Human Trafficking News

PLEASANT HILL, California, USA by Lisa P. White for the San Jose Mercury News (03/26/12) — Stricter standards for massage therapists could help the city weed out businesses that offer more than a back rub.

Under the proposed rules, only massage therapists and practitioners certified by the California Massage Therapy Council could work in Pleasant Hill. The Legislature created the council, a private nonprofit organization, in 2008 as part of a law that established statewide standards for massage professionals.

Currently, massage therapists and practitioners who have a city-issued permit or state certification can work in Pleasant Hill. Applicants for the city permit must pass a criminal-background check and provide proof of training, certification from a national therapeutic massage organization or membership in a professional massage association. Permits cost $130 and must be renewed annually. About 30 massage parlors and 60 massage therapists are operating in Pleasant Hill, according to Lt. Dan Connelly.

“The biggest benefit for us is that we don’t have to deal with the certification process,” Connelly said of the proposed rules. “They get certified through the state and we don’t have to spend the manpower on the fingerprinting and the background checks.”

Read more here

CALGARY, Canada by Jason Van Rassel of the Calgary Herald (3/24/12) — Workers capable of helping victims of human trafficking aren’t always recognizing their plight - and that is part of the problem, according to a study released Friday in Calgary.

Researchers found local human trafficking victims aren’t limited to foreign women brought to Canada to work in the sex trade, but that common conception is causing others to be overlooked.

“We have people who are falling through the cracks because they aren’t being identified as victims of human trafficking,” said Lara Quarterman, who coauthored the report by the Action Coalition on Human Trafficking and Mount Royal University.

The authors called the report the first attempt in Canada to document how a major Canadian city is responding to human trafficking.

Read more here

PETALING JAYA, Malaysia by Steven Daniel and A. Ruben of thestar.com (3/20/12) - A 15-year-old Malaysian girl, who has been missing for over a month after being abducted by an international child sex trafficking syndicate, has escaped from her captors in Thailand.

Selangor CID chief SAC Mohd Adnan Abdullah said the teenager managed to make a bid for her freedom with five other girls from Myanmar, all of whom were found by the Thai police at the Hua Lampong train station in Bangkok on March 11.

Read more here

SAN FRANCISCO, California, USA by Shoshana Walter of the New York Times (3/16/12) — Early this month, the social networking Web site itspimpin101.net fell into disarray after its founder, Kelly Surrell, was fatally wounded in a shooting while driving his Bentley in East Oakland.

For years, Mr. Surrell, 34, had profited by taking a portion of the earnings of his roster of women prostitutes. Then, like many Internet entrepreneurs, Mr. Surrell decided to capitalize on an expanding online community. On his Web site, which referred visitors to Mr. Surrell’s Facebook page and his instructional podcasts, pimps and aspiring pimps could post tips and swap advice about “the game.”

The online sex trade is flourishing despite nationwide campaigns and pressure from government leaders. Two years after public and legal pressure prompted Craigslist.org, the San Francisco-based online classifieds service, to scrap its “erotic services” section, visitors and revenue have soared on other classified Web sites, according to the Advanced Interactive Media Group, a consulting firm for the classified advertising market. Law enforcement officials in the Bay Area said other Web sites had emerged with suspected sex-for-pay advertisements.

Read more here

MANHATTAN, New York, USA by Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times (3/17/12) — I went on a walk in Manhattan the other day with a young woman who once had to work these streets, hired out by eight pimps while she was just 16 and 17. She pointed out a McDonald’s where pimps sit while monitoring the girls outside, and a building where she had repeatedly been ordered online as if she were a pizza.

Alissa, her street name, escaped that life and is now a 24-year-old college senior planning to become a lawyer — but she will always have a scar on her cheek where a pimp gouged her with a potato peeler as a warning not to escape. “Like cattle owners brand their cattle,” she said, fingering her cheek, “he wanted to brand me in a way that I would never forget.”

After Alissa testified against her pimps, six of them went to prison for up to 25 years. Yet these days, she reserves her greatest anger not at pimps but at companies that enable them. She is particularly scathing about Backpage.com, a classified advertising Web site that is used to sell auto parts, furniture, boats — and girls. Alissa says pimps routinely peddled her on Backpage.

“You can’t buy a child at Wal-Mart, can you?” she asked me. “No, but you can go to Backpage and buy me on Backpage.”

Read more here

From Hope for Seattle: We all know this St. Patrick’s Day holiday as celebrating Ireland and Irish heritage. People flock to do the St. Patrick’s Day run, eat at an Irish pub or attend an Irish festival/parade celebrating this wonderful holiday. It is a grand day!

However, many do not know or look into the fact that St. Patrick (387-460) was not actually Irish but a Romano-Briton. Nor do people realize that St. Patrick was not only a Christian missionary, recognized as the patron saint of Ireland or the Apostle of Ireland (Wikipedia) but that he was captured from Wales by Irish raiders when he was only 16 years old and made a slave. After being a slave for 6 years, he escaped and went back to his family. However, after conversion to Christianity and entering the Church, he later became an ordained bishop and went back to Ireland as a missionary. Legend had it that he taught the doctrine of the Holy Trinity via using the three-leaf shamrock green plant as an illustration!

Read more here

MADRID, Spain, by Irina Popescu of the Romania Insider (2/22/12) — Romanian Ioan Clamparu, one of the targets of Interpol’s Operation Infra-Red, was recently sentenced to 30 years in prison by a court in Madrid, Spain, for crimes including human trafficking and procuring for prostitution. The 30-year stretch was the maximum sentence requested by the prosecutors. The human trafficking network he created  is believed to have resulted in more than 100 Romanian women being forced into prostitution in Spain between 2000 and 2004.

Ioan Clamparu, 42, was also sentenced to 13 years in jail in Romania. He was under investigation by the Romanian judicial authorities for eight years but was arrested in Spain in October 2011, following close collaboration between Interpol’s National Central Bureaus in Romania and Spain, reads an Interpol statement.

Read more here

NEW DELHI, India, by Dean Nelson of The Telegraph (2/1/12) — India is the most dangerous place in the world to be born a girl, with females almost twice as likely to die before reaching the age of five, according to new UN figures

The report, which analyses differences between male and female child mortality rates over the last 40 years, reveals that from 2000 to 2010 there were 56 deaths of boys aged one to five for every 100 female deaths.

Indian campaigners for the rights of girls said the figures reflected widespread discrimination against girls, ranging from neglect to abuse and killing of unwanted female infants.

The figures, compiled by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, emerged as India was plunged into introspection over the case of a two year old girl fighting for her life in hospital after being abandoned by her family and trafficked between several adults before being beaten, bitten and branded by a 14 year old girl. The girl, known as Falak, is suffering from severe chest injuries and brain damage and according to her doctors is unlikely to survive the next 48 hours.

Read more here

.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands, by BBC News (3/14/12) — The International Criminal Court (ICC) has found the Congolese warlord, Thomas Lubanga, guilty of recruiting and using child soldiers between 2002 and 2003.

It is the court’s first verdict since it was set up 10 years ago. He will be sentenced at a later hearing.

He headed a rebel group during an inter-ethnic conflict in a gold-rich region of Democratic Republic of Congo.

The prosecution accused him of using children as young as nine as bodyguards and fighters.

In a unanimous decision, the three judges said evidence proved that as head of the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) and its armed wing, Lubanga bore responsibility for the recruitment of child soldiers under the age of 15 who had participated actively on the frontline.

Read more here

BEIJING, China by Clifford Coonan of the Irish Times (3/12/12) — Police in China rescued over 24,000 kidnapped women and children nationwide last year, the country’s public security ministry told the annual parliament, the National People’s Congress, in an ongoing crackdown on human trafficking.

In all, police rescued 8,660 abducted children and 15,458 women in busts of 3,195 human trafficking gangs during 2011, the ministry said.

Girls who are kidnapped are often sold into prostitution and in one high-profile case last year, the police busted a gang that was trafficking women to Angola. In the raid, 19 women were rescued and 16 suspects were apprehended.

Human trafficking is a major problem in China, as the traditional preference for boys over girls, especially in rural areas, and the one-child policy of population control, has seen a rise in the number of boys kidnapped and sold, often to childless couples.

Girls and women also are abducted and used as labourers or as brides for unwed sons, because the one-child policy has seen a massive discrepancy in the birth ratio between the number of boys and girls.

Read more here

PECKHAM, South London, England by Mark Townsend of The Guardian (2/18/12) — Former gang member reveals how women suffer shocking sexual abuse in return for ‘status’

A female former gang member has exposed the growing levels of sexual violence against young women who join them, saying that many are willing to risk being raped in return for the status of membership.

Isha Nembhard, who was part of an 80-strong gang in Peckham, south London, said some girls readily accepted that they would be sexually abused when associating with male gangs.

The 20-year-old said that the problem had reached a point where being raped was becoming “normalised” among many young women. “Girls who are getting treated very badly know what they are getting into. They sleep with a boy and the boy asks if she will sleep with all his friends.

“It’s about low self-esteem and a craving for attention. Even if they know it’s wrong, they will do anything to get acceptance,” she said.

“A lot of girls are sort of prostituting themselves to have sexual relationships within a gang and get treated in a bad way. For example, she might know about what happens to girls in the gang but still sleeps with all of them just for the status.”

Read more here

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA by Ed Davis and Swanee Hunt of The Boston Globe (2/22/12) — Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery in this country. A century and a half later, people are still bought and sold — here in Boston.

Attorney General Martha Coakley warns that human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal industry in Massachusetts. The term “trafficking” evokes images of people smuggled across borders; but FBI, UN, and Congressional definitions describe any children, women, or men coerced into physical violence, mental abuse, and even death.

Organized crime has to be fought with organized action: we’re teaming up to bust those abusing the most vulnerable among us. On Sunday, the nation’s strongest anti-trafficking legislation went into effect. The new law supports victims of human trafficking (which includes most prostitution), increases punishment of pimps and complicit businesses, and — focusing on cause, not effect — targets those fueling the sex market: the buyers.

Want to buy sex in Massachusetts? Think again.

Read more here

MANCHESTER, United Kingdom by Mark Townsend by The Guardian | The Observer (2/5/12) — Marinela Badea was a 17-year-old student in Romania when she was forced from her home and plunged into a nightmare of brutal sex crimes

When police turned up at the Shangri-La, it was quiet. Marinela Badea was catching up on sleep and was awoken by the commotion. Minutes later, on a grey Manchester morning, she and half a dozen other women were handcuffed and marched out of the red-brick massage parlour in Openshaw in the east of the city.

Marinela, 17, was terrified. Trafficked from Romania, she had been coerced into prostitution by a pimp who beat her with numbing regularity. Now there was something new to fear. “I didn’t even know where I was going,” she says now. “I couldn’t trust anyone, I had no idea of the law. I was so scared.”

Read more here

USA by Village Voice Pimps (2/12/12) — In a brazen act of hypocrisy, the Village Voice – under the leadership of editorTony Ortega- has reported on a crime that the weekly newspaper aided and abetted.

The Voice is owned by Village Voice Media, the embattled Phoenix-based company under fire for luring underage girls into lives of prostitution by way of its classified web site, Backpage.com.

The site, which features adult ads under the headings “Body Rubs” and “Escorts,” has become an online clearing house for pimps and sex predators. All 13 Village Voice Media publications link to Backpage.com off their web sites in what has become a national bazaar of human trafficking.

In New York, Backpage.com takes up roughly one-quarter of the Voice home page, which made it that much easier for the alleged perpetrators to carry out a crime so shocking in its depravity that even hardened city detectives were stunned.

The crime, which Brooklyn District Attorney Richard Brown addressed in a press conference, concerned a 15-year-old girl who was kidnapped, raped and tortured after she was snatched off a Brooklyn street corner by a 23-year-old male who had five confederates, including a woman.

Read more here

TENNESSEE, USA by Brandon Gee of The Tennessean (2/28/12) — Nearly two dozen defendants accused of participating in an interstate sex trafficking ring are scheduled to go before a federal jury next month in what is shaping up to be one of the biggest — and most unusual — trials in Middle Tennessee history.

In an era when limited resources and risk aversion have resulted in a dramatic rise in the number of cases that end in plea agreements rather than jury trials, not even one of the 30 defendants in the case has agreed to plead guilty, setting the stage for a massive trial in downtown Nashville that is raising a variety of issues both legal and logistical.

Twenty-nine people, mostly Somalis from the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, were charged in November 2010 with running a prostitution ring that sold Somali girls as young as 12 years of age in cities including Nashville. A 30th defendant was indicted in May 2011. In addition to sex trafficking and conspiracy, the defendants also are accused of alleged crimes such as credit card fraud and burglary.

Read more here

HANOI, Vietnam by Agence France-Presse (3/8/12) — Gang ringleader Vu Van Cong, 28, was sentenced to 26 years in prison by the Hanoi People’s Court in a verdict delivered on Wednesday, the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The 28 others were given sentences ranging from 22 years in prison to a 10-month suspended sentence handed to a relative of a gang member for failing to report them to the authorities.

Police began investigating the gang after one member was arrested in June 2010 while trying to force a 13-year-old girl to board a train heading for the Vietnamese border province of Lao Cai, the local website VNExpress reported.

The victim was going to be forced to work as a prostitute in Lao Cai before being smuggled into China to work in the sex industry, the report said.

Gang members have admitted to police that they forced at least seven women and 10 teenage girls to work as prostitutes in Vietnam and China since they started operations in February 2009, the report said.

Between 2004 and 2009, Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security reported nearly 3,000 Vietnamese victims of human trafficking, which is a criminal offence under Vietnamese law. The majority of victims were girls under 15.

Read more here

MUMBAI, India by Mark Magnier of Los Angeles Times (3/6/12) (reporting from Mumbia) — Sima enters the small storefront in Kamathipura, Mumbai’s red-light district, and hands over some money she had hidden in her bra, then adjusts her fake Prada T-shirt. It was a national holiday the day before and business was good, so she’s deposited two days of earnings, about $66.

Along the wall, other women sit on cheap plastic chairs, chatting, in a bank with an unusual mandate: It serves only prostitutes.

“My dream is to save a lot, go back to my village, build a house,” says Sima, 25. “Well, maybe someday.”

A vast majority of the area’s 4,000 sex workers have accounts with as little as $1 at the 5-year-old financial institution, called Sangini, Hindi for “female friend.”

Read more here

SEATTLE, Washington, USA by Sara Jean Green of The Seattle Times (3/7/12) — Former University of Washington basketball player Venoy Overton pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of second-degree promoting prostitution involving an 18-year-old woman…

According to the charging documents, Overton offered the woman detailed instructions on how to work as a prostitute. He drove the woman to Pacific Highway South in Kent, told her how to walk, what prices to charge and how many tricks to turn before calling him to pick her up, according to the charges.

Kent police launched the investigation after the woman was arrested May 20 after offering to perform a sex act with an undercover officer for $200.

Read more here

HOUSTON, Texas, USA by Molly Henessy-Fiske of Los Angeles Times (3/2/12) — Authorities have charged an Ohio father with raping three boys he adopted in Texas, even as they continue their probe into an alleged sexual exploitation operation the man ran out of his suburban home.

Officials in Troy, Ohio, a city of 25,000 about 80 miles west of Columbus, told The Times on Friday that the father had been caught pimping one of his adoptive sons, a 10-year-old.

The father was arrested last week by an undercover detective, who spotted a Craigslist ad for “taboo sex” and posed as a potential customer, soliciting sex with the boy online, Troy police Capt. Chuck Adams told The Times.

Read more here