AP Photo/Steve Helber

Holly Smith, now in her 30s, was forced into prostitution after running away from home at 14.

The New York City mayor's office recently helped launch a program to give legal assistance to victims of sex trafficking, and a woman in her 40s who endured years as a virtual slave appeared at its news conference.



That woman, who now goes by Kika Cerpa, survived an ugly crime that has started to get attention in America only in recent years. While many survivors come from impoverished circumstances, others, like Cerpa, had jobs before falling prey to sex traffickers. Some victims come from the U.S., while many others come from overseas. Their stories vary, but traffickers use some of the same tactics to control their victims.



"People are not programmed to have sex with multiple strangers [a day]," says Lori Cohen, a senior staff attorney for the advocacy group Sanctuary for Families , adding that trafficking victims sometimes must have sex with 60 men a day. "In order for somebody to do that, their defenses are broken down."









Kika Cerpa's Story

In Cerpa's case, she was kept in a basement by herself after arriving in America as a very young woman. She had been working in the accounting department of a hotel in her native Venezuela when she fell in love with a coworker, Cerpa told Business Insider in a recent telephone interview arranged by Sanctuary for Families.

That coworker introduced Cerpa to his cousin, Sandra, who promised her a job as nanny in the U.S. When Cerpa arrived in 1992, Sandra took her passport and her money.

"She said to me my boyfriend owed her money," Cerpa said, "and the only way I could pay it off was working."

The next day, Sandra took her to a brothel in Jackson Heights, Queens (a popular neighborhood for young professionals), where Cerpa ended up sleeping with 20 men. Sandra pocketed the $12 Cerpa made from each customer. For a year, Cerpa lived under Sandra's thumb and in her house.

"I wasn't allowed to leave the house on my own. I wasn't allowed to eat," Cerpa said, adding that most of the time Sandra would actually feed her.

At one point, Cerpa managed to escape. She slept on the train for a night but didn't know where to go after that. She returned to the brothel where Sandra had been taking her. The pimp there said he would give her a place to sleep, but he continued funneling the money she made back to Sandra — who still had her passport. Cerpa was stuck.

'Modern-Day Slaves'

Both the Justice Department and the FBI have stepped up their efforts to combat human trafficking, a crime that seems difficult to fathom in a country that ended slavery nearly 150 years ago. As the FBI says on its website: "It's sad but true: here in this country, people are being bought, sold, and smuggled like modern-day slaves."

Under U.S. law it's illegal to coerce "a person's labor, services, or commercial sex acts."

"The coercion can be subtle or overt, physical or psychological," the DOJ says, "but it must be used to coerce a victim into performing labor, services, or commercial sex acts." (There is no need to prove coercion in trafficking cases involving minors, because they cannot legally give consent.)

From 2009 to 2011, the Justice Department brought an average of 24 forced labor cases every year. U.S. prosecutors have gone after human traffickers who kept victims in suburban mansions, sweat shops, brothels, strip clubs, and bars. In one recent case, a 33-year-old pimp in Washington State was indicted for allegedly beating and threatening two women into working as prostitutes.

“She never understood specifically why he assaulted her but recounted that she felt ‘lower’ each time he did,” a detective said in charging papers quoted by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

In another recent case, two Long Beach, California, men pleaded guilty to sex trafficking adult women, luring them into romantic relationships through deceptive internet ads and then psychologically manipulating them into prostitution.

"Sex trafficking is not something that only happens outside of the United States, but victimizes Americans in our own backyards,” said Bill Lewis, the assistant director of the FBI Los Angeles Field Office, in a statement after that guilty plea. “In this case, the defendants defrauded victims and forced them to work as sex slaves under threat to themselves and their families."

Story continues