Authorities Bust Minnesota Sex Trafficker

Minneapolois authorities have just broken up a local sex ring.

A man suspected of luring 100 Asian women into a sex ring here has been charged in federal court with transporting women across state lines to engage in prostitution.

The Minneapolis police said the man, Liqing Liu, 41, a Chinese national, began a sex business here in February and made $70,000 a month. Mr. Liu rotated locations and prostitutes frequently in an effort to be inconspicuous, the police said.

Most recently, the police said, Mr. Liu was using a shabby massage parlor in Minneapolis, where red stickers spell the word “Massage” in crooked letters and a waving ceramic cat was perched in the lobby.

Reading these first few paragraphs, something was nagging at me. One hundred Asian women working in a prostitution ring in Minneapolis? One hundred sex workers all being “managed” by one man? Something about that didn’t scream “consensual sex work” to me. And lo and behold, I was right:

Sgt. Grant Snyder of the Minneapolis Police Department, a lead investigator, said the women, all Chinese or Korean, were prohibited from leaving the place of business, kept under video surveillance, and had their passports and other forms of identification confiscated.

The women’s poverty, language barriers and immigration status were used against them, Sergeant Snyder said, and the authorities said they were treating the women as crime victims and not criminals.

Mr. Liu was charged in federal court on Friday. He was jailed after the police dismantled the sex ring on Dec. 13; four women were directed to victim advocacy groups. Some of the women were in the country illegally, the police said.

One of the groups, Breaking Free, based in St. Paul, aids victims of sex trafficking.

“It’s easy to grab onto something that you think might be your ticket to a better life, only to find out that it’s a lie,” said Vednita Carter, the founder of the group.

I’m glad that the women are not being treated as criminals. This should be a given, but its not. And yet, for some reason, authorities don’t seem to explain — and the reporters didn’t seem to ask — why the man was only being charged with “transporting women across state lines to engage in prostitution” and not also with imprisonment, kidnapping, robbery, physical abuse, rape and accessory to rape. So, my question is this: how does the public seem to so frequently fail to make the leap from sex trafficking and imprisonment as a bad, horrible thing to sex trafficking as repeated gang-rape? How do we manage to think “those poor women” and not “those fucking rapists?”

In the past, I have written angrily and on more than one occasion about how I in absolutely no way believe that the men who pay for sex at these brothels do not know that they are having sex with trafficked women who have no choice in the matter. I do think that they often fail to make the leap that this therefore makes them rapists and that they don’t care enough to consciously make the leap. But they know what they are doing. And sadly, this story only proves me right:

The authorities described the patrons as mostly white upper-middle class men between 35 and 55, including doctors and business owners. They usually paid $80 a session, which the prostitutes were obligated to hand over to Mr. Liu, the police said.

The women could negotiate with customers for more money, the police said, but their earnings were marginal at best; one illegal South Korean immigrant mentioned in the criminal complaint had to pay Mr. Liu $40 a day for room and board. He booked her airfare, later deducting it from her prostitution wages, the police said.

Anyone who believes, or expects me to believe, that it was not extremely clear that these women were not working for themselves, that they were making no profit and that they were being held captive is delusional. You think that these white, wealthy, educated men didn’t know any better? That they were just too naive to understand the concept of sexual slavery, or to be able to make an educated guess as to what it looks like? You think that any man who is suspicious of whether or not a sex worker is working consensually and yet decides to fuck her anyway is somehow not a rapist? Give me a fucking break.

No, I don’t think that it would necessarily be feasible to go out and try to arrest the Johns who raped these women. I somehow doubt that Liu was keeping records. But I also have to wonder at the public attitude towards these men, and at the public attitude that the actual person conducting the sex trafficking is the only criminal. It’s just not true, and I’m tired of letting the “patrons” off the hook both legally and morally.

And it leads me back to my original question. Liu was trafficking women, either telling them that they would work in the sex industry or not, bringing them to a brothel where they were not allowed to leave, threatened if they tried, and forced to have sex with men for money that they were not allowed to keep, whether they liked it or not. But again: he’s not being charged with kidnapping, imprisonment, robbery, rape, physical abuse, or accessory to rape. Only transporting women so that they could “engage in prostitution.” And this is somehow acceptable, viewed as justice.

What the hell do we as a society think that sex trafficking is?