Archive for July, 2010

Seduction, Slavery and Sex

Monday, July 19th, 2010

The New York Times, 14/07/2010

By Nicholas Kristof

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/opinion/15kristof.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Against all odds, this year’s publishing sensation is a trio of thrillers by a dead Swede relating tangentially to human trafficking and sexual abuse.

“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” series tops the best-seller lists. More than 150 years ago, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” helped lay the groundwork for the end of slavery. Let’s hope that these novels help build pressure on trafficking as a modern echo of slavery.

Human trafficking tends to get ignored because it is an indelicate, sordid topic, with troubled victims who don’t make great poster children for family values. Indeed, many of the victims are rebellious teenage girls — often runaways — who have been in trouble with their parents and the law, and at times they think they love their pimps.

Because trafficking gets ignored, it rarely is a top priority for law enforcement officials — so it seems to be growing. Various reports and studies, none of them particularly reliable, suggest that between 100,000 and 600,000 children may be involved in prostitution in the United States, with the numbers increasing.

Just last month, police freed a 12-year-old girl who they said had been imprisoned in a Knights Inn hotel in Laurel, Md. The police charged a 42-year-old man, Derwin Smith, with human trafficking and false imprisonment in connection with the case.

The Anne Arundel County Police Department said that Mr. Smith met the girl in a seedy area, had sex with her and then transported her back and forth from Washington, D.C., to Atlantic City, N.J., while prostituting her.

“The juvenile advised that all of the money made was collected and kept by the suspect,” the police department said in a statement. “At one point, the victim conveyed to the suspect that she wanted to return home, but he held her against her will.”

Just two days later, the same police force freed three other young women from a Garden Inn about a block away. They were 16, 19 and 23, and police officials accused a 23-year-old man, Gabriel Dreke-Hernandez, of pimping them.

Police said that Mr. Dreke-Hernandez had kidnapped the 19-year-old from a party and had taken her to a hotel room. “Once at the hotel,” the police statement said, Mr. Dreke-Hernandez allegedly “grabbed her around the throat and began to choke her. Hernandez then pushed her head against the wall several times before placing a knife to her throat and demanding that she follow his commands.

“The female further advised that all of the money made was collected and kept by the suspect. At one point, she indicated that she would not prostitute any longer and the suspect subsequently pulled her into the bathroom and threatened her again with a knife.”

Police officials did not release details about the 16-year-old and 23-year-old, though they said customers for the teenager had been sought on the Internet.

There’s a misperception in America that “sex trafficking” is mostly about foreigners smuggled into the U.S. That exists. But I’ve concluded that the biggest problem and worst abuses involve not foreign women but home-grown runaway kids.

In a typical case, a rebellious 13-year-old girl runs away from a home where her mother’s boyfriend is hitting on her. She is angry and doesn’t trust the police. She goes to the bus station in hopes of getting out of town — and the only person on the lookout for girls like her is a pimp, who buys her a meal, offers her a place to stay and tells her he loves her.

The next thing she knows, she’s having sex with four men a night and all the money is going to her “boyfriend.” If she voices reservations, he puts a gun in her mouth and threatens to blow her head off.

Her customers, often recruited on the Internet, may have no inkling that her actions are not completely voluntary. Some mix of fear, love, hopelessness and shattered self-esteem keep her from trying to run away.

No strategy has worked particularly well against human trafficking, and commercial sex may well exist 1,000 years from now. But a starting point is for law enforcement to go after pimps rather than the girls. That’s the only way to break the business model of forced prostitution.

Sweden offers us not only the summer’s top beach paperbacks, but also a useful strategy for dealing with trafficking. The Swedish model, adopted in 1999, is to prosecute the men who purchase sex, while treating the women who sell it as victims who merit social services.

Prosecution of johns has reduced demand for prostitution in Sweden, which in turn reduces market prices. That reduces the incentives for trafficking into Sweden, and the number of prostitutes seems to have declined there. A growing number of countries are concluding that the Swedish model works better than any other, and it would be wise for American states to experiment with it as well. It’s not a panacea, but cracking down on demand seems a useful way to chip away at 21st-century slavery.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Articles About Human Trafficking in Israel | 1 Comment »

Israel Should Grant Asylum to Sex Slaves

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

The Forward, 09/06/2010

By Elana Sztokman

http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/128675/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

M., a 28-year old Eritrean woman who grew up in Ethiopia, decided to emigrate with her husband in May 2009 in the hopes of a better life. Trying the Sudan and then Egypt, they eventually hoped to make their way towards Israel. A group of Bedouins took their money in exchange for a promise to bring them to Israel, but instead, they allegedly abused them terribly.

“My husband was tortured by them,” M. told workers at the Hotline for Migrant Workers in Israel, where they recorded her testimony from her cell in Saharonim prison. “In front of my eyes, they slowly burnt parts of his body until he died of his wounds. His body was tossed on the road. I was raped and badly beaten by them.”

This week, the testimony of M. and nine other women currently in the Saharonim prison awaiting deportation will be heard by the Committee on the Trafficking of Women in the Knesset. The goal of the Hotline activists is to grant women status as victims of sex trafficking in order to allow Israel to provide the women with a safe haven rather than send them back to where they came from.

“The state of Israel must recognize them as victims of torture,” advocate Osnat Cohen Lifshitz of the Hotline told Yediot Aharonot.

“I can’t tell you exactly where I contracted AIDS,” testified one of the other women, T. She, like other women, believe that money that passed hands was payment for her — that is, to purchase her as a sex-slave. “On the way from the Sudan to Sinai, I was raped by a Bedouin named Salah. Around 9 p.m., he took me with a group of people to the desert, and then moved me to an isolated space, where he held me and raped me for three days straight, without any protection. I resisted, I cried, but he didn’t listen. He whipped me with a belt, tied my hands behind me, and would rape me over and over again. I couldn’t run because I was so far away from people and did not know where to run to. After the three days, he brought me back to the group. I didn’t tell anyone about the rape until after I found out that I had AIDS, and then I told the prison social worker.”

Over the past 10 years, thousands of women have been trafficked illegally into Israel through the Egyptian border. They used to be predominantly women from the Former Soviet Union, but since 2005, the numbers of FSU women who come to Israel as part of the illegal trade have gone down — thanks in large part to the dedicated work of the Knesset Subcommittee on the Trafficking of Women. Unfortunately, the numbers of African women being trafficked have been steadily rising. In addition, there has been a sharp increase in the number of Eritrean women seeking asylum in Israel.

According to a report of the Human Rights division of the American Department of State, hundreds of asylum seekers who were sent back to Eritrea have since “disappeared.” The Ministry of Justice in Israel describes Eritrea as a country in which “human rights violations and political persecution are widespread, and include the incarceration of prisoners of conscience without charge and without trial, persecution on the basis of religion, the disappearing of citizens, and more.” Sigal Rosen, the Public Action Coordinator of the Hotline, told Yediot that the women “cannot be returned to Eritrea because of real threat to their lives.”

S. says she was held for three weeks by a group of Bedouins in the Sinai desert. The leader, a man named “Doyet, along with five other Bedouins whose names I don’t know, raped me continuously.” S., along with the other women, eventually managed to free themselves, and then arrived at the Israeli border where they were summarily arrested for illegal entry. They are currently awaiting deportation, but the fear is that if they get sent back, they will be returned to a life of torture or worse.

The voices of these women, women awaiting deportation back to Eritrea who were sold as sex-slaves when they desperately tried to build a better life, are being heard in the Knesset for the first time this week.

The question standing before the Israeli government is whether to be like the rest of the world and enforce cold, heartless laws that do not recognize the particular suffering of migrant women whose bodies are stolen and sold, or whether Israel will in fact be a light unto the nations and act with heart and compassion and protect these women, the strangers among us, as the Torah implores us to do.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Articles About Human Trafficking in Israel | No Comments »

Teens Sold as Sex Slaves on Craigslist

Saturday, July 17th, 2010

Huffington Post, 19/05/2010

By Conchita Sarnoff

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/conchita-s-sarnoff/teens-sold-as-sex-slaves_b_581716.html?ir=Technology

Washington, D.C. — According to Congressional estimates, everyday 100,000 children (that is under the age of 17) in the United States are being sold, bartered and bought for sex.

Outside of the enterprising Mexican drug cartels who traffic children for sex into this country — using the same routes they use to smuggle weapons and drugs, their American counterparts (a bevy of home grown pimps), are using a far more sophisticated medium — the Internet — to sell underage, disadvantaged, and runaway children as sex slaves.

It gets worse. U.S. online services such as Craigslist have become vehicles for carrying out this heinous crime. According to an article published in the “New York Times” last month :

Craigslist, one of the most popular Web sites in the United States, is on track to increase its revenue 22 percent this year, largely from its controversial sex advertisements. That financial success is reviving scrutiny from law-enforcement officials who say the ads are still being used for illegal ends.

The ads, many of which blatantly advertise prostitution, expect to bring $36 million this year, according to a new projection of Craigslist’s income. That is three times the revenue in last year’s projection.

Law-enforcement officials have been fighting a mostly losing battle to get Craigslist to rein in the sex ads. At the same time, officials of organizations that oppose human trafficking say the site remains the biggest online hub for selling women against their will.

Last week, in the latest example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested 14 members of the Gambino crime family on charges of, among other things, selling the sexual services of girls between the ages 15 to 19 on Craigslist.

The company that provided the revenue projection, the Advanced Interactive Media Group, has been preparing such analyses since 2003. Followers of Craigslist consider AIM’s work to be the most comprehensive estimates of the fiercely private company’s finances. The estimate was calculated based on the number of sex ads counted on Craigslist over the month of February and the fees for posting such ads — $10 initially and $5 for repeat postings.

James Buckmaster, Craigslist’s chief executive, said in an e-mail message that the site would not confirm the figures because it is private and does not discuss its finances. Of the sex ads, he wrote, “Of the thousands of U.S. venues that carry adult service ads, including venues operated by some of the largest and best known companies in the U.S., Craigslist has done the best and most responsible job of combating child exploitation and human trafficking.

Mr. Buckmaster was referring to alternative newspapers, phone directories and sex Web sites that carry ads for prostitution, although authorities say that Craigslist is the largest place for such ads.

Craigslist, based in San Francisco, had seemed to put the conflict over its sex ads to rest. Attorneys general in 40 states, including New Jersey, Illinois and Connecticut, investigated the company for facilitating criminal activity, after a wave of publicity about prostitution and violent crimes linked to the site.

Although Craigslist has continually argued that the Communications Decency Act against liability for what its users’ posts legally protects it — an analysis that judges and legal experts generally agree with — it promised last May to begin manually monitoring these posts for illegal activity.

So far, it has not kept its promise. I say it is time to pull the plug. If as Americans we believe that our Constitution and more specifically, the second paragraph of The Declaration of Independenceof the United States is valid and that:

…”All Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness”…

Then as a Nation and civilized society, we must also act when:

… “A long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism”…

Moreover, “it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security”.

It is unacceptable that in a civilized and progressive society such as the United States of America that a business using a website, newspaper, radio, television, or any other form of mass communication can facilitate the selling, buying and exploitation of children for sex at the click of a button and more importantly, reap financial benefits.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Articles About Human Trafficking in Israel | No Comments »

‘Trafficked women neglected’

Friday, July 16th, 2010

The Jerusalem Post, 08/05/2010

By Rebecca Anna Stoil

http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=175828

MKs and experts pointed to the need for additional holistic rehabilitation programs for trafficked women during a meeting on Monday of the Knesset Subcommittee on Women Trafficking.

The session, called to discuss possible solutions to the correlation between prostitution and drug use among trafficked women, saw welfare authorities testify that they were able to meet immediate demands, while other witnesses complained that challenges related to funding and the legal status of trafficked women created difficulties.

Subcommittee chairwoman Orit Zuaretz (Kadima) called data from the Knesset Research Center “extremely worrisome” and said they show a clear connection between prostitution and the use of psychoactive chemicals to enable women to confront emotional traumas.

“The fact that there is simply no center for drug and physical rehabilitation in a country that has such a wide-reaching phenomenon of women trafficking and prostitution is highly worrisome,” Zuaretz said. “We must act to immediately establish such a center.”

Zuaretz called on the government to clearly differentiate between women who had been victims of trafficking and foreign workers. The government, she argued, must establish a separate budget for trafficked women.

One woman who had been the victim of trafficking and wished to remain anonymous during her Knesset testimony said she had “used drugs to die” but that “someone up above did not want to take me. I am speaking in the name of those women.  I am afraid that every time that there is no money for them, they will go back to prostitution, and it shadows the whole rehabilitation program.”

The woman said that when she was kidnapped in Lithuania at the age of 17 and brought to Israel, her kidnappers provided her with fake documents. As a result, she did not have any legal documentation and could not receive any health care or rehabilitation. Her deliverance, she said, came only after she was arrested, when she was allowed to participate in a drug rehabilitation program in prison.

Beatrice Rosen-Katz, director of the Ofek Nashi program for treating and assisting prostitutes, told the subcommittee that her Tel Aviv and Jerusalem emergency centers were both at 100 percent capacity.

“Women are asked to pay NIS 600 for three weeks of treatment,” Rosen-Katz said. “The message is then for them to go and get a few more customers in order to fund their rehabilitation.”

Galit Geva of the Welfare Ministry argued in response that “there have not been any woman who have waited more than 24 hours” for immediate intervention, adding that government services cooperate to ensure that extra places are found in the event that the 13 available beds are full.

Nevertheless, Dr. Miki Dor, chair of the Interministerial Team for Medical Treatment for Victims of Women Trafficking, said there was a serious problem since “the country doesn’t offer any response” for the 150,000 people in Israel who do not have medical insurance, including women who were brought illegally into the country. Dor recommended that the coverage offered to citizens – which ensures that they are provided with physical rehabilitation – be extended to trafficked women, even if only for a limited period.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Articles About Human Trafficking in Israel | No Comments »

Knesset bill filed to make hiring of prostitutes illegal

Saturday, July 10th, 2010

The Jerusalem Post, 20/12/2009

By Rebecca Anna Stoil

Although the Israeli sex trade is said to generate billions of dollars of profit a year with as many as a million visits to prostitutes each month, the Knesset may have found a way to discourage would-be clients of Israel’s flourishing prostitution market. MK Orit Zuarets (Kadima), chairwoman of the Committee against the Trafficking of Women, presented legislation Sunday that would make the act of hiring a prostitute illegal in Israel. “The significance of placing criminal responsibility on sex trade customers is regarding prostitution as a forbidden phenomenon that is illegitimate and is rejected by society,” explained Zuarets Sunday. Zuarets has initiated a bill that would prohibit “consuming” sexual services and would allow courts to try sex trade consumers. The bill has won wide support, and is being co-sponsored by 25 MKs from across the political spectrum. As an amendment to the penal code, Zuarets’s legislation would create a possible sentence of up to six months in prison for a sex customer. Any customer found guilty for the first time would be offered the alternative of a community rehabilitation plan, whereas repeat ‘offenders’ will not have the option of participating in the community plan. “This is a revolutionary proposal, which would define the customers of the sex trade as criminals and would require them to bear criminal responsibility for their actions,” said Zuarets. “Legislation such as this one is part of a strategy of action against customers, who create the demand for the phenomenon and constitute the driving force behind the sex industry which generates billions of dollars each year. “The only way to defend the women who deal in prostitution is not by those proposals that seek to institutionalize prostitution because prostitution is not a profession, and is not the result of free will,” Zuarets added. “The right way is to criminalize the consumers, spreading a safety net of social rights, a plan for rehabilitation and the establishment of shelters for women to aid them in escaping the cycle of prostitution.” The Committee for the Struggle Against Women Trafficking has already held a number of hearings, starting during the previous Knesset, regarding the criminalization of sex customers. Committee members discussed as the central model the so-called “Swedish System,” after the Scandinavian country that in 1999 became the first state to outlaw sex consumers rather than the prostitutes themselves. That model, said committee staffers, was adopted for Zuarets’s proposal. Prostitution in Israel is currently legal, whereas the “accompanying” crimes, including pimping, running brothels, publishing sex advertisements and trading in women, are all criminal offenses. But legislators claimed that “the law was never sufficiently efficient in reducing these phenomena in any significant manner.” Legislators and anti-trafficking organizations were not alone in their support for Zuarets’s bill. Popular national religious Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, the head of the Petah Tikva Hesder Yeshiva, wrote a halachic opinion supporting the imprisonment of a man who has hired the services of a prostitute. MK Zevulun Orlev (Habayit Hayehudi) had requested Cherlow’s opinion on the subject. The rabbi wrote in support of the measure, but opposed placing sole responsibility on the customer.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Articles About Human Trafficking in Israel | No Comments »