Late on a hot, August afternoon, IJM assisted local authorities in raiding a
rice mill for the second time in less than two years. This was the first time
IJM helped raid the same slave-facility more than once to rescue different
groups of slaves and to press criminal charges again against its owner.
In March 2004, IJM and local authorities rescued 35 people from slavery
and sexual harassment at the mill. The owner pled guilty in a summary
trial, but was released immediately upon the conclusion of his court hearing
—held virtually unaccountable for the enslavement and gross abuse he had
inflicted. Emboldened by impunity, the slave owner “restocked” his mill
with new slaves and began to brag openly about how he would continue his
operations using forced laborers and that no one could stop him.
After trying for several months to gain access to the mill and meet some
of the “second generation victims,” IJM’s lead investigator designed and
executed an intricate mission that arranged for IJM agents to speak with
the owner and to meet the new victims while the owner was occupied.
The owner made outrageous admissions to undercover IJM agents, boasting
about how he trapped this new group through the bait of illegal
monetary advances. He described how he would track down victims that
escaped his facility, how he could not be touched and how there was
nothing anyone could do to change the system. IJM agents believed otherwise
and remained committed to bringing the owner to justice.
The second raid saw another eleven people receive release certificates from
the government, certifying their new-found freedom. During the raid,
the owner had to be physically restrained after trying to hit a police officer
who had blocked him from harassing the victims. IJM’s intervention
team, which has facilitated the rescue of hundreds of slaves, said they had
never seen a group of slaves pack so quickly to leave a facility.
In recent raids to emancipate slaves, IJM staff members have been assaulted,
their vehicles have been damaged by rioting slave owners and death threats
have been hurled against both victims and IJM staff. These are the obstacles
that give cruel slave-masters a false assurance that no one can touch them—
that the system will never change. But the system is changing.
(continued on next page)
Freedom at a Rice Mill
Families rescued from slavery from a rice mill
hold government-issued release certificates, certifying
their freedom. They now live in a village
together where they have their own houses, visible
in the background of this picture.
* In order to protect the individuals IJM serves and those who carry out the work, faces of sex abuse victims and particular IJM
investigators have been blurred. To further conceal the identities of victims and safeguard ongoing IJM casework, pseudonyms
have been used though the accounts are real. Actual names and casework documentation are on file with IJM.
All text and images © 2006 International Justice Mission
The slaveowner at the rice mill has again been charged by police with
crimes relating to slavery and currently awaits trial. As a documented
recidivist, he is now likely to gain much less favor now with local criminal
justice authorities.
IJM social workers continue to follow-up with the former victims to ensure
they are able to care for themselves and their families as they embrace
new lives of freedom. Many of the rescued victims have been provided
with monetary compensation from the local government and are capitalizing
on their freedom by starting new businesses, breeding goats and
investing in their childrens’ education.
Many of the former slaves have built brick houses for their families. Their
new homes are set in a beautiful, open landscape with the barbed wire
fence that held them captive in the mill barely visible far in the distance.
Reflecting on the juxtaposition, one IJM agent remarked, “[s]eeing how
their lives have changed makes everything we do worth the effort.”
IJM attorneys continue to monitor the criminal case against the slaveowner
and are hopeful that he will receive an appropriate sentence for his crimes,
thus deterring future abuses. However, if the slaveowner is again released
with impunity, IJM agents will continue to help authorities raid his facilities
every time he holds even a single slave, until justice is secured.
The rice mill case is a poignant reminder of why criminal accountability
for the perpetrators of abuse is an essential element in IJM’s holistic approach.
The steadfast work of standing for justice, going back again and
again, one case at a time, one raid at a time, will break the back of slavery,
changing the equation for both the perpetrators and the victims.
* In order to protect the individuals IJM serves and those who carry out the work, faces of sex abuse victims and particular IJM
investigators have been blurred. To further conceal the identities of victims and safeguard ongoing IJM casework, pseudonyms
have been used though the accounts are real. Actual names and casework documentation are on file with IJM.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
In Denial
Dale Lapthorne, father of missing girl, Britt, fears that his daughter may have been kidnapped by Human Traffickers while backpacking in Croatia.
He said, on ABC Radio, that Croation officials strongly denied this possibility stating that no trafficking of women into sexual servitude takes place in Croatia.
US State Department Reports dispute their claim:
Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery
Republic of Croatia
[ Country-by-Country Reports ]
The Republic of Croatia is located in the northwest corner of the Balkan Peninsula and is bounded by Slovenia (NW), Hungary (NE), Serbia and Montenegro (E), by Bosnia and Hercegovina (S & E), and by the Adriatic Sea in the west. Its capital city is Zagreb. Following political changes in 2000, Croatia is gradually moving towards a fully democratic society with a free market economy.
Croatia is a source, transit, and increasingly a destination country, for women and girls trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Croatian females are trafficked within the country and women and girls from Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and other parts of Eastern Europe are trafficked to and through Croatia for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Croatian men are occasionally trafficked for forced labor. Victims transiting Croatia from Southeastern Europe are trafficked into Western Europe for commercial sexual exploitation. IOM reported continued seasonal rotation of international women in prostitution to and from the Dalmatian coast during high tourist seasons, raising concerns about trafficking. - U.S. State Dept Trafficking in Persons Report, June, 2008
Up-Date on Hunt for Missing Girl.
Britt hunt intensifies, Facebook page sealed12:00 AEST Wed Oct 1 2008
The father of missing Melbourne backpacker Britt Lapthorne says the investigation into his daughter's disappearance after a night out in Dubrovnik is making "huge progress" after the case made the front pages of major newspapers in Croatia.
Dale Lapthorne's comments came as the 11,000-member Facebook group set up to track Britt down was made off limits to the public, after what her father suspects was the intervention of the Australian Federal Police [AFP].
Mr Lapthorne, who has so far been very critical of the search effort, today said Croatian police had stepped up their hunt for his 21-year-old daughter, who was last seen outside a Dubrovnik nightclub 12 days ago.
"The intensity [of the investigation] has improved dramatically," Mr Lapthorne told ninemsn.
"They've made huge progress, which they should have made weeks ago. My son tells me things are happening."
Local police were overnight expected to begin watching long-awaited CCTV footage of the area outside Club Fuego, between the hours of 12-4am, when its thought Britt may have left the popular tourist nighspot.
"It was OK and there was some reasonable footage," Mr Lapthorne said, adding the investigation prevented him from going into specific details.
Mr Lapthorne hailed the attention his daughter's case was finally receiving in Croatia, after he publicly lobbied Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Foreign Minister Steven Smith to weigh in on his daughter's case.
Mr Rudd yesterday told TODAY that all resources would be made available to find "this young one".
Mr Rudd's comments had made the front pages of major newspapers in Croatia and lifted the case's profile, Mr Lapthorne said.
Mr Smith earlier announced the deployment of an Australian Federal Police to Dubrovnik, who is due to arrive there later today.
The arrival of investigators from the Croatian capital Zagreb was also a big factor in improving the search effort, Mr Lapthorne said.
Britt's parents had been critical of how long it had taken authorities to inspect the CCTV footage, on Monday accusing the local police of lying about whether they had seen it at all.
Meanwhile, the Facebook group titled "MISSING PERSON, BRITT LAPTHORNE!!!", created to help locate the RMIT student, was shut down to the public overnight.
The page's administrator Tara Reynolds set the group to private, meaning the public can no longer view any news or the more than 1000 wall posts that been left by last night.
Ms Reynolds, who is in Dubrovnik with Britt's brother Darren Lapthorne, left a brief explanation on the page:
"DUE TO THE NATURE OF THE SENSITIVE SITUATION AT THE MOMENT I HAVE TEMPORARILY MADE THIS GROUP PAGE PRIVATE," she wrote.
"THANK YOU TO ALL WHO HAVE POSTED ON THIS SITE, YOU HAVE ALL BEEN WONDERFUL IN HELPING FIND BRITT."
Mr Lapthorne this morning said he had not spoken to Ms Reynolds since the page had been shut down and did not know why it was no longer available.
"We can't access it either," Mr Lapthorne said from his home in Melbourne.
"I don't know why. I assume the AFP have [intervened]. That's all I can assume."
Mr Lapthorne said the matter had been complicated by the fact he had lost internet access for much of the night.
Ms Reynolds and Darren Lapthorne did not answer calls made by ninemsn this morning.
A second, smaller group set up by Ms Reynolds asking for photos of the missing backpacker is still accessible.
Britt’s mother, Elke Lapthorne, was a regular contributor to the message board of the larger group, offering latest information and thanking the public for their support.
Yesterday, the Lapthornes said they planned to put up a 100,000 Euro ($177,000) reward for information about their daughter's whereabouts.
By Jay Savage, ninemsn
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Fair Trade Milwaukee
Commercial use of Slaves - 21st Century.
Several years ago, when I was a Parish Councilor, Bill Lange asked us Councilors to join him in protesting poor wages for Mexicans working in sweatshops producing jeans. It was during Advent and there was already too much on my plate, so I didn’t go; but I couldn’t stop thinking about Bill’s concern for the working poor.
With that on my mind, and some subsequent reading in the Milwaukee Journal and the National Geographic about the harvesting of cacao and the mining of diamonds, I created a research unit for my students at Menomonee Falls High School. With help from our school’s librarian, my students began researching the stories behind products marketed in the U.S. The products included GAP jeans, chocolate, diamonds, coffee, bananas and more. I asked my students to do their best to get at the truth of the costs and benefits of producing and consuming these products.
This unit turned into an eye-opening experience for my students and for me. We learned about the widespread exploitation of humans: young women working 14-20 hour days, six to seven days per week, in sweatshops in Haiti; boy slaves harvesting cacao beans on the Ivory Coast; amputations and killings resulting from wars paid for by slaves mining diamonds in Sierra Leone; coffee farmers starving in Tanzania, and the beatings of striking banana workers by soldiers in Honduras. We also learned about the degradation of our environment; such as, the loss of 3 million acres of Latin American rainforests (the cost of sun-grown coffee) and the explosion of toxic chemicals contaminating our ground water as consumers dump old cell phones and computers. In short, we learned that free trade, as it’s being practiced, is not a sustainable practice. We learned that we were actively contributing to suffering and death through our purchase of everyday products.
When you learn the kinds of things we learned, you just have to do something. That’s how I got involved with Fair Trade. I learned about Fair trade through my students first and then through Fair Trade volunteers. Fair Trade is a sustainable practice. It promises workers humane working conditions, fair wages, the right to unionize, and more. Fair Trade also calls for improved care of our earth. When you purchase a bag of Fair Trade coffee, for instance, you can be sure that the workers receive not only sustainable wages but also that the coffee has been produced without exposure to chemical pesticides. Furthermore, the beans are shade grown and that means precious animals and insects are not being destroyed in its production. You can be sure of all this because Fair Trade business practices are available for public review.
I believe I have taken a step toward building peace in our world by purchasing and promoting the purchase of Fair Trade goods when possible. Even though I don’t get the satisfaction of seeing how I’m contributing to life-sustaining measures, I know I am doing the right thing. A lot of Blessed Trinity parishioners are also making this commitment in solidarity with the poor. I am grateful (and proud!) to be part of this parish that truly does follow its Mission Statement of reaching out to all.
LIZ DIXON
Patricia Church
Several years ago, when I was a Parish Councilor, Bill Lange asked us Councilors to join him in protesting poor wages for Mexicans working in sweatshops producing jeans. It was during Advent and there was already too much on my plate, so I didn’t go; but I couldn’t stop thinking about Bill’s concern for the working poor.
With that on my mind, and some subsequent reading in the Milwaukee Journal and the National Geographic about the harvesting of cacao and the mining of diamonds, I created a research unit for my students at Menomonee Falls High School. With help from our school’s librarian, my students began researching the stories behind products marketed in the U.S. The products included GAP jeans, chocolate, diamonds, coffee, bananas and more. I asked my students to do their best to get at the truth of the costs and benefits of producing and consuming these products.
This unit turned into an eye-opening experience for my students and for me. We learned about the widespread exploitation of humans: young women working 14-20 hour days, six to seven days per week, in sweatshops in Haiti; boy slaves harvesting cacao beans on the Ivory Coast; amputations and killings resulting from wars paid for by slaves mining diamonds in Sierra Leone; coffee farmers starving in Tanzania, and the beatings of striking banana workers by soldiers in Honduras. We also learned about the degradation of our environment; such as, the loss of 3 million acres of Latin American rainforests (the cost of sun-grown coffee) and the explosion of toxic chemicals contaminating our ground water as consumers dump old cell phones and computers. In short, we learned that free trade, as it’s being practiced, is not a sustainable practice. We learned that we were actively contributing to suffering and death through our purchase of everyday products.
When you learn the kinds of things we learned, you just have to do something. That’s how I got involved with Fair Trade. I learned about Fair trade through my students first and then through Fair Trade volunteers. Fair Trade is a sustainable practice. It promises workers humane working conditions, fair wages, the right to unionize, and more. Fair Trade also calls for improved care of our earth. When you purchase a bag of Fair Trade coffee, for instance, you can be sure that the workers receive not only sustainable wages but also that the coffee has been produced without exposure to chemical pesticides. Furthermore, the beans are shade grown and that means precious animals and insects are not being destroyed in its production. You can be sure of all this because Fair Trade business practices are available for public review.
I believe I have taken a step toward building peace in our world by purchasing and promoting the purchase of Fair Trade goods when possible. Even though I don’t get the satisfaction of seeing how I’m contributing to life-sustaining measures, I know I am doing the right thing. A lot of Blessed Trinity parishioners are also making this commitment in solidarity with the poor. I am grateful (and proud!) to be part of this parish that truly does follow its Mission Statement of reaching out to all.
LIZ DIXON
Patricia Church
Defying Solution???
A bold challenge to the grim crime of sexual slavery
Nicholas Kristof
September 28, 2008
WORLD leaders paraded through New York last week for a UN General Assembly reviewing their (lack of) progress in fighting global poverty. That's urgent and necessary, but what they aren't talking enough about is one of the grimmest of all manifestations of poverty — sex trafficking.
This is widely acknowledged to be the 21st-century version of slavery, but governments accept it partly because it seems to defy solution. Prostitution is said to be the oldest profession. It exists in all countries, and if some teenage girls are imprisoned in brothels until they die of AIDS, that is seen as tragic but inevitable.
The perfect counterpoint to that fatalism is Somaly Mam, one of the bravest and boldest of those foreign visitors pouring into New York City this month. Mam is a Cambodian who as a young teenager was sold to brothels and now runs an organisation that extricates girls from forced prostitution.
Now Mam has published her inspiring memoir, The Road of Lost Innocence, in the United States, and it offers some lessons for tackling the broader problem.
In the past when I've seen Mam and her team in Cambodia, I frankly didn't figure that she would survive this long. Gangsters who run the brothels have held a gun to her head, and seeing that they could not intimidate Mam with their threats, they found another way to hurt her: they kidnapped and brutalised her 14-year-old daughter.
Three years ago, I wrote from Cambodia about a raid Mam organised on the Chai Hour II brothel where more than 200 girls had been imprisoned. Girls rescued from the brothel were taken to Mam's shelter, but the next day gangsters raided the shelter, kidnapped the girls and took them right back to the brothel.
Yet Mam continued her fight, and, with the help of many others, she has registered real progress. Today, she says, the Chai Hour II brothel is shuttered. In large part, so is the Svay Pak brothel area where 12-year-old girls were openly for sale on my first visit.
"If you want to buy a virgin, it's not easy now," say Mam in English, her fifth language.
Mam's shelters — where the youngest girl rescued is four years old — provide an education and job skills. More important, Mam applies public and international pressure to push the police to crack down on the worst brothels, and takes brothel owners to court. The idea is to undermine the sex-trafficking business model.
In her book, Mam recounts how she grew up as an orphan and was "adopted" by a man who sold her to a brothel. Once when Mam ran away, the police gang-raped her. Then her owner, on recovering his "property", not only beat and humiliated her but tied her down naked and poured live maggots over her skin and in her mouth.
Yet even after that, Mam occasionally defied him. Once two new girls, about 14 years old, were brought in to the brothel and left tied up. Mam untied them and let them run away. For that, she was tortured with electric shocks.
As Cambodia opened up, Mam began to get foreign clients, whom she vastly preferred because they didn't beat her as well, and she began learning foreign languages. Eventually, a French aid worker named Pierre Legros married her, and together they started Afesip, a small organisation to fight sex trafficking. They have since divorced, and Mam works primarily through the Somaly Mam Foundation, set up by admiring Americans to finance her battle against trafficking in Cambodia. It's a successful collaboration between American do-gooders with money and a Cambodian do-gooder with local street smarts.
The world's worst trafficking is in Asia, but teenage runaways in the United States are also routinely brutalised by their pimps. If a white, middle-class blonde goes missing, the authorities issue an "amber alert" and cable TV goes berserk, but neither federal nor local authorities do nearly enough to go after pimps who savagely abuse troubled girls who don't fit the "missing blonde" narrative. The system is broken.
A bill to strengthen federal anti-trafficking efforts within the United States was overwhelmingly passed by the House of Representatives, led by Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat. But crucial provisions to crack down on pimping are being blocked in the Senate in part by senators Sam Brownback and Joe Biden, who consider the House provisions unnecessary and problematic. (Barack Obama gets it and says the right things about trafficking to the public, but apparently not to his running mate.)
With UN leaders focused on overcoming poverty, Mam is a reminder that we needn't acquiesce in the enslavement of girls, in this country or abroad. If we defeated slavery in the 19th century, we can beat it in the 21st century.
NEW YORK TIMES
Nicholas Kristof
September 28, 2008
WORLD leaders paraded through New York last week for a UN General Assembly reviewing their (lack of) progress in fighting global poverty. That's urgent and necessary, but what they aren't talking enough about is one of the grimmest of all manifestations of poverty — sex trafficking.
This is widely acknowledged to be the 21st-century version of slavery, but governments accept it partly because it seems to defy solution. Prostitution is said to be the oldest profession. It exists in all countries, and if some teenage girls are imprisoned in brothels until they die of AIDS, that is seen as tragic but inevitable.
The perfect counterpoint to that fatalism is Somaly Mam, one of the bravest and boldest of those foreign visitors pouring into New York City this month. Mam is a Cambodian who as a young teenager was sold to brothels and now runs an organisation that extricates girls from forced prostitution.
Now Mam has published her inspiring memoir, The Road of Lost Innocence, in the United States, and it offers some lessons for tackling the broader problem.
In the past when I've seen Mam and her team in Cambodia, I frankly didn't figure that she would survive this long. Gangsters who run the brothels have held a gun to her head, and seeing that they could not intimidate Mam with their threats, they found another way to hurt her: they kidnapped and brutalised her 14-year-old daughter.
Three years ago, I wrote from Cambodia about a raid Mam organised on the Chai Hour II brothel where more than 200 girls had been imprisoned. Girls rescued from the brothel were taken to Mam's shelter, but the next day gangsters raided the shelter, kidnapped the girls and took them right back to the brothel.
Yet Mam continued her fight, and, with the help of many others, she has registered real progress. Today, she says, the Chai Hour II brothel is shuttered. In large part, so is the Svay Pak brothel area where 12-year-old girls were openly for sale on my first visit.
"If you want to buy a virgin, it's not easy now," say Mam in English, her fifth language.
Mam's shelters — where the youngest girl rescued is four years old — provide an education and job skills. More important, Mam applies public and international pressure to push the police to crack down on the worst brothels, and takes brothel owners to court. The idea is to undermine the sex-trafficking business model.
In her book, Mam recounts how she grew up as an orphan and was "adopted" by a man who sold her to a brothel. Once when Mam ran away, the police gang-raped her. Then her owner, on recovering his "property", not only beat and humiliated her but tied her down naked and poured live maggots over her skin and in her mouth.
Yet even after that, Mam occasionally defied him. Once two new girls, about 14 years old, were brought in to the brothel and left tied up. Mam untied them and let them run away. For that, she was tortured with electric shocks.
As Cambodia opened up, Mam began to get foreign clients, whom she vastly preferred because they didn't beat her as well, and she began learning foreign languages. Eventually, a French aid worker named Pierre Legros married her, and together they started Afesip, a small organisation to fight sex trafficking. They have since divorced, and Mam works primarily through the Somaly Mam Foundation, set up by admiring Americans to finance her battle against trafficking in Cambodia. It's a successful collaboration between American do-gooders with money and a Cambodian do-gooder with local street smarts.
The world's worst trafficking is in Asia, but teenage runaways in the United States are also routinely brutalised by their pimps. If a white, middle-class blonde goes missing, the authorities issue an "amber alert" and cable TV goes berserk, but neither federal nor local authorities do nearly enough to go after pimps who savagely abuse troubled girls who don't fit the "missing blonde" narrative. The system is broken.
A bill to strengthen federal anti-trafficking efforts within the United States was overwhelmingly passed by the House of Representatives, led by Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat. But crucial provisions to crack down on pimping are being blocked in the Senate in part by senators Sam Brownback and Joe Biden, who consider the House provisions unnecessary and problematic. (Barack Obama gets it and says the right things about trafficking to the public, but apparently not to his running mate.)
With UN leaders focused on overcoming poverty, Mam is a reminder that we needn't acquiesce in the enslavement of girls, in this country or abroad. If we defeated slavery in the 19th century, we can beat it in the 21st century.
NEW YORK TIMES
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Major Trafficking Nations
The nations named on the map are of most concern as they appear reluctant to address isues related to Slavery and Trafficking.They failed to comply with requirements of Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, US Department of State as at 2005.
The following maps show Countries of Origin and Preferred Destinations.
The following maps show Countries of Origin and Preferred Destinations.
21st CENTURY SLAVES
A European Perspective
by HANA BUSHNAQ
Human trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion for the purpose of exploitation — sexual or forced labor — for material gain. With 127 countries of origin, 98 transit countries and 137 destination countries, human trafficking is, sadly, still poorly documented and understood.
"Congratulations! A job for you abroad!” One could only imagine how luring such an advert could be for a naïve Albanian teenager, where one third of the children live on less than two dollars a day. It is not only one of the poorest countries in Europe, but also the youngest, with 34% of the population under the age of 18.1 Many girls reading such ads end up as victims of human trafficking. Although it is almost impossible to obtain solid figures of victims around the world, here is a shocking fact: “It certainly runs into millions,” as stated by Antonio Mario Costa, Executive Director of UNODC (United Nations Office On Drugs and Crime).
It is safe to say that no country on the map is immune to the crime of human trafficking or is not affected by it in some way. It has been found that there are 127 countries of origin, 98 transit countries and 137 destination countries.2 As bad as this may sound, human trafficking is still not a well-presented issue. There still exists a confusion with the term human smuggling. Whereas smuggling is the procurement, for financial or material gain of the illegal entry of immigrants, human trafficking is a much bigger crime. It is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion for the purpose of exploitation for material gain. The two main reasons for trafficking are sexual exploitation and forced labor, respectively.
The problem is massive in the poor Eastern European countries. Although the appalling treatment of girls from that region is not unheard of, it is still poorly documented and understood at present and should move higher up the policy agenda.
Trafficking in Europe has more than exploded since the break-up of the former Soviet Union, depicting the problem as the “underside of Globalization.” The massive growth of “shadow economies” in these countries translated to an increase in the number of vulnerable people who fall victim to practices taking place in such economies. The challenges faced by these countries are plenty. In some areas poverty was brought about by natural disasters and conflicts which were subsequently followed by a flow of refugees and migration. Migration has changed the demography of some of the countries in the region.
For example, the population of men is 75 men to 100 women in Armenia.3 In Russia, the great number of single young mothers alongside the decline of cultural and educational services made poverty a much graver reality for women. All this makes the women of these countries desperate for seeking better income jobs abroad, which makes them easy prey for the traffickers. In a country like Azerbaijan, outdated educational systems and lack of proper publicity on the issue pose an extra hurdle for the government and NGOs since the problem is not only demand-based, but should be understood as a multi-faceted problem with children’s proper upbringing being a cornerstone in prevention.
But simply knowing that the problem exists is not enough, as has been found by a UNICEF led research in Moldova in 2002.4 It discovered that children had heard of trafficking but were still eager to migrate and willing to take risks to do so. In Montenegro, when asked how to protect themselves from trafficking, the children cited, “Not to walk alone after dark.” It makes one wonder how much publicity still needs to be reinforced into the minds of these children. Consequently, while dealing with solving the problem, it helps to consider the programs that understand the root causes of trafficking which are those programs focusing on children. UNICEF doesn’t look at trafficking as an isolated issue, but as a result of the intolerable abuse and neglect of children. It helps governments help families raise strong children before the traffickers come after them.
Although we might not be able to obtain solid figures, as the level of reporting varies considerably between countries, we could know more about the kind of girls the traffickers are after and what awaits them after being trafficked. Most are 18 to 24-year-old women trafficked mainly for sexual exploitation, but ages can range from 15-35.5 The girls are brought in by gangs from Lithuania, Albania and the Czech Republic, among others.
The girls themselves come from many different countries. Most victims come from Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, Albania and Moldova. Of those, the Roma ethnic minority is especially vulnerable. Children under 13 years are trafficked for forced labor and begging. These often come from orphanages or residential institutions. In fact, UNICEF states that children in orphanages are ten times more vulnerable to trafficking than children from healthy households. In Moldova, for example, thousands of children grow up without the care of one or both of their parents. More than 14000 children are in institutions.6 For thousands of other families, one or both parents leave their children to work abroad because they cannot find jobs in their country.
The UK is a major European destination, where the police believe 4000 women have been brought in to work as prostitutes, many of which are from Eastern Europe. The selling price of these women is between £2000-£8000.7 On entry to the destination country, their passports are taken away from them, serving as restraint to keep them from running away. The expectations of these girls are to work in restaurant jobs, or as maids or child minders. Some expect to work as lap dancers or escorts—but not prostitutes. For those who know they will be working as prostitutes, they are lied to about the conditions. These women can be expected to work for 16 hours and service as many as 30 men a day, sometimes physically locked in brothels for months.8
With no passports and under the threat of their pimps, they have nowhere to run. Many of them fall ill or become pregnant. They are moved about frequently and sold from dealer to dealer. They work as a means of paying their “debts” to the traffickers, who take all the money leaving them with no chance of ever paying the debt. Other main European destination countries are France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Belgium and Austria. However, the flow of these victims could be anywhere from poor to more affluent countries. It is estimated that there are 10000 victims in the United Arab Emirates, again many of whom are from Eastern Europe.9
Trafficking routes are many, and they change constantly with the changing routes of migration. A route that has been found out to bring victims to the UK starts in Moscow being the trafficking center. Victims then travel a long journey via Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to Poland and the Czech Republic. From there the route to the UK is less understood; however, some direct flights are used from Moscow to the UK. Two trafficking routes to the UK involve Turkey, where 60% of the victims are Ukrainian or Moldovan. The Balkans also provide a trafficking route on to Italy and Greece, with Belgrade and Sarajevo being trafficking centres.
Some of the countries are serious about solving this problem since they aspire to join the European Union. However, global efforts are hampered by lack of accurate data. The data was also often found to be misleading in these regions. The number of trafficking victims appeared to be decreasing because traffickers use newer, more improved methods. Private apartments are used for sexual exploitation and more use is being made of phone and internet communications. The use of female pimps and legal travel documents all contribute to many cases not making it to the fact sheets. For some countries, there appears to be less of a problem than others because the reporting is less accurate than in countries that might be following more rigid documentation.
That said, the problem is obviously too big to ignore, no matter how discrepant the numbers. Thinking of the big picture is essential when putting a solid plan to fight this problem. The root causes of the problem are poverty and lack of proper child development programs. A major factor that is rarely addressed is gender discrimination and the devaluation of women. These components should be well included in the information campaigns that usually generate more fear than answers.
The most compelling information for the young women in the most vulnerable places in villages, small towns and in cities should be provided. These include showing movies, TV and radio talk shows, hotlines and promotional stickers along with any other distributed material. Information campaigns should also be easy to evaluate so that the governments can gauge their success or lack thereof.
Every country in that region must have a national plan legitimized by law to tackle the problem of human trafficking. These laws should aim at reducing demand, targeting the criminals who usually face a low rate of convictions and protecting the victims who are usually criminalized. Protecting the victims proves to have more than just a humane virtue. If the victims are guaranteed protection, they can testify against their aggressors.
They are usually too scared to speak and are sometimes prosecuted and threatened by their previous abductors even after their escape. Dorina is one such victim from Moldova.10 She stayed at the Rehabilitation Centre for Victims of Trafficking that has not made its existence and address public for security reasons; many girls receive threatening phone calls from their former pimps. But simply protecting the victims is not enough, as the plans usually lack proper integration of these individuals into society.
Not only are they usually looked at as criminals or simply prostitutes themselves, but they are not given some of their basic needs. In the case of Dorina, she cut her long blonde hair and dyed it black to avoid being recognized even by her own village, where the stigma is unavoidable. Therapy is an obvious need for these women to slowly start building their trust in the people around them.
The psychologist at Dorina’s center takes care of the victim’s emotional bruising. Also, teaching them new skills and helping them generate their own money is vital for their full incorporation into society. Dorina aspires to undertake vocational training and become a hairdresser. Afterall, going out of their way to improve their living conditions is what got the victims where they are. The advert, the agent or the sudden older male friend were there when strong prevention campaign should have been.
REFERENCES
1. unicef.org/infobythecountry/albania
2. Unodc.org/unodc/en/press_release_2006_04_24.html
3. Archive.idea.int/df/2000df/regional_reports_chapter_1.html
4. Unicef.org/ceecis/protection_3974.html
5. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5343036.stm
6. Unicef.org/infobythecountry/moldova_background.html
7. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5343036.stm
8. Ibid.
9. uae.usembassy.gov
10. http://unicef.org/infobycountry/moldova_24121.html
____________________
HANA BUSHNAQ is research associate at Islamica Magazine
by HANA BUSHNAQ
Human trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion for the purpose of exploitation — sexual or forced labor — for material gain. With 127 countries of origin, 98 transit countries and 137 destination countries, human trafficking is, sadly, still poorly documented and understood.
"Congratulations! A job for you abroad!” One could only imagine how luring such an advert could be for a naïve Albanian teenager, where one third of the children live on less than two dollars a day. It is not only one of the poorest countries in Europe, but also the youngest, with 34% of the population under the age of 18.1 Many girls reading such ads end up as victims of human trafficking. Although it is almost impossible to obtain solid figures of victims around the world, here is a shocking fact: “It certainly runs into millions,” as stated by Antonio Mario Costa, Executive Director of UNODC (United Nations Office On Drugs and Crime).
It is safe to say that no country on the map is immune to the crime of human trafficking or is not affected by it in some way. It has been found that there are 127 countries of origin, 98 transit countries and 137 destination countries.2 As bad as this may sound, human trafficking is still not a well-presented issue. There still exists a confusion with the term human smuggling. Whereas smuggling is the procurement, for financial or material gain of the illegal entry of immigrants, human trafficking is a much bigger crime. It is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion for the purpose of exploitation for material gain. The two main reasons for trafficking are sexual exploitation and forced labor, respectively.
The problem is massive in the poor Eastern European countries. Although the appalling treatment of girls from that region is not unheard of, it is still poorly documented and understood at present and should move higher up the policy agenda.
Trafficking in Europe has more than exploded since the break-up of the former Soviet Union, depicting the problem as the “underside of Globalization.” The massive growth of “shadow economies” in these countries translated to an increase in the number of vulnerable people who fall victim to practices taking place in such economies. The challenges faced by these countries are plenty. In some areas poverty was brought about by natural disasters and conflicts which were subsequently followed by a flow of refugees and migration. Migration has changed the demography of some of the countries in the region.
For example, the population of men is 75 men to 100 women in Armenia.3 In Russia, the great number of single young mothers alongside the decline of cultural and educational services made poverty a much graver reality for women. All this makes the women of these countries desperate for seeking better income jobs abroad, which makes them easy prey for the traffickers. In a country like Azerbaijan, outdated educational systems and lack of proper publicity on the issue pose an extra hurdle for the government and NGOs since the problem is not only demand-based, but should be understood as a multi-faceted problem with children’s proper upbringing being a cornerstone in prevention.
But simply knowing that the problem exists is not enough, as has been found by a UNICEF led research in Moldova in 2002.4 It discovered that children had heard of trafficking but were still eager to migrate and willing to take risks to do so. In Montenegro, when asked how to protect themselves from trafficking, the children cited, “Not to walk alone after dark.” It makes one wonder how much publicity still needs to be reinforced into the minds of these children. Consequently, while dealing with solving the problem, it helps to consider the programs that understand the root causes of trafficking which are those programs focusing on children. UNICEF doesn’t look at trafficking as an isolated issue, but as a result of the intolerable abuse and neglect of children. It helps governments help families raise strong children before the traffickers come after them.
Although we might not be able to obtain solid figures, as the level of reporting varies considerably between countries, we could know more about the kind of girls the traffickers are after and what awaits them after being trafficked. Most are 18 to 24-year-old women trafficked mainly for sexual exploitation, but ages can range from 15-35.5 The girls are brought in by gangs from Lithuania, Albania and the Czech Republic, among others.
The girls themselves come from many different countries. Most victims come from Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, Albania and Moldova. Of those, the Roma ethnic minority is especially vulnerable. Children under 13 years are trafficked for forced labor and begging. These often come from orphanages or residential institutions. In fact, UNICEF states that children in orphanages are ten times more vulnerable to trafficking than children from healthy households. In Moldova, for example, thousands of children grow up without the care of one or both of their parents. More than 14000 children are in institutions.6 For thousands of other families, one or both parents leave their children to work abroad because they cannot find jobs in their country.
The UK is a major European destination, where the police believe 4000 women have been brought in to work as prostitutes, many of which are from Eastern Europe. The selling price of these women is between £2000-£8000.7 On entry to the destination country, their passports are taken away from them, serving as restraint to keep them from running away. The expectations of these girls are to work in restaurant jobs, or as maids or child minders. Some expect to work as lap dancers or escorts—but not prostitutes. For those who know they will be working as prostitutes, they are lied to about the conditions. These women can be expected to work for 16 hours and service as many as 30 men a day, sometimes physically locked in brothels for months.8
With no passports and under the threat of their pimps, they have nowhere to run. Many of them fall ill or become pregnant. They are moved about frequently and sold from dealer to dealer. They work as a means of paying their “debts” to the traffickers, who take all the money leaving them with no chance of ever paying the debt. Other main European destination countries are France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Belgium and Austria. However, the flow of these victims could be anywhere from poor to more affluent countries. It is estimated that there are 10000 victims in the United Arab Emirates, again many of whom are from Eastern Europe.9
Trafficking routes are many, and they change constantly with the changing routes of migration. A route that has been found out to bring victims to the UK starts in Moscow being the trafficking center. Victims then travel a long journey via Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to Poland and the Czech Republic. From there the route to the UK is less understood; however, some direct flights are used from Moscow to the UK. Two trafficking routes to the UK involve Turkey, where 60% of the victims are Ukrainian or Moldovan. The Balkans also provide a trafficking route on to Italy and Greece, with Belgrade and Sarajevo being trafficking centres.
Some of the countries are serious about solving this problem since they aspire to join the European Union. However, global efforts are hampered by lack of accurate data. The data was also often found to be misleading in these regions. The number of trafficking victims appeared to be decreasing because traffickers use newer, more improved methods. Private apartments are used for sexual exploitation and more use is being made of phone and internet communications. The use of female pimps and legal travel documents all contribute to many cases not making it to the fact sheets. For some countries, there appears to be less of a problem than others because the reporting is less accurate than in countries that might be following more rigid documentation.
That said, the problem is obviously too big to ignore, no matter how discrepant the numbers. Thinking of the big picture is essential when putting a solid plan to fight this problem. The root causes of the problem are poverty and lack of proper child development programs. A major factor that is rarely addressed is gender discrimination and the devaluation of women. These components should be well included in the information campaigns that usually generate more fear than answers.
The most compelling information for the young women in the most vulnerable places in villages, small towns and in cities should be provided. These include showing movies, TV and radio talk shows, hotlines and promotional stickers along with any other distributed material. Information campaigns should also be easy to evaluate so that the governments can gauge their success or lack thereof.
Every country in that region must have a national plan legitimized by law to tackle the problem of human trafficking. These laws should aim at reducing demand, targeting the criminals who usually face a low rate of convictions and protecting the victims who are usually criminalized. Protecting the victims proves to have more than just a humane virtue. If the victims are guaranteed protection, they can testify against their aggressors.
They are usually too scared to speak and are sometimes prosecuted and threatened by their previous abductors even after their escape. Dorina is one such victim from Moldova.10 She stayed at the Rehabilitation Centre for Victims of Trafficking that has not made its existence and address public for security reasons; many girls receive threatening phone calls from their former pimps. But simply protecting the victims is not enough, as the plans usually lack proper integration of these individuals into society.
Not only are they usually looked at as criminals or simply prostitutes themselves, but they are not given some of their basic needs. In the case of Dorina, she cut her long blonde hair and dyed it black to avoid being recognized even by her own village, where the stigma is unavoidable. Therapy is an obvious need for these women to slowly start building their trust in the people around them.
The psychologist at Dorina’s center takes care of the victim’s emotional bruising. Also, teaching them new skills and helping them generate their own money is vital for their full incorporation into society. Dorina aspires to undertake vocational training and become a hairdresser. Afterall, going out of their way to improve their living conditions is what got the victims where they are. The advert, the agent or the sudden older male friend were there when strong prevention campaign should have been.
REFERENCES
1. unicef.org/infobythecountry/albania
2. Unodc.org/unodc/en/press_release_2006_04_24.html
3. Archive.idea.int/df/2000df/regional_reports_chapter_1.html
4. Unicef.org/ceecis/protection_3974.html
5. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5343036.stm
6. Unicef.org/infobythecountry/moldova_background.html
7. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5343036.stm
8. Ibid.
9. uae.usembassy.gov
10. http://unicef.org/infobycountry/moldova_24121.html
____________________
HANA BUSHNAQ is research associate at Islamica Magazine
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Difficulties in proving slavery without evidence of locks and chains.
Non-Physical Restraint.
In Wei Tang (The Queen v Wei Tang [2006] VCC 637), Justice McInerney accepted that there was no evidence that the alleged victims in that case had been held under lock and key. However, Justice McInerney found that due to a combination of circumstances, each alleged victim, while not locked in the premises, was 'effectively restrained by the insidious nature of their contract'. Justice McInerney suggested that to comprehend their circumstances, it was relevant to ask the rhetorical question:
How could they run away when they had no money, they had no passport or ticket, they entered on an illegally obtained visa, albeit legal on its face, they had limited English language, they had no friends, they were told to avoid Immigration, they had come to Australia consensually to earn income and were aware of the need to work particularly hard in order to pay off a debt of approximately $45,000 before they were able to earn income for themselves?
Confused Testimony.
When I was at the Villawood Detention Centre, I was totally exhausted and confused, and the time lapse between the event and time when I was in that detention centre has been a long lapse. I remember the events happening but I may have made some mistakes in the chronological order.
Usually, it's common for people to forget details as time passes, especially at that time I was particularly exhausted and confused (transcript of R v Tran, Xu & Qi, 8 April 2005).
Trafficking as a transnational crime
The transnational nature of many trafficking offences can complicate and even thwart prosecutions. For example, while a trafficking case might be prosecuted in the country where the exploitation took place, key evidence may be located in the trafficked person's country of origin. At least in the Australian context, if the evidence is required for court it will generally need to be sought from the country in question through formal channels (a process known as mutual assistance). While mutual assistance channels can operate quickly and smoothly, they can also be slow, inefficient and ineffective (ADB & OECD 2006: 73-105).
The matter is equally complex if the suspect or defendant is located in another jurisdiction. In these cases, investigators and prosecutors must decide whether to seek extradition (a lengthy and complex process) or provide their evidence to the country in question, thereby allowing the authorities in that country to investigate and prosecute. This may involve balancing a number of competing considerations, including the relative likelihood of a criminal justice process progressing in either jurisdiction, the likelihood of an extradition request succeeding and human rights issues.
Trafficked person may be the crucial witness
The trafficked person may be one of only a small number of people who can verify exactly what happened. Accordingly, their evidence may be crucial to the prosecution case (American Cultural Center 2007: 13). This can raise practical challenges for prosecutors.
In many countries, trafficked persons risk deportation or arrest for involvement in illegal activity such as visa fraud or illegal entry. This has the practical result of removing the key witness to the trafficking offence from the jurisdiction or ensuring they are in prison. Some countries have sought to redress this problem, through laws to protect trafficked persons from prosecution and to ensure the immigration status of trafficked persons can be regularised (Carrington & Hearn 2003: 2-13; Costello 2005: 7-11; ICMPD 2004: 53).
While visas and victim support strategies are vital, they also must be managed carefully in the context of a prosecution process. In an adversarial system, it is the defence counsel's role to explore any possible motives the victim and other witnesses may have for fabricating their story. Experience in the United States, Australia and Italy has confirmed that defence counsel can and will argue that the victim's or other witnesses' testimony has been 'bought' or tainted by 'opportunities' offered by the authorities. This might include immunity from prosecution, access to visas or entitlements under the victim support program (American Cultural Center 2007: 9-10; Costello 2005: 10). For example, in the Australian Sieders and Yotchomchin trial, defence counsel drew attention to the fact that the Australian Federal Police had helped key witnesses apply for visas that included work entitlements (see for example, pp. 506 and 630 of the transcript). The implication was that the witnesses should not be believed, as they had ulterior motives for participating in the criminal justice process.
Australian Government Office for Women
Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs – PO Box 7576, Canberra Business Centre ACT 2610
In Wei Tang (The Queen v Wei Tang [2006] VCC 637), Justice McInerney accepted that there was no evidence that the alleged victims in that case had been held under lock and key. However, Justice McInerney found that due to a combination of circumstances, each alleged victim, while not locked in the premises, was 'effectively restrained by the insidious nature of their contract'. Justice McInerney suggested that to comprehend their circumstances, it was relevant to ask the rhetorical question:
How could they run away when they had no money, they had no passport or ticket, they entered on an illegally obtained visa, albeit legal on its face, they had limited English language, they had no friends, they were told to avoid Immigration, they had come to Australia consensually to earn income and were aware of the need to work particularly hard in order to pay off a debt of approximately $45,000 before they were able to earn income for themselves?
Confused Testimony.
When I was at the Villawood Detention Centre, I was totally exhausted and confused, and the time lapse between the event and time when I was in that detention centre has been a long lapse. I remember the events happening but I may have made some mistakes in the chronological order.
Usually, it's common for people to forget details as time passes, especially at that time I was particularly exhausted and confused (transcript of R v Tran, Xu & Qi, 8 April 2005).
Trafficking as a transnational crime
The transnational nature of many trafficking offences can complicate and even thwart prosecutions. For example, while a trafficking case might be prosecuted in the country where the exploitation took place, key evidence may be located in the trafficked person's country of origin. At least in the Australian context, if the evidence is required for court it will generally need to be sought from the country in question through formal channels (a process known as mutual assistance). While mutual assistance channels can operate quickly and smoothly, they can also be slow, inefficient and ineffective (ADB & OECD 2006: 73-105).
The matter is equally complex if the suspect or defendant is located in another jurisdiction. In these cases, investigators and prosecutors must decide whether to seek extradition (a lengthy and complex process) or provide their evidence to the country in question, thereby allowing the authorities in that country to investigate and prosecute. This may involve balancing a number of competing considerations, including the relative likelihood of a criminal justice process progressing in either jurisdiction, the likelihood of an extradition request succeeding and human rights issues.
Trafficked person may be the crucial witness
The trafficked person may be one of only a small number of people who can verify exactly what happened. Accordingly, their evidence may be crucial to the prosecution case (American Cultural Center 2007: 13). This can raise practical challenges for prosecutors.
In many countries, trafficked persons risk deportation or arrest for involvement in illegal activity such as visa fraud or illegal entry. This has the practical result of removing the key witness to the trafficking offence from the jurisdiction or ensuring they are in prison. Some countries have sought to redress this problem, through laws to protect trafficked persons from prosecution and to ensure the immigration status of trafficked persons can be regularised (Carrington & Hearn 2003: 2-13; Costello 2005: 7-11; ICMPD 2004: 53).
While visas and victim support strategies are vital, they also must be managed carefully in the context of a prosecution process. In an adversarial system, it is the defence counsel's role to explore any possible motives the victim and other witnesses may have for fabricating their story. Experience in the United States, Australia and Italy has confirmed that defence counsel can and will argue that the victim's or other witnesses' testimony has been 'bought' or tainted by 'opportunities' offered by the authorities. This might include immunity from prosecution, access to visas or entitlements under the victim support program (American Cultural Center 2007: 9-10; Costello 2005: 10). For example, in the Australian Sieders and Yotchomchin trial, defence counsel drew attention to the fact that the Australian Federal Police had helped key witnesses apply for visas that included work entitlements (see for example, pp. 506 and 630 of the transcript). The implication was that the witnesses should not be believed, as they had ulterior motives for participating in the criminal justice process.
Australian Government Office for Women
Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs – PO Box 7576, Canberra Business Centre ACT 2610
MELBOURNE BROTHEL LICENCE SUSPENDED
21 August 2003
SEX SLAVERY BROTHEL LICENCE SUSPENDED
The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) today indefinitely suspended the brothel licence held by Wei Tang following an application made by Consumer Affairs Victoria (CAV).
"This action was taken in the public interest after Tang had been charged by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) with 'sex slavery' offences," Dr Cousins, the Director of CAV said.
Paul Pick, the manager of the brothel, had his Manager's Approval status suspended.
"The allegations raised issues of exploitation of sex workers as well as issues of community health risks. Consumer Affairs Victoria acted quickly to have VCAT inquire into the allegations and make a decision," Dr Cousins said.
The suspensions remains in force until the Commonwealth's case against the brothel is concluded. Any licensed person convicted of serious indictable offences will be subject to further disciplinary application in VCAT.
On 30 May 2003, Commonwealth authorities raided the licensed brothel known as Club 417, of Brunswick Street Fitzroy, and detained five illegal workers. These workers provided information to the authorities who were then able to lay charges of sex slavery offences.
In this matter Consumer Affairs Victoria has liaised with the AFP and Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs.
This liaison is continuing and Consumer Affairs Victoria investigators today were present during a raid by the Department of Immigration on a licensed brothel in West Footscray. The raid resulted from Immigration officials' concerns that illegal foreign workers were employed at the brothel. CAV officers conducted an audit of the brothel for compliance with the Prostitution Control Act.
CONSUMER AFFAIRS Victoria
SEX SLAVERY BROTHEL LICENCE SUSPENDED
The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) today indefinitely suspended the brothel licence held by Wei Tang following an application made by Consumer Affairs Victoria (CAV).
"This action was taken in the public interest after Tang had been charged by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) with 'sex slavery' offences," Dr Cousins, the Director of CAV said.
Paul Pick, the manager of the brothel, had his Manager's Approval status suspended.
"The allegations raised issues of exploitation of sex workers as well as issues of community health risks. Consumer Affairs Victoria acted quickly to have VCAT inquire into the allegations and make a decision," Dr Cousins said.
The suspensions remains in force until the Commonwealth's case against the brothel is concluded. Any licensed person convicted of serious indictable offences will be subject to further disciplinary application in VCAT.
On 30 May 2003, Commonwealth authorities raided the licensed brothel known as Club 417, of Brunswick Street Fitzroy, and detained five illegal workers. These workers provided information to the authorities who were then able to lay charges of sex slavery offences.
In this matter Consumer Affairs Victoria has liaised with the AFP and Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs.
This liaison is continuing and Consumer Affairs Victoria investigators today were present during a raid by the Department of Immigration on a licensed brothel in West Footscray. The raid resulted from Immigration officials' concerns that illegal foreign workers were employed at the brothel. CAV officers conducted an audit of the brothel for compliance with the Prostitution Control Act.
CONSUMER AFFAIRS Victoria
GERMANY The defendants don't look like slave traders.
Battling Human Trafficking in Germany
With German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer on the hot seat for allegedly ignoring gaping holes in Germany's visa distribution policies, a major trial against a huge forced prostitution ring opens in eastern Germany. The pressure on Fischer is only likely to grow.
DDP
Thousands of Eastern Europeans work as prostitutes in Germany and Western Europe. Many of them not of their own choice.
The doors to the courthouse in the town of Halle in eastern Germany finally open just before 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 17. The electronic security gates swing open and everyone is searched. Cell phones, cameras, and backpacks are all handed in. The trial, in the courthouse of the Eastern German city of Halle -- is about to begin.
Sitting at the defense table in the courtroom are seven defendants who are, according to state prosecutors, part of a gigantic prostitution ring. There are a total of 73 defendants in the case and the charges are many: creation of and belonging to a criminal organization, assault, human trafficking, violation of immigration laws, duress, rape, pimping and violation of weapons laws. The documents of the case fill 139 thick file folders. It takes the prosecutor 41 minutes to read through the laundry list of charges.
The defendants don't look like slave traders. One of the two Italians is wearing a pony tail and pinstripes, the other sketches small pictures on the pad in front of him. The Greek woman looks like she'd rather be cooking moussaka than importing women as prostitutes.
According to the prosecution, the idea of the ring was simple: take women primarily from Eastern Europe, and bring them together with johns in Germany. At first, the gang was forced to smuggle the women over the border into Germany. Once the German Foreign Ministry loosened its rules for distributing visas at its diplomatic outposts in Kiev, Moscow and Minsk, it became much easier and cheaper. And, indeed, the list of witnesses to be called, many of them forced into prostitution by the ring, reads like an Eastern European telephone book: dozens of Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Poles, Belarussians and Czechs.
The beginning of the trial promises to put even more pressure on popular German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. Accused of having ignored warning signs that criminal groups like this one were taking advantage of liberal visa laws, he finds himself confronted with the biggest scandal of his political career. On the eve of the trial's start, opposition politician Michael Glos of Bavaria's Christian Social Union once again indicated that Fischer should bear a large burden of the responsibility for the recent boom in this kind of organized crime and human trafficking. He even repeated his insinuation that Fischer's policies make him a "pimp" and said that as soon as pictures of the sex slaves hit the press, Fischer would be in trouble.
The trial will take many weeks to complete. Meanwhile, Fischer himself faces many weeks of investigation by a special commission created to examine his role in the visa affair. Meanwhile, the loophole used by the prostitution ring remains open.
Sasha, trafficked in Germany & the Netherlands, originally from the Czech Republic; Interview with Michele A. Clark, Co-Director, The Protection Project
With German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer on the hot seat for allegedly ignoring gaping holes in Germany's visa distribution policies, a major trial against a huge forced prostitution ring opens in eastern Germany. The pressure on Fischer is only likely to grow.
DDP
Thousands of Eastern Europeans work as prostitutes in Germany and Western Europe. Many of them not of their own choice.
The doors to the courthouse in the town of Halle in eastern Germany finally open just before 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 17. The electronic security gates swing open and everyone is searched. Cell phones, cameras, and backpacks are all handed in. The trial, in the courthouse of the Eastern German city of Halle -- is about to begin.
Sitting at the defense table in the courtroom are seven defendants who are, according to state prosecutors, part of a gigantic prostitution ring. There are a total of 73 defendants in the case and the charges are many: creation of and belonging to a criminal organization, assault, human trafficking, violation of immigration laws, duress, rape, pimping and violation of weapons laws. The documents of the case fill 139 thick file folders. It takes the prosecutor 41 minutes to read through the laundry list of charges.
The defendants don't look like slave traders. One of the two Italians is wearing a pony tail and pinstripes, the other sketches small pictures on the pad in front of him. The Greek woman looks like she'd rather be cooking moussaka than importing women as prostitutes.
According to the prosecution, the idea of the ring was simple: take women primarily from Eastern Europe, and bring them together with johns in Germany. At first, the gang was forced to smuggle the women over the border into Germany. Once the German Foreign Ministry loosened its rules for distributing visas at its diplomatic outposts in Kiev, Moscow and Minsk, it became much easier and cheaper. And, indeed, the list of witnesses to be called, many of them forced into prostitution by the ring, reads like an Eastern European telephone book: dozens of Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Poles, Belarussians and Czechs.
The beginning of the trial promises to put even more pressure on popular German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. Accused of having ignored warning signs that criminal groups like this one were taking advantage of liberal visa laws, he finds himself confronted with the biggest scandal of his political career. On the eve of the trial's start, opposition politician Michael Glos of Bavaria's Christian Social Union once again indicated that Fischer should bear a large burden of the responsibility for the recent boom in this kind of organized crime and human trafficking. He even repeated his insinuation that Fischer's policies make him a "pimp" and said that as soon as pictures of the sex slaves hit the press, Fischer would be in trouble.
The trial will take many weeks to complete. Meanwhile, Fischer himself faces many weeks of investigation by a special commission created to examine his role in the visa affair. Meanwhile, the loophole used by the prostitution ring remains open.
Sasha, trafficked in Germany & the Netherlands, originally from the Czech Republic; Interview with Michele A. Clark, Co-Director, The Protection Project
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Questioning the Chocolate Industry
"I don't know how one human being can treat another in the way they treated me."
By Humphrey Hawksley BBC, Mali
The answer, put simply, is because the market is there for it - and until recently no one bothered to question the ethics behind it.
Unlike wine or coffee, with chocolate you don't know for sure which country the cocoa comes from. The chances are, though, it is the Ivory Coast, which produces almost half the world's cocoa.
The British spend four billion pounds a year on chocolate
The British spend £4bn (US$5.9bn) a year on chocolate, yet the big household names, such as Cadbury Schweppes, Mars and Nestle, refuse to speak individually on the thorny issue of child labour.
They describe it as an "industry" issue. They say they are setting up a trust foundation and that surveys have been commissioned. They've also signed an international protocol.
By July 2005, we should be guaranteed that our chocolate is not produced with child slave labour.
At present, no such guarantee exists.
How this will be done, though, is not clear. No figures on money and manpower are available.
As for the surveys, no one had even gone through the Mali government records, for example, to see how the trafficking takes place.
"The objective of the surveys is to look at what is going on in the field, in the cocoa growing areas themselves, right now," said Bob Eagle, the industry spokesman, put up by the chocolate companies.
"Not to see the children themselves," I ventured.
"I think if we look at the detail and objectives it is very much about what is going on in the villages and towns."
Child labour
So I set off to find out what was going on. A drive of hundreds of miles from the parched bush land of Mali to the lush jungle of Ivory Coast.
I had thought that finding child labour would be difficult. I had talked to contacts, gathered phone numbers, spent hours of preparation. In the end, I needed none of it.
After a 30 minutes' drive from our hotel in the city of Yammousoukrou along the main road to Sinfra, we turned into a village, drove through, down a dirt track, past a cocoa plantation and saw gangs of children coming towards us.
They wore grubby, torn T-shirts and carried machetes, their heads hung in confusion.
It was a Wednesday morning. The oldest was 13 years old. The others didn't know their age. The youngest was probably six or seven.
As we talked to them, another gang passed us on their way to work. After that a group of women, who saw nothing unusual about child workers.
Then their boss turned up, on a bicycle, looking for them. He was only 15 himself.
Tiring work
It turned out the boys were shunted between maize, coffee and cocoa farms - depending on the season. If they were paid, it was the equivalent of a pound a day - between the ten of them.
"We spend all the time bent over in the field," one said.
"It's terrible," said another. "Hot, tiring work."
Ivory Coast produces half the world's cocoa
Down the road to my right was a cocoa farm.
In front of me was evidence of the contravention of at least two International Labour Organisation conventions aimed at protecting children from abusive labour and giving them a right to an education.
If child labour is so easy to find, the numbers might be in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions.
I gave their names to an official of the Ivory Coast government and told him where we found them. I showed their pictures to the chocolate spokesman, Bob Eagle.
There was no sign that any immediate help was on its way to them. Mr Eagle said exploitative child labour was unacceptable in his industry - and reiterated the deadline of July 2005 to end it.
But that means, although we know who they are and where they are, they could be working in the farms for at least another three years.
At the centre in Mali, Save the Children Fund says, if the will was there, the problem could be fixed within a month.
By Humphrey Hawksley BBC, Mali
The answer, put simply, is because the market is there for it - and until recently no one bothered to question the ethics behind it.
Unlike wine or coffee, with chocolate you don't know for sure which country the cocoa comes from. The chances are, though, it is the Ivory Coast, which produces almost half the world's cocoa.
The British spend four billion pounds a year on chocolate
The British spend £4bn (US$5.9bn) a year on chocolate, yet the big household names, such as Cadbury Schweppes, Mars and Nestle, refuse to speak individually on the thorny issue of child labour.
They describe it as an "industry" issue. They say they are setting up a trust foundation and that surveys have been commissioned. They've also signed an international protocol.
By July 2005, we should be guaranteed that our chocolate is not produced with child slave labour.
At present, no such guarantee exists.
How this will be done, though, is not clear. No figures on money and manpower are available.
As for the surveys, no one had even gone through the Mali government records, for example, to see how the trafficking takes place.
"The objective of the surveys is to look at what is going on in the field, in the cocoa growing areas themselves, right now," said Bob Eagle, the industry spokesman, put up by the chocolate companies.
"Not to see the children themselves," I ventured.
"I think if we look at the detail and objectives it is very much about what is going on in the villages and towns."
Child labour
So I set off to find out what was going on. A drive of hundreds of miles from the parched bush land of Mali to the lush jungle of Ivory Coast.
I had thought that finding child labour would be difficult. I had talked to contacts, gathered phone numbers, spent hours of preparation. In the end, I needed none of it.
After a 30 minutes' drive from our hotel in the city of Yammousoukrou along the main road to Sinfra, we turned into a village, drove through, down a dirt track, past a cocoa plantation and saw gangs of children coming towards us.
They wore grubby, torn T-shirts and carried machetes, their heads hung in confusion.
It was a Wednesday morning. The oldest was 13 years old. The others didn't know their age. The youngest was probably six or seven.
As we talked to them, another gang passed us on their way to work. After that a group of women, who saw nothing unusual about child workers.
Then their boss turned up, on a bicycle, looking for them. He was only 15 himself.
Tiring work
It turned out the boys were shunted between maize, coffee and cocoa farms - depending on the season. If they were paid, it was the equivalent of a pound a day - between the ten of them.
"We spend all the time bent over in the field," one said.
"It's terrible," said another. "Hot, tiring work."
Ivory Coast produces half the world's cocoa
Down the road to my right was a cocoa farm.
In front of me was evidence of the contravention of at least two International Labour Organisation conventions aimed at protecting children from abusive labour and giving them a right to an education.
If child labour is so easy to find, the numbers might be in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions.
I gave their names to an official of the Ivory Coast government and told him where we found them. I showed their pictures to the chocolate spokesman, Bob Eagle.
There was no sign that any immediate help was on its way to them. Mr Eagle said exploitative child labour was unacceptable in his industry - and reiterated the deadline of July 2005 to end it.
But that means, although we know who they are and where they are, they could be working in the farms for at least another three years.
At the centre in Mali, Save the Children Fund says, if the will was there, the problem could be fixed within a month.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Trafficking of Nigerian Women into Italy
TED Case Studies
Number 656, January, 2002
Allison Loconto
While walking through the streets of Rome or any major city in Italy at night, or while taking a leisurely afternoon drive through the country, on cannot help but notice the hundreds of scantily clad women standing on the side of the road. The majority of these women are Africans, working as prostitutes to send money home to their families in the poverty sticken areas from which they come. Some women are working by their own choice, most are not.
The kidnapping, recruitment, and transport of women and children for sexual and other forms of slavery dates back thousands of years. It hasn't been until the turn of the 20th century that this activity has been recognized as "trafficking", a term that today, has many debated definitions. Trafficking is most often defined as the 'recruitment, transport, harbouring, transfer, sale or receipt of persons through coercion, force, fraud, or deception in order to get people in the situations such as forced prostitution, domestic servitude, sweatshop labor or other kinds of work to pay of debts.' It is at once a moral problem, a criminal problem, a human rights problem, a global problem, an economic problem, a health problem and a labor problem.The Congressional Research Service estimates that every year two million people are trafficked against their will to work in some form of servitude. Annually, about 50,000 women and girls are trafficked into the United States alone. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that trafficking in human beings is a $5 to $7 billion industry worldwide.
These figures indicate that trafficking in human beings is an industry more lucrative than the international trade in illicit weapons. In a review of data on the scale of and recent trends in trafficking conducted in April, 2001 by the IOM demonstrates the paucity of reliable data on trafficking across the world. This lack of data is explained by the underground and illegal nature of trafficking; the lack of anti-trafficking legislation in many countries; the reluctance of victims to report their experiences to the authorities; and the lack of government priority given to data collection and research. This suggests that the real numbers of trafficking could be even higher than those figures stated above.
Extent of the Problem
There are 19,000-25,000 foreign prostitutes in Italy. Approximately 2,000 have been trafficked. Rome is the concentrated region of trafficked Albanian and Nigerian women brought for the purpose of prostitution. According to Police, about 50,000 Nigerian girls engaging in the sex trade have been stranded in the streets of Europe and Asia, most of whom come from Nigeria's southern states Edo, Delta and Lagos. This excludes thousands of those girls scattered across the world neither do they include the dead or those wasted by diseases such as HIV/AIDS. Between October 25 and November 12 1999, eighty-four young Nigerian girls were deported from Italy to Nigeria. Seventy-one were from Edo State, nine from Delta State, two from Ondo State and one each from Enugu and Imo States. Between December 3 and 8 another set of eighty-seven predominantly female deportees arrived in Nigeria from Italy. In all, well over 180 Nigerian girls aged between 16 and 23 years have been deported from Italy within the last three months. 90% of them are from Edo State, Nigeria. So far 9 out of 87 screened for HIV have been found to be HIV positive. It is not known if those found to be HIV positive were positive before they went to Italy or got infected in Italy. This deportation has been a source of considerable embarrassment to both the Federal and Edo State governments. President Olusegun Obasanjo pleaded with the Italian government and other European countries to assist Nigeria in putting an end to trafficking of Nigerian girls for prostitution abroad. The influx of Nigerian girls to Europe for prostitution, he stressed, was caused largely by the degradation of all facets of life in Nigeria during the military era.
The Push Factors
Many academics, advocates, and governments have deliberated on the definition of and the motivations for trafficking of women. Dr. Cornelia Tsakirdou, a La Salle University Professor says, "In many developing countries sexual slavery is tied directly to the impact of globalization. In Eastern Europe, the collapse of the former Soviet Union has led to the sudden impoverishment of vulnerable populations - primarily women and children - who are most likely to be affected by transnational prostitution." The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) admits, "Trafficking is inextricably linked to poverty. Wherever privation and economic hardship prevail, there will be those destitute and desperate enough to enter into the fraudulent employment schemes that are the most common intake systems in the world of trafficking."
Carron Somerset of Ecpat claims "It's all about poverty. It's one less mouth to feed and if they think that child may be able to send money back and could possibly have a better life than they'll go for it. "I think some parents know what's going to happen to their children but I think a lot are duped as well," Ms Somerset said. The same uncertainty rests with how women are recruited. Depty Comptroller-General of the National Immigration Service Alhaji Usaini Mahuta remarked; "From our intelligence report and analyses, the major factor that pushes Nigerian girls and boys into prostitution and hard labor is poverty. Most of the girls deported from Europe and the rest of the world left Nigeria due to poor economic backgrounds." Because of the poor socio-economic condition in the country, human traffickers directly recruit their victims who are willing to submit themselves for either prostitution or hard labor while others are recruited through fraud.
The Pull Factors
Recruitment of girls, usually teenagers, as sex slves often starts with the enticement of potential victims with promises of good jobs in Europe by baronesses who are ironically women. Some of the girls' parents also encourage them to go abroad insensibly in search of greener pastures and with the hope that the daughters would repatriate foreign currencies.
Girls are offered huge sums of money ranging from about 20,000 naira (about $174 U.S.) to 200,000 naira ($1,740 U.S.) by Nigerian sex slave trafficking agents with a promis of a good job for them. Traffickers promise work as shopkeepers, maids, waitresses, or other menial jobs in Europe. One woman in her 30s, who said she was married with five children, said she abandoned her home because she had found the promise of a good life in Italy irresistible.
Number 656, January, 2002
Allison Loconto
While walking through the streets of Rome or any major city in Italy at night, or while taking a leisurely afternoon drive through the country, on cannot help but notice the hundreds of scantily clad women standing on the side of the road. The majority of these women are Africans, working as prostitutes to send money home to their families in the poverty sticken areas from which they come. Some women are working by their own choice, most are not.
The kidnapping, recruitment, and transport of women and children for sexual and other forms of slavery dates back thousands of years. It hasn't been until the turn of the 20th century that this activity has been recognized as "trafficking", a term that today, has many debated definitions. Trafficking is most often defined as the 'recruitment, transport, harbouring, transfer, sale or receipt of persons through coercion, force, fraud, or deception in order to get people in the situations such as forced prostitution, domestic servitude, sweatshop labor or other kinds of work to pay of debts.' It is at once a moral problem, a criminal problem, a human rights problem, a global problem, an economic problem, a health problem and a labor problem.The Congressional Research Service estimates that every year two million people are trafficked against their will to work in some form of servitude. Annually, about 50,000 women and girls are trafficked into the United States alone. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that trafficking in human beings is a $5 to $7 billion industry worldwide.
These figures indicate that trafficking in human beings is an industry more lucrative than the international trade in illicit weapons. In a review of data on the scale of and recent trends in trafficking conducted in April, 2001 by the IOM demonstrates the paucity of reliable data on trafficking across the world. This lack of data is explained by the underground and illegal nature of trafficking; the lack of anti-trafficking legislation in many countries; the reluctance of victims to report their experiences to the authorities; and the lack of government priority given to data collection and research. This suggests that the real numbers of trafficking could be even higher than those figures stated above.
Extent of the Problem
There are 19,000-25,000 foreign prostitutes in Italy. Approximately 2,000 have been trafficked. Rome is the concentrated region of trafficked Albanian and Nigerian women brought for the purpose of prostitution. According to Police, about 50,000 Nigerian girls engaging in the sex trade have been stranded in the streets of Europe and Asia, most of whom come from Nigeria's southern states Edo, Delta and Lagos. This excludes thousands of those girls scattered across the world neither do they include the dead or those wasted by diseases such as HIV/AIDS. Between October 25 and November 12 1999, eighty-four young Nigerian girls were deported from Italy to Nigeria. Seventy-one were from Edo State, nine from Delta State, two from Ondo State and one each from Enugu and Imo States. Between December 3 and 8 another set of eighty-seven predominantly female deportees arrived in Nigeria from Italy. In all, well over 180 Nigerian girls aged between 16 and 23 years have been deported from Italy within the last three months. 90% of them are from Edo State, Nigeria. So far 9 out of 87 screened for HIV have been found to be HIV positive. It is not known if those found to be HIV positive were positive before they went to Italy or got infected in Italy. This deportation has been a source of considerable embarrassment to both the Federal and Edo State governments. President Olusegun Obasanjo pleaded with the Italian government and other European countries to assist Nigeria in putting an end to trafficking of Nigerian girls for prostitution abroad. The influx of Nigerian girls to Europe for prostitution, he stressed, was caused largely by the degradation of all facets of life in Nigeria during the military era.
The Push Factors
Many academics, advocates, and governments have deliberated on the definition of and the motivations for trafficking of women. Dr. Cornelia Tsakirdou, a La Salle University Professor says, "In many developing countries sexual slavery is tied directly to the impact of globalization. In Eastern Europe, the collapse of the former Soviet Union has led to the sudden impoverishment of vulnerable populations - primarily women and children - who are most likely to be affected by transnational prostitution." The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) admits, "Trafficking is inextricably linked to poverty. Wherever privation and economic hardship prevail, there will be those destitute and desperate enough to enter into the fraudulent employment schemes that are the most common intake systems in the world of trafficking."
Carron Somerset of Ecpat claims "It's all about poverty. It's one less mouth to feed and if they think that child may be able to send money back and could possibly have a better life than they'll go for it. "I think some parents know what's going to happen to their children but I think a lot are duped as well," Ms Somerset said. The same uncertainty rests with how women are recruited. Depty Comptroller-General of the National Immigration Service Alhaji Usaini Mahuta remarked; "From our intelligence report and analyses, the major factor that pushes Nigerian girls and boys into prostitution and hard labor is poverty. Most of the girls deported from Europe and the rest of the world left Nigeria due to poor economic backgrounds." Because of the poor socio-economic condition in the country, human traffickers directly recruit their victims who are willing to submit themselves for either prostitution or hard labor while others are recruited through fraud.
The Pull Factors
Recruitment of girls, usually teenagers, as sex slves often starts with the enticement of potential victims with promises of good jobs in Europe by baronesses who are ironically women. Some of the girls' parents also encourage them to go abroad insensibly in search of greener pastures and with the hope that the daughters would repatriate foreign currencies.
Girls are offered huge sums of money ranging from about 20,000 naira (about $174 U.S.) to 200,000 naira ($1,740 U.S.) by Nigerian sex slave trafficking agents with a promis of a good job for them. Traffickers promise work as shopkeepers, maids, waitresses, or other menial jobs in Europe. One woman in her 30s, who said she was married with five children, said she abandoned her home because she had found the promise of a good life in Italy irresistible.
Human Traffickers in Kansas City Plead Guilty
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click here to view the post.
Court hears of teen's life before the streets.
BY RON SYLVESTER
The Wichita Eagle
The Dallas detective listened as the Wichita teenager described a troubled past that led her to work as a prostitute on the streets of his city.
Detective Michael McMurray testified Wednesday in the trial of Marlin Williams -- charged with human trafficking for allegedly taking the teenager to Dallas.
Williams' trial is the first case filed in Sedgwick County under a new law against human trafficking aimed at people who "recruit, harbor or transport" minors to engage in sex. The girl is not being named because The Eagle does not name victims of alleged sex crimes.
She told McMurray:
Her parents divorced in Michigan when she was 8 years old, and she moved to Wichita with her mother, who abused alcohol and cocaine.
When the girl, barely a teen, brought home a 34-year-old man,
her mother said it was all right for him to move in with them. The girl became pregnant by him and had a baby at 14. He went to prison for having sex with her because she was so young. She went to live with an aunt.
The aunt, however, couldn't handle the teen.
"Her mom obviously wasn't a stable environment, and the aunt didn't want her," McMurray told prosecutor Christine Ladner.
The girl ended up at the Wichita Children's Home but ran away after failing a drug test.
She said she later found herself in a car with Williams driving to Dallas.
"This is not something I stewed up in my own mind," the girl testified earlier in the day. "I knew where we were going. I knew what I was going to be doing."
McMurray said his job with the Dallas vice squad often involves locating juveniles prostituting themselves. On May 4, 2007, McMurray was driving in an area of the city where girls "walk the track," as they say, along Northwest Highway near I-35, when he saw the girl.
She lied about her age, saying she was 17. She was 15.
"I'm a police officer," he remembered telling her. "Every day, someone lies to me. Sometimes, it's people on the street, sometimes it's my sergeant. But every single day someone lies to me. I'm not mad at you. But I'm not going away until I find out who you are."
The girl began talking.
Earlier, the girl testified that she earned about $6,000 in two weeks in Dallas, most of which she gave to Williams.
Williams' defense cross-examined the girl about a MySpace page and her use of the social networking Web site.
Brad Sylvester, Williams' lawyer, asked her about a headline on the page that included references to money, "hoes" and sex. He indicated she was advertising herself as a prostitute.
The girl, now 16, said it was a quote from a hip-hop song and had nothing to do with prostitution.
Ladner rested the case for the prosecution Wednesday afternoon.
The trial is in recess until Friday, when Williams' attorney hopes to call Williams' wife as a witness. She lives in Louisiana and her travel plans were complicated, Sylvester said, by the recent hurricane.
Reach Ron Sylvester at 316-268-6514 or rsylvester@wichitaeagle.com.
The Wichita Eagle
The Dallas detective listened as the Wichita teenager described a troubled past that led her to work as a prostitute on the streets of his city.
Detective Michael McMurray testified Wednesday in the trial of Marlin Williams -- charged with human trafficking for allegedly taking the teenager to Dallas.
Williams' trial is the first case filed in Sedgwick County under a new law against human trafficking aimed at people who "recruit, harbor or transport" minors to engage in sex. The girl is not being named because The Eagle does not name victims of alleged sex crimes.
She told McMurray:
Her parents divorced in Michigan when she was 8 years old, and she moved to Wichita with her mother, who abused alcohol and cocaine.
When the girl, barely a teen, brought home a 34-year-old man,
her mother said it was all right for him to move in with them. The girl became pregnant by him and had a baby at 14. He went to prison for having sex with her because she was so young. She went to live with an aunt.
The aunt, however, couldn't handle the teen.
"Her mom obviously wasn't a stable environment, and the aunt didn't want her," McMurray told prosecutor Christine Ladner.
The girl ended up at the Wichita Children's Home but ran away after failing a drug test.
She said she later found herself in a car with Williams driving to Dallas.
"This is not something I stewed up in my own mind," the girl testified earlier in the day. "I knew where we were going. I knew what I was going to be doing."
McMurray said his job with the Dallas vice squad often involves locating juveniles prostituting themselves. On May 4, 2007, McMurray was driving in an area of the city where girls "walk the track," as they say, along Northwest Highway near I-35, when he saw the girl.
She lied about her age, saying she was 17. She was 15.
"I'm a police officer," he remembered telling her. "Every day, someone lies to me. Sometimes, it's people on the street, sometimes it's my sergeant. But every single day someone lies to me. I'm not mad at you. But I'm not going away until I find out who you are."
The girl began talking.
Earlier, the girl testified that she earned about $6,000 in two weeks in Dallas, most of which she gave to Williams.
Williams' defense cross-examined the girl about a MySpace page and her use of the social networking Web site.
Brad Sylvester, Williams' lawyer, asked her about a headline on the page that included references to money, "hoes" and sex. He indicated she was advertising herself as a prostitute.
The girl, now 16, said it was a quote from a hip-hop song and had nothing to do with prostitution.
Ladner rested the case for the prosecution Wednesday afternoon.
The trial is in recess until Friday, when Williams' attorney hopes to call Williams' wife as a witness. She lives in Louisiana and her travel plans were complicated, Sylvester said, by the recent hurricane.
Reach Ron Sylvester at 316-268-6514 or rsylvester@wichitaeagle.com.
Court hears of teen's life before the streets.
BY RON SYLVESTER
The Wichita Eagle
The Dallas detective listened as the Wichita teenager described a troubled past that led her to work as a prostitute on the streets of his city.
Detective Michael McMurray testified Wednesday in the trial of Marlin Williams -- charged with human trafficking for allegedly taking the teenager to Dallas.
Williams' trial is the first case filed in Sedgwick County under a new law against human trafficking aimed at people who "recruit, harbor or transport" minors to engage in sex. The girl is not being named because The Eagle does not name victims of alleged sex crimes.
She told McMurray:
Her parents divorced in Michigan when she was 8 years old, and she moved to Wichita with her mother, who abused alcohol and cocaine.
When the girl, barely a teen, brought home a 34-year-old man,
her mother said it was all right for him to move in with them. The girl became pregnant by him and had a baby at 14. He went to prison for having sex with her because she was so young. She went to live with an aunt.
The aunt, however, couldn't handle the teen.
"Her mom obviously wasn't a stable environment, and the aunt didn't want her," McMurray told prosecutor Christine Ladner.
The girl ended up at the Wichita Children's Home but ran away after failing a drug test.
She said she later found herself in a car with Williams driving to Dallas.
"This is not something I stewed up in my own mind," the girl testified earlier in the day. "I knew where we were going. I knew what I was going to be doing."
McMurray said his job with the Dallas vice squad often involves locating juveniles prostituting themselves. On May 4, 2007, McMurray was driving in an area of the city where girls "walk the track," as they say, along Northwest Highway near I-35, when he saw the girl.
She lied about her age, saying she was 17. She was 15.
"I'm a police officer," he remembered telling her. "Every day, someone lies to me. Sometimes, it's people on the street, sometimes it's my sergeant. But every single day someone lies to me. I'm not mad at you. But I'm not going away until I find out who you are."
The girl began talking.
Earlier, the girl testified that she earned about $6,000 in two weeks in Dallas, most of which she gave to Williams.
Williams' defense cross-examined the girl about a MySpace page and her use of the social networking Web site.
Brad Sylvester, Williams' lawyer, asked her about a headline on the page that included references to money, "hoes" and sex. He indicated she was advertising herself as a prostitute.
The girl, now 16, said it was a quote from a hip-hop song and had nothing to do with prostitution.
Ladner rested the case for the prosecution Wednesday afternoon.
The trial is in recess until Friday, when Williams' attorney hopes to call Williams' wife as a witness. She lives in Louisiana and her travel plans were complicated, Sylvester said, by the recent hurricane.
Reach Ron Sylvester at 316-268-6514 or rsylvester@wichitaeagle.com.
The Wichita Eagle
The Dallas detective listened as the Wichita teenager described a troubled past that led her to work as a prostitute on the streets of his city.
Detective Michael McMurray testified Wednesday in the trial of Marlin Williams -- charged with human trafficking for allegedly taking the teenager to Dallas.
Williams' trial is the first case filed in Sedgwick County under a new law against human trafficking aimed at people who "recruit, harbor or transport" minors to engage in sex. The girl is not being named because The Eagle does not name victims of alleged sex crimes.
She told McMurray:
Her parents divorced in Michigan when she was 8 years old, and she moved to Wichita with her mother, who abused alcohol and cocaine.
When the girl, barely a teen, brought home a 34-year-old man,
her mother said it was all right for him to move in with them. The girl became pregnant by him and had a baby at 14. He went to prison for having sex with her because she was so young. She went to live with an aunt.
The aunt, however, couldn't handle the teen.
"Her mom obviously wasn't a stable environment, and the aunt didn't want her," McMurray told prosecutor Christine Ladner.
The girl ended up at the Wichita Children's Home but ran away after failing a drug test.
She said she later found herself in a car with Williams driving to Dallas.
"This is not something I stewed up in my own mind," the girl testified earlier in the day. "I knew where we were going. I knew what I was going to be doing."
McMurray said his job with the Dallas vice squad often involves locating juveniles prostituting themselves. On May 4, 2007, McMurray was driving in an area of the city where girls "walk the track," as they say, along Northwest Highway near I-35, when he saw the girl.
She lied about her age, saying she was 17. She was 15.
"I'm a police officer," he remembered telling her. "Every day, someone lies to me. Sometimes, it's people on the street, sometimes it's my sergeant. But every single day someone lies to me. I'm not mad at you. But I'm not going away until I find out who you are."
The girl began talking.
Earlier, the girl testified that she earned about $6,000 in two weeks in Dallas, most of which she gave to Williams.
Williams' defense cross-examined the girl about a MySpace page and her use of the social networking Web site.
Brad Sylvester, Williams' lawyer, asked her about a headline on the page that included references to money, "hoes" and sex. He indicated she was advertising herself as a prostitute.
The girl, now 16, said it was a quote from a hip-hop song and had nothing to do with prostitution.
Ladner rested the case for the prosecution Wednesday afternoon.
The trial is in recess until Friday, when Williams' attorney hopes to call Williams' wife as a witness. She lives in Louisiana and her travel plans were complicated, Sylvester said, by the recent hurricane.
Reach Ron Sylvester at 316-268-6514 or rsylvester@wichitaeagle.com.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Women Religious Seek MPs Support
Women Religious Seek MPs Support in Fight Against Trafficking of Humans
Published: September 07, 2008
What do Tanya Plibersek, Minister for Women, Australian women religious and women trafficked in Cebu in the Philippines have in common? They all share a concern for the human rights of people who are trafficked and a commitment to make a difference.
Women religious, members of a major Australian anti-trafficking lobby group (ACRATH), will be in Canberra from September 15-19 visiting MPs and social justice advocates to tackle human trafficking issues in Australia.
Australian Catholic Religious Against Trafficking in Humans (ACRATH) represents 180 religious orders in Australia working to eliminate human trafficking in Australia, the Asia Pacific and internationally.
The two main aims of the week-long Canberra trip are to lobby for changes to the visa regulations applied to people who are trafficked and to ensure adequate services are provided once a person has been recognised as trafficked.
The Chair of ACRATH, Sr Pauline Coll sgs, said the Rudd Government should be applauded for its willingness to work with civil society on this issue. However, she said much more needed to be done to ensure that people trafficked into Australia were treated justly.
ACRATH members will lobby Government on several issues, including:
* Allocation of visas to people trafficked into Australia on the basis of their human rights and not on the basis of their willingness to assist with prosecutions.
* An amnesty for people trafficked into Australia who are now living here illegally.
* Assurances that the Federal Government tender for services for people who have been trafficked is administered to offer a holistic approach to each person's needs.
* A comprehensive community education strategy.
* Utilisation of the sisters' international networks, where appropriate, for prevention repatriation strategies.
ACRATH members will meet with more than 40 MPs, including Tanya Plibersek, Minister for the Status of Women; Bob Debus, Minister for Home Affairs. They will also meet with representatives from various government departments.
ACRATH is one of a growing number of coalitions in Australia, including Melbourne-based Project Respect and the Sydney based Anti-Slavery Project, which is working for a greater community awareness of human trafficking. Many people associate trafficking with Asia. However, there is a growing awareness of trafficking into Australia.
Sr Pauline referred to the recent High Court decision which has provided a definition of slavery in the 21st century; it also recognised that what has happened to the women in the case being considered was a crime against humanity. Sr Pauline also referred to recent Australian media reports of trafficking and labour exploitation, and the trafficking of children for adoption.
Sr Pauline has recently returned to Australia from Congress 2008 in Rome. The international congress involved religious congregations from 30 countries including Australia. The participants agreed to maximise efforts and mobilise resources on the issue of human trafficking; they resolved to educate, prevent, protect and assist, and to have a greater social and political impact.
"This congress really made a commitment, and strengthened the determination of women in religious orders around the world, to work together to prevent the trafficking of humans," Sr Pauline said.
"We have come to Canberra as part of this strengthened commitment and we will keep coming and talking to those with influence until a more just system is in place and until this issue is a priority for policy makers."
If you would more information about ACRATH's work, trafficking in Australia or the visit to Canberra, please contact the following people:
Sr Pauline Coll sgs 0417 498 880
Sr Stancea Vichie mss 0438 116 689
or visit link for Radio Broadcast http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/programguide/stories/200809/s2365630.htm
Published: September 07, 2008
What do Tanya Plibersek, Minister for Women, Australian women religious and women trafficked in Cebu in the Philippines have in common? They all share a concern for the human rights of people who are trafficked and a commitment to make a difference.
Women religious, members of a major Australian anti-trafficking lobby group (ACRATH), will be in Canberra from September 15-19 visiting MPs and social justice advocates to tackle human trafficking issues in Australia.
Australian Catholic Religious Against Trafficking in Humans (ACRATH) represents 180 religious orders in Australia working to eliminate human trafficking in Australia, the Asia Pacific and internationally.
The two main aims of the week-long Canberra trip are to lobby for changes to the visa regulations applied to people who are trafficked and to ensure adequate services are provided once a person has been recognised as trafficked.
The Chair of ACRATH, Sr Pauline Coll sgs, said the Rudd Government should be applauded for its willingness to work with civil society on this issue. However, she said much more needed to be done to ensure that people trafficked into Australia were treated justly.
ACRATH members will lobby Government on several issues, including:
* Allocation of visas to people trafficked into Australia on the basis of their human rights and not on the basis of their willingness to assist with prosecutions.
* An amnesty for people trafficked into Australia who are now living here illegally.
* Assurances that the Federal Government tender for services for people who have been trafficked is administered to offer a holistic approach to each person's needs.
* A comprehensive community education strategy.
* Utilisation of the sisters' international networks, where appropriate, for prevention repatriation strategies.
ACRATH members will meet with more than 40 MPs, including Tanya Plibersek, Minister for the Status of Women; Bob Debus, Minister for Home Affairs. They will also meet with representatives from various government departments.
ACRATH is one of a growing number of coalitions in Australia, including Melbourne-based Project Respect and the Sydney based Anti-Slavery Project, which is working for a greater community awareness of human trafficking. Many people associate trafficking with Asia. However, there is a growing awareness of trafficking into Australia.
Sr Pauline referred to the recent High Court decision which has provided a definition of slavery in the 21st century; it also recognised that what has happened to the women in the case being considered was a crime against humanity. Sr Pauline also referred to recent Australian media reports of trafficking and labour exploitation, and the trafficking of children for adoption.
Sr Pauline has recently returned to Australia from Congress 2008 in Rome. The international congress involved religious congregations from 30 countries including Australia. The participants agreed to maximise efforts and mobilise resources on the issue of human trafficking; they resolved to educate, prevent, protect and assist, and to have a greater social and political impact.
"This congress really made a commitment, and strengthened the determination of women in religious orders around the world, to work together to prevent the trafficking of humans," Sr Pauline said.
"We have come to Canberra as part of this strengthened commitment and we will keep coming and talking to those with influence until a more just system is in place and until this issue is a priority for policy makers."
If you would more information about ACRATH's work, trafficking in Australia or the visit to Canberra, please contact the following people:
Sr Pauline Coll sgs 0417 498 880
Sr Stancea Vichie mss 0438 116 689
or visit link for Radio Broadcast http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/programguide/stories/200809/s2365630.htm
You will rescue my life from the pit, O Lord.
CathNews - a Service of Church Resources
Call for amnesty for trafficked womenPublished: September 17, 2008The Federal Government should provide an amnesty for victims of trafficking now living illegally in Australia, a coalition of Catholic women religious says.
The Australian Catholic Religious Against Trafficking in Humans (ACRATH) coalition says many people from the Asia-Pacific region are brought to Australia to work in the sex industry or in sweatshops or other forms of slave labour, Radio Australia reports.
Good Samaritan Sr Pauline Coll said victims should be treated in a more compassionate manner.
"If its for sexual exploitation many of the women come from the Asian countries, for other labour practices we would have people from the Pacific islands...so it's a broad ranging thing and people are trafficked into Australia or are used here in slave like conditions," she said.
Sr Coll was speaking ahead of a visit to Canberra this week by ACRATH members who will be in Canberra to meet with MPs and social justice advocates.
ACRATH represents 180 religious orders in Australia working to eliminate human trafficking in Australia, the Asia Pacific and internationally, the group said in a media statement.
The two main aims of the week long Canberra trip are to lobby for changes to the visa regulations applied to people who are trafficked and to ensure adequate services are provided once a person has been recognised as trafficked.
Sr Coll, who chairs ACRATH, said the Rudd Government should be applauded for its willingness to work with civil society on this issue. However, she said much more needed to be done to ensure that people trafficked into Australia were treated justly.
ACRATH members will lobby Government on several issues, including allocation of visas to people trafficked into Australia on the basis of their human rights and not on the basis of their willingness to assist with prosecutions.
The group is also calling for an amnesty for people trafficked into Australia who are now living here illegally and is seeking assurances that the Federal Government tender for services for people who have been trafficked is administered to offer a holistic approach to each person's needs.
A comprehensive community education strategy is also needed.
Sr Coll cited a recent Australian High Court decision which has provided a definition of slavery in the 21st century and recognised that what has happened to the women in the case being considered was a crime against humanity.
She has recently returned to Australia from Congress 2008 in Rome with representatives of religious congregations from 30 countries including Australia.
"This congress really made a commitment, and strengthened the determination of women in religious orders around the world, to work together to prevent the trafficking of humans," Sr Pauline said.
"We have come to Canberra as part of this strengthened commitment and we will keep coming and talking to those with influence until a more just system is in place and until this issue is a priority for policy makers," she said.
SOURCE
Calls for amnesty for people trafficked into Australia (Radio Australia, 16/9/08)
Women Religious Seek MPs Support in Fight Against Trafficking of Humans (Media Release, ACRATH, 16/9/08)
ACRATH (Good Shepherd Sisters)
Jonah 1:1-2:1. You will rescue my life from the pit, O Lord. Jonah 2:3-5,8. Luke 104:25-37.
Call for amnesty for trafficked womenPublished: September 17, 2008The Federal Government should provide an amnesty for victims of trafficking now living illegally in Australia, a coalition of Catholic women religious says.
The Australian Catholic Religious Against Trafficking in Humans (ACRATH) coalition says many people from the Asia-Pacific region are brought to Australia to work in the sex industry or in sweatshops or other forms of slave labour, Radio Australia reports.
Good Samaritan Sr Pauline Coll said victims should be treated in a more compassionate manner.
"If its for sexual exploitation many of the women come from the Asian countries, for other labour practices we would have people from the Pacific islands...so it's a broad ranging thing and people are trafficked into Australia or are used here in slave like conditions," she said.
Sr Coll was speaking ahead of a visit to Canberra this week by ACRATH members who will be in Canberra to meet with MPs and social justice advocates.
ACRATH represents 180 religious orders in Australia working to eliminate human trafficking in Australia, the Asia Pacific and internationally, the group said in a media statement.
The two main aims of the week long Canberra trip are to lobby for changes to the visa regulations applied to people who are trafficked and to ensure adequate services are provided once a person has been recognised as trafficked.
Sr Coll, who chairs ACRATH, said the Rudd Government should be applauded for its willingness to work with civil society on this issue. However, she said much more needed to be done to ensure that people trafficked into Australia were treated justly.
ACRATH members will lobby Government on several issues, including allocation of visas to people trafficked into Australia on the basis of their human rights and not on the basis of their willingness to assist with prosecutions.
The group is also calling for an amnesty for people trafficked into Australia who are now living here illegally and is seeking assurances that the Federal Government tender for services for people who have been trafficked is administered to offer a holistic approach to each person's needs.
A comprehensive community education strategy is also needed.
Sr Coll cited a recent Australian High Court decision which has provided a definition of slavery in the 21st century and recognised that what has happened to the women in the case being considered was a crime against humanity.
She has recently returned to Australia from Congress 2008 in Rome with representatives of religious congregations from 30 countries including Australia.
"This congress really made a commitment, and strengthened the determination of women in religious orders around the world, to work together to prevent the trafficking of humans," Sr Pauline said.
"We have come to Canberra as part of this strengthened commitment and we will keep coming and talking to those with influence until a more just system is in place and until this issue is a priority for policy makers," she said.
SOURCE
Calls for amnesty for people trafficked into Australia (Radio Australia, 16/9/08)
Women Religious Seek MPs Support in Fight Against Trafficking of Humans (Media Release, ACRATH, 16/9/08)
ACRATH (Good Shepherd Sisters)
Jonah 1:1-2:1. You will rescue my life from the pit, O Lord. Jonah 2:3-5,8. Luke 104:25-37.
Monday, September 15, 2008
STORIES from WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION (WHO)
Trafficked women commonly report seeing their traffickers bribe local officials. One victim explained how she and her trafficker were transported through a border crossing by police in a police vehicle. When trafficked women were returned to authorities in an African country, it used to be common practice to show their faces on television and in news media as a prevention strategy to warn the public about trafficking. Consequently, many of the portrayed victims were shamed and rejected by their families and their communities.
A woman in a destination country prison who spoke with an NGO and agreed to give evidence against her traffickers subsequently found a note on her prison bunk threatening her life and the lives of her children in her country of origin.
A woman in a destination country prison who spoke with an NGO and agreed to give evidence against her traffickers subsequently found a note on her prison bunk threatening her life and the lives of her children in her country of origin.
Report from a Federal US Prosecutor
By Tom Paquette
FEDERAL PROSECUTOR CAROLINE WITTCOFF: “Under-reporting is the main problem in apprehending and prosecuting human traffickers. Victims are afraid to run away or report their captors to authorities out of fear for their own lives or the lives of their loved ones. As trafficking rings have ties all the way back to their home countries, this is a very real danger.” she was a teenager from an impoverished village in Bangladesh. The American couple offered her transport to America and a better life: a nice job as their nanny and housekeeper, wages and opportunity. The dream offer dissolved into a nightmare as soon as she reached sunny Southern California. The couple informed her she owed them a huge sum for bringing her into the country and forced her to work without wages for years in their home. There she was repeatedly raped and beaten by the husband and abused by the wife. After three failed attempts, and with the help of good samaritans, she finally escaped.
This is just one of the stunning, real-life anecdotes recounted in a series of “Slavery Today” panel discussions on the multibillion-dollar human trafficking industry which, experts say, has grown to epidemic levels in Southern California.
The panels, sponsored by the Foundation for Human Rights and Tolerance and held in Hollywood, recognized the United Nations International Year to Commemorate the Struggle Against Slavery and its Abolition. At the kick-off event, Lynsey Bartilson, star of the WB network’s “Grounded for Life,” told attendees, “The modern day slave trade is largely sexual trafficking, which Hollywood glamorizes in movies like ’Pretty Woman,’ but the harsh reality is that most of the girls involved are sold into a life of slavery.”
FEDERAL PROSECUTOR CAROLINE WITTCOFF: “Under-reporting is the main problem in apprehending and prosecuting human traffickers. Victims are afraid to run away or report their captors to authorities out of fear for their own lives or the lives of their loved ones. As trafficking rings have ties all the way back to their home countries, this is a very real danger.” she was a teenager from an impoverished village in Bangladesh. The American couple offered her transport to America and a better life: a nice job as their nanny and housekeeper, wages and opportunity. The dream offer dissolved into a nightmare as soon as she reached sunny Southern California. The couple informed her she owed them a huge sum for bringing her into the country and forced her to work without wages for years in their home. There she was repeatedly raped and beaten by the husband and abused by the wife. After three failed attempts, and with the help of good samaritans, she finally escaped.
This is just one of the stunning, real-life anecdotes recounted in a series of “Slavery Today” panel discussions on the multibillion-dollar human trafficking industry which, experts say, has grown to epidemic levels in Southern California.
The panels, sponsored by the Foundation for Human Rights and Tolerance and held in Hollywood, recognized the United Nations International Year to Commemorate the Struggle Against Slavery and its Abolition. At the kick-off event, Lynsey Bartilson, star of the WB network’s “Grounded for Life,” told attendees, “The modern day slave trade is largely sexual trafficking, which Hollywood glamorizes in movies like ’Pretty Woman,’ but the harsh reality is that most of the girls involved are sold into a life of slavery.”
Numbers on the Rise
"Globalization’s Underside" Sex Trafficking in Brooklyn
by Claire Hoffman
August/September 2003
The pitch was like a dream come true. For $3,000 each, the three desperate young Indonesian women would receive falsified visas, airline tickets from Jakarta and restaurant jobs when they got to New York. A man named "Johnny" would meet them at the airport and arrange their housing.
But once the women got off the plane, it didn’t take long to see that Johnny had other ideas. He and his friends hustled them off to brothels, first in Connecticut and then in Brooklyn, while threatening to shoot them if they refused to be prostitutes. Over four lurid days, the women were repeatedly forced to have sex with men who paid their captors $140 for each 45 minutes. Johnny also told each woman that she owed him $30,000, and he started making arrangements to "sell" them to other brothels in New York and Boston.
As this case suggests, the sordid business of human trafficking, which includes enslavement in agricultural work, sweatshops, domestic labor and prostitution, is rapidly expanding. And with its growing immigrant population, experts say, parts of New York City, including Brooklyn and Queens, have become hotspots in a trade that the International Labor Organization has described as the "underside of globalization."
The State Department recently estimated that close to 700,000 people are moved through the global networks of human trade each year, and some officials believe that as many as 50,000 of those people are brought to the United States. And while authorities are trying to staunch the flow— "Johnny" and two of his confederates pleaded guilty to federal slavery charges last fall— critics say that the crackdown on visa violators since the September 11th terror attacks has made it harder to get victims and witnesses to come forward to talk about the slave trade.
"It is incredible how big of a business it is," said Christa Stewart, the director of SAFE Horizons, a Manhattan-based non-profit organization that has expanded its outreach from domestic violence victims to women who have been enslaved. She and other advocates said a fundamental tragedy of this crime is that the victims, like the Indonesian women initially were trying to change their lives, were hopeful and courageous enough to leave everything behind in search of a new life.
To read more of this article go to Website below:
http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/fea/20071001/202/2304
Money to be Made
Huge profits ensure human trafficking has become the world's top rights issue
Vienna, Austria: Trafficking people for forced labour and sexual slavery has become the world's number two most lucrative crime, and terrorists are using shadowy underground networks to move around, a senior US counter-trafficking official warned yesterday.Human trafficking, particularly the smuggling and enslavement of young women for prostitution, is tied with weapons smuggling as the second-largest illegal moneymaking activity, said T March Bell, the US Justice Department's senior special counsel for trafficking issues and civil rights.Only the narcotics trade reaps more profits for organised crime, but traffickers are earning billions of dollars exploiting tens of millions of victims each year, Bell said, calling it "the No 1 human rights issue today".The profits are huge, he told reporters, citing the example of a brothel owner in Southeast Asia who typically might pay$8 000 for a young woman. "We think that owner can make a $200 000 profit on that $8 000 investment," Bell said.Although the traffickers are dealing mainly with young women peddled to brothels or men, women and children sold into virtual slavery on farms and in factories, "they're moving any kind of people for a price", Bell said.Despite the massive scale of the crime, law enforcement agencies are having a difficult time bringing perpetrators to justice - in part because of corruption within their own ranks.In the former Yugoslavia, there have been numerous cases of corrupt local police officers engaged directly in the sex trade or willing to alert a bordello operator to an impending police raid in exchange for a bribe.Police officers in many poor, developing countries where trafficking is widespread tend to be poorly paid, making them particularly susceptible to bribes, Bell said. In Cambodia, theaverage officer earns just $35 a month, he said.Local and national police agencies are trying to counter that by improving the training of police officers, ensuring they are paid professional salaries, and making anti-trafficking units the envy of police forces by equipping them with the latest technology and holding them to higher standards, Bell said.While the most effective weapon against traffickers is "street-level law enforcement", police agencies increasingly are turning to undercover operations in an effort to infiltrate clandestine rings, he said.In the United States and many European countries, former victims are getting increased protection and refugee status in the hopes of persuading them to testify against their former captors, Bell said.A key challenge is winning the trust of former victims who all too often are "frightened, scared, intimidated and coerced" by traffickers."Unless a victim feels safe, they're not going to provide much information to prosecute the perpetrators," he said.
Published on the web by Cape Times on January 26, 2005.
Vienna, Austria: Trafficking people for forced labour and sexual slavery has become the world's number two most lucrative crime, and terrorists are using shadowy underground networks to move around, a senior US counter-trafficking official warned yesterday.Human trafficking, particularly the smuggling and enslavement of young women for prostitution, is tied with weapons smuggling as the second-largest illegal moneymaking activity, said T March Bell, the US Justice Department's senior special counsel for trafficking issues and civil rights.Only the narcotics trade reaps more profits for organised crime, but traffickers are earning billions of dollars exploiting tens of millions of victims each year, Bell said, calling it "the No 1 human rights issue today".The profits are huge, he told reporters, citing the example of a brothel owner in Southeast Asia who typically might pay$8 000 for a young woman. "We think that owner can make a $200 000 profit on that $8 000 investment," Bell said.Although the traffickers are dealing mainly with young women peddled to brothels or men, women and children sold into virtual slavery on farms and in factories, "they're moving any kind of people for a price", Bell said.Despite the massive scale of the crime, law enforcement agencies are having a difficult time bringing perpetrators to justice - in part because of corruption within their own ranks.In the former Yugoslavia, there have been numerous cases of corrupt local police officers engaged directly in the sex trade or willing to alert a bordello operator to an impending police raid in exchange for a bribe.Police officers in many poor, developing countries where trafficking is widespread tend to be poorly paid, making them particularly susceptible to bribes, Bell said. In Cambodia, theaverage officer earns just $35 a month, he said.Local and national police agencies are trying to counter that by improving the training of police officers, ensuring they are paid professional salaries, and making anti-trafficking units the envy of police forces by equipping them with the latest technology and holding them to higher standards, Bell said.While the most effective weapon against traffickers is "street-level law enforcement", police agencies increasingly are turning to undercover operations in an effort to infiltrate clandestine rings, he said.In the United States and many European countries, former victims are getting increased protection and refugee status in the hopes of persuading them to testify against their former captors, Bell said.A key challenge is winning the trust of former victims who all too often are "frightened, scared, intimidated and coerced" by traffickers."Unless a victim feels safe, they're not going to provide much information to prosecute the perpetrators," he said.
Published on the web by Cape Times on January 26, 2005.
U.S. National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
International Women's Shelters Conference.
Wed, September 10, 2008
There are 800 delegates -- mostly women but a few good men -- at this week's conference of shelter workers and they all have incredible stories.
Ece Tuncay, who gave a presentation yesterday, is a clinical psychologist with a shelter in Ankara, Turkey, for female victims of human trafficking. There is another in Istanbul and they are desperately needed because Turkey is a destination country for trafficked women from countries like Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Moldova.
The women are tricked into thinking they'll work as cooks or cleaners and then forced into prostitution, said Tuncay.
"They are not generally able to escape because a pimp always accompanies them."
But there are hotlines the women can call and, in a strange twist of fate, Turkish johns sometimes feel sorry for them and call the police to rescue them, added Tuncay.
Her group gets the trafficked women safe housing and counselling. Then, with the help of the International Organization for Migration, the women travel safely home.
Every woman saved is a success story. As Reimer, the prime organizer behind this incredible gathering, commented to the delegates Monday night, shelter workers toil in the middle of a "hurricane of suffering" to keep women alive.
No other profession, she added, sees such a constant reminder of men's inhumanity to women.
I give the last word to Smith who quipped to the hundreds of shelter workers: "I look forward to the day when we all have something else to do in our lives."
Jan Reimer, provincial co-ordinator of the Alberta Council of Women's Shelters
-Edmonton Sun
Wed, September 10, 2008
There are 800 delegates -- mostly women but a few good men -- at this week's conference of shelter workers and they all have incredible stories.
Ece Tuncay, who gave a presentation yesterday, is a clinical psychologist with a shelter in Ankara, Turkey, for female victims of human trafficking. There is another in Istanbul and they are desperately needed because Turkey is a destination country for trafficked women from countries like Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Moldova.
The women are tricked into thinking they'll work as cooks or cleaners and then forced into prostitution, said Tuncay.
"They are not generally able to escape because a pimp always accompanies them."
But there are hotlines the women can call and, in a strange twist of fate, Turkish johns sometimes feel sorry for them and call the police to rescue them, added Tuncay.
Her group gets the trafficked women safe housing and counselling. Then, with the help of the International Organization for Migration, the women travel safely home.
Every woman saved is a success story. As Reimer, the prime organizer behind this incredible gathering, commented to the delegates Monday night, shelter workers toil in the middle of a "hurricane of suffering" to keep women alive.
No other profession, she added, sees such a constant reminder of men's inhumanity to women.
I give the last word to Smith who quipped to the hundreds of shelter workers: "I look forward to the day when we all have something else to do in our lives."
Jan Reimer, provincial co-ordinator of the Alberta Council of Women's Shelters
-Edmonton Sun
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