Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective

I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.

—Frederick Douglass

AN EXPERIMENT

IN OCTOBER 2012, I placed an online advertisement on the website Backpage.com that read as follows: “Asian and European girls, young and ready to please you. Find exactly what you are looking for. Outcalls only. 310-XXX-XXXX.” The listed phone number was linked to an unlocked cell phone that could receive voice messages and texts. The purpose of the placement was to sample the kinds of responses and the rates of response the advertisement would receive. I placed the advertisement on three consecutive Friday afternoons (each advertisement lasted for one week at a cost of $12.00). Table 5.1 summarizes the responses I received.

TABLE 5.1 Responses to Backpage.com Experiment

	TEXTS	VOICE MESSAGES	TOTAL
Week 1	239	192	431
Week 2	206	190	396
Week 3	290	233	523

There were more than 700 similar advertisements on Backpage.com just for the Los Angeles area during the times I posted my false advertisement, and I predicted that I would receive a few dozens texts and calls at most. Needless to say, I was quite surprised when I received several hundred responses each week. More surprisingly, roughly 78 percent of the responses took place within twenty-four hours of my posting the advertisement. These two factors demonstrated to me that there was a high degree of online activity in pursuit of commercial sex in and around the city of Los Angeles. It also demonstrated the power of the Internet as a tool to facilitate commercial sex transactions. Although there is no way to know just how many of the online sex advertisements on Backpage.com relate to sex trafficking victims in particular, it is indisputable that traffickers and pimps exploit the Internet to solicit men to purchase commercial sex of all kinds, including from the victims of forced prostitution. Many of these victims are children. It is highly uncommon to find an online advertisement that specifically indicates that a child is being sold for sex, but key words such as “girl,” “young,” and “tiny” are strong indicators to online sex consumers that a minor could be for sale.

The content of the responses I received ranged from short texts or voice messages asking for callbacks to more detailed messages expressing a desire for young girls of a particular ethnicity to be available in a specific part of town at a specific time, without holding back details on exactly what the customer expected the girl to perform. These messages were overwhelmingly distasteful and unpleasant, at least to me. I called back a random selection of the consumers who responded to the advertisements. Most conversations were relatively businesslike; others were vulgar. Although I had seen and heard more than my share of male degradation of women and children, it was demoralizing to hear the ways in which these men spoke about females. A palpable disrespect for the female gender pervaded the language of many of these men. Words such as “whore,” “bitch,” and “slut” were thrown around as common, acceptable ways to refer to women. The expectations the males expressed signified clearly that they perceived the entire process in a transactional and calculating fashion. I even received warnings that the woman would not be paid should she refuse to perform as expected, or appear different (older, different proportions or ethnicity, etc.) from what had been purchased. Many of the males promised to be repeat customers if they were satisfied with the transaction. Some asked for a discount on the first purchase and said they would refer friends if they were pleased. Two of the men with whom I spoke asked me if I accepted bitcoin.1 I ended up making only half as many callbacks as I had intended because I simply could not stomach the conversations, and to be honest they were also quite repetitive.

When I designed this online experiment, I had intended to use a capture-recapture methodology to estimate the prevalence rate of males over the age of eighteen who were actively online looking to purchase commercial sex in the Los Angeles area. Unfortunately, I was not able to identify specific numbers to 54 percent of the texts and voice messages I received because either the caller ID was blocked or the messages were sent via Skype, which routes most calls through a handful of hub numbers in the region. In addition, the vast regional span of the responses I received made it difficult to calculate a reasonable estimate. In addition to the city of Los Angeles itself, I received responses from Long Beach, Orange County (Irvine, Newport Beach, Lake Forest), the Valley (Burbank, Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley), and even from as far away as Santa Barbara, Carlsbad, and Temecula. Nonetheless, the swiftness and sheer number of responses I received to a single advertisement (that did not even include photographs) persuaded me that even if I did not know the exact prevalence rate, the level of online “shopping” for commercial sex across southern California was far more than I had anticipated. I have no doubt that the same would be largely true in other major metropolitan areas across the United States and around the world.

THE INTERNET AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING

The Internet, social media, and mobile technologies have been used by traffickers to expand the sale of women for sex and forced prostitution and to expand recruitment for labor trafficking victims across the globe. Social media also plays a role in the organ trafficking sector. On the other side of the equation, these same technologies are being used by governments, NGOs, and technology companies to combat sex trafficking and labor trafficking, to prevent labor exploitation in global supply chains, and to prevent human trafficking in disaster and war-torn areas. Limited research has been done on the dual role of technology as both facilitator and prevention/intervention tool of the contemporary human trafficking phenomenon. I have focused my research on understanding the new and developing trends in technology application on both sides of the human trafficking process. Perhaps the most important insight that has emerged from my research is that technology is used by both traffickers and antitraffickers to manipulate one of the most important features relating to slavery—isolation. Human traffickers attempt to isolate their victims, which promotes their exploitation, by confiscating any connectivity tools they may posses, such as mobile phones or email access, and by preventing access to the Internet, landline phones, social networks, or assistance of any kind. This is true whether one is referring to landowners in South Asia who actively isolate debt bondage slaves to advance their exploitation or labor recruiters who confiscate migrants’ connectivity tools to coerce them into forced labor at a construction site. Meanwhile, antitrafficking actors are trying to use these same connectivity tools to prevent human trafficking and provide vital connections to migrants, to rural and other vulnerable populations, and to shorten the duration of exploitation of a human trafficking victim.

This chapter explores the dual roles technology plays as both facilitator and preventer/intervener (friend and foe) in cases of sex trafficking and labor trafficking. Much more research needs to be done to maximize the utility of technology and social media tools as forces of empowerment, connection, and intervention against the crime of human trafficking. I hope some of the findings in this chapter will motivate these efforts.

Sex Trafficking

The primary appeal of the Internet for sex traffickers and sex consumers is anonymity. Selling and buying commercial sex can occur in a virtual fashion right up to the point of the physical transaction. If the purchase is of online photos or videos (recorded or streaming), the entire process remains anonymous. For the victim, anonymity comes hand in hand with isolation. Rather than soliciting on the street or in a brothel with physical visibility, the victim can be sold for sex in a virtual manner to consumers anywhere in the world. This isolation assists traffickers and pimps in maintaining control of victims and limiting their opportunities for escape.

My investigations into the intersection of technology and sex trafficking revealed three points of interest: (1) the use by traffickers of online advertisements of victims to solicit purchases of sex, (2) the use by traffickers of social networking sites to recruit victims, and (3) the use by law enforcement of online advertisements to initiate investigations, primarily for those who appear to be underage.

Online Advertisements

Online sex advertisements have exploded with the spread of the Internet. Countless websites around the world sell all forms of sexual content. Innumerable “John’s Chat Rooms” provide feedback to male consumers of commercial sex on where and how women and children can be purchased safely. Men on these sites also provide reviews of sex clubs, brothels, and even individual women. The most abhorrent chat rooms are dedicated to pedophiles who give tips on how and where to have sex with children safely, or how to purchase child pornographic images without being traced. Men on these sites even provide reviews of children they have purchased. I assessed forty sites that sell sex on six continents and John’s Chat Rooms in the United States. All of these websites and especially the chat rooms are unpleasant, offensive, and inspire a sense of despair for the state of humanity. Imagine, if you will, a dozen or so men bantering back and forth on a Saturday morning about the children they purchased the previous night—what they looked like, how they smelled, how they behaved, how they shared their “love” (such a corruption of the word defies comprehension) with them, and so on. It is difficult not to want to gather these miscreants in an actual room and let loose the dogs of hell. The content of chat rooms that referred to adult females was not much better. They tended to consist of higher levels of outright vulgarity and misogyny. There was no talk of “love” or any other perverted concepts of affection. Crude language and boorish statements about women passed as comedy. Men bragged, touted their rates of purchase, and extolled the virtues of buying sex from certain ethnicities or from specific women. Some men seemed to be in the chat rooms with the purpose of drumming up business for a particular establishment by describing in detail how the women will pleasure the men who buy them. Some men talked about women who were so “doped” that they could do almost anything they wanted to them. Others talked about women who cried or even resisted at the outset, which only seemed to arouse the men further. I wish I could post the statements of these men on highway billboards next to their faces, names, and addresses and let justice run its course.

It is incontrovertible that the Internet is used extensively to sell sex, photos, and videos of women and girls around the world; that it facilitates financial transactions between traffickers and consumers; that it provides anonymity for all parties; that it helps isolate victims of sex trafficking; and that it provides forums for consumers to communicate in a completely uncensored manner to promote the system of male sexual consumption of women and children.2 Perhaps the most compelling facet of my research into the use of the Internet to facilitate the purchase of commercial sex has been the discovery of how opportunistic this facilitation can be. The Internet appears to be the first port of call for consumers in search of commercial sex during major sporting events, such as the World Cup, the Super Bowl, the Olympics, or the Commonwealth Games. These sporting events naturally bring large numbers of males from around the world into a concentrated area for a short period of time. Aside from sports, food, and beverages, sex is the primary service many of these men are after.

My first exposure to the impact a major sporting event can have on sex trafficking was with the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi. In Bonded Labor I described how local brothels on GB Road and in other areas of New Delhi were receiving upgrades, new AC units, and other embellishments in anticipation of the arrival of thousands of male tourists.3 The women and children inside the brothels were receiving bovine steroid injections to fatten them up to better cater to Western tastes. Colleagues at local antitrafficking NGOs reported that they noticed a substantial increase in websites selling sex in New Delhi during the time of the Commonwealth Games, and scores of Indian men with small sex cards and flyers roamed outside the stadiums and tourist areas soliciting male customers.

Researchers have begun to focus on the extent to which major national and international sporting events increase sex trafficking and online advertising for commercial sex. Dr. Mark Latonero, at the University of Southern California, looked into these issues at Super Bowl XLV in Dallas in 2011. Prior to the February 6 event, then Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott described the Super Bowl as “one of the biggest human trafficking events in the United States.”⁴ Latonero’s team selected the adult section of the Backpage.com site for Dallas and collected data on more than 5,500 sex ads to measure the frequency of unique posts for one week leading up to the Super Bowl. Their analysis revealed a sharp spike in the number of unique posts each day on February 4 and 5, leading up to the Super Bowl, including more than 300 posts specifically for escort services on Super Bowl Sunday.⁵ Less than 100 such posts were seen one week earlier. The researchers analyzed data on the ages of the women and girls being advertised, and more than half the posts that included ages advertised girls between the ages of 18 and 21, with a spike toward younger ages during the Super Bowl.⁶ No advertisement specifically offered minors for sale, but many included key words such as “girl” or “very young” or “tiny,” or specified an age of eighteen years, which is usually a strong indicator that minors are being sold.

Using the Internet to sell commercial sex, either tied to sporting events or in general, has not been without debate. Indeed, many argue that doing so is a perfectly acceptable mode of conducting business and a protected form of free speech. In the early 2000s, the two primary sites in the United States that provided space for online advertisements for commercial sex were Craigslist.org and Backpage.com. In 2007, Craigslist was the first major website to receive significant criticism for facilitating prostitution via its “adult services” section in cities around the world. In an effort to pacify these concerns, Craigslist began charging a $5 credit card fee for adult advertisements and required a phone number to verify the identify of the individual posting the ad. These requirements were meant to assist police in tracking advertisements that might involve the actual sale of sex where such sales were against the law (as opposed to clubs, massage parlors, etc.).

In March 2009, Illinois Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart filed a suit against Craigslist, stating that “missing children, runaways, abused women, and women trafficked in from foreign countries are routinely forced to have sex with strangers because they’re being pimped on Craigslist.”7 Attorneys for Craigslist used what has now become a powerful defense in the United States, arguing that section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects the company from liability because it specifically states that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and websites are not liable for content posted by third parties. To assign liability to the ISP would open floodgates of litigation that would cripple the Internet. For example, would YouTube be liable for content posted by one of its users (say, a clip from a feature film) that violates the copyright of the production company that owns the film? The court agreed and the case was dismissed. A firestorm of public pressure ensued, and in what became a triumph of social outrage, Craigslist closed the adult services section of its website in all U.S. cities in September 2010, followed by closure in all cities worldwide in December 2010.

This closure left Backpage.com and Eros.com as the primary websites for online sex advertisements. Unlike Craigslist, Backpage has remained resolute in its right to allow users to post ads for sex services. Backpage charges between $5 and $15 to post these ads and makes approximately $150 million per year from adult advertisements. Backpage further allows the use of bitcoin to make payments, which protects the identity of pimps and traffickers who make the postings. Backpage maintains its rights to facilitate these postings under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. A case in the state of Massachusetts filed in 2014 put this defense to the test. Doe v. Backpage.com was filed on behalf of two minors who alleged that they were sold for sex through the website more than 1,900 times from the ages of fifteen to seventeen. In May 2015, the court held that Backpage is protected by the Communications Decency Act and could not be held liable for third-party postings. Cases filed around the same time in the states of Washington and Illinois met with the same result. On October 7, 2016, California authorities arrested Backpage CEO, Carl Ferrer, on felony pimping charges. In her suit against Ferrer, Kamala Harris, then Attorney General of California, described Backpage as an “online brothel.” Once again citing protection under the Communications Decency Act, the judge dismissed the suit against Ferrer on November 16, 2016. Although the legal scholar in me appreciates the slippery slope argument of assigning liability to ISPs and the need to protect First Amendment rights, the human rights activist in me feels that tools that allow traffickers to exploit women and children in forced prostitution represent a particularly onerous and detestable kind of harm that society must protect against with as much rigor, if not more, than free speech freedoms.

Despite setbacks, activists and lawyers have continued applying pressure on Backpage. Ferrer and other Backpage founders were subpoenaed to testify in front of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security in early 2017. The day before the hearing, Backpage pulled down its adult section, citing an unlawful censorship campaign by the U.S. government. Most commercial sex advertisements on Backpage have since migrated to other sections of the website, such as dating and massage, and some activists have decried the campaign against Backpage, arguing that the online adult section actually helps law enforcement combat sex trafficking. As of May 2017 there is legislation pending in the U.S. Congress that would carve out online sex advertisements as being no longer protected by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, potentially opening the door for more successful outcomes in litigation against Backpage and similar websites.

Social Media

Social media tools also have become powerful facilitators used by sex traffickers to recruit new victims and to solicit customers to purchase women and children for sex.8 The traffickers hide in plain sight among the tens of millions of users on these websites, scouring the world from the comfort of their homes for new victims and customers. Melanie, a sex trafficking survivor I met in Seattle, explained how she was recruited on Facebook:

This guy Matt friended me. He had the coolest page. It said he was an agent for magazine shoots. We chatted for a while before I met him. He made me feel special, but he never came out and said he wanted me to be a model. He was just a cool guy, and I didn’t know many cool guys. My foster parents had two kids of their own and two other foster kids. I didn’t really fit in. I didn’t like school either. I hardly went, you know. I met Matt, and he said he could make me a lot of money. He made it sound like it was so easy, like all you have to do is be lucky enough for someone like him to spot you. He said that’s the only difference between the girls in magazines and me. I thought I would be rich and have this awesome life. I felt like I could be free of all the shit in my life. I was so wrong. Matt raped me. He and some guys locked me in a room and pimped me out. They made a ton of money off me. I didn’t make a … dime. For a while they had a camera in there. People would watch—creeps. After a while, I just went with it. I got more liquor and pot that way. What else was I going to do?

Melanie was one of eighty-three sex trafficking victims I documented around the world who told me they were recruited through social media on Facebook or on numerous online dating websites. Matt’s page on Facebook was long gone by the time I met Melanie. It is exceedingly challenging to intervene in this mode of recruitment because all of the initial contact takes place virtually, and the pages are often taken down after the trafficker has recruited a handful of victims. The traffickers then typically set up new pages, under new names, and search for more young girls who are vulnerable, isolated, in abusive families, or otherwise desperate to receive the kind of false attention and affection the traffickers give them. Most of the recruitment tactics are romantic in tone, and they work well. Europe, in particular, has seen a rapid growth in online recruitment of sex trafficking victims, especially from poorer eastern European nations.9 A young girl named Katya from Moldova described to me how she was recruited through a local dating website (Friendscout24.it) based in Italy:

My family is poor, but not as poor as most people in my country. The situation for life in Moldova is not good. I wanted to go abroad. Most girls in Chisinau go to dating sites to find men in Italy or Germany or Dubai to fall in love with … or we look for jobs, but who wants to work if you can marry a rich man? I was chatting with men on Friendscout, and this one man from Italy named Antonio said he was a lawyer and he sent me photos of his home and his BMW. He said since he was a lawyer he could arrange my travel documents. He asked for my address and sent me gifts. He sent me jewelry and a dress. We talked on the phone, and he seemed like a nice man. I was so excited, but I tried not to be too trusting. When I felt safe, I agreed to meet him to see if we could be together. I was so nervous when I arrived in Milan that he will not look like the photos he sent, but he looked exactly like that. I remember seeing him and feeling so happy. That night my dreams were killed. Antonio took me to a club and left me there. They took my mobile phone. The men raped me and gave me drugs. They forced me to take clients for almost one year before the police arrested me. I explained what happened, and the police referred me to this shelter. They said they will investigate Antonio. I tried to find his profile, but it was gone. I called his number, but it did not work. I know he will trick other girls, and that makes me angry. Now I know better than to have dreams. Soon I will be back in Chisinau. I will be grateful if I can find a job and take care of myself. I don’t want any man to take care of me.

Stories like Katya’s have become increasingly common with the explosion of online dating sites and social media. She was hardly reckless and communicated directly with her supposed suitor for months before agreeing to meet him. However, traffickers are willing to invest a good deal of time to recruit girls through online avenues because—aside from a few gifts and a plane ticket—there is very little expense and risk to them. Raising awareness of these kinds of ruses may have some preventative impact, but it is challenging to thwart human trafficking cases of this manner. There are simply too many young people living in poorer countries with limited opportunities for employment and a burning desire for a better life who are susceptible to false overtures. In regions such as Europe where travel within the EU is open to all citizens, traffickers can recruit from poorer EU countries into richer ones with ease.

Katya’s story also is noteworthy in that in many ways it was simply a higher-tech version of stories I had documented several years earlier in Nepal. In Sex Trafficking,10 I describe how false marriage offers are a common recruitment tool for traffickers across South Asia. Vulnerable, disempowered women and girls in rural Nepal are particularly susceptible to marriage offers from wealthy Indians. There were few if any online dating sites when I documented these cases, so handwritten letters and cell phone calls were the primary tools used to seduce the victims. Since that time, online dating sites in South Asia have spread rapidly. During research in 2010 and 2012, I documented eighteen cases of sex trafficking in South Asia in which online dating sites were used. One victim from Pune, named Dipali, was a teenager who finished secondary school but had not yet started university when she fell for the overtures of Karthik on the website Fropper.com. They went on one date together; on the second date, Karthik raped Dipali and locked her inside an apartment where she was sold for sex for three weeks before she managed to escape. Her captors showed her a mobile-based advertisement they posted of her to recruit customers using photos they took when they drugged her. The customers were mostly middle-class Indian men and university students.

Millions of South Asians in rural areas continue to lack Internet access, so traffickers still write letters and have phone conversations with their intended victims. Awareness campaigns run by NGOs have been somewhat effective at preventing young women from accepting these offers, but the ruses continue with success across much of Asia and the rest of the world, including lower-tech versions of what happened to Katya. The technology tools used by Antonio to seduce Katya are more advanced than letters and phone calls, but they also leave potential digital footprints that can be used by law enforcement to track down the traffickers.

Using Technology to Fight Back

The same technologies used to facilitate all aspects of the business of sex trafficking—from recruitment of victims to solicitation of customers to processing transactions—are being used to combat the business of sex trafficking. While efforts at technology-based interventions have developed more slowly than their criminal counterparts, innovative tools are being crafted that will have a significant impact on combating sex trafficking around the world.

Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding, and Tagging

Although still spotty in application and reliability, crowdsourcing and tagging have become more prevalent in the past few years as tools to combat various human rights abuses, including sex trafficking.11 Many technology companies and NGOs have developed crowdsourcing applications that enable users to submit text messages or other content related to potential cases of sex trafficking or human trafficking more broadly. For example, SMS (short message service) lines can be established that allow users to send short messages of potential instances of human trafficking to an NGO. The NGO can then vet the information and act on it if need be, share it with law enforcement, or both. Verifying crowdsourced content and having the capacity to sift through submissions remain challenges that NGOs and application designers are working through, but significant progress has been made in this area. Every year more human trafficking victims are being rescued as a result of crowdsourcing technology.

A related concept to crowdsourcing is crowdfunding. Crowdfunding platforms allow people from around the world to contribute financially to a single project or cause, including efforts to fight human trafficking. Two of the top crowdfunding websites focused on raising resources for projects that fight human trafficking are Endcrowd.org and 6degree.org. On these sites, individuals can make financial contributions to projects that help prevent human trafficking, liberate slaves, or support aftercare services that protect and empower survivors. Some simple initiatives that have had an impact through funding on these websites include the purchase of a van to take children to school in Cambodia so they are not vulnerable to abduction while walking to and from the classroom each day, a jewelry making business in India that helps provide income for sex trafficking survivors, and funds that help trafficked women and children safely return to their home countries. The potential for crowdsourcing and crowdfunding as tools that help in the fight against human trafficking is still nascent, with ample space for new contributions from innovative thinkers and entrepreneurs.

A third technology tool, called tagging, is being used to combat human trafficking by identifying potential cases that require intervention. Users can tag content on websites such as social media sites, online classified sites, online job recruitment sites, or any other similar site that appears suspicious or potentially fraudulent, thereby triggering an investigation by NGOs or local law enforcement. This is the most direct tool to combat the tactics used to recruit sex trafficking victims like Katya and Dipali. The efficiency of the tagging tools varies, and millions of pages need to be assessed, but tagging holds significant potential for anyone with a basic knowledge of key indicators of human trafficking and a mobile phone, tablet, or laptop to contribute as a “Citizen Abolitionist” who can help expand the reach of NGOs and law enforcement by proactively searching for potential trafficking recruitment pages or profiles, simply by scouring certain websites and being on the lookout for indicators of suspicious content. For example, Backpage classifieds that promise “tiny” or “very young” girls are often in the business of selling minors for sex. Online recruitment sites that promise they can help migrants find no-fee or wage-deduction work opportunities abroad could be indicators of labor traffickers trying to recruit new victims. Online dating profiles that actively engage with girls from foreign countries and are trying to entice them to migrate could be a sign of potential sex trafficking. It can be painstaking work, but key words and certain kinds of behavior or key indicators can be tagged for follow-up by experts, potentially leading to the prevention of, or intervention in, human trafficking cases.

“One-Box,” Facial Recognition, and the “Deep Web”

Google has been doing innovative work in preventing sex trafficking and child sexual exploitation through the development of an algorithm that provides a “one-box” result of the human trafficking hotlines in several countries based on certain searches, such as “Is my boyfriend a pimp?” or “Am I being controlled by someone?” If an individual initiates a search with phrases such as these, a one-box result is triggered by Google’s algorithm that provides human trafficking hotlines for the relevant region based on the IP address of the device being used to conduct the search. The searches that trigger the one-box result of the human trafficking hotlines vary from country to country, and a great deal of engineering went into determining what kinds of searches in which geographies should trigger the result. Google is the first to concede that many victims of human trafficking are not in a position to conduct an online search or even have access to the Internet, however, it is an important tool that could lead to assistance in many cases of human trafficking. As Chris Busselle at Google.org (the philanthropic division of Google.com) told me, “We are putting this information on some of the most valuable real estate on the web,” which is a clear indication of how serious the matter is to the company.

Google also has been active in the area of child protection and helping to thwart child sexual exploitation, primarily through a dedicated team of engineers who work to rid the Internet of sexually explicit imagery of children. Much of this work is automated, although some of it is done manually. In some countries, Google places a warning on search results relating to child pornography, such as “You could be prosecuted for viewing this content” or “Do you need help?” It is unlikely that an individual searching for images of child pornography is going to recognize that he needs help, but the pop-up warnings may make the individual think twice about continuing to search for offensive or exploitative images of innocent children.

Facial recognition is another powerful tool being used to help combat sex trafficking and child sexual exploitation. Microsoft has developed a facial recognition technology, called Photo DNA, that serves this purpose. This image-matching technology developed in collaboration with Dartmouth College creates a unique signature for a digital image that can be compared with the signatures of other images to find copies. The technology was donated to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in December 2009 to help the organization find, report, and eliminate some of the worst known images of online child pornography. To date, the technology has assisted with the identification of thousands of offensive images of child sexual exploitation and pornography on the Internet. Law enforcement has also been using Photo DNA to assist with investigations and to limit the emotional damage relating to personal exposure of officers’ having to view thousands of images of child pornography to find matches manually. The technology also helps law enforcement identify and rescue victims more efficiently and prosecute those who posted the images because their digital trails can be traced. The technology has been particularly useful in assisting law enforcement coordination across jurisdictions; it can match images of a child who might appear in postings in different cities across time, even when those images may have been altered. Once a match is made, law enforcement can work with counterparts in other jurisdictions to rescue an exploited child much sooner than might otherwise be possible.

One of the most intriguing new tools being used to combat human trafficking is software called Memex, created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Memex provides advanced Internet search capabilities into the “deep web” and has assisted with several human trafficking investigations in the United States. The deep web is the roughly 90 percent of information on the Internet not indexed by traditional search engines such as Yahoo and Google. The deep web is often filled with temporary pages (such as advertisements for illicit activity relating to drug trafficking, weapons dealing, money laundering, and human trafficking), which are typically removed before major search engines are able to crawl them. The Memex tool can scour the deep web for temporary advertisements used to lure trafficking victims or to sell them for sex and can analyze the data and identify relationships between seemingly unrelated information, thereby creating spatial and temporal patterns that can be used by investigators to track down victims, trace traffickers, and gather evidence for prosecutions. The tool has been so useful that the New York District Attorney’s office uses Memex in all its human trafficking prosecutions.

These are just a few examples of the kinds of technology tools being developed and refined by major technology companies and being utilized by law enforcement, prosecutors, NGOs, and everyday citizens to intervene more quickly and efficiently to stop the forced sexual exploitation of women and children and the exploitation of online sexual images of women and children. I am optimistic that the pace of development in antitrafficking technology will continue to accelerate, and that more effective tools will be available each year to combat these offenses. In particular, the sophistication and accessibility of technologies that automate the process of searching for vulnerable individuals through facial recognition and trace patterns of movement or provide digital trails for the prosecution of traffickers and male consumers of commercial sex (especially of children) hold great promise. Traffickers and commercial sex consumers will continue to search for ways to use technology to evade detection, creating a sort of technology “arms war” in the human trafficking space. With sufficient funding and dedication, I fully expect that those on the side of decency will prevail.

LABOR TRAFFICKING

Most of the uses of technology and social media in either promoting or combating labor trafficking are similar to those used with sex trafficking, but a few nuances merit exploration. New developments have provided technology tools in the labor trafficking space that enable connections for victims and at-risk individuals prior to their migration for a work opportunity and upon arrival at the employer’s location or the destination country.12 Isolation is the most powerful force facilitating labor trafficking among migrants, and tools that enable access to fellow migrants, local NGOs, law enforcement, and other resources or avenues of assistance can be vital in preventing labor trafficking or assisting with victim escape. These tools notwithstanding, technology and social media platforms are a popular gateway for recruiting new labor trafficking victims.

Recruitment of Labor Trafficking Victims

The Internet and social media are used extensively to recruit labor trafficking victims. Although social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are often used to recruit victims, online job recruitment sites that advertise opportunities to work abroad are the primary websites used for this purpose. The number and variety of online job recruitment sites that promise to arrange opportunities for work in developed economies is astounding. Most of the sites focus on recruitment from South Asia, East Asia, and Latin America and offer employment in domestic work, construction, agriculture, shipping, fishing, entertainment, mining, and numerous other sectors that span the global economy.13 These websites recruit directly into the kinds of slavery cases discussed in chapters 3 (labor trafficking) and 6 (debt bondage). Scores of legitimate work-abroad sites operate in conjunction with licensed recruiters and government agencies to provide foreign employment opportunities for citizens from Nepal, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Mexico, India, and many other migrant worker sending nations. These legitimate labor channels are vital for citizens from these countries, and they provide wage-earning opportunities labor migrants cannot find in their home countries. The remittances sent by these workers to their families are crucial for their survival and can help families send children to school or secure medicines when in need. Traffickers feed on the desperation of the poor for sources of remittance income. Although there are millions of legitimate online job recruitment postings, there are also countless postings that are fraudulent. Sometimes entire foreign migrant job posting sites are fraudulent, but more often the fake postings are intermixed with legitimate ones on fully licensed and regulated websites, making it exceedingly difficult to discriminate legitimate offers from those bound for slavery. It is all but impossible for the companies operating these websites to verify each of the tens of thousands (or more) of job postings that may be listed on their service. One common solution for many of the sites is to include a small box on the home page that warns about the risks of human trafficking and provides a contact number (in the home country) that can provide assistance. Unfortunately, this information is unlikely to dissuade desperate individuals with no alternative other than to migrate for work, and the phone number or email listed does not help if the migrant cannot access a phone or computer in the destination country.

Dinesh, a labor trafficking victim from Nepal, tells a story that typifies the risks of technology as a tool used to recruit labor trafficking victims:

I am from Jajarkot District. Four years back an NGO brought two computers to our village and placed them in the nearby school for the children. They taught us how to use the computers to search for information. They gave us a list of the websites that we could use to search jobs. There were only so many opportunities on these sites, so we learned to search in other places also. I found one job for construction in Qatar. They promised to make the arrangements and said we will earn 2 lakh rupees [$2,000] per month. They had pictures of other Nepali men who said how happy they were in Qatar. There was one number I rang and I spoke to a recruiter in Kathmandu. His name is Arjun. He said the fee for the training and other arrangements is 5 lakh rupees [$5,000]. I paid these fees on loan because my family did not have so much money. It is not good what happened to me. I was in Qatar for more than one year doing construction for the football stadiums. The conditions were very bad. I saw seven people die from heat and two died from accidents. I wanted to leave after the first week, but they took my documents. I had no money. I had no place to go. One day the police came to the worksite and arrested us. They said we did not have permits. They deported us. To this day, I did not receive any wages. I called Arjun, but he said it was not his problem. He offered to help me find another job, but I told him he must think I am a fool to trust him. He told me I have to trust someone, otherwise I will never find a job again. He is correct. People from my country know these websites should not be trusted, but they go anyway. We cannot stay in Nepal.

The NGO that set up the computers in Dinesh’s village is a well-respected, long-standing organization that has done excellent work throughout rural Nepal. Dinesh’s story highlights the perilous nature of introducing connective technologies to impoverished areas. Even with warnings about false recruitment agencies and specific information on which online employment sites could be trusted, there is no way to prevent people from using the Internet to find opportunities for themselves. Furthermore, even with all the warnings about false job offers and excessive fees, people like Dinesh often have no option but to accept the offer and hope for the best because there is no alternate means of survival in their home countries.

I documented dozens of cases just like Dinesh’s in several countries that are major sources of migrant workers. The individuals migrated from South and East Asia and Central and Latin America to developed economies where they toiled in several migrant worker occupations, primarily construction, agriculture, domestic work, seafood, and mining. In all cases, the individuals were isolated from potential sources of assistance on arrival in the destination country, their documents were confiscated, mobile phones (if they had one) were confiscated, and they were monitored around the clock and prohibited access to communication tools through which they could potentially contact assistance. Even when presented with the opportunity to leave the worksite, almost all of the victims I documented opted to remain because they were in so much debt due to excessive up-front fees. They all persevered under the hope that they would eventually be paid enough to discharge their debts and begin to send remittances home. This was, after all, the point of their migration. If it were not achieved, they would be forced to return home to far worse circumstances than before—debt, rejection, and stigma. The power of coercion associated with exorbitant debts accrued by the migrant to secure a work opportunity abroad cannot be overstated. The workers cannot return until the debts (however farcical they become) are repaid and some meager amount of income is earned. Lack of local language skills is almost always a primary isolating factor for labor trafficking victims that perpetuates their exploitation.

Despite their potential for harm, social media, mobile technology, and the Internet play invaluable roles in preventing labor trafficking and providing access to information or resources that can prevent labor trafficking and assist with escape from forced labor. These tools are developing rapidly and hold much promise.

Prevention and Escape

The most effective use of technology tools and social media to prevent labor trafficking and assist with the liberation of victims is through applications that connect them to information, family members, local assistance, and social networks before, during, and after migration. Constant connectivity and obviating isolation is crucial. Having access to SMS texts or email can enable prospective migrants to liaise with people who may have migrated safely and found legitimate work opportunities. These same technologies can keep a person connected during travel as well as upon arrival should any issues arise. The provision of advanced contact information for the relevant government authorities, law enforcement teams, local NGOs, or other resources that can potentially intervene are also important aspects of prevention. Unfortunately, vulnerable and desperate migrants rarely contest instructions or create trouble with an employer who demands that they turn over their mobile phones for fear of losing the work opportunity or of being deported with a lifetime of debt they can never discharge. Even when workers manage to retain their mobile phones and wish to pursue assistance to deal with an exploitative work situation, they can run into technology hurdles for which they are unprepared. Pradeep from Sri Lanka explained:

I kept my mobile phone in a secret place when I arrived in Kuala Lumpur. Immediately they took my documents and locked me inside a barracks. I was lucky that I hid my phone, but how was I to know that the SIM card will not work? The phone was useless. They made us work all day in difficult conditions. I have never been so exhausted in my life. We had only one break for twenty minutes in the day from the work. I ran away during one break to try to get a local SIM card. It was too expensive. I pleaded with the shopkeeper to let me make a call from his phone, but he told me to leave his store. I returned to the worksite. What else could I do? The boss punished me. He beat me with a wooden board. I had bruises all over my body. They locked me in a small room and did not give me food for three days. I thought they would leave me in that room until I died, but on the third day they dragged me out and told me next time I make trouble my punishment will be worse.

Other labor trafficking victims I documented had similar stories: SIM cards that did not work in the destination country, not having money to purchase a local SIM card, and not having access to the Internet to send an email to ask for help.

Labor trafficking victims such as Pradeep, introduced below, demonstrate that many migrant workers know that communication technology can help them in exploitative situations, but these cases also demonstrate the importance of adequate predeparture training on how to use technology effectively. Even when a labor trafficking victim is able to access the Internet, the victim may not know how to find needed assistance. “Some migrants at the barracks told me about an Internet café not far from our worksite,” a construction migrant from Laos named Noi told me, “but I had never seen a computer before. I did not know how to use it.” Migrants need to understand the basics of SIM cards, have introductory computer training, and have enough local currency to meet emergency needs.

Despite pitfalls in the application of technology solutions, I documented several cases in which basic access to mobile communications or the Internet provided a crucial connection that prevented labor trafficking or offered an avenue for escape. One such case involved a man named Nok from Cambodia. He was being transported by truck to Thailand where he expected to work in the fishing industry. A friend who had previously migrated to Thailand for fishing work warned him that the recruiters will probably confiscate his mobile phone, so he should hide it at all times. The perils of the Thai fishing sector are well known to migrants in the Mekong subregion, and many have learned that a mobile phone can be the best means of securing assistance. Nok did as he was advised and hid his phone. During his journey from Cambodia to Thailand, his traffickers became increasingly hostile toward the migrants. Fearing the worst, Nok wanted to return home. When he arrived at Samut Sakhon in Thailand, he was told that he had been sold to a ship captain and would have to work off the debt of his transport at sea. Nok did not want to go further.

That night, I sent an SMS to my friend. He wrote to me, ‘Run from there!’ I had no place to go, and I do not speak Thai language. When the guards were not looking, I snuck out of the docks and ran down the street. I found an alley and I hid there. My friend sent me an SMS with information on the Cambodia Embassy in Bangkok. He told me it was a distance of 48 kilometers and which road to take. I walked all the way without stopping. I came to the Embassy and said I needed help. A very kind man wrote down the details, and they arranged for me to take a bus home. I am lucky I kept my phone, otherwise I do not know what would have happened to me.

Another example in which communication technology helped thwart labor trafficking came from an Indian migrant domestic worker I documented named Anju.

When I came to that home in Dubai, I knew I made a mistake. The owners took my documents and my phone. The recruiter said there would be five people in the home, but there were ten! I had to cook and clean for all of them. I could sleep only two or three hours a night on the floor in a very small room. They spoke to me rudely and the Ma’am had no problem slapping me. I was desperate to get out of that home, but I had no way to ring my family. There was always someone watching me. After three months, there was an accident and they went to the hospital. They left the three children and the grandmother in the home. When they fell asleep, I used their phone to ring my father. I told him what happened. He said I must ring the police. Before I left India, the agency told me that the emergency number in Dubai is 999. I rang that number and told the police what happened. They did not understand what I was saying because I could not speak Arabic. I said “Hindi! Hindi!” and eventually I spoke to someone who could speak my language. They sent police to the home. Everyone was shouting. The grandmother said I was stealing from them. They asked for my visa, but I said they took everything from me. The police arrested me. They sent me back to India. They said I would not be allowed in Dubai again.

Access to a telephone gave Anju a crucial connection that helped her escape forced labor. Ensuring access to phones or the Internet is much easier said than done in labor trafficking scenarios, but the more connectivity victims have and the less isolated they are, the more likely they are to avoid or minimize the duration of exploitation. Connectivity is similarly crucial in times of environmental catastrophe or military conflict. These calamities invariably result in the mass displacement of highly vulnerable people, and traffickers are often the first on the scene recruiting new victims. Finding ways of providing connections for displaced people or refugees can help prevent human trafficking or minimize the duration of exploitation. The challenges of ensuring communication access in these cases are significant, and further testing of solutions is sorely needed.

LOOKING FORWARD

Providing technologies and connectivity tools that can help prevent or end sex and labor trafficking violations is perhaps the least developed area of antitrafficking efforts. For labor trafficking, technology companies can collaborate with NGOs on technical assistance and support the development of tools that narrow the information asymmetries between employers and migrants that so often lead to forced labor outcomes. Tools can be developed to integrate migrant communities more cohesively and link them to information and assistance when needed. Formalized channels for regulated, legitimate online recruitment tools can be created and reinforced in migrant communities, and governments can work to attenuate isolation among migrant workers through laws that ensure access to communications, social networks, law enforcement, and other resources. Researchers should be measuring these efforts to identify what works best, from country to country, from region to region.

For sex trafficking, image recognition tools must be enhanced to assist law enforcement with rescues, investigations, and prosecutions. Efforts to rid the Internet of child pornography and shut down websites or social media pages used to recruit sex trafficking victims must receive additional resources and development. Litigation to shut down the sale of commercial sexual services on Backpage and similar websites should be pursued as vigorously as possible until a precedent is achieved that establishes that commercial sexual content is not protected by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 or similar laws in other countries. Free speech is fundamental to the fabric of the United States, but the freedom to sell sex online, which results in considerable risks of exploitation of slaves and minors, is a freedom that societies everywhere must agree should not be protected. Put another way, the freedom not to be a sex trafficking victim is a more important freedom to protect than the freedom to sell sex on the Internet.

Two additional areas of future development hold promise in efforts to use technology to combat human trafficking: (1) block chain technology and (2) technology that monitors global supply chains.

Block Chains and Human Trafficking

Block chain technology is one of the primary innovations of the digital currency bitcoin.14 The block chain is a public ledger of all bitcoin transactions that have ever been executed. Each “block” represents the current part of the block chain, which records each new transaction. Once the transaction is completed, it is added into the block chain permanently and linked in chronological order. The transaction can never be deleted or altered. The entirety of the block chain is available to all users on the bitcoin network at all times.

Applying block chain technology to human rights issues is a new frontier being pioneered by organizations such as BitFury, Bitnation, and the Humanitarian Blockchain. The primary benefit of the technology is the ability to create 100 percent unique, unalterable identities for people who otherwise lack formalized identification documents. The technology also can be used to track movements of people, which can assist both with their protection and with prosecution of human trafficking crimes.

Block chain technology could provide a digital birth certificate registry for the millions of children born each year without formal registration documents, which otherwise renders them invisible and particularly vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation. Online images of child pornography could be linked to the identities of specific children, which would assist in investigations and child liberation and protection. A mobile phone or a similar portable inexpensive tool is required to set up the initial digital identification, so NGOs and governments will need to assist in this process.

The same identification technology can be used for adults. For example, the Bitnation Refugee Emergency Response (BRER) organization provides emergency services and humanitarian aid to refugees by authenticating identities through a Blockchain Emergency ID (BE-ID). The BE-ID can be used by refugees who cannot otherwise obtain official identification documents or may have lost them when fleeing. The technology enables an individual to cryptographically prove his or her existence and family relations, which can be distributed on a public ledger anyone can access to verify the person’s identity. This technology could tag forged identity documents used by human traffickers to move individuals from one country to another, either as distress or labor migrants.

Finally, the Humanitarian Blockchain (HB) is dedicated to solving human rights problems using block chain technology. The project focuses on land registration, irregular migration, the inability of billions of people to access formal banking systems, and other identity-based human rights issues. Migration-related vulnerabilities, child protection, and human trafficking all can be addressed using solutions HB is developing.

The promise of block chain–based solutions to enhance protection by providing a verified and authentic identification system for the tens of millions of invisible people in the world has barely begun to scratch the surface. Entrepreneurs, human rights activists, and technology leaders are all exploring solutions to these and other pressing human rights issues. Future editions of this book will undoubtedly require a full chapter on new developments in human rights solutions provided by block chain technology.

Technology to Cleanse Global Supply Chains

Technology is being used more effectively each year to monitor labor abuses, slavery, and child labor in global supply chains. The global economic integration that began in the early 1990s led to several benefits, such as expanding international trade, foreign investment, and acceleration of the transfer of knowledge among countries. Globalization’s corresponding ills have resulted in deepening rural poverty, widening the chasm between rich and poor, increasing social instability, and eroding human freedoms.15 Fallen walls (real and virtual) and the free flow of goods and capital allow multinational corporations to scour the globe in search of cheap or underregulated labor markets to cut labor costs. From garment manufacturing in Bangladesh to cell phone manufacturing in China, these low-wage laborers at the bottom of global supply chains continue to be exploited in abusive conditions that in the worst cases amount to slavery. Lack of visibility of the bottom of the supply chain, especially two or three levels down the layered subcontracting chain inherent to many informal labor markets, has been a serious challenge for corporations genuinely interested in ensuring ethical and decent conditions for their workers wherever they may be located. Technology is beginning to address this problem.

LexisNexis has developed tools that allow companies to monitor their supply chains more directly and accurately. The Lexis Diligence tool provides an array of information on vendors, suppliers, and even individuals in a single report, including background checks, litigation history, negative news checks, and other risk factors that could be indicators of poor practices. The tool synthesizes data from more than twenty global databases, including public records and news and company filing information, to uncover risks in supply chains. Issues flagged by the Diligence check can receive a deeper investigation through the Lexis IntegrityCheck, which assesses the risks related to specific vendors or labor contractors being used or considered by the company. LexisNexis also produces a global Human Trafficking Index, which automatically searches thousands of news sources around the world and provides a real-time assessment of risks relating to human trafficking from one country to another.

Another application that holds great promise for monitoring and cleansing global supply chains is the Supply Unchained pilot project of GoodWeave and Target Corporation. Supply Unchained creates an online dashboard, coupled with strategic mobile data collection tools, to provide a monitoring and certification methodology that is scalable and can map, analyze, and share detailed supply chain data on a real-time basis. The cornerstones of the project focus on five areas: (1) random, unannounced inspections using customized mobile applications, (2) providing real-time data to companies and service providers based on these inspections, (3) identifying and addressing root causes of supply chain human rights issues, (4) assessing overall trends in violations, and (5) conducting anonymous mobile worker surveys to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the inspection and monitoring procedures. The net result provides corporations with reliable and direct visibility into their supply chains, which in turn facilitates more targeted and immediate responses to address the issues. I asked the president of GoodWeave, Nina Smith, to summarize the project’s potential:

The combination of the mobile data collection system and strategic analysis of supply chain intelligence that Supply Unchained will facilitate is unprecedented. The tool will enable GoodWeave to scale its system to ensure there is no child labor or forced labor anywhere in a supply chain, especially in outsourced production, and to partner more strategically with companies, suppliers, workers and governments to share relevant data to strengthen all of our efforts to protect workers.

In 2015, Humanity United joined with several U.S. government agencies to launch a contest called “Rethink Supply Chains: The Tech Challenge to Fight Labor Trafficking”; the specific goal was to promote new and innovative technology-based solutions to address human trafficking in global supply chains. The winners of the competition were Sustainability Incubator, an advisory firm that helps seafood companies solve human rights challenges, and Trace Register, a traceability software company. The two organizations have collaborated to help companies better understand and address the risks of labor trafficking through a Labor Safe Digital Certificate, which is a digital risk assessment tool that helps seafood suppliers and retailers better screen for risks of forced labor and address high-risk zones within their supply chains. The runner-up, Good World Solutions, has developed LaborLink, a mobile technology that combats isolation and improves visibility of trafficked workers by capturing and analyzing worker feedback through an SMS platform.

Numerous organizations are developing tools to address slavery and child labor in global supply chains, including Verité, the United Nations Global Compact, the International Labour Organisation, and many major consulting firms. The promise of technology-based tools to cleanse global supply chains of slavery and child labor is one of the true bright spots in contemporary antislavery efforts. I expect to see a plethora of groundbreaking solutions in the coming years, but activists must never lose sight of the fact that exploiters will seek to circumvent these new tools. Ongoing monitoring and assessment of these applications will be crucial to their effectiveness.

THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA

One of the most noteworthy changes in the antislavery field since the time of my first research trip in the year 2000 has been a significant increase in the level of media coverage of the issue. Major news outlets such as CNN, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and the Guardian have aired hundreds of stories on various aspects of slavery in all corners of the world. Some of these stories are sensational in tone, but by and large these and other news outlets have provided excellent coverage of the issue. In some cases, they have been first to break a story about a new phenomenon taking place in the context of modern slavery.

In addition to news media, dozens of feature films, documentaries, and television shows have explored the many facets of modern slavery. Some of this content is sensational or even misinformed, but for the most part film and television have played important roles in spreading awareness of slavery to the broader public. Most major procedural TV shows in the United States have had one episode on human trafficking, if not several. Some of the best films and documentaries about slavery and related issues include Not My Life, In This World, The Whistleblower, Dirty Pretty Things, The Selling of Innocents, The Day My God Died, Very Young Girls, I Am Jane Doe, The Price of Sex, Trade in Innocents, and, of course, the film I wrote based on Sex Trafficking, which is titled Trafficked.

The CNN Freedom Project is the most important and broad-based news media contribution to raising awareness of slavery in the world today. The Freedom Project began in 2011 as a dedicated initiative by the CNN network to raise awareness of slavery, highlight success stories, and amplify voices of victims and survivors. Through this initiative, CNN has produced hundreds of stories and dozens of documentaries on almost every aspect of slavery across the globe. The Freedom Project was initially meant to be a one-year campaign, but the network felt sufficiently passionate about the cause to continue it on an ongoing basis. The CNN Freedom Project has been the most impactful news network initiative to elevate awareness of slavery and is an exemplary demonstration of the power of responsible and dedicated journalism to effect positive change on human rights issues.

A FATEFUL MEETING

I began this chapter by describing an experiment I ran to assess levels of online activity in the Los Angeles area related to commercial sex. I mentioned that many of the callbacks I made to inquiries I received were quite unpleasant. Only three of these conversations lasted longer than four minutes. The longest, a near thirty-minute conversation, led to a meeting.

His name is Lou, and he is a lawyer. We had a pleasant conversation (inasmuch as conversations about the purchase of women for sex can be), and Lou eventually asked to meet with me to talk in more detail about the purchases he wanted to make. Lou said this was the first time he was thinking about purchasing sex, and he wanted to “feel it out” before proceeding. The first thought I had was that I was being set up by someone who perceived me to be a rival pimp. The second thought I had was that I was being set up by a police officer, which would have been fine with me. The third thought I had was that in either case I would ensure that we met in a public place and, if need be, I could explain who I was and the research I was doing. The final thought I had was that if Lou was who he said he was, then he was either very naïve about asking to meet in person with a potentially dangerous pimp (which defeated the entire purpose of searching for commercial sex online), or he was up to some other sort of game. Either way, a public place would protect us both, so we agreed to meet in the afternoon at a coffee shop in West Los Angeles.

We met two days later, and as it turned out, Lou was exactly who he said he was. He was an intellectual property attorney, in his early forties, recently divorced, father of a six-year-old son, and lonely. He worked long hours, which made it difficult for him to meet new people. I asked Lou why he wanted to meet me.