Ask Secretary of State Clinton to Support Iraqi Sex Trafficking Victims

There are an estimated 50,000 Iraqi refugees in forced prostitution in Syria. They range from mothers trying to feed their children to young girls left alone by the war and trying to survive. Many of the women travelled to Syria looking for work in factories, but there was none to be found. Refugees from violence and without many marketable skills, they make easy targets for sex traffickers. Others, especially young girls who are virgins, are trafficked out of Iraq by familiy members and sold into marriage or prostitution. But regardless of the path into trafficking, the reason so many of these women and girls are vulnerable to trafficking is the wake of violence and chaos left by the Iraq war. Their lives are the mess the U.S. government is leaving behind.

However there is one relatively easy step the U.S. State Department can take to help women trafficked into the sex industry during and after the Iraq war: classify them as P-2 refuggees. The P-2 group was created to give people in designated "vulnerable populations" (including sex trafficking victims) a way to skip over some of the beaurocracy of getting refugee status and expedite their resettlement to a new country. It's the same tool that was used to help resettle the children of U.S. soldiers and Vietnamese women created during the Vietnam war. However, the State Department has created no new Iraqi P-2 groups for the thousands of women who are now sex slaves as a result of the war.

Please, ask Secretary Clinton to support Iraqi sex trafficking victims by creating a P-2 group for them.

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