The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter Sept./Oct. and Nov./Dec., 1999, Vol. 6, Number 5 & 6. NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SEXUAL TRAFFICKING Law Enforcement and Legislation Guest Speaker: Robert Flores, Vice President National Law Center for Children and Families; former Acting Director of the Child Exploitation Division, U.S. Department of Justice Robert Flores

O ne of the issues that continues to confront and confound most law enforcement people as they consider this issue is, can we really do something about it? If you talk to the FBI, as I have on many occasions, many of them take the view that it's been here for a long time. It's going to be here for an even longer time, and there's really not much that we can do about it; so maybe we need to just find a way to make it go away.

If you talk to local police, the further up the chain of command you go, you get a similar type of view expressed. But it's very different in the trenches. The police officers, at least when they come onto a vice assignment dealing with prostitution, have very quickly come to understand the dynamics of this industry and the damage that it does, certainly, to individuals and its interconnection with other types of crime.

Part of the problem is that these cases cost money; they take time; they take resources. So one of the challenges for NGOs, people who are interested academics and government folks, is to think about how to motivate law enforcement. Motivation is what's sorely lacking in this particular type of case.

One thing that we have going for us on this issue, which we didn't have five, ten years ago is, that we finally have public attention. There are those who would dismiss the Chris Smith Bill, or any other bill that's out there, but I would say, that those bills are going to get this issue discussed in the places where they need to be discussed. Even if all they do is trigger discussion on these issues and make it possible for government officials who want to try to do something on this issue to move forward, it's important.

How do we pressure law enforcement? What do we give them? These cases are getting more and more difficult every day. One of the challenges with law enforcement is that for a long time law enforcement has relied on prostitutes as an information source. They are often confidential sources, informants on the state, local and even the federal level. Why? Because these women are close to criminals and criminal activity, beyond mere prostitution. If, for instance. you have a woman who has access to drug lords, or drug pushing, or drug running, or gun running or anything else for that matter, she is much more useful to you as an informant than as a case. So there are plenty of law enforcement officers that are happy to let the prostitution continue, in the hopes of making sure that they get a steady stream of information.

One of the things that has to be done is that there has to be some money and some visionary thinking, in terms of assimilating data. I know that as a young prosecutor, I was always surprised that I had to go talk to five or six different police officers to get all of the information that I needed about a particular community. Some cops knew a little bit about organized crime. Some cops knew a lot about the money laundering situation, who was running drugs here, who had the girls on that comer. And so it took a while to put this picture together. A lot of the information that's necessary is out there, but it's got to be collected: it's got to be analyzed, and this is something that most police departments do not have the funds or the money to do. One of the ways to motivate law enforcement is to provide them with some money and some tools for them to start doing some strategic thinking which, unfortunately, they do very little of.

In terms of the international situation, we've got to be less naive about where some of this money is going. The commercial sex industry in the U. S. is extremely good at moving money outside of the country and away from Uncle Sam. The strip club owners don't pay their taxes. The brothel owners do not pay their taxes. These are not typically law abiding folks. And they're making a ton of money. They are not reinvesting in the community in which they are taking these girls, these women and these children, and making life better for any of the citizens in that community.

Offshore banking laws and the Internet makes the movement of money incredibly easy. We have many, many challenges over the next few years, in terms of trying to come up with a process which allows us to address some of the stark needs that law enforcement has.