Let's Call 'Sex Tourism' What It Really Is: Slavery

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated: Why Women's Lives Aren't Getting Any Easier and How We Can Make Real Progress for Ourselves and Our Daughters by Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney. Published with permission of Rodale Inc.

I began to learn about the truly evil world of sexual slavery in 1999, when the human rights organization Equality Now contacted me about Big Apple Oriental Tours, a travel company based in my district. The name sounds innocuous enough, but this was not your typical tour company. Its clients didn't turn to it for its expertise on restaurants or cultural landmarks. Big Apple's clients were interested in just one attraction: women. And they all could have gone by the same euphemistic name: John.

Big Apple was a "sex tourism" business. It arranged tours of seedy nightclubs in Thailand and the Philippines. These nightclubs were thinly veiled brothels, of course. Big Apple even advertised access to virgins. An Associated Press reporter who viewed one of Big Apple's "promotional videos" reported that it contained a clip of a Filipina woman identifying herself as "17 years young."

From the moment I learned about Big Apple, I wanted to put them out of business.

But in 2000, a gap in the law prompted the Queens District Attorney and U.S. Attorney General to decide against pursuing an indictment against the men who ran Big Apple -- Norman Barabash and Douglas Allen. Based on the laws at that time, there was insufficient evidence to prove that Big Apple's customers traveled "with intent" to have sex with minors -- the threshold for criminal conduct.2

Barabash was so bold that he sent me a letter and brazenly posted it on his Web site. Here's an excerpt.

... have you now exposed your true political affiliation to be the champion of lesbian extremists ... that believe that marriage is sexual servitude and bondage? A school of thought that says all men are rapists, wife beaters and child molesters? A school of thought that has nothing more positive to say about men than that they are the source of all evil in the world? A school of thought that believes it is more important for women to be domineering rulers of society than to be conscientious mothers and wives? A school of thought that is actively working to change the world to a matriarchal dictatorship run by a few rich nags?

Despite Barabash's swagger, we -- myself, Equality Now, Gloria Steinem, and other committed elected officials -- continued to pursue Barabash and Allen. In 2003, New York's then-attorney general Eliot Spitzer won a temporary restraining order, effectively crippling Big Apple's ability to do business. In early 2004, Barabash and Allen were indicted under New York State law -- the first criminal action of its kind against a sex tourism company. Though the case was dismissed on technical grounds in 2004, Barabash and Allen were reindicted in 2005.

Charges were dismissed in 2006, underscoring the need for stronger laws. But the process sent a strong message to sex tourism companies across the nation that their actions will be scrutinized and that it might be best to close up shop.

Learning about sex tourism gave me a window onto a broader world that extends into the darkest reaches of the human soul and takes its victims to the outer limits of human suffering -- sex trafficking, a legal term that is really just a euphemism for sexual slavery.

More people in the world may be enslaved today than there were in the 19th century (some estimates run as high as 27 million). The largest categories of extant slavery, sex slavery and domestic servitude slavery, overwhelmingly affect women and girls. Sex tourism is a significant driver of sex slavery, the third-largest and fastest-growing source of revenue for organized crime -- a vicious criminal industry that President Bush rightly calls "a special evil."