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September 25, 2003: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton discussed human trafficking and smuggling with host Jamie Rubin, as part of a two-hour WIDE ANGLE special presentation that was broadcast in the show's second season.
Jamie Rubin: Senator Clinton, thank you for joining us on WIDE ANGLE.
Hillary Clinton: Thank you.
Jamie Rubin: During your time as First Lady, you took up this issue of trafficking in women and trafficking in general. What was it about this issue that struck you and made you take it on?
Hillary Clinton: Well. Jamie, the fact that this is a modern-day form of slavery was shocking to me. When I realized, because of my travels and exposure as First Lady, how prevalent it was, I determined that we should do something about it. I went to Beijing to the UN Conference on Women in September of 1995, and spoke out against a long series of abuses that were human rights violations of women's rights and among those, of course, was trafficking. And then, in the time after the conference, when it did become an item that was of higher interest on the national and international agenda, we followed up. In 1996, I went with my husband to Thailand for a state visit. I went to the north where I met with NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], trying to help young girls who had been sold by their families into prostitution, trafficked into the brothels, mostly in Bangkok.
Jamie Rubin: So they were sex slaves, these girls.
Hillary Clinton: They were. They were 10, 11, 12 years old. I remember going to a hospice and meeting a 12-year-old girl who had become very sick because of AIDS, had been thrown out of the brothel, had found her way back to her family, who didn't want her, and ended up in this hospice for dying teenagers and adolescents. And both I and my staff, led by Melanne Verveer, who was responsible for the work on issues like this, began talking about it with everyone we could find in the White House and the State Department. In 1997, we began something called Vital Voices, and we brought together women from the former Soviet Union in Vienna. And what I found was that it was a huge problem, not just in a country in Asia, like Thailand, but also in Ukraine, Belarus, the former Soviet Union. And then the administration, under my husband's leadership and under Secretary Albright's leadership, really made this a high priority, which led to our involvement in international conferences with the Secretary of State, the President, and other high officials, raising this with governments around the world.
Jamie Rubin: This was new, for an American government to take this issue on.
Hillary Clinton: It really was. When Madeline Albright became Secretary of State -- after the announcement and when she was confirmed -- I went over to the State Department. And we had a joint meeting where we talked about women's rights as being really important to American foreign policy -- and not as some kind of marginal luxury that maybe when we didn't have something better to think about we could worry about. Because where women have rights, as we have found in Afghanistan, and in many other parts of the world, the countries are more likely to be stable, they are more likely to be pro-democracy and understand the values of the West and America. And so Secretary Albright particularly took this to heart. And because of an interagency process that was set up after Beijing to see what the United States needed to do to implement the platform for action that came out of that conference, we began not only looking abroad, but internally. And we discovered that somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 people, mostly women, are trafficked into our country every year as well.
Jamie Rubin: Were there bureaucratic steps you took inside our government to get the Justice Department, the State Department, to make these high priorities?
Hillary Clinton: Well, I didn't do it. The administration did it, but I strongly recommended that there be a position in the State Department, that the Department of Justice begin to focus more on not only protecting the victims, but prosecuting the perpetrators. All of this led to the passage of legislation in 2000, The Trafficking of Victims Act. And that was a tremendous step forward, that the United States would take this position against this horrible crime, would put resources into training police and other law enforcement officials, would make it a priority for U.S. attorneys to prosecute, and would try to provide some resources to help victims. Because once you find a brothel, a sweatshop, someone who is held in domestic servitude, often that person doesn't speak the language, they are afraid; they have no place to go. So money was put into programs to try to help protect and provide assistance to victims too.
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Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton
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