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Friday, Mar. 20, 2009

Former sex slave gives firsthand account of ordeal at Mercer conference

A Brazilian woman who came to Sandy Springs in March 2005 is speaking out about the unexpected fate she met four years ago.

Joana Santos, then a recent university graduate from Goiás in the South American country’s interior, had earned a degree in hospitality management.

She was a 28-year-old from the countryside looking forward to a career in event planning or tourism when a woman approached her on the street and suggested she move to the United States — a place she was told she could make a lot of money working in retail.

Santos, said the business proposition seemed more attractive as it unfolded.

She imagined working in America for about five years, earning enough money to later return to Brazil and purchase a house and a car, and live comfortably for a while with her fiance and provide for her parents.

So, she agreed.

Through a series of phone calls, the woman on the street organized her travel. Santos was told she would fly to Mexico and then to Georgia.

She obtained a visa and took out an $8,000 loan to pay the woman up front and in full, unaware that the transaction was funding an undercover human trafficking operation that sold women like her into prostitution.

Santos, using a false name, spoke publicly about her experience for the first time Thursday night.

She said she chose the setting of the first Mercer University human trafficking conference, which began on campus Thursday, because she never imagined telling such a story and that after years of living in pain, she’s free.

“I think that I have healed and I feel ready to talk about this,” she said, using Portuguese language interpreter Marina Spears, an English professor at Macon State College.

Santos was smuggled across the Mexican border by foot.

She reached Georgia by bus and quickly learned that she would not be working in a boutique or clothing shop, or in a household or hair salon as many women are promised. She said she was sent to live in a home with a Brazilian woman and her American husband.

Almost as soon as she arrived in the north Atlanta community, she learned she was pregnant.

The couple tried to force Santos to have an abortion, she said, but eventually allowed her to keep the baby because she agreed to be groomed as a sex slave while pregnant.

She hadn’t been raised to give up a child in that way, she explained Thursday.

Santos lived alone in a home with her traffickers. But nearby, other prostitutes who still owed money were kept in an apartment with women who acted as madams.

The women had little freedom to do anything on their own, but they were allowed to go to church.

It was during an Atlanta area church service that Santos met two Brazilians and confided in them about her situation.

That conversation led to an anonymous call placed to the Atlanta-based human trafficking organization, Tapestri Inc., and ultimately, a joint investigation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI.

Santos came forward as part of the investigation, which included the rescue of several other women trafficked from Brazil and other parts of Latin America, said Alia El-Sawi, a Tapestri employee who has worked with Santos since 2005.

“It was one of our first cases where ICE and the FBI worked together,” said El-Sawi, a Mercer graduate.

Thursday, Santos said she felt blessed to be saved from ever having to perform sex acts to earn someone else money.

“I was blessed by God. I believe he placed certain people in my life and I was saved,” she said.

Today, she lives near Atlanta with her 3-year-old son and operates a house-cleaning business.

“I never thought I would clean homes for a living,” she said, crying. “My passion was exactly what I went to school for.”

She said she won’t ever return to Brazil to live for fear of being located by the traffickers who still operate there.

Tapestri receives about two new trafficking cases in Georgia each month, El-Sawi said, citing cases evenly divided between people who are enslaved for labor or sex.

El-Sawi coordinates anti-trafficking programs, providing training and outreach to mainstream service providers, law enforcement and community organizations.

She held a training session with the Macon Police Department last year following a series of police raids at local massage parlors and spas, where employees were suspected of performing acts of prostitution.

Human rights advocates say the businesses often cover up human slavery and trafficking operations. Authorities have not confirmed that such operations exist in the Macon area.

“There’s at least one pending investigation that I know of,” El-Sawi said.

David Corr, an avid supporter of the parlors and spas, has been critical of the recent advocacy effort.

“As chairman of the Bibb County Libertarian Party, we totally and vehemently oppose sex trafficking,” he said. “But we have done an extensive investigation of local spas and massage parlors, and we feel like to imply that human trafficking and sex slavery is going on here, when it is absolutely is not, does a great disservice to these honorable establishments.”

Corr said he has visited each of the local spas and parlors and has spoken with the employees there.

“The employees come there willingly. They put in applications. This is not a hostile environment,” he said. “We’d hope that these students would focus their efforts on areas where it is happening rather than on Macon, where it is not.”

Corr said he did not plan to attend the Mercer conference.

“It’s not only sex trafficking,” El-Sawi said.

Advocacy groups and law enforcement officials have started to monitor farming communities, where labor trafficking of migrant workers also is an issue, she said.

“Maybe that can be something we can expand on in the future,” she said.

“STOP Sex Trafficking: A Call to End 21st Century Slavery,” will continue today at Willingham Auditorium.

Kika Cerpa, a human trafficking survivor and advocate who worked to pass a law against human trafficking in New York state, will speak, along with other trafficking experts.

Bob Herbert of The New York Times wrote about Cerpa’s experience in a 2006 column titled “Hidden in Brothels.”

Organizers say about 800 people have registered for the conference, which is free for Mercer students and faculty. The event is open to the public. Registration is $35.

Mercer students in STOP, the Sex Trafficking Opposition Project, began the school’s anti-trafficking initiative in 2008 in Andrew Silver’s Freshman Seminar class.

To contact writer Ashley Tusan Joyner, call 744-4347.