Down Town Spa, an alleged undercover brothel located at 1 Custom House St. - less than a 10-minute walk from campus - was closed in August as part of a federal investigation into human trafficking.
More than 30 people were arrested and charged in an extensive human trafficking ring that stretched across the Northeast from Rhode Island to Washington, D.C., according to an Aug. 16 press release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Kyong Polachek, manager of Down Town Spa, was one of those arrested. The federal investigation, which began in May 2005, uncovered a vast network of Korean-owned brothels posing as massage parlors, health spas and acupuncture clinics.
Another Rhode Island brothel posing as a spa - called Central - was uncovered in the investigation. The prostitutes there allegedly made between $18,000 and $20,000 a month, according to an Aug. 21 Providence Journal article.
Many of the women who were brought to the United States to work in such establishments came from Korea in the hopes of making money to support their families but were caught in the grasps of debt bondage and sold their bodies to pay off transportation costs, according to the Department of Justice press release. Brothel owners and managers often confiscated the women's identification and travel documents, and some of the women worked under threats of harm to their families back home.
Human trafficking - defined as the buying, selling and smuggling of people who are then forced into modern-day slavery - is the third-largest and fastest-growing criminal industry in the world, according to the Web site for the Polaris Project. The Polaris Project is a grassroots anti-trafficking organization founded by Katherine Chon '02 and Derek Ellerman '02 during their senior year at Brown.
Trafficking victims can be subjected to any number of duties, including forced prostitution, domestic servitude, landscaping and factory work. About 800,000 people are annually trafficked across international borders, and 17,500 foreigners are annually trafficked into the United States, according to the Polaris Project's Web site.
Chon said one of her primary motivations for starting the organization came in the form of a Journal article from the late 1990s about a massage parlor in the area that subjected its female workers to slave-like conditions.
"Just to acknowledge that slavery exists in the 21st century was shocking in itself, but to read an article about that happening in our own backyard - in Providence - was shocking," Chon said.
"This recent case ... is not a new phenomenon in Providence," she added.
District 7 State Rep. Joanne Giannini said there are "a lot of incidents, especially in Providence" that involve human trafficking.
One of the reasons for the proliferation of massage parlors in Rhode Island may be a 26-year-old loophole in state law that makes indoor prostitution technically legal in the state, according to the Journal.
"Young Asian women are being taken here from other countries and told they were going to have a different life," Giannini said. "But when they get here, they're taken as victims of human trafficking."
State legislators' efforts to combat human trafficking have not proven successful. Giannini sponsored a bill that would have made human trafficking a felony punishable by up to 30 years in prison. The bill was approved by the House in August but did not pass the Senate.
Mayor David Cicilline '83 and his staff are working on legislation to close down the rest of the alleged brothels in the state, Cicilline told the Journal.
The Rhode Island affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence, along with other state advocacy groups, wrote a letter to city officials several weeks ago expressing concerns about the city's focus on the victims rather than the ringleaders of human trafficking.
"If there is a serious attempt to get to the core of problem, the focus has to be on the people on top (who are) managing and coordinating this trafficking," said Steven Brown, executive director of the state's ACLU affiliate.
Almost every state in the country has been affected by human trafficking, Chon said. Though trafficking is concentrated in major urban areas and along border states due to greater demand in those places, an increasing number of traffickers are moving into suburbs and rural areas, she said.
"People categorize a lot of these human rights issues as being international and taking place elsewhere in places like Africa, but there are elaborate trafficking networks all over the world," said Andrea Titus '08, former president of Brown's chapter of Amnesty International. Titus interned with the Boston-based American Antislavery Group this past summer.
"I think people are so shocked when (they hear about trafficking) in their community - it's not generally acknowledged that this is such a huge problem," Titus said. "There needs to be a commitment in Rhode Island to educating the police force about trafficking and toward more responsible and more expansive legislation on human trafficking."
