Saturday 30 April 2011

GOVERNOR JERRY BROWN - Please release Sara Kruzan from prison now!


 @ Phil Cenedella

Dear Governor Brown
In 1978 you were 3 years into your first term as Governor of the Golden State,......and Sara Kruzan had not yet been born.

Fast forward 16 years...........1994.

You had a radio show that among other topics, focused on the inequity of our criminal justice system and your aim was to CHANGE it.

At that same time Sara, who was now 16 and a human trafficking victim, had been repeatedly raped for five years by men three times her age, sold for sex, beaten and tortured.

Fast Forward 16 years............2011.

You are again the leader of one of the greatest states in our nation.

Sara sits in a prison cell in the state of California.

Former-governor Schwarzenegger recently commuted Sara's sentence but did not release her from her prison cell, ........which quite honestly makes no sense to us at all.



As President Abraham Lincoln stated so eloquently:

"If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong."



We the people, hereby request you correct this criminal justice inequity for this one particular case and use it as a catalyst to re-evaluate how our society handles the inequities child victims of human trafficking (slavery) face in America today.

Governor Jerry Brown:

It's 2011, please immediately, without hesitation or conditions, release Sara Kruzan from prison and help us all CHANGE THE WORLD!

peace,
phil cenedella
executive director
national association of human trafficking victim advocates
www.stopslavery2011.com
888.206.3264

PLEASE SIGN LET'S MAKE SOME CHANGE ENOUGH IS ENOUGH  FREE SARA KRUZAN
 http://www.causes.com/causes/604437-gov-jerry-brown-free-sara-kruzan-a-teenage-human-trafficking-victim?recruiter_id=18650741

Friday 29 April 2011

Student at Washington University shares her story about human trafficking



http://www.ksdk.com/video/default.aspx?bctid=923103447001

By Mike Rush
St. Louis (KSDK) - On the Washington University campus, Katie Rhoades blends right in. She's just another student working towards a better future. But it's Katie's past that may give you pause.
"I was picked up by a pimp when I was 19," said Rhoades.
She's the victim, she says, of sexual slavery.
"Part of the trap is that I didn't imagine that there was a way out," she said.
Katie's way in was about 10 years ago. She says she was a runaway, suffering from depression, abusing drugs and booze and working in topless bars in Portland, Oregon. But she wanted out, wanted to get clean. One night, a woman came into the bar saying all the right things.
"She kind of offered me a way out of that situation and offered to take me to California," Katie said.
Within days, Katie was living in San Francisco. She says she was wined and dined at first by the woman and her boyfriend. But the boyfriend turned out to be a pimp.
"Not too long after that, his main girl, his bottom girl, she was in charge of showing me how to make the money that I needed to make," said Katie, "and that involved prostitution."
She was sold through night clubs and escort services. Katie didn't know what to do. She was in a strange city, cut off from her family and friends and living in a large house with other girls under lock and key.
"I wasn't allowed to leave on my own. I couldn't even get out. Whether we were inside or outside the house, the alarm was on." Katie said. "I was told when to eat, when to sleep. When I was working I couldn't say 'no.'"
Although it didn't happen to her, she says she saw plenty of other girls get beaten. And more of her freedoms were at stake if she didn't make her quota of $1,000.
"One point I made $800 in 30 minutes, which was probably about four guys," she said.
If you think Katie's story is unique, think again.
"It's going on, but it's well-hidden," said FBI Special Agent Billy Cox, based in St. Louis.
Cox says human trafficking numbers are hard to tabulate. Victims, he says, often don't trust authorities or they're too afraid of their pimps to talk. While Cox and his team may investigate seven human trafficking cases a year in Metro St. Louis, he believes sex slavery is much more widespread.
"You could go out there on the internet and start looking at advertisements for girls, just say in the St. Louis area, and you could see anywhere from 20 to 50 a day," Cox said.
Pat Bradley heads International Crisis Aid, headquartered in St. Louis. He's raising money to build a safe house in St. Louis for victims of the sex trade.
"If we had a home for 20 girls, that we opened the door tomorrow that would house 20 girls, I have been told by different sources I'd be filled in an hour," Bradley said.
Katie's way out began when she went into treatment for her drug problem and away from the grasp of her pimp. She's now 30, working on a graduate degree in social work and willingly showing her face and tell her story to NewsChannel 5 as a face of human trafficking. She's not ashamed of her experience, but empowered by it to raise awareness and hopefully effect change.
"I think shame and silence and embarrassment is what keeps this hidden," said Katie. "If I don't talk about it then who else is going to?"
Katie also volunteers for a local group called "The Covering House," an organization raising funds to provide a safe house for victims of sex slavery under the age of 18.
The U.S. Attorney's Office in St. Louis tells NewsChannel 5 local sex trafficking cases mostly involve underage runaways exploited into prostitution. The office is in the process of forming a task force to investigate how prevalent human trafficking is in our area.

New Study: Most Pimps Were Trafficked, Abused As Children


by Amanda Kloer
A new research study from the DePaul College of Law sheds light on a rarely examined subject: pimps. Researchers interviewed 25 pimps from the Chicago area, and what they found was surprising. Most of the pimps they spoke with were both trafficked into the sex industry as children and trafficked kids themselves as pimps, forming a vicious cycle of exploitation that can span generations.
Researchers Brenda Myers-Powell and Jody Raphael issued a 91 question survey to 25 pimps in the Chicago area. The results, while imperfect by the authors' own admission, shed some light on how pimps start pimping, how many women they generally control, and what the modern pimping industry looks like. The interviews included both men and women and people from all races. The results are surprising.
Of the pimps interviewed, 76% were sexually abused as children and 68% were sold for sex themselves before pimping. Every single one of the women interviewed were in the commercial sex industry before pimping. The average age of onset into commercial sex was 15, making the majority of pimps interviewed former child sex trafficking victims. Most of them also reported physical abuse, domestic violence, and drug and alcohol abuse in their home while growing up. Nearly half ran away from those abuses, directly contributing to their entry into the commercial sex industry.
But the news wasn't all sympathetic. The pimps in the study certainly weren't struggling to make ends meet; they earned between $150,000 and $500,000 a year. To do this, they sold up to 30 women at a given time. To keep their "inventory" fresh, they were constantly rotating women out and looking for new faces and bodies to bring in. And for most of the pimps, that meant finding what the buyers wanted -- younger and younger girls. They shared specific strategies for targeting young, vulnerable girls and runaways. Some talked about feeding girls liquor and drugs until they became compliant. Over half of them took all the earnings from at least some of the girls and women they controlled.
This study demonstrates that exploitation in the commercial sex industry is cyclical and sometimes multi-generational, just like domestic violence or child abuse. Therefore, providing care to both male and female victims of child sex trafficking and sexual exploitation not only fulfills an ethical duty to those victims, it will help stop the cycle of exploitation and prevent the next generation of victims from becoming pimps.
Photo credit: bert23
New Study: Most Pimps Were Trafficked, Abused As Children http://chn.ge/gnqP86

Thursday 28 April 2011

Springfield urged to watch for human trafficking

By Rachel Wells


State officials and local social service providers can’t say how big of a problem human trafficking is for Springfield but they’re still encouraging local residents to keep their eyes open. Interstate 55 is known as a “beltway” for trafficking of any kind and sex trafficking has been found in much smaller cities, like Harrisburg, Pa., where a 2005 sting revealed a major interstate operation.

Victims of human trafficking, the second largest and fastest growing criminal industry worldwide, are often manipulated or coerced into sexual exploitation or involuntary servitude. They range in age, are both male and female, and include both U.S. citizens and foreigners transported to the country under force or fraudulent circumstances.

“It’s a matter of being able to recognize that this is going on and being able to report and do something about it,” says Michael Lelys, executive director of the Springfield Community Federation. The federation, along with the six-year-old Illinois Rescue and Restore campaign and the University of Illinois’ Center for Public Safety and Justice, last week hosted a human trafficking outreach program for area social service providers.

Though numbers for suburban and rural Illinois aren’t available, Illinois officials estimate that in Chicago between 16,000 and 25,000 American women and girls are victims of sexual exploitation each year, and Illinois ranks fifth in number of calls to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center Hotline, which can be reached at all hours at 888-373-7888.

“Sadly, human trafficking does exist in Illinois, in our communities all over the state,” says Grace Hou, assistant secretary with the Illinois Department of Human Services. “We know the facts are not pleasant, but the more we know, the faster we can bring an end to this crime.” Hou and other advocates ask that everyone “look beneath the surface” in order to snuff out human trafficking.

“Trafficking victims come from all walks of life,” says Lisa Fedina, project coordinator for Illinois Rescue and Restore, a statewide campaign run by the Department of Human Services and aimed at educating and mobilizing people to spot and stop human trafficking. “Really there is no discrimination in the sense of who trafficking victims are. Traffickers prey on vulnerability, so those individuals could be coming from circumstances of poverty, past histories of abuses or general lack of awareness of human trafficking. Especially for youth, runaway, throwaway, homeless youth are often targeted by traffickers.”

Signs of human trafficking victimization can include not having identification or travel documents, living and working in the same place, physical signs of abuse, behaving in a fearful or submissive manner and lacking basic knowledge about the community in which a person is located.

Chrystina Diedrich is a Springfield resident and administrative assistant with the Center for Economic Progress, a national nonprofit with a local office that provides support to low-income individuals. She says she recalls bruised and hungry young boys, one of whom couldn’t speak English, once knocking on her door. They told her that they and several others were being housed in a local motel and had been dropped off in the neighborhood to sell subscriptions.

“In afterthought, that [human trafficking] is probably what it was,” she says, contemplating what she would have done had she known then what she knows now. “I would do the same I did before, which was bring them in the house and offer them something to eat, but at the time, I would have also called the (hotline) number. I don’t know where it would have gone from there, but I would have at least outreached.”

For more information about human trafficking, visit www.acf.hhs.gov/trafficking.

Contact Rachel Wells at rwells@illinoistimes.com

Girls Like Us: The Hidden Story of Human Sex Trafficking in America Face

girls_like_us
(Photo: HarperCollins).
Teenage girls forced to work as prostitutes under the thumb of violent pimps and traffickers—that's something that only happens in faraway places like Cambodia and the Philippines, right?
Sadly, no. Right here in the U.S., countless young girls and women are forced to sell their bodies on street "tracks" and in hotel bedrooms every year, from Oakland to Atlantic City.
A new memoir from Rachel Lloyd, herself a survivor of the commercial sex trade, underscores just how widespread—and heartbreaking—America's sex trafficking problem really is.
Lloyd's book, Girls Like Us (HarperCollins, 2011), is a powerful and haunting page-turner. She describes her own escape from the world of stripping and turning tricks to founding New York's Girls Education and Mentoring Service (GEMS), which has helped countless girls break free from "the life."
From its opening scene of an 11-year old describing being pimped by her 29-year-old boyfriend, to Lloyd's own "epiphany" that got her out of "the life" for good, Girls Like Us holds the reader in, daring apathy.
Lloyd spoke to TakePart about how individuals can get involved to help organizations like hers and end human trafficking in America.
TakePart: Can you give us an idea of how prevalent this is across America?
Rachel Lloyd: I think, frankly, that is one of the hardest things to do because it's an underground population. Because this isn't the group that's going to come forward in a research study. The best kind of numbers that are out there come from a University of Pennsylvania study, which isn't a count of how many, but of how many young people are at risk—and I think that's probably an undercount.
But they're talking about 200,000 to 300,000 young people in this country are at risk for some kind of commercial sexual exploitation. There have been a couple of other studies that estimate that a couple hundred thousand young people are involved in the commercial sex industry. We know that last year we served 330 girls and young women [at GEMS] who either are or have been involved in the commercial sex industry—99 percent of whom have been under the control or a pimp/trafficker. And I think, every week, it is disturbing and stunning how many different parts of the country are having arrests.
What do you tell people when they say "this doesn't happen here in the U.S?" How do you explain to them how these girls get caught up in "the life?"
The thing we try to help people recognize is that you don't have to be from another country to feel like you don't have options in this one. There are a huge amount of young people—boys and girls—who are growing up in our country who don't feel like they have viable options for their future. So when you don't feel like you have options and somebody comes along and presents you with something that looks like an option—looks like love, looks like care, attention, a home, and those are the things you don't have right now, and are missing out on—that can be fairly easy to lure someone in.
When we begin to help paint a picture of what it's like for a 13-, 14-, or 15-year old girl who has been, generally, sexually abused at home, or physically abused at home, who has run away or who is in the foster care agency, with a real lack of family support, and an adult man whose sole focus in life is making money off of girls, when he comes along and he begins to tell her that he loves her and he will be there for her, it's not that hard to see how those next steps take place. What I'm seeing already with the book, and what we've seen with the film I produced a few years ago—Very Young Girls—is how many people, particularly women, are able to say 'Oh my goodness, I was so young at 13, 14, or 15, and an adult man at that point could have told me anything, because he was grown and I wasn't.' When there's a predatory adult on the scene, it's not that hard to lure someone into the sex industry. Particularly when that kid has already experienced trauma and violence and abuse
What are you hoping will come about from putting this book—and your story in particular—out to the public?
You know, in the beginning I was really reluctant to use my story. I'm already pretty public about my experiences and have dealt with that over the last decade, and wasn't sure if I wanted to put additional information out there. But ultimately I could write about my own story better than the girls' stories, and I felt like if that could be helpful in any way to people as an entry way into understanding what it's like for a girl or a young woman, then it was worth it. My hope is that people were able to connect on a very human level—that there's real empathy and compassion—not just on an academic understanding of "ok this is happening here," but a real "oh this could have been me, this could have been my daughter, these are girls who are real, as opposed to a statistic or a story in the news."
What steps have been taken by lawmakers and policy makers are encouraging to you, and what more needs to be done to make your job of helping these girls even easier?
The shift in people's cognizance and understanding of the issue, and ultimately people's compassion—I mean neither GEMS nor any other agency can be in every place—so knowing that the girl who walks into the ER or the girl who is in a local junior high school now and is struggling with this, or the girl who does come into contact with law enforcement, all those professionals are sensitive and have empathy and treat that girl with compassion and respect and connect her to some kind of services and support. That is how we begin to change this issue. If we can talk about this and be frank about who's doing the buying, on this issue, and have frank conversations with men about buying sex and what that means to girls and young women in the sex industry, the more we can put this issue out there and be honest about what's happening, the more we can address it.
I wonder if you could share a brief success story, one that can highlight why organizations like GEMS are important and can change lives?
Honestly, I could give you a hundred stories. I was just on Facebook this morning, and a girl who we served on and off from 12 up to 20 [years old] is now in college, has a 3.7 GPA. I mean, this is a girl who was trafficked all over the country from the age of 12. She was being sold out in Las Vegas, in Atlantic City. I mean this kid has had guns in her face, and has experienced some really brutal violence, and is doing phenomenally well. She just got picked to be on the debate team. She has worked at GEMS, and is just a great role model for her peers.
http://www.takepart.com/news/2011/04/27/girls-like-us-the-hidden-story-of-human-sex-trafficking-in-america

SCTNow... we need to walk.

Child Trafficking


http://SCTNow.org Do you want to know more about Human Trafficking and how you can help? In this video you will hear the Founder of SCTNow as well as the leaders of our operative teams!

Wednesday 27 April 2011

Stories from the Hotline



Call 1-888-3737-888 (National Human Trafficking Resource Center)
To report a tip; to connect with anti-trafficking services in your area; or to request training and technical assistance & general information.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5WfBH-x-OQ

Ask Fox 35 to Report on Human Trafficking


On April 19, Fox 35 Orlando reported that a Sheriff from Polk County arrested “60 alleged prostitutes, pimps and johns” following a week-long undercover bust targeting “escort services”. However, this crackdown was not simply involving alleged escort services, but young girls who - under the control of pimps - performed sex acts for johns.
Polaris Project | Combating Human Trafficking and Modern-day Slavery http://t.co/d088xMB via @AddThis

Tuesday 26 April 2011

Exposing the Sex Traffickers

California investigative journalist and film-maker Mimi Chakarova’s chilling documentary on the seamy networks that traffic young girls from eastern Europe to the West premiered April 17.
Imagine you are a woman living in an impoverished village in Moldova or Bulgaria, and someone offers you a glittering life in the West. For thousands of women in post-communist Europe, it was an offer impossible to resist; but it led them into the violent, shadowy world of sex trafficking rings. Twenty-first century sex slavery, driven by corruption and shadowy criminal cartels, continues to defy global efforts to stop it.  
Mimi Chakarova, a 34-year-old California journalist born in Bulgaria, spent eight years tracking the sex trade in an investigation that took her from the hard-scrabble villages of central Europe to Turkey and Dubai. In the course of her investigation, she posed as a prostitute in Istanbul’s red light district.  Her 73-minute documentary,  “The Price of Sex," had its world premiere in Sarasota April 17, and Chakarova herself is due to be awarded the 2011 Human Rights Watch Festival’s Nestor Almenderos Award for Courage in Filmmaking.
The film, produced in association with the Center for Investigative Reporting, will be screened at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in New York June 16-30. To see the trailer, Chakarova’s photographs, a map of trafficking hotspots, as well as links and resources and ways to get involved, visit: http://priceofsex.org
Chakarova, in response to e-mailed questions from The Crime Report editor in chief Stephen Handelman, discusses why she made the film, why police and other authorities close their eyes to what’s going on―and how the sex rings are shrewdly changing their methods through “happy trafficking.”

The Crime Report: This is an intensely personal account as well as a journalistic investigation.  What motivated you to make this documentary?
Mimi Chakarova:  What motivated me changed over time. Initially, I wanted to see if what I was reading and seeing in the press was fairly reported. The sensationalism surrounding this issue really troubled me. So, I challenged myself to see if I could do a better job of understanding why women were sold into sexual slavery after the collapse of communism.
Over the years, no matter how difficult this journey got, I felt a sense of obligation to carry on.  I grew up in a village in Bulgaria. I migrated abroad as well, and my family struggled with some of the same challenges of poverty that others faced. It was my obligation to return and expose something that many chose to ignore or were too afraid to acknowledge as a post-communist plague in our society.

TCR: You introduce the film by quoting a Bulgarian proverb that you were entering the 'mouth of the wolf'  What did you mean?

MC:  What I meant was that digging around for answers in the underbelly of red light districts, mafia-infested areas and corrupt officials gets you killed in the Balkans and in other places where  human life is treated as a commodity.

TCR: What drives women into the clutches of sex traffickers?
MC:  Desperation. If your choice is either to starve by staying or to leave your village or town and seek work abroad, you would leave too. Traffickers prey on the most desperate and vulnerable, because no one would look for them once they're sold into prostitution. The system is ruthless, and what makes it even more disturbing is that the supply of women is abundant. There is no shortage of people seeking a better life and willing to take their chances.

TCR:   At one point in the documentary, you say that for traffickers “one kilo of cocaine, one  AK47 and one Moldovan girl are all the same.”  What did you mean?

MC:  This was originally a quote by a Croatian writer whom I met in Istanbul in 2009. He put it very simply:  "Let’s not pretend we don’t know the system. In many countries, (there are) corrupt leaders of  (the) army, police, ministers, influential people... For the major players in that pimp game, you’re nothing. You’re one kilo of cocaine, or one AK 47, or one Moldova girl, that’s all the same to them."

TCR: You suggestion corruption of local police and authorities is both a driver and enabler of the trafficking trade.  But are large transnational criminal cartels playing a role?

MC:  Of course, transnational criminal networks play a role. But they would have a much harder time conducting business if the police and authorities were not complacent and in some cases, fully involved. Another thing to keep in mind is that traffickers are constantly remolding and adapting their schemes.
Initially, in the 1990s, they used brutal force, gang rape, starvation, and torture to keep the women in check. In the past few years, they've come up with a new method called "happy trafficking." They use psychological threats to keep the women from running or pressing charges. They also know that the younger the girl, the more likely she can be brainwashed into believing that her main purpose in this life is to sell her body and to hand over every penny she makes off her flesh.
I had a young woman from Ukraine tell me that her pimp buys her cigarettes and that if I worked for him (I was doing undercover work at the time,) that's one of the perks I could look forward to.

TCR:  In one stunning revelation in the film, the director of a nonprofit in Moldova charges that some international aid to help woman affected by the trade is diverted to corrupt officials. Have you been able to back that up?  What are the implications?

MC:
  I have not had corrupt officials admit on camera that they're pocketing international aid.  But as the attorney in Moldova stated, despite large amounts of funding to help combat human trafficking in Eastern Europe in the past ten years, trafficking continues to plague the region for two main reasons: poverty and corruption in the countries of origin; AND demand and corruption in the countries of destination.
The women who manage to survive and escape don't receive the appropriate rehabilitation, and that is the most dire implication. Those who need the most help are the ones who are most neglected. Add stigma to the equation and you can understand why women would rather keep quiet.

TCR: What can U.S. journalists do to follow up on these stories?

MC:   First and foremost, don't only scratch the surface or sensationalize trafficking. Make sure you speak the language and you can communicate with the women directly. Make sure you've worked with people who've experienced trauma. And most importantly, understand that to get to the bottom of someone's trafficking experience often takes years.

TCR:  It took some courage to enter this world. Were the risks and dangers more than you expected?

MC:  I often think about some of the situations I put myself in and I realize it was absolutely insane. I didn't have security. I was shooting with hidden cameras in environments where you are constantly watched and you can't show fear. This type of work gets to you over time. Even when you come home and it's "safe," you can't turn it off.

TCR: As far as you know, is the sex trafficking trade in Asia pretty much similar to what you've uncovered in Eastern Europe?

MC:   I know that Asia is leading in numbers in both sex and labor trafficking. I saw a lot of Chinese women sold for sex in Dubai and they go for the cheapest price. They are also exploited in some of the worst ways. My primary focus in the film has been on Eastern Europe, the West and parts of the Middle East. I haven't investigated this issue in Asia.
Stephen Handelman is Editor-in-Chief of The Crime Report

http://www.thecrimereport.org/news/inside-criminal-justice/2011-04-exposing-the-sex-traffickers 

Child sex trafficking increasing in US




http://www.presstv.ir/detail/176714.html

Andrea Powell works directly with children who have been sold for sex in Washington, DC. The FBI says child sex trafficking has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. It says 300-thousand American children are at risk for commercial sexual exploitation.

Press TV's Rhonda Pence reports from Washington.

Porn Harms: An Untreated Pandemic - Dr. Donna Hughes - Women in Porn & S...


www.PornHarms.com www.facebook.com/pornharms

Donna M. Hughes is a leading international researcher on trafficking of women and children. She has completed research on the trafficking of women and girls for sexual exploitation in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Korea.

She does research and writing on women's rights. Her topic areas include: violence, slavery, sexual exploitation, Islamic fundamentalism, and women's organized resistance to violence and exploitation. She also works on issues related to women, science and technology.

She is frequently consulted by governments and non-governmental organizations on policy related to women's human rights, particularly on trafficking of women and girls for sexual exploitation. She has testified before the U.S. House International Relations Committee, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Moscow Duma, and the Czech Parliament.

Her research has been supported by the U.S. State Department, the National Institute of Justice, the National Science Foundation, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, the International Organization for Migration, the Council of Europe, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education, University of Rhode Island Foundation, the University of Rhode Island Council for Research, and the University of Bradford, UK.

She is currently a professor of Women's Studies at the University of Rhode Island.

Slavery hits home


Ambassador Luis CdeBaca has a demanding portfolio: He runs the State Department office devoted to fighting human trafficking and slavery around the world.
So why was he at the University of New Hampshire School of Law last week on a trip that included meeting with local cops, activists, and policy makers? The answer: Human trafficking — slavery, to put it bluntly — is not something that only occurs elsewhere. It happens under our noses too, and he wants to make Americans more aware of it.
“People think that this doesn’t happen in New England, that this isn’t Houston or Miami,’’ he said in a telephone interview. “But it does happen here.’’
He’s right, of course. Pimps have been known to target under-age girls in Boston MBTA stations. Community groups like Roxbury Youthworks have worked to stem the flow of young girls entering a world of crime and dependence that can be almost impossible to break out of.
New England states are moving toward tougher laws to fight trafficking.
Just a couple of weeks ago, prosecutors in Rhode Island won the first prosecution under that state’s new human trafficking law. Two pimps from Yonkers, N.Y., were convicted of luring young women into prostitution and holding them hostage. The men got lengthy jail terms.
Massachusetts is one of just a handful of states that don’t have a human trafficking statute — though that may soon change. State Representative Cory Atkins of Concord and Attorney General Martha Coakley have joined forces on a bill that would boost penalties for exploitation and forced labor.
CdeBaca has worked in the field of trafficking for years. He cut his teeth on the issue in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — then led by Deval Patrick — and has been involved in prosecuting exploitation cases across the country.
He has come to believe that those who traffic in human beings share certain traits. “One of the things I found — whether they were Americans, Koreans, or Mexicans — was that they were tremendously self-confident, tremendously manipulative, and had an utter disregard for the humanity of other people,’’ CdeBaca said. “It is those people who figure out how to make money out of cruelty.’’
The Rhode Island case was an example of such cruelty. The victims in the case had known defendant Andrew Fakhoury since childhood. He lured the women to Rhode Island with talk of waitressing jobs. When they got to Providence, they found themselves forced into prostitution and unable to break away. At the sentencing earlier this month, the women wept through their victim impact statements. The pimps betrayed no emotion.
CdeBaca said his mission is to help police officers and others become more aware of the signs of trafficking. On last week’s visit, he spoke to them about asking the right questions of women picked up for prostitution, and being aware they often need help in getting away from their captors. And he wanted victim witness advocates and others to know that they also have a role to play.
CdeBaca said federal officials are keeping a close eye on the Massachusetts legislation. “Massachusetts has always been a leader in areas such as this, and now they’re playing catch-up,’’ he noted. “They can be a leader in this area too.’Strictly speaking, domestic human trafficking doesn’t seem to have much to do with State Department foreign policy. But it is an issue that spans domestic and foreign concerns — especially because many of those enslaved are recently arrived immigrants. This is a problem with a distinctly international flavor.
And the ambassador suggests that how we respond to it matters to the world.
“We want to make human rights norms a reality,’’ he said. “It’s not enough to say we believe in freedom and have children and women enslaved in brothels.’’
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. 
 Slavery hits home http://t.co/7GxLUHY via @ArchiveDigger

Bill would extend human trafficking task force

A new bill could help the state achieve more convictions for human trafficking.

The bill (A.6800/S.4089), sponsored by Assemblywoman Grace Meng, D-Flushing, and Sen. Stephen Saland, R-Poughkeepsie, would extend the Interagency Task Force on Human Trafficking until Sept. 1, 2013.The task force is set to expire in September 2011.

The task force is co-chaired by the Division of Criminal Justice Services and the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance. It was created in 2007 under legislation signed into law by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer to establish harsher penalties for human traffickers and provide assistance to victims of prostitution and involuntary labor.

Meng took an interest in the legislation after the first person convicted under the 2007 human trafficking laws was caught in Queens. According to Meng, who represents a district in Queens, the borough is an area of concern for the crime.

"It's known to be one of the problem areas for human trafficking. I guess mostly because it's also … the hub of … two major airports in New York," said Meng.

The goals of the task force are to recommend best practices for training and outreach to law enforcement and service providers regarding the crime, gather data on victims and the effectiveness of the 2007 law and raise public awareness about human trafficking.

Supporters of the legislation say the extension of the task force for two more years could help the state find and convict more people who are guilty of trafficking people into the country.

The U.S. State Department recently reported approximately 20,000 people are trafficked into the country through New York state each year. Only Texas, California and Florida have higher occurrences of human trafficking than New York.

Meng attributes this number to the high immigrant population in New York City and how easy it is to find employment for human trafficking victims who are mostly women.

The bill passed the Assembly on April 12, coinciding with the New York State Crime Victims' Rights Week. According to the assemblywoman, human trafficking is a crime not often discussed because the victims are hard to locate. The legislation was advanced to a third reading in the Senate on March 31.

"Human trafficking is a topic that's sort of viewed as domestic violence was, let's say, 30 years ago. There's not much known about it. It's really hard to find victims and, obviously, even harder to find the perpetrators. Built on top of that is the language component. Often times we're dealing with people from various countries and immigration issues."

In addition to extending the task force, Meng suggests collaborating with community-based organizations that provide help to victims as a way to combat human trafficking in the state.

"I just think that it's really important that New York state continues to look into this, and it's really important that we continue to partner with a lot of community organizations because often times they're the kind who are able to provide assistance to victims … first hand, and they'll be able to help the government tackle these problems and prosecute the perpetrators," said Meng.

Human trafficking a problem in Inland area, police say


By DAYNA STRAEHLEY
The Press-Enterprise
Modern slaves usually don't wear shackles.
But they live all around us, Inland law enforcement and social services experts say.
Riverside County is a hotbed, with pockets of agricultural slavery, as well as being an artery from Mexico and South America to Los Angeles.
"Everyone has to go through Riverside County to get to LA," said sheriff's Deputy Aron Wolfe, who is part of the Riverside County Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force, which has representatives from the Riverside County Sheriff's Department and district attorney's office and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He spoke last week to the Riverside Branch of the NAACP, asking for the public's help in reporting suspected cases.
The U.S. Department of Justice estimated 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked into the country every year.
Investigators said they are seeking prosecution of a case where a girl was brought here from Egypt to work as a nanny in the trafficker's home. She and her family were promised she would receive an education and a salary to send home.
Once she got here, she was barely fed, not allowed to go to school or even leave the house. If she tried to leave, she was told her family would be killed. She didn't know the language. After a few years, neighbors finally called police.
Some slaves are forced to sell candy, flowers or food on street corners, often with no idea of where they are, not even what city. They have no identification and follow a circuit throughout Southern California and Nevada or across the southern United States, investigators said. Keeping them far away from familiar surroundings is one way traffickers control and manipulate their victims, added Jennifer O'Farrell, Riverside County Collaboration Against Exploitation director.
Human trafficking has grown from a $9 billion to a $33 billion-a-year industry, Riverside police Officer James Barrette said. It rivals drug and arms trafficking for the most profitable criminal enterprise.
VICTIMS CAN BE REUSED
It's growing because victims can be reused and resold over and over. An ounce of drugs can only be sold once.
United Farm Workers National Vice President Erik Nicholson said trafficking is a growing problem, in part because of the growing difficulty of crossing the U.S.-Mexican border. Families could migrate easily with harvest seasons 10 years ago.
"Now it takes more knowledge and sophistication, and usually that knowledge is possessed by the drug cartels," Nicholson said. Small farmers in Mexico and South America pay recruiters $5,000 to $7,000 to come work. When they get here, their focus on their debt, at high interest rates, sometimes turns them from human smuggling clients into human trafficking slaves, Nicholson said.
"There's been a number of successful convictions for slavery in the United States," he said.
Trafficking involves coercion or some type of physical threat and victims being held against their will and forced to work. Victims' identity documents are taken away from them. Smugglers sometimes do that but not always, said Virginia Kice, public information officer for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
UNRECOGNIZED
There are no statistics yet on the extent of the problem in the Inland area. Kice said more initial reports are coming since the task force started training local police.
The task force is finding previously overlooked or misidentified problems, O'Farrell and Kice said.
"We know it's occurring in Riverside County," a Riverside County sheriff's deputy said. "I've seen it but not recognized it because I wasn't trained properly."
O'Farrell works from Operation SafeHouse, a shelter in Riverside for homeless and runaway teens. SafeHouse is now also the nonprofit arm for the task force. Runaway youth are most vulnerable, she said, but victims include men, women and children from all races and backgrounds.
STATE IN TOP THREE
California is one of the three states with the most human trafficking, with victims smuggled from around the world, as well as locally, she said.
Wolfe said he's working on a case in which a group is recruiting minors out of a high school and forcing them into prostitution. Some of the recruiting is through Facebook, said Barrette, the Riverside police officer.
Prostitution is not a choice for most of them, Barrette said.
"A kid doesn't wake up at 12 years old and say 'I want to be a prostitute,' " he said.
In the past, police just arrested the prostitutes, and sometimes the pimps, who served little jail time. Wolfe and Barrette said federal anti-trafficking laws add increased penalties.
"If we can stop the people who are exploiting, we can make a big difference," Wolfe said.
Victims seldom ask police for help, even if arrested, Barrette said.
They have been manipulated through fear, O'Farrell said. It may take two years before anyone trying to help hears the whole story, because victims have been through so much psychological trauma. They feel dependent on their abusers, she said.
'THE LOVE THAT BEATS THEM'
"The love they have come to know is the love that beats them," O'Farrell said. "I had one girl say 'why are you so nice to me? Kick me or beat me. That's how I'll know you love me.' "
Gaining their trust is difficult, Wolfe and Barrette said. Victims from other countries expect police here to be corrupt, like many in their home counties, they said.
The men in their lives will show them love and affection and then beat or manipulate them, Barrette said.
He said he feels he's gaining some trust from a 13-year-old girl who has been a prostitute since she was 11. She keeps running away from different group homes but calls his cell phone when she does.
Juvenile prostitution is just one aspect of human trafficking, Wolfe said. Children or teens selling flowers or candy, especially at hours when they should be in school, in the rain or in 110-degree summer heat, are usually trafficking victims, he said.
Reach Dayna Straehley at 951- 368-9455 or dstraehley@PE.com
REPORT SUSPECTED CASES
Signs of human trafficking victims include:
Bruises, depression, fear
Prostituting on the streets or Internet, especially by minors
Lack of identification and lack of control over personal schedule or belongings
Debt owed to employer
Inability to leave job
Control by a boss
Inability to speak on own behalf
Lack of knowledge about geographic location
If you think someone is a victim of human trafficking, call the National Human Trafficking Resource Center at 1-888-373-7888 .
Calls go directly to local law enforcement.
Human trafficking a problem in Inland area, police say | Local News | PE.com | Southern California News | News for Inland Southern California http://t.co/TCDuJkF

Child sex trafficking, 'epidemic' in US


A recent FBI law enforcement bulletin says child sex trafficking is a “problem of epidemic proportion” that threatens 300,000 American children.


The report said victims are often forced to travel far from home and their lives revolve around “violence, forced drug use and constant threats.”

According to the Washington-based FAIR Fund international nonprofit organization, most of the child victims come from poor neighborhoods and broken families.

“Most of the girls that we work with come from a broken home, maybe a single-headed household, [where] there is a lot of poverty,” said Andrea Powell, executive director of FAIR Fund that works to prevent human trafficking and sexual violence in the lives of youth, especially girls, around the world.

Powell says in the majority of cases there have been records of previous abuse by a family member or a parent in the form of verbal abuse, sexual abuse, and witnessing domestic violence.

“We are talking about something that has been called an epidemic by the FBI,” she told Press TV adding “we need a culture shift. We need people to understand this is not only a dirty 14-year-old girl who has made some bad choices. This is a child. Somebody out there is taking advantage of her selling her body.”

Child sex victims are often transported around the US and are often provided counterfeit identification to use in case they are arrested.

The average age a child gets involved into the sex trafficking industry in the US is between 12 and 14 years old.

“No matter where we would pull in different truck stops, there were always other truckers talking on their CBs to let other truckers know that I was available,” said Kristy Childs who became a victim at the age of 12 and was prostituted out in different cities and truck stops for six years.

Experts say it is more difficult to track and arrest offenders because traffickers' are now widely communicating to customers on the internet.

“The majority of the girls that we work with here at Fair Fund are in fact girls who are being exploited online,” said Powell.

TE/AO/MMA

Child sex trafficking, 'epidemic' in US : http://t.co/ff35pCO 

Monday 25 April 2011

The truth of trafficking Most women in the sex industry don't want to be there: their 'choice' is driven by desperation

Rahila Gupta
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column,
In the article below we said that in Britain it is estimated that 80% of the 80,000 women in prostitution are foreign nationals, most of whom have been trafficked. The figure of 80,000 women in prostitution is an estimate made in 1999 based on information from 17 projects providing services to sex workers; it is now widely quoted, including in Home Office publications. The 80% estimate was provided by the Poppy Project; it applied only to women working in the off-street sex industry. It is based on research done in London, but the Poppy Project believes that the percentage for Britain as a whole is similar. The article also said that police estimate that 10 to 15 years ago, only 15% percent of the women in the UK sex trade were trafficked; we meant 15% were foreign nationals. This has been corrected.



The European Convention on Action against Human Trafficking comes into force in the UK this week - the result of a vigorous campaign fought by organisations as diverse as Amnesty and the Poppy Project - for trafficked people to be seen as victims of crime rather than as criminals who have broken immigration laws. Trafficking is a lucrative activity, estimated to be worth $32bn globally per year. It is the selling of women and children into the sex industry that usually takes the limelight, eclipsing those trafficked into Britain to do work that is dirty, difficult and dangerous - construction, care work, cleaning and agriculture - for little or no pay. The focus on the sex trade is driven in part by the fact that larger numbers are involved where violence as a tool of control is endemic, but also because it drives media sales.
As it is mostly an underground industry, estimates of scale and size are bound to be provisional. However, the most widely accepted figures, from the US state department, indicate that 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year; 70% are women, most of whom are destined for the sex trade. In Britain, it is estimated that 80% of the 80,000 women in prostitution are foreign nationals, most of whom have been trafficked.
These figures are important, because there is a disgraceful attempt by those who support prostitution as a career option to rubbish these figures, which fatally undermine their argument around choice. Central to the concept of trafficking is the idea that women have been deceived or coerced in the recruitment process, including deception about the conditions of work even if they know they are entering the sex industry. For who would willingly agree to work 12-18 hours a day, 7 days a week, in conditions of bonded labour, where their so-called wages only just cover their exorbitant and inflated living costs? Migrants without legal status make the perfect victims for traffickers.
A vocal minority of women in the sex trade have been arguing that prostitution is a job like any other, where unionisation can help improve working conditions. This superficially attractive argument has been winning over sections of the progressive left who believe, along with libertarians, that opposition arises from a moral agenda or "killjoy" feminists.
Although it is imperative to make conditions as safe and healthy as possible, and to campaign against criminalisation of women working in the sex industry, it is also important to recognise that this industry can never be made truly safe and that women want to get out as soon as alternatives are available.
The police estimate that 10 to 15 years ago, only 15% of the women in the UK sex trade were foreign nationals. It is tempting to see the reduction of local women in the industry as evidence of economic growth and high employment. Everywhere you look, women leave prostitution as soon as there are alternatives. In South Korea, for instance, when the economy improved in the 1990s, local women deserted the bars and clubs. In order to service the needs of Americans on military bases, the government had to issue E6 entertainment visas to attract women from other countries such as Russia and the Philippines. Choice driven by hunger and desperation is not choice at all.
The European convention allows victims of trafficking a 45-day period of rest and reflection with access to support and accommodation - which can be extended by another 45 days, if necessary, in which to provide proof of having been trafficked and to claim asylum if they so wish. They will also be granted residency permits of up to a year if they want to give evidence against their traffickers. It is to be hoped we will not see any repeat of the scenarios in which police raid a brothel accompanied by immigration officers who throw any woman whose papers are not in order into a detention centre.
As the government, to its shame, has to be forced into any liberalisation of immigration controls, we can expect the culture of "disbelief", which characterises its approach to potential immigrants, to minimise the number able to take advantage of the convention through arguments about the precise nature of their "deception".
Those people who decry the anti-trafficking lobby as white, neo-colonialist do-gooders (I've never heard Amnesty described as such), determined to destroy the agency of migrant sex workers, are paradoxically placing themselves on the same side as the government. By insisting that only a minority of women are trafficked, they are taking us back to the bad old days when women without papers were quickly deported.
• Rahila Gupta's most recent book is Enslaved, The New British Slavery
rahila_gupta@yahoo.co.uk

The Eliot Spitzer scandal's true victims The New York attorney general was disgraced for hiring escorts, but never went to jail – unlike the sex workers he prosecuted

Melissa Ditmore
Parker Spitzer CNN talkshow
Former New York Attorney General and Governor Eliot Spitzer, with co-host Kathleen Parker, completes his rehabilitation on their recently launched CNN show. Photograph: CNN handout
Eliot Spitzer was the attorney general and then governor of New York state. As attorney general, he prosecuted prostitution rings, as well as mafia dons and corrupt financial managers.
In 2005, Spitzer, then attorney general, prosecuted owners and employees of the escort agency New York Confidential, sending top-rated escort-turned-author Natalie McLennan and artist-turned-booker Hulbert Waldroup to prison. As governor, Spitzer signed a law increasing penalties for clients of prostitutes (PDF). When it came out that he was himself a client, Spitzer resigned. He was not charged with any crime.
CeeCee Suwal served six months and has a felony conviction for arranging Spitzer's meeting with the escort that led to his downfall. Each appears in a new documentary, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, to be released across the US on 12 November, this week.
One person who isn't interviewed, however, is Ashley Dupre. She was the escort Spitzer met in Washington, DC; after the scandal broke, she later became a NY Post columnist. Director Alex Gibney's visually beautiful film attempts to rehabilitate Spitzer's image. Dupre is slammed for her media appearances – seemingly because they inhibited a comeback for Spitzer. Her former boss, CeeCee, is far more generous, praising Dupre's ability to move ahead after her role in the scandal.
Spitzer is a wealthy man with no criminal record who now hosts a CNN show. Gibney has misplaced his efforts attempting to vindicate Spitzer. Instead, those convicted felons – put away by Spitzer for so-called victimless crimes – are the people who really need the image overhaul now that they are out of jail. Their stories demonstrate that prostitution convictions, and even having admitted to selling sex, are obstacles to other employment in the US.
Unlike the hubristic Spitzer, each comes off as likeable and business-minded, with proven sales and interpersonal skills. They would otherwise be getting along in life, but felony convictions prevent their rising above the scandals in which they fell.
Work and business opportunities are necessary to anyone's efforts to resume a normal life. A report from the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Centre found that people turn to the sex industry for economic reasons, often with goals like paying school tuition and supplementing low wages in other jobs, jobs sometimes tied to long-term goals. Waldroup, whose work with the agency supported his painting, and Dupre, with her singing aspirations, both bear witness to the idea of sex work subsidising art.
The report also documented that some sex workers feared arrest and conviction because that would hamper their efforts to attain larger goals, including working outside the sex sector. Boom or bust, it's the economics of the sex industry that draws people to it, and a prostitution-related conviction can leave a person stuck in sex work because they may not be hired by other employers. As stripper, author and blogger Jo Weldon points out, no one ever says they got into sex work because they needed the sex.
The Eliot Spitzer scandal's true victims | Melissa Ditmore http://t.co/vKPmOXZ via @guardian 

It is not just violent clients who hurt sex workers In Uganda and many other countries, they are denied access to HIV treatment, stigmatised by authorities and brutalised by police

Audacia Ray
 The first time Kyomya Macklean did sex work, her client turned violent after she refused to have sex without a condom. As she fought back, she remembers him saying: "I can kill you bitch! After all, you are just a slut who sells your body to earn a living." As he assaulted her physically he continued to berate her, saying: "Even if I killed you, nobody would judge me of murder because you are nothing but a prostitute and a kisarani [the Lugandan word for curse]."
As the oldest of 19 children in a family in which her father had seven wives, this young Ugandan woman opted to do sex work to pay for her education. After her violent introduction, she continued to do the work – and she organised a group with other sex workers. In 2008, she co-founded Wonetha with two other adult sex workers who had also experienced harassment, insults, stigma, discrimination and arrest without trial. They would like to see sex work decriminalised, and the human rights of people who engage in the sex trade upheld. To this end, Macklean's story and the stories of four sex workers from Uganda and Kenya are captured in the booklet When I Dare to Be Powerful, published by Akina Mama Wa Afrika, an African feminist organisation whose name means "solidarity among African women".
There are a lot of obstacles to their goals. Although sex workers in Uganda and many other places are vulnerable to the kind of one-on-one violence that Macklean experienced, human rights abuses from the state are widespread and actively prevent sex workers from improving their working conditions. Although the purported mission of governments who criminalise sex work is to abolish the industry, sometimes with overtones of rescue, in reality the laws punish sex workers and make their lives harder.
Health clinics that offer HIV testing and treatment services in Uganda regularly deny sex workers access to care and withhold anti-retroviral medications on the grounds that there are other people, whose jobs are legal and who aren't engaged in immoral activities, who are more deserving of treatment. Some healthcare workers regard time and HIV/Aids resources spent on sex workers as a waste. Sex workers are included as one of the UN's four populations who are most at risk from HIV, but restricted access to services does nothing to improve the health and wellbeing of those engaged in the sex trade. It likewise does not protect the people sex workers come in contact with. Restrictions imposed because of criminalisation leave sex workers out in the cold and solve no one's problems.
Although grassroots organisations are making progress, the work has been stymied by government officials. Last month, a Sex Workers Leadership Institute was set to take place in Kampala, Uganda. It was shut down by the country's minister of ethics and integrity, Nsaba Buturo. In a letter to the hotel hosting the conference, Buturo states that "prostitution is a criminal offence in Uganda" and as a result "the hotel is an accomplice in an illegality". But as Amnesty International points out in a public statement opposing the shutdown of the conference, the Ugandan Constitution affirms the right to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association. The enforcement of this discrimination against sex workers makes it impossible for them to improve their situations.
Just days later, the district police commander in the town of Kasese in western Uganda incited a contingent of police officers to raid bars and streets where sex workers congregate. On this night, the police delivered beatings to everyone they thought was a sex worker. About 20 women spent the night in jail and the women who were not detained were forced to pay fines. Following the assaults, some got treatment in hospitals. There were, however, no charges made against the women. The roundup was a way for the police to assert their dominance and stigmatise people they suspected were sex workers.
Denial of access to HIV services, restrictions on organising, and police crackdowns do not make it possible to eliminate the sex trade; instead they perpetuate stigma and discrimination. The global sex worker rights movement emphasises that it is possible to make the sex trade more hospitable to workers, but that institutional violence is one of the major barriers.
Since American sex icon Annie Sprinkle established the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers in 2003, sex workers from around the world have organised vigils, community gatherings and speakouts on 17 December to mourn victims of violence in our communities. The event was originally created in the wake of the Green River serial killer. But violence doesn't just come in the form of bad clients – more often, it is delivered by the institutions that are supposed to protect and improve the lives of citizens.
 It is not just violent clients who hurt sex workers | Audacia Ray http://t.co/7ko2oeW via @guardian

The value of the Poppy Project The Poppy Project, which works with trafficked women, is losing its funding to the Salvation Army. Two writers debate the move

Nichi Hodgson and Catherine Robinson
trafficking
Trafficked … specialist women's service the Poppy Project faces an uncertain future. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Guardian

Catherine Robinson: Proven expertise, overlooked by government

Catherine Robinson I am an immigration solicitor, and a number of my clients have been trafficked to the UK for the purposes of sexual exploitation and domestic servitude. Some of my clients have been supported by the Poppy Project. However, the Ministry of Justice has recently decided to change providers for services to adult victims of trafficking and has awarded funding for the next two years to the Salvation Army.
From my point of view, it is deeply disappointing that the Poppy Project's proven expertise in working with trafficked women has not been given proper recognition or weight by the Ministry of Justice. The project has extensive experience; it houses women in safe, women-only properties in London, Cardiff and Sheffield and provides intensive support addressing their myriad complex emotional, psychological and practical needs. Between March 2003 and March 2011, it received 1,869 referrals, housed and supported 334 women, and provided outreach support to a further 449, all of whom were trafficked into, and exploited in the UK. The top five country of origin for referrals are Nigeria, China, Lithuania, Albania and Romania.
Poppy's support to my clients has been invaluable. Their reports and assessments are recognised by the UK courts, from the immigration and asylum tribunal to the criminal court of appeal. This is key, as often the UK Border Agency does not believe what has happened to my clients. The Poppy Project was also one of the five interveners in the case of M v UK, which was the first trafficking case from the UK to be considered by the European court of human rights. The court allowed the Poppy Project to intervene to provide expertise on the issue of risk of re-trafficking.
Many of the cases are complex. For example, one of my clients was trafficked to the UK from Jamaica. At her first asylum appeal she represented herself – she was unwell at the time and unable to tell her story to the judge. Her appeal was dismissed. She was subsequently referred to the Poppy Project. We made a fresh asylum application supported by reports from the Poppy Project and she has been granted limited leave to remain. She has received a huge amount of intensive support from the team. She is now in her own accommodation and very recently got a job, thanks to their support, which included a referral to a Ready for Work programme.
A gender-specific and specialist service with a proven track record of providing high quality and intensive support is vital to trafficked women given their experiences of gender-based violence. This does not mean that there should not be other services providing support for other groups of individuals, but the Poppy Project has been the specialist service for women – and it is a very big shame that has not been recognised by this government.
• Catherine Robinson is an immigration solicitor at Fisher Meredith LLP. Her practice includes representing women who have been trafficked to the UK and victims of domestic violence. She was one of the lawyers in the case of M v UK

Nichi Hodgson: Why did the Poppy Project support the Policing and Crime Act?

Nichi Hodgson The Poppy Project has undoubtedly done much for trafficked women. But in approving the appalling myopia of the Policing and Crime Act (2009), Poppy only further endangered all sex workers.
Section 21 deals with new brothel closure orders that were designed to stop traffickers exploiting hordes of sex workers. The orders allow police to make arrests where they merely suspect (no proof needed) that two or more prostitutes are operating together; where they have received just one public complaint of antisocial behaviour (which can be sex work itself); or where there are sex workers "incited" or "controlled for gain". Neither Poppy nor the Home Office considered that traffickers could just separate prostitutes to cover their tracks, increasing their victims' invisibility and the risk of abuse from punters and traffickers alike. Meanwhile, that "causing" or "inciting" prostitution permits closure means that many non-trafficked prostitutes can be accused of exploiting each other.
After a flurry of token raids early on, we are still waiting for the grand ring-cracking statistics resulting from the act. Instead, the most significant prostitution-related arrest in this period was Stephen Griffiths for the murder of three Bradford sex workers last May. The new law and the Griffiths case were not directly connected, but the latter highlighted the need to allow non-trafficked sex workers to operate in the safer space of brothels, rather than pushing them to work on the streets, where they are at greater risk of drug addiction and extreme violence. In advising the Home Office to increase police involvement, the Poppy Project ignored the long-running antagonisms between law-enforcers and sex workers. The law has increased police power to criminalise sex workers, something they claimed it opposed.
The Poppy Project believes it deserves funding because it is the only dedicated support service for trafficked women, and has claimed to be the only service offering accommodation. This ignores both the Medaille Trust's accommodation provision, and the vital work done by the the Helen Bamber Foundation. Both provide victim support, irrespective of gender, as does the Salvation Army. Focusing on female trafficking victims ignores the needs of men and transgender sex workers who are particularly vulnerable in the sex industry. Fewer men than women are trafficked for sex, but as a prison officer at a male young offenders institute pointed out to me, 60 of its 800 inmates have been trafficked in circumstances of enforced hard labour or drug-smuggling. Sex-trafficked women are not the only victims.
Trying to agglomerate both trafficked and non-trafficked sex work offences, the Policing and Crime Act 2009, backed by the Poppy Project, spurned the Palermo protocol's precise definition of trafficking for the oblilque "controlled for gain". Victims of sex trafficking deserved their own law. The Poppy Project could have recommended this. But it didn't. Without government funding, Poppy is now free to pursue its ideological agenda and develop its specialised, women-only service. David Cameron's anti-trafficking budget, inadequate as it is, should fund an organisation with a wider remit.
The value of the Poppy Project | Catherine Robinson and Nichi Hodgson http://t.co/c8Fx0fx via @guardian

Katya's story: trafficked to the UK, sent home to torture The experience of one woman, enslaved by traffickers and and shuttled across Europe to serve the sex trade, highlights the need for urgent reform of the law

Sex trafficking report
A model poses as a victim of sex trafficking. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA
When they assessed her case, British immigration officials knew that Katya, a vulnerable 18-year-old from Moldova, had been trafficked and forced into prostitution, but ruled that she would face no real danger if she was sent back.
Days after her removal from the UK, her traffickers tracked her down to the Moldovan village where she had grown up. She was gang-raped, strung up by a rope from a tree, and forced to dig her own grave. One of her front teeth was pulled out with a pair of pliers. Shortly afterwards she was re-trafficked, first to Israel and later back to the UK.
The Home Office decision last week to pay her substantial damages has raised serious questions about the way Britain treats trafficked women. The unprecedented case also opens the possibility that other individuals who have been removed from this country and subsequently found themselves exposed to danger in their home country, could attempt to sue the Home Office for damages. The Moldovan woman was first kidnapped by traffickers when she was 14, repeatedly sold on to pimps and other traffickers, and forced to work as a prostitute for seven years in Italy, Turkey, Hungary, Romania, Israel and the UK. She told the Guardian that British police need to do much more to protect women like her and to prevent others from being trafficked into prostitution.
"Just look around you - see how many girls there are like me. They are coming all the time. I see them every day - in tube stations, all made up, early in the morning. Maybe for you it is difficult to see them, but I see them," said Katya (not her real name), in an interview in her solicitor's office. "I think the police should work better to stop this. Why don't you shut down saunas and brothels? Then there would be no prostitutes, no pimps."
The exhaustive account that Katya has given in court documents, explaining how she was targeted, captured and intimidated, reveals the sophisticated methods employed by gangs trafficking vulnerable women from eastern Europe, Africa and the far east. It also reveals the danger that these women are often exposed to when the British immigration service opts to remove them.
Experienced staff at the Poppy Project, which provides specialist support for trafficking victims and which last week learned it was losing its government funding, described her story as among the most disturbing they have encountered. Katya has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but finds therapy sessions too painful to engage with.
She was living with her mother in Moldova when two older men invited her and a friend to a birthday picnic in a nearby forest. Both girls were knocked unconscious, driven to Romania, blindfolded, taken across a river in an inflatable dinghy to somewhere in Hungary, dressed in dark clothes and made to walk through the forest across the border during the night, passing through Slovenia and arriving eventually in Italy.
They were sold on to two separate men. Katya worked first in a flat in Rimini and then on the streets of Milan. After some months, she managed to escape and was sheltered for a while in the Moldovan embassy there, when she discovered she was pregnant.
She chose to return to her family in Moldova to have the child, but her traffickers found her, beat and raped her brother and killed the family dog as punishment for her decision to tell Italian police what happened to her. She discovered that the friend she had been kidnapped with had been murdered by traffickers in Israel who had drugged her and thrown her off a seven-storey building. These experiences terrified her so much that for years she avoided doing anything that might upset her traffickers in case they acted on their threats to hurt her family.
After she gave birth, and sent her daughter to live in relative safety with an aunt, Katya was sent to Turkey to work in a nightclub. She was later smuggled in a lorry to work in a London brothel. During her time working as a prostitute, she was given no money for her work and was not allowed to go anywhere unaccompanied in case she tried to escape. Her clients in London rarely asked about the conditions in which she was working. "The clients, they're drunk, and just come and say, 'Give me this, that'. No one asks: 'How are you?'. Some of them asked, 'Why do you do this job?', but I wouldn't answer," she said, explaining that she was afraid that if she appealed to them for help, they might turn out to be friends with the trafficker.
She and the other women - mainly eastern European, none of them British - never talked of their circumstances among themselves. "I didn't know if the other girls were friends of the trafficker. It was dangerous to speak to the clients or the other girls. There were speakers in the flat where we lived. We didn't talk about anything. Sometimes we were locked up for weeks and weeks, not going out."
The brothel, in Harrow, north-west London, was raided a few weeks after she arrived. She was arrested, but she did not reveal the full details of her enslavement to the police because the Kosovan Albanian man who had bought her told her that her family would be in danger if she said anything.
Because officials did not realise Katya had been intimidated by her trafficker, they allowed him to visit her nine times when she was in detention, visits he used to intimidate her further. Although they recognised that she had been trafficked, immigration officials decided to remove her to Moldova, judging that there was no real risk to her safety. A few days after she returned home, her traffickers found her.
"They took me to a forest and I was beaten and raped. Then they made a noose out of rope and told me to dig my own grave as I was going to be killed," Katya's court statement reads. "They tied the noose around my neck and let me hang before cutting the branch off the tree. I really believed I was going to die. They then drove me to a house where many men were staying. They were all very drunk and took turns to rape me. When I tried to resist, one man physically restrained me and pulled my front tooth out using pliers."
The attack ended only when her trafficker told the men they needed to stop as Katya was to be sold in Israel. "I think maybe they did not kill me because I was more valuable alive," her statement reads. Katya, now 26, is thin and pale, but dentists have replaced her tooth, and her other scars are well hidden. "I didn't have too many scars or injuries as the traffickers wanted to keep me looking pretty," she said. After working in Tel Aviv for a while, Katya again escaped before being trafficked to work in a central London flat, where her pimps sold her for £150 an hour; again, she received no money. In 2007 she was detained for a second time by immigration officials, who considered returning her to Moldova, before finally granting her refugee status.
Katya has been interviewed by medical and trafficking experts in preparation for the trial, all of whom found her account credible. Her legal team argued immigration solicitors should have investigated evidence that she was a victim of trafficking and that their decision to return her to Moldova, where she ran the risk of retribution and retrafficking, was a violation of her rights under article 3 (the right to freedom from torture and inhumane and degrading treatment) and article 4 (the right to freedom from slavery and servitude) of the European convention on human rights. Paul Holmes, the now retired former head of the Metropolitan police's vice unit, CO14, said in a pre-trial statement that there was already much evidence by 2003 that should have led immigration officials to identify her as a trafficking victim. He said there was "friction" at that time between the immigration service's desire to remove "illegal entrants" to the country, and his department's desire to interview potential victims and get them to testify against traffickers.
"Our doubt about the effectiveness of prompt removal was exacerbated by the fact that our intelligence-gathering and operational activities had highlighted the fact that in some cases, victims that had been removed were subjected to retrafficking and were being discovered for a second time in London brothels or elsewhere within weeks of their original removal," he said.
Katya's case was due to open last week at the high court in London, but Home Office lawyers agreed to pay substantial, undisclosed damages the day before the scheduled start of the case.
Her solicitor Harriet Wistrich, of legal firm Birnberg Peirce, said she hoped the case would highlight the dangers of unlawful removal and could prompt other claims. Wistrich said she believed the case, which has been two years in preparation, might also educate people about the reality of trafficking of women from eastern Europe. "People don't believe it's happening on this scale. People don't want to believe it," she said.
There is no clear data to indicate how many trafficked women may be in England and Wales, but research for the Association of Chief Police Officers last year found clear evidence of 2,600 trafficked victims and of another 9,600 "vulnerable migrants" who might have been trafficked.
The Home Office says there have been improvements in the way immigration officials deal with trafficked women since 2003, and minister Damian Green said: "The UK has become a world leader in fighting trafficking and has a strong international reputation in this field."
But Sally Montier, of the Poppy Project, said the charity was still regularly helping women who were wrongly sent home and retrafficked. She warned that 21% of the women who came to the charity seeking help had already been sent home and retrafficked at least once.
"Worryingly, we are seeing an increase in women who have been identified as victims of trafficking but who are in the process of being removed," she said.
Last week's decision to award the Salvation Army the government contract to provide support to trafficked women would lead to the loss of the expertise built up by the Poppy Project over the last eight years, she said. "We are very worried that we will see more women who are not identified as having been trafficked, and who are consequently removed, so that they fall back into the cycle of trafficking and abuse."
Katya's traffickers have not been arrested and she is concerned they could now target her younger sister in Moldova. She plans to stay in the UK, has signed up for computer courses and English language classes, and is doing voluntary work. Recently she succeeded in bringing her daughter to live with her, but is troubled by the possibility that she could run into the people who forced her into prostitution in London.
She is sceptical about the likelihood that the Home Office decision could force officials to treat trafficking victims with more sensitivity: "If the government cared it would not be closing the Poppy Project. They don't care."
But she adds: "I'm not angry with the government. How can you be angry with the government? I'm angry with my life, the things that have happened."
Katya's story: trafficked to the UK, sent home to torture http://t.co/R8sa3Vo via @guardian