Recently, Jay-Z, the man who created an anthem which shamelessly glorified pimp culture, "Big Pimpin", acknowledged his own conflicted feelings about that song to the Wall Street Journal. "It was like, I can't believe I said that. And kept saying it. What kind of animal would say this sort of thing? Reading it is really harsh," said the rapper. Yeah, listening to it come on in a club and see the entire crowd go wild and singing along has been really harsh too Jay.
Full disclosure, I'm a Jay-Z fan and I have been since his first album Reasonable Doubt. Yet as a survivor of the commercial sex industry and as an advocate for exploited and trafficked girls it's hard to not feel some shame for liking an artist who has contributed his fair share of misogynistic lyrics and who has helped equate the concept of pimping with masculinity and 'swagga.'
I'm not alone with these conflicted feelings about Jay-Z or hip-hop in general. For those of us who grew up listening to Public Enemy, Grandmaster Flash, Eric B, and Rakim Mc Lyte and Queen Latifah and who felt that rap told our stories and captured our hearts in a way that nothing else did, hip-hop has been part of the soundtrack of our generation. Yet for those of us, particularly women, who have been impacted by gender-based violence, who've experienced the venom behind the words 'bitch' and 'ho' and who are disgusted by the objectification and sexualization of women and girls in this medium, loving hip-hop presents an uncomfortable contradiction.
For me, the conflicted feelings run deep. For the last 13 years, I've worked with and fought for girls and young women who've experienced violence and oppression at the hands of pimps and johns. And I know first-hand what its like to dance on the stage of a stripclub, be leered over by strange men, and break my 'daddy' off some bread. In short, I've been one of the girls that are alternately scorned and objectified in the lyrics of many rap songs.
Rachel Lloyd's piece raises a number of important points and questions, most without easy answers. Creating a world without sex trafficking or any form of slavery will take more than laws, arrests, prosecutions, and victim services. It will take evaluating the root causes and the ways that we are complicit, as individuals and as societies, in a world that tolerates and even promotes slavery. As Lloyd notes, that includes examining the "glorification of pimp culture" in music, art, and film.
Lloyd goes on to write, "I don't know how much Jay-Z understands the realities of pimps and the harm that's done to girls and young women every day in this country by pimps and traffickers. I don't know how much he feels that he's played some role in the acceptance and glorification of pimping within our culture and how committed he is to perhaps trying to take responsibility for that. But his acknowledgment that he feels a level of shame about this song is a start towards having a balanced conversation about hip-hop's role in this issue."
Obviously this is a two-way street, and as music consumers we bear some responsibility for supporting songs that glamorize pimps and that objectify women and girls. Still, like Lloyd I would argue that if established artists and musicians began the learning about the realities of trafficking and start self-reflecting on their roles and actions, both positive and negative, we will have a strong first step.
MONROE, North Carolina- A Monroe massage parlor has been shut down after a three-month undercover investigation. Police said they arrested the owner and two employees on sex charges.
The owner of the Island Day Spa, on Highway 74, Son Jarkowski, was charged with human trafficking and maintaining a place of prostitution. Employee Min Ye was charged with solicitation. Another employee, Dan Kim, was charged with two counts of indecent exposure.All the crimes shocked Mark Binks, whose family shopped at the grocery store in the same shopping center as the spa.
“It’s hard to believe something like this would be going on in this area,” Binks said. “It’s too rural, you know, nothing happens here."Monroe police said the arrests were the result of an undercover investigation that began back in April. Sgt. T.J. Goforth said that’s when officers received a tip that the spa was a front for prostitution.
With their job taking them to the remotest parts of the state, the postmen in Meghalaya will be assigned a new task -- report on human trafficking cases.
An NGO, Impulse, has entered into an understanding with the Indian Postal Services to reach out to remotest villages in the Northeast for disseminating information on human trafficking.
"People in remote villages of the region do not have access to any sort of information, be it on the very notion of human trafficking or available ways and measures for their redressal."
"They are hesitant to go to the police station and report cases of missing children from their localities or villages," the team leader of Impulse, Hasina Kharbhih, said.
The project includes setting up of common service centres in post offices as coordinating locations in the region.
"The postman will distribute pamphlets on awareness. Also upon receiving any information on missing children or person, he will intimate, transmit and guide the information to the coordinator placed at the CSCs."
"The coordinator will subsequently work out a rescue strategy with the law-enforcement agencies and local NGOs," Kharbhih said.
Objective of the project is to create a sustainable harmonising environment for the communities to combat trafficking along with NGOs and law-enforcement agencies by utilising the reach of the Indian Postal Services, Kharbhih said.
About 44,000 children go missing in India annually and only 22 pc of them are traced, most of them victims of human trafficking.
Rescue operations conducted by NGOs show that majority of the victims belong to remote villages like those in some parts of Northeast where the illiterate masses do not have any access to information.
UTAH, United States, February 27, 2008- A bill to create a state felony penalty for human trafficking and smuggling hit a roadblock Wednesday when it was rejected in a tied 2-2 vote by a Senate panel.
Rep. Christopher Herrod, R-Provo, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that HB339 had received unanimous support in the House as a way to add a state provision to match federal law. Herrod said human trafficking is a modern day slave trade, and "some of the saddest ones are children brought ... for sexual purpose."
And he said Southern Utah is a popular human smuggling route. Herrod said a state statute would help bring grants to Utah and pointed out it's local police and social workers who are more likely to encounter trafficking than federal agents.
However, in voting against HB339, Sen. Scott McCoy, D-Salt Lake, said he believed existing federal efforts to curtail trafficking are sufficient.
As global demand for live transplants keeps growing, the shadowy organ trading business is rapidly expanding, dominated by unscrupulous brokers and facilitated by inadequate national legislations, widespread corrupt practices and a general lack of public awareness on the extent of the trade.
The illegal trade in body parts is largely dominated by kidneys because they are in greatest demand and they are the only major organs that can be wholly transplanted with relatively few risks for the living donor.
Organ trafficking accounts for around 10 per cent of the nearly 70,000 kidney transplants performed worldwide annually, although as many as 15,000 kidneys could be trafficked each year.
China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Brazil, the Philippines, Moldova, and Romania are among the world's leading providers of trafficked organs. If China is known for harvesting and selling organs from executed prisoners, the other countries have been dealing essentially with living donors, becoming stakeholders in the fast-growing human trafficking web.
Trafficked organs are either sold domestically, or exported to be transplanted into patients from the US, Europe, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and especially Israel.
Earlier this afternoon, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), held a picket line protest from 12:30 pm to 2:30 pm in front of the corporate offices of HBO in New York City, protesting its reality series Cathouse set in a brothel.
Here are excerpts from CATW's letter to Richard Parson, Bill Nelson and Sue Naegle, the Chair of Time Warner, Chair of HBO, and President of HBO respectively:
CATW urges HBO to stop promoting prostitution and sex trafficking. Rather than revealing the reality of the exploitation of prostitution and its inextricable link to sex trafficking, HBO's show Cathouse serves as propaganda for the sex industry, denying and concealing the harms to both prostituted women and society at large. HBO must cease glamorizing commercial sexual exploitation through so-called "documentary" shows like Cathouse. Instead, we urge HBO to produce programming that tells the truth about prostitution and its profound impact on human trafficking.
Shows like Cathouse are highly staged, one-sided advertisements for the pips that seek to increase social acceptance of buying and selling women. HBO has adopted the false image that no one is ever hurt in prostitution. Through our work with trafficking survivors, CATW and its partners around the world know that this belief is tragically and dangerously inaccurate.
By airing shows like Cathouse, HBO normalizes prostitution and its legalization. The cultural and legal acceptance of prostitution, in turn, encourages the demand for prostituted and trafficked women and girls in the global sex trade. Legitimizing pimps as entrepreneurs and managers, as well as portraying patronizing prostituted women as acceptable, harmless entertainment commences a vicious cycle in which the sex industry expands, and increases the demand for sex trafficked women and girls.
CATW calls upon HBO to take responsibility for its role in normalizing and promoting prostitution by removing the series Cathouse (and all other shows promoting prostitution) from its programming. HBO must not only stop airing Cathouse and all similar pro-exploitation shows but also use its resources to produce programming that exposes the truth about the harms of prostitution and trafficking, rather than profiting from the further exploitation of its victims. NYC Council Member John C. Liu discusses Human Trafficking & HBO at the protest
On April 24, 2008, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), will hold a picket line protest from 12:30 pm to 2:30 pm in front of the corporate offices of HBO, located at 1100 6th Avenue at 42nd Street in New York City, protesting its reality series Cathouse set in a brothel.
“HBO for some time now has been normalizing the demand for prostitution, which fuels sex trafficking. Its most recent example, Cathouse, distorts the reality of the sex industry by transforming pimps into businessmen, and by presenting the buying and selling of women as harmless and normal,” says Norma Ramos, Co-Executive Director of CATW.
CATW’s campaign will address HBO's effort to erase the harm of prostitution. 80% of all human trafficking victims are women and girls, 70% of which end up in prostitution. “HBO cynically labels Cathouse as a documentary when in fact it packages prostitution as entertainment. HBO has a social responsibility to tell the truth about prostitution and sex trafficking, not profit from and promote the world's oldest oppression,” says Founding Board Member, Dorchen Leidholdt. “HBO is creating a culture of acceptance of sexual exploitation, and it needs to take responsibility for that,” says Norma Ramos. CATW calls upon HBO to fund social services for trafficking victims and produce a credible documentary that exposes the true nature and human cost of commercial sexual exploitation.
Author Victor Malarek and NYC Council Member John C. Liu will be joining CATW and making statements. Victor Malarek is the author of The Natasha’s and the upcoming book, The Johns. Co-sponsors of the protest will be ECPAT-USA, Prostitution Research and Education (PRE), Equality Now and NOW NYC. Joining the protest will be two ‘HBO’ blow-up doll pimps dressed in their Cathouse gear. A press conference will be held at the protest.
HBO delves into its Cathouse vault to mine the most memorable scenes and wildest moments, from six glorious years filming at one of Nevada's premier tourist attractions: the Moonlite BunnyRanch, the bustling legal brothel located outside of Reno. Featuring up-close-and-personal interviews with many of the girls, good-time proprietor Dennis Hof, and longtime Ranch manager Madam Suzette, this month's half-hour show brings Cathouse fans classic footage with the likes of Sunset Thomas, Isabella Soprano, Brooke Taylor, Bridget the Midget, Air Force Amy and many others.
NEW DELHI, India- Victims of trafficking need to be handled more humanely during and after rescue operations, [policemen need to be made aware during training of stereotypes and judgments faced by victims].
With around 200,000 people trafficked in the country annually, the Centre for Social Research (CSR) has prepared a manual for police seeking to train them to be more humane towards trafficking victims during and after rescue operations. “While the law demands viewing trafficked persons as vulnerable victims in need of protection and support, assumptions and stereotypes that result in the judgement and accusation of trafficked persons are still widely prevalent and in dire need of change,” said Ranjana Kumari, human rights activist and CSR director.
The manual, supported by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the central government, was unveiled on the occasion of CSR’s annual day here Friday. To be used in police training colleges across the country, the manual has been designed specially to make the policemen understand the importance of approaching human trafficking from a multi-disciplinary human rights perspective with emphasis on issues of child rights and gender sensitivity.
The manual stresses the negative perception of the police against the victims/survivors and aims to act as a reminder to the policemen to work as ‘delivery agents’, ensuring that justice and basic rights of the survivor are delivered.
ISLAMABAD: Seventy-six kidnapping cases of women were registered by 14 police stations of the federal capital in the last 14 months compared with 13 cases of men, data gathered from police stations revealed.
The kidnapped women, married and unmarried, were abducted for various reasons.
Requesting anonymity, a police official said that women kidnapping incidents were increasing in the capital due to failure of police and other law-enforcement agencies to crack down on organized gangs dealing in human trafficking. He said parents were also responsible for the rising incidents of kidnapping.
The official said in most cases girls married against their will absconded with men of choice, instigating parents to label such cases as kidnapping to save their face. He said better understanding between parents and their daughters could avoid such cases.
Malik Naveed Fazal advocate said that lack of understanding between parents and their daughters had caused an increase in divorce rate and court marriage cases.
Naeem Mirza, the Aurat Foundation, director said that the main reason for rising women kidnapping cases across the country was that internal human trafficking was yet to be included into the human trafficking law. He said law-enforcement agencies need to crack down on the internal kidnapping gangs, as most of them were linked with international human traffickers.
Shehnaz Bukhari, a women rights activist, said that the main reason for rise in women kidnapping cases was the inability of the state to implement the human trafficking law. She said corruption in police department was another reason for rising women kidnapping cases.
Denver's goal to make August's Democratic National Convention eco-friendly could overshadow other important issues - such as the spike in prostitutes being imported to town to cater to the city's 35,000 guests.
"The amount of awareness that there is among activist communities is high. I think not a lot of (other) people have been listening," said Amanda Moon, a graduate student in international human rights at the University of Denver.
"I think this DNC is trying to achieve a lot of things that have never been done before like the green movement, which is a great movement. But a lot of energy is being focused toward that, and a lot of other issues aren't being heard."
The exact number of sex workers trafficked into the city for the DNCC would be impossible to calculate. But many metro area strip bars have already tripled their staff in preparation for the convention, said Stephanie Sharp, who has done outreach work with Denver prostitutes and works for the STD division of the Colorado Department of Public Health. "[The police] have a whole list of things they have to be concerned about as well, and prostitution and sex trafficking is not at the top," Moon added.
State Rep. Alice Borodkin, D-Denver, who has worked to crack down on human trafficking the last three years, said the convention could be a good opportunity to make contact with prostitutes brought into Denver, but logistically any outreach effort would be complicated. "My personal feeling is that we need to do a lot more. I'm not 100 percent convinced that people understand what they're looking at," Borodkin said.
Sharp said ideally outreach groups will join forces to offer resources and options outside of prostitution to any trafficked-in women.
A U.S. State Department report has highlighted people trafficking, corruption by government officials and domestic violence as matters for concern in its annual review of human rights conditions in Palau.
The report notes that in 2007, charges were brought by Palau’s Attorney General against four foreign nationals for human trafficking to advance prostitution in a local karaoke restaurant. All were convicted, with fines, restitution and jail terms. Charges were also brought forth against state officials for misuse of public funds for personal benefit by the Special Prosecutor, with the former governor of Airai ordered to pay over $5,000 in restitution.
Cases are still pending against a Koror State legislator, 23 current or former legislators of Kayangel State for misuse of public funds and against the governor of Melekeok State on similar charges.
Charges of misuse of per diem by the Special Prosecutor against current and former members of Palau’s Congress have also been filed with most pending trial. In addition, a officer of the Bureau of Revenue, Customs and Taxation was charged and convicted of accepting a bribe and fined in addition to a jail sentence.
The State Department also voiced concern over domestic violence involving women and child abuse with alcohol and drug abuse as contributing factors. In addition, the report alluded to reports of illegal prostitution being a problem with women from China and the Philippines working in karaoke bars as hostesses and prostitutes.
While crediting the Palau government for responding to such incidents, the U.S. State Department acknowledged that enforcement capabilities were lacking due to few qualified personnel and inadequate funding.
As global demand for live transplants keeps growing, the shadowy organ trading business is rapidly expanding, dominated by unscrupulous brokers and facilitated by inadequate national legislations, widespread corrupt practices and a general lack of public awareness on the extent of the trade.
The illegal trade in body parts is largely dominated by kidneys because they are in greatest demand and they are the only major organs that can be wholly transplanted with relatively few risks for the living donor.
Organ trafficking accounts for around 10 per cent of the nearly 70,000 kidney transplants performed worldwide annually, although as many as 15,000 kidneys could be trafficked each year.
China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Brazil, the Philippines, Moldova, and Romania are among the world's leading providers of trafficked organs. If China is known for harvesting and selling organs from executed prisoners, the other countries have been dealing essentially with living donors, becoming stakeholders in the fast-growing human trafficking web.
Trafficked organs are either sold domestically, or exported to be transplanted into patients from the US, Europe, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and especially Israel.
Ten years ago, organ trafficking was largely seen as a rumour. Since then a number of countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, Moldova) have taken decisive steps to go after the traffickers, criminalise the trade in human organs, or ban transplants from living donors. Nonetheless, this has come at the risk of driving the trade underground, or shifting it to other countries.
Arguing that laws and policies are insufficient to effectively curb organ trafficking, Organs Watch, COFS and other non-governmental organisations say it is essential for civil society to be actively engaged in this combat so organ trafficking is universally recognised as a medical human rights abuse and a "body tax on the poor".
MADISON — Human trafficking is happening in Wisconsin, but most law enforcement agencies haven’t received any training to recognize the crime and don’t consider it a problem, a new state report says.
The Office of Justice Assistance’s study marks the first attempt to gauge trafficking in the state. It concluded international and domestic trafficking involving dozens of victims is taking place in urban and rural areas across much of the southern two-thirds of the state.
But three-quarters of the justice agencies and more than a third of social services providers surveyed in the study said trafficking is not a serious problem or isn’t a problem at all.
“This is an indication of the lack of awareness,’’ the report said. “At the very least, the results indicate a need for training and education.’’
Tim Dewane is the director of the School Sisters of Notre Dame’s Office for Global Justice and Peace in Elm Grove and a member of the Milwaukee Rescue and Restore Coalition, which was launched by the federal government to raise human trafficking awareness. He said the report’s findings aren’t surprising.
“When Wisconsin or anywhere else has taken a closer look at human trafficking, they realize for most law enforcement it hasn’t been on their radar screen,’’ Dewane said. “This isn’t just a global issue but has local ramifications as well. Hopefully (the report) will open up some eyes.’’
The state Senate is expected to vote Tuesday on a bill that would outlaw human trafficking. Anyone caught trafficking a person for sex or labor would face up to $100,000 in fines and 25 years in prison. Anyone caught trafficking a minor could get 40 years.
Sen. Spencer Coggs, D-Milwaukee, the author of the bill, said the report may drive him to amend it to include police training.
The report calls human trafficking the third largest and fastest growing criminal industry in the world. Federal justice and immigration officials estimate as many as 17,500 people are trafficked annually into the U.S. for sex and forced labor, the report said.
The highest profile case in Wisconsin involved a pair Brookfield doctors who forced a Philippine woman to work as their maid for nearly two decades. The couple was convicted in 2006.
But hard data on victims in the state is nonexistent. The Office of Justice Assistance sent out a survey to police, sheriffs and prosecutors as well as social service providers early last year hoping for more information.
Of the 261 justice agencies that responded, only 6 percent said they had run across a case they considered slavery or human trafficking.
Thirteen percent said they didn’t know if they’d ever encountered a case, and 7 percent said they’d had any training on human trafficking.
UK- The government has agreed to look into funding the UK's first male-only refuge for victims of forced marriage. It has emerged that 15% of the people who seek help about being forced into wedlock are men or boys.
A man taken to Pakistan as a child and forcibly engaged to his five-year-old cousin has called for a men's refuge. Foreign Office minister Meg Munn said authorities must talk to those affected to "listen to their experiences" and "learn directly from them." She said: "Generally people expect men to be able to look after themselves, to manage situations, so men subject to domestic violence, men subject to forced marriage are likely to find it much, much more difficult." She added "there could well be" a need for a male shelter.
The British High Commission in Pakistan said that the issue of boys and men being forced is a problem that it is aware of. Spokesman Theepan Selparatnum said: "Sixty per cent of our case load is forced marriage work and between 10 to 15% of that are male. Our workload is increasing yearly and that's probably attributed to increased publicity and increased knowledge of what we can do."
'Abducted' Imran Rehman, from Derby, said his family took some extreme measures to get him back in line when he resisted the marriage, explaining that he was abducted and taken to Pakistan. He said a relative shackled his legs together and he was imprisoned for 15 days.
Mr Rehman has now urged the government to take action. "What I'm calling on the government to do would be set up a male refuge," he told BBC 5 Live. He went on: "There are no male refuges at all for Asian men. We have 165 women's refuges. What about the men? "We know it's happening, and I have a caseload of 36 men. We definitely require male refuge."
Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, told BBC Radio 5 Live a male refuge was a good idea. "We have even heard of bounty hunters chasing people," he said. "It exists, all these things, so I think people do need solid support."
VIENNA, Austria — Better data is needed to determine the magnitude of human trafficking and some countries are not taking the problem as seriously as they should be, the U.N.'s top anti-crime official said Tuesday. "We only see the tip of the iceberg but we have not succeeded in pushing this iceberg out of the water," Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the Vienna-based United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, told The Associated Press in an interview.
Costa, who described human trafficking as possibly the most difficult issue his office deals with, made his comments before a conference on the matter to be held in Vienna next month. The three-day gathering, which starts Feb. 13, is being organized by the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking, launched by Costa's drugs and crime office in March 2007 to increase knowledge and awareness of the issue, promote effective responses and foster joint action partnerships.
"We need to mobilize people by understanding better and we need better statistics so as to identify specifically what is going on," Costa said, while acknowledging that the matter was "murky" and often difficult to quantify. "We are dealing with human beings, we are not dealing with commodities and that makes it difficult to measure — but we will succeed," he said.
In preparing the meeting, known as the Vienna Forum to Fight Human Trafficking, Costa said organizers have run into countries that appeared not to fully grasp the severity of the problem. "We did run into some member states that, how can I say, maintain ... a sort of benign neglect who say, for instance, 'Well, this is not human trafficking or slavery — it's just prostitution,'" Costa said.
"I sense that greater educational efforts on our part are needed to make sure that the crime is fully understood and the severity fully appreciated," he added. Costa declined to divulge any names, saying he did not want to "shame" anyone. "Those are limited cases but in some instances they are important cases, countries well known to us," he said.
Costa also noted that some states — such as Moldova, Belarus and Nigeria — were becoming very "militant" in their efforts to stop trafficking. All three were ranked as recruiting countries in a report by the drugs and crime office released in April 2006. The report showed that most victims of human trafficking are women and children who are abducted or recruited in their homelands, transported through other countries and exploited in destination countries.
The report also found that the trafficking of people for sexual exploitation or forced labor affects virtually every region of the world and called on governments to do more to reduce demand, protect victims and bring perpetrators to justice.
By Rachel Lloyd:
