10% of Israeli Prostitutes are Minors

From the Jerusalem Post:

By Ruth Eglash
July 23, 2008

The age of those being forced into the sex industry is rapidly falling, with more than 1,000 out of the estimated 10,000 prostitutes in Israel being minors, according to statistics collected this year by counter-trafficking non-governmental organization, the Task Force on Human Trafficking (TFHT).

These figures, which are based on the findings of numerous non-governmental and official sources, were presented Wednesday at a special session of the Knesset Sub-Committee on Human Trafficking - headed by Meretz MK Zehava Gal-On - focusing on a new Education Ministry initiative aimed at raising awareness of the dangers of the sex industry in general and human trafficking in particular among school-age children. TFHT's report also noted a new trend of 13 and 14 year olds frequenting prostitutes.

"It is essential that the future generation learns about equality between the sexes and is given the tools to correctly judge and evaluate this phenomenon," Education Minister Yuli Tamir told The Jerusalem Post following the meeting.

Earlier in the session, the minister had referred to the rise in media reports of children, some as young as 11 or 12, using cellphones to capture graphic sexual incidents on camera and stories of teens pimping out their peers for cash. Tamir said that the goal of the program, which started work six months ago, was to combat such incidents and to provide teachers with the educational tools to raise awareness of right and wrong among teens.

"Our main goal is to teach children that other people should not and cannot be seen as mere objects to be purchased," commented Miriam Schechter, Commissioner of Gender Equality in the Education Ministry and the one responsible for incorporating information on trafficking and prostitution into the education system.

She said that so far this year the ministry had worked together with several hundred teachers on how to present the subject to high schoolers and had run a handful of workshops and other pilot programs in Ashdod, Kiryat Gat, Bat Yam and Nahariya.

"We are very happy that this [education] minister is so open to this topic and willing to raise the issue among the country's youths," said Gal-On. "It is not easy to introduce a new topic to the education curriculum and obviously there is always more work that can be done in this area, but this is definitely a step in the right direction."

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A Disappointing Life in the Promised Land

By Matt Siegel

From Russia Profile:

TEL AVIV, Israel- Although Israel has only two official state languages—Hebrew and Arabic—it’s difficult to find a restaurant that doesn’t have a Cyrillic menu in the winding alleys of Jerusalem or the wide main boulevard in Haifa. Everywhere, second-hand shops and luxury chains alike hawk their wares to Israel’s Russian population. While these signs can, and often should, be perceived as a sign of hospitality toward Russian speakers, at other times, they signify something radically different.

For Jews, Israel is the “Promised Land,” the biblical home held out as the prospect of a final end to millennia of wandering. But for many thousands of people from the former Soviet Union, Israel held out a different sort of promise: a respite from the crushing poverty of the post-Soviet economic and social decline.

According to experts in Israel and Russia, many of these people, whose hopes and dreams were exploited for nearly two decades, became part of the vast illegal network of human trafficking that fueled the sprawling Israeli archipelago of prostitution and domestic slavery. It now appears, however, that what had for so long seemed to be an intractable problem for both Russia and Israel, is finally beginning to show signs of improvement.

The good news
The U.S. State Department’s scathing 2006 indictment of Israel’s inactivity in combating human trafficking, which nearly relegated the country to the level of North Korea and Sudan, appears to have been the final straw for the government of the Jewish state. Since then, the government of Israel, working together with a tight network of domestic NGOs, has made tremendous inroads against human trafficking from the former Soviet Union. A raft of new laws and tougher enforcement policies, together with increased cooperation on extradition from regional governments, has helped reduce the peak number of trafficking cases by some 90 percent.

“A lot has been done. It’s actually virtually miraculous how much has been done. I feel that we have a more humane system here: more has been attained here than has, in many ways, been accomplished in the United States,” said Rahel Gershuni, National Coordinator in the Battle Against Trafficking in Human Beings within the Israel Ministry of Justice. “Look, there’s a lot left to do, I’m not saying no, but a lot of progress [has been made].”

According to an October 2007 report by the Ministry of Justice entitled “Trafficking in Persons in Israel,” the police estimate that the trade in women reached its peak in 2003, with 3,000 people being trafficked. The same report claims that this number had dropped to “a few hundred, up to 1,000 in 2005-6.” Due to the problematic nature of documenting an illicit trade, these statistics are almost certainly incorrect. The positive trend, however, has been confirmed by multiple experts with street level knowledge of the situation.

But despite all the good news — and nearly everyone agrees that the news has been good — there is a dark side to the story. Deprived of a steady supply of women from Russia and the former Soviet Republics, internal traffickers are increasingly turning to Israeli citizens, a great number of whom appear to be native Russian speakers who immigrated to Israel legally. The lost children of Russia’s Diaspora live in sub-human conditions on the streets of Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities, many addicted to drugs, all victims of a cruel cycle of exclusion and desperation.

Falling through the cracks
Israel’s improbable victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, in which 264,000 Israeli soldiers delivered a crushing defeat to almost 550,000 soldiers from the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, led to a massive awakening of Zionist sentiments among the Jews of the former Soviet Union. A surge in protests and lobbying both internally and abroad led to the first wave of emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel in 1969. Emigration continued at a trickle throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with the plight of Soviet Jews becoming a key bargaining chip in the Cold War power struggle. In 1990, with the implosion of the Soviet Union, that trickle turned into a raging river that carried more than a million Russian speaking Jews to Israel over the next decade.

As the social safety nets crumbled beneath millions of former Soviet citizens, many thousands of desperate people, including women with no prospects in their home countries, decided to follow the path of Soviet Jews and flee their homeland for brighter prospects. Israel, with its large population of Russian-speakers (by some estimates as much as one-third of the country), and its porous border with Egypt, became a prime destination for the smuggling of human beings.

“We were all so happy, you know; the wicked Communists fell, but at least when the Communists were in power, people had some sort of welfare network,” said Gershuni. “They weren’t hungry. They may have been in prison for dissenting, but they weren’t hungry.”

According to an unnamed source with first-hand knowledge of Israeli law enforcement, the system for trafficking women from the former Soviet Union has not changed much since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In most cases, women from all over the region respond to advertisements placed in local media sources looking for exotic dancers or models. According to experts in Israel, these are code words well known in the countries that once comprised the Soviet Union, and very few of the women are unaware of the fact that they will be engaging in prostitution once in Israel. What many of them don’t know is that the glossy descriptions given to them in ads or even by former prostitutes sent as recruiters are often very far from the truth.

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Organ Trafficking around the World

Israeli Police Bust Organ Trafficking Ring


From Reuters:

6/7/07- The International Organization for Migration (IOM) expressed alarm on Thursday over rising cases of trade in human organs in Asia, and said globalization had increased risks of human trafficking.

Bruce Reed, IOM regional representative, said trafficking in persons for sexual or labor exploitation and other purposes such as adoption, false marriage and human organ donation was the third-largest international criminal activity, behind drugs and arms smuggling.

"The profile (of those being trafficked) is constantly changing," Reed told a seminar on human trafficking in Manila. "Women and girls are being trafficked for non-sex work and cases of men and boys are also being reported in the region."

Reed said many trafficking cases in Asia "end up in situations of forced begging, delinquency, adoption, false marriage, or most recently, as victims of the thriving trade in human organs".

He said trafficking for organs was on the rise in China and in many impoverished states in Southeast Asia, like Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Although rising, the number of those being trafficked for organs was dwarfed by those being smuggled for sex, Reed said, saying there was constant demand from the entertainment and hospitality industry.

Chinese migrants apply for jobs at a job fair

The IOM said there could be 30 million Asians living outside their country, making them more susceptible to sexual and labor exploitation.

"Due to globalization, improved communications, more accessible travel and high technology, people are traveling like never before, substantially increasing the numbers of persons exposed to the influence of traffickers and criminal networks," Reed said.

Organ Trafficking in Israel

From Haaretz:

In a precedent-setting ruling yesterday the Haifa District Court yesterday sentenced two Haifa men to jail for trafficking in humans for the purpose of harvesting their organs.

John Allan (formerly Mohammad Gheit), 59, was sentenced to four years in jail with a three-year suspended sentence. Allan was also ordered to pay each of his six victims NIS 15,000. Hassan Zakhalka, 32, was sentenced to 20 months in prison and 12 months suspended sentence for aiding and abetting human trafficking for the harvest of organs. Advertisement This is the first time an Israeli court has issued a conviction for this offense, based on a law passed at the end of last year. The pair confessed to the charges against them in a plea bargain with the prosecution.

Allan and Zakhalka admitted that at the end of 2006, they persuaded Arabs from the Galilee and central Israel who were developmentally challenged or mentally ill to agree to have a kidney removed for payment. They located their victims by placing ads in the newspaper offering money for organ donation. According to the indictment, the pair gave false information to the donors, and also pressured and threatened them to give up their kidney. After the surgery, Allan and Zakhalka did not pay the donors as promised.

Read the full article

Sex trafficking in Israel

This is from a recent BBC article on the problem of trafficking in women to Israel:

During the height of the phenomenon, from the beginning of the 1990s to the early years of 2000, an estimated 3,000 women a year were brought to Israel on the false promise of jobs and a better way of life.

Last year, the United Nations named Israel as one of the main destinations in the world for trafficked women; it has also consistently appeared as an offender in the annual US State Department's Trafficking in Persons (Tip) report. [Tier Two Watchlist- the same as Ukraine]

In all cases, the traffickers - as many as 20 in the chain from recruitment to sale - take away the women's passports before selling them on to pimps. Sometimes the women are subjected to degrading human auctions, where they are stripped, examined and sold for $8,000-$10,000.

Rinat Davidovych, the director of the Maagan Shelter in Tel-Aviv, is someone who travels the world in the effort to fight human traffiking. She was interviewed for this BBC article:

For years, Israel treated trafficked women as criminals"When they come here they are in a bad condition," said Rinat Davidovich, the shelter's director.

"Most have sexual diseases and some have hepatitis and even tuberculosis. They also have problems going to sleep because they remember what used to happen to them at night," she said. "It's very hard and it's a long procedure to start to help and treat them."

I was lucky enough to have her as a guest in my family's home last year in Buffalo. This year, I bumped into her at a conference in Kyiv where she presented a host of information about trafficking in Israel. Rinat broke down the statistics of origin for Israel's sex trafficking victims- Ukraine 21.45%, Moldova 11.24%, Russia 9.2%, and Uzbekistan 5.11%, and now recently, victims are coming from China as well. She also did a thorough review of Israel's anti-trafficking laws. Up until 2006, the law only included women sex victims and protection was only offered to victims if they agreed to testify against their traffickers and pimps. Now, following the threat of sanctions against Israel by the United States, Israel has stepped up their efforts and has included a broader range of trafficking victims under national law. Rinat says that soon, the same protection given to victims of sex trafficking will be provided for those of labor trafficking.

The shelter she directs is a state shelter, and at the moment, only provides assistance to female victims of sex trafficking. Victims must be brought to the shelter by police, or if an ngo refers a victim, they must do so through the police. The shelter provides additional rights to the victim including full medical services, weekly allowances, temporary residence visas, and work placement. Rinat was overloaded with questions about why the state response was so weak, some of which seemed like they were more questions about why she works for the state shelter as opposed to the ngos. Rinat seemed more hopeful though that through her position, she is able to keep in contact with both ngos and the government, and that she is able to facilitate communication between both.

One of the things she mentioned has changed though, is that because of the crackdown on sex trafficking in Israel, more of the prostitution and, by extent, the trafficking victims have been moved underground. Now, instead of a place quite obviously being a brothel, it is hidden either as a massage parlor or sauna, forcing ngos to find more creative ways of reaching victims.

For more information on human trafficking in Israel, click here.

This Week in Trafficking

Trafficking and migration related articles from around the web


Source: Corbis

Senator says the annual quota of Filipina nurses to Japan is not enough
Taking up the cudgels for thousands of health practitioners, Senator Loren Legarda on Friday questioned the "highly restrictive" quota-based deployment of Filipino nurses and caregivers to "the land of the rising sun" under the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA). "We definitely would have preferred the market demand-driven deployment of Filipino nurses and caregivers, instead of a prohibitive quota system," said Legarda, chair of the Senate committee on economic affairs. "There is a huge pent-up demand for foreign healthcare workers in Japan due to its rapidly aging population. The (Philippine) government is duty-bound to secure for Filipino professionals the greatest opportunity to cover this demand," Legarda stressed. According to a study by Nomura Capital Management Inc., Japan’s population is aging faster than that of any other country. The study said Japan would soon have only two able-bodied workers for every retiree.

New Jersey women fined $78,000 for enslaving nanny
Attorney General Anne Milgram and Criminal Justice Director Gregory A. Paw announced that a Filipino woman residing in West Windsor , N.J. pleaded guilty Thursday to forcing a young Filipino woman who came to the U.S. as a nanny to instead care for her ailing husband and do her housekeeping for two years. The young woman's passport and visa were taken away, and she was told not to leave the house without family members because she would be arrested. She was paid only a small fraction of what she was supposed to receive for coming to work in the U.S.

Proposed mandatory social security for migrants draws criticism from migrant NGO
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s endorsement for mandatory Social Security System coverage of overseas Filipino workers is just "another extortion scheme" aimed at OFWs, a Hong Kong-based Filipino group said Thursday. “The unbelievable greed of the Arroyo administration for the money of OFWs is again shown by its effort to corner our earnings through the SSS coverage," said Dolores Balladares, chairperson of the United Filipinos in Hong Kong (Unifil-Migrante-HK) in a press statement. The newly-imposed deployment guidelines exact from OFWs additional fees for retraining and other requirements. There is the membership fee for the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration. Add to these the rising value of the peso that continues to erode dollar remittances, Balladares cited. According to the group, the expanded SSS coverage proposal is another item on the list of moneymaking schemes of the administration.

Shelter in Israel rehabilitates survivors of trafficking
Foreign women who are victims of trafficking can now get support at the Maagan shelter in Tel Aviv. In 2002 the Israeli government, in an attempt to encourage these women to testify against the people who bought and sold them, decided to offer them work visas in return for sworn statements detailing their tribulations. The visas run until one year after the end of their trials. About 250 of these women have been through the Maagan shelter in the last few years. According to estimates, several thousand victims have been trafficked into and within Israel since the 1990s. Those who cooperate become eligible for rehabilitation through the shelter, which is funded by the Israeli Ministry of Welfare.

Three charged in New Jersey trafficking ring
Thursday, September 6th- Federal agents today arrested two men and a woman from Togo who they say smuggled at least 20 girls and young women from the West African nation and forced them into indentured servitude, working without pay at hair braiding salons in Newark and East Orange. "This is a case of modern-day slavery," said Tom Manifase, deputy special agent in charge of investigations for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Newark, the lead agency in the investigation. "These women were promised a better life in the U.S. but instead ended up becoming victims of human trafficking."

Immigration intensifies anti-human trafficking campaign in the Philippines
Immigration Commissioner Marcelino Libanan has ordered his officers and agents in different airports and sub-ports to intensify the campaign against human trafficking. "This is a very serious problem and we in the Immigration bureau, being the country's chief gatekeeper, should do our part in stopping this human trafficking menace from victimizing more of our countrymen," Libanan said after the United Nations reported that one in four of humans trafficked across the globe were Filipinos. Libanan admitted that he was so alarmed by the report that he immediately issued a directive to his men at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.