Part 1: The setup on the conclusion of a two-year human-trafficking trial

From Joe Ryan at the New Jersey Star-Ledger

“And the girls were not allowed to keep any of the money they earned?” asked Shana W. Chen, an assistant U.S. attorney.

“No,” said Afolabi, a burly man who sat shackled before U.S. District Judge Jose Linares, wearing a dark-green jail uniform.

He said it here.

(Note: I found Joe Ryan’s article after reading the following piece. Read on.)

Part 2: The context

Laura Kenney of AOL’s StyleList fashion site uncovers a straight-up classic case of international trafficking of children as young as 10 into the United States.

The worldwide epidemic of human trafficking has reached the beauty industry.

A West African immigrant has pleaded guilty to running a human trafficking operation that forced women to braid hair for up to 14 hours a day in Newark and East Orange NJ, reports the New Jersey Star Ledger.

In a case prosecutors equated to modern day slavery, Lassissi Afolabi, 46, told a judge he headed a ring that smuggled victims from villages in Ghana and Togo. He brought twenty women, age 10 to 19, to New Jersey, where he seized their passports, forbade them to learn English and make friends, and planted them in salons where they were forced to work up to 14 hours per day, 7 days a week.

Though not as horrific as sex-trafficking, this story brings to light the exploitation of innocents who want to find a better life in the US. And this is only one case — we wonder how many more women are being made to work against their will in salons across the country?

She said it here.

Part 3: False Distinctions

Not being a sex-trafficking case this case of trafficking, with coerced sex, hasn’t yet showed up on the standard sites for hand-wringing for sex-trafficker/prostituteders. Because for most of them the real crime isn’t the trafficking or coerced labor it’s sex work. (Why else would so many of them insist that even self-selected sex-workers equals trafficking.)

Which is sort of a shame, as I’ve said fairly regularly. Because it’s not like only trafficked sex-workers have coerced sex. Here’s the Star-Ledger again.

During yesterday’s hearing, Afolabi admitted trying to have sex with one of the girls, who was under 18, during a trip to North Carolina, where he hoped to open a hair-braiding salon.

“And she begged you not to do it — “You are old enough to be my father,’ “ Chen said, quoting the alleged victim.

“Yes,” Afolabi said.

He pleaded guilty today to forced labor, aggravated sexual abuse and traveling with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor.

The point being that just as not all sex work is coerced, neither does all non-sex trafficking involve no sexual coercion. Failing to get this has multiple consequences. The two biggest being that resources are spent to “protect” people (those sex-workers who are autonomous) who don’t need it and resources don’t protect other people (a substantially larger number who are trafficked, yes, and like Afolabi’s hair-braiding victim definitely sexually exploited, but who very often not the least bit “sex-trafficked.”)

Part 4, which seems to be growing into its own post, will be about a peculiarity in what I’m going to call, cynically, “benevolent trafficking” that makes prosecution, and even identification more difficult. The two-bit version is that four of Afolabi’s victims dispute that they were exploited and others report that their families at home are scorning and/or shaming them for complaining. The peculiarity being that Afolabi was actually treating his victims fractionally better than they would have been treated at home, with the result that they and their families felt they were getting a pretty good deal while… on the other hand he was treating them appallingly, and illegally, by U.S. standards and pocketing the difference between what they and their families expected them to earn in their home country (nothing) and what he was able to charge for their services (contemporary U.S. beauty-salon prices, which is quite a lot.)