America's Secret.

Voice for the Voiceless, Miss Bethany Kent, put together this amazing presentation for her degree in social work. We couldn't be prouder to share it with you, couldn't be prouder to call her friend and fellow abolitionist!

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America's Secret on Prezi by Bethany Kent

Latino House Brothels: Human Trafficking In America.

Recently MSNBC did an investigation of a Latino House Brothel maintained by an Atlanta sex Trafficking ring. Investigators say Amador Cortes-Mezahe, the ring's leader promised the victims a good job, a nice home, money, even marriage, but when they arrived in the land of the free they were brutalized, held captive and forced to work as prostitutes, sometimes servicing up to 40 men in one day.

According to MSNBC's report, "Cortes-Mezahe met Cristina when she was just 24 years old in a rural village in Mexico. He told her he loved her and brought her to the U.S. to build a life with him. This was not the case. 'That's when I realized he was not telling me the truth. A man who loves a woman would not make them do that. I lived under his humiliation, I lived under the beatings, under the fear, there was nothing I could do.'

Atlanta Sex Trafficking ring-leader Amador Cortes-Mezahe.

When another one of Cortes-Meza's victims asked to be returned to her family, she testified, he repeatedly dunked her head in a bucket of water until she felt she was drowning. Another had an iron thrown at her, slicing open her head."

According to MSNBC, in these operations, 'closed-network' houses of prostitution cater to customers of a specific race or ethnicity, in this case, Hispanic women and Hispanic customers.

House where Cortes-Meza exploited his Latino Victims

Anti-trafficking group Polaris Project, who runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline (1-888-3737-888) was the first to label these Latino Residential Brothels, or LRBs. Their research has found that residential brothels have spread to at least 25 states over the past 20 years. Their website highlights this problem here.

Polaris Project explains: "Traffickers set up in average neighborhoods and use coded advertisements in Spanish language newspapers, or by handing out false business cards and word of mouth to attract specific customers.

The young women, some as young as 13, are all lured in similar ways - promised jobs and better lives, smuggled into the country and then held captive until they pay off their 'debt' and forced to live under the ringleaders' control for years. They are usually moved from one brothel to another to prevent them from establishing roots and escaping.

"One woman in her early 20's was smuggled into the United States from Guatemala for what she thought was a housekeeping job. The journey from her small town to the Texas border took 26 days. From there she was whisked to a safe house near Houston, then brought to Tampa, and moved once more to a house in Jacksonville. There, an enforcer for the human trafficking operation told the woman her debt had jumped from $5,000 to $30,000. The enforcer demonstrated how to use a condom by rolling it over a beer bottle. He said she'd have to pay back the debt as a prostitute, according to authorities. She turned 25 tricks the next day and nearly every day for eight or nine months. This tortured existence — the daily life of a human trafficking victim — ended May 22, 2007, when authorities intervened." - 2009 St. Petersburg Times Article

Map of House Brothel prevalence by state.

Human trafficking victims in residential brothels are often forced to provide commercial sex to high volumes of men daily. In certain sex trafficking networks, women and girls commonly "serve" as many as four men per hour (every 15 minutes), totaling 48 men in a given 12 hour day. In this network, the victims are almost always women and children from Latin America. Brothels are typically located in homes, town homes, condos, apartments, and trailers. The majority of residential brothels are “closed networks” for only Latino men as "johns." Rather than advertizing online or through newspapers, they distribute business cards or “tarjetas” and also publicize their existence through word-of-mouth.

When does it become trafficking?

Trafficking occurs when brothel operators and/or boyfriends/recruiters use force, fraud, and/or coercion to maintain control over women in the brothel and to cause them to engage in commercial sex acts. An individual under the age of 18 engaged in commercial sex is considered a victim of sex trafficking regardless of the presence of force, fraud or coercion. Common means of control include:

Force – Complete isolation in the residential brothel; regular and frequent transportation to other brothels or other cities by drivers working for the trafficking network; physical or sexual abuse.

Fraud – False promises of a better life; false promises that a job in the United States will be better than their current job; false promises by a trafficker presenting as a boyfriend.

Coercion – Pressure to please the customer; debt manipulation; verbal, psychological and emotional abuse; threats of harm to the victim or victim’s family; threats to shame the victim by revealing the commercial sex to his or her family and others in the community; exploitation of a foreign national unfamiliarity with the language, laws and customs of the U.S.; threats of deportation and arrest; confiscation of passports and visas; restrictions on communication to family; forced abortions; rumors of or witnessed violence at hands of traffickers; coercive pressure from boyfriends or pimps outside the brothel.

*The above list is not comprehensive or cumulative. One element of force, fraud or coercion may be present, or many.

Vulnerabilities:

Immigration Status – Frequently, the women within residential brothel networks are undocumented. They may have come to the U.S. on a legitimate visa, a false visa provided to them by the network, or they may have been smuggled across the border. In many cases, their passport or identification documents have been confiscated by the trafficker, further increasing their vulnerability. Without legal status, the women frequently are taught by traffickers to fear and distrust police or government authorities.

Economic Hardship – Residential brothel networks often target women experiencing economic hardship, exploiting women’s need to care financially for family members or children.

Frequent Movement & Disorientation – Typically, women are not aware of or familiar with their surroundings because they are made to live and sleep at the brothel location and are not allowed to leave except when transported to a new brothel location.

Recruitment – Similar to domestic pimp-controlled sex trafficking, women in residential brothels are commonly recruited into the network by traffickers posing as boyfriends who feign romance and affection. Others are recruited in their home countries through false job promises in the U.S. Latina women already living in the U.S. may also be targeted through print advertisements, informal communications, or word of mouth.

Statistics Snapshot

* Standard price for 15 minutes of sex at a Residential Brothel: $30
* Standard day for a woman or child at a Residential Brothel: 10am – 10pm; 12 hours; 7 days a week
* Estimated number of men a woman or child must have sex with daily: 25 – 48 men daily"

Here are the 10 steps common to most Latino residential brothels, according to sex trafficking and law enforcement experts. Read the full article here.

1. Direct marketing

Brothels ensure a steady stream of customers by advertising aggressively at bus stops, parks and other high traffic pedestrian areas.

2. A nod and a wink

After identifying qualified customers (typically Spanish-speaking males), advertisers pass out "tarjetas" — business cards with ads in Spanish for phony products and services like men's cologne or house-call manicures. "Johns" know the ads are for sex. "Squares" likely never give the cards a second thought.



3. Reading between the lines

Some "tarjetas" will have codes - like wings indicating a brothel that delivers. Sometimes a call has to be placed to get the location of a brothel; other times the address is right on the card.

4. Now delivering

If delivery is an option, trusted car services are sometimes involved, with drivers taking a fee. Sometimes employees of the brothel drive girls around. Busy brothels keep long lists of available drivers, who share the profits with the brothel owners.

5. The door man

When a "john" visits a brothel, a "door man" will ask probing questions: "Where are you from?" "Where do you live?" "Where did you hear about us?" If the story and the accent check out, the customer he can gain entrance to the closed-network brothel.

6. The sale

Inside the brothel — usually a normal house or apartment — available girls or waiting "johns" sit on couches in a sparse living room. When a "john's" turn comes he goes to a man called a "ticketero" and hands him money — usually $30 for 15 minutes.

7. The token

The "ticketero" gives the "john" a token (a playing card, a marble, a poker chip or a glass bead). Girls keep the tokens to keep track of how many "johns" they see at the brothel. Even though they keep a count, many girls are not paid.



8. The selection

Depending on the brothel, a "john" can select a girl. Often there are as few as two girls servicing as many as 50 men each in a night, so there are not always options. Ledgers are used to keep track of visits.

9. Behind the curtain

"Johns" follow girls to a room. Often large rooms are divided up by nothing more than hanging sheets. There is rarely anything other than a sparse bed, and products like sanitizer, lubricant, condoms and paper towels within.

10. The sex act

The "john" gives the girl the token, and the 15 minutes begin — sometimes with the turn of an egg timer.

If you or anyone you know has been victimized by one of these house brothels or if any of these steps seem familiar please call the National Human Trafficking Hotline 1-888-3737-888.

Please help Conspiracy Of Hope end this evil in our lifetime. Thank you.

America's Homeless Youth And Human Trafficking

There are one million homeless kids on the streets of America. Almost half are running from physical abuse, a third from sexual abuse. Within 48 hours of being on the streets 1 out of every 3 runaways is forced or coerced into prostitution or illegal pornography. The average age for the sexual exploitation of a runaway child is 13. This is human trafficking.



The following is Jill's story. It could be the story of tens of thousands of other girls and boys. It is not for the faint of heart. But it must be told. And we must wake to realize trafficking happens in our borders, in our biggest cities, in the shadows of our cathedrals, in the parking lots of our shopping malls. We must fight this evil with the same resolve as if Jill was our daughter, sister, best friend, or girlfriend. Here is her story.

"I became a runaway teen, escaping sexual and physical abuse. I left, figuring that my life couldn't be in any more jeopardy than it already was at what I'd called home. In leaving I hoped there would be no more broken bones, no more sexual abuse, no more rationalizations of molestation and cruelty.

As a runaway, your old concerns quickly disappear and are replaced by new, life threatening ones. There were no familiar faces and no one who wanted to talk to a teenage girl who was homeless; even my name became irrelevant. Instead, my concerns were more pragmatic, involving finding food, shelter, and water. I slept in cemeteries, and stole food out of dumpsters and from convenience stores. Getting drinking water and a chance to wash my face became quests of endurance. I hid from security guards, store and restaurant employees and others who didn't want a homeless girl "loitering". As a runaway teen, I was viewed as something less than human. Still, it was safer than going home.

Into my hunger, loneliness and desperation came a man named Bruce. Attractive, well dressed and very charismatic, he approached me in a suburban mall and offered to "help" me. He could provide me with food, shelter, clothing, work--and I really wanted to work. I wanted desperately to be off the street and to have something to do. In essence he knew exactly how to manipulate a desperate teenage girl with his promises to fulfill all my needs. The manipulation began within minutes of meeting him. When I questioned whether or not this "work" was prostitution, he retracted the offer and began to walk away. Desperate, I ran after him, pleading with him to give me another chance and to forgive my insult.

He brought me into his "office" (which was actually his cellar) blindfolded under the pretense of not wanting competitors to know his location in case I was a spy for them. I put my fear aside and agreed to being blindfolded because I needed what he was offering. When we went into his "office", he explained that I had to audition for the job and should step on the stage and raise my hands. When I did so, I felt leather straps being put around my wrists but didn't understand what was going on. He pulled my pants down and my shirt up, leaving me virtually naked. When I tried to stop him from undressing me, the reality of what was happening became very clear. He shoved out the wooden box I was standing on, and I was left hanging in mid air naked, suspended by my wrists. It was the beginning of my "training" for a position as a prostitute that catered to "clients", who wanted to act on their violent bondage/torture fantasies. While still hanging from my wrists, I was told that unless I agreed then to sign a contract, I would never be let down. This threat was followed, while I was still hanging by being hit, punched, whipped and penetrated with a beer bottle. I could barely breathe, and my arms, wrists and shoulders were screaming in pain. I gave up and agreed to sign, at which point I was let down, bound behind my back, gagged and blindfolded, thrown into a tiny closet under the cellar stairs without food or water and left there. Bruce did not come back until after what seemed like a couple of days, at which time he freed my hands and told me to sign by his finger while I was still blindfolded. What I signed was what is known in these "rape and snuff" circles as a slave contract. By doing so I was essentially agreeing that I was no longer a human being, but rather, a slave, whose sole purpose in life was the fulfillment of Bruce's desires and those of his "clients". The contract took away my right to feel, to speak without approval, to have emotions. In it, I agreed to do anything that I was told and to accept any punishment or training he determined necessary.

What followed next--the "training"-- was months of being tortured, starved, dehydrated, sensory deprived and raped. I was supposed to learn how to "want" to be a slave and "want" to be punished. To that end, I had to beg for everything, using phrases that Bruce had written. I had to apologize for being alive, had to thank him for each act of torture and beg for more. If I resisted, the punishments got worse, until I gave up and agreed.

Once he was satisfied that my training period was nearing the end he began to refer me to "clients" who would use my body for their fetishes. They paid Bruce to rent my body to rape in as many ways as they could devise without killing me. I was held underwater in toilets or bathtubs, whipped, hung, shocked with electrical current, and paid to have me tell them how much I was enjoying it.

One of my early clients portrayed himself as a nice guy who was going to help me escape, which I agreed to try. It turned out to be a test of my "loyalty", the failure of which resulted in a savage night of gang rape, beating, being hung by my wrists and ankles, and an attempt to hang me by my neck which left me physically scarred and damaged my vocal chords for life. I nearly died that night and never tried to escape again.

For three years I was forced to let men rape me for Bruce's profit. During that time, I'd nearly been killed several times, including Bruce's failed attempt to perform an abortion on me after I'd become pregnant. After about a year I entered a suburban Los Angeles hospital bleeding extensively from my vaginal area. On my wrists, ankles and neck were burns, cuts and scars. Having been hung from the ceiling by my wrists while my pimp attempted to abort a child that I was pregnant with, I was in shock and nearly unconscious when I was brought into the hospital. A broken, long neck beer bottle had been shoved into my vagina as the object to remove the fetus. Needless to say, it didn't work out. The fetus remained in my womb but the abortion attempt nearly killed me.

Fearing retaliation from my pimp. I didn't communicate to the doctors what had actually transpired, but instead, remained silent allowing my pimp's explanation of my abortion attempt to go unchallenged. Had these doctors given any thought their ethical oaths it should have occurred to them that the bruises, scars, strangulation marks, etc. were inconsistent with attempting to abort my own child. Exactly how did I destroy my larynx attempting to abort a child? How did I self-inflict leather strap burn marks around my wrists and ankles? Since I was an in-patient for three days, why wasn't a mental health professional sent to talk to me? Why was I questioned only in the presence of my pimp who was masquerading as my older brother, who was pretending to help his psychotic little sister? Had I been questioned alone and placed in the psychiatric ward away from him, perhaps the outcome would have been different.

When we left a Midwestern city, I was thrown into the trunk of a car and taken across country. After being left in the trunk for long periods of time in the southwest desert in July, I became sick from dehydration. At one point this pimp took me out of the car on a remote road in the desert, handcuffed me, tied me by my neck to the bumper of his car and told me he was going to drag me until I was nothing but hair and a grease stain. This fate was guaranteed unless I agreed to remain totally compliant.

Arriving at an Arizona truck stop, he pulled me out of the car, took off the blindfold and shackles and told me to walk with him into the truck stop and get a Pepsi. Weak from fatigued, dehydration and exhaustion, I couldn't walk. I became violently ill on the brick patio of the truck stop. EMS was called to the scene. I was violently ill, dirty from head to toe, and had sores on both my wrists from the handcuffs and the corners of my mouth from being gagged for days. Did they call the police? No. They accepted his explanation of the death of "our parents" and his care taking of his schizophrenic little sister. Why didn't they ask questions? Why did they only treat the symptoms of heat exhaustion and not ask how I got to that point? Why did the lady getting into her Cadillac with her husband not help me as the pimp was tying my hands behind my back and putting me back into the trunk in plain view?

These incidents are not meant to shock, but to illustrate the reality of my day-to-day life. Bruce and his "clients" inflicted every torture imaginable on me, forcing me to do disgusting, humiliating things which have had a devastating effect on my mind, my body and my soul.

My captivity came to an abrupt end. Bruce was arrested on unrelated charges, and I was able to escape after he'd been handcuffed and taken away. The police who arrested Bruce offered me no support, despite finding a young girl locked in a closet, bound gagged and blindfolded. Even my request for a female officer to speak to was denied. The police told me that there were there to execute a warrant and that I'd better shut up or I was going to be arrested, too. I wasn't even eighteen yet.

Taking whatever money I could find in the house, I left immediately, taking a taxi to the airport and flying to the first destination available with the amount of money I had. After arriving in the new city, I found a cheap hotel and literally slept for days. The face I saw in the mirror when I awoke was hardly like the one I'd seen at age fourteen. I'd lost a third of my body weight. My once thick, long hair had fallen out in clumps and was now thin, fragile and lifeless. Emotionally, I was still stunned, lost in my own world, trying to readjust to a life that suddenly left me free but with no place to go and no one to turn to. Sleep was filled with nightmares, daytime with flashbacks and raging paranoia of being located by Bruce. After three years of eating dog food and being forced to beg for it, I was unaccustomed to eating anything normal and struggled with anorexia. In essence, I still didn't exist as anything more than a slave, except I was an escaped slave.

It has been more than a decade since then. In many ways, I've recovered, having eventually regained enough sanity to get a job and hold it. The physical injuries either healed or scarred, and I learned to compensate. But having survived this experience doesn't mean I've become safe from it.

Depression is still part of my life, as is shame, fear and a strong drive for self-destruction. I still feel like I'm crazy and fear that I'm a burden to my friends, a failure as an employee and that I'm destined to again be homeless, vulnerable and alone.

There are issues on which I'm working towards recovery: an integral part of my recovery is speaking out about what happened to me, what I faced as a runaway teen, and what I face even to this day trying to live with the memory of what I survived. I write this story so that maybe someone who hears it will somehow be able to avoid the pain that was forced on me and for others to know that things like I experienced really do happen--and they can happen to anyone's daughter, sister, girlfriend, niece or wife." ---Polaris Project

From all of us at Conspiracy Of Hope. Please help us stop this evil. Support anti-human trafficking organizations such as International Justice Mission, Shared Hope International, and Not For Sale. Please volunteer at homeless shelters, especially those that house kids. Keep your eyes open for troubled teens. Rescue them before they fall through the cracks. And if you or anyone you know has been trafficked please call the National Human Trafficking Hotline 1-888-3737-888.

There is Hope.

Numbers.

Some estimates are that there are 1.2 million children trafficked every year. 600,000 of those are girls, average age 13, that end up as child prostitutes.

But those are just numbers.

Numbers are not afraid to cry during the rape sessions, numbers are not afraid of the beatings they will get if they do. Numbers don't get addicted to the heroin force fed them to keep them docile, to break their will, to keep them coming back. Numbers do not have their virginity sold to the highest bidder, or have their "virginity" resold and resold and resold to the highest bidder after a surgery to "restore" that virginity. Numbers are not fed animal hormones to make them look healthy when the ravages of rape and the filth of light-less existence begin to atrophy their bodies. Numbers don't get Aids. Numbers don't get thrown out of a brothel when they do.

But children, 3200 hundred a day, 135 an hour, 2 every minute, do. They lose their childhood, their hope, their sense of justice, their will to live. What if it were your child? What if it were your little sister? I bet she has a name, bet she's not a number to you. Numbers get filed in folders, in file cabinets, between other files, and are forgotten. But you'll never forget her.

These are the real life stories of the victims of human trafficking from The Polaris Project. Their stories are unforgettable, they are the daughters, the baby sisters, the children those numbers represent, they are the statistics that suffer the most depraved of injustices. Please read their stories. Please imagine their words are your own child's, your own sisters words. Please do whatever you would do for your own child for these children. Because until we fight for them with that same passion, that same relentless resolve, they are just a number to us. And numbers have a way of being rounded down, subtracted, erased, and lost forever.

Child Prostitute in India.