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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > November > 15
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Editorial: Human trafficking issue gets useful look from UD, Cordray
How’s this for a coincidence:
Just as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize was going to a young writer named Ben Skinner for his book about modern human slavery (“A Crime So Monstrous”), the University of Dayton independently had a conference on human trafficking in Ohio.
Because of the serendipitous convergence, Mr. Skinner accepted his award at the Schuster Center on Sunday, Nov. 8, and got to make a speech the next day at UD.
And yet maybe the word coincidence doesn’t quite cover the situation.
In how many other communities, after all, is there a civic organization that gives a nationally recognized peace prize and a university that has a human rights studies program that holds such conferences?
The answer is zero. The Literary Peace Prize is unique. And the human rights program is one of about a dozen such undergraduate programs in the country.
On Tuesday, a big part of the Kennedy Union ballroom at UD was overfilled for a forum featuring four women talking, mainly from personal experience, about various forms of slavery and trafficking abroad and at home.
These are not new evils, but a lot of people are just starting to learn about them. The first question people have about domestic trafficking is how common is it, especially in Ohio?
The feds use 17,000 as a figure for people trafficked into this country in a year. Specialists outside of the government think that number is way low.
There’s also a purely domestic variant, wherein American women and children are lured or dragged into the sex trade. The UD audiences heard from a UD grad who said she was raped at 15 and blackmailed into life as a prostitute under threat of her conservative, Catholic parents and others being shown photos of her in sex acts.
As a result of newspaper attention to the conference, one local family was prompted to come forth to report they believe their very young daughter has been forced into gang-related prostitution.
UD’s Mark Ensalaco, head of the human rights program, says that when one such victim is found, she can usually tell about five others.
At the conference, people in and out of government who work with victims met with local police chiefs and sheriffs, as well as national experts, on how to recognize human trafficking and what to do about it.
Attendees heard about a local woman who paid her landlord with the sexual attention of her underage daughter. That, the gathered were told, meets the legal definition of trafficking.
Attorney General Richard Cordray was there to discuss the Ohio Trafficking in Persons Study Commission he has set up. It is in the early part of its work and is hoping to answer questions about just how much of what kinds of trafficking are prevalent in the state, and what can be done. Several members of the commission were present.
Mr. Skinner called his listeners to a new abolitionism: the cause of eliminating worldwide slavery in our time. A game plan toward that goal is hard to envisage.
But cracking down at least on Americans who use foreigners or Americans against their will for sex or any other industry, or who use children, has to be doable.
What’s going on now is — to use an inelegant phrase out of the 1960s — a sort of consciousness-raising. Most people’s awareness of modern human trafficking might be limited to what they have gleaned from occasional television cop shows.
What’s needed at this stage is a sharp focus on the murky world of traffickers, a focus that two Dayton organizations have done their part to foster.
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