Human Trafficking News

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas, USA by Carrie Johnson of NPR News (4/25/12) — Forced labor and underage prostitution are hiding in plain sight in cities all over the U.S. and are no longer problems confined to the developing world, according to Attorney General Eric Holder.

In a major speech on human trafficking Tuesday in Little Rock, Ark., Holder said far too many reports of abuse cross his desk each week, more than 40 percent of them involving children.

“I think about my girls Maya and Brooke, and I wonder about the parents of these girls i read about — what must they be feeling, what must they be wondering? Sometimes they don’t know where their daughters are,” Holder said.

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NEW YORK, USA, by Nicholas D. Kristof  of the New York Times (4/18/12) — If you think sex trafficking only happens in faraway places like Nepal or Thailand, then you should listen to an expert on American sex trafficking I interviewed the other day.

But, first, wish her happy birthday. She turns 16 years old on Thursday.

She asked me to call her Brianna in this column because she worries that it could impede her plans to become a lawyer if I use her real name. Brianna, who grew up in New York City, is smart, poised and enjoys writing poetry.

One evening when she was 12 years old she got into a fight with her mom and ran out to join friends. “I didn’t want to go home, because I thought I’d get in trouble,” she said, and a friend’s older brother told her she could stay at his place.

Brianna figured she would go home in the morning — and that that would teach her mom a lesson. But when morning arrived, her new life began.

“I tried to leave, and he said, ‘you can’t go; you’re mine,’ ” Brianna recalled. He told her that he was a pimp and that she was now his property.

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LONDON, UK by Jantine Werdmiller of The Platform (4/19/12) — The UK is the destination for men, women and children primarily from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe who are subjected to sexual exploitation, forced labour, domestic servitude, forced street crime, cannabis cultivation, benefit fraud, and forced marriage.

In the first two years since the setup of the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) in April 2009, 1,481 referrals were made to the UK Human Trafficking Centre (UKHTC). In reality the numbers are greater, confirmed in the Project Acumen report (2010) by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO). According to this report, of the 17,000 identified migrant women involved in prostitution in England and Wales, 2,600 were trafficked. It is important to acknowledge that this report only explored trafficking for sexual exploitation, excluding other forms of human trafficking, and only looked into migrant women, so did not analyse internal trafficking within the UK. Of 61 known nationalities of individuals identified as likely trafficking victims in the UK, British nationals are the fourth largest group after Nigerian, Chinese, and Vietnamese nationals.

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WASHINGTON, USA, by Kathlen Hennessey of the Washington Bureau via LA Times (4/27/12) — President Obama has confidence in the Secret Service director, his spokesman said Tuesday, as a prostitution scandal widened with allegations that at least 20 women joined members of the U.S. advance team arranging security for the president’s visit to Colombia last weekend.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who was briefed by Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, told reporters that “20 or 21 women foreign nationals were brought” to the Hotel Caribe in Cartagena, where the Secret Service and other members of the advance team were staying.

The Secret Service is investigating 11 agents and the Pentagon is investigating 10 military personnel — five Army Special Forces soldiers, two Marines, two Navy personnel and one member of the Air Force — for alleged misconduct. The inquiry may broaden to include other military personnel who stayed at the hotel, an official said.

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BATON ROUGE, Louisiana, USA by Ed Anderson of the Times-Picayune (4/17/12) — A Senate committee Monday took the first step toward passing legislation that would deny state tax breaks to the producers of pornographic movies. Despite criticism that the bill does not clearly define pornography, the Senate Finance Committee gave unanimous approval to a heavily amended Senate Bill 513 by Sen. A.G. Crowe, R-Slidell, that would require the Department of Economic Development or the Office of Entertainment Industry Development to deny the tax breaks if the film is pornographic.

Crowe’s bill now heads to the Senate floor for debate. “Do you have a definition of what pornography is?” Sen. Edwin Murray, D-New Orleans, asked Crowe.

Crowe said although the bill does not have a specific definition, it would apply to X-rated movies or movies that are “triple X or quadruple X. I don’t have a definition of pornography; you know it when you see it.”

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NORTH KOREA by Blaine Harden for the Los Angeles Times (4/4/12) — Joining my 9-year-old daughter and a sizable slice of the American population, I queued up last week to watch”The Hunger Games.” My daughter had just read the book and was giddy with excitement. Reviewers had reassured me that scenes in the film showing children fighting each other to the death on orders of a totalitarian state had been carefully edited.

Still, the movie turned my stomach — and not because of what I saw on the screen. What flashed through my mind were images of North Korea. There, in a real totalitarian state, children are bred like livestock in labor camps. They are taught to betray their parents. They are worked to death.

The Kim family dynasty — founder Kim Il Sung, his son Kim Jong Il, who died in December, and Kim Jong Un, the third-generation successor — has presided over this human rights catastrophe for more than half a century without provoking much interest, understanding or outrage from the American public.

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HAMILTON, Ontario, Canada by Nicole O’Reilly for The Hamilton Spectator (3/20/12) — The kingpin of the largest proven human trafficking ring in Canadian history has entered a guilty plea in a Hamilton courtroom.

Ferenc Domotor, 49, entered a guilty plea on charges of conspiracy to commit human trafficking, being part of a criminal organization and coercing victims to mislead immigration authorities.

His son Ferenc Domotor Jr., 21, also pleaded guilty to the exact same charges. Ferenc’s wife Gyongyi Domotor, 41, pleaded guilty to coercing victims to mislead immigration authorities and welfare fraud exceeding $5,000.

Domotor led the Canadian operations of a modern-day slave ring that targeted often vulnerable men desperate for work in their hometown of Papa, Hungary. These men were promised good-paying jobs in the family stucco business and easier lives in Hamilton. Instead, they were threatened, coerced into falsely claiming refugee status and welfare, forced to work without pay and live like slaves with little food and no outside contact in their captor’s basement.

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USA by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times (3/31/12) — THE biggest forum for sex trafficking of under-age girls in the United States appears to be a Web site called Backpage.com.

This emporium for girls and women — some under age or forced into prostitution — is in turn owned by an opaque private company called Village Voice Media. Until now it has been unclear who the ultimate owners are.

That mystery is solved. The owners turn out to include private equity financiers, including Goldman Sachs with a 16 percent stake.

Goldman Sachs was mortified when I began inquiring last week about its stake in America’s leading Web site for prostitution ads. It began working frantically to unload its shares, and on Friday afternoon it called to say that it had just signed an agreement to sell its stake to management.

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SEATTLE, Washington, USA by William Yardley of the New York Times (4/1/12) —  For more than three months, she was sold online for sex. She had run away at 15, gone back home, then run away again. Finally, an undercover police officer caught her, and her pimp. This time she went home and stayed, but she was not the same.

“She was a different child after that,” her father said. “It was like she was programmed. She spoke different. She looked different. They cut her hair, they dyed her hair, they bought her new clothes.”

Now 17, the girl is in counseling and in college, “on her way,” her father said.

She is also evidence. When one of the men who raped her was sentenced in February, one of the exhibits that prosecutors used was an advertisement selling her services as an escort on backpage.com. The ad said she was 18.

That same month, the Washington Legislature was debating a bill that would require sites within the state to obtain documentation that escorts advertised there are at least 18. On Thursday, Gov. Christine Gregoire signed that bill into law, the first of its kind in the country.

“It’s a start, and it’s a precedent,” the girl’s father said, “and it will make a difference.”

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ENID, Oklahoma, USA by James Neal for the Enid News and Eagle (3/31/12) — “Bringing Oklahomans together to expose and end slavery” was the mission Friday of a day-long professional training session at Northwestern Oklahoma State University-Enid.

Oklahomans Against Trafficking Humans (OATH) sponsored the event, aimed at training law enforcement, health care workers and social service providers to identify signs of human trafficking.

Connie O’Brien, a licensed professional counselor and local OATH volunteer, organized the training session to raise awareness of human trafficking and its prevalence in Oklahoma.

 “The major need was to increase understanding and awareness,” O’Brien said. “When people think of human trafficking, they think of it as being an international problem, but it’s truly a problem for the U.S. and it’s here in Oklahoma.”

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