Monday, December 7, 2009

NPA Continuing Ed: Sex Slaves in Suburbia

I recently saw an episode about sex slaves in suburban Detroit on MSNBC. This is a clip that summarizes what the show was about:
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2009/11/25/dnt.woman.sex.trade.wjla?iref=allsearch

These women were promised a life of education and better work in the United States if they came over from Ukraine. Instead, they were forced to be strippers at Cheetahs in Detroit and sexually assaulted by their captors.

I was surprised about how the lawyer for the men responded. He said the men would not deny laundering the money the women made and were forced to give them but the fact that the women were held against their will and sexually assaulted was false. He claimed they could have left the club they were working at any time and they were not barricaded into their apartment and could have left there at any time. He seems to be ignoring the fact that the men took the women's documents and had threatened their families in their home countries.

The women's attorney, as I was told, was on campus last year and talked at one of the PE events. It is nice to hear her support of the women's story at a time when the men's lawyer can be so uneducated about the methods of control these men used to keep these women working for them.

What do you think about the existence of sex trafficking and sex slaver going on in the United States?

-Gretchen

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