Women's Rights & Issues
Related: About this forumSex Slaves on the Farm
From the passenger seat of the red Camaro convertible hurtling away from Southampton Road, Janet watched the scenery change from one-story houses to tobacco fields and apple orchards. She had come to Charlotte, North Carolina, to work on a farm, but she wasnt going to be pickingshe and the three other women in the car were wearing high heels and see-through miniskirts, and they felt alone and afraid.
The thought of the violence to come terrified them. It was midday, and after about an hour on the road, the man behind the wheel, whom the women knew as Ricardo, a common fake name traffickers use, turned down a dirt path and stopped at a cluster of cheap cabins that had floors lined with mattresses. These beat-down shacks were home for more than 100 farm workers. In the main farm house nearby, the workersmostly from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemalawere on their lunch break, eating chicken and rice.
The four women climbed out of the Camaro and went over to sheds near the cabins, where the workers kept their tools. The cement floors inside had crumbled through, exposing big dirt holes. While the women laid down rags, the men, filthy and reeking of sweat after spending all morning in the fields, quickly finished eating and formed lines outside the sheds, with as many as 50 men waiting for a woman. Ricardo stayed by the car, keeping lookout for police or anyone who might try to rob him and the women.
One by one, the men paid $30 to rape Janet and the other women. Most of them, having gone a long time without sex, lasted only a few minutes with Janet. Some were so violent she was sure they would have seriously hurt or even killed her if it werent for Ricardo, watching over the operation. She remembers seeing that happen once, to a woman who came without a driver or a pimp; she says the farm workers threw the body in a dump.
http://www.newsweek.com/2015/02/13/sex-slaves-farm-304354.html
brer cat
(24,513 posts)I don't know how they live through so much abuse.
I lost the best moments of my life, when I could have been with my family,
niyad
(113,012 posts)further from the article:
. . . .
Sex trafficking flourishes in areas of****** MALE-DOMINATED industries, such as fracking and oil boomtowns, military bases and, as a slew of recent court cases and victim accounts show, farm labor camps.***** (emphasis mine) The U.S. Department of State estimates that traffickers bring some 14,500 to 17,500 people into the United States each year.
These organizations that victimize these women
transport them to where the business is, says James T. Hayes Jr., special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in New York. Traffickers set up shop in metropolitan areasthey often choose Queens for its central location along the Eastern corridor to cities north and south, plus its big clientele base in New York Cityand send women to farms near and far, ranging from Vermont to Florida. Officials dont know how many women are trapped in this city-to-farm sex pipeline, but experts say the number is growing every year. Keith V. Bletzer, an adjunct faculty member at Arizona State University who has studied prostitution in agricultural areas, says that until recent years, women went to farm labor camps on their own to sell sex out of financial necessity. Now, however, there is an organized crime element, with other people recognizing that this might be a viable source of income, he says. Rather than women selling sex to make a living, its traffickers bringing them to farms as part of larger international operations.
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