She's 10 and May Be Sold to a Brothel

Nicholas Kristof has been writing articles for The New York Times regarding human trafficking for years. His most recent article highlights the personal side of the internationally lucrative business.

From The New York Times on 1 June 2011:

M. is an ebullient girl, age 10, who ranks near the top of her fourth-grade class and dreams of being a doctor. Yet she, like all of India, is at a turning point, and it looks as if her family may instead sell her to a brothel.

Her mother is a prostitute here in Kolkata, the city better known to the world as Calcutta. Ruchira Gupta, who runs an organization called Apne Aap that fights human trafficking, estimates that 90 percent of the daughters of Indian prostitutes end up in the sex trade as well. And M. has the extra burden that she belongs to a subcaste whose girls are often expected to become prostitutes.

M. seemed poised to escape this fate with the help of one of my heroes, Urmi Basu, a social worker who in 2000 started the New Light shelter program for prostitutes and their children.

M., with her winning personality and keen mind, began to bloom with the help of New Light. Both her parents are illiterate, but she learned English and earned excellent grades in an English-language school for middle-class children outside the red-light district. I’m concealing her identity to protect her from gibes from schoolmates.

Unfortunately, brains and personality aren’t always enough, and India is the center of the 21st-century slave trade. This country almost certainly has the largest number of human-trafficking victims in the world today.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Setting the Record Straight

Last week, the Association of Chief Police Officers of England, Wales, and Northern Island issued a report that found that nearly 10% of prostitutes in the UK are victims of human trafficking (that figure jumps to 15% for migrant women.

Release about the report:

The report, called Setting the Record, involved a widespread collaboration between a number of law enforcement agencies, non-government organisations and has been independently academically reviewed. It also has the support of government as providing the most comprehensive estimate of the levels of trafficking for sexual exploitation.

It found that around 17,000 of the estimated 30,000 women involved in off-street prostitution in England and Wales are migrants. Approximately half come from Eastern Europe and a third from Asia. These women were grouped into three categories: those who were trafficked, those who are vulnerable and those who meet neither threshold.

Of the 17,000 migrant women identified, 2,600 were deemed to have been trafficked and a further 9,200 were deemed vulnerable migrants who may be further victims of trafficking. Most of those trafficked (2,200) are from Asia, primarily China.

ACPO lead on migration and associated matters Deputy Chief Constable Chris Eyre said: “Human trafficking for sexual exploitation involves the most extreme abuse of individuals in our communities.

“We recognise that Project Acumen focuses on only one area of trafficking, but it clearly sets out the scale of the problems that those in law enforcement, victim support, social care and border protection, collectively face.

“It provides us with a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of how migrant women are involved in prostitution - how they are influenced, controlled, coerced, exploited and trafficked. “The publication of this report represents not the end of a process, but the start. We now have a better picture of the extent of trafficking and will look to support from Government to ensure we work effectively with all agencies to make the UK a more hostile environment for traffickers, to shut down trafficking routes into the UK and to prosecute those who are exploiting women for their own gains.”

Read the full report here.

The Lost Girls

From the Texas Monthly by Mimi Swartz

Most people who are aware of the existence of human trafficking think that it happens in faraway places, like war-torn countries in the former Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, or Eastern Europe. Few can imagine that slaves are brought into the U.S. to work in restaurants, factories, and sexually oriented businesses (SOBs to those in the know). In fact, across the country, tens of thousands of people are being held captive today. Depending on whom you ask, Houston is either the leading trafficking site in the U.S. or very near the top, along with Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans, and New York City. . .

In recent years there have been several high-profile arrests and prosecutions in Harris County, which has some of the toughest anti-trafficking laws in the country and one of the country’s most innovative anti-trafficking task forces. In 2005 police brought down Maximino “El Chimino” Mondragon, who ran one of the nation’s largest sex-trafficking rings, in which young women from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mondragon’s native El Salvador were forced to work as prostitutes. That same year, a sixty-year-old man named Evan Lowenstein was arrested for operating at least a dozen brothels stocked with women from Eastern Europe who had been brought into the U.S. with promises of legitimate work. He got probation and disappeared. . .

But each time a case is made, the business simply morphs and grows in a new way. Case in point: When officers in the FM 1960 area set up a task force and began shutting down massage parlors that did not have legitimate licenses to operate, the traffickers began circumventing state regulations by reclassifying their operations as “tea parlors” and, in a novel twist, “art galleries.” “We could have fifty people doing this 24/7 and still not have enough manpower,” says Skip Oliver, a captain in the Harris County Constable’s Department in Precinct 4. “You can punch a button here and get a girl from Thailand in the pipeline. We’re nibbling at a piece of the problem. We don’t even see the whole picture.” . . .

Many rescuers know that women who wind up as trafficking victims were usually abused earlier in their lives, often by a family member or a spouse; that’s what makes them so vulnerable to the traffickers’ feigned affection and false protection. But the repeated rapes that captive prostitutes endure can turn someone with low self-esteem into someone with a serious psychiatric illness. Many suffer from severe dissociative identity disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder is usually a given. Some are bipolar. Many of these conditions have similar symptoms: extreme highs, harrowing lows, paranoia, drug or alcohol abuse as self-medication, and various forms of self-destructive behavior, including self-mutilation. . .

Usually trafficking victims are profoundly ashamed of what they have been doing or believe they have failed at it, disappointing the families who depend on them for survival. Like battered spouses, they often return to their abusers. Many have no other way to make a living. . .

“They break people beyond repair,” Dottie [Lester, coordinator for the Trafficked Persons Assistance Program for YMCA International Services] says of traffickers. “If I shattered a glass and then put it back together, it wouldn’t hold water.”

Read the Full Article

Arresting traffickers, rescuing victims, and prosecuting cases are the more high profile ways to fight human trafficking. As this article points out, though, such efforts are only first steps at best. Trafficking victims and survivors require long-term services and support beyond escape and rescue. High-profile arrests and shutting down SOBs do not address the root causes or trafficking and in many cases do little to address demand. While these efforts are important, and I strongly believe we need to advocate for increased prosecution of traffickers, these efforts must not exist in isolation but instead need to be part of a holistic anti-trafficking strategy. Otherwise, they are stop-gap measures at best and potentially counterproductive or harmful at worst.

Photograph by Van Ditthavong for the Texas Monthly

Behind the myth of the "happy hooker"

HTP Community Comment:

The so-called "nation wide survey" referred to here was conducted by Melissa Farley, IIRC, and has severe methodological problems. To put not too fine a point on it, Farley mostly interviewed prostitutes who were in rescue organizations. A similar analogy would be studying marriage by only interviewing women who were in shelters for battered women.

Prostitution is, in many ways, a bad job. It is NOT, however, synonymous with slavery or trafficking as the author of the above article makes out. Bad and tenacious science which greatly exaggerates the dangers of prostitution does nothing to help us to stop trafficking as it reroutes anti-trafficking resources into, essentially, anti-vice programs.

- Dr. Thaddeus Blanchette, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

From the Global Post:

By Kate Transchel

Generating an estimated $32 billion dollars annually, human trafficking is the fastest-growing criminal activity in the world today. It is also the most lucrative. According to a 2005 International Labor Office (ILO) report, just a single female held for sexual exploitation yields an average of $67,200 annually in Western Europe and North America.

A multitude of recent studies try to explain why women get snared into the trade in flesh. Researchers point to poverty, chronic unemployment, domestic violence and drug addiction as the primary “push factors.”

But sadly, there isn’t enough discussion of the real root of the problem — the men. Human trafficking is basically international sexual terrorism perpetrated against women and children on a mass scale by men. It is their demand for illicit or predatory sex that generates huge profits for the slavers and leaves behind the tortured minds and broken bodies of those women and children they violate.

According to a 2008 study by the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, the majority of men who buy prostitutes do so in order to obtain sex they are uncomfortable asking for. As one interviewee put it, “I want to pay someone to do something a normal person wouldn’t do. To piss on someone or pay someone to do something degrading.” The same study revealed that johns subscribe to a tremendous amount of denial — 87 percent thought women choose prostitution, “just like any job,” and 64 percent believed that the women they bought were sexually satisfied by the encounter.

Read the full article

Sweden Takes Action Against Sex Trafficking

Sweden, currently holding the EU Presidency, is calling for a strengthening of international cooperation and coordinated action to combat the increasing global problem of prostitution and human trafficking for sexual purposes. Sweden is calling upon other EU countries and the international community to adopt even more effective measures to combat this serious violation of human rights, and of individuals human dignity, this barrier to social equality and gender equality.

Sweden regards trafficking and prostitution as intrinsically linked and Sweden was the first country in the world to introduce a law (1999) criminalizing the purchase of sexual services.

In July 2008, the Government confirmed its commitment to action by adopting an Action Plan against prostitution and human trafficking for sexual purposes and committed SEK 213 million to the introduction of 36 measures up to 2010. The Action Plan covers five priority areas: greater protection and support for people at risk and for victims, a stronger emphasis on preventive work, higher standards and greater efficiency in the justice system, increased national and international cooperation, and educational and awareness campaigns.

The consensus among Swedish experts is that efforts to combat prostitution and human trafficking must take into account judicial, social and gender perspectives and be based on the human rights principle. Societies that claim to defend principles of legal, political, economic and social equality cannot allow human trafficking to flourish. The eventual elimination of human trafficking is achievable.

Illinois and the Swedish Prostitution Model

llinois' Cook County Sheriff, Tom Dart, is in the process of re-focusing Illinois' efforts to address prostitution to the demand side. In his efforts, he is looking to the Swedish model for addressing prostitution. In Sweden, the selling of sex is legal, but buying sex is illegal, reflecting a belief that prostitution is a form of violence against women. The law is meant to put the focus on the people who create the demand for commercial sex and facilitate it: johns, pimps, and in some cases traffickers.

In a recent article in the Weekly Standard, Ambassador Lagon, former Ambassador-at-Large and Director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (TIP) and current Executive Director of Polaris Project, reports that Dart is shifting "enforcement resources from the supply side to the demand side: from arresting (and releasing and rearresting) forcibly prostituted women and girls to arresting pimps and johns and impounding their cars, while directing the prostituted females to social services."

Lagon quotes Thomas Bodström, a former Swedish minister of justice, stating that "as long as men think they are entitled to buy and use women's and girls' bodies, human trafficking for sexual purposes will continue." While not all commercial sex is forced or is trafficking, proponents of the Swedish model and efforts to address demand argue that such efforts will afford protections to anyone engaged in commercial sex, since it will allow prostitutes and sex-trafficking victims to access social services and healthcare without fear of arrest.

End Demand, IL, an organization advocating for efforts to address demand for commercial sex, states that its goals are to "advocate for the creation of resources and tools for law enforcement to hold perpetrators accountable, deter further exploitation and increase options for prostituted and trafficked women and girls. . . . EDI's work will result in the adoption of sound public policies and practices that focus law enforcement efforts on protecting victims of the sex industry and prosecuting traffickers, pimps and other enterprises that profit from the exploitation of women and girls in the sex trade. Furthermore, our work will create an infrastructure of care for those involved in prostitution." From a basic economic-analysis standpoint, addressing demand makes sense, given that reducing supply tends to mainly drive up prices and profits - for pimps and traffickers, in this case - and does not eliminate demand.

At the same time, Amanda Kloer of End Human Trafficking points out that simply lifting the Swedish model and attempting to graft it onto other communities and localities is problematic. She lists three main reasons that simply imposing the model on Illinois may not work, including Sweden's more extensive social welfare system, the fact that Sweden is more homogeneous and a significantly smaller country and more centralized nation than the US, and a cultural emphasis in the US on individual rights and the ability to "do what we want." She concludes, "These concerns shouldn't prevent Sheriff Dart or any other creative public servants from taking a hard look at their prostitution policies and reinventing them to better protect women and girls in prostitution. But they should be an reminder that the U.S. isn't Sweden, and thus we shouldn't implement the exact same policies nor expect the exact same results."

We can learn a great deal from international efforts to end slaver, but at the same time, innovative efforts, in fact all efforts, to address trafficking must carefully consider the local context.

Nigerian women forced into voodoo prostitution

Greek police crush voodoo prostitution ring

Greek police said Thursday, November 12th, that they had smashed a gang that forced Nigerian women into prostitution using voodoo in the latest of a number of such cases reported in Europe.

The Athens Police Department said the traffickers are believed to have exploited more than 40 Nigerian women brought to Greece via Turkey in the last two years.

A 20-year-old Greek woman of Nigerian origin was arrested on suspicion of working for the network and police are seeking her husband, who is also a naturalized Greek citizen. Police rescued five women held captive by the traffickers against a ransom of 80,000 euros (R885 369) demanded from their families.

In October, Dutch prosecutors sought prison sentences of up to eight years on Tuesday for ten Nigerians accused of using voodoo curses to force about 140 Nigerian girls into prostitution in Europe. The trial, on charges of human trafficking and membership of a criminal organisation, opened in March in Zwolle in the central Netherlands and judgment will be handed down on December 3.

Prosecutors claimed that the girls brought by the gang into the Netherlands as asylum seekers had disappeared from asylum centres in 2006 and 2007. About a dozen of the girls were traced, while the rest were thought to have been forced into prostitution in Italy, Spain and France.Their ages ranged from 16 to 23.

The suspects were arrested in the Netherlands in October 2007 after an investigation by Dutch police in collaboration with their Nigerian, Italian, Spanish, French, Belgian, British, Irish and US counterparts.In August Spanish police said they had smashed a gang that used the threat of voodoo curses to force Nigerian women to work as prostitutes in Germany, arresting more than 50 people. - AFP

Read the full article

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Black magic cultists are using Voodoo to control the minds of Nigerian girls and force them into prostitution. This has been a common phenomenon in the European region involving the human trafficking victims from West Africa.

Voodoo is deeply rooted in the Western African culture. Voodoo priests often use a ritual to "seal financial transactions or root out suspected thieves -- often with a threat of a deadly curse for the wrongdoer." [1]

Likewise, traffickers lure young girls into the false promise of job in Europe and make them go through voodoo ritual. The girls are told that if they leave the traffickers or the pimps, it "will bring death to them or their family." [2]

An incident like this reinforces the importance of raising the awareness and educating the potential victims to bring about cultural changes to prevent further harms in the future.

A Look at the Times Special: Running in the Shadows - For Runaways, Sex Buys Survival

From Jennifer Hollinger:

In the second article of a two article series, Ian Urbina of the New York Times explored the growing number of teen runaways on US streets as a result of the recession. In this excellent article, Urbina discusses how teens survive a harsh life on the streets. For many teens, this means resorting to survival sex. According to the article, nearly 1/3 of runaway children engage in survival sex for food, drugs, or a place to stay. I suspect that the actual number of runaways who engage in survival sex is far higher.

I was immediately struck by how similar the situation of the teen runaways was to that of someone trafficked for sexual exploitation and how easily these two phenomena could intertwine. Pimps used the same methods a trafficker would to coerce women into working for them; seducing the women and girls, convincing them they were “in love,” initiating a sexual relationship and then demanding that they do them a favor by having sex with friends or simply forcing them to have sex for money. Take, for example, the story of 17-year-old Nicole, who ran away from home in Medford, OR. “I didn’t know the town, and the police would just send me back to the group home,’ Nicole said, explaining why she did not cut off the relationship once her first boyfriend became a pimp and why she did not flee prostitution when she had the chance. ‘I’d also fallen for the guy. I felt trapped in a way I can’t really explain.’

In addition to runaways, over a dozen convicted pimps were interviewed by the New York Times. According to Urbina, incarcerated pimps described the complicated roles they played as father figure, landlord, boss and boyfriend to the girls who worked for them. They said they went after girls with low self-esteem, prior sexual experience and a lack of options. Again, the overlap with the conditions leading to human trafficking was alarming. Those who wish to exploit vulnerable people have a common vocabulary of abuse, manipulation and deceit.

While there are those who seek to exploit young runaways, there are others who are doing their best to help, including anti-trafficking units in metropolitan police departments and the FBI. A poignant interview with a 16-year-old runaway who was forced into prostitution highlighted the fine line that the FBI prosecutor had to walk in this so-called flip interview. In essence, he had to persuade her to leave her pimp without actually admitting that she had one while simultaneously convincing her to testify against him, or flip on him. The irony of this situation is that, were this same girl 16-year-old girl to have sex with a male over the age of 18, he would end up in jail but, because money changed hands, he would simply be fined and she would be arrested for solicitation. If a 16-year-old child is too young to legally consent to sex, how can we simultaneously consider her old enough to sell it?

Overall, this two article series was highly informative and gave some good insights into the phenomenon of survival sex by teen runaways and the systematic abuse they face at the hands of their pimps. The article effectively highlights one of the fundamental flaws in the US legal system. We criminalize prostitutes, even those who are under 18, but we let off the johns with barely a slap on the wrist. The people who pay for sex promulgate this system of abuse and yet they suffer little fear of punishment from the legal system.

While much was done well in this article, more of a connection could have been made between human trafficking and teen prostitution, especially considering that Urbina quotes the head of a Boston anti-trafficking task force in the piece. The methods of exploitation employed by a pimp and a trafficker share many similarities and addressing the criminalization of prostitutes could do much to aid both trafficking survivors and teen runaways who are forced into survival sex.

Go here to read the full article.

Namaste-My Five Weeks in Kolkata, India

I got to spend five weeks in India this past summer. I was working in shelters for trafficking survivors and children of sex workers.

I'm really excited about all the opportunities that are going to come from this adventure and to share it with you.

While in Kolkata, I wrote a few excerpts for this blog. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment or email me! I cannot wait to start a dialogue!

"For the next few weeks I will be working at the Destiny Reflection Center in Kolkata, India. The Destiny is a center where girls rescued from the sex trafficking industry come to work and earn a sustainable living.

I've only been to the center once, being that I've only been in the city for a couple of days. I met a few of the girls and saw what they are working on. Monday is my first official day of volunteer work.

During my first few days of visiting here, I am just in awe and wonder of how magical a place like India, and more specifically Kolkata can be. There have been many obstacles to overcome while here. Not knowing how to communciate, going the past six days without my luggage, being taken advantage of by cab drivers and shop owners because I am an American. However, that does not stop the immense joy that I feel while I am here.

There is so much to learn and know about Kolkata, India. This pulsing metropolis is in the eastern part of the country. It is overwhelmingly diverse in people and in ways of life. I'm staying in an apartment right now in a modest neighborhood along the main road of Kolkata. Just a few blocks down the road is a mall that trumps any mall I've ever been to, and you can feel the air conditioning from the street. Yet, 50 feet in front of this mall is a slum full of houses made of sticks, mud, and grocery/rice bags.

Indian people take such pride in their culture, people, and country, yet do not lend a hand to their brothers and sisters in the slums. Walking past a slum yesteray, I heard a car horn beep behind me, and it was a Mereceds Benz. Really? Behind the mall I spoke of, there are three highrise apartment complexes being built. They are complete with tennis courts, swimming pools and state-of-the art fitness centers.

Maybe it's my strong Western sense of community, but I just can't seem to rationalize why a booming economy doesn't help build up its people. No wonder terrible phenomena like Human Trafficking still exists.

I was riding in a cab the other day (quite the adventure) and while stop a young girl reached her hand in the open window and smacked my arm. She was a gorgeous child, maybe seven or eight eyears old. One of the most stunningly beautiful children I have ever laid eyes on; the sad thing was I couldn't look at her. I had to ignore her because she is working for someone, trying to get money she'll never see. I wanted to pull her into the cab with my firend and me, and just take care of her. I don't know how people can walk the streets of this city and ignore what's going on all around them. How a child can walk the streets and beg for moeny instead of playing and pretending; or how a young girl can sleep with numerous men who will never remember her name or love her the ways she is supposed to be loved. My heart cannot help but be open and broken to the situation my eyes are laying witness to. This just has to stop."

"Wandering through the streets of Kolkata give me a whole new udnerstanding of teh world in which Indians live. Slums lay next to luxury tower apartments. People beg for moeny outside of shopping malls. There are thousands of girls that get lured from their homes and taken into the sex industry. Living in filthy and infectious stalls and forced to service man after man.

Working at the Destiny Center has given me a chance to put faces with the name "Trafficking." These girls are barely 16, 17 years of age and have already seen more of a life than their parents. Most of the time they are offered a better life in a bity city. There are promises of good jbos and higher salaries, but these promises never go through.

My heart breaks to know that something like this happens right under the noses of people who live in this country. Everyone knows about it. Does anybody care? Have they become so callused to this way of making money and exploiting people, that it becomes almost justified?

In the USA, trafficking occurs, too. We make up about 10% of the sex trafficking; most of the people trafficked into our country are for labor. They become landscapers, house slaves, domestic caregivers, farmhands and the like. Most Americans don't know that this happens. We say they are "illegal aliens" and that they are "stealing our jobs." Keep in mind that not every foreigner in our country is there by free will.

I'm most outraged at my own country for not noticing trafficking and going something about it. We have so much power and authority, so many means to make trafficking stop, and we all it to continue. Maybe that's why people like me, Faceless International, The Empancipation Network, Free the Slaves, Stop The Traffik, Made By Survivors, and others exist. We are teh ones called to educate and seen an end to such a horrible and unjustifiable way of treating people. Help rescue the ones who are in it and help restore the quality of life they all deserve.

Human beings have the ability to dream, exlore, create, and change the world in which they live in. We are given a complex mind and imagination that no one can compare to; why discourage people to not use that to its fullest power and authority?"

"I, again, got to go through the Red Light District of Kolkata a few days ago. For those of you new to the blog, I'm an Art Therapist, and I went to Khidderpore to work with the children of sex workers.

The first time going through the RLD, I wasn't approached at all. This time I was bombarded. One sex worker spotted me and came running towards the taxi I was in. She was offering me her baby girl, who was maybe seven months old. A beautiful baby girl, don't think it didn't cross my mind to take her home with me.

Being around the children of Khidderpore shelter was like being around any other group of children. They are very joyous, want to be loved and talked to. They drew pictures for me and laughed when I treid to understand Bengali. Watching them walk back to the brothels for the night broke my heart.

If you could look into their eyes, like I got the chance to, you'd feel like you had to do something too. We're doing a great injustice to humanity when we know the facts and don't do anything to stop this."

Swedish Institute Releases Films on Human Trafficking Efforts

The Swedish Institute, in conjunction with The NewsMarket, has released two short films about Sweden's efforts to combat sex trafficking, at home and in its capacity as current president of the European Union.

The first discusses Sweden's Action Plan against human trafficking, and sets forth the Swedish government's stance that prostitution is inextricably connected with human trafficking. This view led the Swedish government in 1999 to become the first country to criminalize the buying of sex while allowing the selling of sex, treating the prostitute as more of a victim than a criminal.

The second video highlights the conference "Towards Global EU Action against Trafficking in Human Beings" that was held October 19-20 in Brussels. At the conference, future efforts to combat trafficking were addressed, including the Stockholm Program and increasing cooperation with origin and transit countries.

Queen Silvia of Sweden stated during the conference: "It is important that we recognize that the demand for sex with minors is a very strong driving force behind this global problem, and therefore needs to be addressed urgently. And to deny, to turn a blind eye, or to passively observe, is a contribution to the continuous contemporary slave trade that is manifested by trafficking of human beings."

Amnesty International Hobart Action Centre: Comfort Women Event

On the 1st of August, Amnesty International Hobart Action centre ran an action on the grounds of Parliament House, Hobart, in an effort to raise awareness for the "comfort women", a body of women put into sexual slavery by the Japanese Military during World War II.

World War II saw one of the largest cases of human trafficking in the 20th century.

Thousands of 'comfort women' were coerced into providing sexual services for Japanese armed forces across the Asia Pacific.

Many of these women are in their later years now, and are still campaigning for some sense of acknowledgment or compensation from the Japanese Government.

Japan still refuses to officially acknowledge its responsibility or legal liability for these crimes.

More info on comfort women

"Be the Change" on Gandhi's Birthday

Here's a great chance to "be the change you wish to see in the world": the Kids with Cameras Foundation is looking for volunteers to host "House Parties for Hope" on October 2 - Gandhi's 140th birthday. Kids with Cameras is the foundation that grew out of the award-winning documentary Born into Brothels, which follows the lives of several children of prostitutes in Calcutta's red-light district who are given video cameras and taught how to use them. Through a partnership with the Buntain Foundation, Kids with Cameras is now working to build "Hope House," which is a "landmark endeavor to house up to 100 girls who are daughters of prostitutes from the same red-light district featured in the film. Hope House will give them access to on-site physical and psychological care, as well as formal mentorship from nursing students from an adjacent College of Nursing, all on a quiet, rustic campus on the city's outskirts. Each girl will have a full scholarship for private school education through high school, as well as access to computer labs, English language instruction and art, film and photography classes."

To complete the project, Hope House needs to raise the remaining $690,000 of its $1.2 million goal--and that's where you can help, by joining others from all over the world in hosting or attending a screening of Born into Brothels at a House Party for Hope. All proceeds from the house parties will go directly to Hope House's Capital Campaign.

Says Ross Kauffman, co-director and producer of Born into Brothels: "I hope all of the film's fans and our past supporters will join us in this unprecedented effort to raise the completion funds to build Hope House. It was a dream of ours as we made the film to have a place for these children to learn and grow. The dream is close to becoming a reality. There is no better way for anyone that watches the film and falls in love with these kids, just as we did, to make a difference in their future."

To learn more about hosting or attending a House Party for Hope, please visit http://www.kids-with-cameras.org/. For more information on Hope House, visit http://www.kids-with-cameras.org/school.

Domestic Sex Trafficking in the U.S.

From OrlandoSentinel.com:

A 15-year-old Orange County girl who ran away from home after an argument with her mother in 2007 was kidnapped and held captive in an underground world of drugs and forced prostitution.

Now, more than two years after the teen's harrowing, three-week ordeal, an Orange County husband and wife are charged in a child trafficking case, one that highlights a growing state problem, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said.

Aleisea N. Smith, 22, and Timothy L. Smith, 39, are accused of kidnapping the teen at gunpoint and demanding she turn tricks for them. They remain at the Orange County Jail without bail.

The case came to light this week after Aleisea Smith's Aug. 7 arrest on numerous charges, including sex trafficking, forcing/coercing another person into prostitution and kidnapping.

Oakland police learned Smith's identity and discovered an outstanding warrant while investigating her for an unrelated incident. She was in court Thursday to face new charges of child neglect and providing false information to police in that other case.

Timothy L. Smith already was in jail in an unrelated child-support case when he was charged in the 2007 case, records show. He faces nine counts, including sex trafficking, kidnapping and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.

Investigators worked for several months with the State Attorney's Office to press charges against the Smiths, the Orange County Sheriff's Office said.

The teen's allegations against the couple illustrate a "huge problem" confronting teens in Florida, FDLE special-agent supervisor Lee Condon said.

"We're seeing it more and more," he said. "What a horrible life for a child to end up that way."

Earlier this year, the federal government documented more than 1,200 allegations of human trafficking that occurred between January 2007 and September.

Nearly 85 percent of the incidents involved sex trafficking, the Department of Justice said. Nearly one-third of the 1,229 alleged incidents involved sex trafficking of children.

U.S. citizens accounted for about 65 percent of sex-trafficking victims.

Police reports show the teen, whom the Orlando Sentinel is not identifying, was missing for 21 days, a tortuous period during which she was beaten, raped and forced to work as a prostitute.

On April 8, 2007, the girl ran away from home after an argument with her mother. The girl quickly agreed come back, reports show.

But as she walked near the Silver Oaks Apartments at Silver Star Road and Powers Drive, a man forced her into a van at gunpoint, reports show.

The man later was identified as Timothy Smith. Eventually, he picked up his wife, Aleisea Smith, at a strip club on Orange Blossom Trail.

Aleisea Smith put a towel over the girl's head and told her, "If you move, you are dead," according to an arrest affidavit. The teen later was told "she belonged to them now and would be making a lot of money."

Hours later, while the teen and Aleisea Smith waited at a hotel, Timothy Smith was arrested on a probation violation.

For the remaining 20 days, the teen told investigators, Aleisea Smith forced her to have sex with more than a dozen men at a trailer park and at a home in Minneola in exchange for money and rent, according to the affidavit.

Aleisea Smith often beat the teen, reports show. The girl's mother finally located her after receiving a call from Jatosha Battle, a woman with whom Smith and the teen were staying. The mother showed up at the house and called authorities. Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said the scenario of the alleged kidnapping is relatively rare.

"It's certainly not unheard of," he said. But, "It is far more likely that the kid would be tricked or seduced or lured into a situation like this."

Full Article
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Just like the citizens in Thailand or a country in Eastern Europe, the U.S. citizens are not immune to becoming human trafficking victims. Too many teenagers in the United States run away from their own abusive homes and find themselves entrapped by the false affection and promises of the pimps. Pimps usually play roles of the victims' boyfriends or caregivers to the victims who are desperate for love and attention.

Once the pimps earn the loyalty and trust of the victims, they forcefully or deceitfully place the victims into the prostitution. According to the research of Shared Hope International, these girls are not allowed to come home to the pimps until the daily quota is met. [i] Otherwise, they will inevitably face the consequences of verbal or even physical abuse by the pimps. [ii]

Indeed, sex trafficking of teenagers in the U.S. may sound so foreign to some of you. But, the statics shows that the domestic minor trafficking in the U.S. urges our serious attention. In fact, the U.S. Department of Justice reported in 2007 that 63% of the victims of human trafficking within the United States are U.S. citizens. [iii] If you would like to find out more about this issue, please visit Share Hope International.

FG urges reform of prostitution laws

*Picture from previous Irish Times article on prostituton.

Failure to amend the prostitution laws could lead to Ireland becoming the new “red light district of Europe”, a Fine Gael TD has claimed. Party immigration spokesman Denis Naughten yesterday said that Ireland has not reformed its laws on soliciting and prostitution, unlike many other EU states.

Mr Naughten said the Dutch authorities had recently decided to close a third of Amsterdam’s notorious red light district because its liberal policy on prostitution had failed to prevent organised crime and human trafficking. Similarly, he said, both Norway and Sweden had outlawed the buying of services from a prostitute.

He said that in Britain new legislation will have the effect of clamping down on those who buy sex from women who have been victims of sex trafficking. Mr Naughten claimed tougher laws elsewhere could lead to illegal traffickers targeting Ireland. He called for the establishment of a group to review and examine prostitution laws with a view to preventing the proliferation of sex trafficking in a growing industry.

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As an abolitionist, I fully agree with Mr. Naughten's argument in regard to Irish prostitution law. If anything, a lax regulation or liberal policy of prostitution in Ireland will only facilitate the members of organized crime to take advantage of the systems. Irish Times earlier this year also reported the gravity of sex trafficking in Ireland. While some British showed full support for legalizing of the country's sex industry, a study in the past has proven otherwise. In Netherlands, for instance, the sex industry grew by 25% and accounted for 5% of the Netherlands' national economy. Also, 80% of women in the country's brothels are trafficked from other countries, with 70% from Central and Eastern European countries. But, the world will watch and see if the liberal regulation of the Irish sex industry will in fact countermeasure the problems of human trafficking in Northern Ireland.

Prevention

By the time someone has been trafficked, we've already failed. Obviously efforts to help victims, empower survivors, and punish perpetrators are extremely vital. At the same time, ultimately we should be working towards a world where trafficking does not occur in the first place. Prevention efforts can be nebulous, though, and even with the best of intentions can do more harm than good. A few weeks ago I attended a panel on preventing human trafficking. Numerous experts who are working in the anti-trafficking movement in various capacities expressed some common themes about what needs to happen to address the roots of trafficking.

Denise Brennan, an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Georgetown University, is the author of What's Love Got to Do With It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in Sosua, the Dominican Republic. She is currently working on a book about survivors of human trafficking entitled Starting Over: Life After Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States. Brennan suggests that efforts to prevent human trafficking must begin with efforts to promote the rights of migrants. From her research she has found that migrants are extremely vulnerable to trafficking because even when they are not trafficked, their basic rights are often violated. Since they are treated as though they have no rights, they are also less likely to come forward to law enforcement when they are exploited. Brennan also argued that migrants rights groups must be a part of the anti-trafficking conversation. She also advocated for increased opportunities for human trafficking survivors to connect with one another and to shape the anti-trafficking movement.

Martina Vandenberg is a partner at Jenner and Block LLP, and she does pro bono representation of women trafficked to the US for forced labor, including civil litigation on behalf of survivors. She echoed many of Brennan's points about migrants rights, and highlighted several prevention efforts that have actually been harmful. First, she argued that efforts to discourage migration do not work and ultimately leave migrants more vulnerable when they do migrate.

Vandenberg also said that anti-prostitution efforts are counterproductive, making women more vulnerable to commercial sexual exploitation. As a corollary, she pointed out that prostitutes can become victims of human trafficking; the idea that if someone once consented to being a sex worker means that she can never be trafficked is both false and extremely harmful. Finally, she argued against efforts to buy people out of slavery, pointing out that such efforts actually increase the demand for slavery.

Vandenberg went on to discuss what should be being done to prevent human trafficking, focusing on the root causes. She emphasized that this work is not glamorous, but it is necessary if we are serious about preventing this human rights abuse.

First, we need to work to fight discrimination against women and girls. Statistically, women and girls still make up the majority of trafficking victims, and due to gender discrimination, they are especially vulnerable to trafficking. On a related note, Vandenberg argues that anti-trafficking efforts must go hand-in-hand with work to address domestic violence. She noted that sometimes money is diverted from domestic violence work to anti-trafficking work, which actually can make people more vulnerable to trafficking when they are desperate to leave a domestic situation and lack options.

In a slightly different direction, Vandenberg advocated for due diligence: we need to seriously look at where US' money is going, particularly in military contracts. She also addressed deterrence, including criminal prosecution and civil litigation on behalf of survivors. Finally, she also discussed the importance about educating migrants about their rights and enforcing labor laws.

Ben Skinner, a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, journalist, and author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery, focused his remarks on a call to action. He argued that slavery is the main human rights issue of our generation, and how we respond to this atrocity will be a sign of our commitment to a more just world. Preventing human trafficking, he suggested, must start with each of us and the daily choices that we make.

On a personal note, I have been thinking about prevention a lot lately. This summer I am interning with an agency doing casework with people who are homeless or at risk of being homeless. These people are extremely vulnerable to numerous forms of exploitation. The Colorado Advisory Committee on Homeless Youth recently recommended that all agencies that work directly with people who are homeless should be trained on human trafficking, because traffickers target this population. Working daily with people who are homeless has again reinforced for me the importance of comprehensive efforts to address poverty, discrimination, and other factors that make people easy prey for traffickers.

Picture taken by Kay Chernush for the U.S. State Department.

Arrests Made in Tampa, FL

*Photos courtesy of ABC Action News

From the St. Petersburg Times:

It started with one.
Police investigated.

They found a woman who endured abuse, rape and beatings, they say — a woman held captive in a $600,000 Treasure Island home, forced to dance and prostitute her own body.
But it didn't stop at one.

"This broke it open," said an investigator, Pinellas County sheriff's Capt. Teresa Dioquino. "A lot of tentacles sprung off of this case."

Now, Tampa Bay may sit in a ring of something often associated with dank rooms and Third World countries.

Human sex trafficking.

• • •

What police claim happened inside the house — what may be happening in other local cases — fits the predatory manifesto of traffickers all over the world.

"We're starting to find more and more cases where our youth is being targeted right here in the U.S., right here in Florida," said Giselle Rodriguez of the Florida Coalition Against Human Trafficking. "We're starting to see cases involving homeless adults. They look for people that are down and out on their luck, who are desperate to get themselves out of debt.

"They promise the American dream."

Kenyatta Cornelous, 38, Edward Jones, 47, Corinna Shaffer, 24, and Colin Dyer, 36, who turned himself in Monday, are all charged in connection with the case.

They brought women to the home with promises of prosperity, deputies say, then took their phones and identification and began a cycle of sexual and mental torture and mind control. They brought the women to strip clubs, where they were forced to dance and sell themselves while trailed by "handlers."

It's a classic model for exploitation. It happens in trailers, seedy motels, five-star resorts and mansions. It happens to men and women, young and old. It happens in a country where people have basic freedom.

So when it starts to get bad, why don't the victims just leave?

"They're afraid," said Mark P. Lagon, executive director of the Polaris Project, a U.S. organization that combats trafficking. "They're afraid of their exploiter killing or harming them, and they're afraid that they won't be seen as a victim, that police or immigration officials or society will treat them like a criminal, like an illegal alien or like a dirty, disposable person."

• • •

Vegas Showgirls, a squat stucco building beside Derby Lane on Gandy Boulevard, has a sign out front.

What happens at Vegas stays at Vegas.

But sordid allegations led investigators right back to the club. At least one victim was forced to dance there against her will, officials said.

Shaffer, who danced off and on at Vegas Showgirls under the name "Lacy," has four previous arrests related to prostitution or nudity in an establishment that serves alcohol. During her last arrest at Vegas Showgirls in February, seven other women ranging from 18 to 26 were also arrested on various charges, including prostitution for four of them.

"Vegas had nothing to do with this. It's just a club," owner Chip Jones said Sunday. "They just worked here. We didn't know anything that was going on on the outside."

Employees standing at the door declined to comment Monday.

Lagon points to the sex industry. He points to newspapers and magazines that print ads for illegal massage parlors. He points to the Internet.

"The sex industry is the enabling environment of human trafficking," he said. "It takes many forms. Latin brothels, Asian massage parlors, minors and migrants sold for sex on craigslist. There are the faces of sex trafficking, and businesses who are accomplices need to look at themselves in the mirror."

Where there is demand, he said, there will be supply.

At 2:30 p.m. Monday, there were 10 cars in the parking lot at Vegas Showgirls.
Emily Nipps can be reached at nipps@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8452. Stephanie Hayes can be reached at shayes@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8857.

A friend of mine sent this article to me. He resides in Tampa, Florida. Crazy to think how close to home trafficking can get. Tampa is a mere 12 hour drive.

Recently I attended a workshop for Social Workers and Therapists on dealing with Human Trafficking in the states and it was astonishing to realize how little people think it goes on here. It occurs under the guise of the sex industry.

It makes my heart beat fast, at least now people know what's happening and that it's happening in their neighborhoods.

Prostitution: The Oldest Profession in the World

When it comes to sex trafficking, there is a lot of tension among abolitionists over the topic of prostitution. On the extreme ends, some see all prostitution as a form of trafficking while others make a clear distinction between a person who is a prostitute and someone who is a victim of trafficking. There is, of course, a lot of grey area in between. I bring this up though because today I'm feeling a little frustrated with people who make statements such as, "Prostitution is the oldest profession" or "It's been around for centuries," - as if that somehow proves a point or justifies anything in the prostitution vs. trafficking debate (or, the more common debate over whether prostitution should be legalized). I hate it when people point this out - as if it somehow legitimates anything. Just because something has been around for a long time, doesn't mean it's a good thing.

It's hard to say that women 2000+ years ago chose prostitution of their own free will - more likely, they chose it because it was the only option. It was certainly not some grand statement of female empowerment - rather it was a reaction to the social restrictions placed on women at the time. (Now, some might point to various societies where sex was not as taboo or wrapped up in morality as we see it today, and to them I say that we are talking about commercial transactions for sex - and that if someone can point out a society where prostitution was just as valid a decision as any other business endeavor, and garnered just as much respect and inclusion in society without any opportunity costs (such as marriage) that other business endeavors did not have - I'm willing to listen). ANYWAY - fast forward 2000 years and I wonder how much of this has changed - how much of the decision to become a sex worker today is an enthusiastic embracement of one's own sexuality and the desire to express it in a particular manner, and how much of the decisions is a product of circumstances.

In the present day tension, the idea that someone might choose or even be forced to become a sex worker because of certain circumstances is often overlooked. Now, it is true that, at least from a federal law perspective there has to be some sort of force, fraud, or coercion involved for a commercial transaction involving sex to be considered trafficking. What isn't so clear is what those three words mean. For many, there seems to be this idea that they refer to actions of violence - the woman was chained to the bed, or a gun was held to her head, or she was beaten until she finally submitted. Others consider a definition that afford a little more breadth, so that things like deliberate/blatant psychological coercion or manipulation will qualify as trafficking. Absent some egregious factor such as specific and/or severe physical, sexual, or psychological abuse (from a pimp or from her past) though, many people assume that a woman who is a sex worker is doing it of her own volition - she wants to be there, it was her choice, etc. I think though, that other circumstances play an important role in the idea of consent and that there is room in the idea of force, fraud, or coercion for a different interpretation of consent - one that considers background circumstances that may 'force' a woman into prostitution.

Consent in my mind means active and enthusiastic yes. This can include a woman who chooses, of her own accord, to engage in sexual acts for money. I do not deny that some women will and do choose, of their own volition, without any sort of past hardship or lack of opportunity, to become a sex worker - BUT I think the number of women who fit into this category is very, very small. I think that a large number of women who become sex workers are pushed to that decision by other factors in their life, and when you start adding those factors in, the line between consent and force, fraud, or coercion becomes blurry. What about the woman who did not have the opportunity for an education that would provide her with job skills? What about the woman who has kids to take care of but can't find a job that pays enough? What about the woman who grew up in foster care, or in a family environment surrounded by drug abuse, or the one who is just down on her luck? Are these women victims of trafficking, or are they consenting sex workers?

I am not in any way making a moral judgment here. For your purposes and mine, I have no opinion on the morality of sex workers. What I am trying to do is reframe the debate so people stop seeing it as a black and white, good vs bad issue. I'm asking people to look a little deeper, beyond the question of whether a woman should be allowed to choose to sell her body, beyond the question of whether the government has any right to outlaw a person's rights over their own body, and look beyond the apparent consenting adult ethos. Ask yourself what consent really means, and again, are these women victims of trafficking, or are they consenting sex workers?

My answer? I don't know. Maybe this type of circumstance-created sex work doesn't rise to the level of trafficking, but at the same time I hardly think you can view it as enthusiastic consent. I tend to think that many women who are sex workers would not be in that profession if they were given the opportunity for something else (and the idea of a different set of opportunities can go the whole way back to childhood). I also tend to think that the image we see of sex workers - on TV, on news shows that discuss the topic, etc - is a much more glamorous version of what most sex workers experience. I get a sense that the women who go on to news programs to advocate for sex workers (sometimes actual workers, sometimes not) are the exceptions to the rule - maybe even the ones that did have the opportunities others miss. (NB: that was a huge blanket statement there. Please excuse for the sake of the argument).

Now, for a full disclosure that hopefully won't distract from my above point - I don't know what I think about prostitution being legalized either. Some days I favor the idea of legalizing it - because a woman should be able to decide what she does with her body, and even if the only reason she is involved is due to circumstances that forced her there (money issues for example), far be it from me to limit the ways she has to escape those circumstances, or force her into a worse situation because that avenue of income is unavailable. Now, on those days I still favor prosecuting those who create the demand for such services to the maximum possible under the law. I have no time for people who pay for sex - I think it is wrong and pathetic and there is no way you will ever convince me that the payor is not exploiting the payee, even if the payee is a consenting adult. This is one of the few things I will express a judgment on with no reservations or qualifications whatsoever (although the law student in me still feels the need to reserve the right to change that statement, should anyone make a valid argument that convinces me I am wrong). For more on the idea of legalizing prostitution but outlawing the demand side, see Jennifer's post!

Oh - and also - take a moment to think about the phrase, "Prostitution is the oldest profession in history" before you use it to justify present day prostitution. Whether you are for or against the legalization, basing your argument on the reality of a few thousand years ago is just silly.

Can Legalizing Prostitution Help Prevent Human Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation?

Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to US drug policy, on the heels of comments by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on US complicity in the violence on the US-Mexican border and a recent President Obama town hall meeting which detoured to the role of marijuana in stimulating the economy. Amongst my friends, this has led to numerous discussions of the liberalization some of America’s more “puritanical” policies on drugs and commercial sex work. As a result of my experience in the immigrant advocacy and anti-human trafficking fields, I am somewhat leery of the legalization approach. What would happen if the US was to legalize sex work? What has been the experience of countries that have legalized prostitution? Would this somehow help victims of human trafficking?

I have had some exposure to the British and Swedish approaches to prostitution and models for fighting human trafficking during a 2007 fellowship in the UK and Albania with the Advocacy Project. The British model is somewhat similar to the US system where prostitution is illegal, although they do not have an option similar to the T-visa for victims of human trafficking. British policy was recently updated on April 1st when the Council of Europe Convention Against Trafficking in Human Beings took effect in the UK.

The Swedish approach to prostitution, much lauded by advocates in the UK, is somewhat different. Prostitution has been legal in Sweden since 1999 but it is illegal to buy sex or to pimp. Not only has Sweden made buying sex punishable by fines and jail time, they also humiliate the purchasers of sex by publishing their names in the newspaper. But what has happened in countries where prostitution is legal and the shaming approach of Sweden was not adopted? I recently ran across an informative opinion piece called “Does Legalizing Prostitution Work?” by Helen Mees, a Dutch economist and lawyer, that goes some way towards answering this question.

Mees argues that, even in the liberal city of Amsterdam with its open outlook on prostitution and soft drugs, women are forced into sex work while police stand by and watch. Even in the Netherlands, women and girls who sell their bodies are routinely threatened, beaten, raped, and terrorized by pimps and customers. In a recent criminal trial, two German-Turkish brothers stood accused of forcing more than 100 women to work in Amsterdam's red-light district (De Wallen). According to the attorney who represented one of the victims, most of these women come from families marred by incest, alcohol abuse, and parental suicide. Or they come from countries in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia and have fallen victim to human trafficking, lured by decent job offers or simply sold by their parents.

These women are Amsterdam's leading tourist attraction (followed by the coffee shops that sell marijuana). But an estimated 50 to 90 percent of them are actually sex slaves, raped on a daily basis with police idly standing by. It is incomprehensible that their clients are not prosecuted for rape, but Dutch politicians argue that it cannot be established whether or not a prostitute works voluntarily. Appalled by their daily routine, police officers from the Amsterdam vice squad have asked to be transferred to other departments. Only this year, the city administration has started to close down some brothels because of their ties to criminal organizations.

According to a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, the average age of death of prostitutes is 34. In the United States, the rate at which prostitutes are killed in the workplace is 51 times that of the next most dangerous occupation for women, working in a liquor store. Other studies show that nine out of ten prostitutes urgently want to escape the job. Almost half have attempted suicide at least once.

Apparently Norway examined the Dutch and Swedish approaches to prostitution and decided that the Swedish approach was superior and changed its legislation accordingly. According to Mees, the shaming approach of the Swedish has been so successful because the fear of humiliation for purchasing sex is quite real.

According to a study in California, most men who bought sex would be deterred by the risk of public exposure. For example, 79 percent said that they would be deterred if there was a chance that their families would be notified. And a whopping 87 percent said that they would be deterred by the threat that the police might publish their photographs or names in the local newspaper.

Most of these men showed pathological behavior towards women. One in five admitted to having raped a woman, while four out of five said that going to prostitutes was an addiction.

While it is important to realize that prostitution and human trafficking are two separate phenomena that can sometimes intersect, the importance of protecting the safety of both sex workers and trafficking victims cannot be overstated. Ultimately, the approach to prostitution and fighting trafficking adopted by countries should be the model that best protects women and girls. Some argue that this is an approach, much like the Swedish model, that would humiliate and criminalize those that pay for sex or pimp women. The first step, surely, is to raise awareness and to realize that even in countries where prostitution is legal, sex trafficking and forced prostitution do not disappear.