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Stories tagged with “Human Trafficking”

Health

New York Governor Introduces A ‘Bill Of Rights’ For Women To Combat Discrimination

By Aviva Shen on Jun 5, 2013 at 4:45 pm

A women's rights rally at the Capitol in Albany (Credit: AP)

In January, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) vowed to protect and bolster a host of women’s rights, from abortion to pay equity to domestic violence supports. On Tuesday, Cuomo followed through by introducing the Women’s Equality Act, a wide-ranging bill already facing backlash from anti-abortion advocates. Cuomo blasted “fear-mongering” over the bill’s updated abortion language and urged New Yorkers to accept the package. “Bias against women is sweeping. It exists. The discrimination exists. We’re not going to allow it to exist anymore,” Cuomo declared in a press conference Tuesday.

New York’s current abortion law predates the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic Roe v. Wade decision, which led to a federal law legalizing late-term abortions when a woman’s health is in danger. The state law has a more restrictive abortion limit at 6 months of pregnancy. Cuomo wants to update this law to reinforce the federal protections, while moving abortion regulation from criminal law to health law. The plan, which originally would have expanded the types of health professionals who could perform abortions, has already been scaled back to appease Republicans.

The bill would also tackle housing discrimination against single mothers and victims of domestic violence, make it easier for women to get restraining orders against abusers, expand sexual harassment protections to all workplaces, and increase penalties for human trafficking. Additionally, employers would no longer be allowed to fire pregnant workers who need certain accommodations, or retaliate against employees who share their wage information with each other.

Cuomo has made it his mission to make New York one of the strongest states in the nation for women’s rights. Earlier this year, he pushed a “rape is rape” bill updating the state’s rape statute to include more kinds of sexual violence.

Still, conservatives may try to derail the entire agenda based on the reproductive rights language. A spokeswoman for the Senate Republican leader attacked it as “a political maneuver designed to curry favor with the extremists who want to expand late-term abortion, and open the door to non-physicians performing abortions.” The Catholic League scoffed that the governor’s “lust for abortion rights has effectively killed his chances of ever becoming president of the United States.” Despite the outcry from the right, Cuomo’s proposal will simply bring New York in line with federal law, not expand access to abortions.

Health

Five Republicans Oppose Bipartisan Measure To Combat Human Trafficking

By Josh Israel on Feb 12, 2013 at 2:22 pm

As the Senate moves to a final vote on the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), today 93 Senators endorsed an amendment to combat human trafficking. While opposing human trafficking is a fairly non-controversial subject, five far-right Republicans broke with the majority of their own caucus and opposed the bipartisan amendment.

The amendment, authored by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT), strengthens VAWA by reauthorizing the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The measure helps law enforcement investigative human trafficking and supports international efforts to stop the practice. Leahy noted that on the anniversary of President Lincoln’s birth, “we continue to fight human trafficking, which can amount to modern day slavery,” making the amendment a fitting tribute. “The United States remains a beacon of hope for so many who face human rights abuses. We know that young women and girls – often just 11, 12, or 13 years old – are being bought and sold. We know that workers are being held and forced into labor against their will. People in this country and millions around the world are counting on us.”

The amendment was opposed by Senators Tom Coburn (R-OK), James Inhofe (R-OK), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Jeff Sessions (R-AL).

Lee also voted against even allowing the Senate to consider the Violence Against Women Act, based on his bizarre belief that the entire bill is unconstitutional.

Prior to his time in the Senate, Johnson famously opposed the bipartisan Wisconsin Child Victims Act, a bill to extend the civil statute of limitations for child sexual abuse crimes. His objection was that it would be bad for business if employers who help cover up the crime could be “severely damaged, possibly destroyed, in a legitimate desire for justice.”

Leahy said of the the Trafficking Victims Protection Act:

This measure strengthens criminal anti-trafficking statutes to ensure that law enforcement agencies have the tools they need to effectively combat all forms of trafficking. It ensures better coordination among federal agencies, between law enforcement and victim service providers, and with foreign countries to work on every facet of this complicated problem. It includes measures to encourage victims to come forward and report this terrible crime, which leads to more prosecutions and help for more victims. We have included accountability measures to ensure that Federal funds are used for their intended purposes, and we have streamlined programs to focus scarce resources on the approaches that have been the most successful. A Senator asserted yesterday that trafficking programs have been wasteful and duplicative. In fact, the programs supported by this amendment have been carefully tracked and shown to be effective. Nonetheless, the amendment reduces authorization levels by almost a third from the levels in the last reauthorization because we are determined to ensure efficiency and respond to concerns. We have made similar efforts to streamline VAWA.

The offices of the five Senators were not immediately available to respond to questions about their rationales for opposing the amendment.

Politics

Idaho Lawmaker Compares Abortion To Prostitution

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jan 17, 2013 at 4:47 pm

An Idaho lawmaker on Thursday compared abortion to prostitution, arguing that both are “a choice” that women make, and asking members of the Idaho American Civil Liberties to defend prostitution, since they were willing to protect women’s access to abortion services.

Presenting abortion and prostitution as cavaler choices women make and ignoring the real danger of sex slavery, State Rep. Ron Mendive (R) elicited “audible gasps” on Wednesday during a meeting with representatives from the group, which later condemned his comparison:

“He was correlating a criminal action with something that is constitutionally protected. Those are two completely separate issues,” [an ACLU representative said after the event. [...]

“It was just a question,” he said. “I do believe it’s a double standard.”

Prostitution is a choice “more so than an abortion would be,” he said.

“Because (in an abortion) there’s two beating hearts. And then there’s one,” Mendive said.

Asked later whether he stood by what he had said, Mendive offered, “Maybe it was a poor illustration.”

For some women, sex work is in fact a choice, and questions have been raised as to whether the United States should consider honoring that work as legal employment. But that does not mean that all sex work is voluntary, and, in any case, it is no reason to invite a comparison with abortion.

Health

Girls, Human Trafficking, And Modern Slavery In America

By Guest Blogger on Oct 6, 2012 at 10:00 am

Our guest blogger is Malika Saada Saar, the executive director of Rights4Girls, a U.S. based human rights organization for young women and girls.

On the 150th anniversary of when President Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which set the date for the freedom of more than 3 million enslaved Americans, President Obama called for the end of modern day slavery. The president’s historical speech delivered at the Clinton Global Initiative, called for major policy changes, at home and abroad, to combat the enslavement of millions of women, men and children.

Many of the slaves today are girls. Born in America. Hidden in plain view.

They are the lost girls, standing around bus stops, hanging out by runaway youth shelters, or advertised online. At the Motel 8 or the Marriott, at McDonalds or the clubs.

According to the FBI, there are currently an estimated 293,000 American children at risk of being exploited and trafficked for sex. Forty percent of all human trafficking cases opened for investigation between January 2008 and June 2010 were for the sexual trafficking of a child. And while the term trafficking may conjure images of desperate illegal immigrants being forced into prostitution by human smugglers, 83 percent of victims in confirmed sex trafficking cases in this country were American citizens.

The majority of these children being sold for sex are girls between the ages of 12 and 14. They are girls abducted or lured by traffickers and then routinely raped, beaten into submission, and sometimes even branded. When the girls try to run away, their traffickers torture and or gang rape them.
Read more

Justice

Military Contractors Traffic Workers, Abuse Them With Impunity

By Guest Blogger on Jul 10, 2012 at 4:00 pm

A report released late last month by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Lowenstein Clinic at Yale Law School documents ongoing abuse and trafficking of workers hired by U.S. Government contractors to support the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The civilian workforce comes mostly from developing countries and performs low-wage services like construction, transportation, security, and food services.

Tens of thousands of Third Country Nationals (TCNs) are hired yearly through contractors to support the military and are subject to a variety of abuses, including illegal recruitment, trafficking, and forced labor. Vulnerable workers, many of whom make less than $1 per day, are targeted by recruiting agents who promise exorbitant salaries and often lie about the location and type of work the recruits will preform. Then, when the workers arrive in Iraq or Afghanistan, they are subjected to appalling work and living conditions, including twelve- and fourteen-hour work days, seven-day work weeks, no vacation, low salaries, squalid living conditions, confinement, and inedible food.

Because TCNs often have to borrow money to pay recruiting fees, they comprise a uniquely vulnerable group. They remain in Iraq or Afghanistan even when abused with impunity in the hope that they will eventually be able to pay off recruiting fee debts, which are subject to interest rates as high as 50 percent per year, and protect their families from retribution. The report describes individual instances of abuse such as the following:

  • Thirteen men from Nepal, promised jobs in hotels in Jordan, were instead sent to work for a government contractor in Iraq. Twelve of the men were kidnapped by insurgents and executed. The thirteenth man was prevented from going home for fifteen months.
  • In 2008, 1,000 South Asian workers protested outside of Baghdad. They had been confined to a windowless warehouse without pay or work for three months.
  • Another group of workers incurred debts up to $5000 for jobs that never materialized, and were forced to live in huts made out of tarp and pieces of carpet. The workers had no access to food or water.

While the United States has a zero-tolerance policy toward human trafficking, existing measures are failing to curb the entrapment and abuse of foreign workers. “Accountability exists in theory but not in practice: to date, the U.S. government has yet to fine or prosecute a single contractor for trafficking- or labor-related offenses,” the report states. The ACLU recommends making changes to prevention, investigation, and prosecution policies in order to protect workers.

–Alex Brown

Economy

Rep. Allen West: Democrats Practice The ‘Most Insidious Form Of Slavery In The World Today’

By Guest Blogger on Feb 16, 2012 at 9:25 am

In a floor speech last night, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) attempted to expound on the Republican party’s record of defending personal freedom over the past 150 years. However, as often happens when West speaks, the rhetoric quickly turned nasty.

West turned the subject away from the GOP’s record to the Democratic Party’s supposed dislike of equality, saying that the Democrats’ support for a robust social safety net amounts to “the most insidious form of slavery remaining in the world today”:

“Our party firmly believes in the safety net,” West said in a late Wednesday floor speech. “We reject the idea of the safety net becoming a hammock.

“For this reason, the Republican value of minimizing government dependence is particularly beneficial to the poorest among us,” he continued. “Conversely, the Democratic appetite for ever-increasing redistributionary handouts is in fact the most insidious form of slavery remaining in the world today, and it does not promote economic freedom.”

West is either unaware or callously dismissive of the fact that there are an estimated 12.3 million actual forced laborers around the globe, according to the International Labour Organization. Among them are many sweatshop workers held illegally and paid very little, girls and women forced into prostitution, and many others.

The issue of slavery, while legally settled in the United States, has not been solved globally. In fact, according to the United Nations’ Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking, “estimated global annual profits made from the exploitation of all trafficked forced labour are US $31.6 billion.”

Of course, it is possible that West believes that support for the social safety net is a greater evil than actual slavery. But if that’s the case, there are millions of people worldwide who disagree with him.

– Zachary Bernstein

NEWS FLASH

Village Voice Founder’s Son Joins Campaign To Stop Child Sex Trafficking On Backpage.com | John Mailer, the son of Village Voice co-founder Norman Mailer, has joined a campaign on Change.org calling on Village Voice Media to shut down the adult section of Backpage.com, where child sex trafficking “is becoming a disturbing trend.” Mailer said that “the fact of the matter is that Village Voice is making money from selling advertisements that others have used to buy and sell minors for sex.” In an August 2010 prostitution sting following a suspicious Backpage.com ad, police arrested a Georgia man for trafficking two 17-year-old girls. Before that arrest, police charged four people in Denver for forcing a teen girl into prostitution. So far, more than 80,000 people have joined the Change.org petition demanding that Village Voice Media remove Backpage.com’s adult section.

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Jan 13, 2012 at 11:00 am

NEWS FLASH

States Fail To Crack Down On Sex Trafficking | According to a new report by the advocacy group Shared Hope International, too many states “still inadvertently provide safe havens when it comes to sex trafficking.” More than half the states the group examined got grades of D or F for failing to pass laws that protect children who are pushed into the sex trade and punish those who seek out their services. Sex trafficking is so misunderstood and understudied that experts aren’t even sure how many victims there are every year, but estimates start around 100,000 people in the U.S.

By Marie Diamond on Dec 1, 2011 at 9:30 am

Alyssa

The Supply and Demand Problems in Sex Trafficking Movies

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jun 7, 2011 at 1:48 pm

I love Rachel Weisz as a crusader: she’s got those big, vulnerable, open features that can simultaneously express steel will and naivete—after she disappeared as an active presence from The Constant Gardener, you could see why Ralph Fiennes would chase after her ghost and her moral example:

And it looks like she’ll be quite good in The Whistleblower, which I would see even if it looked dreadful, to further the noble cause of getting more Benedict Cumberbatch on American screens large and small.

The thing, and this was what bothered me about the second season of The Wire, is that while it’s absolutely to address the supply problem in sex trafficking, you’re only telling part of the story if you make sex slavery a story about scary foreigners. The demand side of the story is an important one not just because it explains why this exists as a business, but because of what it reveals about American attitudes towards gender and sex. This is not a problem that only exists out there in the vague and scary beyond. When women are sold and shipped to the United States, they are forced to have sex with actual people here, and that’s a harder thing to face up to.

If someone hasn’t bought the rights to Amy Fine Collins’ excellent Vanity Fair piece about a major sex trafficking investigation and trial in Hartford, Conn., then Detective Deborah Scates is the kind of real person that some actress of middling years could really sink her teeth into. Done correctly, the evil and stupidity of the pimps she puts in jail would be less evidence of bumbling criminality than of our communal blindness and complicity, of how easy it is to do this to women. And it could really take a cold, hard look at what people who pay to have sex with unwilling prostitutes tell themselves about what they’re doing. Fine writes: “Most of the johns were startled to learn that the girls were not acting of their own free will—75 to 80 percent of prostitutes don’t. The men believed the ads, and the legend of the Happy Hooker. Each of them also assumed they were the one exception to the rule of the repulsive customer.” That’s worth putting on-screen and really dramatizing, even if viewers will have a hard time believing it.

Security

State Department Report On Human Trafficking Lists U.S. As A ‘Suspect Nation’ For The First Time

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Jun 16, 2010 at 10:10 am

tip-report-2010Earlier this week, the State Department released its annual report on “Trafficking in Persons.” For the first time in its history, the U.S. was listed as a “suspect nation” in a report that experts describe as one that is “candid” and “doesn’t pull any punches.” “Human trafficking is not someone else’s problem,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. “Involuntary servitude is not something we think or hope doesn’t exist in our own communities.” Though the U.S. received the highest ranking in terms of its efforts to combat human trafficking, the State Department still highlighted various weaknesses — many which relate directly to the nation’s broken immigration.

The U.S. is described as “a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced labor, debt bondage, and forced prostitution.” According the State Department, NGO reports and prosecutions indicate that private recruiters for temporary worker programs often charge excessive fees, which leave migrant workers “vulnerable to debt bondage; identity documents are confiscated; and victims feel they risk deportation should they report labor violations.” The Kansas City Star has further reported that many times victims are threatened by their traffickers. “If I kill you, I won’t get in any trouble. No one knows you are here. You don’t exist,” one victim was told by her trafficker. To make matters worse, the State Department points out that local police who are authorized to enforce immigration law under the controversial 287(g) program and trained in victim-based immigration relief have not “enhanced the response to or identification of trafficking victims or other immigrant victims of crime.” Advocates have also encountered difficulty “securing law enforcement assistance to request public benefits and immigration relief.”

The biggest challenge is, because the immigration status of the victims is dependent on their employment-based visa, victims are difficult to identify and unlikely to seek help on their own. However, assistance is available. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVSA) allows for foreign human trafficking victims to obtain “immigration relief,” or work authorization that makes them eligible for legal permanent residency and eventually qualify for citizenship. The TVSA additionally mandates that victims not be inappropriately incarcerated, fined, or otherwise penalized for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of being trafficked. However, the State Department reports that there have been several instances in which trafficking victims have gone unidentified in immigration detention. The Kansas City Star has blamed that on the fact that immigration agents simply don’t screen enough for trafficking victims when going about their enforcement efforts. Regulations also allow for the debarment of employers who abuse the temporary worker programs, but during the reporting period no employers were debarred — despite what seems like common knowledge that violations are occurring.

While none of the State Department’s recommendations deal specifically with fixing the immigration system, experts maintain that “whatever progress is made in the United States will be limited until lawmakers — and the American public — finally accept that human trafficking is but one dimension of illegal migration.”

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