I'm Elizabeth Sackler and I would like to welcome you to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. It is a pleasure to have you here and it is a pleasure to continue our programming here in the center. We opened in 2007, in March of 2007, and in addition to being an exhibition space and clearly the home of the wonderful dinner party by Judy Chicago, we are also dedicated to not only feminist art past, present, and future, but to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions, to educate new generations about the meaning of feminist art, and to maintain a very dynamic and welcoming facility to present panel discussions and enjoy guests who come to lecture for us, such as Sonia Osorio today. And it is my pleasure to welcome Sonia Osorio and to introduce her to you. She is president of the National Organization for Women and she has titled her presentation today, A Global Epidemic Human Trafficking in Your Neighborhood, and Sonia just said to me, she's here, she's here to speak about that, and all kinds of other things that might come up for all of you, any questions you have for her in any direction she would like to take us in. I think it will be very exciting. Sonia was a former journalist. She has written extensively on women entrepreneurs and women in corporate America. Her work has appeared in USA Today, the Denver Post, the Journal News, and the San Jose Mercury News among others. Ms. Osorio has spoken widely on the subject of women in the workplace, including the keynote address of the 2000 Conference of the National Association for the Empowerment of Hispanic Women. Sonia Osorio was elected president of Now NYC, which is the charter chapter of the National Organization of Women in January 2005. As president of Now NYC, Ms. Osorio has led a campaign to repeal the statute of limitations on rape. And for this, we all must be extremely grateful. She waged and continues to wage a large public education and media campaign, where key components in fighting this victory for women. And she has crisscrossed the state meeting with legislators, local attorneys, and sexual assault service providers. She garnered support by talking about the devastating effects this outdated law has had on women, family, and society in general. In June of 2006, again led by Sonia, Now NYC launched its latest campaign, Ending the Business of Human Trafficking in New York City. Again raising awareness in communities of human trafficking throughout New York State. She advocated on behalf of victims by lobbying legislation, attracting traffickers and educating local businesses about their role in the illegal industry in helping to break the cycle of this severe problem. Of course, there is still much work to be done, but thanks to Sonia's commitment and tenacity, New York State legislature passed an anti-trafficking law in the 2007 legislative session for which I thank you. And I'm happy to introduce you. Please join me in welcoming Sonia Osario from Now NYC. Well, I'm so thrilled to be here. I want to thank all of you for coming here. It's a gorgeous Sunday afternoon. This is the subject we'll start with is not one that's light on the heart, but I want to be very open and frank with you about it when I talk to you about what I have seen and learned from victims and what I've seen in our communities, and it should be very eye-opening for you. And I know we have quite a bit of time, so I'm going to take my cues from you guys. Give me faces, give me hand signals if you have a question to ask at any point. And maybe what we'll do is I'll talk for a little while, we'll have some discussion and then we can go on to maybe another area in this, and we can also talk about whatever you'd like. I would love to, before I leave, to just get your thoughts about what you feel are the really critical issues facing women in our country, and particularly here in our city. Moving forward, and I know the economy is certainly a big issue, and it's something that I'd like, I'd love to learn from you as to what I can take back to my organization and the things that we might think about for the future. So in terms of trafficking, there are a few topics that we could talk about that I'd love to tell you a little bit about, basically, you know, trafficking today, what does it look like? A little bit of the bigger picture than a little bit about, you know, in our neighborhoods, it's an international problem that many of us think of it as an international problem, but what that means is you have to bring it back home, and that means it's happening in our community and in communities across the globe. I'd also like to talk to you a little bit about the community activism that we've been a part of, that you could take back to your neighborhoods if you like. The other thing that I think will be interesting to talk about is a little bit about the cultural, the climate that we live in, in terms of the culture that lends itself to allowing an industry like trafficking to flourish. And then I think that, you know, you can't talk about issues of trafficking and prostitution that is coerced and such without talking about demand, and it's something that we just don't talk enough about, because without the demand, we wouldn't have. The market is there because of it, so there's all interesting things in this area. So in terms of trafficking today, many of you probably know, one of the reasons you're probably attracted to come to hear more about this and learn more about it is that this is an issue. In terms of the United States, the first law was passed in the year 2000, a federal law called the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which was a first recognition that this was happening here in this country, and it gave the Department of Justice the tools to try and go after traffickers. Can you guys hear me? Hi. Okay. And the Department of Justice is not a pretty good job. I mean, they have really, some of the cases that they have cracked open are jaw dropping. There are still people today who feel that not enough is being done, and that's probably par for the course. It's really tough because trafficking doesn't resemble like the robbery on the street that's easy for all of us to recognize and see and understand who and how you're a victim. Trafficking is much more insidious. So I'll give you an example of some things, I'll just give you actually real life examples of some of the things here in New York City. What was the biggest case up until recently was a federal case that was in this trafficking ring that operated between Tenencingo, Mexico, and Queens. And they operated for at least 13 years. That's what they were tracked for. And it was a particularly brutal operation. And what they would do is they would go to the rural parts of Mexico and find women. They were uneducated, you know, unworldly, tell them that they had jobs for them here in the United States, which seems like a very innocent and obvious thing. And once they were in their grips, they basically seasoned them, a word that's used in the industry, by raping them and beating them. Often they'll use one person there, a beating, a killing, to put people in their place. And if you can just imagine yourself in that position for a minute, you would be very obedient because you'd want to save your own life. So they would bring the women to Queens and, you know, they were locked up and they were forced to work seven days a week. I mean, some of the actual brutality of the amount of work that they're subjected to, I use the word work loosely, is startling and hard to comprehend. It takes a while. It takes a while. It's hard to believe at first until, you know, story after story that you actually, you hear that, you know, the human body and mind can handle it. These women had forced abortions. It was 20, at that time, it's been two years now, and the three main players have gotten sentences of 50 years in prison and 25 years for two of them. So that was a great victory and that ring was broken up. Those women, it's harder to find out exactly what's happened to those women here. The way it's set up is that if you cooperate with authorities, if you're willing to testify against your trafficker, there are some things that can be done. You can get a certain visa that will give you some time to work here. You can get some benefits. But nobody, whether they're young American girls who are trafficked or foreign women who are trafficked here, what's available for them is there's not a lot. There is not a lot. And that's one of the things that we'd like to do in the future is to get some funds for that, which of course in this economic climate is very, very tough, but to maybe expand some of the current types of domestic violence shelters to be able to accommodate women who have been trafficked. So that's just one of the cases. There was another case just last year which involved as Korean women. I think predominantly into the New York City area, what you find mostly is South American and from there mostly Mexican, some Central American women that are trafficked, you see big operations from Korea in China. Not so much now from the former Soviet Union. That was maybe the period before more in the early 90s when there were such economic upheaval there. That's all you have to do is look around the world and see where there's real turmoil, and that's where the vulnerability is going to exist. And that is where these human trafficking entrepreneurs will go and find their supply. So the Korean women that was in flushing, there was a house that they had and they had a secret compartment that led to another house where the women slept and there were 69 women that they rescued. None of them spoke English at all. In the vault, what did they find, which is very common, they found their passports because that's one of the first things you do is you take somebody's passport. They found $800,000 in cash. It's a lot of money and that's a lot of low budget sex acts that had to be performed for that. If you want to break it down that way, that's what it is. And the supply of ecstasy drugs.  Of course, with the ecstasy, I mean, it's the best way to keep someone as well, somewhat obedient. I've read a very, very good book recently that I really recommend to all of you. It's not based on American trafficking, but it's based on trafficking in Cambodia, which is, you know, you just, it puts it into perspective. It is certainly terrible what's happening here. But in Cambodia, it's the public has no problem with it. The police, you know, from the low level to the high level, law enforcement are completely cooperative with traffickers and it's very young girls, four years old starting up who are, you know, forced into prostitution, sold into prostitution. And it's a way of life. But the book is called The Road of Lost Innocence. And it's by a woman named Somali Man, M-A-M. And she's an amazing woman, incredibly inspirational. She was sold into prostitution when she was 16.  And then she started to, you know, she started her life by going around and distributing condoms, by going into the brothels and just saying, oh, I work as a nurse at the hospital.  I'll take her, we'll fix her up, we'll bring her back. And she has an amazing shelter and she's raised, you know, just international awareness of the situation in Cambodia. So it's a really, really good book. And it's worth reading.  So I recommend it highly. Somali Man, S-O-M-A-L-Y. And her last name is M-A-M. So the Korean women were rescued. Many of them were sent back to their countries. And those traffickers are in the process of being prosecuted. And it's, you know, there's all the players in it are from the person who's the recruiter.  So these drivers, these transporters play a big part and they're prosecuting them as well. There was another case of a woman that I spent a great deal of time with who she actually helped us with our campaign last year to pass the first trafficking law here in New York City, in New York State. And she is from Venezuela and she, again, was told by, you know, the cousin of a friend, you know, that there were great jobs here. Someone met her at the airport and the first night she was here, she was in a brothel and had 19 customers, really difficult to understand. And that's what's, that's what is the landscape here in the cities that we live in. It's not just Manhattan, it's not just Queens, it's not just Brooklyn. It's Westchester as well and Rockland County, it's the suburbs. And the rate at the time when she started, when the Mexican women, that case rounded up, it was $25 per sex act for 15 minutes, with a timer by your side.  And now it's up to 35. That's the going rate for the 15 minutes. So she has been able to stay and she has two daughters here and she has a job and she is really one of the lucky ones and she was able to get a lot of support from Sanctuary for Families, which is a domestic violence shelter and legal services for battered women that has been able to cobble together some additional funds to direct to victims of trafficking. So we're hoping in the future that they'll be able to do more of that. And then there was another case that just in December was indicted and this ring dealt as well in Korean and Chinese women and they had a network of brothels. So they would take the women on a circuit, it was like a tour. So they bring them into JFK, they do some different brothels here and there. Then they would be on to, it was the network operated from Washington DC to Rhode Island. So they're on the road all the time. So you can imagine for the women, they never acclimated to any area, they never got used to a neighborhood and how they might escape or get to know anybody. They were constantly on the road. And so that was a very big and significant trafficking ring that was uncovered. But it takes a lot of money and a lot of time to do this because as I started out it doesn't resemble the robbery on the street that we all can recognize. It means that we need our prosecutors and our law enforcement to be able to do wiretaps, to have the resources to go undercover, to, you know, all the things that they do in regular types of investigations that builds a case. You do that a lot with organized crime. So while our federal government started this in 2000 with the passing of this law and there's been a lot of great things that have come from it and they're learning every day what better ways to prosecute these cases. And learning that more sensitivity needs to be, needs to be there for the victims and how to help them. I mean, there is some criticisms like you have to take part in a prosecution to get any help.  These people have kept you hostage, have maybe killed the girl next to you. They just want to get away. They don't want to be part of it. So that, there's some work there still to be done. And the law that we passed here for New York State in 2007 was similar in the sense that it created the crime of trafficking. There really was nothing on the books before that. There's rape and there's kidnapping and there's promoting prostitution, which is a very, very minor offense.  There was no law, there was no crime of human trafficking. And to prove rape and to prove kidnapping in that moment is often difficult. And sometimes it doesn't rise to that occasion. Let me tell you about this one young Russian woman who answered an ad in her newspaper for an employment agency. Great, she was coming to the U.S. to get a job. She flew first to Chicago. Someone met her there. This is how the rings work. And then they put her on a bus here to Brooklyn.  And they told her she's, you know, sleeping on somebody's couch. And they said, well, oh, that job for the nanny is gone. Well, the job for the waiters you need papers for. So it's this thing, she's in a foreign country. She doesn't know anybody. You know, each day she's a little bit more backed into the corner. So they tell her, well, you can work in a massage parlor. She says, well, I don't even know how to do massage. You'll learn it. It's not a big deal. So you know where this story goes. Before you know what she is, she's having to work in prostitution in a massage parlor. The only reason that she was discovered is because when she got the opportunity to take enough pills, she swallowed them all. And she ended up in Coney Island Hospital. And her situation is, I mean, you wouldn't be able to prove rape or you could prove some fraud, which is one of the things in the New York State law that we got passed, which was very, very difficult to do. Like I say, just wanted the force and the coercion. You know, so for her, you know, she ended up in this hospital. And that's the other area that we have to. It's not just law enforcement on the ground that needs to be able to recognize what trafficking looks like. But it's also the health care workers. Because most victims are not going to run to the police first.  That's not where you turn to for help. And in many cases, you know, the police work with the organized crime syndicates. There wasn't, you know, you open the New York Times not that long ago to see a picture of a young officer. And he was being indicted because what he was doing with two brothels in fleshings is he was protecting one, getting kickbacks from one by arresting and raiding the other brothel to increase the other one's business. And this is where trafficked women were being held.  I mean, but this is our, it's not even that different from some of these stories that you hear from other countries. And somehow you kind of start out thinking, well, no, not in the great city of New York City, not in the United States. But, you know, in this market, you know, when the lights go down at night, it doesn't look any different. It's not any less vicious, brutal, chaotic, corrupt. So that's just some of the reality. And some of the things that, you want me to stop right now, see if you have any questions about this part. I mean, what I'm just trying to go over initially is the United States in terms of legally what's happening with trafficking, we passed the 2007 law, which I can tell you more about if you like. Some of the impediments to, you know, facilitating that law, some of the cases that we've seen. You had a question in the back? You know, it doesn't exist because it's just not something that we really follow. I mean, it's all very new. Even though it was 2000 when this law was passed, it took a couple, you know, nationally. It took a couple years to get things going. It's all relatively new. The estimations from the State Department to other agencies can vary. Some are that there are at least 17,000 trafficking victims in the United States at any given time. You know, it's impossible to come up with a number locally because we just don't investigate it enough. It's, we very much operate, we have a culture of prostitution. So it's not, you know, brothels operate here and they're everywhere, and it's not something that we're that concerned with. Yep. And that's very important. It's a lot of what we do, you know, at now. My job is to kind of to... Sheldon Silver, for example. Well, you know, it's interesting. Sheldon Silver. Yeah, it's very interesting. Sheldon Silver, although he gives you a hard time the whole way through, I mean, the two laws that we have passed did not happen without, you know, without him greenlighting it and him getting behind it. And that was the repeal of the statute of limitations on rape as well as the trafficking law in 2007. So at the end of the day, I have to say that he's been very good on making sure that these issues do come to the forefront. It's a little alarming the degree of power that one person can have, these, you know, respective leaders of the houses, because it's not such a democracy when you start to... When you're in the thick of it and you see how, you know, you can have, you know, both houses overwhelmingly pass a measure and you can have a few people in a room decide that it never gets to the floor or that it just dies on the floor or that, you know, in the 2008 legislative session, we worked on another law called the Safe Harbor Act. And with that, it passed at the very last minute. But even though there was overwhelming support in both houses and they came to agreement on it, you know, which is what they do. They come into session and they iron out the fine points of each version of the bill to come together with one bill. It could have, they could have just decided to never send it to the governor's office for signing and it would have died. So it's very, very interesting how all this process works. Frank Padavan, who is here in, he's in Queens, is actually a sponsor of the trafficking legislation from O7. He's a Republican. Actually, I don't even, we just had, well, he's having an election in November. I don't remember who his competitor is. Jeffrey Klein in the Bronx has been really fabulous. He worked very, very hard on the statute of limitations on rape. And I think one of the things that you can do to evaluate your representatives. It's very easy.  I've cosponsored that. It's all you have to do to cosponsor something is put your name. You just, two second call. Oh yeah, sign me up for that. There's a world of difference between that and being listed on 100 different pieces of legislation and being the originator of something which is a ton of work. Meaning, you know, you have to meet with me and you have to meet with, you know, the sanctuary for families and all the different advocates to get their perspective on what's happening on the ground. You have to have your counsel and your legal staff research precedent across the country and put things together. And then the bigger part is going out and really selling it. You've got to get your colleagues endorsement and you've got to do a lot of public education. I mean, Jeff Klein with the sexual limitations on rape, I found it to be incredibly admirable because he had initially introduced it a couple of times as a Democrat in the Senate which he didn't have very much power. So he actually got somebody else to introduce it using all of his research and facts and all the things that you do to build a case for something and somebody else introduced it but he was still out there, you know, on Sunday afternoon we were in front of, you know, City Hall having press conferences and he was at the public forums at night speaking on behalf of this. So it's a lot of time and effort and that's really where the test of what they're doing for us is. So hopefully that's helpful for you. Yes. Is this a form of slavery? It is. In the federal legislation, it is. It certainly is called slavery. There is some discussion about whether the description of what that slavery is is broad enough.  I mean, with the Russian woman that I described to you, she was defrauded. I mean, an employment agency said there was a job for her. She came here and there wasn't a job. She had absolutely no options. There were scary people around her and the place she ends up in is a massage parlor. Some people would say, hmm, that moment, did she have an opportunity to run? Did she have to go to that massage parlor? Where is the force or the coercion? And I think that, you know, what we were able to do in the state legislation is to make the case that it's not that black and white and if we don't include that type of fraud and really define what coercion is, we're gonna lose a lot of people because there's lots of ways that this happens. You can grab someone by the hair, throw them in the trunk of a car and put them in a brothel. That's very clear cut, but the description with the Russian woman who came here and then there's another woman who, and this is very popular in the Russian organized trafficking area, where they'll threaten your family. So then you say, well, is that real force?   And that's the reality of what can happen. Yes. Well, unfortunately, the environment now is that a lot of that federal grant money has dried up. The NYPD did get some grant money. The city of New York, criminal justice coordinator's office, did get some money and they've started a task force and I can talk to you a little bit more about that. And they're trying to incorporate the traffic, you know, even starting with just trying to identify the trafficking victims and certifying them is that, that whole process of how you do that had to be done first before saying, okay, and now they're eligible for money. So the 2007 bill did have some funded mandate, but not a great deal. The division of criminal justice services, the OTADA is the acronym for this organization has done a good job of facilitating that certification. You know, you can get some emergency funds within, you know, 24 hours if a law enforcement or other agency contacts and we have this victim. The problem is it's capped very, it's very low. So it doesn't go far is one of the problems. And so the other part of your question, I'm not sure if I answered it all. The law enforcement piece, we could start talking about that a little bit since you brought that up. So we've talked about, these are the laws that exist, how they're coming along in terms of implementation. And we touched on the idea of how law enforcement has to be more, more aware and trained and has to be a priority in how, you know, for, you know, there could be a lot done in churches, a lot of women, you know, seek refuge in churches and in the healthcare arena from the emergency rooms to the many, many community low-cost clinics that exist here, particularly in Queens and Brooklyn. So in terms of law enforcement, there was a $450,000 grant that the NYPD got in 2005. The truth of the matter is it took them a year and a half to even move on trying to get the money in. This has not been a priority at all for the NYPD. They did get the money, they use it a lot for overtime for a small group that's doing trafficking work. And a lot of what they're focusing on now is child prostitution, which is very significant. And I wanna tell you a little bit about that when we move on to our next subject and what that is here locally. I'm always left saying to myself, 12-year-olds on the track, didn't that kind of draw your attention before? It's like, you know, a lot of people had to be up in arms and, you know, a grant from the federal government to start looking at that. So there are problems there. I don't feel that the NYPD is doing a sufficient job at all to make this a priority. In fact, one of the things that we're doing it now in YC is we, and one of the things that you could help with, so we're gonna talk, this will be a little community involvement as well, is we have a campaign called Ask a Cop. And it's our effort to survey cops on the street to find out what it is that they know about trafficking and about the laws that are on the books about trafficking here so that we can take that information to the police commissioner to just say, hey, this information is not trickling down. And the cops, the entire force and the cops on the beat, on the street, need this information. And I'll just give you a couple of examples and I can tell you what you can do if you want to do this yourself is, you know, I started this because I would see a cop on the street and I would just ask, you know, so this is the way it goes. Yes, so, oh, I was reading a story today about human trafficking. Is that happening here? And you know, they'll talk to you because, especially, often they don't have anything else to do. And that's, you know, better, they're being asked directions all the time. This is at least a little different. And I had, the first one I did, the, there were two of them, the one said, no, that's not happening here, very definitively. But in New Jersey, you know, and it was just really, it was really so funny. And all my confrontations have gone like that. I have only spoken to one or two who know, who knew about trafficking. And one of them was very well informed and she was a woman cop. But she also was very quick to start talking about honor killings in Jordan and everything. So this is clearly where her consciousness was. I, the last police officer that I spoke with, I told them, you know, so I heard about human trafficking is happening here.  And I said, well, but I was reading in the story, you know, and then I just keep talking about this story that I've read. But I was reading in the story that there was a lock past here that increases the penalties for trafficking. And he started laughing at me a little. He said, no, no, no. The law you're talking about is for traffic agents. If you assault a traffic agent, you get higher, the penalties have gone up, which is true, that's, that's, that's, but he couldn't even make the connection. And over and over in the interviews that I've done and we have a trafficking action network, we've been just out on the street, you know, just, they're unaware that there's a law now on human trafficking. They're unaware that the penalties for soliciting prostitution have gone up and they don't know how to describe it. If they, I mean, they wouldn't, they would not recognize, they would not recognize if they did do a brothel raid. They wouldn't recognize the women who are there who are, you know, they're through trafficking. And there was some federal training that was done that I found very, very interesting because there was a conversation. I saw one police officer say to the other one, he looked at his partner, he said, you remember that bus we did, dah, dah, dah, dah? Those three Mexican girls in the back, they were trafficked. And it dawned on him then, those three girls who were, who were scared, who didn't speak English should have been, you know, better served. And one of the things that we are asking the local law enforcement to do is to have specially trained people, just like you have with rape crisis. So if you do a brothel raid, you know, or on, you know, Saturday night in Midtown Court with all the prostitution arrests, is somebody there from the DA's office it could be who would be able to do just quick assessments, interviews? You know, whether it's top 10 questions that you find out this person, this is a potential trafficking situation. Because otherwise you're not gonna know, they're scared. Yes. That would be part of the investigation. So let me, so let me then move on a little bit to, you know, we started talking about the law enforcement and what's lacking there and all the areas in which different social services could play a part in being able to identify victims, which would then lead to more investigations and more prosecutions, because as it stands, New York has been a bit of a bonanza for traffickers. You just come here, you set up shot and nobody really cares. So I can talk about the internet, but let me talk a little bit more about another piece of community activism that we have created that you could also take part of. So in addition to ask the cop, if you go to our website, you can get more information about that. And it'll be, it's a very interesting exercise because you can just do it whenever you're in a subway or when you're, you know, you'll start to notice, you see cops all the time, you just never really noticed it before. But if you talk to them and you go through those series of questions, just when you walk away, just write down the location, the time, the date. The goal is not to get any one police officer in trouble for this. It's that the goal is to show the overall lack of awareness in the police force. And then you can send it to us and we're compiling this report. So you can learn more of it on my website, which is nownyc.org. The other thing that we have done, and this goes to your question about internet and the marketing of these services, we started a campaign called Trafficking Free NYC. Not long after we started working on this whole issue in terms of the legislation, the questions start to arise. It's like, well, how do they come to town and just set up these businesses and nobody knows and we're just living our lives every day, going to Starbucks and going to work and going home. And we don't even notice. How does it happen? So you have to then kind of open it up and take a look and ask the question, well, what are the legitimate businesses that are taking part in facilitating this? Who else is complicit in this? Now we know some of the cops are because that's been documented. We see that case after case. You'll see that there's been some kind of police corruption bribery going on with brothels and stuff. So the obvious thing was, we see all of these sex ads. We all know the Village Voice. You open up all those back pages. But it's in all kinds of publications. It's in a lot of the ethnic, small neighborhood publications that are across Brooklyn and Queens, particularly in southern Manhattan. It has become their bread and butter of many of these sex ads. And a lot of that, you can't distinguish, when you've got the traffic industry that is a supplier to the existing sex industry, you can't really distinguish too much between which is the forced prostitution, which is the not forced prostitution. And you can very quickly find out that you can even distinguish some of it. Our campaign is aimed at educating publishers about their role. Because they know what they're doing. We pretend we go there and we pretend that we're educating them for the first time, as if they don't know that these are ads that are selling sex. But we make the connection with trafficking. And we explain to them that they've gotta do their due diligence. We ask them to sign a pledge that they are not, they're either gonna do due diligence or we try to get them to just stop taking these ads because it's the marketing arm of this industry. And we've gotten about 17 or 18 publications to sign on, which is really great. And the case that we make is like, if you're gonna be in the adult entertainment business by having a section on that or the massage business, it's prone to abuse. It's not like selling furniture. Furniture is just furniture. Dental services are just dental services. But when you're operating in this area, it's prone to abuse. And it's incumbent on you to make sure that illegal businesses are not advertising in your publication. So we've been successful with that. And for some of them, it's taken a long time. We convinced New York Magazine to stop their sex ads in the back, which I always found to be very hypocritical because here was this beautiful glossy magazine and you had fine dining reviews and opera on one page and then you had hot Asian honeys on the back. It didn't make sense. And they didn't think that they should just get away with just doing that. I mean, one of those, and let me give you an example of trafficking, which took me about a year, a year to break them down because they would come back every time with, this is a First Amendment right. Then the next argument would be, we are not the police. We can't monitor all our ads. The police tell us something's wrong. We'll take it out. Not good enough. They had an ad that said it was for a resort in Dominican Republic. And it said, it read on the ad that appeared in New York Magazine, have your own harem. I just don't know how much clearer can that be? They thought it was a joke. I mean, what? Have your own harem. And all you had to do was go onto that website. A click away was the information. The difference between a standard and a deluxe room was how much access you had to women. The standard room, you only got one. The deluxe room, you got two women. And they advertised Eastern European women. So you had Eastern European women being trafficked to the Dominican Republic, to this resort that was then advertising in New York Magazine to American men here in New York City. Are there connections there? Yes. I think they're all part of the same business. So with that, in terms of what you can do, I certainly can't be in every neighborhood throughout this whole area. If you pick up those free little publications and just take a look at what they have in the back magazine, a newspaper. It's not something you would normally do because this is not a world that you've been operating in. And the thing is when you leave here, you're gonna have a new perspective.  But if you just communicate with us, we can certainly evaluate those publications on our own if you wanna do some of the investigation on your own. Because what we do is we go to a publication and when they try to tell us, oh, we don't know what this is. There's no way of knowing this. I just, I pull the thing right off the internet, which I've Googled. You can Google somebody's phone number. There's an ad for Massage Poller and whatever else is being advertised on, say, Craigslist will pop up. It's very easy. There's also websites. There's a website called spahunter.com which is a playoff of the website Spa Finder which is about real spas, like Oasis and Bliss. Spa Hunters, though, is about brothels. Brothels slash massage pollers. I'll use those words interchangeably. And men rate the services, rate the women, and you can very clearly see what their real business is. And that's only a click away and I don't think it's asking too much of publications to take that five minutes or less to check something out. And in the state of New York, you need a license to either perform and advertise a massage service. So the simplest thing to start with is a form that asks the massage pollers to send in their information. What is their license numbers? It's not too much to ask. Yes, you have a question. Yep, so I will talk about that next. Should I finish up just in terms of the advertising? Let me, so if you in any way would like to help or be a part of that, you can certainly, we have a trafficking action network that meets once a month. Even what I just described in terms of asking the cops on the street. Checking out publications, googling them, seeing what those businesses really are for. And just very quickly, you know, when you take a look at it, something that it's not legit. And do it for a couple of days and you'll be an expert at it. There's certain words that are used in the ads.  This is the brothel section. And I remember one of the ones that we pulled off of that spa hunters, one of the comments from one of the guys is he's telling the other guy. He says, I asked, I asked Candy, I guess that was her name in the brothel. If she likes doing this to men. And he says, through much pantomime, she said, first six months I cry. Well, anyone who has been working, you know, is crying every day because they're having to work in a brothel doesn't want to be there. You know, so that was very valuable to show it to the publisher and say, this is what you're taking part in.  And the thing to do after that, if they don't cooperate is to go after their advertisers and tell their legitimate advertisers, which is what I started doing with New York Magazine, started calling Macy's, which was advertised and spent a great deal of money with them. So there's always, you know, tenacity is a really important part of this business. And you have to just keep plugging away at it that way. So, and the other thing that I'd love for you to do when you get home is take a look at your yellow pages. Take a look at your Verizon yellow pages. Go to the escort service. You're gonna find that the escort service is one of the thickest in the entire book. Now my investigations show that, you know, it costs $45,000 to run a full page color ad in the yellow pages, the Verizon yellow pages. That's a lot of money. If you're in the prostitution business, you've got to pay that upfront. Unlike if you're a doctor's office, you can pay that as part of your monthly phone bill, you know, so it's very interesting. They know exactly what they're doing. They want their cash up front for these businesses that move a lot. And take a look at those. I wish I would have brought with me some copies because I'd want everyone to see it right now. But you'll have, there are ads in the yellow pages, the ones that we all have in our businesses and in our kitchen drawer. Pictures of, and sketches and images of girls that look like they're eight years old. And there's no second guessing that. They're made to look that young. Little pigtails with the little pajama top. And you'll be just flabbergasted. And, you know, it's like, who's to say they don't have 10-year-olds that they market there? The one of them that has a really young face. You know, the business is called Asian Flowers. Is that a coincidence? So I think about this and I think about, you know, I told you about Somali Men's book that I read just recently. And, you know, here she's in a third world country. And I wonder how she feels coming here to the United States where she's trying to raise money for her shelters back in Cambodia. To come here and go to a hotel and open the phone book and see pictures of eight-year-olds just in our telephone book with the number to call. It must be, it must feel to her like there's no winning. There's no winning this fight. The United States here and all of this democracy and all of these great people and this is okay with everybody. I think sometimes in the future, and I'm like, my goodness, if we do break this open and it becomes a really an issue like domestic violence, if we get as far with it as we have with domestic violence, someone will be speaking to an audience in 25 years saying, can you believe back, you know, back in 2000, you know, and eight, the Yellow Pages, New York City, had pictures of little girls and telephone numbers under their escort listings. You know, it's really, when you think of it in those grand terms, it's very significant. So you wanted me to talk next a little bit about underage prostitution? That is happening here too. And it's startling. There's a couple of, this past year, what did pass was a law called the Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth Act that just passed by a hair. The governor signed it into law. What it aims to do, whether it will do it, I don't know, it is not as strong as the trafficking law of last year. It just got whittled down, whittled down a lot in the time that we were working on it. But what currently happens is that girls under 17 are, if you're arrested for prostitution, generally what happens is you're incarcerated through juvenile detention. So we criminalize them. And the juvenile detention centers are no place to get help. A lot of them lie about their age because that's what their pimps tell them to do. And they end up in Rikers, where it's, as you can imagine, it's just not a good situation. So the law aims to defer these girls from juvenile detention into special services. And I know that that sounds perfect, and I was a big part of making this bill happen. But to be frank, that isn't gonna happen. It's a lovely idea, and it would have been heartbreaking if our legislature did not agree that at least on the idea that this was something we needed to do. The problem is that that infrastructure doesn't exist. Those specialized services are out there for these girls. And I don't know when it's gonna be there. This is actually gonna be the bigger struggle moving forward with the underage prostitution is to get the funds there for some services, to get a specialized house and such so that they can start to rebuild their lives. So in terms of underage prostitution, one thing that I want everyone to think of, because you know, it's like, if you have a 20 year old young woman who's working in prostitution, at some point she was underage, and we felt sympathy for her then. But the average age of entry into prostitution is actually 14 years old.  That's gonna be a lot of fun. It's their life circumstances that have taken them there. And here in New York City, there's been two studies. One was done by a government agency that said there were at least 2,250 underage girls working in prostitution in New York City alone. There was a research project done by John Jay College that just finished up that actually estimates it at 4,000, which seems more accurate, because from what people have been seeing, they thought that that number was a little low, the first one. You know what, I don't know, actually, you know what, I will tell you, I've got an executive somewhere here, so maybe I'm able to tell you what it is. And if I don't find it right this minute, I'll tell you afterwards. But it's startling. It is absolutely startling that this is happening. And you wanna know the main way that they're being advertised goes back to your question, sir, which was it's on the internet, it's on Craigslist. That's the way the pimps are working today. They recruit young women and young girls through neighborhoods from in front of schools. It's the classic story of treating them well, taking them out, taking them to the nail salon, and then they're in this. And then it becomes, it's like trafficking, and then it comes a little bit more brutal. And they pit the girls against each other. They beat them, they have quotas that they have to meet. They've got all across the city, they've got these little hot sheet motels, hotels, where you buy a room by the hour. Another area that we can go after, because they see these young girls coming in, they see the prostitution taking place, they shouldn't be able to operate, and they should be reporting it. So it's definitely happening with the young girls. We do have this new law in place that at least is the start of trying to work towards it. Recognition by our state government that this is an issue and that we don't want to criminalize young girls, that they're first, they're victims. In the state of New York, you can't even consent to sex until you're 17. You can't even consent. You're not seen as old enough to really even consent to sex, but yet somehow a 14, or 15, or 16, or in many cases a 12-year-old as well, when money changes hands, they're a criminal and they're a prostitute, especially when the money is going to somebody else. So there's a lot of work to be done in this area that is the one area that the NYPD is focusing some of their efforts on. And I think this will be a good time when I was talking to you a little bit about the culture that we live in and how this is playing a role in it, was really, really interesting because the John Jay College study, when they interviewed a lot of these young girls, they really were able to, they were able to identify 10% of these young girls who articulated what they saw as, this is actually being a career path for them. They talked a lot about being porn stars. They talked about, they literally pointed to the HBO shows, they've got the pseudo documentaries about prostitution, that these girls were, the nice clothes that they had and how they went to the nail salon all the time. And so what the researchers are saying is that you have, for these young girls to go into prostitution, they hit like a little, a desperation point. They get targeted by a pimp, but that for some of them, they're actually going into it a little sooner than they would have before that desperation point or force point came in because this industry has been clamorized. And then once they're in, it's a whole, it's a hard to get out of, really, really hard to get out of. They're very, very quickly, their sense of worth and their self, sense of self-esteem is shot. They're brutalized by their clients and Johns and their pimps. It's, you know, you're labeled at that point. So it's very, very difficult. And one of the other things that we've been doing lately is we have this campaign against HBO. We've protested in front of the headquarters on Sixth Avenue a couple of times because here you have this network and they do some great work, but then they also, at the same time, they do these pseudo documentaries on, are they mentioning any of these studies? Are they interviewing cops who are picking up 12-year-olds? So that, and then they have this other show called Cat House, which I don't know if you guys are familiar with just, it's the a brothel, the legal brothel in Nevada, and it's supposed to be a documentary of this. And of course all the girls are having a great time. They're so happy. But you know, if you talk to, I've been to producers who have been there for some of these shows that are, and they say it's the most depressing, decrepit place.  You know, the women, they come for two and three weeks. You don't get any of your money until you leave.  That doesn't seem like a good employment contract or what legal employment is supposed to be like. They've had assaults there.   He's giving that to them for the, you know, different things. He's got the hooker of the month who gets a check. And this hooker of the month that it was 26 parties in four days, which is what they refer to it, you know, parties. So that meant she had at least 26 men or multiples of men or something in four days. That's, that resembles a lot like the low budget, you know, factory style prostitution that we've been talking about that I described that takes place in these trafficking operations throughout the city.  It's very, it's a very interesting thing and it's worth kind of doing some reading about to be able to arm yourself if you're interested. And there's another good book that's been out for a couple of years, but it's called Female Chauvinist Pig by Ariel Levy, L.E.V.Y. And she kind of documents in that kind of backlash way, kind of just documents, you know, the girl's gone wild phenomenon and talks about HBO and kind of this self-objectification that seems to be taking place a bit in our culture and how the pornification of so much, you know, is becoming really mainstream. And lo and behold, here in the results of this John Jay College survey, you actually find it being verbalized with young girls who are entering into prostitution a little sooner than they probably would have and maybe there would have been a chance to save them or some other avenue that they could have taken. So is there anything else you would like to know about child prostitution? I do have a couple of facts and figures that are kind of interesting about from the first government agency that took a survey over 50% of the NYC kids in prostitution, they already had prior juvenile justice placement. So they already been troubled in some way, shape or form. And we didn't catch it then. So there's a parallel, just how we said we're not catching when foreign women are arrested or when there's a brothel raid or, you know, we're not also, we're not evaluating situations for our American girls who are lured into prostitution because they have been involved, you know, with the city and the state. So we're not catching it there what the problem is or that they're in prostitution. And very interesting, they did a survey of upstate kids in prostitution in upstate New York and in downstate. In New York City, 44% of the prostitution took place in these hot sheet hotels or outside. So maybe on the track or in a car or something like that. In upstate, 52% of it took place in people's homes. So people were dealing in children out of their homes. And interestingly, the majority of New York City, it was with strangers. Upstate, it was with people that they knew, acquaintances. And 70% of the kids in upstate were used for video pornography. So it's a different makeup. Upstate, it's a little, you know, and it's interesting because some of the legislators that we talked about really would love to say, we don't criminalize our kids up here. We don't do this.  But the truth is, it's just more frank here in New York City. You've got, it's more of a business. You've got pimps who are putting girls on Craigslist and out on the street. It's a very clear transaction. What you have at other parts of the state would resemble more, you know, sexual abuse and incest in the home. And somebody's making money off of it. Somebody's videotaping it and selling it. Someone's inviting their friends over and making money off of it. So it's a very interesting, you know, the different forms that it's been taking in our state. And that agency, somebody asked about it, is the New York State Office of Children and Family Services, OCFS, Office of Children and Family Services. OCFS is the one that did this study and that also works with some of these kids. So we've covered quite a bit so far. I'm just gonna go over it, because in case there's something that we've missed or more that you wanna talk about, we've talked about, you know, the legislation in terms of trafficking at the federal and at the state level that have taken place. We've talked about a couple of the things that it's an international problem that's in our neighborhoods. From the way it's marketed in our newspapers to the brothels and massage parlors that are like Starbucks in our community. We've talked a little bit about the culture that exists out there that has normalized and mainstreamed prostitution as some kind of wonderful career choice. When the truth is, it's the number one way since the beginning of time that we have oppressed women. You know, if you attack a woman's sexuality and you take it away from her, that's what you're doing. And the other thing we have to talk about is demand. You know, it's a real issue. If we didn't have the demand, it wouldn't exist. And everywhere we speak and everywhere when we read about this, we always, the questions are, how did women get into it? How do they survive it? Why do they do it? And those are actually the easy questions to answer. They've been abused. They're addicted to drugs. They desperately need money. The harder question to answer is, why do men do this? Well, that's an easy way to find out about it.  Yeah, certainly there's the track in the South Bronx from, you know, there's, by Chelsea Pierce, there's apparently a spot for young gay youth that are runaways and that's where they land. You know, the industry has changed a lot. There's not so much street prostitution anymore. I mean, I think during our Giuliani years, you know, that was really, that changed a lot. And then with the advent of the internet, it's just so easy. You've got, you've got, you can go on Craigslist where you can buy, you know, look for a job and, you know, buy a stroller and, you know, also get erotic services, which is the listing there. You have a question? I tried to spread it to the office of the president of the world. He just had a governor that was involved. I've been at my block here for 45 years of two grand children, stormed out by his wife. I've only been across with him for two years and this has confirmed that, that's what you're saying. All right, so has there been any study by, or maybe your organization can encourage some academic study, you know, one of our prestigious schools, which they study some of these different things like stealing order and all this other stuff, of what one then would be so happening by this kind of thing, you know, whether it's on, whether it's advertised, et cetera. Has there been any psychological, is it a psychological problem? Obviously, it's sick. I don't use the word sick. So is there any study stone on this? Any analysis stone on this? You know, that may be correct, so. You know, not a lot. And that's what's interesting is we haven't put the spotlight on that. And it's just now, yep. There is some that is being done now, which is really great. So that door has been opened. You know, but it has to go through. I mean, it's like, you have to, it's very cultural because even you have the NYPD, which their arrest rates for prostituted women to men who've solicited them is four to one. In other cities, it is 20 to one. So there has to be kind of an evolution in thinking and the approach to this that, you know, in Sweden, you know, the model is actually that they've decriminalized it for the women.  And the men are the perpetrators. So they view it that way. And so it is illegal for the men, but the women, for the women, it's just been decriminalized. They're not gonna get convictions over it. They try to put them into services, which we've talked a lot about today. And so that's one kind of model that is being used out there. I think another thing is, you know, in other, you know, when I see the trafficking here, what you see is a, you see a pattern starting to take place in terms of the foreign women. You'll see that it's foreign traffickers from that country. It'll be Mexican traffickers who know the landscape in Mexico, who are finding and recruiting the Mexican women, bringing them here, and then they market to Mexican men, the Mexican immigrant population here. So in a lot of these countries, you know, if you read Somalia Man's book, I mean, you just see it's so prevalent.  And it's just like washing your hands and it's a different mentality. It's a different mentality. Not that American men don't, but it's just even starker in other cultures where you see that women are in general just lower on the, you know, on the social status bar. So, you know, that's part of it as well. You know, a lot of this mainstreaming that's happening now is keeping that awareness from happening. I think another thing is, you know, the truth is that all of us know somebody, you know, probably in our family who is kind of sketchy. You know, you don't want to think about it if it's the neighbor or it's, but the truth is, you know, we do. We're like, hmm, you know, I bet I wouldn't be surprised if that ankle here or there or something, but we don't talk about it. We don't confront it. We don't, we just ignore it and they don't, there's no penalty from them, whether it's, you know, there's the legal penalty and then there's just the social stigma penalty.  It'd be interesting if that could happen in the world of prostitution, you know, because a lot of problems would come to an end because there would not be the demand, therefore there would not be the, you know, the entrepreneurs who are trying to make money to create, to find the supply for the demand. There must be mail-to-attracting that if the conversation comes up, we'll generally, you know, be doubtless as a female issue. I wrote in a place where I know men who are molested or raped who never talk to God, but then when I want them to become molesters and rapers. One of the things I think is, there is absolutely no discussion in the society even with women about men. I know very few men, just as black men, men who are taught by their mothers. I know very few men whose mothers talk to them about sexuality, all of them learn sexuality in two point order. And religions play a huge part in parents not teaching their sons anything about sexuality. So there's a space in which all of that silence will still kind of come into this conversation because as soon as we say, okay, I heard someone said something about Coney Island or those of each where there's homosexual trafficking that don't go along. The word boys and trafficking haven't come together yet. And just in the nature of the story and sexuality we're talking about, that's going to happen because those sorts of people who are in that consciousness where it's just a flesh-pointing consciousness and a power-pointing paradigm are not going to, a lot of times you make that distinction whether they're working with a boy or a girl. So I just pose that to just ask how that whole part of the conversation almost in station always is kind of left out of this conversation. The points you are making are so very important. I couldn't agree with you more. In the trafficking that we've seen and that could be because maybe they're just focusing on women, we don't really see men traffic too much. The young, the boys were runaways. That's what they're seeing in that. But everything that you're saying is incredibly, incredibly valid and it leads me to the conclusion it's like just like women had a women's movement, men need their own movement. Because everything is spoken, it's so much silence and your lives and what is supposed to be success and what manhood is in a box and that all needs to be broken open. And I don't know if any of these can be changed until men start having those same kind of conversations amongst themselves and creating it in a formalized way to get there. You could lead it.  It's great. I wanted to tell you a couple of the stats that did come from this Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, which finally did get some money to do a survey about this, which is flipping this on its head. Let's take a look at the men.  So I thought that was very interesting.  So they knew what they were taking part in wasn't healthy. 80% said prostitution had a negative impact on communities. Then this is so interesting. Then, but 22% felt guilty. So you've got all these high percentages. I mean, we're in the 80s, 79, 60, 57, but 22, only 22% felt guilty. It's really interesting. And here, when they asked the question, they dug into that why, a lot of men felt that men's sexual drives were out of control. So that's just kind of like an old myth.  They can't control themselves. This is what men do. It's just, that's a definition of manhood.  That's hard to believe. And it just comes down to, if we don't stem the tide of demand for particularly young girls' bodies, it's getting younger and younger. You've got 12-year-olds out there. The demand will continue to be met by coercion and violence and force and exploitation of vulnerable women, girls, and men. So what do they say would be a deterrent? 87% said public exposure would be a deterrent for them. So that wouldn't be so hard to do. 83% said jail time, which doesn't happen. And 79% said a letter to their family. So that chain factor could be really significant. We do have like the Brooklyn DA's office, which I think is a very progressive office in terms of criminal justice and sexual violence issues concerning women. They have a John School, which is the only one in the five boroughs. So what they aim to do is, it's almost like what we talked about with the young girls instead of deferring for juvenile delinquency. If they will take services, if we could have them get services, that would be a better remedy. And the same thing with men who are arrested for prostitution at the John School, that they could avoid a conviction if they do this, it's like a seminar, which is whatever it is, whether it's a day or two. It's pretty good. I think that they focus a lot on the health aspect. So it comes back to the individual.  And it could be a little bit more about just the overall, how this affects the women involved. And maybe a warning there, and then if we catch you again, we'll be publishing your name or something. But that's one effort locally to deal with demand. And hopefully we'll have more in the future. So there's a few more questions. Why my door? And the victim was an abuser and there's some harassment from the views. But I never had to learn in the two hour segment if it was maybe that another prostitute would kill her because as you have noticed, women are pitted against each other. What I also bring up when I come to any of these sessions, when you're speaking, I always talk about the impact of people with disabilities because somebody does have to constantly develop a belief that type of minor ability. I come to a particular study and investigation where that leads to somebody's involvement because I think that's certainly important. Also, the other question that I'd like to know about, how often does it end up, of course, with the kids, but on the additionally, where these women are pitted against each other. So again, when we're waiting for a sweet hotel, we're waiting to be pitted against each other. You know, I'm not sure. I really haven't delved too much in that area of the violence of women against women. I do know that that is kind of a tactic.  Really, so much mirrors, you know, just what was done in the South with slavery, you know, pitting slaves who got to work inside and ones who got to work outside. I wanted, I did want to mention on a good note, the first case for under the trafficking law that was passed 2000 has gone through the court system. And interestingly enough, it's about a child prostitution case. There's this guy named Cody Wooten who actually recruited a girl as she's walking home from school, walking from school here in Brooklyn. I don't know what school it was. She was 16 and he took her to have her nails done, took her out to eat, treated her well, and then within a short period of time, once he'd gotten her trust some, he invited her to the Bronx. So he takes her to the Bronx. So she's away from Brooklyn, you know, she's in the Bronx. Locks her up in her apartment, puts an ad out for her on Craigslist. Guy starts showing up. She's there for two weeks and she has 200 customers. She was 16 years old. She, she escaped. She escaped and you know, that's how her parents were looking for her. And so that was the first case on the trafficking law that was prosecuted. He had a, I mean, he had like a $12,000 watch on when they arrested him just. So he's gonna go to jail for, he hasn't, sentencing hasn't happened yet, but he'll go to jail for a long time. So this was a victory for this law and as well for the, you know, the DA's offices that were involved making that happen. Another thing that we're talking to the DA's offices is to set up investigation units. Why not? We've got the law. We've seen from the federal cases that have taken place here in just the New York metro area that it happens on a grand scale as well as a small scale. Like he just, this was one girl at a time for him, but he made a lot of money.  What do you call that? Pirated, you know, brands and stuff. We put so much time and money into that. If we can do that, isn't, isn't, aren't human beings worth the same?  Shakedowns, which are kind of low-level organized crime.  If not, you know, they'll, they'll disrupt your construction site. This is very normal, you know.  Shouldn't we put that kind of money into following some trafficking operation?  So, I think there's a lot to be done and I hope that you, that you take this information and that you're able to continue to talk about it when you go to cocktail parties with your friends because we have to just spread the word. Knowledge is power. And I hope that you can help us with our campaigns, with ASSICOP, the Trafficking Free NYC with the publications. I mean, the more, the more pressure we put on everybody and the more we make this an issue, it'll continue to evolve. And it's not gonna happen overnight. It's an insidious problem. But I look to all that's taken place in the domestic violence movement. 30 years ago, there was not a name for domestic violence. We didn't name it. We didn't have laws against it. It was, there was no awareness on the law enforcement. They went to a dispute at a home. That was a private matter between a man and a woman. We've come a long way, right? We've named it. We have services for the victims. We have, we've really drilled down. And we know these are the top 10 things that would, we could say to victims that this would mean that you are being abused. We've had an evolution of laws. We had a law that was passed last year of the year before which was orders of protection for pets. Because pets are hurt and injured in domestic violence situations because that's the way you hurt somebody else. So that's what we have to do with human trafficking because it is happening on a large scale. We know it and we've started that process. Often that starts with the legal changes and then a lot of the cultural changes we've talked about that need to take place and speaking to men and speaking to the businesses who are profiting from this. So I wanna thank you so much. Thank you very much Sonia and thank you for everybody for joining us here today. Thank you for your work and for telling us about it. We are going to be continuing. I was thinking actually the oldest profession in the world I would say coming pretty close to it is probably war. So I guess we have a couple of things that we have to work on that are testosterone driven. On December 13th Gloria Steinem is going to be coming in and is moderating a panel which will be in the auditorium. It will be part of the center's panel discussions but it will be in the auditorium. She's entitled the panel Sex Trafficking and the New Abolitionists.


Think Tech Away. Civil engagement lives here. I'm welcome to stand the energy man on Friday. Thank goodness it's Friday. This week seemed like it was never going to end for me. I won't get any more details than that, but it was a tough week for me. Anyway, also ending up pretty recently is the legislature, which is kind of wrapping up its season right now. And so I've asked several legislators to come on and talk to us about energy bills and things in the legislature. And the first one to pop up was Senator Gil Rivera from the North Shore. And now I got to say that the legislature is full of all kind of great great folks and but I'm really impressed with the ones that reach out to the energy office and to my office and the university and ask questions about energy things because I don't know they're really engaged in the topic and they really care about what's going on in their community and helping their constituents. So thanks for being on with us. Appreciate it. Thanks Dan. Thank you for inviting me. No, my pleasure. And thanks for reaching out to us. We obviously want to give you the best information that we can for you to help make good decisions for the state. So yeah, thanks for being engaged. That's great. I was hooked on, we met because of the question of hydrogen. I was hooked on the product several years ago when I got to tour the Pearl Harbor Hickam and drive a hydrogen fuel cell car back in 2011 or 12 maybe. And I thought, wow, that's a product that we need to talk about going forward. So as I've been involved in the legislature, you know, I've asked you about that a few times and I'm always interested in alternative energies that are going to be useful and practical for us. Well, we're still pushing on the hydrogen button and we're hoping that we'll get that moving along pretty quick and things have been happening. It's a quiet kind of the old George Arreo should quiet, but effective story where there's a lot going on in the background, a lot going on internationally. We're pretty much aware of South Korea and Japan and China pushing into fuel cells in a really big way. I just found out this morning that Vietnam is very interested in hydrogen fuel cell technology and extending that way too. So there's a lot of going on in Asia, a lot going on in Europe, a lot going on in California, some stuff going on on the east coast of the U.S. and of course here in Hawaii, the University of Hawaii, our office, Blue Planet Research, we're all really heavily engaged in hydrogen. So we'll keep you informed. Yeah, that's great. I'm looking forward to that day. What's some of the things that have been going on in the legislature in terms of bills that you know, got through and I know they don't get all the years, but let's start off maybe with the process. I think a lot of folks don't really understand the legislative process here in the state of Hawaii and how bills move through. If you could give us a quick one-on-one on that, that would probably be really helpful. Okay, quick civics course. So we've got the House and the Senate, 25 members in the Senate, 51 in the House and we, when we introduce bills, sometimes a bill will be introduced in each chamber. It'll be the same identical bill, so it'll be called a companion. For example, I work with Representative Sean Quinlan in my area for some bills and Rep Keohokalole or Rep Matsumoto, the different representatives I work with, we may introduce matching bills. And then depending on the pace and the activity of the committees in either of the chambers, a bill may get some traction or it may stall out. So it's good to have those two sets of bills to get them through, yeah? So they have to pass through each House and so they cross over. So when the Senate is done working on a bill, we have to vote on it three times, plus it has to go to committee. It's in the committees where the public gets to testify and the testimony is actually very useful because we'll have these lofty ideas sometimes and we'll say, well, I think we can fix X, Y or Z with this bill, but we don't see all the repercussions. So the experts or the people that are involved in that business, that industry, that technology will come in and testify, help us punch it up and make it a better bill. And that's why it gets modified along the way. Yes. And so sometimes it's a completely different bill by the time it comes out the other end, notwithstanding the infamous gut and replace. But there's bills sometimes where it starts to do something and by the time it gets to the end, it accomplishes generally the same thing, but it may look very different. So the Senate will work on it for the first month and the House simultaneously. Then the bills will pass on to the other House and they'll go through the same process. So each bill theoretically has a real heavy vetting. In reality, sometimes they only get one or two hearings and they go through fairly quickly. But hopefully by the time it gets around to the last committees, it's in a form ready to roll. I serve on the Ways and Means Committee, which is the Senate Money and Budgeting Committee. So anything that has to do with money appropriations, etc., will come through Ways and Means. So I have a chance to have a broader perspective of all the bills moving through. Even if we do pass the bill and even if the House passes the same bill, it might be slightly different. And at that point, it goes into the Notorious Conference Committee process. And that is where good bills sometimes just die due to either budgetary concerns or maybe disagreements. Sometimes you get some personalities involved in the House and the Senate negotiators get mad at each other.  I'm killing your bill. And that's a tragedy when that happens. So we hope to have the decorum and the cooperation to come up with good bills, but sometimes personalities get in the way. And if it makes it all the way through the committee, the committees and that process, it goes to the governor for signature. And he either becomes law with his signature or over time without his signature or he vetoes it. And if he vetoes it, what happens? So on a veto, if the legislature convenes to consider that measure again and votes by two-thirds majority in both House, each House and both House have to be two-thirds, then the veto is over-ridden. Interestingly, I believe the first governor's veto override did not occur until towards the end of Governor Cayetano's administration. So up until then, if the governor vetoed it, the legislature just let it lie and maybe picked it up the next year. But since then, now anytime we hear veto, my colleagues, we start talking about we coming back, we coming back. So it's an interesting power play between the branches of government. Thanks for that quick civics lesson, because I know that a lot of us paid attention in school, but it's been a while and it's good to always look at the process again. And I'd like to emphasize too, like you said, getting down and submitting testimony is important. I have, for most of my life, underestimated the interest at not only the state legislature, or the county councils and stuff, but also the congressional offices have in hearing from citizens. You know, everybody thinks they're too busy, they'll never listen to me, they've got other stuff to do. But you'd be quite surprised if you haven't tried it already. Go talk to your legislator. They want to listen to you and they want to hear your input, so I'll definitely encourage them. I think most of us do. Sometimes you'll have a legislator with a plan. They got a plan. They get out of the way. We're going forward with this. And so sometimes the public can be frustrated, because they'll say, man, I gave them all these good reasons and improvements, and they just wouldn't listen to it. But again, on balance, you know, we're all trying to do good bills and get stuff through, and we take the input and hopefully come out with a good product at the end. And I know too, a lot of times I'll have a great solution for something, but I'm not seeing the finance side, or I'm not seeing the social implications side, or I'm not seeing the impact to people who have less income than me, or more income than me, or a business. And those things all come into play. So even though I might have a great idea and I bring it to you, you can go pat me on the head and say, Stan, I appreciate your input, but we can't do that. And that's okay too, as long as it's explained and people understand, they're not being ignored. They're just being told there's other factors that play there. And that's why it's good to go through two or three different hearings in each chamber to get the vetting to work on it. And here what other people are saying too, because I guarantee you, if five or ten people are all saying the same thing, legislature starts listening to that. There was a bill this year, early in the year, to more regulate homeschooling. Homeschoolers would have to pass certain checkboxes and background checks and things like that. So parents would now be subject to this new regime. Oh, the whole homeschoolers are very organized. They came down and said, no, that's ridiculous. We're taking care of our kids. You know, you can't, that's an overreach of government. And that was an example where people power quickly turned that question around and that bill just dropped off right there. So things can change if the public is united. So get involved, get involved with your legislature and your congressional delegation, especially you business folks. The congressional delegation wants to hear from you. So let's talk a little bit about energy things. You're in North Shore, so from kind of point all the way around to Kaneohe, and you work with your house counterparts. Jared Keohokalole has been on our show once or twice, and I think he's running for Senate now in the wound on Kailua side, isn't he? Correct, for the neighboring Senate district for the Kaneohe side. So I, you know, and I talk to him a lot too about hydrogen. He's very interested in hydrogen. And so what are some of the things that, you know, and like I said earlier, I don't want to talk about specific bills necessarily, but you have different categories of bills like tax incentives and things like that. Have you seen anything in those categories like tax incentives or standing up new offices or anything that actually made it through pass, I mean if it hits ways and means it's practically through the gauntlet. So things that made it at least pass your your committee that... A couple of bills that went through, there's a matching program now. We appropriated two million dollars for the HTDC, my attack, you guys, to match federal grants, so to double the viability of funding. So there's two million dollars this year to match programs to research alternative energy projects, because a lot of times we have, again, back to the great ideas, but you need a proof of concept. And so that's a bill, I think, it's not a giant infusion of money, but it's, I know it's going to help get some projects off the ground. We have another project, you know, the GEMS, remember the GEMS project, this green energy systems, and a few years ago the idea was let's set aside 50 million dollars and we're going to support people who cannot afford to put solar on the roof. And it was a great idea that was just a little bit late, because as solar penetration hits certain thresholds, point electric got a little anxious about the stability of the grid, they imposed some new restrictions and suddenly the solar roof installation has, has, has dropped off a lot. So now we've got this 50 million dollars that we're paying off, we're borrowed and we're paying money on it and it's been sitting there for a few years without any good use. So I think this year we did something that's wise under the circumstances is we've turned it now and not just for private or individual lending, but we can actually now use that money for schools, for example, buildings, government buildings, 52% of the electricity used on this island is by commercial and government. And so now if we can use this money to help put solar on every school roof, for example, we can save as much as, you know, 38 million dollars is spent on electricity by the Department of Education, so that money's now getting reappropriated or now being made available. So it's more available for, it's more available for larger users to do a bigger impact on getting to renewable services. Yeah, that always made me wonder, initially, they were talking about $20,000 here and $25,000 there, $15,000, I'm like, that's going to take a long time to get to 50 million. That's, that's a pretty small bite out of that apple every day. So going to the larger projects is probably a good idea. So I think so. Let's, let's support that. Okay. And then the monies that are saved through the utility savings, the electricity savings, can then go back in to refund the program. So let's hope this gives it a kickstart and it's not just 50 million bucks sitting, doing nothing. And then we had another bill, if I remember, that was talking about something going to the PUC on on a performance-based rate, you know, structure for the electric company. What's that one about? There's been, you know, the, the utility companies get paid based on how much stuff they own and how much money they got to spend to maintain their system. So there's been this perverse incentive where if they have a little bit of extra money at the end of the year, they go buy more trucks or something because then they have a bigger base to maintain and therefore they need greater rates to support that. So the whole purpose of the public utilities is provide a stable, in this case, electricity. The incentives are in the wrong place. So over the last several years, the Public Utilities Commission has been working on performance-based programs to try to unhitch that adverse incentive. And this year we passed a bill that will actually expedite that and then require the Public Utilities Commission to get to that day sooner where they break the cycle of revenue and spending altogether, but more like stable electricity generation and more alternative renewables. And so I think that it's going to go in the right direction. At this point is that then just kind of directing the PUC to get the study done faster or I mean is it actually going to direct the PUC to implement or is it more to just do the homework and make sure we're doing the right thing? Well the PUC is already working on certain modules of this bigger and complicated grid and energy production and reliability and resiliency. So they're working on parts of it. This one requires them to get it done on a bigger, on a holistic level and then give a path forward on how are we going to break that cycle of just spending irrespective of, you know, our energy change because I think most people understand and most people support going to renewable energies. But having said that, there's a very short fuse on this bill. This bill targets a year and a half from now for the PUC to render this report. It's a very aggressive timeline. So I'm hoping that it's not too short that they have to make quick answers. I hope that they've got enough background information. Yeah, I hope they got enough background time, information, resources and they can put it together in that time. Okay. We're going to take a quick break here and let some of the other folks talk about their shows here on Think Tech Hawaii. We'll be back with Senator Averi in a few seconds. I'm Jay Fidel, Think Tech. Think Tech loves energy. I'm the host of Mina, Marko and me, which is Mina Morita, former chair of the PUC, former legislator and energy dynamics, a consulting organization in energy. Marko Mangostorf is the CEO of Provision Solar in Hilo. Every two weeks we talk about energy, everything about energy. Come around and watch us. We're on at noon on Mondays, every two weeks on Think Tech. Aloha. Hi, everyone. I'm Andrea Gabrieli. I'm the host for Young Talents Making Way here on Think Tech Hawaii. We talk every Tuesday at 11 a.m. about things that matter to tech, matter to science, to the people of Hawaii with some extraordinary guests, the students of our schools who are participating in science fair. So Young Talents Making Way every Tuesday at 11 a.m. only on Think Tech Hawaii. Mahalo. Hey, welcome back to Stand Energy Man on my lunch hour as usual because I'm a state worker, so I got to do this on my own time. But we've got the state senator here watching me. He's got oversight of where my lunch hour and I've got state senator Gil Rivera. Thanks again, Gil for being on. Let's talk a little bit about your neighborhood. You know, you represent actually by square miles or acres. You probably have a lot of territory in your district. You went all the way from Kuhuku actually around into Kanioi. Not quite into Kanioi town, but to Heia. Go to the fish pond is more or less the boundary. And going the other way around to Kaena Point Wailua and all that in Kuhuku, but goes through Schofield Barracks. That's almost all of Schofield Barracks and around to Kunia Village. So we've got agriculture lands in Kunia, you know, the North Shore, Whitmore, we got Kahuku, Punaluu. We've got Ag lands all the way around conservation lands. And we do have a lot of alternative energy now too. Let's talk a little bit. I mean, obviously everybody's familiar with the wind power projects because they're all in your area. And I'm curious as to what the folks in your district think about the wind power.  Do they kind of concern about it?  Can you give us a picture of what your take is on the wind power? When the wind mills, the wind projects were proposed back in 2010, they're about, I think our community was full in full support. We said, this is great. Let's get off. Let's get off of oil and if wind mills help, they provide alternative energy. That's great. Some questions were asked about the visual effects of it. And frankly, the guys selling the wind projects were not very forthright. They said things like when asked, hey, how's that, what are the wind mills going to look like from Pupukea? And they said, oh, they're going to have a special view. And as it turns out, it's a horrendous view. And there's people that live up the top of Pupukea that can't, they have to close their sheet, their blinds at night because the wind mills have a big red light blinking in their window. So what used to be this glorious view to Mount Kuala and all the agricultural fields now, they got this blinking red light and wind mills by day. So the visual impacts have been great. I think once they went up, they went up quickly, people started rethinking and say, wait a minute, what's going on there? So we felt a little bit cheated on the visual aspects of it, especially when you go through Waimea Bay. It's pretty off-putting. The other thing is they only generate the Kahuku, or the Kuala wind farm, only generates about between 20 and 23 percent of its projected energy. So when they say 69 megawatts of capacity, they don't hit that on day in and day out. They hit about 20 to 23 percent. So there's a question as to whether it ultimately has been worth it. So when they talk capacity, are they talking like 20, 30 knots of wind, or what does it take to get a wind mill to get into that capacity? Well, okay, now that's a better question. They can start to spin at what's called three and a half meters per second, which is, I think, 10, 11 miles an hour. The wind mills can start to spin. However, they do their maximum damage on endangered species up until the wind is really blowing. So there are now requirements that the wind turbines do not start operating until they get to five and a half meters per second. I used to say they lock them up until the wind's strong. They have to wait. So even though they could be spinning in the low wind speed, in most cases they're not allowed now because of the damage they're doing to our endangered species. So they can operate up to, now they generate a certain amount of energy when they're going at full speed. Right. But once the winds drops, just a little bit, their production drops off substantially. So if the wind drops off maybe a quarter, they're only producing about an eighth of the energy. That makes sense. The wind turbines that we've used at Hickam, the folks that designed them tell us that they did power output is exponential. It's not a straight line. No. When you start getting into the real productive zone, it goes up quickly. Every increase of a mile per hour kilometer per hour just really pushes it, pushes the power output greatly. But does Hawaiian Electric talk about any future plans out there or are you aware of? There's the Kauai Law Project, which has 28 or 30 windmills above Waimea. And then there's the Kahuku Project, has another 12 right now. Okay. And there is another proposal for eight or nine even taller turbines, 656 feet, which is 50 percent taller than the buildings. 50 percent taller than the tallest building downtown. Yeah. Or basically, if you put one at the base of Diamond Head, it'd be about the same size as Diamond Head. That's how big these things are that are now proposed to surround Kahuku. So the people in our district are very concerned. I guess I can leave it at that. Is the energy productions out there? They're killing endangered species. They're a visual blight. Very few people think that they look great. So there's kind of been probably a transition from initial acceptance to a little bit more skeptical look at these things now. A lot more concerned. And in the Kauai Law area, Kahuku, Haula, Laie, that area, they're very concerned because they're worried that with the addition of another energy production that even though it's not direct competition against solar, rooftop solar, they're worried that the grid may not be able to handle it might be taken up. Well, it's another intermittent renewable. And the intermittent part of solar and wind is what destabilizes HIKO's grid. So any addition of industrial-scale solar or industrial-scale wind is going to mean rooftop solar is going to probably be pushed out of the picture because they can control the big stuff. It's harder to control everybody's individual rooftop. So it sounds like we have some work to do with everybody involved to come up with some good solutions. And there's a bit of an equity question too. And I've talked about this. There's a concept called environmental justice. The folks in Kahuku, I think, are overwhelmingly opposed to any additional wind turbines because they've already got them. Right. And now they're going to be expected to take more. And I think it's unreasonable for their position to be ignored. Yeah, I agree. And so I've been a real strong advocate to advocate downtown here.  Well, I'd like to push to your constituents, again, make yourself available. Come down and do some testimony in the legislature. Don't let your state senators sit there and take the brunt of the fight by himself. You folks are the one he's fighting for, so get down there and help him out. That's important. What the people show up makes a difference. And I think people underestimate their power. Well, that's one thing, Stan. We've got a very great community. We do stand up. And, you know, we do protect the North Shore and the windward side. So we're strong in that. But you're right. Your point is still well taken that we do need to make ourselves heard. And unfortunately in the past we have been very good at that, you know, protecting the North Shore. What are some of the other good things going on in your area? Are you familiar with what's going on at School Field with the military? There's a new 50 megawatt. When's that? The opening is coming up. It's pretty soon. Yeah, it's real soon. And we were talking to HECO recently and they're excited about that project coming online. Yeah. Is that being pretty well accepted in the neighborhood? Uh, yeah. That one's not being talked about too much. It's on base. It's, you know, it's base load, right? Firm power. So that's, that's pretty good. And back to one more thing on the windmills. Okay. And solar for that matter is you have to have a base load somewhere for wind that wind. Even when the windmill is spinning at full speed you've got to have right now oil, fire, generator spinning in neutral burning oil. Just in case. But not making electricity. Just in case. So we look at the windmill, we say, wow, that's clean, green, and wonderful. And we don't think about the the oil we're burning. Just a suggestion. This comes from our Michael Gritz and HECOM. We're looking a lot at flywheels. And I know HECO's got a project with with one of the local companies that's doing the flywheels. That's your absolutely your spinning reserve. Instead of running a generator whenever you have surplus electricity you spin up that flywheel. And you keep it spinning and when it's in neutral it's got it's got zero friction bearing. So once you get it spinning it just keeps spinning. And then when you have that load that's unexpected that thing kicks in really fast. And takes up the load. So you don't have to run a generator in conjunction with your wind turbines to do that spinning reserve piece. And so that's that's something that I would say maybe your constituents and yourself could ask HECO to look more into is yeah spinning reserves that that are actually more mechanical than battery or generators. That's great. That's exactly the kind of solution that we need to to fill that load. And we need some sort of storage and because we can generate a lot of solar power during the day. Right. We've talked about this and I think it's really important. I think with the surplus solar we should be making hydrogen. I agree. We take water and we make oxygen and hydrogen. I mean that's pretty good. And then we can fire that up in our cars our fuel cell cars and turn the lights on. We cook whether we knew a lot of things with hydrogen. And not only that but you're making oxygen. Do you have any aquaponics or or like shrimp farms and things? I mean I've been told by the folks that raised fish that if you put oxygen into the system where the fish are rather than just air and air eat the water but put oxygen you actually accelerate their maturity their growth patterns. So you could even take the oxygen which we normally from our electrolysis just throw it away we put in the air and say great we're cleaning up Hawaii's air but if you could actually employ it as a byproduct as a product your fish farms and stuff and your shrimp farms might actually help. I always thought it was ironic when the the submarines have always done this right. So they would keep the oxygen and throw away the hydrogen and now here we are doing exactly the opposite. We're trying to tell the Navy to keep some of the hydrogen from some middle hydride storage instead of lithium batteries on their subs and they're starting to listen to that too. Good idea. Well believe it or not Senator we're at the end of our show and I appreciate you being on and I hope that all all of you will join us next week for Stanley Energy Man and we'll try and get some more folks from Legislature on to give us their side but remembering you know your voice means a lot down at the Legislature so don't hesitate to write your your representative or your senator and especially when it comes time for testimony show up down there and show the committees exactly what you think until next week Allah