Why Victims Of Human Trafficking Often Don't Speak Out

DANBURY, CT — The conviction of Glastonbury businessman Bruce Bemer last month signaled the dramatic end of a sex trafficking ring that prospered in Danbury for two decades. It was a small battle in a much longer and larger war that Connecticut law enforcement is no closer to winning.

The Bemer case highlighted one of the prevailing myths surrounding human trafficking, namely that the victims tend to be underage girls. Bemer’s victims were all men, and over the age of 18.

But those men shared one commonality with the stereotypical trafficking victim, according to Krishna Patel, former deputy chief of the National Security and Major Crimes Unit in the District of Connecticut.

"Vulnerability is at the root of it," Patel explained. "It did not surprise me to learn that (the victims) had disabilities of some sort, particularly mental or psychiatric disabilities, or were living in group homes."

Patel is now the justice initiative director at Grace Farms Foundation in New Canaan, where she leads "big data" platform training sessions to educate law enforcement on the latest techniques to locate and apprehend traffickers and rescue survivors.

None of these are cases where a victim is tied to a pipe in some basement, screaming their lungs out. That’s because human trafficking, for sex or labor, is a crime where the victims themselves don’t usually come forward. Either they don’t view themselves as victims, or "they can get deported, they have debts to pay off, the traffickers know where their families live, or the ‘shame issue’ that came up in the Bemer case," Patel said.

Witnesses in that case testified that the Danbury sex traffic ring brought them to Bemer, who would perform oral sex on them for money or drugs. Later, they were too ashamed of what they had done to report the crime.

The vulnerability of the victims goes a long way toward explaining how the operations stay in business as long as many of them do. The victims/survivors “never ever” blow the whistle on those exploiting them, Patel said. The tip-off to law enforcement always comes from an outside source.

Often that source is Polaris, a non-profit non-governmental organization, based in Washington DC. The group established a human trafficking hotline in 2007 that is now a prime source of actionable intel for law enforcement.

In other cases, Patel explained, “there’s a money indicator that something’s going wrong.” That makes it a waiting game for law enforcement, who must bide their time until the trafficker fails to sufficiently mask his accounting from some state agency audit. Complicating the takedown of a big operation are quite-understandable laws that mandate law enforcement must immediately sweep in if they learn a minor is in any way at risk.

As awareness of the crime improves, the tips to law enforcement are coming more frequently. Patel began her task force for the state in 2003, a time when "nobody was reporting," she said. Since then, there has been an increase in "front line training" within the hotel/motel industry and emergency rooms, making workers in those environments more keenly aware of the signs of human trafficking (see the Polaris training video below).

So with a centuries-overdue heightened-awareness of the crime in Connecticut and elsewhere, and better-trained law enforcement tightening the noose, can we expect the traffickers to start scurrying off like cockroaches beneath a spotlight?

No.

"Sex trafficking in the United States is insanely profitable," Patel explained. "Globally, human trafficking is now the second largest crime. The traffickers are usually prostituting children, to the tune of $500 to $1,000 a day. You sell a gun, or you sell some dope, you get to sell it once. You can sell a child over and over again."

It is that chillingly unique economic model that sustains the business even during what should be its end days. But Patel sees law enforcement and judicial tactics shifting, if not enough to compensate for the trade's nine lives, then maybe just enough to take out a few of the trade's formerly untouchable players. She was particularly gratified to see, in the Bemer case, authorities go hard on the "john," or customer.

"He’s a particularly horrifying john, a particularly arrogant and demented john," Patel said of Bemer. "Kudos to the state for doing this."