Sex, Human Trafficking Thriving In Australia

From Voice of America: 

By Phil Mercer

Anti-trafficking campaigners say human trafficking is thriving in Australia, with women brought from Asia forced to work in the sex industry. The warning follows the release of new details of two police investigations in Australia that have identified alleged links between legal brothels and illegal trafficking syndicates.

Rights activists and government officials say most human trafficking in Australia involves women from across Asia and parts of eastern Europe who are brought to work in industries ranging from prostitution to agriculture. Many come from Thailand, Taiwan and South Korea.

Only a handful of traffickers have ever been convicted in Australia, although senior officers have insisted they are starting to win the battle. Most women who are trafficked say they are reluctant to go to the police out of fear of deportation or because of threats against family members.

Since 2003, specialist units run by Australia’s federal police have carried out more than 300 investigations, and have identified about 150 women working as sex slaves.

Read the full article

Human Trafficking at the Superbowl

The attorney general is sounding an alarm today about the dark side of the Super Bowl. Greg Zoeller says there will be an increase in demand for the illegal commercial sex trade in connection with the Super Bowl and, he says, we ought to expect that some of sex workers who come here are the victims of human trafficking.

South Korea: The stimulus plan, sexism, and sex trafficking

From the Washington Times:

By Youngbee Dale

The San Francisco Chronicle reported the story of You Mi Kim, a woman from South Korea forced into prostitution in the United States to pay off her $40,000 credit card debt. To pay off her heavy debt, she worked in a massage parlor that was actually a brothel, serving dozens of men in downtown Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Since the Chronicle broke the story, US authorities have focused on prostitution at local massage parlors, but have failed to address the root causes behind the proliferation of sex trafficking of South Korean women. 

South Korea is one of the major countries where sex trafficking victims in the U.S. originate. According to the US Attorney General in 2006, South Koreans accounted the highest population (24%) of sex trafficking victims in the U.S. followed by Thailand (11.7%), and Peru (10%),. The U.S. Trafficking in Persons report categorized South Korea as a Tier 1 country in the same year.

American authorities are well aware of the problem of South Korean women trafficked to the U.S. and other developed countries. The Trafficking in Persons report in 2011 noted the problem and recommended South Korea to implement a comprehensive anti-trafficking law.

Read the full article

Human Trafficking on the Silver Screen: The Whistleblower

From Women's News Network:

In 1999, Kathryn Bolkovac, a single mother from Nebraska and a seasoned cop, joined the U.N. peacekeeping force in Bosnia, a country still in tumult after its brutal civil war. Her job was to investigate the sex trafficking of young women from Eastern Europe. Once she began collecting evidence from the victims she discovered that a number of U.N. officers – the very people who were supposed to be keeping the rule of law – were themselves playing part in prostitution rings.

Bolkovac told her employers, the American company DynCorp, what was going on. Instead of being lauded for her investigative acumen she lost her job. Her findings were considered bad public relations for the lucrative rebuilding effort.

After a two-year legal battle in England, where the DynCorp office that dealt with peacekeeping related contracts in Bosnia was based, a tribunal ruled that Boklovac was unfairly dismissed, thereby clearing her name.

Read the full article

Kenya: Sex-trafficked women and girls also vulnerable to organ trafficking

From Women News Network:

By Gitonga Njeru

With the highest rate of human trafficking in East and Central Africa, several nongovernmental organizations in Kenya are now under investigation by INTERPOL , the world’s largest international police organization, with 188 member countries. The Interpol Sub-regional Bureau for Eastern Africa is based in Kenya’s capital in Nairobi.

Young women as well as girls who are trafficked can also become a living supply for human body organ transplants.

“Trafficking in human beings for the purpose of using their organs, in particular kidneys, is a rapidly growing field of criminal activity,” says INTERPOL. “In many countries waiting lists for transplants are very long, and criminals have seized this opportunity to exploit the desperation of patients and potential donors,” continues Interpol.

The trail of corruption in Kenya may also reveal human trafficker’s collusion with Kenyan authorities which may include the police and intelligence, as well as the judiciary. This alleged collusion may enable the illegal industry to grow as it goes ‘unchecked’ inside the country.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the most prevalent destinations for trafficked organs is Western Europe and the United States. These destinations have the highest number of patients waiting for a new kidney, liver, heart or pancreas.

Organizations currently under investigation are based in Kenya’s capital Nairobi and in Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city. For legal reasons the organizations cannot be named since investigations are ongoing and there are pending court cases.

Read the full article

Human trafficking increases in Ukraine

Police officers and human rights workers decry Ukraine's expanding human trafficking industry. Sunita Rappai reports.

Human Trafficking in Chicago

Dozens of girls, some as young as 12, were pulled into a human trafficking ring that forced them into prostitution, State's Attorney Anita Alvarez said today.

The girls and women, some of them homeless, were recruited on CTA trains, the Internet or during random meetings on the street, Alvarez said while announcing that nine people were charged under a state anti-human trafficking law passed last year.

During a yearlong investigation dubbed "Little Girl Lost," investigators armed with wiretaps listened as girls were beaten and, sometimes, thrown into a car trunk and driven around as a form of punishment, Alvarez said. Others were branded

One 13-year-old was sold from one pimp to another for $100.

Michael Anton, a commander with the Cook County sheriff's vice unit, called the case among the worst he's seen.

"There's so much of this out there," Anton said about human trafficking. "It's happening every day. It's happening in Chicago,Cook County, it's happening across the state.

Those arrested were charged with "involuntary sexual servitude of a minor" and trafficking in persons for forced labor. Four of them appeared in Cook County court today and ordered held on bail as high as $1 million.

The other five are scheduled to appear Thursday. Alvarez said the investigation is ongoing.

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.

What About American Girls Sold on the Streets?

Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times

When we hear about human trafficking in India or Cambodia, our hearts melt. The victim has sometimes been kidnapped and imprisoned, even caged, in a way that conjures our images of slavery.

But in the United States we see girls all the time who have been trafficked — and our hearts harden. The problem is that these girls aren’t locked in cages. Rather, they’re often runaways out on the street wearing short skirts or busting out of low-cut tops, and many Americans perceive them not as trafficking victims but as miscreants who have chosen their way of life. So even when they’re 14 years old, we often arrest and prosecute them — even as the trafficker goes free.

In fact, human trafficking is more similar in America and Cambodia than we would like to admit. Teenage girls on American streets may appear to be selling sex voluntarily, but they’re often utterly controlled by violent pimps who take every penny they earn.

Read the full article here.

Ask Fox 35 to Report on Human Trafficking

From Polaris Project:

On April 19, Fox 35 Orlando reported that a Sheriff from Polk County arrested “60 alleged prostitutes, pimps and johns” following a week-long undercover bust targeting “escort services”. However, this crackdown was not simply involving alleged escort services, but young girls who - under the control of pimps - performed sex acts for johns.

Polk County prostitution bust targets online escorts: MyFoxORLANDO.com

To read more and take action click here.

Demand Change: Everyone Can Work To End Modern Slavery

From the U.S. Dept. of State Official Blog
By Ambassador Luis CdeBaca

Last week, a court in New York sentenced a client of a prostituted child. So often, such a crime goes uncharged, or if an arrest is made, the case is unnoticed, unreported. But because the defendant was NFL Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor, not an anonymous "john," the case was heavily covered. The pimp who allegedly provided the sixteen year-old girl to Taylor is under indictment as well, on federal sex trafficking charges. A successful outcome? To some degree, but it was certainly tarnished after the sentencing, when the child victim told her side of the story and media outlets used that as excuse to print her name.

This episode made me reflect about how easy it can be to regard the protection of survivors as the responsibility of the court system or victim advocates, while at the same time the media exploits and sensationalizes a crime and the public watches passively or even revels in the scandal. But just as this is not a victimless crime, this is also a crime in which the solution lies with all of us.

Read the full post here

Ambassador Luis CdeBaca serves as Director of the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons and Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State.

Wyden Reintroduces DMST Deterrence and Victim Support Act : S.596

From Shared Hope International:

What you need to know about this legislation:
• It will provide $2m to $2.5m a year in funding to six state and local pilot projects to serve and shelter child victims of sex trafficking.
• Applying entities must have a multidisciplinary, collaborative plan to combat the sex trafficking of minors. • 67% of funds must be used for direct services and shelter for victims.
• Funds can be used to increase law enforcement efforts to combat the sex trafficking of children.
• This is a bipartisan bill.
• The legislation is sponsored by Senator Ron Wyden (D‐OR) and Senator John Cornyn (R‐TX).

How this bill will help address existing domestic minor sex trafficking challenges:

Challenge: There is little collaboration and communication between the various agencies and organizations that encounter or work with sex trafficked children. This lack of collaboration is a major impediment to efficiency and finding workable solutions.
How this bill helps: This legislation requires multidisciplinary collaboration from grantees.

Challenge: Law enforcement has expressed frustration that when they discover an exploited child, there is nowhere safe to place him/her for help.
How this bill helps: With at least 67% of funding required for shelter and services for victims, the grant locations will be required to establish safe shelter for victims.

Challenge: Sex trafficked children have a multitude of needs ranging from post‐traumatic stress and depression to STDs, substance abuse and chronic illness. They also may not have a safe, appropriate home to return to. There are few programs appropriate to address their needs. As a result, they are caught in a cycle of abuse and arrest.
How this bill helps: The majority of funding is required to go to services and shelter for victims. Additionally, the bill’s multidisciplinary focus will result in all stakeholders coming together to collaborate on fixing the response protocol, making it more efficient and addressing the intense needs of these children.

Challenge: Trafficking cases are time intensive and can be expensive. Federal prosecutors may prosecute these cases but local police are most often in a position to find the crime. Local law enforcement agencies need the resources and training so they can identify a trafficking case. If law enforcement does not have the resources to investigate trafficking cases, criminals will see little risk in the profitable venture of selling children for sex.
How this bill helps: By allowing funds to be used for training and law enforcement/prosecutor salaries related to investigation and prosecution of sex trafficking cases, the bill supports critical enforcement efforts.

To track this bill visit: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s112-596 Visit http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm to find your senators if you would like to contact them to express your support.

Half the Sky Movement

Nicholas Kristof, two time Pulitzer Prize winner and Op-Ed journalist for The New York Times, recently published a book highlighting the inconsistencies in gender based progress in the developing world. "Half the Sky" focuses on various issues that have affected women throughout the world in unique and often disastrous ways. Health, education, abortion rights and human trafficking are among the numerous topics discussed in Kristof's latest book.

For several years, Kristof has been a relentless voice in raising awareness about human trafficking related issues, and his New York Times series on child trafficking gained international recognition. He first encountered human trafficking while on assignment in Cambodia and was "blown away" by what he saw. His research was intended to expose the not-so-secret child trafficking rings in Southeast Asia. But Kristoff was not prepared for the stories he would hear.

Shortly after beginning his assignment, he read about two young women, chained to bedposts, who were killed when the brothel where they were enslaved burned down. Time after time, Kristof head the stories of women being bought and sold like livestock. Their virginity sold to the highest bidder; their futures stolen without hesitation. Kristof said that like most people who get involved in the anti-trafficking field, it took a personal experience like meeting the young girls and hearing their stories for him to truly understand the atrocity that is human trafficking. "When you see things like that, it's hard to move on," he confessed.

Since this time, Kristof has spent a substantial amount of time writing, reading, researching and collecting stories about the issue. He believes that human trafficking is not black and white. "Trafficking is evil, but it's not being driven by evil but by a pursuit of money. We need to make it less profitable and more dangerous for perpetrators." For example, while in Southeast Asia, Kristof encountered a woman who has ventured to make a larger profit for her brothel by kidnapping young girls and selling their virginity. However, international organizations has recently put pressure on the local police to crack down on illegal trafficking activity. The potential cost of being found out and shut down was too great, ands she decided she could make better money by running a grocery store instead of a brothel. As the dynamics of her business environment changed, it simply became too costly to continue the illegal activity. Kristof firmly believes that with real pressure and punishment by local authorities, the whole industry could become less and less profitable which would make it less and less enticing for traffickers, pimps and brothel owners.

"Half the Sky" is a well-written, hopeful book that gives an overview of the major issues that plague women in developing countries. It does not go into much depth about any subject specifically, but it does offer a quick, educational read surveying these challenges and some of the more hopeful stories of triumph and progress. Also, the back of the book lists hundreds of women's and human rights organizations from grassroots to United Nation programs.

For more information about "Half the Sky" and the campaign to push for greater equality for women across the world, visit Half the Sky Movement. Kristof continues to write articles about women's issues for The New York Times. You can find his articles here LINK.

I would like to thank Mr. Kristof for agreeing to an interview during a very busy weekend in Oklahoma.

Super Bowl a magnet for under-age sex trade

From MSNBC:

ATLANTA — Pimps will traffic thousands of under-age prostitutes to Texas for Sunday's Super Bowl, hoping to do business with men arriving for the big game with money to burn, child rights advocates said.

As the country's largest sporting event, the game between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers will make the Dallas-Fort Worth area a magnet for business of all kinds.

That includes the multimillion dollar, under-age sex industry, said activists and law enforcement officials working to combat what they say is an annual spike in trafficking of under-age girls ahead of the Super Bowl.

"The Super Bowl is one of the biggest human trafficking events in the United States," Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott told a trafficking prevention meeting in January. Girls who enter the grim trade face a life of harsh treatment and danger, according to a Dallas police report in 2010.

Few who emerge are willing to speak about it. Tina Frundt, 36, is an exception. Now married and living in Washington D.C., Frundt was lured into sex work at 14 after she fell for a 24-year-old who invited her to leave home in 1989 and join his "family" in Cleveland, Ohio. That family consisted of the man and three girls living in a motel.

When Frundt declined on the first night to have sex with her boyfriend's friends they raped her. "I was angry with myself for not listening to him, so the next night when he sent me out on the street and told me ... (to earn $500) I listened," she said in a telephone interview. Frundt paced the streets for hours and finally got into a client's car.

When she came home in the morning with just $50, her pimp beat her in front of the other girls to teach them all a lesson and sent her back onto the street the next night with the warning not to return until she had reached the quota.

Read the full story here. To learn more about outreach and awareness efforts surrounding the Superbowl 2011, visit Traffick911 and read about their I'm Not Buying It campaign. For a calendar of events around the Superbowl, click here.

To read Laura C's post about trafficking and the Superbowl, click here.

Underage Sex Trade Still Flourishing Online

From CNN.com
By Amber Lyon and Steve Turnham

Her ankles and wrists are shackled. She's wearing used sweats in the bright colors of the jailhouse, orange, blue and yellow. She shuffles to the courtroom to face the judge, her mother, and an uncertain future.

Selena is a 13-year-old who was sold for sex.

She wants to go home to her house in the suburbs and the baby sister she hardly knows. And now, facing a sympathetic judge and a loving mother who wants to make sure she's safe, Selena is being told she can't go home.

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"I want to go home and I want to be with my family, that's all I want," she tells Juvenile Court Judge William Voy, her face bathed in tears. "This isn't making me any better in here."

Selena was arrested by undercover police on the Vegas strip on prostitution charges. But although she exchanged sex for money, in the eyes of the law, she's a victim, by virtue of her age and the circumstances under which she was sold: by a pimp on the website backpage.com, a pimp who used drugs to entice her, and took everything she earned.

"It made me feel so nasty, I always just want a shower and get it off. I was like, oh, it's so disgusting," she said. "And it never made me feel pretty, not one time, not one time."

She told us she was seeing four or five men a day, at the standard rate of $300 for an hour, $150 for a half.

She may be a victim, but she can't go home, because no one trusts that she won't run again, back into the arms of a pimp. . .

Read the full story here.

The Super Bowl and Human Trafficking

The 2011 Super Bowl in Dallas, Texas will bring thousands of people to the city in the hopes of witnessing greatness. Sadly, in the shadows of all the glitz and glamour, as many as a few thousand children will be trafficked as sex slaves, bought and sold countless times throughout the event.

In 2009, the Florida Department of Children and Families assisted 24 minors who were trafficked as sex slaves for the Super Bowl. Texas State Attorney General, Greg Abbott, is taking initiative, and announced plans to send 12 individuals from his human trafficking task force to help Dallas law enforcement fight human trafficking. A number of organizations, such as Traffick 911 and Free the Captives, are mobilizing ground efforts in Dallas to raise awareness and support prevention efforts in the area.

The awareness campaign is assisted by Dallas Cowboy player, Jay Ratliff, who recently filmed a public-service announcement for Traffick 911’s I’m Not Buying It Campaign. Watch the PSA here:

This Super Bowl Sunday there is more at stake than who wins the game on the field. The countless lives destroyed by trafficking reveal the true victory comes when we stop the commercial sexual exploitation of children off the field.

Photo courtesy of the United Methodist Women.

Keep Human Trafficking Victims in the Brothels to SAVE them? Who would have thought?

What is the first step to take in saving a victim of sex trafficking? My initial reaction, and I venture to say that many others share my view, that removing the individual from the brothel would be the most sensible first step. However, my logic went to hell after reading about a group named of Freeset.

Freeset, located in the Kolkata red light district, has a mission identical to hundreds of other anti-trafficking groups around the world. As stated on their website, they “… would like to see the 10,000 sex workers in our neighborhood empowered with the choice of leaving a profession they never chose in the first place.” From 2001, Freeset has helped workers leave the sex trade by offering the alternative livelihood of manufacturing bags for export. Freeset offers girls an alternative lifestyle while still remaining inside the brothels.

Of course when I learned about Freeset’s model, my mind raced with a million questions. Can a girl live in a brothel and not be part of the sex trade? Can they help to effect change from the inside? Is this a model that other groups should emulate? As we fight to end modern slavery, it is important to learn what all of us are doing to combat the evil. We learn from each other, good or bad. An educated anti trafficking group is by definition a better trafficking group.

Freeset’s model may be unappealing at first blush but it has a proven track record. Its success should teach us to learn so that we avoid the pitfalls of applying our experiences in a foreign land. How many of us have even been to Kolkata? How many of us can even understand how desperate a worker might be. Doesn’t Freeset teach us that even an ex-sex trade worker needs a livelihood? Isn’t that obvious?

For myself, I admit the Freeset model wouldn’t have been my first suggestion, and perhaps not even in my top 100. That failure of imagination reflects poorly on me. Now that I know of Freeset, I want to learn more, do more, and I never want to forget that real people need real help starting with food, shelter, and dignity. I will accomplish success before I ever give in, no matter the price or the time.

To learn more about Freeset and the work they do, please click here.

Image from freesetglobal.com

‘I can’t get my sister back:’ Investigators warn of sex traffickers targeting Natives

By KYLE HOPKINS for The Village

A disproportionate number of women working in the Anchorage sex trade are Alaska Native and pimps and sex traffickers are pursuing Native girls at events like AFN, police warned tribes and villagers today.

“There have been traffickers and pimps who specifically target Native girls because they feel that they’re versatile and they can post them (online) as Hawaiian, as Native, as Asian, as you name it,” said Jolene Goeden, a special agent for the FBI in Anchorage.

Far from home and surrounded by strangers, girls from remote villages are particularly vulnerable to sex-trade recruiters said Goeden and Sgt. Kathy Lacey, supervisor for the Anchorage police vice unit. The investigators delivered a kind of “Prostitution 101” to people from villages across the state at an annual Bureau of Indian Affairs conference, telling community leaders and health workers to be on the lookout for pimps preying on Alaska Native women and girls.

The pair gave a a similar, shorter talk in October in Bethel. For some, the stories were personal.

“We don’t think that this is happening in our in small villages. It happens. It happened to my baby sister,” said a woman from a rural hub city, who said her sister was 14 years old when she disappeared while visiting the Alaska Federation of Natives convention in Anchorage about four years ago.

Read the full article here.

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Native American women experience domestic violence and sexual assault at more than double the rate of other racial groups in the United States. An Amnesty International report in 2007 estimated that Native American women are 2.5 times as likely to experience sexual assault in their lifetime.

Despite this reality, there is a dearth of services for Native American women who experience sexual assault or domestic violence, particularly culturally competent services. Similarly, there are very few services for Native American women and girls who are victims of sex trafficking.

In 2009, the Minnesota Indian Women's Resource Center released a report on "The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of American Indian Women and Girls in Minnesota," which is one of the best sources of information and data on sex trafficking of Native Americans.

Domestic Sex Trafficking and Pimp Culture

By Emily Biggs:

The pimps who are trafficking young women and girls on the street in the U.S. have a great marketing tool; the media. As Americans when we hear the words “sex trafficking” we immediately think of women and children overseas who are being forced into the sex trade, or who are brought into the United States for the purpose of sexual exploitation.

We usually do not think closer to home; Americans trafficking Americans. Think about women and girls you have seen out late at night on the streets, when you are coming home from work or a social event, dressed in short dresses and spike heels. Most people turn their heads and look away, not wanting to look at the faces of these young women and girls who are forced to work out in the street. To fully understand sex trafficking in the United States, it requires an open mind and letting go of what is shown on television. You have to let go of the media’s portrayal of the “joys” of prostitution shown in music videos on VH1 and MTV, and open your eyes to the violence and control the pimps have over their victims.

Tina Frundt was fourteen years old when she was forced into prostitution. She was like any typical teenager, finding her identity and defying her parents were at the top of her list. When a man came into Frundts’ life that showed her attention and listened when she complained about her parents, she did not think twice about the fact that he was ten years older than her. He informed her that she was mature for her age, and that she understood him better than anyone his age. Tina stopped believing anything her parents told her, and believed he was the only one who truly understood her. After six months of dating, Frundt believed she loved him, at least that is what he told her, and she ran away to be with him. The couple ended up in Cleveland, Ohio and he informed Tina she was going to meet the rest of his family.

Tina had no idea that the “rest of the family” meant three other girls. After she met the family she was told what her role would be; Frundt would go out to “work” that night and bring him back the money. He assured Tina that he would always love her no matter what, but he needed to know how much she loved him by making sure she would do anything for him. The first evening his friends came by the motel, he told Tina to have sex with someone, but she did not want to so his friends raped her.

Afterward, he told her “that wouldn’t have happened if she would have just listened to him first.” Tina blamed herself instead of being angry at him for getting raped. He then picked out her clothes, told her what to wear, how to walk, what to say to “Johns” and how much money she was to bring back to him. Then she was forced back out into the streets. Tina walked the streets back and forth for hours, she finally got into a car because they were always being watched and she had to get into a car sooner or later. Their nightly quota was $500 but Tina was only able to make $50 that night to give back to the pimp.

As a result, he beat her in front of the other girls and then sent her back out to the street to earn the rest of the money. This was the man that took Tina out to eat, listened to her, gave her advice, and had complete trust in, now she was seeing another side of him. Frundt was shocked at the situation she found herself in, but was also scared. She was locked in the closet numerous times, and had her finger broken which never set right. None of the girls were allowed to see a doctor so they tolerated the pain by pushing it deep down inside them and trying to forget it ever happened. People have asked Tina several times to this day, “Why didn’t you just leave? Couldn’t you escape?” She now knows that it was not her fault that a pimp manipulated a child.

As I stated earlier, the pimps use media to their advantage in luring young women and girls. Pimps are glamorized in TV shows, music videos, and movies, and young people use the word “pimp” in everyday conversation. They do not understand the reality behind the term. Traffickers and pimps prey on women and girls by finding their weakness and then exploiting it; children are easy to manipulate because they quickly become dependent on a pimp.

After a pimp gets into a victim’s mind it is easy for him to maintain control. The women are required to bring him $500-$2,000 a night, they are always a “bitch” or a “ho” and are reminded of that daily. The victims are part of his “stable,” and if they do not want to follow his rules then he may sell them at anytime to another pimp.

A non-profit anti-trafficking organization in Washington, DC, reported that a pimp that had three young girls in his “stable” were each bringing back $500 every day. The pimp was making about $24,000 a month or $642,000 a year tax free by selling sex with girls and young women and then keeping all of the money.

Tina’s situation, fifteen years ago, is still going on today. Girls every night are forced onto the streets, beaten and raped, to make money for pimps.

Emily Biggs attends Milligan College in Tennessee majoring in Exercise Science. She plans to pursue a career in Physical Therapy or Occupational Therapy. She plays collegiate fastpitch softball for Milligan.

Call to Action: Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking Deterrence and Victims Support Act of 2010

From the Polaris Project Action Site: On December 9, the U.S. Senate passed S.2925, “Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking Deterrence and Victims Support Act of 2010.” This bipartisan legislation was introduced by Senators Wyden (D-OR) and Cornyn (R-TX) and was passed with unanimous consent in the Senate. With only one week left in the Congressional session, the House must now adopt the Senate bill and pass it by Friday, December 17!

To learn more about what you can do and how to contact your representatives, click here.

According to Change.org:

The Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking Deterrence and Victims Support Act of 2010 will improve federal and state government efforts to combat domestic sex trafficking of minors by:

- Authorizing six year-long grants of $2.5 million to state or local governments in regions that have

-- a significant sex trafficking problem

-- demonstrated cooperation between law enforcement, prosecutors, and service providers in efforts to combat sex trafficking, and

-- developed a plan to combat sex trafficking that includes provisions for victims' shelter and services, training of law enforcement and service providers, and prosecution and deterrence of traffickers.

- Providing that a minimum of 25% of grant funds are used to provide shelter and services to victims of sex trafficking.

- Providing for an independent annual evaluation of grant recipients' programs.

- Requiring state reporting of missing children to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and encouraging the Attorney General to change the NCIC to facilitate protection of missing children.

- Encouraging states to enact safe harbor laws that presume a minor found in prostitution is a victim of a severe form of trafficking.