In Mexico, human trafficking is often operated by those in power

Human trafficking is often associated with organized crime or gangs operating the smuggling. In Mexico, the perpetrators of human trafficking are sometimes those in positions of power within the government.

One reporter exposed some of this abuse of power and now receives death threats every day because of it. Lydia Cacho Ribeiro recently spoke in New York about her investigations. Inter Press Service writer Melanie Haider attended the event.

She has investigated gender violence and sex trafficking and published numerous stories and books on the subject. Her 2005 book "The Demons of Eden" exposed an international child pornography and sex trafficking ring in Cancún which involved senators and politicians.

She was thrown in jail and tortured for publishing that book. When she finally came out and started talking, the government tried to label her a terrorist, but without success. She traveled for six years to investigate the world of international sex trafficking of women, resulting in her latest book "The Slaves of Power" in 2010.

Together with non-governmental organisations and a grassroots activist network, Cacho started a prevention campaign called "No estoy en venta" - "I am not for sale" - against sex trafficking that includes a video to give young people tools they need to protect themselves. The video explains anti-trafficking laws, the tactics traffickers use to lure their victims, and other aspects of the issue.

"It is getting away from discourse of fear and moral panic and all this (crap) and going back to the discourse of 'you have the power of the information, use it for your own good and how to protect yourself and other kids in school'," she stressed.

But her fight has not come without a price. Cacho told IPS that she has a lengthy checklist of safety strategies she must adhere to in her daily life because of the threats she receives, such as using a different name to make hotel reservations when she travels and constantly switching phone cards.

"I guess right now in Mexico my biggest challenge is to stay alive," she said.

Video: America's Dirty Secret: Child Sex Trafficking

From the Associated Press, a video about child sex trafficking in the United States.

Slavery is still a part of today's economy

The practice of human trafficking has given us more slavery today than at any time in the history of the world. The victims of trafficking are often given a general proposition to leave their home, only to find the terms of the deal changed once they arrive to the new country. The people trafficked then have to work off any agreement made with their controllers, often through sex trade or domestic work.

From the Inter Press Service, writer Simba Russeau gives us more details on this growing problem.

"For many, the simplicity of the transaction when dealing with illegal recruiters is more attractive," Pardis Mahdavi, author of ‘Gridlock: Labour, Migration and Human Trafficking’ told IPS. "If governments could put into place a system that allows the legal channels for migration to be easier, it could limit the number of workers migrating under informal middlemen."

Slavery, which is a system where people are treated as property and forced to work, is very much a part of today’s global economy. It rivals and in some regions eclipses the international drug trade.

There are nearly 27 million slaves worldwide, generating 1.3 billion dollars in annual profits, according to conservative estimates. Some estimates show a world slave population as high as 200 million, with the majority held under debt bondage.

Considered a new form of slavery, human trafficking is one of the fastest growing criminal industries in the world. The United Nations (UN) estimates that nearly three million people are trafficked annually.

"Global human trafficking is fueled by the insatiable demand for unmediated access to other human beings - to their labour, their personhood, to all that makes each of us unique, and all of us generic," Eileen Scully, author of ‘Pre-Cold War Traffic in Sex Labor’ told IPS.

"The demand in EU countries for ‘exotic women’, for example, is not merely a demand for non-local women, or for women from cultures that supposedly do not stigmatise prostitution. This demand is, rather, for ‘trafficked women’ and ‘trafficked children’, meaning individuals who have been manoeuvered into untenable, inescapable situations, where having once said yes to the general proposition, they are unable to say no to the particulars when later presented."

The new International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Convention on Domestic Workers adopted in June aims to ensure that women - who constitute nearly 50 percent of the global migrant population – are treated as human beings.

"When male migrant workers come to work in construction or other service and industry sectors in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, they are protected under the labour law. Even if they don’t have full rights their work is recognised as work under the law, which is not the case for domestic workers (in the Arab region)," Simel Esim, gender specialist at the ILO's Regional Office for the Arab States told IPS.

India makes an effort to employ rescued sex trafficking victims

India was recently declared as one of the top five most dangerous places for women due to the amount of human trafficking for sex that runs through the country. An article today shows of one government effort to rehabilitate the victims and to give them employment after they are rescued.

From this Press Trust of India article that we found at the Hindustan Times, we read of more details about the trafficking rescue program.

Fifty young trafficked women are now working as security guards at a government-run school here and some corporate houses after the CRPF offered to train them, giving them a chance to start life afresh. "Over 50 young women were given security training by the CRPF at Burmu in Ranchi district," Sanja y Kumar Mishra, state coordinator of Action against Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation of Children and Women, said.

Most of the women have now found employment as security guards at the government-run Kasturba Girls School while some corporate houses have also engaged them in their projects, he said.

Besides these 50 women, many other trafficked girls in the state have now have a better life after undergoing training.

19-year-old Sahita, who was lured to Delhi on the promise of a job and made to work for hours as a domestic help, has now a better life after being rehabilitated as a housekeeper in a hotel here in Jharkhand's capital.

"I was made to work for 14 to 16 hours a day. I was not allowed to go out. I was virtually imprisoned and taken sexually advantage of till I was rescued by a NGO in 2008," said Sahita.

Video: China's government trafficking babies from poor families

From Al Jazeera, a video about China's extreme measures to enforcing the one child policy.

Overnight Links for December 16th

The UK is giving some emergency humanitarian assistance to Somalia. 1.5 million people have been displaced due to ongoing violence, so the emergency aid will provide food, water and shelter for those people. This Shabelle Media Network article from All Africa gives us the details. 

80 million children work in Africa and experts warn that that number could increase. From Africa News, writer Rubakana Eddy explains how most of thee children are victims of exploitation.

From the Inter Press Service more details on Israel's mass deportation of African migrants. Writer Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa Al-Omrani find that some observers are likening it to building a new wall against another people.

Finally, Reuters Alert Net is providing an audio newscast of world headlines that we will begin embedding into our overnight links post.

A look at NGOs working a border city of India to stop human trafficking

From IRIN, a look at how anti-human trafficking NGOs work a border city of India to stop people being trafficked in from Nepal.

The daily flow of Nepalis over the border to India is relentless, as they come by car, motorcycle, rickshaw and horse-drawn carriage, but mostly on foot, through the main gate at the border city of Nepalganj.

Not all the migrants are legitimate, however, and there are lookouts to prevent traffickers’ false promises from being realized. Waiting by the side of the road, Puspa Rana and Bimala Shrestha blend in with the rickshaw drivers, food vendors and resting travellers.

The two women with Saathi, a local anti-trafficking NGO, notice a young woman walking briskly with a young man, and pull the two aside for questioning.

But the couple's story checks out; they are going to India to work as potato farmers.

Just a few minutes later, two workers with the NGO International Nepal Fellowship (INF) hand over to Saathi a young couple whose behaviour, they say, is suspicious.

“When we asked them where they are going, the girl started weeping and the man tried to run away,” said Hem Bahadur Thapa of INF.

The girl said she was 14 and that she had married the man, who appeared at least several years older, a month previously.

Twice she changed her explanation for the trip: first it was for work, then for a medical check-up, and lastly, to visit her sister.

“We think he could be a broker, but we have don’t have any clear evidence yet,” said Puspa Rana of Saathi, referring to the man.

The NGO workers then escorted the couple to local police, who are supposed to open an investigation.

Looking for a better life

Nepal’s per capita GDP is just US$467 and often substantially lower in rural areas.

Such poverty compels some 1.5 million Nepalis every year to work abroad, mostly in neighbouring India but, increasingly, in other countries in Asia and in the Gulf, according to the government's Central Bureau of Statistics.

Many find work across the border on their own; others are enticed. Traffickers offer poorly educated rural Nepali women jobs as domestic workers or factory staff that promise steady pay.

However, the deals can be a ruse, say anti-trafficking NGOs.

Once out of their country, some trafficked Nepali females are sold into bonded labour as domestic or sex workers with no pay and no way out unless their families pay for their return, or the women are rescued or flee, say rights groups.

According to researchers from the UK-based University of Southampton in the most recent and comprehensive study on this topic, released in 2005, most trafficked females are between the ages of 13 and 18, unmarried, illiterate and born into the Mongoloid or Dalit “untouchable” castes - which while no longer legal are still widely observed.

The report, based on interviews with victims of trafficking at NGO shelters, estimated some 7,000 Nepali women and girls are trafficked annually, through deception or abduction, into India for forced sex work.

NGOs say the report’s findings remain true today.

On the lookout

Saathi and fellow anti-trafficking NGO Maiti Nepal say that in the first 10 months of 2010 at the Nepalganj checkpoint, they counselled more than 16,000 border crossers, sent back 106 and were contacted by the families of 99 missing persons.

“First, we look at their behaviour. Do they look concerned?” said Bharat Singh Rathaur, the police officer in charge of the border outpost.

“Second, we see who they are with. Are they on their own – which makes us concerned – or with friends and family?”

Since police and NGOs have stepped up their surveillance at major transit points in recent years, traffickers are using more isolated routes along the open 1,880km border between Nepal and India, said Rathaur.

Nepali women were banned by their government from working in the Gulf in 1998 because of safety concerns, leading traffickers increasingly to circumvent the ban by transiting to third countries through India, said Navaraj Joshi, head of Saathi in Nepalganj.

Video: Human trafficking in the Netherlands

From Al Jazeera, the story of a human trafficking survivor from the Netherlands.

Human trafficking in Texas

Occasionally we take a break from world poverty to link to a story about human trafficking.

The state of Texas has one of the main trafficking routes in the United States. Texas authorities have recognized the problem and have established some of the toughest laws against human trafficking found in the states..

From this Texas Tribune story, writer Julian Aguilar sheds some light on the problem and also explains how those laws can sometimes go too far.

Human trafficking now exceeds all illegal enterprises except for illicit drug and weapon smuggling in terms of profits derived, which can be as high as $32 billion annually. And Texas has the dubious distinction of sharing a large slice of that pie.

The state is home to one of the busiest routes for trafficking humans: the stretch of Interstate Highway 10 that runs from El Paso to Houston. The most recent data from 2007 indicates 30 percent of calls made to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline to report cases of alleged human trafficking were made from Texas, according to the Polaris Project, a Washington-based nonprofit that operates the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline and lobbies for stronger state and federal anti-trafficking legislation.

Legislators and law enforcement officials aren’t sitting idly by, however. Texas has a reputation as one of the country’s leaders in attacking the problem: The Polaris Project considers the state one of the most proactive in curbing the practice, as it meets a majority of the 10 criteria the group has set forth as a barometer to measure success. Penalties for trafficking children here are also among the most severe in the nation. A person found guilty of pimping a child, which is what happens to the majority of children trafficked, faces a second-degree felony charge, punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Pimping an adult, by comparison, is a Class A misdemeanor.
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Texas’ record of being tough on crime has often meant harsh penalties for child victims of human trafficking, as they have historically been charged with criminal acts of prostitution despite being forced to engage in sexual acts against their will. But lawmakers are encouraged by a Texas Supreme Court ruling in June that reversed a lower court's decision to charge a 13-year-old female with a misdemeanor crime of prostitution.

In a 6-to-3 decision, the court ruled in The Matter of B.W. that a minor child, known only in court documents by her initials, could not be charged with prostitution due to her age. The initial charge of prostitution was filed after the teen consented to sex with an undercover officer during a sting operation in Houston. She received 18 months of probation, a sentence that was upheld on appeal before being overturned by the high court.

“The Texas Supreme Court recognizes that Texas will treat these [children] as victims and not offenders,” says Houston attorney Ann Johnson, who was appointed to represent B.W. on appeal. “This is the first case like it in the nation, so Texas is leading the way and saying that we’re going to address this issue and we’re going to protect these children.”

A call for tougher action against human trafficking in East Africa

From the Voice of America, a story on human trafficking in East Africa that reminds us that victims of trafficking fall across both genders.

The International Organization for Migration says there’s an urgent need for tougher action against human trafficking in East Africa. The IOM has released a new assessment of the problem, saying men, women and children of all ages are being exploited.

Human trafficking often begins with the basic desire to seek a better life in another country. However, the IOM says that dream often turns into tragedy with exploitation by family members, religious acquaintances, businessmen and retired prostitutes.

Alice Kimani, the organization’s counter-trafficking program officer in Nairobi, says, “In East Africa, all the countries have been identified as sources, transit and destination countries for human trafficking.”

Although it affects both genders and all ages, Kimani says some are more attractive targets for traffickers.

“You find that children and young people are more vulnerable. But we also see a trend of men being trafficked, even older men for purposes of forced labor, though not in large numbers,” she says.

Many types of exploitation

“For example,” she says, “in Kenya we found women and children being subjected to sexual exploitation. We have found them exploited for domestic work. We’ve recently found some children from Tanzania trafficked to Kenya for street begging. We’ve also come across children who are trafficked to work in the agricultural sector. They are employed in farms and they are subjected to hard labor, forced labor.”

The assessment also found a lot of internal trafficking within Tanzania. Children from rural areas are lured by the promise of going to school. The tempting offer often comes from relatives or friends of their parents. They never make it to school. Instead, they are forced to do domestic labor.

It’s difficult for the IOM to give a good estimate as to how many people in East Africa are victims of human traffickers. “Because of lack of identification techniques or a centralized way of collecting data, a lot of this information gets lost in the way. So the victims may get assisted or they may not get assisted and we’ll never know their numbers,” Kimani says.

Organizing against traffickers

Some 50 senior East African government officials, civil society members and international experts reviewed the IOM’s assessment at a recent meeting. As a result, they proposed the organization take steps to help establish a regional network to share information on trafficking. That could eventually lead to a centralized database that could be shared with law enforcement agencies.

The organization says, currently, Rwanda is the only country in the region where the government has established both shelter and hotline services to assist victims of gender violence and trafficking.

Alice Kimani says they also called for implementation of a region-wide 116 emergency hotline number to report possible cases of human trafficking.

“It was recognized that 116 [is] a number that has been adopted by many countries in the region. For example, Mozambique and Zimbabwe already have 116. Kenya also has a 116. And 116 is a number that has been used in other countries as a very child-friendly line. So the participants were recommending for this number to actually be adopted by all the countries in East Africa,” she says.

Many victims are afraid to talk about their experiences. They say if they go public, traffickers could hurt their families or they could be stigmatized if they returned to their homes.

Kimani says, “It is only through counseling and assisting them that we can actually assist them to come out of that sort of hibernation.

Besides counseling, the International Organization for Migration also offers adult education or business classes to help them find jobs.

Continued violence in the Eastern DRC is contributing to the human trafficking problem. Buses and lorries carry war-weary Congolese to Uganda in hopes of finding a better life, but they often become prey of traffickers.

Human trafficking victims shunned when returned home

From IRIN, a story about human sex trafficking victims from Myanmar who are shunned when they return home.

When Kyi Kyi Thein* and her teenage daughter took up an offer for work in neighbouring Thailand, they did not expect to be smuggled by sea and locked up in a shrimp factory.

Fortunately, they and 64 others were rescued by police in 2006. They stayed in Thailand for two more years during court proceedings against the shrimp factory and won the case, along with US$950 each in compensation.

Many Burmese, who have faced exploitation, violence, forced labour or forced prostitution abroad, return home penniless and are shunned as failures. But for Kyi Kyi Thein and her daughter, the payment helped them to rebuild their lives.

“They received compensation, and it has really helped those victims to be reintegrated into the community,” said Ohnmar Ei Ei Chaw, of the UN Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking.

An estimated 32 percent of the population live below the poverty line, but of the millions of Burmese who attempt to escape poverty by working abroad, many accrue huge debts and repatriation can be difficult.

“We need to put more pressure on the destination country and the offenders there. If those at the origin [country] have to bear the burden, we feel it’s really unfair," Ohnmar Ei Ei Chaw said.

Tough times abroad and at home

After arriving at the Ranya Paew shrimp factory in central Samut Sakhon Province, 50km west of Bangkok, Kyi Kyi Thein and her daughter were told that their earnings of 30 cents per kilogram of peeled shrimp would go toward a $1,000 debt for their trafficking fees.

For the next several months, they were forced to work 20-hour shifts and saw co-workers who tried to escape stripped and tortured.

One worker peeled 18-20kg per day, but did not receive any salary until her fourth month - even then, it was only $5, according to the AFL-CIO-affiliated Solidarity Center.

Back home, villagers at first did not believe their story.

“For four or five months, people discriminated against us,” Kyi Kyi Thein said during a visit to Yangon from their home in Bago Division. “They didn’t know the real story and thought we had been in prison.”

“Even if they were working as domestic workers in the other country, the community thinks the girls are coming back from brothels or were being abused or sexually exploited by their employers,” said Khin Thant, who works in the anti-trafficking in persons unit of World Vision.

“People call them bad women, and sometimes people refuse to buy the food or the things they are selling,” said Moe Moe Swe, also with World Vision’s anti-trafficking unit.

“Sometimes the families had to invest some amount of money for their trip abroad. When they come back empty-handed, the families don’t welcome them back,” Moe Moe Swe said.

Destination Thailand

The International Organization for Migration (IOM), reported that an estimated three million Burmese have migrated abroad but cited other figures suggesting that as many as five million might be living abroad, with Thailand the main destination. Myanmar has a population of around 50 million.

The Thai government, in an effort to legalize migrants, has registered more than 800,000 Burmese, but the IOM estimates there are another million undocumented labourers from the region in Thailand.

Since the 2007 establishment of the Myanmar police anti-trafficking unit, there have been more prosecutions, Ohnmar Ei Ei Chaw said.

Myanmar police tallied 1,251 traffickers and 265 smugglers arrested between 2006 and 2009. Those cases were linked to 2,000 trafficking survivors and smuggled migrants – a mere fraction of the actual numbers, experts say.

The US State Department’s 2010 Trafficking in Persons Report has placed Myanmar among 13 countries not making sufficient efforts to combat trafficking.

Comment: Malaysia needs another law to hold child traffickers accountable

Malaysia has taken steps to fight child trafficking with its borders. The US has recognized their efforts by recently upgrading their status. Fines and penalties against child trafficking for sex have also doubled in Malaysian law.

Yet a piece in the teen paper Malaysian Today says the country needs to make another step. Writer Pauline Wong tells us why it's important that Malaysia signs on to the Optional Protocols in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Just last month, Malaysia was upgraded to Tier 2 from Tier 3 in the United States Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, showing recognition of the efforts of the government to fight illicit trafficking.

And even more recently, the penalties of human trafficking were increased 10-fold, showing a move in the right direction to deter and curb this crime against humanity.

But despite all that, Malaysia is still one of only three countries in South East Asia who have not signed on to the Optional Protocols (Articles 34 and 35) in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) - a shocking fact, for these protocols are crucial in putting precedence on the rights and protection of children victimised by sexual trafficking.
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According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Articles 34 and 35 of the CRC state that the government should protect children from all forms of sexual exploitation and abuse and take all measures possible to ensure that they are not abducted, sold or trafficked. In this protocol, it is made compulsory to criminalise these offenses. This Optional Protocol strikes hard on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, and is to supplement the Convention, and to provide detailed requirements to end sexual abuse and exploitation of children.

What Now?

But Malaysia is not bound by these Optional Protocols. Malaysian children are at great risk of sexual exploitation with little to no consequence to the monsters who are responsible.

"So many Malaysians are appalled at the crime of the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, yet no concrete action is undertaken," said Noreen Proseeur, Training and Education Director of P.S. The Children. "The Optional Protocol, once ratified, will be a solid platform to advocate for meaningful child protection with respect to the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography."

The Optional Protocol (to the CRC on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography) reinforces and extends the duty of the government to initiate protection measures relating to the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, explained Nooreen.

"It is a lack of political initiative that stops the government from signing to these protocols - they don't deem it important," she said. "The government is only looking into human trafficking, but much more still needs to be done to stop child sex trafficking."
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One organisation taking matters into their hands is The Body Shop, who in collaboration with their non-governmental organisation (NGO) partners, are embarking upon their second year of their campaign against child sex trafficking.

Last year, The Body Shop launched their 'Stop Sex Trafficking of Children and Young People' campaign with the aim of creating awareness of this highly secretive and lucrative crime, urging the people to face the facts: Malaysia is a destination, transit and more shockingly, source country for trafficking, with an estimated 90 children getting trafficked every month.

This year, they are pushing even harder for the signing of the Optional Protocols - and the reason is clear.

"Child pornography is an extremely grave concern, now more so than ever. Technology has made it so easy to film a child for pornographic purposes; times have moved on and so has technology," said The Body Shop MD, Datin Mina Cheah-Foong. "You can do so much more that you could not do before. It's as easy as installing a spy camera in a kindergarten, for instance, and the pictures get circulated all over the world among pedophiles!"

Human traffickers using Ireland more as a gateway

A child protection group says that human traffickers are increasingly using Ireland as a gateway into Britain. Ecpat says the traffickers are using Ireland more because their traditional routes into Britain from France now have tightened security.

From Ireland's Wexford People newspaper, we read more on what is within the report.

Children as young as three years old are being bought and sold for sex, as domestic servants and for forced marriages.

The report by international child protection organisation Ecpat commended the UK for "notable efforts" in fighting child trafficking, but said Ireland had only made "some progress".

And while Ireland was doing better than some other European countries such as Sweden or Greece, campaigners pointed out it was lagging at the bottom of the progress rankings.

Ecpat said Ireland was also considered a destination for trafficked children as well as a transit country to the UK. Ireland is a source country for tourists travelling to destinations such as the Philippines and Thailand to have sex with children.

"Traffickers are finding getting through the 'classic' routes into Britain - ferries from France or through the larger London airports - increasingly difficult due to heightened security," the report said.

Child trafficking dangers in Yemen

From IRIN, a story on child trafficking activities along the Yemen/Saudi Arabia border.

Ali Hassan Salem was 10 when he was trafficked to Saudi Arabia. “When I grew up I did not go to school, but cleaned cars,” he said. Earning very little money in Yemen and having heard of the opportunities in Saudi Arabia, Ali decided to try his luck there.

“No-man’s-land between the borders is a harsh place,” Ali said. “There are wild animals and criminal gangs. I was lucky that nothing happened.”

In Jizan across the border he found work at a construction site. “I didn’t earn much and after expenses for food I only managed to save 200 SAR [US$55],” he said. “It was hard work and the Saudis mistreated us and called us dogs.”

After a month of hard labour and sleeping in an abandoned house with some men from Egypt and Somalia, Ali wanted to go home. “I was scared all the time and I missed my family.”

However, Ali was stopped at the border by Saudi police. “We tried to run away, but we were beaten with belts and batons and I spent three days in a detention centre,” he said.

Today Ali has this advice for any Yemeni children trying to go to Saudi Arabia to find work: “Don’t go. It’s dangerous and many come home damaged.”

However, with growing poverty and a shaky ceasefire in the north, there are fears that child trafficking may increase.

Border patrols

There are no reliable figures on child trafficking from Yemen. The Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour (MOSAL) says the number of children trafficked to Saudi Arabia are down from 900 in 2008 to 602 in 2009 due to awareness campaigns and collaboration between the Yemeni and Saudi authorities.

However, others say the dip in numbers is due to enhanced Saudi border patrols as a result of the conflict in the north. “If the restrictions [on the borders] are lifted the numbers will go up again,” said Jamal al-Haddi of The Charitable Society for Social Welfare (CSSW), a local NGO.

Mona Ali Salem of MOSAL’s Child Labour Unit worries that when internally displaced persons (IDPs) start returning to their homes in Saada, poverty will force many to put their children to work. “I am worried that children will be sent to work in the big cities and Saudi Arabia,” she said.

According to al-Haddi, child trafficking is linked to poverty. “The economic situation is bad in Yemen… Many have lost their homes and livelihoods because of the war [intermittent fighting between government forces and Houthi-led rebels in the north since 2004],” he said.

A 2008 study by CSSW entitled Situation Analysis of Child Trafficking said 70-80 percent of families interviewed sent their children away because of poverty.

“When people return many will have no choice but to send their children to Saudi Arabia or start smuggling. There is no other work,” said al-Haddi. “In many instances they will rely on their children for money.”

Children exploited

Children are both smuggled into Saudi Arabia to find work, and themselves also smuggle goods across the border, al-Haddi said, adding that while there were no accurate figures, it was estimated that two thirds of children living in the border areas of Harradh were involved in smuggling. While adults can face long prison sentences if caught, children do not.

But it is a dangerous business and often leaves children without much of an education in Yemen. “Many children leave school, as they work at night,” said al-Haddi. “Sometimes the Saudi authorities crack down on smuggling. Often children will try to run away, which results in them sometimes being shot at and wounded or killed,” he said.

On a visit to the Yemeni border village of al-Khadour in 2008, al-Haddi was told there were hundreds of children with disabilities as a result of gunshot wounds or having been hit by Saudi border patrol cars whilst trying to flee.

According to a report by CHF International (a US-based NGO working for “long-lasting positive change in low and moderate income communities around the world”), over 60 percent of children who had worked in Saudi Arabia were exposed to physical abuse, and over 10 percent reported sexual abuse. More than 80 percent of children were pushed by their parents into smuggling.

Education aid

To help reduce trafficking, CHF - in cooperation with CSSW, through their Access Plus Programme - is looking to work with five government schools near the three al-Mazraq IDP camps in Haradh District, Hajjah Governorate, to reach IDP children, as well as children vulnerable to trafficking in host communities.

The plan is to provide primary education for at least 2,000 girls and boys aged 6-14, of whom about 70 percent are IDPs and 30 percent local. There are also plans to provide employment for 500 young people aged 13-17, of whom 30 percent are local and 70 percent IDPs, through informal education and vocational training.

To further help curb and counter child trafficking and smuggling, the UN Children’s Fund is assisting Yarmouk Mazraq School (near the three al-Mazraq IDP camps) where some 1,250 IDP children are currently enrolled. The local authorities have enrolled 299 IDP children in other schools in Haradh District.

US critiques self in human trafficking report

The U.S. State Department has released their annual report on human trafficking. In this year's report, the state department turns a critical eye on their own efforts to fight trafficking and says it could do a better job. The U.S. finds only a fraction of human trafficking victims. When some victims are found, law enforcement officials usually do not provide any help to them.

Experts are applauding this critical look in the report. Past editions ranked nations according to their effectiveness in fighting human trafficking. This is the first report that gives a ranking to the U.S.

From the Kansas City Star, writers Mark Morris and Mike McGraw detail the report. The article is part of the Star's outstanding series on human trafficking.

Kevin Bales, an internationally-recognized expert on human trafficking and the president of the anti-trafficking group Free the Slaves, called the report the best yet in the State Department’s 10-year series of reports, which are mandated by Congress.

“It doesn’t pull any punches,” Bales said of the new report.

Clinton and the 373-page report she unveiled acknowledged that the U.S. was “a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced labor, debt bondage, and forced prostitution.”

The report noted that the U.S. can do much better at fighting such abuses in a number of areas. Despite significant expenditures of tax money, authorities find only a few of the human-trafficking victims thought to be in the country.

The report also said efforts to identify children who are involved in the sex trade are “not well coordinated.”

The report also identified U.S. guest-worker programs as an avenue for labor traffickers and called on authorities to work harder at prosecuting such cases.
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Overall, 22 countries were upgraded from last year’s rankings. Nineteen were downgraded, including Switzerland, which U.S. officials ranked in Tier Two with such countries as Angola, Liberia and Mexico.

Thirty-one countries were rated as Tier One this year along with the United States, indicating that U.S. officials thought those countries made significant efforts to stop human trafficking. There were 28 Tier One countries in 2009.

The report listed 12 countries in Tier Three — the worst category — down from 17 in 2009. Moving out of Tier Three to a higher category were Chad, Fiji, Niger, Swaziland and Syria.

Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/06/14/2017767/us-report-cites-progress-but-more.html#ixzz0qvcvKcCR

Freeing young girls from sexual slavery in Nepal

From IRIN, freeing young girls in Nepal from sexual slavery and human trafficking.

When Shardha Chaudhary was 11 years old, her impoverished parents rented her out for US$17 a year. For the next two years, she endured physical and mental abuse, one of thousands of girls forced to work in slave-like conditions as indentured labourers in Nepal.

Shardha was rescued five months ago in Kathmandu by local NGO Friends of Nepal (FNC) and is slowly recovering.

“Shardha was so malnourished, weighing barely 13kg because of neglect and abuse. She survived extreme inhumanity at the hands of her owners in Kathmandu,” said Manoj Silwal, programme director of the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation (NYOF), an international organization working with FNC.

The practice of selling daughters for indentured servitude - “kamlari” - is done through a middleman, traditionally in western Nepal’s indigenous Tharu community.

Thousands of kamlari girls around Nepal have suffered starvation, rape and other forms of sexual abuse, being burnt and stabbed by their “owners”, according to investigations by NYOF.

Education funding

Raju Dhamala, executive director of FNC, told IRIN that Nepal’s kamlari girls are “safer now as most of them have been rescued, and the parents who were unaware of such abuses are no longer practising this tradition”.

Since 2000, the two NGOs have rescued close to 10,000 kamlaris, though estimates suggest there are 20,000 around the country. Almost 7,000 were younger than 14, and some as young as eight, all working for middle-class and elite families in urban areas. This year, 3,595 girls have been rescued, and the organizations have sent warnings to the households holding the remaining 1,000 kamlaris.

Both FNC and NYOF claim the government fails to support the rehabilitation of rescued girls although government officials say funding has been made available and it is taking steps to be more actively involved in the process.

So far, $1.5 million has been allocated for educational support, but it is barely enough to meet the needs of the rescued girls.

“The government has to address the root problems and educational support covers only the tip of the iceberg,” said Dhamala.

Poverty pressure

With many Nepalese families landless, jobless and hungry, opportunities to make a little extra cash are few and far between, while almost one-third of the country’s 28 million people live below the poverty line on less than $1 a day.

Dhamala said that only the Ministry of Education was involved in the rehabilitation, and the government should mobilize other ministries and come up with a far-reaching economic programme.

“Unless the families get more humanitarian aid and poverty-alleviation support, the risks of the kamlari system resuming are always there,” said Silwal from NYOF.

The government gives reunited families $25 a year towards the education of rescued kamlari girls, but this barely covers school expenses, according to NYOF.

“For the time being, they are not sending off their daughters to work as kamlaris due to social pressure, but for how long they will do that is our concern as most have lost their financial support and were dependent on their children to meet even their basic needs,” said Silwal.

Shanta Chaudhary, 28, a lawmaker who was herself a kamlari at 10, urged the government “to keep its promises to provide humanitarian assistance as part of their rehabilitation, and take measures to protect them from further risks”.

South African police being trained in child exploitation tracking software

A big concern for the upcoming World Cup is a possible increase of child exploitation during the tournament. With many tourists coming to South Africa the fear is that many children or young women will also be brought in to be "rented" during the games.

A Microsoft program manger has helped to develop a software to combat human trafficking. John Hancock developed the Child Exploitation Tracking System with police in Toronto. The program is now spreading to other police departments and officers from South Africa were recently introduced to the software.

From the Globe and Mail, writer Ann Hui talked to Hancock as he visited the training.

“Calling it child pornography just sends the wrong message,” he said of the images shown to him and a group of Microsoft executives in 2003 by former Toronto child-exploitation officer Paul Gillespie. “These were crime scene images. These were children being abused.”

Mr. Hancock, a 37-year-old program manager at Microsoft, was born in the United Kingdom, but grew up near Johannesburg where he lived until his mid-20s. This is why, when helping the Toronto Police in 2003 create the Child Exploitation Tracking System – a software tool that is now used globally to combat child pornography and trafficking – he hoped his home country might one day get the chance to use it.

“There’s a lot of poverty, a lot of children missing parents, and a lot of tourists,” Mr. Hancock said. “It’s the perfect storm for child exploitation and trafficking.”

Seven years later, and amidst concerns of increased abuse during the upcoming World Cup, Mr. Hancock is finally seeing that happen.

On Monday, he watched as a group of South African police officers and criminal prosecutors learned how to use CETS at the Toronto Police College in Etobicoke.

“It’s been the highlight of my career,” Mr. Hancock said.

Although the software won’t be implemented in time for the World Cup, he said he hopes that the other investigation techniques taught will help to immediately combat abuse. Mr. Hancock now lives in Redmond, Wash., but was in Toronto on business and dropped by to watch the training.

The group from South Africa is being trained in areas such as victims’ issues and the proper uses of online sources by the Kids’ Internet Safety Alliance, a non-profit organization started by Mr. Gillespie before leaving the Toronto Police in 2006. Mr. Gillespie estimates there are about one million images online that depict the abuse of about 50,000 children.

Though Mr. Gillespie is careful to say that the South African group is not being trained only because of the World Cup, he acknowledged that large global events like it pose a risk. Last week, UNICEF addressed concerns of exploitation during the World Cup by launching a social networking platform called Red Card contact, aimed at combating abuse.

“For the same reason the Olympics were a challenge – many people in the world coming to one spot, they want to be entertained, they often have a lot of money,” said Mr. Gillespie. “And along with that comes people who are interested in the purchasing or renting of human beings.”

Anti-trafficking laws not sufficient in Egypt

From IRIN, the rise of human trafficking for sex in Egypt, and the lack of laws on the practice.

In the dock stood her parents, a lawyer and a broker, a woman who earned a living marrying underage Egyptian girls to wealthy old men from the Gulf. They pleaded not guilty to trafficking charges at their first court hearing on 20 April.

“If it were me, I’d never put you in jail,” the girl, 14, tearfully told her parents. The girl had been forced to marry a Saudi man, 50 years her senior; her father was paid 10,000 Egyptian pounds (about US$1,881) in return.

A few days later, however, the girl telephoned her father and said she would commit suicide if he did not help her escape her Saudi husband. She said the man did “weird” things to her and later, doctors said she had been abused.

Similar cases have made headlines in the local media, highlighting the issue of sex tourism.

Her parents’ lawyers said hundreds of rich Arabs came to Egypt for a temporary marriage. Some parents, particularly in the poor countryside and the slums of Cairo, marry off their underage daughters to rich men - usually 30 or 40 years older - for money. The marriage lasts a few months and costs an Arab tourist $3,000 at most.

Marrying off their daughters for money is a temporary respite from poverty in a country where more than 23 percent of the 80 million population live below the poverty line, according to the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics.

“Extreme poverty stands behind the rise in this phenomenon,” said Ahmed Seif el-Islam, a lawyer and a human rights advocate. “These parents need money and they view their daughters as a deal that can bring them money.”

Joy Ngozi Ezeilo, the UN special rapporteur on trafficking in persons, who visited the country on 21 April, called on the government to take tougher action to combat what she called “a list of social ills”.

“There’s a growing trend of sexual and economic exploitation of underage girls through seasonal/temporary marriage, domestic servitude, other forms of sexual exploitation and prostitution,” Ezeilo said.

“Instead of offering protection to their daughters, parents force them to get married this way,” said Farkhunda Hassan, head of Egypt’s National Women’s Council, a government-affiliated agency. “They’re paid to do this and this is the crux of human trafficking,” she said at a recent conference in Cairo.

Egypt is a source, transit and destination country for women and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labour and sexual exploitation, according to the 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report by the US State Department.

“Culture to blame”

The new anti-trafficking law, which was approved by the Upper House of the Egyptian Parliament on 24 April and the Lower House on 2 May, states that individuals or groups who commit human trafficking crimes will be given life sentences and fined between 50,000 ($9,090) and 200,000 Egyptian pounds ($36,363).

The government is responsible for protecting survivors and offering the necessary medical, education, and social assistance so that they can be part of society again, according to the new law. A special fund will be created to offer the necessary financial assistance to victims of human trafficking.

But some rights activists were not convinced. “Laws alone can’t bring a social ailment like this one to an end,” Seif el-Islam said. “This is a matter of culture and social habits. We must address the root causes of the problem in order to solve it,” he said.

Trafficking convictions improve slowly in Nigeria

From IRIN, the slow but improving progress of catching human traffickers in Nigeria.

Interceptions and convictions of human traffickers and smugglers have risen year-on-year in Nigeria since the government passed legislation to ban the trade in 2005, but the volume of trafficking is still high and progress on convictions needs to speed up, say government officials.

"Trafficking rates have come down,,,and convictions are up," Ego Uzoezie, Commissioner of Women Affairs in Anambra State Ministry told IRIN, "but the progress is not as high as we'd like when we compare it to the efforts the government has put in."

Nigeria uses the UN definition of trafficking, which includes recruiting, transporting, harbouring or receiving people through use of force or coercion, abduction, or fraud; and exploiting a person in a position of vulnerability for forced labour or servitude.

How many men, women and children are trafficked each year in Nigeria is unknown – the only figures on record are the number of people law enforcement officers have intercepted since the National Agency Prohibiting Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) was set up in 2004.

Over 4,000 victims were intercepted between 2004 and the end of 2009, with the number rising each year to reach 1,000 in 2007 and 1,269 in 2008, according to NAPTIP.

Most children trafficked and smuggled in Nigeria are sent by families to work as domestic labourers, with a minority used as street beggars, or sold into marriage or to illegal orphanages, according to NAPTIP. Families pay middlemen to take children across the borders to West African destinations like Togo and Cameroon, or north to Saudi Arabia, said Simon Chuzie Egede, the head of NAPTIP.

The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) child protection specialist in Abuja, Sharon Oladiji, said poverty was still the main reason families pushed children to leave home to find work.

"I was sold by my mother because of a 20,000 naira [US$137] debt she owed a yam-seller. Later I was forced into early marriage by him [the seller]," said Grace Ikede (not her real name), from Rivers State. She was lucky - the man she married helped her trace her family when he heard her story. "We are on the look-out for the seller, but he is on the run," she told IRIN.

Convictions up

The government has been making progress in the fight against traffickers and smugglers, partly because the Ministry of Women's Affairs, NAPTIP, the police, immigration services, and child protection agencies such as UNICEF, have started working closely together, Egede told IRIN. Prosecutions have steadily risen since 2006, with 67 traffickers convicted between 2004 and the end of 2009, UNICEF said.

On the US State Department list rating countries' efforts to eliminate the worst forms of trafficking, Nigeria rose from tier-two to tier-one status

"This is a clear sign Nigeria has made progress in preventing trafficking, punishing traffickers and protecting children," UNICEF's Oladiji told IRIN.

In 2009 the government also set up a Victims Trust Fund, through which assets confiscated from traffickers are transferred to victims. NAPTIP said so far the assets of two traffickers in Sokoto State had been seized.

But prosecuting traffickers was still "achingly slow", Oladiji said, with dozens of cases awaiting trial. A 2009 report on Nigeria's justice system noted that detainees could wait up to nine years for conviction. NAPTIP's southern zonal coordinator, Ijeoma Okoronkwo, said it would take state-by-state reform of the prosecution system to speed up the rate.

Next steps

Oladiji told IRIN that preventing trafficking would have to be stepped up in view of the sluggish prosecution service, and stressed that this must be a community effort, not a family-by-family attempt. UNICEF has been working with communities in at-risk border areas to encourage them to protect vulnerable families from turning to child smugglers.

A human rights lawyer in Anambra State, Ben Nwosu, told IRIN that punishments should be made more severe to deter traffickers. "The fines and jail terms given to those convicted and sentenced are still not enough compared to the inhumane treatment that the traffickers subject their victims to."

NAPTIP is evaluating the impact of its recent efforts – including the Victims Trust Fund, among other tools – to better prioritize its funding, Egede told IRIN.

To attract more funding for the fight, NAPTIP and all other agencies involved should develop clear action plans on prevention and prosecution, so that donors could peg funding to the initiative, UNICEF's Oladiji told IRIN.

The governments of Italy, Switzerland, Finland and the United States have recently supported anti-trafficking activities in Nigeria.

Fighting child trafficking at Heathrow Airport

If a child is illegally trafficked into the UK, the place the child often arrives is at the Heathrow airport. The authorities at the airport found that in the years 2006-07, 63 Chinese children arrived at the airport only to disappear moments later, it is believed to be the work of organized crime. Since 2007, the work of dedicated child care has been able to drop the number of missing children to four.

From the Luxbridge Gazette, writer Dan Coombs details what now happens to unaccompanied children once they arrive at the airport.

To understand how a child can slip through the cracks it is necessary to see what occurs when they first arrive.

Heathrow is a 24-hour airport and there is no respite from arrivals. Statistics show 90 per cent of unaccompanied children and young people touch down outside the hours of 9am-5pm.

Therefore a dedicated care team from Hillingdon is on call around the clock to respond rapidly if they receive a call from the UK Border Agency (UKBA) telling them a child in need has arrived.

Not every unaccompanied child is a victim of trafficking; many arrive genuinely to claim asylum. It is the job of UKBA to determine the specifics of each case, while Hillingdon's teams are needed to safeguard the welfare of the child, irrespective of the circumstances.

Speaking to councillors at last Thursday's policy overview meeting were Jane Graver, head of care at a residential home in the borough, and Paula Neil, the home manager.

Ms Graver said: "When a child arrives at Heathrow, immigration is their first point of contact and we work closely with the staff. We need to place the child immediately.

"We are there to offer support, especially in the first few days and weeks of their arrival, when they most need it. We are informed if the child may be high risk, and we do our own risk assessment. If they come with a phone, we may detain it."
...

For every story of illegally trafficked children, there is a success story. Recently the Gazette's Citizen of Courage award went to Akhtar Jan, now 23, who arrived unaccompanied at Heathrow aged 16, unable to speak English. Granted asylum, he went on to achieve A-level results good enough to gain him a place to study medicine at Queen Mary's University.