Bush Admin. Fails to Live up to Promise to Help Modern Day Slavery Victims

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

One of the finest and most laudable goals of the Bush Administration seems to have gone the way of promises to revamp Social Security and capture Osama bin Ladin.  However, despite the millions affected worldwide, it doesn't sound like we'll hear much about it this campaign season.  With a broken economy and an intractable war, modern slavery isn't at the top of most people's issue list.

But that doesn't mean nothing is happening; it's just not being widely reported.  In its July 2008 audit report on the management of grant programs to assist victims of human trafficking released last week, the inspector general at the Justice Department had several alarming criticisms.

One of the most dismal aspects of the report is the numbers.  The report estimates somewhere between 14,500 and 17,500 victims are trafficked into the U.S. each year.  The year the report marks as a high point in victim assistance is 2005; the report says the numbers of victims assisted since then have fallen off dramatically.  However, using the more conservative estimate, the agencies were still serving less than five percent of victims trafficked in the U.S.

Even more troubling, though, is the fact that some service providers are fudging these already dismal numbers to look more productive than they actually are.  The audit could verify less than one fourth of the number of victims the service providers reported to Congress between 2003 and 2006.  So, that high water mark in 2005 could actually be hovering around one or two percent of U.S. slavery victims instead of five.

The audit found that the programs work, but that service providers are generally failing to identify and reach out to victims. 

There is also a problem of misused funds. Between 2005 and 2007, the agency awarded more than $19 million in grants for assisting victims of human trafficking.  However, four out of seven individually-audited service providers spent only 10 percent of their grant money on direct victim assistance. 

The audit found that the Justice Department wasn't managing the grant money very well either.  The amount of money given to each service provider varied wildly and did not necessarily correspond to the number of victims served in a rational way.

Audits of goals achieved by individual grantees were also disappointing.  The report cites "systemic" problems with service providers failing to comply with nine out of 10 essential grant requirements.  One would think such low performance would preclude service providers from continuing to receive federal grants, but that does not appear to be the case.

President Bush made ending modern slavery one of those stated priorities that everyone could agree upon and most could ignore.

John R. Miller, who from 2002 to 2006 led the State Department's efforts against human trafficking wrote a bitter op-ed for The New York Times last month slamming the Justice Department for opposing nearly every effort to curtail modern-day slavery:

"Should the State Department's annual report on trafficking, which grades governments on how well they are combating modern slavery, consider whether governments put traffickers in jail? The Justice Department says no. Should the Homeland Security and Health and Human Services Departments streamline their efforts to help foreign trafficking victims get visas and care? No. Should the Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, State and Justice Departments pool their data on human trafficking to help devise strategies to prevent it? Amazingly, no.

... Should the [Justice Department] prosecute the American sex tourists who create demand for adult human-trafficking victims in foreign countries? No. Should Congress make clear that there should be increased penalties for Americans who sexually abuse children abroad? No way. Should we give our courts jurisdiction over Americans who traffic human beings abroad? Certainly not. Should the attorney general include information in his annual report on his department's efforts to enforce anti-trafficking laws against federal contractors and employees? No. Too ‘burdensome,' says the Justice Department."

Miller gives the president the benefit of the doubt, saying Bush probably didn't see or approve of the 13-page letter in which the Justice Department outlined its opposition to fighting slavery.  Miller is sure Bush wants very badly to end human trafficking, but what can the man do if the Justice Department isn't on his side?

I take issue with that.  If Monica Goodling, Bush's former liaison to the Justice Department, wasn't so busy worrying about whether DOJ employees voted for Democrats or supported a woman's right to reproductive choices, the department might have been able to foster what could have been Bush's greatest legacy, or at least not crush its chances entirely.  As Miller says, the ideological divide on modern slavery is not right vs. left or liberal vs. conservative:

"In this case, the feminist, religious, and secular groups that help sex-trafficking survivors are on one side.  And on the other are the department's lawyers (most of them male), the Erotic Service Providers Union and the American Civil Liberties Union -- this side believes that vast numbers of woman engage in prostitution as a 'profession,' by choice."

So maybe human trafficking isn't partisan enough for the new and politically-improved Justice Department?

Conservative pundit and Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich recently wrote an opinion piece on this issue that concludes by agreeing with Miller's assessment of Bush's complicity, essentially giving the president a free pass.  Interestingly, he says that while "the situation is worse than [Miller] described in Times," Bush still has time to act on this issue. 

If Bush still hasn't done anything after being called out by his former employees and by conservative political writers, I don't know why I should believe he'll do anything more than continue to pay lip service to ending modern slavery.  In fact, Bush has recently eased up on countries that should be facing sanctions for their shoddy records on human trafficking prosecutions.

At a moment when Congress and some state governments are apologizing for our country's history of institutionalized slavery, the federal government needs to step up and stop human trafficking at our state and national borders. 

E. Benjamin Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery, wrote an article for The Huffington Post this spring noting that neither major party candidate has committed any significant campaign breath to ending modern-day slavery.  After eight years of paying lip service to ending slavery does nothing, should we expect even less from our next president, who has said next to nothing about the issue?

The worst part is the fact that the U.S. is at the forefront of this global problem.  If we, who can only claim to have served a tiny fraction of the thousands of slaves who cross our borders each year, are one of the best, then what is our incentive to try harder?

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS