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Americans
tend to associate “modern slavery” with illiterate girls in India or Cambodia.
Yet there I was the other day, interviewing a college graduate who says she
spent three years terrorised by pimps in a brothel in Midtown Manhattan.

Those who
think that commercial sex in this country is invariably voluntary – and
especially men who pay for sex – should listen to her story. The men buying her
services all mistakenly assumed that she was working of her own volition, she
says.

Yumi Li (a
nickname) grew up in a Korean area of northeastern China. After university, she
became an accountant, but, restless and ambitious, she yearned to go abroad.

So she
accepted an offer from a female jobs agent to be smuggled to New York and take
up a job using her accounting skills and paying $5,000 a month. Yumi’s
relatives had to sign documents pledging their homes as collateral if she did
not pay back the $50,000 smugglers’ fee from her earnings.

Yumi set
off for America with a fake South Korean passport. On arrival in New York,
however, Yumi was ordered to work in a brothel.

“When they
first mentioned prostitution, I thought I would go crazy,” Yumi told me. “I was
thinking, ‘How can this happen to someone like me who is college-educated?”‘
Her voice trailed off, and she added: “I wanted to die.”

She says
that the four men who ran the smuggling operation – all Chinese or South
Koreans – took her into their office on 36th Street in Midtown Manhattan. They
beat her with their fists (but did not hit her in the face, for that might
damage her commercial value), gang-raped her and videotaped her naked in
humiliating poses. For extra intimidation, they held a gun to her head.

If she
continued to resist working as a prostitute, she says they told her, the video
would be sent to her relatives and acquaintances back home. Relatives would be
told that Yumi was a prostitute, and several of them would lose their homes as
well.

Yumi
caved. For the next three years, she says, she was one of about 20 Asian
prostitutes working out of the office on 36th Street. Some of them worked
voluntarily, she says, but others were forced and received no share in the
money.

Yumi
played her role robotically. On one occasion, Yumi was arrested for
prostitution, and she says the police asked her if she had been trafficked.

“I said
no,” she recalled. “I was really afraid that if I hinted that I was a victim,
the gang would send the video to my family.”

Then one
day Yumi’s closest friend in the brothel was handcuffed by a customer, abused
and strangled almost to death. Yumi rescued her and took her to the hospital.
She said that in her rage, she then confronted the pimps and threatened to go
public.

At that
point, the gang hurriedly moved offices and changed phone numbers. The pimps
never mailed the video or claimed the homes in China; those may have been
bluffs all along. As for Yumi and her friend, they found help with Restore NYC,
a nonprofit that helps human trafficking victims in the city.

I can’t be
sure of elements of Yumi’s story, but it mostly rings true to me and to the
social workers who have worked with her. There’s no doubt that while some women
come to the United States voluntarily to seek their fortunes in the sex trade,
many others are coerced – and still others start out forced but eventually
continue voluntarily. And it’s not just foreign women. The worst cases of
forced prostitution, especially of children, often involve homegrown teenage
runaways.

No one has
a clear idea of the scale of the problem, and estimates vary hugely. Some think
the problem is getting worse; others believe that Internet services reduce the
role of pimps and lead to commercial sex that is more consensual. What is clear
is that forced prostitution should be a national scandal. Just this month,
authorities indicted 29 people, mostly people of Somali origin from the
Minneapolis area, on charges of running a human trafficking ring that allegedly
sold many girls into prostitution – one at the age of 12.

There are
no silver bullets, but the critical step is for the police and prosecutors to
focus more on customers (to reduce demand) and, above all, on pimps.
Prostitutes tend to be arrested because they are easy to catch, while pimping
is a far more difficult crime to prosecute. That’s one reason thugs become
pimps: It’s hugely profitable and carries less risk than selling drugs or
stealing cars. But that can change as state and federal authorities target
traffickers rather than their victims.

Nearly 150
years after the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s time to wipe out the remnants
of slavery in this country.

© 2010 New York Times News Service