“Outrage was mounting at the 1999 hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building, where congressmen were learning about human trafficking.
“A woman from Nepal testified that September that she had been drugged, abducted and forced to work at a brothel in Bombay. A Christian activist recounted tales of women overseas being beaten with electrical cords and raped. A State Department official said Congress must act — 50,000 slaves were pouring into the United States every year, she said. Furious about the ‘tidal wave’ of victims, Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) vowed to crack down on so-called modern-day slavery.
“The next year, Congress passed a law, triggering a little-noticed worldwide war on human trafficking that began at the end of the Clinton administration and is now a top Bush administration priority. As part of the fight, President Bush has blanketed the nation with 42 Justice Department task forces and spent more than $150 million — all to find and help the estimated hundreds of thousands of victims of forced prostitution or labor in the United States.
“But the government couldn’t find them. Not in this country…The administration has identified 1,362 victims of human trafficking brought into the United States since 2000, nowhere near the 50,000 a year the government had estimated.”
The International Marriage Broker Regulation Act of 2005 (IMBRA) unfairly targets men and men’s civil rights. To read my blog posts on the subject, click here, here, and here. As so often happens, feminist groups and the government greatly exaggerated a problem women face, one which reflects poorly on men, and then passed an anti-male law because of it. According to Tristan Laurent of www.OnlineDatingRights.com:
“The Washington Post uncovered widespread fraud in human trafficking reporting. Beginning in 2000, the US government has found sex trafficking a convenient target to attack and they have given millions and millions to stop it. NGOs and feminist groups have sprung up to lap up the gobs of money the feds and the states have spent on this essentially non-existent problem. The National Organization of Women, the Tahirih Justice Center, US Senator Maria Cantwell and others…have used these phony reports of massive human trafficking to justify [the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act of 2005], a law against men who want to meet foreign women, IMBRA.”
According to Laurent, in 2004 Cantwell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
“Human trafficking is the politic way of describing modern-day slavery…18,000 and 20,000 people are trafficked into the United States each year….When we talk about human trafficking and abuse, we need to also be aware of the advent of for-profit international marriage brokers – companies that operate solely to connect men and women of different nations with the intent of getting married.”
The Washington Post article is below.
Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence
U.S. Estimates Thousands of Victims, But Efforts to Find Them Fall Short
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post, 9/23/07 (more…)
