Labor trafficking victims are left out of the national conversation about human trafficking, as they often work behind the scenes, after hours and in remote locations

by Madeline Fox

In 2005, approximately 500 Indian men paid $10,000 each — a figure more than six times their country’s total domestic product broken down per person — to recruiters who promised them good jobs and permanent residency for themselves and their families in the United States.

Instead of the stable life with family and work they were promised, these men were forced to pay more than $1,000 per month, in addition to their initial “recruiting fee,” to live in crowded, guarded labor camps. They were underfed and overworked while they repaired oil rigs and facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina for Alabama-based shipbuilding company Signal International. Their promised residency documents never materialized.

The Signal International case is one of the largest labor trafficking cases ever prosecuted, with more than 200 plaintiffs filing more than a dozen related lawsuits against the company and other individuals involved in the trafficking process. What sets the case apart, though, is not simply its scope, but the fact that it was prosecuted at all.

Labor trafficking is the use of force or physical threats, psychological coercion, abuse of the legal process, deception, or other coercive means to recruit, harbor, transport, provide or obtain people who are then compelled to work.

While trafficking statistics are difficult to come by, an estimated 14.2 million people are victims of the estimated $51.2 billion labor trafficking industry worldwide, according to the International Labor Organization. The ILO uses reported cases from law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI, and nongovernmental organizations like the U.S.-based Polaris Project to extrapolate the total number of cases.

According to the U.S. Department of State’s 2015 Trafficking in Persons report, only 11,438 of these victims were identified globally in 2014, and a mere 418 labor trafficking cases were prosecuted — and while this is a decline from the number of prosecutions in previous years, even those proportions are low — 1,199 cases were prosecuted out of the 10,603 victims identified in 2013.

In comparison, the ILO estimates that there are about 4.5 million victims of sex trafficking across the globe. While sex trafficking cases are also under-prosecuted, nearly three times as many victims of sex trafficking were identified and nearly 24 times as many cases were prosecuted than labor trafficking cases in 2015, according to the Trafficking in Persons report.

One of the reasons labor trafficking cases can be difficult to prosecute is that identifying victims is a challenge, says Catherine Longkumer, an attorney with Metropolitan Family Services in Chicago, who provides legal advocacy to survivors of trafficking.

“A lot of victims of labor trafficking are immigrants, and their traffickers are very good at making them fear any sort of law enforcement,” Longkumer says. “Even if they’ve got perfectly valid legal status, they’re so fearful of deportation proceedings being initiated against them because of what their trafficker told them.”

Though many trafficking victims enter the country with legitimate work visas, traffickers often prey upon their victims’ limited knowledge of the American immigration system to make them fear law enforcement — for example, by telling them that their work papers are not valid or by withholding their identifying documents and indicating that they will be deported if they seek help without a passport or papers.

This, Longkumer says, makes the victims less likely to come forward. Additionally, while domestic victims of human trafficking might have family members who can seek help on their behalf, the families of victims who are foreign nationals might be both more hesitant and less knowledgeable about reaching out to authorities.

“Many victims have an inherent distrust of law enforcement based upon the country that they came from or their immigration status and a lot of them carry a lot of shame or guilt because of the work they’ve been asked to provide,” said FBI Special Agent Stephen Kam, supervisor of the FBI’s Civil Rights Unit, which investigates sex trafficking of adults and labor trafficking of both adults and children. “All these elements are put in place by the traffickers specifically so the victims don’t come forward and try to report their situation.”

The National Human Trafficking Resource Center, which operates a hotline for victims, law enforcement, medical professionals and other community members to report possible instances of human trafficking, has found that nearly 70 percent of reported labor trafficking cases involved victims who were foreign nationals, as opposed to about 13 percent of sex trafficking victims.

In identifying victims of trafficking, law enforcement and anti-trafficking organizations look for evidence of “force, fraud or coercion” — signs that the individual has been compelled in some way to provide their labor or sell their body against their will. While traffickers’ methods vary widely, from withholding papers to the threat or use of physically or psychologically abusive tactics, to threatening loved ones, some organizations, like nonprofit the Vera Institute of Justice, have compiled lists of indicators for advocates to use in determining whether someone is a trafficking victim.

Many U.S. labor trafficking victims are people from other countries driven out by poor economic or social conditions in their home countries and lured to the U.S. with false promises of good jobs by recruiters like those in the Signal International case. While people can also be forced into the sex industry by similar means, sex traffickers also prey heavily upon vulnerable U.S. citizens, such as runaways.

Additionally, the industries in which labor trafficking most frequently occur, such as domestic service, agricultural work, construction, hospitality and restaurant service, often keep victims out of sight.

“With the nature of work a lot of individuals are doing, finding those individuals and figuring out a way to reach them with information and to conduct these investigations can be challenging,” says Audrey Gilliam, staff attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center’s Counter-Trafficking Project. “It can be agricultural work where they’re in rural areas, it can be landscaping work, it can even be restaurant work, where they’re in the city but not necessarily on the surface, so it can be difficult to conduct outreach.”

Another factor victim advocates point to in the limited prosecution of labor trafficking cases is the focus on sex trafficking in the media (and among lawmakers and the public) when discussing issues of human trafficking.

“Sex trafficking may have a higher profile in terms of the speeches people make because it’s more — and this is horrifying to say — titillating in some way. It makes a good headline,” says Laura Lederer, founder of nonprofit Global Centurion, which works to eradicate trafficking by focusing on eliminating demand for exploitatively cheap labor. However, Lederer says she doesn’t think that this means Americans don’t understand that forced labor is an equally severe problem.

“When you’re trying to draft and pass a bill that’s against sex trafficking or labor trafficking, you need to help people understand the problem by telling the stories of those who have been trafficked,” she says. “The stories help make the harm visible.”

Those stories, though, do skew toward tales of sex trafficking rather than labor trafficking. This was particularly apparent in the efforts to pass the embattled Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act this spring. The bill, which was stalled for months over language that prevented funds collected under it from paying for victims’ abortions, is intended to help law enforcement crack down more severely on traffickers while bringing about greater restitution and justice for victims.

While the bill dealt broadly with human trafficking, many of its provisions focused specifically on commercial sexual exploitation, particularly exploitation of minors. In speeches on the Senate floor, as well, lawmakers referred to human trafficking, but specifically referenced cases of commercial sexual exploitation; for example, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who introduced the bill, talked about the prevalence of commercial sexual exploitation around major sporting events such as the Super Bowl, while Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, D-NY 12th district, who has actively supported anti-trafficking legislation for more than 15 years, praised Congress’s “firm stand against the pimps and Johns and for women and children” in a press release after the bill passed.

However, as Katherine Kaufka Walts, director of the Center for the Human Rights of Children at Loyola University Chicago, points out, labor trafficking not only receives less of the media and legislative spotlight than sex trafficking, but also is less visible to begin with.

“If we see prostitution, we know that that’s illegal,” Walts says. “If you see a 16-year-old working at a restaurant, though, that doesn’t necessarily raise any red flags…[labor trafficking] requires more inquiry and more effort because things are often happening within formal labor sectors.”

In fact, while sex trafficking has more physical indicators — the act of soliciting sex on street corners or online, for example, as well as injuries consistent with sexual trauma that healthcare providers can be trained to spot — victims of labor trafficking must be identified more by what they do and do not have access to — whether their passport is being withheld, for example, or whether they are allowed to leave their workplace or their job.

“I think sex trafficking is more clear, particularly to law enforcement, but labor trafficking I think is harder for local law enforcement to identify,” Walts says.

A 2014 study by the Urban Institute, in collaboration with researchers from Northeastern University in Boston, confirmed Walts’s claim. The study found that labor trafficking victims often escaped on their own, without help from law enforcement, and that law enforcement agencies “did not prioritize labor trafficking cases and often believed they did not have enough evidence to corroborate victim statements.”

Walts said she has seen this attitude in her work representing labor trafficking victims and helping them obtain T-visas, which allow victims of human trafficking and their immediate family members to remain and work temporarily in the United States.

“Sometimes among law enforcement there’s the assumption that ‘this isn’t trafficking,’ and yet a T-visa comes later, from another arm of the law, so then it was, in fact, labor trafficking,” Walts says. “I think with the political issue, that’s part of it as well — what do agencies want to be accountable for, what do they want the headlines for?”

Kam says he disagrees with the idea that law enforcement doesn’t give enough attention to labor trafficking cases — the issue, he said, is one of identification, rather than prioritization.

“The fact that [sex] traffickers have to allow access to their victim in order to conduct the transaction makes it much easier for law enforcement to identify and interdict the transaction,” he says. “Based upon that, it’s much easier for us to find commercial sex cases than labor cases.”

Once it gets up to the level of prosecution, human trafficking cases that deal with commercial sexual exploitation of minors, who make up about 36 percent of the total number of labor and sex trafficking cases reported to the National Trafficking Resource Center’s hotline, are often the easiest to prosecute because they require a lower burden of proof. While labor trafficking cases (cases in which a person forced to work in exploitative circumstances without freedom of movement) and cases of commercial sexual exploitation of adults (instances in which individuals over 18 are coerced into performing sexual acts for money) require that the prosecutor prove that the trafficking survivor was compelled by “force, fraud or coercion” to engage in trafficking, the law presumes that those under 18 are unable to consent to commercial sexual acts, waiving that hurdle.

“When people hear about children being bought and sold for sex, it infuriates us, and rightly so,” Lederer says. “You are always going to see more action, because every group, across all political spectrums, can agree on the need to stop children from being exploited, assaulted, and hurt.”

While Lederer noted the greater media and public focus on sex trafficking, she also emphasized the legal strides made in the past several years in combating labor trafficking, such as President Obama’s 2012 executive action to protect against labor trafficking in government contracts, followed in 2013 by the similarly motivated National Defense Authorization Act. Also in 2013, the Department of Labor released an extensive list of products that could be produced by child labor or forced labor.

For Walts and many other trafficking victim advocates, though, these advances are just a fraction of the improvements needed to better combat labor trafficking — and for those, there needs to be a greater awareness of labor trafficking.

“I hear a lot of people saying, ‘Well, we’re not seeing labor trafficking,’ and that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, sometimes it just means we’re not looking for it. Ten years ago, people were saying human trafficking doesn’t exist [because] we don’t see sex trafficking,” Walts says.

Kam, too, identified raising awareness — and dispelling misconceptions — about trafficking as one of the most important tools to effectively combat it.

“You see those ‘Taken’ movies, with these dark shadowy criminal organizations that broadly exist to snatch people off the street and force them into trafficking, so people aren’t looking for the dishwasher in the kitchen, they aren’t looking for the cleaning crew cleaning out the department store after hours, all these people that work behind the scenes to make our society function,” he says.

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Madeline Fox is a native of Portland, Oregon transplanted to the Chicago area. An avid reader, tea enthusiast and public transportation guru, she studies journalism and international studies at Northwestern University. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram for pictures of food, airport carpets and famous landmarks.