Judging with compassion
Judge Puig-Lugo explains why a piecemeal approach is failing America's exploited girls
Series
This is part six of a seven-part series about sex trafficking.
Federal and state courts have to deal with a spaghetti tangle of laws when it comes to dealing with the sex traffic of minors. But the result can too often be the same: The pimps and johns get away, and the girls who are trafficked are left with marks on their record.
Hiram E. Puig-Lugo, a family court judge in Washington, D.C., is hoping to change that.
He recalled seeing a girl who had been in and out of his court for almost two years on the annual Youth Law Day in March, when teens are taught about the legal system at the courthouse.
A caseworker from the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services went up to him and said, “There’s somebody who’d like to see you.”
“From behind her stepped out one of the young ladies who was still under the agency’s supervision … I was very glad to see her. She looked healthy,” said the judge. “She looked happy. She looked safe. And it is those brief, passing moments that make this type of persistent effort over years worth the time and energy.”
With 16 years of experience on the bench, Puig-Lugo is not representative of every judge in the system. As with any area, some laws and courts are more effective than others.
“Between 2002 to 2012, we went from zero to 50 states that have human trafficking laws. But they’re written in all kinds of different ways, and roughly half don’t have any sort of a safe harbor provision in them,” said Michael Shively, a senior associate with Abt Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were he researches crime and justice.
“The laws are their own universe, and then there’s the practice, how the laws are implemented, and that’s another layer of complexity because something can appear on the books at a federal level … but end up being a paper tiger. Some laws might as well not actually exist, in terms of actually dealing with the problem,” he said.
And there are laws aplenty.
According to the Polaris Project, an anti-slavery nongovernmental organization, 37 states passed anti-trafficking laws of some description between August 2013 and July 2014. A ticker of laws being passed or killed can be found on Shared Hope International’s bill tracker.
What can make all the difference in terms of the law are cops and the courts. And a court is only as good as the judge presiding over it.
“Most judges look at those girls and say, ‘You’re prostituting yourself,’” said Christabelle, who was trafficked as a teen in the D.C. area. “And the pimps get away, and the girls are left with a mark on their record.”
Puig-Lugo noticed that trafficked girls arrive in his court in three contexts: via delinquency cases, as people in need of supervision and through the child welfare system, which handles abuse and neglect cases.
Up until a couple of years ago, he said, the majority of commercially sexually exploited children he saw were in the juvenile delinquency system, charged with solicitation and prostitution. That doesn’t happen anymore, he said, “because a decision was made to treat these youths as victims, not criminals … It’s been gradual. It hasn’t happened overnight.”
The chronic runaways, frequently people in need of supervision, he said, are the ones he mostly sees being sexually exploited.
In some states, such as California, the foster care system is seen as failing the children in its care, with Attorney General Kamala Harris targeting it as a pipeline for human trafficking. And in D.C., the executive director of Fair Girls said, 70 to 75 percent of the girls helped by the anti-trafficking organization were in the foster care system.
But Puig-Lugo isn’t so quick to blame any one agency for the exploited kids he sees in his courtroom.
“There is a problem with the statistics. I think at this point we can only make calculated estimates … We know that the problem exists. We see the children. We can’t cover up the sky and pretend that it doesn’t happen. But it’s not clear how widespread the problem it is,” he said.
“Maybe in some places the child welfare system does a play a role in how the kids end up in the system. Maybe it doesn’t,” he said. “But independently of how widespread or not it may be, it is our responsibility as society to support [those] who are identified [as trafficked] as best as we can, whether it’s one child or 100,000.”
In pointing this out, Puig-Lugo touched on yet another messy truth about the trafficking of minors for sex in the United States: The problem might look similar in different states, and maybe there are common denominators in how the minors end up being exploited.
He is not much for a piecemeal approach. He’s shooting for comprehensive.
He has called all the key players — such as NGOs (including FAIR Girls and Shared Hope International), court advocates, social workers, health care officials, mental health professionals, lawyers, teachers and other judges — for strategic planning sessions aimed at providing training and information across the board.
They are piloting a program that involves asking minors entering the system questions that are not directly related to sex trafficking but could raise flags that could trigger taking a closer look at certain children, improving the screening of youths for being commercially sexually exploited.
They’re also working on improving informal lines of communication and making them a matter of protocol. “Everybody across the system has to be equally aware about and sensitive to the situation,” he said. “What we see is pockets of initiative, pockets of awareness. We see a lot of enthusiasm for collaboration.”
“The challenge comes in coordinating that collaboration,” he said.
