http://www.dailynews.com/theiropinion/ci_3180049

Homegrown evil exists in our own communities
By Tony Cardenas, Guest Columnist


Ask any Angeleno what human trafficking is and you'll get an array of responses, some not so insightful. One resident even asked, "Is that where coroners sell dead bodies for scientific research?" You may laugh, but most people don't realize the tentacles of this monster are in our own backyards.

Human trafficking is a crime involving illegal import, export, prostitution, pornography, slavery, drugs and a submergence of other crimes that we as a community have been trying to eradicate. If you think these issues are hurting our communities now, traffickers will soon multiply the problem.

Thousands of women and children are being bought and sold every day, and it's happening here. These victims are forced to do the most hellacious things imaginable. You can see the scars on their bodies and worse, the scars deeply embedded in their minds.

Every day, traffickers sneak poverty-stricken victims into this country to sell their bodies in brothels, over the Internet and out on the streets. Smuggling is not trafficking. Trafficking is the illegal importation of individuals into this country and then forcing them to do things against their will.

I know many of you think better border patrol is the answer, but some of our own citizens are the criminals. Yes, sex slavery is at the hands of some of our own American citizens. Don't mistake this as being an immigrant crime.

Take the case of two women who were sold in Africa for the price of $200 each to a Beverly Hills couple. To this day, one has black-and-blue legs from climbing the mansion's staircase 20 hours a day to meet the demands of feeding, cleaning, dressing, and even bathing both husband and wife.

That was two years ago. The youngest victim is now 21, and still breaks down into tears when asked what was expected of her. Besides washing the wife's hair twice a day and answering to the call of "animal," her advocate says she was forced to meet the sexual demands of both the husband and wife.

These women said nothing to authorities because they couldn't speak


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the language and feared their families' lives back home. Again, their traffickers were American and their buyers were American.

If traffickers are among our own citizens, then it shouldn't surprise you that American children are also being kidnapped and sold into sex slavery.

I've met an American woman - yep, a blond-haired American woman - who was kidnapped at a young age, sold for sex from state to state, and forced into pornography. She handed a note to a stranger in an airport before boarding a plane. That stranger saved her from being sold to a trafficking ring in Japan. Her original trafficker was an American from the Midwest.

Perpetrators of trafficking can earn up to $40,000 per year per one victim. It's not unlikely for perpetrators to use different outlets including the Internet and underground video distribution companies to sell images of exploited victims.

The more victims, the more profit for traffickers. Over a year ago, federal authorities busted a South Los Angeles brothel where they found about 15 young women being forced to prostitute themselves to pay off coyote fees to get into the country. Two of them were minors. It was happening in a house in a fairly quiet neighborhood.

This is where you come in. By knowing how to identify these crimes, we as a community can help stop them. By educating ourselves we can help our police department crack down on traffickers and break the chain of modern-day slavery. But we can only do that by first saying, yes, it exists. And it exists in L.A.