The scene plays out the same way night after night. Taxi drivers – both of yellow and livery cabs – pick up women engaged in illegal sex trade and bring them to brothels in Queens where waiting customers expect more than a gracious hello from their “escorts.”

The taxis, according to one Queens State Senator, are just as much of the problem as the nefarious pimps who force undocumented women into having sex upon threat of violence or deportation.

Stepping up his offensive to tackle the sex trade on Roosevelt Avenue in Corona and Jackson Heights, State Sen. Jose Peralta (D-East Elmhurst) announced the introduction of a bill which would educate cab drivers about human trafficking.

“We have to dispel the dangerous notion that prostitution is a victimless crime,” Peralta said. “Someone aware of this brutal reality is less likely to participate in the continued exploitation of these women.”

The bill would require taxi and livery cab drivers to be educated on how to identify a situation of human trafficking while they are on duty and would be incorporated in the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission’s training program.

Joining the effort to curb both human trafficking and prostitution, Restore NYC, a nonprofit organization which helps sex-trafficking victims, welcomed the first-time collaboration between the Senator and the TLC.

According to Faith Huckel, executive director and co-founder of the nonprofit, there are approximately 27 million people currently enslaved throughout the world.

“Most are trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation,” Huckel said. “Eighty percent are female.”

Sold the “American Dream,” women are lured with the promise of a good job or false marriage then kidnapped or sold into the sex trade where they have ended up in brothels within the borough, Huckel said.

“By raising public awareness about what is really going on, there will be a greater flow of information to law enforcement,” she said.

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Police in Nigeria freed 32 teen girls from an alleged “baby factory” used to feed the region’s exploding sex trade and human trafficking markets, authorities said.

Cops in the southern Nigerian city of Aba raided the clinic, known as The Cross Foundation, Monday after receiving a tip that the owner was harboring pregnant girls and selling their babies, Nigeria’s Daily Champion newspaper reported.

Some of the girls, who were between 15 and 17, told authorities that the clinic’s owner, Dr. Hyacinth Orikara, forced them to sell their babies to him for around $190, depending on the gender, Agence France-Presse reported.

“We rescued 32 pregnant girls and arrested the proprietor who is undergoing interrogation over allegations that he normally sells the babies to people who may use them for rituals or other purposes,” police commissioner Bala Hassan said.

Orikara could face up to 14 years in prison for selling babies, authorities said.

The doctor denied the charges, telling the Champion that the clinic cared for teenagers with unwanted pregnancies.

The women were transferred to the regional headquarters of an anti-trafficking organization, authorities said.

“Baby factories” or “baby farms” are common in western Africa.

The organizations sell newborns to the highest bidder, and the children often end up being used as factory workers, mine workers or sex slaves.

Human trafficking is ranked the third most common crime in Nigeria, after fraud and drug trafficking, according to the UN.

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From the moment she arrived at the karaoke club, Srey Neang looked for a chance to escape. But Chuan operated the club like a prison. Whenever they were not seeing johns, the girls were kept captive in the apartment atop the club. Each door had a deadbolt that locked from the outside. Steel wires covered the windows.

He forced the women to have sex with ten men each day on average. Most of the johns hailed from Cambodia, though a decent portion came from Thailand, China, and India. The customers began trickling into the karaoke club in the late afternoon, and the final engagement might not end until two in the morning. On rare occasions, a john would pay to keep a girl for the entire night. More typically, johns put out $2.50 for a visit that might last twenty minutes.

Chuan aimed to keep a steady stable of young women working in the club at any given time. Few showed up as young as Srey Neang; most had turned seventeen or eighteen years old, and none were older than twenty-four. Regardless, once at the karaoke club, they aged at an accelerated pace. A woman seemed to add two days for every one day she spent there.

To prevent rebellion, Chuan regularly sold individual women to other brothel owners. A network of recruiters had little trouble replenishing his supply. Due to the constant turnover, the women rarely formed relationships where trust and solidarity might take root. They shared a nightmare, yet faced their suffering alone.

In a departure from his pattern, Chuan did not sell off Srey Neang. He had his reasons. A good number of the johns specifically requested a young girl, and that made Srey Neang a valuable commodity. Chuan’s second reason made Srey Neang even more ill. He confessed that he had fallen in love with her.

As far as she was concerned, love had nothing to do with their relationship. Chuan raped Srey Neang at least three times a week. He treated her no better or no worse than the other johns she met each day. Occasionally Chuan brought her small gifts such as perfume or new earrings. He never failed to mention— usually the next day—that he had added the cost of the gift to her debt.

Only on one occasion did Srey Neang feel hopeful about getting away from the karaoke club. Late one morning, while nearly all of the girls still lay asleep in their beds, she awoke to the sound of pounding at the front door. She stumbled out of the bedroom and heard a clear voice bark: “It’s the police! Open up the door immediately!”

“I can’t,” she yelled back through the door. “The door locks only from the outside. You’ll have to get the key from Chuan.”

“Stand back then,” the voice advised. “We’re going to break down the door.” “Be my guest!” Srey Neang squealed with delight.

Within seconds a band of uniformed police officers came bursting through the entrance. By now, all of the girls had spilled out of their bedrooms and stood pensively in the front hallway. The officer in charge paced slowly in a circle around them. He used exaggerated gestures to show that he was counting the number of girls present. He then announced, “You are all under arrest for the illegal solicitation of sex.”

“Boy, I never thought I would be so glad to be arrested,” quipped an older girl. She then added to the policeman who grabbed her arm, “But you got the wrong criminal. Find that bastard Chuan, and throw him behind bars.” Ignoring her comment, the commanding officer ordered his team to escort the girls down the stairs to the cars parked below. Once at the police station, they placed all the girls in a single holding cell.

Nothing much happened over the next twenty-four hours. Srey Neang kept waiting for the opportunity to tell the police her story. Surely Ly and Chuan committed a crime when they bartered her like a prized cow. And can someone be forced to perform unmentionable acts with men? She thought not.

The following afternoon a guard opened the door of the jail cell and invited only Srey Neang to accompany him. She assumed that she would get fi rst crack at testifying against Chuan. To her surprise, the guard led her straight out of the police station. There, waiting for her on the sidewalk, stood Chuan. “I bet you missed me,” he crowed.

She turned to run back into the police station, but Chuan grabbed her by the arm. “You’re wasting your time,” he said. “How do you think I got you released? The police are more than happy at the moment with their cash bonus.”

Chuan drove her back to the karaoke club. Once they arrived, he walked with her up the stairs to the apartment and then raped her. Before departing the bedroom, he whispered into her ear, “So glad you’re back.” Lying still in her bed, Srey Neang heard the key lock the door.

In the weeks to follow, Srey Neang sank into a deep depression. Sleep once had been her refuge, but the events of the day seeped into her dreams. She now tossed and turned her way through the night. Food lost its appeal. She lost nearly twenty-five pounds. Though she had always been somewhat slight, at sixty-six pounds she now looked all skin and bones.

Perhaps death would be her only escape. She counted it among her options.

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Every night the streets of Bangkok are filled with middle-aged men who walk hand-in-hand with teenage girls. These sex tourists have traveled from all over the world to be here and play out their own private fantasy. Some men pay for quick sex, but most prefer to buy a ‘girlfriend’ for an entire night or even several days. The johns behave like young adolescents, publicly pawing their “dates,” squeezing their buttocks and breasts with little shame.

Specialized travel agencies around the globe promote “exotic sexual adventures” with Asian women “who know how to please a man.” After sex tourists experience firsthand how easy it is to buy young girls, they frequently make their own arrangements for return visits.

Thailand, in particular, has been branded internationally as a Disneyland for sexual escapades. A Bangkok-based children’s rights group has tracked the country’s boom in sexual tourism over the past two decades. Its research shows that 2 million foreigners visited the country in 1984, 4 million in 1988, and more than 11 million in 2003.7 Out of the total number of foreign visitors, roughly two-thirds entering Thailand were unaccompanied men. In other words, about 7.3 million unaccompanied men visited the country in 2003. Certainly, not all of these men came as sexual tourists, but it’s a good bet that a significant percentage did. In fact, according to a survey of travel agents con- ducted by international aid agency World Vision, 65 percent of all tourists to Cambodia are men and one-fifth of them travel with the express purpose to have sex.

Male clients from Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan drive the demand for young girls who are virgins. In these Asian cultures, sex with a virgin is thought to bring good luck to a new business venture. Moreover, virgin girls pose less threat of exposure to sexually transmitted disease.

The lucrative market in virgins tempts parents to sell their preadolescent daughters to a brothel for a high premium. It’s a bizarre business: a john may pay $750 for one night with a young girl, and one week later that same girl may be seeing ten clients a night for $2.50 a session.

The growing demand for virgins has created a niche market outside the usual channels for commercial sex–the bars, karaoke clubs, and brothels. A growing number of parents market their daughter’s virginity like an independent talent agent, selling her to the highest bidder for a one-time sexual experience once she reaches the age of twelve or thirteen. As a matter of propriety, the daughter will be sent away “to visit relatives” for a couple of weeks. After a fixed period of sexual exploitation, the girl will return to her normal life at school or work at home.

Though much less common, Japanese and Chinese men are known to pay parents years in advance to “sponsor” a young child. The families receive a regular payment to raise a healthy daughter, and when the sponsor is ready, he will come and use her for sex.

Western sex tourists, on the other hand, tend to frequent the bars and brothels in major cities. Though some specifically request sex with children, most act in an opportunistic way; that is to say, they react spontaneously to what happens once they arrive at a sex bar or karaoke club. Some men may not even initially plan to engage in commercial sex on their journeys to Southeast Asia, but find it easy to do once they are there.

Sexual tourism clearly feeds the beast of sexual slavery. Nonetheless, its contribution to the sex trade in Southeast Asia is vastly overrated in the global media. By far the largest proportion of johns comes from the local population. “Foreigners are not the only ones who exploit our children,” confirms Cambodia’s former Minister for Women’s Affairs. “The real disease comes from within.”

Particularly in Cambodia and Thailand, men will visit a brothel together during a night of partying; it’s simply a part of the evening entertainment. A number of studies conducted in both Cambodia and Thailand show that approximately 40 to 50 percent of local men pay for commercial sex during the course of a year. 10 Married women quietly accept that their husbands will pay to have sex on a night out with the boys. Men have sexual needs, the wives reason, and at least they will not be in pursuit of eligible single women who could displace them.

Paying for sex has become embedded in many social rituals. Businessmen use paid sex as a courtesy in the arrangement of commercial deals; if a firm does not offer its clients sex, it may risk losing them to competitors who will. Working-class men buy sex for their friends on birthdays and other special occasions. Doting fathers pay for their sons to have their first sexual experience at a brothel.

Sexual tourism could end tomorrow, but it would make only a modest change in the flow of sexual slavery in Southeast Asia. In fact, at the sites frequented by sexual tourists, a minority of the women who work are enslaved. By and large, bar owners consider it too risky to present enslaved women to foreign visitors. While some women may be in debt slavery to the bar owners, most of them work as free agents, paying the bar owner a commission for each trick. Enslaved women, on the other hand, typically are found in brothels that cater to local men.

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Young boys and girls in every city on the globe today are forced to serve as sex slaves. Sex traffickers target twelve- to seventeen-year-old children as their choice candidates. The johns who pay regular visits to brothels prefer adolescents above any other age group. Looked at from the cold perspective of a slaveholder, adolescents also have a longer shelf life. Any older and they start to lose their youthful appeal. Any younger and they may draw the attention of law enforcement authorities.

Because sex trafficking masks itself as prostitution, the general public does not feel outraged. The children are perceived to be criminals or sexual deviants or at best victims of their environment: desperate for survival, the kids “choose” to sell their bodies for profit.

The real criminals hide in the shadows. An illicit network of traffickers, pimps, recruiters, brothel owners, and johns preys on vulnerable kids and forces them into a life of sexual commerce. Once the inner workings of that criminal network are exposed, common sense prevails. Of course a child would not volunteer for the repeated trauma of ten (or more) grown men penetrating their bodies every evening. We have a word for exploiting minors that way: rape.

It should be noted that the same mechanisms of financial bondage and violent intimidation that enslave children are practiced on females of all ages. Adult “prostitutes” too can recount shocking testimonies of pimps locking them in closets, flogging them with coat hangers, and forcing them to ser vice a staggering number of clients. The pimps quite explicitly refer to these women as “my property” and will attack anyone who acts to compromise their control.

Donna Hughes, an influential activist in the campaign to stop the flow of sex trafficking, explained to the U.S. House Committee on International Relations that prostitution and sex trafficking are inextricably linked: “To not understand the relationship between prostitution and trafficking is like not understanding the relationship between slavery in the Old South and the kidnapping of victims in Africa and the transatlantic shipment of them to our shores.”

Without a doubt, we need a more nuanced understanding of prostitution. Katherine Chon, co-founder of the Polaris Project, points to a conversation she had with a Korean woman in her early twenties whom she suspected was a victim of sex trafficking. When Katherine asked the woman whether she had been coerced into coming to the United States to work in the sex trade, the woman adamantly denied that was the case.

Katherine decided to change her tack: “Well, on a scale of 0 to 100 percent, how much control do you feel you have over your decisions each day to continue selling your body to men?”

Given the flow of the conversation up to that point, Katherine expected the woman to give a response that might fall close to 90 percent. But after considering for a few seconds, the woman gave Katherine a surprising answer: “Oh, I’d say maybe 5 percent.”

Confused by her answer, Katherine started digging a bit deeper: “So why do you feel such loyalty for the owner of the brothel where you work?”

“The owner told me that if I got into trouble, she would bail me out of jail and pay for an attorney,” the Korean woman replied. “I am not from here [the United States]; the police can do bad things to you, so I need security.” The Korean woman went on to explain that the brothel owner also keeps possession of all her “savings.” If she were to leave the brothel, the owner would not give her the money back. Her pimp also provides her protection, though he threatens to beat her if she tries to leave him.

Is she a slave? It would not be much of a stretch to identify her as such, even though she technically does not live under lock and key. Tragically, the woman herself rejects the label. She has come to accept her destiny the coercion weaves so seamlessly into her surroundings that she no longer recognizes it as a chain.

Coercing children into the sex trade entails much less ambiguity. The actual process of enslavement varies from place to place; the most influential independent variable is the strength of law enforcement in a particular region. Research across five continents uncovers a disturbingly common pattern in child sex trafficking, regardless of whether international crime networks are involved or the operation runs on a regional level with ad hoc players. The process of enslavement involves five predictable elements:

Recruitment- Traffickers target children most commonly from communities that lack social power, at times with the consent of the victims parents.

Extraction- Traffickers remove recruits from their home community and shift them to a destination where they are unlikely to get support from law enforcement bodies or the general citizenry.

Control- Slaveholders seek control over every aspect of the child’s life so that escape becomes unthinkable.

Violence- Slaveholders exercise violence as a means to reinforce their control and ensure compliance.

Exploitation- Slaveholders show slight regard for the physical or emotional health of the child in their pursuit of financial gain.

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Stories like the one below are all too common.  What is your role in being an “agent of change”?

It was revealed that out of the 1.2 million children around the world who are trafficked every year, 100,000 are Filipinos. That means one out of 10 children who are sold into slavery is a Filipino; that’s one every 12 minutes.

“Anna,” who has asked that we disguise her identity, was trafficked to Malaysia from her home in the Philippines in early 2007.

Promised a job as a waitress, she arrived to find her traffickers had something very different in mind.

Anna: My manager told us we will work as a prostitute … I go there, I’m still virgin. I tell my friend I don’t want this work because I cannot give myself to anybody … My boss tell me I sign contract, I cannot go back Philippines. 

She was forced to sign an official-looking contract which spells out how much she owes her traffickers.

Anna: Air ticket, 500 ringgit. Cash advance, 1,600 ringgit. Travel tax, 150 ringgit.

When she went to Malaysian immigration officials for help, they turned around and called her traffickers.

Anna: The higher official at the immigration he asked me how can I pay my debt to my boss if I did not work?  He said, just go back to work … The Malaysian officer know what will happen to us because sometimes they also go to pub … They choose girl, the girl sit beside them and then if they want to make love with them, but no pay.

That night Anna’s virginity was sold for $80.

Anna: I can do nothing because my boss tell me I need — I need to do that. (crying) If I did not do that I cannot pay my debt, I cannot go back to Philippines.

Anna was forced to work up to 17 hours a day, seven days a week for months on end.

Anna: When a customer comes, then our mommy will call us then introduce us one by one then the customer will choose. If the customer want to make love with you he will tell the mommy then he will pay then you go out, in the other room.

At her real mother’s urging, the Philippine embassy in Malaysia began looking for Anna.  In June 2007, they tracked down her trafficker and called to inquire about Anna’s well-being.

Anna: My boss call me in. I see in the office two policeman, my boss, my mannager, and my boss tell me, call your mother, say to the embassy that you’re ok, you’re fine, you work here. If I did not do that, the police will bring me to jail.

Anna did as she was told, but she memorized the number of the Philippine embassy and later that night called back in a panic.

Anna: “I work here as a prostitute, I lost my virginity here, and then I got sick.  I want to go home and please help me.”

The Philippine embassy staged a rescue and helped return Ana home to the Philippines.  She is free but not well.

Anna: Maybe I have — I’m afraid I have AIDS.

Two Australians and a New Zealander have been arrested after a raid on a suspected brothel as the Philippines stepped up a campaign against trafficking of women and children for sex, police say.

Investigators said they have yet to establish whether detained Australians Barry Burston, 69, and Raymond Anderson, 57, and Michael Watt, 59, from New Zealand, owned, operated or were customers at the suspected brothel.

Police raided the night club in the northern city of Angeles late on Thursday and found 42 alleged sex workers, including a 17-year-old girl that had earlier been reported missing by an aunt, chief investigator Samuel Pagdilao said on Friday.

“They (detained suspects) are being investigated by our women and children’s protection section. We should be filing cases against them shortly,” said Chief Superintendent Pagdilao, head of the police criminal investigation division.

Prostitution is illegal in the Philippines, Asia’s Roman Catholic outpost, but the sex trade flourishes openly in many urban areas including Manila and Angeles, which until 1992 had hosted a US military base.

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