SAGE Project First Annual Residency Program

Good morning. Let me say how very happy I am to be here. I have known Norma Hotaling for almost ten years, and since she founded SAGE, I have wanted to come out here to observe the client program, the peer residency program, and the John School. I also wanted to have an opportunity to get to know those of you who are working so hard to help heal young women and children who are hurting, while at the same time changing the larger systems of trafficking and prostitution that continue to create that hurt.

I lived in San Francisco and Oakland from 1975 to 1990, and during that time, there was nothing remotely like the SAGE Project for those who had been trafficked into prostitution. At that time, the cycle was the streets, round-ups, arrest, jail-time, bail, the streets, and the cycle started up all over again.

It took someone like Norma to find the courage and creativity to break that cycle; to say, "No—this isn’t fair, this isn’t right—and I’m going to do something about it."

As you all know, what she saw wasn’t fair came out of her own experience. She saw that women and children, the most vulnerable and most powerless in the community, were always the focus of law enforcement activities, while the men, whether pimps and traffickers or johns and users, always got off scot-free, or worse, were protected by the laws and law enforcement.

From that simple recognition of injustice came this wonderful program, SAGE, which, to my mind, is a model for the entire world. You are all a part of this model because Norma understood from the beginning that in order to be successful, SAGE had to be survivor-centered. It had to make use of the knowledge, the information, the experience that you all had in order to shape effective programs. And this is the secret of SAGE—the secret of its success—that it listens to the women, youth, and children it wants to serve, and that it has all of you at the center of the programs, both in terms of design and implementation.

In the work I have done in the past 20 years to stop sex trafficking, I have also come to realize that we must utilize the wisdom and knowledge and skills of survivors.

• It was a survivor who taught me about the double witness statutes in the U.S. These state statutes require a second witness to corroborate testimony of a woman in prostitution because her testimony is not seen as credible. As we all know, it is rare that there is yet a third witness to many crimes connected to prostitution and trafficking, and so many of these crimes were going unpunished. When I began collecting the trafficking laws worldwide, I found these double witness statutes in almost every part of the world. Once discovered, we could and did make a recommendation to those negotiating the Transnational Convention on organized Crime and the Protocol to Prevent and Suppress Trafficking that these double witness statutes be eliminated from national criminal codes. 
  
  
• It was a survivor in Southeast Asia who explained to me the collusion between the police and the traffickers in that region. The brothel owners would call the police to come raid certain brothels. In the police sweeps, all the trafficking victims were arrested and taken to jail. Then the traffickers would come and post bail—but only for those that were still healthy. The rest, with HIV/AIDS, TB, hepatitis and other serious diseases, were summarily deported back to their country of origin to languish and die. 
  
  
• It was also a survivor in the first sex trafficking case in the U.S. who traced for me in exacting detail the routes of the traffickers from Veracruz, Mexico, up the Gulf Coast of Mexico, across the desert, through the Rio Grande River, and into Brownsville, Texas, a small town on the very border of Texas and Mexico. This information helped us set up law enforcement interventions and trainings in border cities across the U.S.-Mexico border. 
  
  
• And finally, it was a survivor in India who bravely volunteered to go back to the brothel she was trafficked into and reveal to us the trick walls and doors covering holes in the ground where the traffickers stuck trafficked children during police raids. Her knowledge and her willingness to give this information to us saved many dozens of children’s lives.

So you can see how important your knowledge and expertise is in the fight to stop sex trafficking both here and abroad, for only with your help will we be able to do our jobs effectively. I am glad SAGE exists, and I am glad you are here in the residency program. It is good to know that you are training to help heal those who have been trafficked. I hope we will see many more programs like SAGE spring up all over the United States and all over the world. Together we can stop the traffickers and restore the trafficked.