human trafficking
This is news?! This was the OBVIOUS!!
StandardGreen Beret discharged for beating alleged child rapist speaks out
Green Beret discharged for beating alleged child rapist speaks out
Green Beret discharged for beating alleged child rapist speaks out 02:28
(CNN)Sergeant 1st Class Charles Martland, the Green Beret being separated involuntarily from the U.S. Army for kicking and body slamming an Afghan police commander he describes as a “brutal child rapist,” began telling his side of the story Monday.
Martland is under a gag order imposed by the Pentagon, but at the request of Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif, he wrote a statement detailing his actions on Sept. 6, 2011, which was obtained by CNN.
“Kicking me out of the army is morally wrong and the entire country knows it,” Martland writes. Last week the Army rejected his appeal.
Martland and former Captain Daniel Quinn were disciplined by the Army after they beat a powerful local police official who they concluded had been raping a small boy. They say they had been encouraged by higher-ups that there was nothing to do about such horrific acts, that these were Afghan problems for the Afghan authorities to work out.
But the Afghan authorities wouldn’t do anything about it, the two soldiers say.
“Our ALP (Afghan Local Police) were committing atrocities and we were quickly losing the support of the local populace,” Martland writes in his statement. “The severity of the rapes and the lack of action by the Afghan Government caused many of the locals to view our ALP as worse than the Taliban.”
Quinn and Martland were told by a young Afghan boy and his mother, through an Afghan interpreter, that the boy had been tied to a post at the home of Afghan Local Police commander Abdul Rahman and raped repeatedly for up to two weeks. When his mother tried to stop the attacks, they told the soldiers, Rahman’s brother beat her. Quinn says he verified the story with other ALP commanders from neighboring villages. Then they invited Rahman to the camp.
“After the child rapist laughed it off and referenced that it was only a boy, Captain Quinn picked him up and threw him,” Martland writes. Martland then proceeded to “body slam him multiple times,” kick him in the rib cage, and put his foot on his neck. “I continued to body slam him and throw him for fifty meters until he was outside the camp,” Martland writes. “He was never knocked out, and he ran away from our camp.” The incident lasted no more than five minutes, he says.
Quinn told CNN’s “The Lead” last week “We basically had to make sure that he fully understood that if he ever went near that boy or his mother again, there was going to be hell to pay.”
“While I understand that a military lawyer can say that I was legally wrong, we felt a moral obligation to act,” Martland writes.
Quinn told CNN that they took the action they took because otherwise nothing would be done by the Army or local authorities. “The reason we weren’t able to step in with these local rape cases was we didn’t want to undermine the authority of the local government,” he said. “We were trying to build up the local government. Us acting after the local government fails to can certainly undermine their credibility.”
The Pentagon denies that telling soldiers to look the other way is official practice.
“We have never had a policy in place that directs any military member, or any government personnel overseas to ignore human rights abuses,” Defense spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis said. “Any sexual abuse, no matter who the alleged perpetrator and no matter who the victim, is completely unacceptable and reprehensible.”
-You want an American hero, you got him! Beat a child molester and kill him and you have my vote for fucking life! These trash are not able to be rehabilitated and need swift execution and anyone who believes that one of these putrid fucks can pay a debt to society needs to get extensive shock therapy!
The best thing for a molester is a bullet to the back of the head, and that means an adult and a little child, not an 18yr old with a 16yr old! It is a well known fact in the military that soldiers from the Middle East as well as civilians commonly molest little boys and as long as they aren’t public about it, then it isn’t an afront to Islam. Ask the people who have been there, they have a frame of reference, not asshole liars who pontificate about things they don’t have the slightest idea about!
Human Trafficking tragedy
StandardAtlanta (CNN)In the new CNN documentary “Children for Sale: The Fight to End Human Trafficking,” actress Jada Pinkett Smith worked closely with CNN producers to shed light on the growing epidemic of human trafficking in the United States — in particular, Atlanta.
It’s a problem that may seem too big to tackle, but for the thousands of people caught in this dangerous world, there is hope. And there are ways you can help.
Watch ‘Children for Sale: The Fight to End Human Trafficking’
Tuesday: 9 p.m. ET and PT / 3 a.m. CET Wednesday / 9 a.m. HKT Wednesday
Wednesday: 7 a.m. ET and PT / 1 p.m. CET or 7 p.m. HKT;
11 a.m. ET and PT / 5 p.m. CET / 11 p.m. HKT;
3 p.m. ET and PT / 9 p.m CET / 3 a.m. HKT Thursday.
Join the conversation at #endsextrafficking.
Here are some organizations that are helping victims start new lives:
The Living Water Center is a safe house and rehabilitation center for human trafficking victims. It also helps survivors graduate from high school and apply for college and/or job placement.
Wellspring Living provides a safe house, education, and therapy for underage victims. It also offers an independent living program which includes continued education and job skills training.
4Sarah is an intervention program that reaches out to women working in strip clubs and informs them about the risks of the human trafficking industry.
There are also other organizations and resources across the United States where you can find help or donate.
Safe Horizon is based in New York City and provides housing, counseling, legal services, education and job training. The organization also has a 24-hour hotline available.
Polaris Project in the Washington area has a crisis response team with emergency housing, transportation, and legal advocacy. The organization also has a center where victims can get clothing, food, therapy and job placement help.
Not For Sale in San Francisco partners with businesses and employers to find jobs for victims in addition to providing education and shelter. The organization also has locations in Europe, South America, and Asia.
If you or someone you know is a victim of human trafficking, call the National Human Trafficking Resource Center at 1-888-373-7888.
This is tragic and needs to be stopped!
StandardSelling Atlanta’s children: What has and hasn’t changed
By Jane O. Hansen, Special to CNN
Updated 11:34 AM ET, Sat July 18, 2015
15 years ago, Jane Hansen reported extensively on child prostitution in Atlanta
Now, trafficked children are more likely to be viewed as victims, not criminals
Technology has transformed the illegal sex industry
(CNN)The image sticks in my mind: A female defendant is escorted into the courtroom with shackles around her ankles, making it difficult to walk. Dressed in a jail-issued jumpsuit and flip-flops, she takes a seat at the appointed table up front, until the judge is gaveled in and we all rise.
As a newspaper reporter for more than 20 years in Atlanta, I’d observed this scene before. But this time, something was different.
Selling Atlanta’s Children
Jane O. Hansen’s three-part series “Selling Atlanta’s Children” about child prostitution was published January 7, 2001, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she worked for 25 years as an investigative reporter, columnist and member of the editorial board. Over the years, her stories captured many national awards, and she was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A series on the failures of Georgia’s child welfare system led to an overhaul of Georgia’s child welfare laws.
This defendant was chewing on her finger, had her hair pulled back in a tiny pigtail, and spoke in a high-pitched voice. She was 10.
She had been in and out of an Atlanta jail for months, as had her sister, because she was an alleged prostitute, a chronic runaway and no one knew what to do with her. When her probation officer asked whether the defendant could address the court, the judge nodded yes, and the little girl rose from the defense table. Her head bowed, she quietly told the judge she wanted to go home. Then, as she rubbed her eyes with balled up fists, she began to cry.
These children are victims, not prostitutes
Nearly 15 years ago, I wrote a series of stories called “Selling Atlanta’s Children” about child prostitution for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and I started it with that courtroom scene. That little girl was a metaphor for everything I had learned through my reporting. By meeting and interviewing her, her 11-year-old sister and other girls, I realized: There’s something wrong with this picture.
How to help sex trafficking victims
In 2000, I got a call in the newsroom from Stephanie Davis, a woman I’d never met, who identified herself as director of the Atlanta Women’s Foundation.
She told me there was a problem with childhood prostitution in Atlanta, that she knew I’d written about children’s issues before, and that she wanted me to meet with some people who could describe in detail what was happening. I was working on another series of stories, but I agreed to the meeting.
Educating Americans on human trafficking
Educating Americans on human trafficking 00:54
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A week or so later, I met with a group of women that included a Fulton County Juvenile Court probation officer and some child advocates. They told me that a growing number of young girls — early to late teens — were coming into juvenile court charged with shoplifting or, more commonly, running away — an offense that applies only to minors.
Upon questioning by the judge, they learned that the girls were surviving on the streets as prostitutes under the tutelage of men who housed, fed and clothed them and, in exchange, sold them to other men for sex. I asked for numbers, but they couldn’t provide them. I asked for access to the girls. They said that because of confidentiality, that could not happen. I told them I wouldn’t use their names, but I wouldn’t do the story without meeting some of the girls involved. I also said I needed some way of determining how big a problem this was.
Back then, when people spoke of sex trafficking, I assumed they were referring to an international trade — the phenomenon of young women from China or Thailand or some other country being brought to the United States, then forced to pay back their transportation fees through sexual slavery. But these women I’d just met were telling me it was a homegrown problem. I wanted them to prove it.
When I searched for articles about child prostitution as a homegrown industry in other cities, I found only one story about an American-based prostitution ring that had exploited local minors somewhere in the Midwest.
Watch ‘Children for Sale: The Fight to End Human Trafficking’
Tuesday: 9 p.m. ET and PT / 3 a.m. CET Wednesday / 9 a.m. HKT Wednesday
Wednesday: 7 a.m. ET and PT / 1 p.m. CET or 7 p.m. HKT;
11 a.m. ET and PT / 5 p.m. CET / 11 p.m. HKT;
3 p.m. ET and PT / 9 p.m CET / 3 a.m. HKT Thursday.
Join the conversation at #endsextrafficking.
One of the first people I met was Fulton County Juvenile Judge Nina Hickson. Through her, I began to see what was wrong with this picture — what was wrong that day I sat in her courtroom and watched that little girl with the pigtail cry.
In Georgia in 2000, while children were being arrested, put in jail, and chained like the worst of criminals, the men selling them and having sex with them were rarely arrested.
Back then, there were no reliable statistics on the number of prostituted children. While the number of 300,000 nationwide was bandied about, I researched the genesis of that number and learned it was wildly speculative and had no basis in fact.
The human traffickers you never even notice
The human traffickers you never even notice 01:00
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The best I could do was pull the numbers of adults who had gone to prison for prostitution in Georgia versus the number who had gone to prison for pimping. From 1972 to 1999, I found that 401 adults — almost all women — had been incarcerated for prostitution. Not one person had gone to prison for the crime of pimping. That told me something.
I remember the explanation given to me at the time by Mike Light, then the Department of Corrections spokesman and a former parole officer. “I think there was an unwitting bias that the woman was the perpetrator,” he said. “She was the one out having sex. …The pimp was just collecting the money.”
Because the numbers were so unreliable, my newspaper agreed to do a national survey of juvenile judges. We enlisted the help of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, who urged enough judges to respond that we were able to get a reliable sample.
A hidden problem
Child prostitution is a hidden problem that was — and still is — difficult to count.
Unlike adult women, these children — such as that 10-year-old girl — rarely came into the criminal justice system charged with prostitution. Rather they came in under a host of other charges, such as running away. Juvenile judges were often the first to identify them as sexually exploited minors who were working as prostitutes. And according to our survey, their numbers were growing.
Almost one in three of the juvenile judges surveyed said they had seen an increase in the past five years in the number of child prostitutes coming into their courtrooms. Rural judges participating in the survey reported the sharpest increase, with the typical rural judge seeing an average of three youths a month involved in prostitution.
Our survey suggested, however, that even judges viewed the problem differently, depending on their gender. Among female juvenile justices, 85% estimated they saw one or more child prostitutes a month, compared with 68% of male judges.
Read the original report
Selling Atlanta’s Children
The female judges were also more likely than male judges to complain that police weren’t aggressive enough in going after pimps and customers. Many judges participating in our survey said they believed the laws should be changed, mandating harsher penalties for pimps and “johns.”
One judge said the adults got away with exploiting children because “people don’t believe children, particularly if they’re a naughty, bad, unpleasant child.” A majority of the judges said their communities lacked services for child prostitutes in need of being “deprogrammed,” with 10 times as many judges saying they should be treated as victims rather than criminals.
Atlanta police said at the time it was a lot harder to arrest pimps than prostitutes.
As undercover officers, they could pluck the prostitutes off the streets as the girls or women worked the “track,” such as Metropolitan Parkway, or turned tricks at strip clubs, where underaged girls illegally danced. The pimps were more hidden.
Even if police were able to make an arrest, prosecutors said it was difficult to build a case against the men. They needed witnesses, but the general rule was that prostitutes didn’t testify against their boss, the pimp, out of reluctance or fear.
The problem, Judge Hickson said at the time, was that police and prosecutors often failed to distinguish between prostitutes who were adults and those who were children.
The children who were coming into her courtroom weren’t seen as victims by law enforcement, she said. “They’re seen as consenting participants.”
Partly in response to that perception, I told her I needed to find a girl 12 or younger who was allegedly being prostituted. I felt if I could paint a picture of a child who was being prostituted, as opposed to a teenager, the exploitative nature of this problem would become more real to our readers. I told her I would not use any names without her approval, as I understood the dangerous lives these young people were leading. Eventually, after she contacted other judges familiar with stories I’d done involving child victims, I think she decided it was worth the risk.
She called me one day and said, “What about a 10-year-old?” Soon after, I was in her courtroom when they brought in the little girl.
The judge explained that the last thing she wanted to do with this child was to keep her behind bars, which is where her 11-year-old sister had been waiting for three weeks. “But I’ve got to make sure she’s safe,” the judge said. There was just nowhere to put children like these because of a lack of children’s programs in Georgia.
There were plenty of beds for bad children needing punishment, but practically none for young exploited victims needing help.
At the court hearing, Hickson was clearly frustrated. She accused child welfare officials of not doing enough to find some place to put the two sisters other than jail. The probation officer complained they had done nothing to get the girls’ mother into drug treatment.
Hickson said she had never intended to keep them locked up more than a few days, and she was angry she had had to schedule this hearing to force the child welfare officials to act. They told the judge they worried about sending the girls home to their mother, whose life was controlled by drugs.
When the child told the judge she wanted to go home, Hickson said to her, “I don’t want you locked up either. But I’m also concerned about your safety and whether you’re going to stay with your mom. Are you going to stay at your mother’s?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the child said.
After the hearing, the judge took me back to her chambers where she allowed me to interview the little girl. Her eyes red from crying, the child said she was sorry for what she had done.
She said if she could, she would “change back the hand of time.” She said a relative’s boyfriend had led the sisters into prostitution. At first he “was buying us stuff.” She said she realized something was wrong “because of what he wanted in return.” He wanted money “by my prostituting.”
“He forced me. He wouldn’t let me go.” She said he took her sister and her to a hotel on Fulton Industrial Boulevard in Atlanta.
As she sat hunched over with her hands partly hiding her face, she said softly that he threatened to kill her if she left. “He’d pull my hair, and he punched me.” She was very frightened of him.
She said she would like to tell other girls her age, “Stay in school. Don’t waste your life on something like this. Some people have caught HIV and AIDS.”
She said she wanted to go back to school. Her elementary school had a mentoring program. And then this 10-year-old little girl — with no hope and no one in her life who loved and cared for her — said that more than anything, she wanted a mentor. “It would help me be better off in life,” she said. “Much better than I am.”
That day, Hickson ordered that both girls be returned home and without electronic monitors, as child welfare officials had requested. Three weeks later, the 10-year-old ran away again. Eventually police picked her up and returned her to the youth jail, where she remained while officials tried to figure out what to do with her.
“It’s not the judge’s fault,” Alesia Adams said at the time. Adams was head of Victims of Prostitution, a newly formed program to help children like the 10-year-old. “It’s not anybody’s fault. There’s just no place for these kids to go.”
In the past 15 years, I’ve thought of that child, as well as the other girls I met and profiled for the newspaper series. I’ve wondered what happened to them. The 10-year-old would be 25 today. If she’s alive.
Changing industry, changing laws
Since I wrote that series, a lot has changed. And a lot hasn’t.
Soon after my stories ran in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, people such as Hickson, Stephanie Davis and Alesia Adams convinced the Georgia Legislature to change state law so that pimping minors was no longer a misdemeanor but a felony, with prison sentences of up to 20 years, depending on the child’s age.
It was a start.
Prosecutors such as Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard called child prostitution possibly “one of the largest problems facing our young people today.” He said more than a new law was needed, and he began more aggressively prosecuting men who were exploiting minors while calling on police to more aggressively identify and arrest them.
The Atlanta Women’s Foundation set up “Angela’s Fund” to raise money to help children exploited as prostitutes. Soon Angela’s House was born as a residential safe house for a small number of children victimized by commercial sexual exploitation. While Angela’s House no longer exists, eventually two other safe houses have taken its place, thanks in part to a growing number of individuals and organizations concerned about the problem, such as youthSpark, Street Grace and Wellspring Living.
Each year, these organizations promote a “Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children Lobby Day” to continue calling attention to the problem.
In 2011, they succeeded in winning passage of House Bill 200: Georgia’s Human Trafficking Law, which again increased penalties for trafficking, required training for the proper response by law enforcement and emphasized the need to treat those who were being commercially exploited as victims rather than criminals.
This year, Gov. Nathan Deal of Georgia signed two new measures, both sponsored by Sen. Renee Unterman, a Republican from Buford. Senate Resolution 7 would permit an annual $5,000 fee paid by strip clubs to go toward housing, counseling and other services for victims of child prostitution, if voters approve. The resolution sets up a statewide referendum that will be on the ballot in November 2016.
Senate Bill 8, known as Rachel’s Law and the Safe Harbor Law, lays out how the money would be collected and spent. It also ensures that sexually exploited youths are treated as victims, not criminals, specifically stating that children who have been sexually exploited may no longer be charged with prostitution.
Hickson, today an ethics officer for the city of Atlanta, was there for the bills’ signing.
“The level of awareness certainly has increased,” she said in a recent interview. She believes the perception of human trafficking has also changed and is no longer viewed exclusively as a problem among immigrants from other countries.
“I think people today understand it is a homegrown problem,” she said. “You have people acknowledging that the problem exists in our metro area, and the children need to be treated as children with problems as opposed to problem children.”
But, she said, it remains critical to keep the public glare on the problem.
From the streets to the Internet
And that’s not easy, because if this societal problem was hidden before, it’s gone underground today.
Internet and cell phones have changed everything, according to Hickson and law enforcement officers. While young girls can still be seen walking the “track” in some well-known areas of Fulton and DeKalb counties, in the core of the Atlanta metro area, they are as likely to be advertised on the Internet.
A number of girls and women have set up their own ads that are prominently displayed on a plethora of websites, one of the biggest being “Backpage.com,” which filled the gap after Craigslist was sued and in 2010 shut down its money-making adult services section. Backpage’s escort and body-rubs section brings in millions in revenue each month, according to a 2013 report by an advertising consultant company, the AIM Group. Backpage “has succeeded Craigslist as the nation’s leading publisher of online prostitution advertising,” the report said.
(Earlier this summer, Visa, American Express and MasterCard all cut their ties with the website.) Calls and emails to representatives of Backpage were not returned.
To understand how endemic the Internet is to the world of prostitution, consider the website “The Erotic Review,” or TER. It has been around so long, there are johns who make it their business to go see escort after escort, then review them on TER. They call themselves “hobbyists,” and they post explicit descriptions of the services others can expect from a girl, whether the girl has a bad attitude or whether she’s posted a picture that makes her look better than she does in person. Attempts to reach TER have been unsuccessful.
Pimps who once exploited girls by making them walk the track can now troll the Internet for girls who are going it alone, sometimes luring them into escort services with an offer of higher salaries, payment to cover the cost of their ads and an apartment where they can rendezvous with their clients.
That means that for the 14-year-old girl from an impoverished area who is just getting started and doesn’t understand what she’s getting into, “a pimp will come along and say, ‘Instead of you staying out there in the wind or the cold, I’ll put you in a warm apartment and you’ll make a lot,’ ” says a seasoned law enforcement officer and former vice and narcotics detective. “Anyone who runs an escort agency and gets a cut from your profit prostituting, they’re pimping.”
As prostitution has moved indoors and underground, the community is less likely to see it on the streets and complain to police. So there’s less involvement by police, who are driven to respond by the community’s complaints.
That’s bad for the young victims, the officer says, as well as for the community because the sexual exploitation of underage youth remains a booming business. He worries that while demand remains strong, too many young girls — and some boys — are lured into prostitution out of view of the public and police and without understanding the consequences.
“The biggest impact is on the girls themselves,” he says. “It has a psychological, moral impact on a girl, and she doesn’t realize what she’s sacrificing. A lot of these girls become drug addicts. This is happening all over Atlanta. After 10 years, if you survive the diseases, a potential criminal record, and the psychological toil, you suddenly realize you have no education or marketable skills.
“Once you lose your looks, you’re back in the same place you started in. Any time you take a productive young person out of the mainstream of society and point her toward a criminal enterprise, which prostitution is, that’s never good.”
Hickson agrees.
She said that while she is hopeful about the new laws, the growing awareness and the numbers of people and organizations fighting against child prostitution, she worries there’s a “flavor of the month” aspect; that child prostitution is a “topic that’s in style.”
“If this is a shallow issue for people, it will dissipate when the next issue comes along,” she said. Fifteen years ago, I wrote that Hickson “looks into the eyes of children who have been prostituted and she sees nothing. No hope. No dreams. No more childhood.”
Like that 10-year-old girl.
Some years after that child had stood before Hickson, the former judge got word about what had happened to her and her older sister.
For a while, they were in the care of the Department of Family and Children Services because of their mother’s ongoing drug addiction. But at some point, their mother got into a drug treatment program and eventually the girls went home.
“It was touch and go,” Hickson said. “But last I heard, they were in school.”
In the meantime, Hickson and a number of others remain committed to rescuing young girls and boys from the destruction of sexual exploitation. Top of their agenda now is to ensure that voters support the $5,000 annual fee on strip clubs in next year’s referendum.
“We have to remain vigilant because the adult entertainment industry has deep pockets,” Hickson said. “This is long-term work. There has to be a level of commitment.
-These little girls and the boys that are involved, are VICTIMS and to shackle them is an affront to all sane thinking people! The pimps need to be put in hard labor camps and the system needs to aggressively start programs to protect, rehabilitate and educate these victims to a better future! Licensing needs to be enacted for the privilege of bringing a child into the world, not the incentive of being able to sit your lazy ass on welfare! So many of these victims started as being pimped by their trailer trash mom’s boyfriends. Many were kidnapped out of good environments, yes, but millions of children born into poverty by irresponsible, ignorant parents become the ‘easy pickings.’
It is NOT A RIGHT to have a child, no matter what any knee-jerk asshole believes! It is the most important job a person will EVER do! I will continue to be as active in my community as possible and will pass out literature to open people’s eyes to this tragedy, but the people also need to put pressure on the Government to pass laws protecting these victims and that target and utterly destroy the lives of the pimps and johns involved in human trafficking!
Stop the Insanity!!!!
StandardHuman Trafficking! We have to stop it!!
StandardHuman Trafficking! Stop this NOW!
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A WEB RESOURCE FOR COMBATING HUMAN TRAFFICKING
How You Can Help
Individuals Interested in Helping to Combat Human Trafficking – Toolkit
General Information
Tips for Recognizing Victims of Trafficking
- Understand the different forms of trafficking: labor or sex trafficking
- Visible Indicators of Trafficking
- Understand the profile of a trafficked person
- Health Characteristics of a Trafficked Person
- Signs that a person is being held as a slave
- Questions to ask if you suspect you are in the presence of a trafficking victim
Different forms of trafficking
Sex Trafficking
Victims of sex trafficking are often found in the streets or working in establishments that offer commercial sex acts, i.e. brothels, strip clubs, pornography production houses. Such establishments may operate under the guise of:
- Massage parlors
- Escort services
- Adult bookstores
- Modeling studios
- Bars/strip clubs
Labor Trafficking
People forced into indentured servitude can be found in:
- Sweatshops (where abusive labor standards are present)
- Commercial agricultural situations (fields, processing plants, canneries)
- Domestic situations (maids, nannies)
- Construction sites (particularly if public access is denied)
- Restaurant and custodial work.
How Do People Get Trapped Into Sex or Labor Trafficking?
No one volunteers to be exploited. Traffickers frequently recruit people through fraudulent advertisements promising legitimate jobs as hostesses, domestics, or work in the agricultural industry. Trafficking victims of all kinds come from rural, suburban, and urban settings.
There are signs when commercial establishments are holding people against their will.
Visible Indicators of Trafficking
Visible Indicators May Include:
- Heavy security at the commercial establishment including barred windows, locked doors, isolated location, electronic surveillance. Women are never seen leaving the premises unless escorted.
- Victims live at the same premises as the brothel or work site or are driven between quarters and “work” by a guard. For labor trafficking, victims are often prohibited from leaving the work site, which may look like a guarded compound from the outside.
- Victims are kept under surveillance when taken to a doctor, hospital or clinic for treatment; trafficker may act as a translator.
- High foot traffic especially for brothels where there may be trafficked women indicated often by a stream of men arriving and leaving the premises.
Trafficking victims are kept in bondage through a combination of fear, intimidation, abuse, and psychological controls. While each victim will have a different experience, they share common threads that may signify a life of indentured servitude.
Trafficking victims live a life marked by abuse, betrayal of their basic human rights, and control under their trafficker. The following indicators in and of themselves may not be enough to meet the legal standard for trafficking, but they indicate that a victim is controlled by someone else and, accordingly, the situation should be further investigated.
Profile of a Trafficked Person
What Is the Profile of a Trafficking Victim?
Most trafficking victims will not readily volunteer information about their status because of fear and abuse they have suffered at the hands of their trafficker. They may also be reluctant to come forward with information from despair, discouragement, and a sense that there are no viable options to escape their situation. Even if pressed, they may not identify themselves as someone held in bondage for fear of retribution to themselves or family members. However, there are indicators that often point to a person held in a slavery condition. They include:
- Health Characteristics of a Trafficked Person:Trafficked individuals may be treated as disposable possessions without much attention given to their mental or physical health. Accordingly, some of the health problems that may be evident in a victim include:
- Malnutrition, dehydration or poor personal hygiene
- Sexually transmitted diseases
- Signs of rape or sexual abuse
- Bruising, broken bones, or other signs of untreated medical problems
- Critical illnesses including diabetes, cancer or heart disease
- Post-traumatic stress or psychological disorders
- Other Important Signs:In addition to some of the obvious physical and mental indicators of trafficking, there are other signs that an individual is being controlled by someone else. Red flags should go up for police or aid workers who notice any of the following during an intake. The individual:
- Does not hold his/her own identity or travel documents
- Suffers from verbal or psychological abuse designed to intimidate, degrade and frighten the individual
- Has a trafficker or pimp who controls all the money, victim will have very little or no pocket money
Questions to ask if you suspect you are in the presence of a trafficking victim
Screening Questions
- Is the person free to leave the work site?
- Is the person physically, sexually or psychologically abused?
- Does the person have a passport or valid I.D. card and is he/she in possession of such documents?
- What is the pay and conditions of employment?
- Does the person live at home or at/near the work site?
- How did the individual arrive to this destination if the suspected victim is a foreign national?
- Has the person or a family member of this person been threatened?
- Does the person fear that something bad will happen to him or her, or to a family member, if he/she leaves the job?
Anyone can report suspected trafficking cases. If the victim is under 18, U.S. professionals who work in law enforcement, healthcare, social care, mental health, and education are mandated to report such cases. Through a grass-roots community-wide effort and public awareness campaign, more professionals on the front line can readily identify the trafficking victim and have him/her treated accordingly.
Together, we can save innocence!
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Saving Innocence
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-Only through a concentrated group effort, can we stop this travesty!
Disturbing human bondage statistics!
StandardSTORY HIGHLIGHTS
The Global Slavery Index 2014 report finds that globally, almost 36 million people are subject to modern slavery
India is home to the largest number of enslaved, with over 14 million people living in bondage
Mauritania has the highest percentage, with 4% of the population enslaved
Iceland and Luxembourg have the lowest number, both in prevalence and in absolute numbers
(CNN) — The second annual edition of the Walk Free Foundation’s Global Slavery Index has found that globally, almost 36 million people are subject to modern slavery.
While incidences of slavery were found in every one of the 167 countries surveyed, five countries — India, China, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Russia — accounted for nearly 22 million people (61%) suffering in bondage. The worst offender, India, accounted for an estimated 14.29 million people.
Human slavery, the report states, is defined as “human trafficking, forced labor, debt bondage, forced or servile marriage, or commercial sexual exploitation.”
Surge in cases
The report found an increase of 20% on the foundation’s findings a year ago, although it attributed the rise to more sophisticated data collection and analysis.
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“There is an assumption that slavery is an issue from a bygone era. Or that it only exists in countries ravaged by war and poverty,” Andrew Forrest, Chairman and Founder of the Walk Free Foundation, said in a statement.
“The first step in eradicating slavery is to measure it. And with that critical information, we must all come together — governments, businesses and civil society — to finally bring an end to the most severe form of exploitation.”
Highest percentages
While some of the world’s most populous nations were home to the bulk of the incidences of modern slavery, other countries had higher percentages of their populations enslaved.
The West African nation of Mauritania, the report found, had the highest prevalence, with an estimated 4% of its population in bondage. Other offenders include Uzbekistan (3.97%), Haiti (2.3%) and Qatar (1.35%).
The Emirate, which will play host to the World Cup in 2022, has faced numerous questions concerning its labor laws and the kafala sponsorship system, which limits foreign workers’ rights of movement.
“Qatar hosts significant numbers of foreign workers, and has risen in the ranking due to improved survey data, giving better insight into the high number of enslaved migrant workers in the nation,” Gina Dafalia, the foundation’s policy and research manager, told CNN. “It is ranked fourth with an estimated 1.4% of the population in modern slavery. We consider this to be a conservative estimate.”
There is an assumption that slavery is an issue from a bygone era. Or that it only exists in countries ravaged by war and poverty.
Andrew Forrest, Walk Free Foundation
Qatar has promised to address criticisms and expects to make announcements concerning repeal of the kafala system in early 2015.
Refugees most vulnerable to slavery
Kevin Bales, lead author of the report, told CNN’s Kristie Lu Stout that vulnerability is a key factor in the prevalence of slavery in a country, and that refugees are particularly susceptible to modern enslavement.
“It’s not a surprise that many of the countries where we see large proportions of the population in slavery are also those countries that are beset by conflict, like Syria, and by other economic and environmental problems,” he said.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that forced labor generates more than $150 billion in illicit profits every year, making it the second largest source of profits for international organized crimes behind the drugs trade.
Bright spots
Iceland and Luxembourg, the report finds, have fewer than 100 people each living in slavery, the lowest number both in prevalence and in absolute numbers.
While it acknowledges the efforts made by some countries, such as the Netherlands, Sweden, the U.S. and Australia to tackle the global issue, the report also reprimands some rich countries for not doing more.
Hong Kong, Singapore and Brunei, along with Qatar and Kuwait are singled out for mention.
The Walk Free Foundation, a global human rights organization with a mission to end modern slavery in a generation, was founded by Australian philanthropists, Andrew and Nicola Forrest.
-I know that I have excoriated people in the recent past for being greedy selfish sheeple assisting in the sale of our country to the highest bidder, but my efforts to save children will continue to become more complex. I hold adults responsible for their actions but also must realize that if 90% of them are sheep, then personal responsibility actually IS not the best course of thought in which to follow. Those of us who pride ourselves on not following the latest fads or for thinking outside of the box actually have a greater level of responsibility to our fellow humans to protect them from themselves, and if that takes exerting more control over them for their own good than so be it.
Too many people are having children that they cannot support due to their own stupidity in following their most base animal urges. These children are brought into a world that is very unforgiving and that is filled with evil people who don’t hesitate to exploit them. All children deserve a chance and until we can force people to use birth control, we need to protect the children that are already here. My children come home from school every night into a bed that I have worked my ass off to provide for them, many kids never return home from the days of slave labor that they are forced into. As long as there are little ones who do not return home, I will continue to write, donate, pontificate, march and dig my hands in to help these faceless innocents return from brutality.
These kids are not a world away, they are as close as your front doorstep in many areas. I post flyers on signs to look for, I post links on this blog to guide people to resources. I am venturing deeper into this world and learning more effective ways to assist because I detest an armchair quarterback who sits on his/her lazy ass and tells everyone else how the world should run but never tries to make a difference. Please pay attention, and please realize that the problem only gets worse with population increase. I mention this because if we don’t start examining the bigger picture the problems of this planet will never be solved. Most of our problems are created by too many rats in the maze and a bunch of bigger rats hoarding resources. If we fail to control our populations than the governments will surely damage personal freedoms a lot more than anyone can imagine. So please, help those in bondage out there now but think of the things that actually lend to these problems.
hitchens67 Atheism WOW!! Logic and reason campaign 