Tom's NYC Against Sex Trafficking Journey blog 1.

This is the first of Tom's views from New York and will run 

for the rest of this week while Jouney is running there.

For more information on Journey and the Helen Bamber Foundation click here

Saturday 7 November

The journey of JOURNEY has been long and variously diverted. It started in London 3 years ago, travelled to Vienna in 2007 and now finally, after months of wrangling and postponements arrives in New York. Mike Dempsey and I work on the periphery of the Foundation, each to our own skills and in our own studios. Emails on a daily basis from HBF HQ have been coming through for press release, or leaflet, or special edition newspaper, or emergency something else or other. The Foundation struggles to survive but has huge ambitions and does fantastic work with many people. Anyhow we have a location – Washington Place – off Washington Square and on the way to Heathrow I have been trying to imagine what New Yorkers will make of this UFO that is about to land in their neighbourhood.

Find I am departing from Terminal 3, which is a strange irony. JOURNEY is all about human trafficking. It tells the story of Elena who was seduced from her home in central Europe with promises of finding fortune in the west. Terminal 3 was the cash point where trafficked women who have been ordered are paid for. The minder (the woman who has groomed the girls) hands them over the trafficker. You can pick up a nice young fresh one for as little as a £ 1,000. Once they have been sold, the minder flies back to nurture the next one and the trafficker takes his prize home. Home is a house somewhere in the suburbs, or a massage parlour in some innocent enough neighbourhood. The woman is stripped of her passport, phone, clothes and identity, and summarily raped by new owners to break her in. Then she is put to work to service as many men a day as she can squeeze in. The traffickers control the women absolutely. They threaten violence against her relatives and the girl is effectively imprisoned. Most have no idea where they are and are kept under tight security by woman employed by the traffickers until they are tamed. There comes a point where the humiliation and loss of self is so overwhelming, staying put and paying their ‘sale price’ back to the trafficker seems the only alternative to going home to shame her family. The women are used until their sell-by date has expired, and then sold down the chain, gradually reduced in price until they are no longer marketable.

Terminal 3 encapsulates all the banality of the human race rolled into one ghastly experience. People totter around hungry for they know not what. The containment of people, the security and paranoia in western airports is now worse than anything encountered in the Eastern Bloc. Which ironic because some Germans just off the left of me are reading newspapers commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago today. A lot of trafficking comes from the collapsed iron curtain countries. Life was always hard and the social and political vacuum has bred a particularly gruesome criminality. Generations were rendered passive spectators of their own lives.The immigration hall at JFK is worse than ever. At one point over 1,000 people are queuing in line and only 2 kiosks are open. The attitude of the staff is indifferent, going on complacent, going on contemptuous. Lots of parents struggle to keep children distracted. Meanwhile vacuous videos play on the plasma screens showing grinning officers greeting all manner of nationalities. We are guilty apparently. And there are even code of conduct poster that promise equitable treatment, and a big WELCOME TO AMERICA. Two hours later I clear customs and heading for the official taxi rank, crowds of illegal taxi cowboys tout for business.