tagged w/ Trafficking
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MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — The agricultural output of this country includes rice, soybeans and wheat. Soon, though, the government may get its hands dirty with a far more complicated crop — marijuana — as part of a rising movement in this region to create alternatives to the United States-led war on drugs.
Uruguay’s famously rebellious president first called for “regulated and controlled legalization of marijuana” in a security plan unveiled last month. And now all anyone here can talk about are the potential impacts of a formal market for what Ronald Reagan once described as “probably the most dangerous drug in America.”MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — The agricultural output of this country includes rice,... more
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Read the full story at http://womensenews.org/story/prostitution-and-trafficking/120429/african-americans-turn-headlights-sex-traffic
African American film artist Brook Bello, whose toned, slim build and close-cropped blonde hair belie her 40 years, has appeared in TV commercials and dramas, such as the science fiction program "Stargate SGI."
Despite her achievements, Bello was desperately unhappy for many of these apparently successful years. She had a horrific youth hidden deep inside her.
Bello had been one of the millions of women and girls in the U.S. and internationally who are abducted, duped or coerced into selling sex for their "owners'" profit.
For years she said nothing, but now she's going as public as she can.
Bello has written, produced and directed a documentary film, "Survivor: Living Above the Noise," in which she tells her own story as a sex trafficking victim, as do others in the film. The documentary takes the viewer to Bahrain in the Middle East, one of the global hotspots of the practice, where Bello went to recover from her experiences and learn about the impact of sex trafficking on women and girls there.
She is also partnering with the International Black Women's Public Policy Institute to expose the problem of sex trafficking in the African American community. Bello and the policy institute, founded in 2009 in Washington, D.C., are planning nationwide discussions and screenings of her film, which will be shown next month at the 65th Cannes Film Festival.Read the full story at... more
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Do you know what is "Human Trafficking"? It is an example crime of modern day slavery that involves the use of force, fraud or coercion to obtain some type of labor.
Are you familiar with the "Florida 15 case" or known as "F15"? It is a group of 15 Filipino workers that were recruited by the San Villa Ship Management Corporation between 2008-2009 to work at the W Hotel in Miami, Florida, as housekeepers and managers. On March 15, 2011, they all came together to form this group as the victims of labor trafficking.Do you know what is "Human Trafficking"? It is an example crime of modern... more
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Human trafficking must end. Hope for the Sold seeks to end human trafficking one word at a time. They create compelling resources to spread awareness, connect leaders, and inspire hope and action. Find out how you can join the abolitionist movement.
http://hopeforthesold.com/Human trafficking must end. Hope for the Sold seeks to end human trafficking one word... more
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CNN...
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THE CNN FREEDOM PROJECT ENDING MODERN-DAY SLAVERY
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January 19th, 2012
12:03 PM ET
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Child slavery and chocolate: All too easy to find
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In "Chocolate's Child Slaves," CNN's David McKenzie travels into the heart of the Ivory Coast to investigate children working in the cocoa fields.
(More information and air times on CNN International.)
By David McKenzie and Brent Swails, CNN
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CLICK ON CNN LINK (at top) TO VIEW THREE VIDEOS
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Daloa, Ivory Coast (CNN) - Chocolate’s billion-dollar industry starts with workers like Abdul. He squats with a gang of a dozen harvesters on an Ivory Coast farm.
Abdul holds the yellow cocoa pod lengthwise and gives it two quick cracks, snapping it open to reveal milky white cocoa beans. He dumps the beans on a growing pile.
Abdul is 10 years old, a three-year veteran of the job.
He has never tasted chocolate.
During the course of an investigation for CNN’s Freedom Project initiative - an investigation that went deep into the cocoa fields of Ivory Coast - a team of CNN journalists found that child labor, trafficking and slavery are rife in an industry that produces some of the world’s best-known brands.
It was not supposed to be this way.
After a series of news reports surfaced in 2001 about gross violations in the cocoa industry, lawmakers in the United States put immense pressure on the industry to change.
“We felt like the public ought to know about it, and we ought to take some action to try to stop it,” said Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, who, together with Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, spearheaded the response. “How many people in America know that all this chocolate they are eating - candies and all of those wonderful chocolates - is being produced by terrible child labor?”
But after intense lobbying by the cocoa industry, lawmakers weren’t able to push through a law. What they got was a voluntary protocol, signed by the heads of the chocolate industry, to stop the worst forms of child labor “as a matter of urgency.” One of the key goals was to certify the cocoa trade as child-labor free.
“It was meant to achieve the end of child slave labor in cocoa fields,” Engel said.
It didn’t.
UNICEF estimates that nearly a half-million children work on farms across Ivory Coast, which produces nearly 40% of the world’s supply of cocoa. The agency says hundreds of thousands of children, many of them trafficked across borders, are engaged in the worst forms of child labor.
A recent study by Tulane University says the industry’s efforts to stop child labor are “uneven” and “incomplete” and that 97% of Ivory Coast’s farmers had not been reached. But the industry’s main representative in the country disagrees with the assessment.
“I think the situation has improved exponentially,” said Rabola Kagohi, country director for the International Cocoa Initiative, the chocolate industry’s answer to fighting child labor and trafficking. “Today, the message is physically getting through.”
Kagohi works out of a basement office with one other permanent employee.
“There are some results,” he said. “I wish that you had spoken to some planters.”
None of the farmers CNN spoke to in the heart of the cocoa production region said they had ever been reached by the International Cocoa Initiative, the government or chocolate companies about child trafficking.
Children such as Abdul don’t know anything about protocols or certification. All they know is work.
When Abdul’s mother died, a stranger brought him across the border to the farm. Abdul says all he’s given is a little food, the torn clothes on his back, and an occasional tip from the farmer. Abdul is a modern child slave.
And he is not the only youngster working in his group.
Yacou insisted he is 16, but his face looks far younger.
“My mother brought me from Burkina Faso when my father died,” he said.
Scars crisscross Yacou’s legs from a machete. He can’t clear grass in the cocoa fields without cutting himself. During harvest season, he works day after day hacking the cocoa pods.
The emotional scars run much deeper.
“I wish I could go to school. I want to read and write,” he said. But Yacou hasn’t spent a single day in school, and he has no idea how to leave the farm.
“It makes me angry,” Engel said. As far as he’s concerned, the chocolate companies haven't done enough.
“They are working with us, and we are glad that they are working with us. But they could do better.”
One of the major players in the Ivory Coast cocoa trade is, not surprisingly, the Ivorian government. Although the country has cornered a vast chunk of a lucrative market, it is considered one of the world’s poorest by any measure.
But the government leadership blames politics and war for the problems in the cocoa industry.
“Thirty years of political instability caused a lot of damage to our economy generally, and to the agricultural sector particularly, and more specifically to the cocoa industry,” said Ivory Coast’s minister of agriculture, Sangafowa Coulibaly. “Unfortunately, these years have been lost.”
After an attempted coup in 2002, the country was split in half and kept from all-out civil war by the United Nations. There was protracted violence after the last disputed presidential elections, when then-President Laurent Gbagbo refused to concede.
With the new government of Alassane Ouattara in charge, the government says it can now put much-needed reforms in place.
“Things can only get better,” Coulibaly said. “The main reason is that today, the political crisis is behind us, the armed conflict is behind us.”
But many observers believe that a new government won’t make it a priority to stop slavery in the cocoa fields.
And with peace, traffickers are free to do their work again. U.N. officials told CNN that the Ivory Coast conflict actually helped slow down trafficking because people were too afraid to move across borders.
Contrary to the promises of action, CNN’s investigation could only find promises. And those promises are empty to children like Abdul and Yacou.
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Post by: CNN's Brent Swails, CNN's David McKenzie
.CNN...
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THE CNN FREEDOM PROJECT ENDING MODERN-DAY SLAVERY
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January 19th,... more
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When the U.S. State Department recently agreed to a U.N. human rights recommendation for sex workers it joined one side of an anti-sex-for-hire argument. The other side believes prostitution is never safe for women and must be abolished.
In Union Square here, three members of the Sex Workers Outreach Project stood poised, in black underwear and with red ribbons binding their wrists and mouths, for 86 minutes.
At the tick of 86 minutes and 59 seconds, they untied the ribbons, erased the red targets drawn on their bodies--signifying targets for violence--and cheered for the U.S. approved-U.N. resolution that could change laws and foreign policies that target sex workers.
"We are hoping that this will be the beginning of a dialogue with the State Department about what the federal government will do to address human rights abuses against sex workers and to our knowledge, it is the first time this has really happened," Sienna Baskin, co-director of the New York-based Sex Workers Project, later told Women's eNews in a phone interview.
The performance art demonstration took place on March 18, eight days after the United States accepted the U.N. Human Rights Council's Recommendation No. 86 to "ensure access to public services paying attention to the special vulnerability of sexual workers to violence and human rights abuses."
The U.S. State Department's affirmative response to the recommendation–one of the 228 put forth by countries during a peer-led review of countries' human rights records every four years--may mark a monumental shift toward protecting sex workers' human rights.
Full story at Women's eNews http://womensenews.org/story/prostitution-and-trafficking/110420/us-sex-workers-hail-nations-new-stanceWhen the U.S. State Department recently agreed to a U.N. human rights recommendation... more
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Before I get to the grit, here’s a base of information for us to start with:
* Most consumer chocolate comes from cocoa beans that are farmed in West Africa.
* West Africa is known for forced labor, human trafficking and child labor – sometimes all three at once.
* Hershey, which has the largest market share in the US at 42.5%, gets the majority of their chocolate from – you guessed it! – West Africa.
* Out of every major (and a bunch of relatively minor) companies that produce chocolate, Hershey is the only one that refuses to certify their chocolate as fair trade.
In fact, not only does Hershey refuse to use chocolate from certified fair trade sources, it won’t even list them publicly. Does Hershey get its cocoa beans from the same places that practice forced child labor? We don’t know, because they won’t tell anyone: When asked by companies like Global Exchange and The International Labor Rights Forum, Hershey refused to provide public information about its cocoa sources in West Africa, period.
Here’s what we do know: the majority of Hershey’s cocoa is sourced from West Africa; the company has no purchasing policies that would prevent labor exploitation of those in West Africa; it refuses to shift to third-party fair trade certifications (which almost every other major chocolate manufacturer has); and even when Hershey’s investors asked the company to “institute supply-chain transparency programs for its cocoa,” the company refused.
Read more about Hershey and what you can do to stop child labor in West Africa:
http://www.awakenedaesthetic.com/2011/02/exposed-hersheys-chocolate/Before I get to the grit, here’s a base of information for us to start with:... more
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Tuesday, December 7th
7:00 pm doors open/chocolate tasting; 7:30 pm program begins
Chocolate Dividends and World Centric invite you to a screening of the 2010 documentary, The Dark Side of Chocolate. Global Exchange Fair Trade Campaign Director, Adrienne Fitch-Frankel will introduce the film.
The Dark Side of Chocolate, "Is the chocolate we eat produced with the use of child labour and trafficked children? The award winning Danish journalist Miki Mistrati decides to investigate the rumours."
World Centric Community Space Wheelchair Accessible
2121 Staunton Court, Palo Alto, CA 94306Tuesday, December 7th
7:00 pm doors open/chocolate tasting; 7:30 pm program begins... more
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Toda la fuerza policial al norte de Mexico renuncia despues de balacera.
The entire police force of the small town in northeastern Mexico quit on Tuesday, a day after gunmen attacked their headquarters. Los Ramones Mayor Santos Salinas said 14 members of the police force told him they quit on Tuesday morning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2HV089go6cToda la fuerza policial al norte de Mexico renuncia despues de balacera.
The entire... more
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La cadena de farmacias CVS pagara 75 Millones de dolares en multa por vender un ingrediente importante de la Metanfetamina que le daba ganancias enormes gracias AL TRAFICO DE DROGAS!
CVS Pharmacy, the nation's largest operator of retail pharmacies, announced it had agreed to pay $75 million in fines for allowing repeated purchases of pseudoephedrine that led to a spike in Southern California drug trafficking.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1LfFf-GjmILa cadena de farmacias CVS pagara 75 Millones de dolares en multa por vender un... more
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Um Ali is scared. She says male relatives want to kill her and sell her daughters into marriages that are really sex-trafficking arrangements that put young women to work in brothels overseas.
She lives in hiding and relocates often. Her pulse accelerates every time an international text message pops into her cell phone.
"The world is small," wrote her brother in a recent threat.
Um Ali is one of over a million refugees who have sought shelter in Syria since U.S. troops entered Iraq in 2003. She left with her husband and children during a wave of militia violence against Iraqis working--"collaborating"--with Americans in 2006.
Some girls and women among these refugees face being sex trafficked by people within their own families. No statistics or studies are available on this specific problem, but there are plenty of stories of men in a pinch treating female relatives as young as 13 as commodities for sex and marriage markets.
Read the rest: http://womensenews.org/story/war/101011/in-syria-iraqi-refugee-daughters-risk-being-soldUm Ali is scared. She says male relatives want to kill her and sell her daughters into... more
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An investigation into suspicious circumstances surrounding the sale of the former Huffman Aviation has unearthed an explosive secret at the heart of an otherwise unremarkable aviation facility. Almost since its inception, the specter of heroin trafficking has hung over the airfield which would later become the Venice Municipal Airport. http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php/recent-news/5678-venice-airportAn investigation into suspicious circumstances surrounding the sale of the former... more
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worrg
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It is reported Edgar Valdez was fighting Hector Beltran for control of the Beltran Leyva drug cartel. The cartel was previously controlled by Hector's bother Arturo, but he was shot dead last December.
"Earlier this month, police found four decapitated bodies hanging from a bridge in the city of Cuernavaca and their heads were discovered nearby with a message warning that anyone supporting Edgar Valdez would risk a similar fate.
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Mr Valdez has been charged with distributing thousands of kilos of cocaine in the eastern US between 2004 and 2006. "-BBC
The arrest of Edgar Valdez was described as a boost for Mexico president, since Valdez was one of the most wanted criminals in Mexico. The article says the war against the drug cartels has left 28,000 people dead and 3,200 fired police officers who were either corrupt, incompetent or connected to crime.It is reported Edgar Valdez was fighting Hector Beltran for control of the Beltran... more
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Criticism is building for Craiglists' adult advertisement section on the website. The site is under investigation in South Carolina for promoting prostitution and the creator Craig Newmark was confronted by a CNN reporter about the allegations.
Now in the Washington Post, an advert paid by by Fair Fund (charity which helps trafficked women) showed an open letter written by two women who were sold for sex on the website. It sounds like the letter highlighted the issues of sex trafficking of women and children on the website.
Craiglist chief executive Jim Buckmaster stated they're working with police to monitor, identify for arrests of exploitation adverts on the website.
"One of the women, who identified herself as MC, said she was forced into prostitution at the age of 11 by a man who trafficked "many girls my age".
"All day, me and other girls sat with our laptops, pasting pictures and answering ads on Craigslist, he made $1,500 a night selling my body, dragging me to Los Angeles, Houston, Little Rock – and on one trip to Las Vegas in the trunk of a car," the ad said. "Craig we write this letter so you will know from our personal experiences how Craigslist makes horrific acts like this so easy to carry out … and the men who arrange them very rich."
The second woman, identified as AK, said that last year she met a man twice her age who pretended to be her boyfriend. "He put my picture on Craigslist, and I was sold for sex by the hour at truck stops and cheap motels, 10 hours with 10 different men every night. This became my life," the ad said. "Men answered the Craigslist advertisements and paid to rape me. The $30,000 he pocketed each month was facilitated by Craigslist 300 times."
AK said she knew of more than 20 girls who were trafficked on the site: "-GuardianCriticism is building for Craiglists' adult advertisement section on the website.... more
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Before Dider Drogba was named 2009's African Footballer of the Year, he was a 5-year-old living in Paris with his uncle, Michel Goba. In this Vanguard extra, correspondent Mariana van Zeller talks with Goba about Foot Solidaire, an organization that helps young players who have been abandoned by agents.
"Vanguard," airing weekly on Current TV Wednesdays at 10/9c, is a no-limits documentary series whose award-winning correspondents put themselves in extraordinary situations to immerse viewers in global issues that have a large social significance. Unlike sound-bite driven reporting, the show's correspondents, Adam Yamaguchi, Kaj Larsen, Christof Putzel and Mariana van Zeller, serve as trusted guides who take viewers on in-depth real life adventures in pursuit of some of the world's most important stories.
For more, go to http://current.com/vanguard.Before Dider Drogba was named 2009's African Footballer of the Year, he was a... more
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In this scene from Vanguard's "Soccer's Lost Boys," correspondent Mariana van Zeller travels to a prestigious -- and unconventional -- academy for young African footballers. Founder Tom Vernon explains how for the 40 boys currently attending Right to Dream in Ghana, an emphasis on both athletics and academics empowers students to plan for their future.
Learn more about Right to Dream: http://www.righttodream.com/
"Vanguard," airing weekly on Current TV Wednesdays at 10/9c, is a no-limits documentary series whose award-winning correspondents put themselves in extraordinary situations to immerse viewers in global issues that have a large social significance. Unlike sound-bite driven reporting, the show's correspondents, Adam Yamaguchi, Kaj Larsen, Christof Putzel and Mariana van Zeller, serve as trusted guides who take viewers on in-depth real life adventures in pursuit of some of the world's most important stories.
For more, go to http://current.com/vanguard.In this scene from Vanguard's "Soccer's Lost Boys," correspondent... more
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The Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group, which is made up of a number of different human rights groups are asking for an independent watchdog to monitor UK Border Agency. The group says officials aren't helping the victims of trafficking because they target them as the criminals instead of the traffickers.
"In one case, it says a West African woman was told that although it must have been "extremely unpleasant" to be forced to have sex with strangers, this did "not amount to trafficking" because she had failed to escape when she had the opportunity.
In another instance, it says a woman forced into domestic slavery was told that as this had happened in 2008 she should now have "overcome any trauma". "-BBC
In 2009 called for more anti-trafficking phonelines to help people who have been trafficked into the sex industry in the UK. "In Italy, a freephone trafficking hotline for clients to anonymously report concerns and for victims to expose their criminal bosses receives thousands of calls and has helped thousands of women to be rescued."-http://tinyurl.com/3xrfld5
Amnesty on Trafficking: http://www.amnesty.org.uk/content.asp?CategoryID=10314
Current doc on Trafficking Brides: http://current.com/groups/on-current-tv/92357386_bride-trafficking-unveiled.htmThe Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group, which is made up of a number of different human... more
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Sex trafficking simultaneously exploits both the best and the worst aspects of globalization. The champions of globalization tout the growing ease of conducting business across national borders. Sophisticated communication tools and relaxed banking laws make it possible to exchange assets internationally with ease. Virtual enterprises can operate everywhere and nowhere, making themselves known only when and where they choose.
Organized crime syndicates take advantage of these tools to create more efficient overseas networks. Although most trafficking originates with local operators, they deftly connect to an international sex industry looking to fill slots in brothels, massage parlors, strip joints, and lap dance bars.
A club owner in Chicago can pick up the phone and “mail-order” three beautiful young girls from eastern Europe. Two weeks later a fresh shipment of three Slavic girls will be dancing in his club. Though a number of quasi-independent traffickers were likely involved in moving the girls, the operation would appear seamless to the Chicago client.
The critics of globalization point out that capital flows wherever it can most easily exploit cheap labor. The owners of capital will abandon a specific location quickly once one of two conditions occurs: (1) the assets it exploits are depleted, or (2) those assets can be obtained more cheaply in other markets.
Sex trafficking also manifests itself in this form. Over the past three decades, the prime area for recruiting sex slaves has shifted rapidly from one zone of economic depression to another. In the 1970s, traffickers targeted girls from Southeast Asia “above all Thailand and Vietnam” as well as the Philippines. After ten years or so of mining in Asia, traffickers shifted their focus to African girls from Nigeria, Uganda, and Ghana flooded the international sex bazaars. In the mid-1980s and spilling over into the early 1990s, Latin American girls from Brazil, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Central America (especially El Salvador and Guatemala) became the favored pool.
Traffickers move opportunistically to prey on vulnerable populations. In the 1980s, the trafficking of girls out of eastern Europe hardly registered on the radar screen. Following the economic and political collapse of the Soviet Union, that situation changed dramatically. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that roughly a quarter of a million females were trafficked within Europe alone “from East to West” since 1991.
Even within eastern Europe, the prime recruitment zones for trafficking shift rapidly to exploit opportunities. In 1992, the vast majority of trafficked victims came from Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. By the mid-1990s girls in those markets had been depleted, so traffickers started targeting Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Moldova. After the turn of the century, the prime recruitment zone shifted to central Asia “Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan” and Georgia.
Wherever the greatest profit can be extracted, there the traffickers move. In an impassioned speech delivered in Brussels, European commissioner Anna Diamantopoulou aptly characterized the “ruthless efficiency” of these modern-day traders in human property:
“They know their business inside out and respond to changes in the market with a speed unmatched by even the most competitive corporations. Their expertise and ability to exploit the market are surpassed only by their disregard for human life. Women are bought, sold and hired out like any other product. The bottom line is profit.”
Children Are Not Prostitutes
Young boys and girls in every city on the globe today are forced to serve as sex slaves. Sex traffickers target twelve- to seventeen-year-old children as their choice candidates. The johns who pay regular visits to brothels prefer adolescents above any other age group. Looked at from the cold perspective of a slaveholder, adolescents also have a longer shelf life. Any older and they start to lose their youthful appeal. Any younger and they may draw the attention of law enforcement authorities.
Because sex trafficking masks itself as prostitution, the general public does not feel outraged. The children are perceived to be criminals or sexual deviants or at best victims of their environment: desperate for survival, the kids “choose” to sell their bodies for profit.
The real criminals hide in the shadows. An illicit network of traffickers, pimps, recruiters, brothel owners, and johns preys on vulnerable kids and forces them into a life of sexual commerce. Once the inner workings of that criminal network are exposed, common sense prevails. Of course a child would not volunteer for the repeated trauma of ten (or more) grown men penetrating their bodies every evening. We have a word for exploiting minors that way: rape.
It should be noted that the same mechanisms of financial bondage and violent intimidation that enslave children are practiced on females of all ages. Adult “prostitutes” too can recount shocking testimonies of pimps locking them in closets, flogging them with coat hangers, and forcing them to service a staggering number of clients. The pimps quite explicitly refer to these women as “my property” and will attack anyone who acts to compromise their control.
Much more important stuff at the link:Sex trafficking simultaneously exploits both the best and the worst aspects of... more
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Mariana van Zeller is a correspondent for Vanguard.
Every four years, I look forward to the World Cup. It's the one time where my small country, Portugal, commands a little respect on the world stage. But this World Cup is different...I know too much.
Over the last six months, I've been investigating a particularly heartbreaking scandal for a Current TV documentary called "Soccer's Lost Boys," airing next Wednesday. The story took me from the dirt soccer pitches of Ghana to the migrant ghettos of Morocco and finally, to black market soccer games in Paris.
It's estimated that 20,000 young West African players are currently stranded throughout Europe--trafficked there by predatory agents who snatch them off the fields of Ghana and Senegal and Cameroon promising contracts with big European teams and then abandon them when those tryouts either don't materialize or don't go well.
Jean Claude Mbvoumin, one of the few advocates trying to help these kids through his small Paris-based organization Foot Solidaire, told me that 70 percent of the tryouts that took place in France last year were "uninvited," meaning that--like door-to-door salesmen--these agents just show up with a player--or three or 10--from parts unknown, hoping to get them in front of coaches. Not surprisingly, this approach leads far more often to heartbreak and suffering than to the fame and fortune promised these youngsters.
If you're reading this in the US, you may not be aware of what big industry soccer has become. Money on par with the salaries in the NFL, NBA and MLB are being paid to players from around the globe to play for teams in the UK, France, Italy, Spain. Soccer, or "football" as the rest of the world knows it, is the most global of sports and these days, there's perhaps no bigger market for promising new players than Africa.
Over the last decade there's been a surge in the number of Africans playing at big European clubs. To take the top English league for example, in 1989 it had only four players from Africa, all of them white Africans. In 2009, the league had 60 African-born players, nearly all of them blacks from West Africa. A handful, like Didier Drogba from the Ivory Coast or Michael Essien from Ghana, have risen to become global super stars and fabulously wealthy in the process. These rags-to-riches stories now serve as inspiration for thousands of young African boys who see soccer as their way out.
But the same desperation that drives many young Africans to pile 70 people in a fishing boat meant for seven to make the dangerous sea crossing to Europe, also makes them easy targets for unscrupulous agents, conmen and other unsavory characters. At the embassy of the Ivory Coast in Rabat, Morocco, the consular general pulled out a thick blue book--like an accountant's ledger--filled with the names and faces of young footballers who had been scammed and abandoned in Morocco. I stood in shock as page after page of young African faces stared back at me. My initial worries that we might be stretching some isolated, anecdotal cases of player trafficking into something bigger vanished on the spot. This problem was real--and real nasty.
I like to think of this story as an African Hoop Dreams, although a similar story could be told from South America or even Eastern Europe. Anywhere in the world where a passion of football is paired with the desperation of poverty, the conditions are ripe for the exploitation of young talent. As South Africa hosts the World Cup--the first African nation to do so--it's important that people realize that the growing popularity of European leagues around the globe has come at a cost.
The reason that FIFA, the governing body of the sport, has decided to hold the World Cup in Africa for the first time has nothing to do with the beauty of safari Africa--featured so prominently in ESPN's promo package--with its epic vistas and silhouetted giraffes. The passion for soccer in Africa lives in less picturesque places, like the war-torn Ivory Coast and the coastal slums of Accra. The World Cup is being held in Africa because the future of soccer is very much entwined with the future of the developing world.
The trafficking of young African players may be news to soccer's many millions of fans, but it's an open secret among those who oversee the sport. A few years ago, Sepp Blatter, FIFA's president, even accused top European clubs of "social and economic rape" in their search for new talent in Africa. But despite those harsh words, little has actually been done.
Now that FIFA is raking in billions of dollars in TV rights and sponsorships from the Cup in Africa, perhaps it's time to give a little back. The most popular sport in the world shouldn't be turning its back on thousands of its own.
"Soccer's Lost Boys" premieres on Current TV Wednesday, June 16 at 10/9c. Watch the episode trailer after the jump.
Mariana van Zeller is a correspondent for Vanguard.
Every four years, I look... more
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As a graduate student at Harvard in the mid-1990s, I participated in research studies carried out by the psychology department that began in October 1996 and continued until August 2005 to interview adults who had experience sexual abuse as children and learn what effects the abuse had had on their lives. Although I was sure I knew what I would discover—that the abuse would be remembered as a horrible experience that overwhelmed the people I interviewed with fear when it happened and had always been viewed as a traumatizing occurrence—what I heard in the hundreds of interviews I conducted was quite different. In nearly all the cases, the adults I questioned had not experienced the abuse as traumatic when it occurred and only came to regard it as so years later. And in many of the cases, they had never been questioned about their evolving sense of the abuse and the ongoing impact that it had on their lives, but only about what the traumatic experience had been like at the time. These findings led me to question the progress professionals in the sexual abuse field have made when it comes to understanding and treating child sexual abuse.
Certainly we have advanced to the point that the right things are being said (sexual abuse is common and harmful; it is never the child's fault). Funding in the trauma field has been secured, research conducted, studies and books published, treatment centers established, and public awareness raised through sex-education programs and campaigns in the media. But is any of it translating into actual progress for victims? Do they feel that they're being helped, that they're understood and their needs are being served effectively?
The trauma model's main purpose—one of the primary reasons why mental health professionals welcomed it with such enthusiasm in the 1980s—was to provide an explanation for how and why sexual abuse wreaks such psychological and social havoc in victims. Armed with a better understanding of the impact of abuse, mental health professionals hoped to be better able to help victims cope with and recover from these damaging crimes.
The problem is that today, after more than twenty-five years, predictions based on the trauma model have not proved accurate. Characteristics of the sexual abuse experience related to trauma (like how frightening it was, whether penetration or force was involved, and how many times it happened) do not do a good job of forecasting the level of long-term psychological harm experienced. There appears to be no direct, linear relationship between the severity of the abuse and the psychosocial difficulties victims experience in adulthood. Worst of all, we have developed no clearly effective treatments for sexual abuse victims. They continue to suffer from psychological and social problems in the aftermath of their abuse, and mental health professionals still have not reached a consensus as to exactly why or what precisely to do to help them recover.
This state of affairs is far from surprising. How can trauma be the cause of harm if most victims say that the abuse was not traumatic when it happened? A growing number of scholars in the sexual abuse field are coming to agree that understanding how and why sexual abuse damages victims probably has little to do with the actual abuse and a lot to do with what happens in its aftermath. For example, as David Finkelhor concluded in his recent book Childhood Victimization, continuing research efforts that seek to track the consequences of early events through developmental, cognitive, and behavioral pathways may prove more fruitful than continuing the restrictive focus on the severity and nature of event-specific trauma. I believe that the victims themselves have always known this.
Jen was a sixty-five-year-old, divorced, retired administrative assistant. A tall, big-boned redhead with long purple fingernails, she was up front about lots of things. She did not like the coffee I gave her, my office was too cold, and she did not like the color of my hair. We were at the part of the interview when I asked her to rate how traumatic her abuse had been when it occurred. She did not like the questions I asked.
"Nothing personal," she said, "but these questions are kind of dumb. If you are trying to do what you say you're trying to do, and figure out why the abuse screwed me up so badly, why are you asking so many questions about what it was like when it happened? What you need to be focusing on was what it was like later on."
I asked what she meant. "What I mean is that what it was like when it happened and what it is like now are two separate things entirely."
At that point in my career, I did not have a lot of experience interviewing sexual abuse victims. I had, however, a lot of experience interviewing victims of other kinds of horrible experiences (motor vehicle accidents, combat, natural disasters, abductions), and I had asked these subjects to rate how traumatic the events were at the time. No one in these studies had ever said this to me before. And as far as I knew at the time, scholars were not talking how perceptions of the traumatic nature of an abuse experience change over time—how an event not initially perceived as horrible could become so. They certainly talked about how symptoms of trauma (depression, anxiety) might not manifest themselves until long after the abuse, but they were not talking about how perceptions of the abuse itself can change.
I knew I had to consider Jen's words seriously. From that point on, I asked my question in two parts: What was the experience like when it happened? And what is the experience like for you today, looking back on it.
By the end of the study, the data was clear. Although sexual abuse was not a particularly awful experience for many victims when it happened, looking back on it, from their perspective as adults, it was awful—ratings of shock, horror, disgust, and even fear were all high. Obviously, perceptions of abuse when it occurs and when victims look back on it years later are entirely different. In addition, sexual abuse is very different from other kinds of terrible life experiences. For example, getting into a car accident is traumatic both at the time it happens and later when it is recalled. Sexual abuse, however, becomes traumatic later on. Why? What happens in the aftermath of sexual abuse?
According to victims, they did not experience the abuse as awful when it happened because most simply did not understand clearly the meaning or significance of the sexual behaviors they were engaging in. That being said, at some point later on in life, they do. Over time, the "cloak of innocence lifted," as one victim described it. Victims reconceptualized the formerly "confusing and weird experiences" and understood them for what they were—sexual in nature and clearly wrong. Only at this point—when the sexual abuse is fully apprehended—does it begin to damage victims.
More at the link:As a graduate student at Harvard in the mid-1990s, I participated in research studies... more
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