Robert Kraft’s Sex Offenses Shine Light on Human Trafficking, Illegal Immigration

Move over, Jusse Smollett: You’ve been outdone in one news cycle by the pious and sycophantic Trump supporter, Robert Kraft. As owner of the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots, Kraft will be fitting symbol of how wealthy men finance the sex trade in America—a trade that has strong overtones of illegal immigration. (Walking across a U.S. border is not a crime, it is "unlawful entry." Walking across a border with a sex slave is a federal crime.)

Kraft has reportedly been charged with two counts of solicitation at a luxury spa. He has been caught on film, so the slow-motion replay of his offense will be quite interesting, if this goes to trial.

This tees-up today’s post on sexual labor.

Here is what the International Labour Organization—a group that tracks a variety of exploitative and degrading labor practices—reports:

Globally, there are 40.3 million victims of human trafficking globally.

81% of them are trapped in forced labor.

25% of them are children.

75% are women and girls.

This is estimated to be a $150 billion industry worldwide. (That’s where men such as Robert Kraft play such a damaging role.)

Polaris Project Map of Human Trafficking in the U.S.

Here in the U.S., the General Accounting Office—a research arm of Congress—issued a lengthy report on human trafficking in December 2018:

December 4, 2018

Congressional Committees

Trafficking in persons, or human trafficking, is a longstanding and pervasive problem throughout the world, as traffickers buy, sell, and transport victims across national boundaries (editorial comment: no wall will abate this problem … migrants now at the border are mostly families seeking aysulum).

Victims are often held against their will in slave-like conditions or forced to work in the commercial sex trade, garment factories, fishing boats, agriculture, domestic service, and other types of servitude.

In addition to inflicting grave damage upon its victims, trafficking in persons is a multi-billion dollar industry that undermines government authority, distorts markets, fuels organized criminal groups and gangs, enriches transnational criminals and terrorists, and imposes social and public health costs. The Department of State (State) noted in its June 2018 Trafficking in Persons Report that terrorist organizations also use trafficking in persons to recruit adherents and finance their operations. Congress enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 to combat trafficking in persons, and has reauthorized this act four times.

The act, as amended, defines severe forms of trafficking in persons as (1) sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act is under age 18; or (2) the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion, for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.