Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., discussed the worldwide problem of human trafficking Tuesday night in Little Rock as part of the Frank and Kula Kumpuris Distinguished Lecture Series.
Holder said while many Americans view the problem as one that affects other countries, human trafficking is a major domestic issue as well.
“In communities nationwide, human trafficking victims often are hiding in plain sight: the young woman who traveled to America for the promise of a new life, but finds herself enslaved and sold for sex,” Holder said.
Holder’s lecture drew national media attention. Below is an excerpt from a National Public Radio story on the speech:
In a major speech on human trafficking Tuesday in Little Rock, Ark., Holder said far too many reports of abuse cross his desk each week, more than 40 percent of them involving children.
“I think about my girls Maya and Brooke, and I wonder about the parents of these girls i read about — what must they be feeling, what must they be wondering? Sometimes they don’t know where their daughters are,” Holder said.
For a long time, those images seemed to belong an ocean away: brothels in Thailand; sweatshops in Southeast Asia. But there were a record 120 such cases in the U.S. in the past year, including Ukrainian immigrants forced to work for virtually no wages in Philadelphia, and street gangs selling the body of a 12-year-old runaway girl in northern Virginia.
Holder recounted one such case: “We restored freedom to undocumented Eastern European women and convicted the trafficker who brutally exploited them in massage parlors in Chicago and even branded them with tattoos to claim them as his property,” he said.
The Kumpuris Lecture Series was established by Katherine Ann Kumpuris Trotter, Dr. Drew Kumpuris and Dr. Dean Kumpuris in honor of their mother, Kula Kumpuris, and in memory of their father, Dr. Frank Kumpuris. The series is sponsored by the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton School and AT&T.
Video of the lecture will be posted soon at www.clintonschoolspeakers.com.