U.S. among top 3 destinations for sex traffickers in $8B trade (Nancy Pelosi's District)

SAN FRANCISCO — Many of San Francisco's Asian massage parlors — long an established part of the city's sexually permissive culture — have degenerated into something much more sinister: international sex-slave shops.

Once limited to infamous locales such as Bombay and Bangkok, sex trafficking is now an $8 billion international business, with San Francisco among its largest commercial centers.

San Francisco's liberal attitude toward sex, the city's history of arresting prostitutes instead of pimps, and its large immigrant population have made it one of the top American cities for international sex traffickers to do business undetected, according to Donna Hughes, a national expert on sex trafficking at the University of Rhode Island.

"It makes me sick to my stomach," said San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. "Girls are being forced to come to this country, their families back home are threatened, and they are being raped repeatedly, over and over."

Because sex trafficking is so far underground, the number of victims in the United States and worldwide is not known, and the reported statistics vary wildly.

Promised model, hostess jobs

The most often cited numbers come from the U.S. State Department, which estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked for forced labor and sex worldwide each year — and that 80 percent are women and girls. Most trafficked females, the department says, are exploited in commercial sex outlets.

Relying on research from the CIA, the State Department estimates there are 14,500 to 17,500 human-trafficking victims brought into the United States each year — but does not quantify how many of those are sex victims. Some advocacy groups place the number of U.S. victims much higher, while others criticize the government for overstating the problem.

"The number will always be an estimate, because trafficking victims don't stand in line and raise their hands to be counted, but it's the best estimate we have," said John Miller, director of the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. The CIA won't divulge its research methods, but based its figures on 1,500 sources, including law-enforcement data, government data, academic research, international reports and newspaper stories.

Women trafficked for the sex industry are predominantly from Southeast Asia, the former Soviet Union and South America — lured to the United States by promises of lucrative jobs as models or hostesses, only to be sold to brothels, strip clubs and outcall services and extorted into working off thousands of dollars in surprise travel debts to their new "owners."

Federal investigators say that even those who come to the United States with the idea of working as high-society call girls cannot imagine the captivity and the degrading workload they face.

"Human trafficking is a multibillion-dollar business. In terms of profits, it's on a path to overtake drug and arms trafficking," said Barry Tang, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement attaché with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in South Korea. "There's a highly organized logistical network between Korea and the United States with recruiters, brokers, intermediaries, taxi drivers and madams."

Female traffickers recruit in bars

The United States is among the top three destination countries for sex traffickers, along with Japan and Australia. Once in the United States, traffickers most often set up shop in California, New York, Texas and Las Vegas.

It's an underground world, but in more than 100 interviews with federal agents, experts and sex-trafficking victims in California and South Korea, a picture emerges about how international traffickers buy and sell women between Asia and the West Coast.

Overseas, the trafficker is usually a woman. She recruits from clubs, bars, colleges, pool halls and restaurants, said Deputy Special Agent Mark F. Wollman, who oversees San Francisco for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Recruiters fill the want ads in papers and the Internet, targeting vulnerable young women with fake job offers for waitresses, models and hostesses in the U.S.

Traffickers fly the women to Canada or Mexico, and walk or drive them into California. In Canada, they slip through Indian reservations off-limits to the U.S. Border Patrol, often at night, and sometimes along snow-packed trails.

Every move monitored

Sex slaves who work in massage parlors and bars are often locked in their place of business by double security doors, monitored by surveillance cameras and only let outside under the guard of crooked taxi drivers who ferry them to their next sex appointment.

Women report being beaten, raped and starved by their keepers.

Sex-trafficking rings are often run by criminal organizations that aren't afraid to use violence to protect the billions they generate.

1 posted on 10/23/2006 2:25:15 PM PDT by Conservative Coulter Fan

To: Conservative Coulter Fan

What's your point about Pelosi? Do you really think that our lords are expected to adhere to the same standards of decency as us peons? That went out the window when the swimmer abandoned a young woman to drown in Chappaquiddick.

2 posted on 10/23/2006 2:31:51 PM PDT by samm1148 (Pennsylvania-They haven't taxed air--yet)

To: Conservative Coulter Fan

From personal experience here in San Francisco and as a regular at an Asian Massage Parlor, I have never been offered to get nekkit nor inappropriately touched. Maybe naive or just not lucky!

3 posted on 10/23/2006 2:39:04 PM PDT by SF Republican

To: Conservative Coulter Fan

Skip to comments.

DFU SONG: Sing a Song (Ng Lap Seng - women abuse, child prositution, 12 visits to Clinton W.H.)
DFU SONGS | 7-2005 | Lyrics, Doug from Upland

Posted on 07/31/2005 1:29:01 PM PDT by doug from upland

MIDI - SING A SONG - Carpenters

I fight for children... for women and children...ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
I fight for children... for women and children...ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Ng, Ng Lap Seng...there is some help...that you can bring
Come deliver the cash...we'll add it to our stash

Ng, Ng Lap Seng...what you do, well, it doesn't mean a thing
Abusing young women everywhere
Just hide it from the right wing...our friend, Ng Lap Seng

I fight for children... for women and children...ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
I fight for children... for women and children...ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Ng, Ng Lap Seng...we'll treat you like a king
Get a photo with me...signed "Your pal, Hillary"

Ng, Ng Lap Seng...what you do, well, it doesn't mean a thing
Abusing young women everywhere
Just hide it from the right wing...our friend, Ng Lap Seng

Good friend, Ng Lap Seng...our friend, Ng Lap Seng

I fight for children... for women and children...ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
I fight for children... for women and children...ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

(fade out)

TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Government; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; Click to Add Topic
KEYWORDS: CHILDREN; CLINTONS; HILLARYSCANDALS; NGLAPSENG; WOMEN; Click to Add Keyword

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1 posted on 07/31/2005 1:29:01 PM PDT by doug from upland

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To: All

READ THIS AND BE AMAZED....no, I don't suppose anyone is amazed

"I am proud that my husband has stood up as President to confront the violence and to protect American women … it is only when men – from the level of men of the barrio to the level of men of the presidential palaces – join hands with us to stand against violence against women that we will know our societies have truly been transformed" – Hillary Clinton to the Inter-American Development Bank, October 20, 1997

"We are working to stop trafficking of women and girls in this region and around the world. No government and no citizen can rest until we stop this modern form of slavery, protect its victims and prosecute those who are responsible." – Hillary Clinton, at a conference on women and democracy in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Hillary Clinton, while publicly “opposing” the exploitation of women, (see quotations above), kept a close association with Ng Lap Seng, a kingpin of the international slave prostitution trade. Lap Seng also dabbles in heroin trafficking, arms smuggling and murder-for-hire. His prostitution empire is known for abducting very young women and girls from villages throughout Indochina. Lap Seng visited the White House 12 times. Hillary Clinton posed for photographs with him, and he often sat at the right hand of the Clintons at White House dinners. Even though an international criminal, Lap Seng received security clearance due to his large financial contributions to the Democratic National Committee.

2 posted on 07/31/2005 1:32:54 PM PDT by doug from upland (The Hillary documentary is coming)

4 posted on 10/23/2006 2:39:42 PM PDT by doug from upland (Stopping Hillary should be a FreeRepublic Manhattan Project)

To: doug from upland

Liberals love all forms of degeneracy. No human debauchery is to low or vile for them.

5 posted on 10/23/2006 3:29:56 PM PDT by libertylovinactivist

To: libertylovinactivist

6 posted on 11/07/2006 10:25:19 AM PST by mewzilla (Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist. John Adams)

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