Prosecutors from around world meet to compare investigations

Prosecutors are calling the scourge of sex trafficking a form of modern-day slavery that touches every state in the nation, and they’re working to draw connections between active investigations around the globe at a summit in Waikiki.

Representatives from eight countries and a dozen states met to share details about cases of victims forced into the sex industry, hoping to collaborate on strategies to bring traffickers to justice.

“Sex trafficking internationally is somewhere between a $7 billion and $23 billion business,” said Cyrus Vance Jr., district attorney for New York County. “It’s second to international arms sales in terms of the scope of the crime and the money that’s involved with it. So it’s huge. And it’s in every community in America — whether we like to acknowledge it or not — and every country around the world.” Prosecutors from Canada, China, Japan, Palau, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand attended the summit, along with American prosecutors from Hawaii and states spanning the coasts and the Midwest.

In New York City, where there’s a special court to handle cases involving prostitution or sex trafficking, many young men and women are brought in from other states and forced to work in the sex industry, Vance said.

California law enforcement officers have encountered victims forced into the sex trade from Mexico, Taiwan and China, but most of the victims were born in the United States, said Michael Ramos, district attorney for San Bernardino County and president of the National District Attorneys Association. “Yes we have a problem internationally ... but we really have a homegrown problem, and we need to take care of that,” Ramos said. Prosecutors in Hawaii have found sextrafficking victims brought to the U.S. from China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Korea and Thailand, Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney Keith Kaneshiro said. In the past year, the prosecutor’s office has closed down three massage parlors in Honolulu that involved Asian sex-trafficking victims, including one case where sex workers from China were flown to New York and then Hawaii, he said.

“There are a lot of massage parlors proliferating in our community,” Kaneshiro said. The conference, which began Wednesday, is being held in Hawaii, which was the last state in the nation to formally ban sex trafficking.