The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter Sept/Oct and Nov/Dec, 1999, Vol. 6, Number 5 & 6. NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SEXUAL TRAFFICKING Keynote Speaker: Michael Horowitz, Senior Fellow Hudson Institute by Michael Horowitz

I t has been a great privilege on my part to be a part of a rather remarkable international human rights revolution, the battle against the annual enslavement of, some say as many as 4 million people, mostly women and children, into lives of sexual bondage. This, at the hands of linked organizations-- criminal mafias in the Soviet Union, corrupt businessmen in Thailand, and corrupt public officials in Western countries who have carried on, insulated from any real form of public response, this unspeakable slave trade. We are about to start a process, by the end of this Congress, to set the United States in the direction of shattering this trade, and of shattering the assumptions that underlie it-- that women are chattel who can be easily moved from country to country as just so much meat and property. There is currently a bill before Congress that would help to bring an end to this terrible crime-- Let me just briefly describe the particulars of the legislation. What it says is that there is a basic minimum standard for dealing with sex traffickers involved in enticing women and children either through deceit or outright abduction, or by trafficking in women and children below the age of 18, sending them across international borders for the purpose of prostitution. Below 18, as a minimum standard, anyone involved in fraud or abduction must be punished in the country where the crime is committed. That includes the brothel owners in the Western countries and the Russian mafias who are enticing and deceiving women to take "jobs" in the West. They must be prosecuted with penalties equal to the penalty that that country provides to first-degree rapists. No more business-as-usual fines for owners. They are rapists, pure and simple, and our minimum standard says they must be treated as such.

The countries involved in sexual slavery must not only pass laws to that effect; there are serious tests to see whether they are actually enforcing those laws. One of the provisions, for example, says that any woman who is involved as a whistle-blower cannot simply be threatened with immediate deportation. That ensures that there will be protection under the immigration laws of those countries for women who blow the whistle. We define those standards and we say to countries you have got to live up to those standards. Our legislation says if a country does not live up to that minimum standard non-humanitarian, United States aid will be taken away. What this does is to force the issue on to the short-list agenda at the level of presidents and secretaries of states and their opposite numbers, because any president who waives those sanctions and keeps American foreign aid going to countries that are indifferent to the trafficking industries within their midst, are going to have to face the wrath of groups in the United States like the Salvation Army and the church-going community, the women's groups, and the human-rights community.

Consequently, the President is going to have to tell the President of Russia that he best get his act together and he had best start prosecuting because the American President's continued ability to provide that aid, to vote for International Monetary Fund support for countries is dependent on those countries making progress-- And they will make progress, because the kind of aid that we produce is much more important to them than allowing continued corruption and indifference to mafias. I do not expect the problem to be resolved overnight, but I will say that getting that issue on the short-list agenda and forcing presidents to be accountable for inaction and a failure to make progress is one sure way to generate progress. That signal will carry an awful lot of weight and our continued passion on the issue will ensure it, And we will set up mechanisms for reporting about it every year and getting congressional hearings on the subject. This is a country that will not abide that kind of slavery once the issue is well known. So we will have the visibility, we will have the priority, we will have Presidential accountability, and if we stick to the issue we will make progress.

Great Britain, in ending the slave trade in the 19th century, had to go much further than I think we will. Great Britain sent its Navy into friendly ports, that is to say, ports of countries with which they were otherwise conducting business and had friendly relations, to break up the slave-trading ships. It did so at the behest of groups just like this beginning in 1807, when William Wilberforce finally succeeded in that abolitionist campaign to make the slave trade and slaving illegal in Great Britain. The British Navy lost thousands of sailors, hundreds of ships, over a 50-year campaign to end the slave trade. The historian W.E.H. Lecky wrote "The unweary, ostentatious, and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may properly be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations--" So may it be said of the United States and of us, as we work to end the trafficking and enslavement of millions of women and children at the hands of these evil abductors. They are strong, but not as strong as the collective moral passion of a shrewd American people that know the soft spots, and know how to exploit America's power.

W e have power to do good. We will use it. And may it be said of us as well, that we can join the ranks in this effort of writing a page of history that is perfectly virtuous, on behalf of powerless people who depend on us, and, by God, will count on us, to make history on their behalf. We have made a good start. We are on our way. We are going to win. We are going to make a difference.