Carissa A. Rarick† | 2 Regent J. Glob. Just. & Pub. Pol. 65
We worked from 4pm till late night or early morning with three to four clients a day. Sometimes we used condoms, but sometimes we didn’t. Most of the clients were foreigners who didn’t speak my language and didn’t care about my age. I didn’t know how to contact the police and I didn’t know if the police would even care. I wanted to run away, but was scared the gang would find me and kill me. My self-loathing grew, so I began injecting myself with drugs. I tried to numb myself from the pain so I wouldn’t feel anything at all.1
These are the words of a young girl who was a victim of human trafficking.2 Loreta is not the only victim of this horrific crime, as human trafficking is an ever-increasing industry.3 The International Labour Organization estimates that more than 20.9 million individuals are currently the victims of forced labor, and an estimated 4.5 million of these individuals are forced into human sex trafficking.4 Human sex trafficking is “the fastest-growing business of organized crime and the third-largest criminal enterprise in the world.”5 Many victims of this crime are adult and adolescent women.6 According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation:
[T]he business of human sex trafficking is much more organized and violent. These women and young girls are sold to traffickers, locked up in rooms or brothels for weeks or months, drugged, terrorized, and raped repeatedly. These continual abuses make it easier for the traffickers to control their victims. The captives are so afraid and intimidated that they rarely speak out against their traffickers, even when faced with an opportunity to escape.7
It is assumed that if an individual knows that a prostitute was coerced into sex trafficking, then the individual will not have sex with the prostitute; however, this is not always the case.8 Individuals who have sex with girls involved in sex trafficking typically have knowledge of the sex trafficking industry and potentially even know that their prostitute has been sex trafficked.9 One instance of this abnormality is the continued sexual exploitation of young women by private military contractors.
Over the last decade there has been a rise in the military’s use of private military contractors (PMC) as the United States has sought to reduce its budget.10 The United States has acknowledged that this increase in PMC deployments has contributed to the issue of human trafficking, as there have been several negative side effects of the implementation of PMCs.11 First, there has been an increased number of incidences of PMCs involvement in labor and sex trafficking (often during peacekeeping operations).12 Second, there is little to no way of policy enforcement to reprimand PMCs involvement in human sex trafficking.13 Third, incidences of PMCs involvement in sex trafficking have led to a plethora of bad publicity for the United States and its military.14
This Note first examines the military’s increased use of Private Military Firms (PMF) and PMCs. This Note next discusses previous PMF and PMC labor and sex trafficking violations. This note further analyzes the current laws in place to prevent PMF and PMC involvement with human trafficking, and the implementation of prior policies. Likewise, this Note analyzes why current laws, such as the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), have failed. Finally, this Note concludes by proposing a solution that will provide a way to prosecute PMFs and PMCs involved in sex trafficking violations while forcing governmental agencies to cut ties with PMFs and PMCs that violate trafficking laws.
I. HISTORY
A. History of Military Sexual Exploitation
“Throughout history, women have been treated as spoils of war; wherever there has been military occupation, incidents of rape and sexual assault have been prevalent. . . . [S]exual abuse of women has been regarded as an inevitable feature of war.”15 Over time, the nexus between military deployment and sexual assault has not diminished.16 Even today, the effects of military deployment in otherwise cold conflicts nevertheless negatively impact women.17 Recently, a Department of Defense (DOD) report on human trafficking showed women being rushed to an area of war by traffickers to meet the needs of the military personnel stationed in the area.18 The culture of the military and its views and actions towards women and sexuality are largely to blame for these demoralizing problems.19 The recent trend towards utilizing PMCs in place of military personnel has intensified hostile actions towards women in various PMC job locations since PMCs often carry the same cultural views towards women;20 yet there is a lack of current legislation to provide for efficient and adequate prosecution of PMC involvement in human trafficking.21
1 EQUALITY NOW, SURVIVOR STORIES: LORETA 22 (2014), http://www.equalitynow.org/sites/default/files/Survivor_Stories.pdf.
2 Id. See also Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, adopted Nov. 15, 2000, 2237 U.N.T.S. 319, 344 (entered into force Dec. 25, 2003) (defining trafficking in persons as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.”).
3 Amanda Walker-Rodriguez & Rodney Hill, Human Sex Trafficking, FBI L.
ENFORCEMENT BULL., Mar. 2011, at 2, https://leb.fbi.gov/2011/march/leb-march-2011. See generally Human Trafficking, UNITED NATIONS OFF. ON DRUGS & CRIME, https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/what-is-human-trafficking.html (last visited Oct. 29, 2015) (noting that every year human trafficking affects thousands of men, woman, and children).
4 New ILO Global Estimate of Forced Labour: 20.9 Million Victims, INT’L LABOUR ORG. (June 1, 2012), http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_182109 /lang–en/index.htm.
5 Walker-Rodriguez & Hill, supra note 3, at 2.
6 U.S. DEP’T OF STATE, TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS REPORT 6 (2006), http://www.state. gov/documents/organization/66086.pdf.
7 Walker-Rodriguez & Hill, supra note 3, at 3.
8 Cf. Angela Snell, Note, The Absence of Justice: Private Military Contractors, Sexual Assault, and the U.S. Government’s Policy of Indifference, 2011 U. ILL. L. REV. 1125, 1139– 40 (2011) (noting that while the U.S. government implemented regulations to guarantee their employees did not engage in human trafficking, “it is doubtful that the regulations will accomplish their laudable objective, since [c]ontractors are unlikely to self-report.”) (alternation in original).
9 Cf. id. at 1139–40, 1160 (noting that even though the Department of Defense “adopted a zero-tolerance policy on trafficking activities for military personnel” trafficking scandals involving military contractors still persisted).
10 See id. at 1129.
11 See Enforcing U.S. Policies Against Trafficking in Persons: How Is the U.S. Military Doing?: Briefing Before the Comm’n on Sec. & Cooperation in Eur. & the H. Armed Servs. Comm., 108th Cong. 4, 7 (2004) (statement of Rep. Christopher H. Smith, Chairman, Comm’n on Sec. and Cooperation in Eur., and Ambassador John R. Miller, Director, Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, U.S. Department of State).
12 See id. at 2, 7.
13 See id. at 4 (statement of Rep. Christopher H. Smith, Chairman, Comm’n on Sec. and Cooperation in Eur.).
14 See id. at 2–3.
15 Snell, supra note 8, at 1127–28, 1134. “In 2003, nearly thirty percent of female veterans from Vietnam through the first Gulf War surveyed by psychologist Anne Sadler and her colleagues said they were raped in the military. A 1995 study of female veterans reported that ninety percent had been sexually harassed, which was defined broadly as anything from being pressured for sex to being leered at by fellow service members. Military reports placed the number of sexual assaults in the military at 2670, but the Pentagon itself estimates that eighty to ninety percent of military sexual assaults are never reported and that the figure given is probably grossly inaccurate.” Id. at 1133.
16 See id. at 1158–59. See also Mindy Kotler, The Comfort Women and Japan’s War on Truth, N.Y. TIMES (Nov. 14, 2014), http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/opinion/comfortwomen-and-japans-war-on-truth.html?_r=0 (discussing the Japanese military’s official policy of using comfort women during WWII, and recent attempts by the Japanese government to discredit the historical record).
17 Snell, supra note 8, at 1132.
18 See U.S. DEP’T OF DEF., ASSESSMENT OF DOD EFFORTS TO COMBAT TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS: PHASE II—BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA AND KOSOVO 7 (2003), www.dodig.mil/ FOIA/ERR/HT-Phase_II.pdf (discussing evidence of sex trafficking by various multinational military related personnel in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovia).
19 Snell, supra note 8, at 1132–33.
20 See id. at 1133.
21 U.S. DEP’T OF DEF., supra note 18, at 7, 10.
† B.A. 2010, Vanguard University of Southern California; J.D. 2016, Regent University School of Law.