June 3, 2015
It was nighttime in Lansing, Mich. Clara’s, a local restaurant built into the historic Michigan Central Railroad Depot, was quiet on Michigan Ave. Down the street, ten-year-old Christina Linguidi climbed down a fire escape.
Linguidi’s parents met when her mother was 14 and her father was in his late 20s, a soldier. He picked her up hitchhiking and she got pregnant with Linguidi soon after. They were married when she was 16. Growing up in that home, Linguidi was sexually assaulted by her father and her male babysitter, and eventually put into foster care.
The foster home turned out to also be an abusive environment. At ten, Linguidi ran away with her foster siblings. It turned out that they were going to the home of her 16-year-old foster sister’s pimp.
He prostituted her out until she escaped down a fire escape. She was then placed into a new foster home. There, her foster mother’s girlfriend sold her to a male relative, whose house she was sent to every day. Once again, Linguidi was sold into trafficking.
Finally, when Linguidi was 16, she moved to Vista Maria, a Social Services organization in Dearborn Heights, Mich. From there she went on to college and began speaking out about her experiences as a victim of human trafficking.
“I know I can’t change what happened to me, but I can change it happening to somebody else, so it’s given me a passion,” Linguidi said.
Linguidi worries that the foster care system is very susceptible to abuse and human trafficking because of the prevalence of high-risk children who are already vulnerable. She experienced this firsthand.
“I was exposed to that stuff at a very young age, so I didn’t have any red flag sign of what was normal or what wasn’t normal,” she said. She also pointed out that when people who have already been emotionally traumatized, traffickers play on their vulnerability.
“Oh, I understand. I’m gonna protect you. I’m gonna help you,” she said. “You think this person loves you, and it’s not till you defy them that you realize [they don’t], but then you still go back to them because they’re still taking care of you, giving you clothes. It’s like a family.”
Linguidi’s foster sister fell into this pattern with her pimp.
“She didn’t look at it as being trafficked,” Linguidi said. “She looked at it as he took care of her. He bought her things — jewelry and purses and clothes — she was brainwashed and didn’t see the truth of what was happening.”
Linguidi also had friends in the foster care system who were being trafficked. Many ended up pregnant or falling into cycles of abusive relationships into adulthood. While Linguidi speaks out about her past, many of her friends have chosen to leave it behind.
For people going through human trafficking now, Linguini offered this message: “I think you need to believe that these people don’t have what’s best for you, and it’s easy to find love in the wrong places. You need to seek help. Learn the red flags of an abusive relationship and that if someone hurts you they’re going to continuously hurt you.”
Although today Linguidi has found a support system in her church, throughout her youth she had no one to check in on her.
“[If] somebody was on my side and didn’t just look at me as a troubled foster care kid, if they looked at the whole situation of my background and what I’d come from, I think it would have been different,” she said. But in her experience, law enforcement and social services were overwhelmed.
“My caseworker had probably 40 cases on her caseload. She’s supposed to have 20,” she said. “I even had a caseworker tell me later, ‘I knew things were wrong but [my] hands were tied.’”
There are, however, efforts in Michigan that work to provide more services to victims of human trafficking. The Human Trafficking Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School provides legal support to victims of human trafficking. It was founded in 2009 and is the only human trafficking clinic in the county. Students in the program, along with a partner and an adult supervisor, provide services to several clients over the course of a semester. Clients come to the clinic through many different routes. One is the Polaris Project, a national organization with a human trafficking hotline which people can call at any time to be fielded to a place to get services. Some find out about the clinic on their own, or by googling terms or things that are happening to them, and human trafficking comes up. Sometimes law enforcement might refer them to the clinic.
The clinic has dozens clients with a wide variety of needs. Human trafficking is divided into two subsections: labor trafficking and sex trafficking.
“The term human trafficking is a legal term that the federal government uses to identify somebody as a victim, and then they get many services through their victimization,” said Julia Toce, a law student working in the clinic. “And then also there’s a criminal aspect to criminalize the act of enslaving somebody and being a human trafficker, so they can be prosecuted by the federal government as well, the traffickers or pimps or bosses. Our clients really range from the most obvious sex trafficking story that you hear. Young naïve girl comes to a new city and maybe starts dancing or stripping in some places. Someone tells them, you could make more money doing this, and then quickly she’s either brought somewhere else or isolated from her family.”
According to Toce, many people don’t think of Michigan as a hub of trafficking. “But it’s a border state, which a lot of people forget about, and Detroit is kind of a city with less than optimal opportunities for somebody, which frequently push people who are already at the margins further out,” she said.
Linguidi echoed this sentiment, noting that another vulnerable group is homeless women and youth and LGBT youth, people who are already socially marginalized.
“Most people can’t imagine that it’s happening in Ann Arbor, or Lansing,” Linguidi said. “People don’t want to see it. If you see it you can’t stand for the injustice, and so it’s easier to turn a blind eye and say, there’s no way that’s happening in my city. It’s also easy to see it as happening in other countries, but not in America.”
The clinic serves victims of sex trafficking who, like Linguidi, have been forced to prostitute themselves in Michigan or around the country. To be legally classified as a victim of sex trafficking, Toce explained, “you have to be obtained, harbored, procured and a few other things, through the use of force, fraud or coercion. And that’s kind of an important key because it take the voluntariness out of it and somebody has to force you, but it doesn’t have to be physical abuse. It can be all different types of intimidation tactics that people use for the purpose of slavery or peonage or death bondage.”
Many of the clients in the clinic are victims of labor trafficking, which takes many different shapes. These people are frequently foreign nationals, many of whom are duped into coming to the US by fraudulent promises of getting a visa or a job. Many of these people have put a lot of money into traveling to the US, and when they arrive are exploited for labor.
“There are a lot of clients from India, a lot from Togo, a small country in Africa,” Toce said. “We have a lot of girls who were found forced to hair-braid for 17 hours on end and they were kept in this house and secluded for years and years and years. It’s a lot of visa manipulation and promises that if you come here we’ll pay you, we’ll house you, we’ll set you up. It’ll be great, you’ll have a job. They arrive and they’ll be living in the back of a store with bugs and its disgusting. Especially if you’re here illegally, a lot of victims easily fall prey to an idea that there’s no help for them, no resource, and they feel indebted in a lot of ways – not even angry at their situation, but, how will they pay off the money that supposedly they owe to the person who brought them here? Unfamiliarity with the way that our law enforcement works, unfamiliarity with the way that or visa system and immigration work, and then they find that they’ve been here for five years working endless hours but they don’t have legal status here and they have made no money because they’re not getting paid.”
Many people come from well-to-do families in another country and come to the US to find a better life.
They want to fulfill the American dream,” Toce said. “Many don’t identify as being victims, and then once you’re called a victim, there’s a lot of shame that can come with that: how was I so stupid to let this happen to me? How did I not think better? When, in reality, when you have a dream it’s easy to put blinders on and not see what’s really happening. And the tactics that people use to coerce people are extremely subtle and very well thought-out. Some people think that this is just the way that it is in America, or this is just how my life is going to be.”
“One of my clients, a couple, thought, no, we’re not victims of human trafficking, that’s for girls from Russia who are prostituted,” said Toce. “We think of it as only one thing sometimes. They don’t realize that not only is the definition very broad, but there doesn’t need to be such a stigma about it.”
Linguidi believes that a better understanding of human trafficking is necessary not only from those experiencing it, but from people in positions to help stop it.
“You have to have everyone on board and seeing the same thing,” she said, “especially the men in politics, seeing that trafficking is trafficking and rape is rape. You have to have them seeing that this isn’t the woman’s fault, this isn’t the girl’s fault. A kid can’t consent to this kind of thing, nor would they. There are a lot more men standing up for it now but also a lot more men who still look at it and say that woman should be prosecuted or that 16 year old should be in trouble. And that’s not the case.”
She also emphasized that this can not be a fad issue that is quickly dismissed – it’s institutional. “[Traffickers] are making billions of dollars,” she said. “If you’re watching any pornography movie many of them have been trafficked. Men don’t think about that… Organizations, like sports organizations and fraternities are allowed to get away with things too much. It’s happening all over the place… We need people willing to stand up and say no.”
