. The American custom of men accepting step-children as their own does not exist in Latin America. One Colombian man stated the issue: "Why should I raise another man’s puppy?" Because so many women marry in their mid to late teens and have children early, they often end up abandoned before they are 20 years old. Faced with these conditions, women make sometimes unwanted choices, including loveless marriage to older men who offer financial stability, man sharing, and risking the many dangers of international travel to the United States and other "promised lands."

The dynamics of sexual exploitation faced by women and girl children become much worse during national and regional conflicts such as the civil wars that occurred in Central America during the 1980’s, when tens of thousands of indigenous and other poor, mostly rural women were raped and murdered. The huge expatriate colonies of Salvadorans and Guatemalans now living in the United States were originally founded by a mass-exodus of exactly such war refugees. Exploitation also becomes much worse during economic downturns. Poor economic conditions combined with the historic female under-education to increase women’s dependence upon men, often resulting in men choosing to exploit that desperate situation by demanding sexual barter in exchange for providing women with the meager financial means for their survival.

The above evaluation of social conditions throughout Latin America is harsh, but it is completely true.

These hostile conditions for women and girls within Latin America have been a major factor driving significant female immigration into the United States. Poverty and sexual oppression motivate millions of Latin American women to seek refuge in the U.S., Canada, and in any other society where they feel that they can survive and support their families in safety, with dignity, and with non-discriminatory access to employment.

SEXUAL EXPLOITATION AND TRAFFICKING WITHIN LATIN-AMERICA

Into this human rights vacuum has come the world’s sex trafficking networks, who often cajole women and girls into traveling abroad with false promises of honest service sector work in restaurants, child care, office and home cleaning and hotels.

International sex trafficking is a lucrative criminal business. For example, on an annual basis, an estimated 35,000 women are trafficked out of Colombia, South America into the international prostitution market, bringing $500 million dollars in criminal profits to the traffickers. That figure represents over $14,000 per trafficked person. Victims trafficked from Asia into the United States have been sold for as much as $16,000 dollars each. These profit figures have not been lost upon the criminal networks of the world. The traditional criminal enterprises of illegal drug and arms trafficking are becoming ever more dangerous for these gangs due to increasingly effective law enforcement efforts used against them. Human trafficking is regarded as an equally profitable criminal activity that results in a comparatively lower risk of detection, arrest, prosecution and imprisonment. The enslavement of an estimated 2 million persons in prostitution and other forms of forced labor globally is made possible by the criminal community’s ability to circumvent the few anti-trafficking laws that do exist while taking advantage of the economic globalization movement’s eased restrictions on international migration.

Within the Latin American context, criminal organizations already have long-established smuggling routes for the trafficking of arms, drugs and undocumented immigrants in search of the American dream who pay to be taken into the United States. That transportation infrastructure has now been adapted to smuggle both kidnapped and also unsuspecting, honest-job seeking foreign women and children across our national borders specifically for the purpose of enslaving them as unpaid, maltreated prostitutes.

Colombia, second only to the Dominican Republic in the volume of internationally trafficked women in Latin America, provides an important example of entrenched sex trafficking. Colombian sex trafficking to Japan and Europe has existed for over 20 years.

Within Colombia, the prostitution of women and girls is commonplace. The kidnapping of pre-teen and teenage girls to be sold into sexual slavery is also a frequent occurrence. The Mafia in the U.S. and Europe, yakuzas in Japan and major drug cartels in Colombia and Mexico have all added Colombian women to their list of illegal merchandise for sale.

The Japanese yakuzas have operated established sex trafficking routes from Colombia to Japan since the 1980’s. Long existing trafficking routes between Colombia and Holland have resulted in at least 5,000 Colombian women being forced to work as prostitutes in a country where prostitution is legal and many trafficked women are forced to sit partially naked in glass-windowed storefronts waiting for the next customer to select them.

Mexico and Central America are, like Colombia, places where the prostitution of women and girls is a frequent occurrence. They are also major source countries for women and girls who will be trafficked across international borders. A study done by the Catholic charity Covenant House in Mexico and Central America in the year 2002, conducted by 56 researchers over a 10-month period, identified large, well-organized and well-funded sex trafficking networks at work in the region. These are described as being involved in the sex trafficking of sizable numbers of Central American girls, especially between the ages of 12 to 14. Most of these victims are from El Salvador and Honduras, and are sold to clandestine pedophile networks for an average of $100 to $200 each. Mexico and the Central American countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and especially Costa Rica have been identified repeatedly by advocacy groups as being major centers of child prostitution, international sex tourism and sex trafficking.

Costa Rica, where adult prostitution is legal, represents an especially problematic zone for child sexual exploitation. The government of Costa Rica estimates that 5% of the 1 million western tourists traveling to Costa Rica annually are pedophile sex tourists who have targeted Costa Rican girls and boys for sexual abuse in the wake of sex tourism crackdowns in Asia. An estimated 5,000 child prostitutes now "work" in the capital city of San Jose. Other concentrations of child prostitutes work at the beach resorts that are popular with foreign (largely American, European and Australian) tourists. Dozens of web sites now market Costa Rica to international pedophile sex tourists. Despite these facts, child advocates have had to repeatedly sue the government of Costa Rica to force it to fund its child welfare agency and defend its own children from sexual exploitation.

Child sex tourism is also common in Mexico’s beach resorts and along Mexico’s border with the United States, most notoriously in Tijuana, near San Diego, California. One barometer of the child sexual exploitation crisis in Mexico came from a mid-2002 Mexican report that noted that 135,000 children had been kidnapped during a recent three year period, and were presumed to have been sold to criminal networks specializing in child prostitution, child pornography and illegal adoptions. The over 300 girls and women raped and murdered with impunity during the last ten years in Ciudad Juarez (Juarez City), a major sex tourism destination located directly across the international border from El Paso, Texas is also indicative of the gravity of this crisis in Mexico.

The Central American countries of Honduras and Nicaragua both have major problems with child prostitution that were made dramatically worse after Hurricane Mitch killed over 11,000 people in 1998 and destroyed local economies. Since that time Honduran women and children have become a major component of the sex trafficking victim population that is trafficked throughout Central America, Mexico and into the United States. Covenant House Latin America was the first child advocacy group to sound the alarm when it reported large numbers of orphaned Honduran children, victims of Hurricane Mitch, showing up in the brothels of Guatemala and Mexico.

The above described scenario of socially powerful machismo, the resulting hostile living environment and under-empowerment for women and girls, severe poverty, wealthy criminal cartels and widespread prostitution and sex tourism has also resulted in the large-scale migration of these social realities into the United States. American institutions now face the daunting task of combating this relatively new phenomenon.

LATIN AMERICAN IMMIGRANT SEXUAL EXPLOITATION WITHIN THE UNITED STATES

Native-born and immigrant persons of Latin American descent are now recognized as the largest ethnic minority in the United States, currently estimated to be 38 million people. Latin-American specific issues of sexual exploitation are necessarily becoming priorities for America’s legal, social service, medical and mental health and immigrant advocacy professionals. In addition to trafficking and the prostitution of minors and adult women, issues of sexual exploitation with impunity in the American service sector workplace and within Latin American immigrant community settings are also of major concern.  A growing body of legal case documentation is developing in relation to the sexual exploitation of Latin American immigrant women and children in America.

The U.S. Latino population is growing four times faster that the rest of the U.S. population. Imported traditions of machismo increasingly impact women and girls in American Latino communities where men are typically a sizable majority.  Gender imbalances together with the social isolation felt by immigrant men help create a market for prostitution, and exposes a given community's immigrant women and youth to high levels of sexual harassment, sexual coercion and criminal sexual assault.

In addition, the aggressive feudal sexual privilege that is demanded by men who supervise working women and underage girls in Latin America is a dynamic that is also imposed with impunity upon Latin American immigrant women and girl children employed in the U.S. labor force. The low wage professions of commercial office cleaning, hotel maintenance, and restaurant, factory and farm work are all labor categories that are severely affected by these practices.

Beyond immigrant communities, non-Latino immigrants and men of all races native to the United States comprise an additional source of consumers for prostitution.  Latina women and girls are also vulnerable to sexual assault in their communities by non-Latino men who understand that such women and girls are vulnerable to attack due to their legal status and their lack of English language skills.  In low-wage and other workplace settings, non-Latino men also learn how to exploit Latin immigrant women and girls from listening to their Latino male colleagues explain how to go about intimidating Latina women and girls.

The legal restrictions placed upon undocumented immigrants, together with anti-immigrant hostility in the larger US society have created a largely hidden underground cash economy that allows undocumented immigrants to survive by working in a wide variety of informal jobs and by the use of false documents. The invisibility provided by this underground economy, together with powerful influences of machismo and the migrant gender gap have worked to create a market for prostitution and sexual slavery in the United States that is hard to detect.  It has also made the coercion and criminal abuse of Latina women and girls hard for society to identify and react to.

The demand for sexual services within US immigrant communities, and the Latin American socioeconomic pressures that drive poor women to migrate create conditions favorable to organized criminal exploitation through sex trafficking. Women and youth seeking work in the USA routinely put their faith in labor traffickers (coyotes) to help them cross the international border in search of work. False promises of American jobs lead many women and youth into the arms of sex traffickers. Large numbers of kidnap victims are also trafficked. Cultural and language barriers often hide these criminal abuses from law enforcement, the judicial system, social service agencies and the general public.

Importantly, women and children who are first generation immigrants are typically under-served by America’s institutions when it comes to effective law enforcement, effective prosecution of sex offenders and victim assistance. Language barriers, immigrant fear of institutions based upon past negative experiences with public institutions here and abroad, and anti-immigrant hostility from some American first responders and practitioners are very real problems that have often created major obstacles to effective victim treatment. Such negative experiences with crisis intervention send a clear message through the Latino community grapevine that equal treatment is not available to Latin women and child victims in the United States. These conclusions are reinforced by findings such as those of a December, 2002 study by the Pew Hispanic Center that noted that 82% of Latinos feel that they have faced discrimination in their daily life here in the U.S.

CONCLUSION – RECOMMENDATIONS FOR PROFESSIONALS INVOLVED IN JUDICIAL, SOCIAL SERVICE AND TRAUMA INTERVENTIONS

Law enforcement, judicial system, social service and trauma professionals are today likely to encounter Latin American victims of sex trafficking and many other forms of community and workplace based sexual exploitation. Practitioners can provide more positive outcomes when victims are treated with compassion and an understanding of the above-described social realities of sexual exploitation with impunity that they have typically experienced throughout their lives. Both voluntary immigrants and involuntary trafficking victims seek a stable life free from sexual exploitation with impunity. Given their past experiences with men in general and with Latin American and, at times, American institutions, victims usually have doubts about their ability to find justice and fair treatment by participating in the ‘system.’ Compassionate professional interventions can make a significant contribution to assuring that crisis interventions do not involve re-victimization and cultural insensitivity. The building of institutional infrastructure in the United States to address these emerging realities will be critical to achieving successful victim outcomes.

ARBRAPIA, Date? - "Prostitution - it is illegal in Brazil to exploit a child for purposes of prostitution. ARBRAPIA, the Brazilian Interprofessional Association for the Protection of Children and Adolescents states that approximately 2 million children aged between 10 and 15 years have been forced into prostitution." (As quoted in Julibee Action’s report "Brazilian Street Children" – Date?) From: http://www.jubileeaction.co.uk/reports/Brazilian%20Street%20Children.pdf

Associated Press, January 17, 2003 "Two more plead guilty in Mexican prostitution ring" - "Two sisters became the latest defendants to plead guilty to roles in running a brothel, admitting on Friday they supervised Mexican girls who had been lured to the United States and forced into prostitution."

Associated Press, 1996. From: Associated Press, February 3, 1996, "Government Cracks Down on Sex Tourism" (As quoted in "Human Rights Report of Trafficking of Women and Children" - Lederer, Laura J, J.D. - January, 2001 - Page 21)

(Granma exists at: http://www.granma.cu

From: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9242

From: http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/segment_display.cfm?segID=146969

From: http://www.libertadlatina.org/US_Slavery_Molina_Case_Texas_01042003.htm

From: http://iwraw.igc.org/publications/countries/cescrmexico.html

From: http://www.iadb.org/sds/doc/1077eng.pdf

From: http://www.libertadlatina.org/LatAm_USAIDs_Response.htm

From: http://www.cia.gov/csi/monograph/women/trafficking.pdf

From: http://209.190.246.239/tvpa_text.pdf

From: http://www.zmag.org/LAM/zguatemala.html

From: http://www.catwinternational.org/fb/Mexico.html

http://www.transnationale.org/anglais/sources/tiersmonde/zones_franches__Maqui98d-02.htm

Also: http://www.libertadlatina.org/UNICEF_p1_More_Girls_Becoming_Victims.htm

From: http://www.libertadlatina.org/US_Slavery_Case1_p1.htm