Sexual Slavery in North Dakota: Is there a light in the end of a tunnel?
Since previous summer, when news headlines were twinkling with titles about sexual abuse suddenly evoked across male-dominated region of Bakken in North Dakota, human trafficking has became a widely debated subject far away from the state boundaries. Many other states today, in particular those heavily encumbered with illegal sexual services, voiced their problem to the government, leveraging tools of social interactions, custom-developed web resources and elementary community work.
Despite local efforts, there seems to be little progress in establishing a comprehensive regulatory system on the government level which would put an end to a disgusting reality of young female adults becoming remedies against the loneliness of dirt packing jobs.It is not that a problem of human trafficking is something our society is not aware of, or not prepared to face the consequences of, like in cases of tsunami or earthquake. Often referred to as a modern shape of slavery, in 2010 this form of ugly business was estimated to represent about 30 billion US dollars in the international trade. Transformation of small, quiet towns of North Dakota into the source of young and expensive sexual pleasure had certainly contributed to the revenues both on the oil export and trafficking front.
While crooked businessmen keep recruiting new clients through announcements at Craigslist, and offer discounts for regular clients, government keeps examining official reports and briefly reviewing bills passed being unable to exterminate the problem at a core.It is not a lack of evidence but the bureaucracy and procedural nature of the U.S. legal system are preventing community from effective resolution. Project “Trafficked” (http://www.traffickedreport.com/) to the date collected hundreds of stories, videos and reports that disclose the issue of human trafficking across the state of North Dakota that could serve as a basis for unbiased consideration for the problem on hand. A new task force FUSE have been established as a coalition of organizations that hope to jointly influence policy development against raising human trafficking issue in the state, seeking for triangulation of efforts in community support, law enforcement and prosecution, and local policymaking. As one of FUSE members, CAWS North Dakota acts as a statewide protector against sexual and domestic violen
ce, seeking for “strengthening connections” to eliminate above. The problem for all of these is funding – their initiatives are primarily sponsored by individual contributors having scarce inflows of the federal budget. Policy uncertainty is only one side of a problem. Traffickers typically use force, fraud and coercion to manipulate their victims while negotiating terms of “cooperation”, thus frequently engaging them into sexual activities against their will. This results in deprivation of freedom, accompanied with horrific conditions of life and fear of exiting the business without consequences for victim’s future life. Consequently, the second issue is to explain why trafficking is criminal offense, what is the role of offenders involved, how this affects young women, how to prove the …
