Yocheved's Bookshelf

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Human Traffickers
by Joe Ike

As if the world of singles seeking that “Special Someone” isn’t demeaning enough, the fictitious Matefinda.com online dating organization prostitutes its staff and global clientele. Based on factual incidents, Joe Ike’s portrayal of the nefarious world of human traffickers is sickening in its reality-based revelations and chilling “around the corner” effect on the reader.

Human trafficking is presently the politically correct phrase for the prostitution of sexually exploited individuals, a form of slavery that involves every ethnic group abused by human predators. The problem has been addressed in the mass media, from starving Chinese immigrants crammed into cargo holds to deserted Mexicans perspiring to death in sweltering truck trailers. Ike indicates that “[Human Traffickers]… is a montage of various human trafficking cases that actually happened around the world, but… elaborated to fit a… plot.” His fictitious story about the phenomenon takes place in sexy San Francisco, California. Here, beautiful singles at their professional and physical peak become involved in the world of prostitution against their will and powerful individuals at their moral depth prey on an international smorgasbord of lonely hearts.

The plot follows the ramifications of Miss Lynn Chidu’s involvement within the Matefinda.com organization. An administrative assistant at Matefinda.com and the story’s victimized protagonist, Lynn Chidu is an immigration case gone dangerously awry. Her vulnerability lies in the false and inconsistent information she supplied on the immigration application being abused by her boss Neel Kumar. Kumar’s manipulates Lynn’s precarious legal status by coercing the enslaved secretary into luring other defenseless foreign women into the world’s most degrading profession. Readers will sympathize with the predicament of immigrants desperate to gain footholds for a better life in America as they recognize a tale crafted from today’s headlines.

The pacing of the story is unfortunately somewhat jumpy and jarring. By the time Lynn’s situation is unfairly exposed on page 77 to the time she is hospitalized due to a car accident on page 106, the incidental and violent end to her romantic relationship turns out to be one of several complications in Lynn’s overall predicament. In between those passages the reader learns, through retrospective vignettes, of predatory abuses upon a global and growing number of innocent and not-so-innocent victims. Their welfare eventually depends on the successful initiative of Robin Kirchoff, titular head of the fictional International Organization Against Trafficking in Women in Washington, DC. Kirchoff intends to expose rampant international sexual exploitation and in-depth knowledge of how MateFinda.com and similar fronts seek out and enslave female clients. With the aid of Chidu’s secret micro-recorder, Kirchoff alerts capable reporters to a worldwide network of sex-slave traders and the action moves from there.

The back-and-forth (and what initially seems to be unconnected) action culminates in the potential linchpin that can collapse the story’s predatory schemes and schemers. The settings in Russia, throughout the USA, in depressingly dreary warehouses, and by-the-book government offices are offered in rapid-fire fashion and without sufficient descriptive details. A significant part of the story rests on the readers’ imaginations. Although Kirchoff seems to be the embodiment of the do-gooder stereotype, Chidu and her fellow immigrant victims come across more believably. The author succeeds at garnering sympathy for the plight of real women (some of them highly educated professionals) unwittingly caught up in the prostitution vortex. Despite the need to reread many passages for a sense of clarity and the recurring need to sort out the chronology of Human Traffickers, readers may also find it hard to ever consider using or recommending online and other mass media-touted dating services.

The paperback book details techniques for human trafficking, the technological and human means by which the US Immigration and Naturalization Services attempt to prevent illegal border crossings, and how the two interact. According to the author, his expertise on the overall topic stems from being “… a strong advocate of women issues. Over the years my interest came to rest on the subjects of sexual harassment in the workplace (of which a close relative was a victim) and human trafficking (which has consistently received half-hearted attention from lawmakers). I spent over two years (1999-2000) researching [actual] stories of human trafficking victims… as well legislative overtures from interest groups and anti-human trafficking activists.” Ike blends the subjects with modern crime- enabling technologies that up the ante beyond the realm of today's standards of law enforcement.

A bit heavy of the “Tell” versus the more professional “Show” technique of storytelling, the text also suffers from punctuation errors and grammatical limitations (a lack of past perfect, past present and future perfect sentence structures results in awkward phrasing throughout the story). The result is an occasionally jarring story line and the need to reread whole paragraphs in order to understand the time/place/person of the narrative. An example of the problems appears on page 269: “Brian got his first dose of disappointment when one of the CART agents told him that every newspaper in San Francisco already carried the story as told by Robin. How could she? After some thought, he dismissed his anger towards her. After all, she gave him the best leads in the case.” The reader is left to wonder about the nature of the unexplained disappointment, the abrupt forgiveness of a betrayal, and to ponder over the chronologically and grammatically awkward passage.

Problems aside, Human Traffickers cries for an end to sexual and other abuses of immigrants. It also portrays actual INS technology that both monitors registered aliens and strives to prevent illegal entry into the USA. The resolution to the story is partly the portrayal of depravity on behalf of the individuals preying on each other and on the lonely public via online dating service, and partly the call to arms as one successful prosecution case concludes. International in scope, the story depicts the vulnerability and cruel treatment of foreigners longing to start life anew on American soil.

Relevant publicity material indicate that author Joe Ike is the Vice President of the Alliance Articulators Club of Dallas (Toast Masters International). One passage from the publicity kit reads, “Once in our lifetime we make choices that alter our lives forever, like thousands of trafficked women and children make every year. This book is in response to the muted plea of these subjugated victims…” Human Traffickers (ISBN: 1-58982-056-8) was published in February 2004 by American Book Publishing.