Human Trafficking News

WASHINGTON, D.C. by Brian Bennet of the Washington Bureau (5/23/12) — The prostitution scandal that has embroiled the Secret Service is not evidence of a wider culture of boozing and paying for sex among those who are trained to take a bullet for the president, the director of the agency told skeptical senators.

The senators challenged Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan to explain how it was possible, without an atmosphere of permissiveness among the agency’s supervisors, that 12 agents could go out in separate groups on April 11 in Cartagena, Colombia, independently decide to bring women back to their hotel rooms, and then sign the women in at the front desk next to the agents’ real names.

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CAMBODIA, Southeast Asia, by Agence France-Presse of the Jakarta Globe(5/23/12) — Sold into a brothel as a child, Cambodian activist Somaly Mam has become one of the most recognizable, glamorous and controversial faces of the global anti-sex slavery movement.

The quirky, energetic campaigner boasts a string of celebrity supporters and has been named a CNN hero of the year, but she is as divisive among anti-trafficking activists as she is beloved by the international press.

Most recently, Mam kicked up a storm of controversy when she allowed her “old friend,” New York Times correspondent Nicholas Kristof, to “live-tweet” a brothel raid in the northern Cambodian town of Anlong Veng in November.

“Girls are rescued, but still very scared. Youngest looks about 13, trafficked from Vietnam,” Kristof wrote to his more than one million followers on the Twitter microblogging website, in remarks that trafficking experts say raised questions of safety and consent.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. USA by Holly Smith of the Washington Times (5/23/12)  — Meet Antonia “Neet” Childs, Founder and Executive Director of Neet’s Sweets Incorporated in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Neet, a survivor of human trafficking, discusses the difficulties and rewards to being a young entrepreneur:

“[I thank] God for this day, as well as every day, that I can continue to keep fighting and pushing [for] my dream. As I embrace 27, I think about what it has [taken] for me to get to this point…I am not even supposed to be here.  Just being a young black woman starting a business is tough, so I am forever grateful that I am able to use my past as my strength to inspire others to use theirs, because that’s what it’s about.”

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LONDON, UK, by Ryan Momtaz of ABC News (04/18/12) — The Nevada brothel owner who became famous as the star of an HBO reality show says he wants to start a new and fully legal brothel in London during the upcoming summer Olympics — not just because he could make “a couple million pounds,” he says, but because legal brothels would stop human trafficking by international criminal gangs.

Dennis Hof, the 65-year-old owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch and star of “Cathouse,” promoted legal prostitution during a Thursday night debate at the Oxford Union, and told ABC News that while he’s in the U.K. he’s on a mission to sell London authorities on legal brothels.

“These illegal brothels are disgusting,” said Hof. “The girls are not tested for diseases and they’re trafficked and forced into it. I’m saying it’s not always like that and it doesn’t have to be like that. We can provide the client with a clean, safe and fun experience.”

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SEATTLE, Washington, USA, by Liz McDougall of the Seattle Times (5/6/12) — To stop human trafficking online, you have to fight it online. To fight it online, you have to be online. And you need allies online.

Weeks ago, I was a lawyer litigating high-profile Internet and cybercrime cases, and providing pro bono services to help victims of abuse, exploitation and civil-rights violations, including human trafficking. Today, I am still fighting cybercrime and human exploitation — but as general counsel for Village Voice Media Holdings, owner of Backpage.com.

Backpage.com is an online classifieds service. It includes a category of “adult” advertising that has been the recent target of accusations that it facilitates human trafficking.

Why did I make this move?

Because human trafficking, especially sex trafficking of children, is a social atrocity. Because I have children. Because I want human trafficking to stop. Because I believe Backpage.com is a critical ally to make it stop.

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SACRAMENTO, California, USA by CBS Sacramento (5/3/12) — A family of five Sacramento women, and a sixth defendant, all pleaded guilty for their involvement in the prostitution and sex trafficking of underage girls in the Sacramento area.

Tynisha Marie Hornbuckle, Tamrell Rena Hornbuckle, Cherrelle Elizabeth Hornbuckle, Latrelle Alicia Hornbuckle, their mother Tammy Rena Brown, and Jacqueline Lanoise Radisha Wade, all pleaded guilty for various counts ranging from the sex trafficking of children, concealing a felony and tampering with a witness.

According to court documents, beginning in 2008, the defendants solicited minor females. At the time, Tynisha was a pimp for a 13-year-old runaway, and at least two minors. Tamrell was also the pimp for one of the minors. There were also at least two adult victims who worked for both women.

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MANHATTAN, New York, USA by Russ Buettner of the New York Times (5/2/12) — It was not exactly a run-of-the-mill prostitution case: the men accused as ringleaders were a father and his son, a pimp team coercing women to push their trade like traveling sex saleswomen, handing out business cards at hotels and strip clubs.

The women were branded, tattooed with the pimps’ monikers, Mr. Vee for the father and King Koby for the son, Manhattan prosecutors said. One woman was even tattooed with a bar code.

But what makes the case noteworthy is not how the operation was run, but how the men are being prosecuted. The Manhattan district attorney’s office is employing a sex trafficking charge, added to the New York State penal code five years ago, that is helping to redefine how law enforcement agencies approach organized prostitution.

In a stark departure from decades of such prosecutions, the women who were working as prostitutes are not facing criminal charges but are instead being treated as their pimps’ victims, and offered services to help them build new lives.

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NYC, New York, USA by Kevin M. Ryan of the Huntington Post (5/2/12) — Fourteen men appeared in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan on Monday, charged with patronizing a prostitute, after a crackdown on a brutal sex trafficking ring run by a father and son team from Pennsylvania.

This is one of the few high profile cases across the country in which the johns as well as the traffickers have been indicted, and I applaud the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., for his leadership.

By arresting the alleged johns as well as the pimps and the six taxi drivers who are accused of finding customers and ferrying them from place to place, the D.A. shows that he gets it. The alleged pimps were vicious, going so far as to tattoo their names, and in one case a bar code, on the women they treated as slaves, according to court papers.

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ORANGE COUNTY, California, USA by LA Now of the Los Angeles Times (5/2/12) — A Long Beach man accused of using Craigslist and other websites to find women to lure into a lucrative prostitution ring has been arraigned in federal court on charges of sex trafficking, authorities said.

Authorities believe 36-year-old Roshaun “Kevin” Nakia Porter was forcing at least five young women into prostitution in Orange County, according to KTLA-TV. Santa Ana police say Porter would meet the women on Craigslist or other sites.

The women say they responded to Porter’s ads and thought they were entering into a monogamous relationship with him. The women said after Porter maintained a romantic relationship with them, he forced them to work as prostitutes.

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USA by Meghan Casserly of Forbes (4/26/12) — Twenty-seven-year-old Army specialist Casey Bogenrief was set to deploy from Fort Wainright in Fairbanks, Alaska, in a few days when he met a young woman who invited him to her apartment to have a drink and sing karaoke. Shortly after arriving, the soldier is said to have become violent and demanded to have sex with the woman before slamming her head against a door and assaulting her.

While his attorney says that any sexual contact was consensual, Bogenrief stands trial this week for rape, putting him among the hundreds of annual perpetrators of the crime in the city that’s been called a hotbed for sexual violence. For a metro area that the FBI measures at just 38,307, an incredibly high rate of rape (more than double the national metropolitan average) lands Fairbanks among the top three most dangerous cities for women in the United States at 193 reported rapes per 100,000 residents.

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Jim Wilson of the New York Times (4/19/12) — Some say laws against prostitution unfairly victimize women. A Canadian court recently ruled that laws preventing brothels endangered prostitutes by forcing them to work on the streets. And as the recent Secret Service scandal makes clear, in Colombia, prostitution is legal in “tolerance zones.” But in Spain, prostitution is essentially legal, and the nation has become a magnet for sex trafficking. Can legalized prostitution ever be safe and free of exploitation? Or should laws against prostitution remain?

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