Seduction, Slavery and Sex

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.

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Israel Should Grant Asylum to Sex Slaves

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.

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Teens Sold as Sex Slaves on Craigslist

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.

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‘Trafficked women neglected’

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.

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Knesset bill filed to make hiring of prostitutes illegal

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.

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Flourishing Palestinian sex trade exposed in new report

By Amira Hass, Haaretz Correspondent, 9 December 2009

Young Palestinian women are being forced to into prostitution in brothels, escort services, and private apartments in Ramallah and Jerusalem, including areas inhabited by Jews, according to a report released Wednesday. The Palestinian organization SAWA (All Women Together Today and Tomorrow) published the paper, the first of its kind, urging Palestinian society to break its silence over its sex industry.

The report was compiled with support by UNIFEM, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, which allotted resources for research on the subject. SAWA conducted research and interviews for the study in the beginning of 2008, but for a variety of reasons has only now been published. The report, which is titled “Trafficking and Forced Prostitution of Palestinian Women and Girls: Forms of Modern Day Slavery,” was released in conjunction with the ?Global 16-day Campaign to Combat Violence Against Women.”

The report claims that women are trafficked from different areas of the West Bank, in particular urban areas, as well as from the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem. Women from Eastern Europe who are sold into the sex trade in Israel are also occasionally brought to the West Bank, where they work in designated apartments. There are a number of legally registered hotels and cleaning companies that offer “double services,” which include sexual services for men.

Researchers only spoke with a small number of people for the study, among them several women, cab drivers, lawyers, hotel owners, and Palestinian police investigators, and came away with the impression that trafficking in the Palestinian territories is not run by a sophisticated network. Researchers also spoke with Palestinian women pimps in their 40s and 50s, who themselves are former prostitutes. One of these pimps had a Jerusalem identity card and owned four apartments. She allowed the women working for her to go out freely, but used intimidation to ensure that they would return. She also supplied them with customers from cities inside Israel.

The report notes that like in other places around the world, women are forced into prostitution due to economic hardship, the Palestinian cases brought to their attention mainly stemmed from incidents of sexual violence, and occasionally forced marriage at a young age. Some of the women mentioned in the report are students at institutions of higher education in the West Bank, and some are high school students. In a number of cases that came to the authors’ attention via the press, fathers sold their daughters through “back door” marriages, in which an announcement of marriage is made without the involvement of a religious official. When one girl is seen to be married repeatedly in the same way, it is clear that it is a cover for sex trafficking.

While the authors of the report stress that the prostitutes’ clients range from “rich businessmen to young people,” they do not give any further details as to their identities and backgrounds.

The report urges the Palestinian authorities and Palestinian society to acknowledge the existence of the problem. It calls on Palestinian non-governmental organizations to propose a bill that would treat prostitution as sexual violence and to work for the enactment of this law. The report also encourages the rejection of the stance that prostitution is a “choice;” and proposes the training of law enforcement authorities to treat the women with respect and fairness. The report also calls for the creation of shelters, as well as more support for existing shelters, where women forced into prostitution can find refuge.

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Prime Minister Netanyahu: Existence of human trafficking frightening

As reported by Ronen Medzini http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3814312,00.html

Ceremony at President’s Residence honors those who contribute to war on human trafficking. During event, Netanyahu says phenomenon must be fought. President Peres adds, ‘There must not be even a trace of trafficking of children or women’

The war on human trafficking has reached the President’s Residence: President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday bestowed honors for the fight against human trafficking.

During the ceremony Netanyahu said, “The fact that human trafficking exists is frightening.”

The honors were received by Marit Danon, for her contribution as Director of the Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women, and for the establishment of protective frameworks for women working in prostitution, Rinat Davidovich, for her contribution as director of shelters for victims of prostitution, and for the Kav Laoved worker’s hotline, for its contribution in the advancement of legislation and raising the public’s awareness.

During the ceremony, Peres said, “There must not be even a trace of trafficking of children or women in our country. A war to the end must be waged against it, without compromise, and without mercy.

“One of the conditions for the success of a war on this ghastly disease is the existence of unforgiving public opinion, of explicit laws and adamant enforcement to prevent its existence. It is the State’s duty to ensure that a person’s liberty be preserved, that economic distress, or physical weakness not be exploited.

“That the rights of every citizen, as a person, not be violated. The fight against human trafficking, which exists in Israel, must be boosted, and it must be uprooted.”

Netanyahu said at the event, “It is a horror that should concern every person that considers themselves a part of human civilization. It compels us to mobilize against the continuation of this phenomenon. There are still people who are trying to make a profit out of greed by human trafficking.”

Ronen Medzini

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Aharonovich announces bill to curb trafficking

As reported by Rebecca Anna Stoil at the Jerusalem Post: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1257770042872&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

The government will sponsor a bill later this Knesset session that is expected to put the squeeze on those trafficking in women for the purpose of prostitution, Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich announced Wednesday.

Aharonovich, addressing his ministry’s plans to combat the phenomenon during a hearing of the Subcommittee on the Trafficking of Women, said that he intends to submit a bill during this Knesset session, sponsored by the government, that would increase penalties for pimping to the same level as those for human trafficking – from seven years to 16 years imprisonment.

In addition, Aharonovich said, his office would reexamine the topic of business licensing to any businesses found to be running a brothel while abusing the business licenses that they were issued – and will try to cancel the licenses.

Subcommittee chairwoman MK Orit Zuaretz (Kadima) complimented the enforcement activities currently underway to curb trafficking, and noted their “significant contribution to reducing the phenomenon of women trafficking.”

But Zuaretz also called upon the enforcement agencies to plan ahead for changes in methods of trafficking and employment of women as prostitutes in light of the fact that, according to Zuaretz, the methods of employing the women have become more advanced.

“The minister’s position is consistent with my perspective throughout all of the subcommittee’s hearings, to make the level of punishment for those convicted of trading in women’s bodies more severe. I call upon the police and the other law enforcement authorities to act to try offenders under the existing law that forbids human trafficking and employment under conditions of slavery for the purpose of sex, which includes a sentence of 16 years,” said Zuarets.

In the course of the meeting, police officers reported that in the past two years, they had noted a significant decline in the phenomenon of organized prostitution in Israel, including a decline in the number of victims of women trafficking.

Police representatives did, however, add that with the increase in the number of foreign workers living in Israel – a number that the Immigration Authority places around 200,000 – they have noticed an increase in instances of trafficking of manual laborers. The police officers added that they could not determine whether the incidents were widespread enough to consider them a “phenomenon.” They emphasized that it was still a “rare” occurrence.

The Israel Police said that the number of people working in prostitution in Israel was “a couple thousand,” but NGOs who offer assistance to women involved in prostitution said that they believed the true number to hover around 20,000.

The police also said that at the beginning of the decade, there were estimated to be approximately 3,000 victims of women trafficking in Israel, whereas in 2009, they believed that the number was only a few dozen. The Israel Police attribute the decline to the enforcement efforts by police in the field.

Recent years have also seen a decrease in the number of investigations opened by police into suspected cases of trafficking for prostitution. In 2007, 21 such files were opened by the police whereas in the past two years, a mere 10 investigations have been opened each year.

The data provided by the police was not, however, entirely positive. Although police recorded a decrease in trafficking investigations, there has been an increase in the number of files opened for offenses related to trafficking, including pimping and operating brothels. In the first eight months of 2009, 331 files were opened for trafficking-related offenses – an increase of 84.9% from the overall number of investigations on similar charges in all of 2008.

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Success in Combating the Import of Women for Sex in Israel has Led Traffickers to Recruit Local Girls

16 August, 2009

Source: Haaretz Online

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1107851.html

At the start of the new century, Israel found itself with an unexpected and unwanted reputation – as a destination hotspot for sex trafficking. The government took significant measures against this phenomenon, but the success in stamping out the import of women for sex has led to a new problem.

From the security of her Tel Aviv office, Yedida Wolfe dials a number at the bottom of a newspaper advertisement that reads, in Hebrew: “Looking for young liberal women for easy work at great pay!!” The phone is answered by a man named Yossi. He explains that the type of work was sex; Yedida would get to choose with whom, how often, and under what conditions. ”

You will have complete control,” Yossi tells her. The pair arrange a time to meet.

Wolfe is the Executive Director of the Task Force on Human Trafficking (TFHT). She chose the advert at random from dozens of others just like it that appear daily in a major classifieds supplement published across Israel’s major cities.

Until 2007, thousands of women each year were trafficked into Israel for sex, mostly from the former Soviet Union. They were subjected to violence, rape, and public auctions, and forced to have sex with up to 20 men per night, often without any pay.

NGOs and government officials, however, achieved a measure of success two years ago in liberating and rehabilitating the foreign women, frequently identifying them via their missing papers. Many of those saved from the sex trade were subsequently replaced by Israeli women.

“The demand for sex did not change, and the [gap] had to be filled. Israeli women filled it,” Adi Willinger, the Trafficking Coordinator at Hotline for Migrant Workers, tells Haaretz. The National Coordinator of the Battle against Trafficking in Persons at Israel’s Ministry of Justice, Rahel Gershuni, confirms this.

NGOs estimate that hundreds of Israeli women are currently trafficked within the country, mainly in Tel Aviv and Haifa. “We are just now uncovering this phenomenon,” says Wolfe.

Wolfe, Willinger and the senior deputy to Tel Aviv’s district attorney, Dalia Avramoff, explain how Israeli women are normally lured into the sex trade: A pimp seeks out a vulnerable girl, usually between the ages of 12 and 15. He takes her in from the streets, or from an abusive home, providing her with “love” and protection. He then gets her addicted to drugs (most frequently heroin) and forces her to work for him as a prostitute in order to pay off her drug debt.

The prostitution and the drugs form a vicious cycle; due to the physical and emotional terror to which the girl is exposed by her clients, she depends on substances for survival more and more. The more drugs she uses, the more money she owes her pimp – money that has to be raised by having sex with more and more men. These pimps have complete physical and psychological control.

The Israeli government acknowledges there is a new problem. There are two new state-funded shelters for Israeli women who have been forced into prostitution. One of them, Shalit, is now home to Miri, a former sex worker.

Married at 18, Miri says she was quickly forced into prostitution by her husband. At first she refused, but he threatened to hurt their child and have her sister raped. Miri’s husband repeatedly abused her; he drugged her food, beat her, and tied up her legs before raping her. She says he would tell her over and over again: “You’re mine; I control you. You are not yours. You do not belong to yourself.”

According to the manager of the shelter, Na’ama Ze’evi Rivlin, most Israeli prostitutes at Shalit are forced into prostitution by a boyfriend, partner, or husband.

The problem

The NGOs fighting the phenomenon say Israel Police flatly denies the existence of domestic sex trafficking. These groups are outraged at the perceived lack of police action against the people behind the classified ads.

The U.S. Trafficking In Persons Report, issued in June 2009, states: “Police did not initiate any investigations into the trafficking of Israeli citizens within the country and generally did not recognize trafficked Israeli women as such.”

“They [the police] deny the existence of this phenomenon,” says Willinger. “They claim there is no such thing as internal trafficking in Israel.” Wolfe notes that when women from the former Soviet Union were first trafficked into Israel, police also denied the occurrence, but later estimated that 3,000 foreign sex workers were trafficked into Israel from the region annually.

But Gershuni believes that the Tel Aviv police are doing the best that they can to find and stop traffickers. Although trafficking is considered a high priority crime by the police, pimping and related sex crimes are not.

“Only after a victim has been trafficked by a pimp can we prove the pimp is a trafficker,” says Wolfe. The police are not prepared to spend their time following newspaper ads that will lead them, at face value, to “merely a pimp.”

“The police do not show extreme cooperation in pimping or soliciting cases,” Avramoff says. “Unfortunately, if I do not have a victim to tell the story I cannot prosecute the crime in court. If no one speaks, our hands are tied.”

All too often, she adds, the most despicable, ruthless sex crimes slip through the cracks. If they fall just outside of defined criminal law, Avramoff says, they cannot be prosecuted.

For example, authorities have trouble determining whether or not cases like that of Miri qualify as human trafficking.

Fighting on

According to TFHT, men in Israel pay approximately one million visits a month to brothels. Without this demand, Israeli women would not have been recruited to fill the void left by rehabilitated foreign sex slaves.

“There is now a legislative initiative to incriminate clients of prostitution,” says Gershuni. The initiative is to be relaunched in September 2009, allowing for a year of research from the date when it was initially proposed.

In battling the trafficking of women in Israel, says Avramoff, “there is a long struggle ahead of us. And we are not giving up.”

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Posted in Articles About Human Trafficking in Israel, Press Releases, TFHT in the News | 6 Comments »

Obama Turns Blind Eye to Russian Mobsters and Slave Traders

7 July 2009

Source:Jim Kouri, CPP

http://www.thelandofthefree.net/conservativeopinion/2009/07/11/obama-turns-blind-eye-to-russian-mobsters-and-slave-traders/

One of the issues sure to be avoided by President Barack Hussein Obama during his heralded visit to Russia is the role of the Russian mob and its global impact on crime, especially in the United States. It’s a sure bet that Obama will never broach the subject of Russia’s international crime enterprises with Prime Minister Vladmir Putin since no one is paying attention to it in the US, especially the news media.

From Himalayan villages to Eastern European cities, people — especially women and girls — are attracted by the prospect of a well-paid job as a domestic servant, waitress or factory worker. Human traffickers recruit victims through fake advertisements, mail-order bride catalogues and casual acquaintances. Upon arrival at their destination, victims are placed in conditions controlled by traffickers while they are exploited to earn illicit revenues. Many are physically confined, their travel or identity documents are taken away and they or their families are threatened if they do not cooperate.

Women and girls forced to work as prostitutes are blackmailed by the threat that traffickers will tell their families. Trafficked children are dependent on their traffickers for food, shelter and other basic necessities. Traffickers also play on victims’ fears that authorities in a strange country will prosecute or deport them if they ask for help. A major purveyor of these de facto slaves is the Russian organized crime syndicate. Brutal, cunning and ruthless, these 21st Century mobsters present a new threat to US national security.

Over the past decade, trafficking in human beings has reached epidemic proportions. No country is immune. The search for work abroad has been fueled by economic disparity, high unemployment and the disruption of traditional livelihoods. Traffickers face few risks and can earn huge profits by taking advantage of large numbers of potential immigrants. Trafficking in human beings is a crime in which victims are moved from poor environments to more affluent ones, with the profits flowing in the opposite direction, a pattern often repeated at the domestic, regional and global levels. It is believed to be growing fastest in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

In Asia, girls from villages in Nepal and Bangladesh — the majority of whom are under 18 — are sold to brothels in India for $1000. Trafficked women from Thailand and the Philippines are increasingly being joined by women from other countries in Southeast Asia. European InterPol estimates that the industry is now worth several billion dollars a year. Trafficking in human beings is not confined to the sex industry. Children are trafficked to work in sweatshops as bonded labor and men work illegally in the “three D-jobs” – dirty, difficult and dangerous.

A recent CIA report estimated that between 45,000 to 50,000 women and children are brought to the United States every year under false pretenses and are forced to work as prostitutes, abused laborers or servants. UNICEF estimates that more than 200,000 children are enslaved by cross-border smuggling in West and Central Africa. The children are often “sold” by unsuspecting parents who believe their children are going to be looked after, learn a trade or be educated.

In the decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has become the target of a new global crime threat from criminal organizations and criminal activities that have poured forth over the borders of Russia and other former Soviet republics such as Ukraine. The nature and variety of the crimes being committed seem unlimited — trafficking in women and children, drugs, arms trafficking, stolen automobiles, and money laundering are among the most prevalent. The spillover is particularly troubling to Europe because of its geographical proximity to Russia, and to Israel, because of its large numbers of Russian immigrants.
Russian law enforcement agencies are widely corrupt and split between supporters of different interests and often organized crime groups. On the other hand, given the rampant corruption and unprecedented expansion of organized crime in Russia, it is impossible not to cooperate with the Russian law enforcement agencies, and there are honest people there, even though they do not have upper hand now, according to Russian criminologist Yuri Shvets.

“Institutionalized crime ruins Russia. It represents a serious threat to the whole world given Russia’s vast territory and huge arsenals of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear power plants. In the present situation, to continue financial assistance to Russia means to further enrich and pervert corrupt elite,” wrote Shvets of the The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies

No region of the world seems immune to this menace, especially not the United States. America is the land of opportunity for unloading criminal goods and laundering dirty money. For that reason–and because, unfortunately, much of the examination of Russian organized crime (the so-called “Russian Mafia”) to date has been rather hyperbolic and sketchy — many in law enforcement believe it is important to step back and take an objective look at this growing phenomenon.

Russian organized crime has come to plague many areas of the globe since the demise of the Soviet Union just more than a decade ago. The transnational character of Russian organized crime, when coupled with its high degree of sophistication and ruthlessness, has attracted the world’s attention and concern to what has become known as a global Russian Mafia. Along with this concern, however, has come a fair amount of misunderstanding and stereotyping with respect to Russian organized crime.

Trafficking is almost always a form of organized crime and should be dealt with using criminal powers to investigate and prosecute offenders for trafficking and any other criminal activities in which they engage. Trafficked persons should also be seen as victims of crime. Support and protection of victims is a humanitarian objective and an important means of ensuring that victims are willing and able to assist in criminal cases. As with other forms of organized crime, trafficking is globalized.

Groups formerly active in specific routes or regions have expanded the geographical scope of their activities to explore new markets. Some have merged or formed cooperative relationships, expanding their geographical reach and range of criminal activities. Illegal immigrants and trafficking victims have become another commodity in a larger realm of criminal commerce involving other commodities — such as narcotics and drugs, weapons and money laundering — that generate illicit revenues or seek to reduce risks for traffickers.

With respect to organized crime, certain geographical or infrastructure characteristics, such as the presence of seaports, international airports, strategic border locations, rich natural resources, and so on, provide special criminal opportunities that can best be exploited by criminals who are organized. More so than common crime, organized crime is fed by the presence of ethnic minorities who furnish a ready supply of both victims and the offenders to victimize them. Organized crime also thrives in environments characterized by a relatively high tolerance of deviance and a romanticization of crime figures, especially where government and law enforcement are weak or corrupt (the history of the Sicilian Mafia illustrates this).

Sources: US Department of Justice
United Nations Protocols
National Criminal Justice Reference Service
National Association of Chiefs of Police
Department of Homeland Security

Posted in TFHT in the News | 15 Comments »

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