State Department-hosted international conference, "Pathbreaking Strategies in the Global Fight Against Sex Trafficking," Washington, D.C., Feb. 23-26

10:30 A.M. (EST)

Real Audio of Briefing

MS. SCHALOW: Good morning. Welcome to the Foreign Press Center. My name is Kathy Schalow. I'm the Program Officer for Human Rights. I have the pleasure of introducing this morning Mr. John Miller who is the Director of the State Department's Office to Combat and Monitor Trafficking in Persons.

Mr. Miller is here to talk this morning about a State Department-sponsored conference that we're convening on Monday. It will have over 500 delegates from over 120 countries, and the subject of the seminar is, "Successful Strategies for Combating Sexual Trafficking."

Mr. Miller, before coming to become Director of Office for Trafficking in Persons was a House Representative representing the First District of Washington State from 1985 to 1993. Most recently, he chaired the Seattle-based Discovery Institution, which is an organization devoted to research and writing on international affairs, trade and defense.

Mr. Miller.

Just real quickly, he'll make a brief opening statement and then we'll take questions and answers. Wait for a microphone, please, and identify yourself and your news organization.

MR. MILLER: Great. Well, thank you very much. I am John Miller and it's a little over a month ago that the President and the Secretary of State invited me to come back into public service and take over the office in the State Department that is euphemistically called the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
What we're really about is fighting modern day slavery and the slave trade.

This issue is starting to seep into the public consciousness. I think people in this country and abroad are just starting to become aware that, well particularly in this country, slavery based on color may have ended at the end of the Civil War, but slavery based on color, on forced labor, on military impressment, and most hideously on sex, goes on in this world. And there is no country that is immune.

This coming week is a very exciting milestone in the struggle against the slave trade, and particularly against the struggle in the sex slaves trade. We have, coming from all over the world, hundreds of delegates who have been out on the frontlines working on this issue: police chiefs from small provinces in the Ukraine; people working with charitable organizations setting up shelters in India; people engaged in education of their countrymen so that they avoid this fate in Russia.

They're coming from all over the world and we're coming together to learn from each other -- to learn about strategies of fighting the sex slave trades, strategies in prosecution, strategies in prevention and strategies in protection.

I think that you have so many people coming together shows the increasing interest in this issue in the world, the awareness that we're talking not about thousands of people or even hundreds of thousands of people, but in excess of a million people. Afterall, UNICEF estimates that over a million children -- that's not counting the adults -- over a million children each year are forced into the sex slave trade.

So it's a milestone that all these people are coming together, and it's also evidence of the commitment of President Bush and the Secretary of State for the United States to play a leading role in this struggle for abolition.

With that, I will throw it open to any questions you have. And Sharon Payt is here from our office. And since I've only been on the job a little over a month, she may need to fill in and answer the questions I can't.

Go ahead. If you could identify yourself.

QUESTION: I'm Charlene Porter with The Washington File. This numbers issue, it's so difficult. I mean, the last report from State on human trafficking estimated, I think, 700,000 to 4 million. This conference is isolating sex trafficking as opposed to overall human trafficking. Did you just use the figure of a million within UNICEF? A million children? I'm getting very confused. You know, how do you -- and I know it's all very difficult, but how -- can you break it out a little bit more as best you can?

MR. MILLER: And it is difficult. There's no question about it. And organizations ranging from the International Organization of Migration to our office working with the CIA, are trying to come up with more current, up-to-date estimates. The estimate I gave you was from UNICEF to illustrate the magnitude of the problem.

Obviously, when you have a traffic that is so engaged in sex slavery and it's so linked to organized crime, you are never going to have an exact number. One of the things that we're trying to do at this conference as we have delegates from all over the world is to look at this number issue and to look at it in terms of borders; to get countries to focus on what they can do to increase the scrutiny of immigration officials at borders because this is the main source that's counting so that we can get better and more accurate counts.

But whatever the count, whether you go to International Organization of Migration, whether you go to the CIA, whether you go to organizations abroad in the European Union, no matter whether you go to UNICEF, no matter where you turn, we are dealing with large, large numbers of people.

QUESTION: If you want to break out -- is there any idea about what percentage of the whole number of human trafficking people, victims, of that 700,000 to 4 million, what percentage of that might be sex trafficking, alone? Is there any way to divide it?

MR. MILLER: I don't know that there's a way to exactly divide it. But I would say all the experts agree that if you take all the forms of slavery, if you take the traditional bonded labor forms of slavery, you take the military impressment, you take forced labor, including in factories and homes, including children and adults, the fastest growing form of slavery is sex slavery. There doesn't seem to be any question about that. That's the fastest growing. It's the one that has the most money involved.

Again, how many dollars are involved? Nobody can be precise, but all the experts agree it's a multi-billion dollar a year industry, that it's third only to drugs and arms when it comes to profits for those in organized crime.

So we're taking it very seriously. Part of taking it seriously is not only encouraging people to care for the victims, not only encouraging prosecutions, not only encouraging education campaigns, but part of the challenge is research, and part of the challenge is trying to get a better handle on this issue, which people all over the world are seeing in their countries.

You cannot go by a day -- you know, with this Internet which -- and I'm a techno-peasant so I don't claim to be very proficient -- but it's wonderful what, you know, staff can arrange and friends out in the community. And so I get articles from all over the world on these issues every day. A day doesn't go by that there isn't a major article coming in on this issue.

For example, yesterday, maybe it was the day before, big article in the Romanian press. Several people arrested, men are arrested in Romania and charged with operating a sex slavery ring that sent three or four hundred girls and young women to Spain. These were women that were taken under false pretenses. They thought they were going to get jobs in restaurants or whatever, and they fall for that, they get taken, they're sent, their passports are seized, they're at the mercy of these people. Then the typical story is they are threatened with, "You work in the brothel or you're -- you know, we have your passport, you owe us money." And what happens there, beatings and rapes frequently accompany it.

This is a story that you can't go a day in my office without a story coming in from one newspaper or another like that. So this isn't just, you know, some isolated thing. It's happening. It even happens in this here United States. I mean, we're not immune. There have been some stories in the last couple of years, the last couple of months in the United States, including my city of -- the city I come from -- Seattle. Similar stories to the one I just told you about from the Romanian press.

Yeah, go ahead. Sure. Oh, you're waiting. Okay, I'm sorry.

QUESTION: Julie Ziegler from Bloomberg News. I'm wondering if you could, do you have any end result that you're looking for to emerge from this conference? Are you looking for some kind of a planned strategy, or what do you want to accomplish?

MR. MILLER: Well, that's a good question, Julie. What we hope for, where we're going to have 20 different panels meeting -- and I can even, if you're interested, go into all the different subjects they're covering that relate to the sex slave trade-- but we are hoping that after all these panels meet and then regional panels meet on cooperating and cross-border stuff, that at the end of the two-day conference we will have -- we will not produce some lengthy report. We're not going to produce some lengthy exposition of remarks. What we hope to be able to produce are some concise bullet point ideas, practical ideas that can be taken back by the people at the conference.

These are the fighters. These are the workers. Some of them are government officials. Most of them aren't. But they can take ideas back to their countries; that somebody will go back to Italy with an idea they picked up from somebody in Russia; that somebody will go back to Uganda with an idea they picked up from somebody in Thailand; that somebody will go back to Colombia with an idea that they picked up from somebody in Canada. That's the purpose, and we hope to produce a list of some of these practical ideas and to, of course, distribute those accordingly.

I think the second result of this conference is a more intangible one. People who have been struggling, sometimes alone, out in the field, realizing that they're not as alone as they thought and that there are other people and other resources that they can call upon, whether it's through my office, whether it's through charitable groups, you know, ranging from the International Justice Mission to the Salvation Army, to whatever. They may even learn about groups in their own country they didn't know about. That's conceivable, too. So that would be another result that I'd like to see.

Yeah. Go ahead.

QUESTION: Can you tell us something about your 2004 budget?

MR. MILLER: There is a modest increase and I believe the funding is closer to 10 million than the 7 million it's been in the past.

Our office, just to make clear the limits of our office, we are not -- that money I'm talking about is not primarily for staff. We have 13 or 14 people in our office. That money is primarily for grants to, or programs abroad, out in the field, many of them with nongovernmental organizations, sometimes with governments, to work on protection, prevention and prosecution.

Now, to just further elaborate so nobody is misled, there is actually $60 or $70 million in the budget for such grants, but a lot of it goes to other agencies. It goes to the Department of Justice, Health and Human Services, AID, et cetera.

So our office has -- we have our own role, but we also have a coordinating role under the law. We're supposed to help coordinate, working for the cabinet, a cabinet-level council. We're supposed to coordinate the activities of the various agencies.

I probably gave you more than you wanted to know, but I -- you know. Anybody else?

QUESTION: Mr. Ikeda from the Associated Press. I cover the Latin American affairs.

MR. MILLER: Sure.

Two questions. Do you have a kind of breakdown for regions of the problem? What areas in the world, a percent is worse within areas?

And the second question is how did sexual slavery begin? And how this process start? Did it start with the participation of the parents? Or the kids are hypnotized maybe (inaudible)? Could you talk about the process itself?

MR. MILLER: Sure. Well, I've got to tell you, after a couple of months on the job, I don't have a clear answer to your last question. It certainly didn't start last year. We know that. But let me give you a partial answer. You said did it start with the parents.

Regrettably, there are certainly cases where parents have sold their children into sex slavery. I mean, I saw a video a couple of weeks ago taken surreptitiously by the International Justice Mission in a Southeast Asian country where a woman -- I don't know if the woman was a mother or aunt or whoever -- was selling a girl who appeared to be six or seven years old to the owners of a brothel.

Now, so this happens. Parents do this. I don't think, however, that that is the major source. I think -- so I don't want to go overboard on that, I'm just saying it happens -- I think the major origins are people that are attracted by "travel agencies," "friends" in their villages, "acquaintances," that come and paint the rosy picture that they can make more money if they go to some far off country and, of course the job is not mentioned, the job that's mentioned is restaurant worker, modeling or something like that, you know, maybe it's, you know, working in a club or whatever. It's never -- it's not mentioned.

That is the common origin. You see that in countries ranging from the former Soviet Union to Africa to Asia. I could give you specific illustrations that have been published of how that works. And the one I described in Romania, that press account I was relating, it's -- they all have a similar pattern.

And why does it happen? We're still exploring all the causes. Certainly, economic circumstances are a part of it, but not the only part of it. There seems to be another element that goes along with poverty. There seems to be an element of some expectation of bettering oneself. I mean, you know, for example, there's an organization in Russia, MiraMed, a nonprofit organization that did a -- ran an education prevention campaign. They ran ads saying, "You know, don't get hooked. If you see an ad for a travel agency, you know, with some job, please call us." They got a lot of calls. The majority of their calls were from people, young women who had either college degrees or had jobs.

One of our staffers who has been -- done a lot of work in Africa reports that the studies there show that television is a big influence, that many of these people don't come from the poorest villages, they come from the villages that have TV, pictures of, you know, the better economic life. So there are a lot of factors going into this and we're just starting to come to grips with all the factors that are involved.

Now, you asked another question. I didn't want to -- your first question was -- I think it was which area was the worst or whatever. I can't -- I wouldn't label a continent, one continent, worse than another at this point, and let me tell you why. We do a report every year. This spring, we're doing a report. We're going to report on every country. We just sent out cables to our embassies with a list of 50 questions. We want information back from them on what's going on on the total slave trade picture, not just sex slavery, in the countries where they're located.

We also sent out hundreds and hundreds of letters to nongovernmental organizations in different countries, organizations in this country that have branches in other countries, asking for their input on what's going on. We're also monitoring news media reports.

And this May or June, we're going to come out with a report, and I don't want to prejudge it because we haven't even started getting the information. It's going to be an interesting report because the report has been done -- this office has been in existence a year and a half or two years. The report's been done before, but it's not with the potential consequences that come this year under congressional legislation. This year, if a country -- there are three categories. Without getting into all the legal language, there's three categories: you're doing well or you're doing fair or you're failing. And the countries that are perceived to be failing face the possibility of aid sanctions unless waived by the President, unless they come into rapid -- they undertake some rapid efforts.

So, you know, sometime in June, we'll have a picture of different countries. But I will say this. I think, even then, it will be hard to say which continent because it's all over. I mean, you cannot -- every country in the world, almost every country -- there may be some exceptions, I shouldn't say every country. But the overwhelming majority of countries are either suppliers of slaves, transit countries where slaves are trafficked through, or demand countries where they go. So, you know, nothing can -- very few countries you can say, "Well, there's no involvement."

QUESTION: You said at least one million children are --

MR. MILLER: That's the UNICEF estimate.

QUESTION: Yes. Are forced into this sexual slavery every year.

MR. MILLER: Yeah.

QUESTION: Do you have more wider scope into the adults, too? How many people --

MR. MILLER: Well, that's what we're working on. The CIA, many years ago, talked about an overall estimate of 700,000 to 4 million. There was a book published a couple of years ago that came up with an estimate in the 20s of millions -- not sex slavery, but total. I hope in the next several months we'll have a more precise estimate to that. All we know, it's very big at this point.

Yes.

QUESTION: Thomas Korghisian, Al Wafd, Egypt.

(Cell phone rings.)

MR. MILLER: Excuse me. Let me just -- I forgot to turn this off. Okay.

QUESTION: Mr. Miller, trying to, let's say, the UN try to use the expression recently frequently used, which is "connecting the dots" that you said. What you are expecting from this conference, I mean, which is -- because it's -- your office is to monitor and combat, right? I mean, it's a big job, I mean, and with the budget that you mentioned and the stuff --

MR. MILLER: Fighting it out -- (laughter.)

QUESTION: -- the stuff you mentioned, I wonder how you can both monitor and combat, or at least organize.

So my question is, is there a mechanism that you are trying to make it, you know, to at least monitor what's going on?

The second question related to your experience for years as a congressman, on the legislative branch, are there any laws prohibiting this or just it's a matter of law enforcement judgment whether it's sex trafficking or trafficking or any kind of this, you know? Because it seems that you are referring to CIA and FBI and all these people, and it becomes like a crime after it's done, not before it's done.

MR. MILLER: Okay. Very good question. It may have been a crime after it was done several years ago, but no more in this country. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which created my office, much of that legislation deals with focusing on this as a specific crime.

Now, you could say if somebody kidnaps, rapes, beats, imprisons somebody, they have obviously committed a lot of criminal offenses. But the Act focuses on this as a specific offense with sentences from 20 years to life in this country. So it's no longer a case of the law not focusing on this.

And increasingly in other countries, other countries are passing laws that specifically focus on this. And we're in the process -- our office -- of drafting a model law that might be of help or of interest to different countries. So I think that is helpful. There is no question about it, because it raises the sensitivity of law enforcement and it gives them a valuable tool.

Your first question was, I think, how do you go about monitoring, right? How does a small -- you know, the mechanism. Well, I'm not -- you know, I'm not going to stand here and tell you that -- you already know from my answers that the monitoring mechanisms are very imperfect. What we're trying to do, we, in our office, we're trying to collect information from embassies, from nongovernmental organizations, from the news media, from international organizations, the UN, UNICEF, the International Organization of Migration, to get a better handle on this. The monitoring is imperfect, there's no question about it. And, but I think somebody said the perfect cannot be an enemy of the good. And so we do what we can, better than, you know, than throwing up our hands. Let's commit ourselves to this struggle for abolition.

QUESTION: Sir, the reason I was asking, I mean, besides the NGOs and woman organization and human rights organization, what's the addition that you are going to do? I mean, you are going to -- I mean, people assume you're part of the State Department, you have some muscle at least.

MR. MILLER: Well, the addition is, as you know, for years, the State Department has put out a Human Rights Report. That Human Rights Report, through its -- the attention and publicity it's gathered, I believe, has had an impact. We're doing the same thing. I don't think countries want to be listed in this report as having a bad record. And as I said, unlike the Human Rights Report, we have some tools, some carrots and sticks, here. The stick this year being the potential of some aid sanctions.

So that is the muscle. Now, that will help. I think if a country like the United States recognizes this challenge and stands up and says. "We're going to play a role in combating this," that will help. We need other nations, and other nations, and many other nations are starting to recognize this and they are standing up. International organizations are starting to recognize this and they are standing up.

But it's a long struggle ahead. I mean, after all, William Wilberforce took 20 years and the British parliament back in the 1800s to get the British navy to intercept African slave ships and abolish the slave trade. And we're going to need that perseverance and dedication.

Yes.

QUESTION: Sorry, I'm Mr. Ikeda from AP again. Is this the first time this kind of conference is being held, and in the U.S.?

MR. MILLER: Well, I think a fair answer is yes. Of course, there have been other conferences, and I don't even know of them. But there are conferences in other parts of the world and I'm sure there have been conferences in the United States -- but nothing on this scale, bringing so many people from around the world to Washington, D.C., sponsored by both the U.S. Government and some nongovernmental organizations. Nothing of this scope has ever been done.

Okay. Yeah.

QUESTION: I wanted to know if you would address how globalization plays a role in all of this. Because on the one hand, globalization has been praised as the (inaudible) for the developing countries where a lot of these people who are being supplied (inaudible) these jobs to where they are coming from, and this seems to indicate that this is an ugly, dark side of globalization. Is there a way to --

MR. MILLER: Well, I mean, I don't know that -- I don't know that I would join in that characterization at all. Certainly, to the extent that we improve the economic conditions of people, we help address this challenge. I suppose people -- what's that?

QUESTION: The reason I'm asking, it is the globalization of the world economy has increased the movement of people across borders legally and illegally, especially from poor to wealthier nations. This is a report for Congress.

MR. MILLER: Well, I'm sure it's increased trade and maybe it -- maybe you can say if it's increased trade, maybe you can draw some connection. I hope -- my hope would be that it would increase attention to trade as well as increasing trade, and that trafficking or trading in people is not something that those who promote "trade" are about.

Any other questions?

(No response.)

MR. MILLER: Okay. Well, thank you all for coming. I appreciate it. I didn't know I was going to be standing up here talking for so long, but you keep asking these good questions and I hope you'll get a chance to stop in at our conference.

I want to introduce again Sharon Payt from our office, who is in charge of working for our office on media at the conference, and I will turn it back to you.

MS. SCHALOW: Thank you very much, Mr. Miller, and thanks to everyone for coming today. A reminder that the application for press credentials to cover next week's events is on the back of the media advisory that was out front, or you can go to www.state.gov/g/tip, trafficking in persons, and there is an application online and information how to contact them with more questions.

MS PAYT: And ignore the deadline.

MS. SCHALOW: And ignore the deadline. Just come. Thank you very much.