And if the girls are lucky enough to escape, there's often nowhere for them to go. "The families don't want them back," Sister Veronica, a nun who helps run a rescue mission for trafficked prostitutes in an old church in Mexico City, told me. "They're shunned."
When I first met her, Andrea told me: "We're way too damaged to give back. A lot of these children never wanted to see their parents again after a while, because what do you tell your parents? What are you going to say? You're no good."
An article on January 25 about sexual slavery referred erroneously to the film Scary Movie 2. A Mexican woman who was being held as a sex slave in the United States could not have been taken to see it by her captor; by the time the movie came out in 2001, she had already escaped and returned to Mexico.
"The Girl Next Door," an article about the importing of women and girls to the United States for sexual slavery, has generated much discussion since it appeared in the Times Magazine on January 25. In response to questions from readers and other publications about sources and accuracy, the magazine has carried out a thorough review of the article.
On the issue of sources, the writer, Peter Landesman, conducted more than forty-five interviews, including many with high-ranking federal officials, law enforcement officers, and representatives of human rights organizations. Four sources insisted on anonymity to protect their professional positions. A magazine fact-checker also interviewed all relevant sources, many of them both before and after publication. Some readers have questioned the figure of ten thousand enforced prostitutes brought into this country each year. The source of that number is Kevin Bales, recommended to the magazine by Human Rights Watch as the best authority on the extent of enforced prostitution in the United States, who based his estimates on State Department documents, arrest and prosecution records, and information from nearly fifty social service agencies.
In the course of this review, several errors were discovered in specific details. One, an erroneous reference to the release date of Scary Movie 2, was corrected in the magazine last Sunday.
On the question whether women imported through Cotton-wood Canyon, California, could have been wearing high heels, the original source, when pressed, acknowledged that his information was hearsay. The article should not have specified what the women were wearing, and the anecdote should have been related in the past tense, since the trafficking ring was broken up in 2001.
The woman in her twenties known to her traffickers as Andrea recalled an incorrect name for the hotel to which she was taken in Juarez, Mexico. The Radisson Casa Grande had not yet opened when she escaped from her captors.
After the article was published, the writer made an impromptu comment in a radio interview, noting that Andrea has multiple-personality disorder. The magazine editors did not learn of her illness before publication. Andrea's account of her years in slavery remained consistent over two and a half years of psychotherapy. Her therapist says that her illness has no effect on the accuracy of her memory. Her hours-long interview with the author, recorded on tape, is lucid and consistent.
An independent expert consulted by the magazine, Dr. Leonard Shengold, who has written books and papers about child abuse and the reliability and unreliability of memory, affirms that a diagnosis of multiple-personality disorder is not inconsistent with accurate memories of childhood abuse. Because multiple-personality disorder has been associated with false memory, however, the diagnosis should have been cited in the article.
The magazine's cover showed a nineteen-year-old nicknamed Montserrat, who escaped from a trafficker four years ago. An insignia on her school uniform had been retouched out of the picture by the magazine's editors to shield her whereabouts. The change violated the Times's policy against altering photographs.
Peter Landesman is a journalist, award-winning novelist, and screenwriter. A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, his journalism has also appeared in The New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly. His journalism typically takes him inside underground networks that traffick in weapons, refugees, sex slaves, and stolen and forged art and antiquities. He lives in Los Angeles.
I spent five months in Mexico, the United States, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine for this piece, among victims, police, and federal agents and trafficking networks, carrying out what was at times an emotionally and physically harrowing investigation. "The Girls Next Door"-cited by the Overseas Press Club for Best International Reporting on Human Rights Issues and the most requested and widely read NewYork Times story of 2004, and the most thoroughly fact-checked in the history of the New York Times Magazine- sparked a national conversation, and a wave of controversy. The story made people feel terrible, and the attacks against it were organized. And yet the truths the story laid out were incontrovertible. While the controversy was bolstered by little more than blog-esque ad hominem rhetoric and unsubstantiated and at times hysterical disbelief, in the real world-the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.; Mexico City; Rome; and London (among other capitals), and in the streets where girls and young women are "disappeared" inside these networks-the story has had a profound and tangible effect:
Government officials continually report to me the many ways the story changed policy inside the Department of Justice and the Bush administration, which had believed sex trafficking to be a problem in Asia and Eastern Europe but not in the United States. Multiple federal and state task forces and initiatives were established in the story's wake. Two weeks after publication, Mexican and United States authorities performed simultaneous raids on one of the trafficking networks the story identifies. Its victims held captive in New York City and Mexico were rescued and entered into a witness protection program. The infant of one of them-held by the traffickers as collateral in Mexico-was also saved. The principles in the network were arrested and are now being tried in the United States. That same week, a sex trafficking ring operating near Disneyland-another place the story identified-was broken up, its principles arrested. Federal authorities have since surveilled and raided the San Diego trafficking network exposed by the story, rescuing dozens of its captives. Cities such as Los Angeles have begun to train its police officers to recognize sex trafficking when they see it. Embarrassed by the story's revelations, the Mexican government- through its intelligence agency, CISEN-founded a task force to fight sex trafficking in Mexico.
But perhaps most importantly, "The Girls Next Door" sparked a national conversation about sex slavery, the use and captivity of thousands of foreign girls and young women in America. I am frequently buttonholed by NGO experts and government officials- including a number of Justice officials and federal prosecutors, and one high official from the Department of Health and Human and Services-that this article was not only groundbreaking in its accuracy, but represented a watershed moment in the understanding of this barbaric economy.
Robert Draper