United States
Feds focusing help on human trafficking victims in Las Vegas
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Federal and local service providers were training Wednesday on ways to identify and help human trafficking victims working in sex, construction, restaurant or housekeeping trades in southern Nevada.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nevada/2005/mar/16/031610193.html
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Federal and local service providers were training Wednesday on ways to identify and help human trafficking victims working in sex, construction, restaurant or housekeeping trades in southern Nevada.
The expansion of a Department of a Health and Human Services program Tuesday to Las Vegas comes after the Department of Justice and other federal and local authorities announced a law enforcement crackdown on human trafficking in September.
The Rescue and Restore Victims of Human Trafficking effort aims to help more than 30 southern Nevada service agencies that shelter runaways and offer aid to trafficking victims, officials said.
"We see these kids on a nightly basis," said Kevin Morss, coordinator of a WestCare street outreach team that got a $150,000 grant Tuesday to double in size to four members. WestCare is a nonprofit agency that also offers substance abuse and mental health treatment in the Las Vegas area.
Maj. William Raihl, Salvation Army coordinator in Clark County, called the agencies "a safety net for the victims of human trafficking, allowing them to come forward and get the help they need."
The Salvation Army is getting part of a $500,000 federal grant to provide shelter and other services to people brought from a foreign country and forced into what Steve Wagner, director of the Health and Human Services Trafficking in Persons Program, called "modern day slavery." Las Vegas is the 11th U.S. city included in the effort.
Wagner said the problem involves children, women and men forced against their will to engage in sex, prostitution, pornography, escort services, or to perform labor in massage parlors, farms, construction, restaurants and sweat shop factories.
Most are persuaded to trust their captors and employers by the promise of fame and fortune or a better life in America.
Emmett McGroarty, deputy director of the Trafficking in Persons program, said Rescue and Restore aims to train those likely to encounter human trafficking victims how to help, how to report the crime and how to help authorities prevent it.
Victims are more likely to trust service providers than law enforcement officials, McGroarty said.
Federal authorities estimate as many as 17,500 people are brought into the United States each year in some form of bondage.
Prostitution rings have been found involving Eastern European women, Las Vegas police Sgt. Al Cervantes said, and authorities have also found cases of women forced to work in Asian massage parlors.
In 2004, Las Vegas police found 207 girls forced into prostitution, Sgt. Gil Shannon said, with at least half brought to southern Nevada from other states.
Shannon, of the police department's Juvenile Vice Investigation Squad, said the girls are lured by pimps and other girls into prostitution at hotels on and off the Las Vegas Strip, and bound by threats and intimidation.
Those who are apprehended enter a program called Operation Stop, where they are treated as victims and encouraged to help authorities prosecute their pimps.
Shannon said most victims are reunited with family or placed in programs helping them leave prostitution.
Since 2001, the U.S. attorney in Las Vegas has prosecuted four human trafficking cases. Operation Jade Blade, a 2 1/2-year federal investigation, led to the conviction of several people for smuggling Asian women into Las Vegas for prostitution.
David Thronson, co-director of the immigration law clinic at the Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said not all human trafficking cases involve the sex trade.
He said he recently helped three people, including a woman who escaped forced agricultural work in another state, obtain a T-Visa. The document is issued to human trafficking victims who cooperate with the prosecution of their oppressors.
Thronson said some trafficking victims are lured into debt bondage, by employers who help get them into the U.S. in return for repaying a sum that gets bigger instead of smaller over time.