New York Anti-Trafficking Coalition

Slaves of New York
Editorial
The New York Times
May 20, 2007

New York City and its wealthy suburbs are full of desperate immigrants who suffer greatly at the hands of abusive employers. Many factors help to wrap these crimes in silence, especially the immigrants’ ignorance and shame, and their fear of arrest and deportation.

It is thus cause for considerable cheer that New York State’s leaders last week agreed on a long-awaited measure that would crack down on the trafficking of people for sex and labor while offering help to the victims. Any doubts that we badly need such a law were dispelled by a horrifying story of exploitation and cruelty that surfaced last week in Long Island.

According to federal prosecutors, a couple in Muttontown, a wealthy enclave near Oyster Bay, kept two Indonesian women in virtual slavery for years, paying them a pittance for long hours of domestic labor punctuated with sickening abuses. The couple, Varsha Mahender Sabhnani and Mahender Murlidhar Sabhnani, who run a multimillion-dollar perfume business from their home, are said to have given the women little food and forced them to sleep on mats on the floor and to hide when visitors came. According to court papers, Mrs. Sabhnani often beat one of the women with a stick and burned her with cigarettes and scalding water.

The story came to light early on Mother’s Day, when one of the women showed up at a Dunkin’ Donuts, bruised and disheveled, wearing only pants and a towel. Employees invited her in and offered her a jacket and coffee, then called 911 after seeing her injuries. The couple have been charged with violating a federal law against slavery.

The Sabhnanis are entitled to the presumption of innocence about what their lawyers say is merely “an assault allegation.” But the accusations against them should jolt people awake to a wider problem that law enforcement officials and human-rights advocacy groups have been warning about for years. Although there is a federal law against human trafficking for sex and labor, the Justice Department is usually forced to spend its limited resources in breaking up larger operations, like prostitution rings, and not individual cases of exploited nannies or maids.

For its part, New York has long needed an aggressive anti-trafficking law that contains tough penalties, helps victims to escape their tormenters and offers an array of social services once they do. A good bill sponsored last year by Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, a Bronx Democrat, was badly weakened in committee, and the session ended without a chance to improve it and hammer out a final bill with the Senate.

The news is better this year. Gov. Eliot Spitzer and the Legislature reached a deal last week on an anti-trafficking bill that would turn such forms of modern slavery, particularly prostitution, into felonies and offer victims emergency housing and health care and other services from the state. Their action comes too late for the Indonesian women. But for others who are out among us, suffering mutely, the hope for justice has improved.