Freedom for the Weekend: GEMS

by Amanda Kloer

category: Freedom for the Weekend

Published July 03, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT

Well, it's Friday afternoon, and that means the weekend is almost here!  W00t! Perhaps you're reading this blog because you're bored at work or school and you're thinking about what you want to do this weekend.  How about spending part of your weekend fighting slavery?  Each week I'll profile a different anti-trafficking nonprofit who you can connect with to help free slaves and prevent slavery around the world.  So, spend a couple hours this weekend getting to know this nonprofit through their website, and then get involved!

This Week's Profile: Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS)

The Bottom Line: Girls Educational and Mentoring Services' (GEMS ) mission is to empower young women, ages12-21, who have experienced sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking to exit the commercial sex industry and develop to their full potential. GEMS is committed to ending commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking of children by changing individual lives, transforming public perception, and revolutionizing the systems and policies that impact sexually exploited youth. 

What They Do: GEMS provides a plethora of direct services and referrals to trafficked girls.  They also provide training and technical assistance to people who work with exploited youth.   GEMS has a very effective "Girls Are Not for Sale" campaign.

What Can I Do?: You can purchase items from their GEMS shop, the proceeds of which support their programs.  You can also donate online, volunteer, or join their Facebook group.

Why They Rock: I've highlighted their film Very Young Girls as one of the best about human trafficking in the U.S.  You can buy a copy here, or get on on Netflix!

So now that you've got some basic information on GEMS, visit their website this weekend and get involved.  And on Monday morning when everyone else is talking about sleeping in and watching tv over the weekend, you can say, "What did I do this weekend?  Oh, just the usual- abolition of slavery."

Do you have a favorite nonprofit you'd like to see featured here?  If so, let me know!

Cigarettes: Bad for Workers, Bad for You

by Amanda Kloer

categories: Human Trafficking in Africa, Human Trafficking in Asia and the Pacific, Human Trafficking in the US, Labor Trafficking and Trade

Published July 03, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT

Big Tobacco can't seem to catch a break these days, poor guys.  First everyone starts banning smoking in public because it kills people.  Then everyone starts taxing cigarettes because they kill people. And now, all around the world, migrant workers who pick tobacco are making ridiculous requests, like to be paid fairly for their work and not be exposed to deadly chemicals.  Poor Big Tobacco!      

There is the potential for exploitation in any industry which employs large numbers of migrant workers, and tobacco is no exception.  In Malawi, child labor and forced labor have been identified throughout the tobacco industry.  In India, children are often enslaved in factories rolling small, unfiltered cigarettes called bidis.  Even in the U.S., workers have complained about mistreatment at the hands of employers while picking tobacco.     

When I first started researching this issue, I assumed that tobacco is that it is one of the few consumer products which doesn't have a more fair or more sustainable option.  Wrong! The UK recently released an ethically-sourced cigarette, which actually gives a portion of the proceeds to support disadvantaged Native American workers.  This unexpected dichotomy boggled my progressive brain which commonly defaults to: tobacco=bad, fair trade=good.  But what happens when they join forces?  My dilemma is illustrated by the contrast between the shiny happy feel-good interracial handshake logo and the giant "SMOKING KILLS" warning on the ethically sourced cigarettes above. Weird.

Can an ethically sourced cigarette be a good thing?  Is it just Big Tobacco pushing their addictive, deadly products on children and exploiting their workers which makes the industry terrible, or is it the product itself?  Is there a place for small tobacco or fair tobacco?  It seems to me that no matter how much the farmers are paid, no matter how much the exploitation is reduced, at the end of the day, it's still a cancer stick.   

 Image from guardian.co.uk

Taliban Buys Children To Be Suicide Bombers

by Amanda Kloer

categories: Human Trafficking in Europe and the Middle East, Trafficking in Children

Published July 02, 2009 @ 08:10AM PT

Faced with a shrinking supply of willing martyrs, the Taliban in Pakistan is now purchasing children as young as 7 years old to be suicide bombers.  The going price for a child bomber: $7,000 to $14,000.  In Pakistan, where the average yearly income is $2,600, there are many traffickers looking to kidnap children and sell them to the Taliban. 

The leader of the Pakistan Taliban and mastermind behind the traffick-children-to-be-suicide-bombers scheme is Baitullah Mehsud, who evaded capture by U.S. troops as recently as last week.  A U.S. Defense Department official, speaking anonymously, told reporters recently,

"Mehsud has turned suicide bombing into a production output, not unlike the way Toyota outputs cars." 

And it looks like he's basing this grotesque new industry on children. 

The use of children in war is unfortunately not new.  Child soldiers are being used right now, in conflicts around the world.  But trafficking children to be suicide bombers feels especially evil for some reason.  Perhaps it's because, theoretically (if not practically), a child soldier would have a sliver of hope of survival, whereas a child suicide bomber is doomed.  Perhaps it's because the children being used in Pakistan are so young. 

I am still shocked by the new and innovative ways human beings develop to abuse, torture and destroy each other.  It was naïveté on my part to assume that the industry of suicide bombers would not follow the rules of supply and demand that guide all other industries of trafficked persons.  But it obviously does.  And now we have the sad duty of adding a new variation of human trafficking to the long and growing list.

Image from timenewsgloaming.com

PIMPtendo: Gaming for Pimps

by Amanda Kloer

categories: Sex Trafficking and Prostitution, Technology and the Media, Trafficking in Children

Published July 02, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT

Do you love video games?  Do you also love glamorizing men who sell and exploit women and girls?  Well then you need to purchase the PIMPtendo!  The PIMPtendo is basically an old school NES system that has been covered with zebra print fabric and purple feathers.  It's actually pretty cool and funky looking.  So why did it's creator choose to call it a PIMPtendo instead of a RETROtendo or a FUNKtendo?  Because in our society, to pimp something has come to mean "to improve it", and pimps are considered cool.

Dictonary.com defines "pimp" as:

-noun

1. a person, esp. a man, who solicits customers for a prostitute or a brothel, usually in return for a share of the earnings; pander; procurer.

2. a despicable person

3. Australia and New Zealand. an informer; stool pigeon. (Ed note: Wow.. note to self if I ever travel to that part of the world)

-verb (used without object)

4. to act as a pimp.

-verb (used with object)

5. to act as a pimp for.

6. to exploit.

Pimps are, by the definition above, exploiters of women and children in prostitution.  They are criminals, not cool guys to name modified NES systems after.  This cultural glamorization of pimping helps justify the actual crime of pimping, for both the perpetrators and the victims.  A young girl today who has grown up playing the PIMPtendo and watching Pimp My Ride and hearing about Pimp N' Ho parties has a very different experience with the idea of a pimp than the reality of street life under pimp control.  And if she meets a real pimp, will she be wary of what having a manager/controller will mean for her?  Perhaps not.  Our cultural obsession with the "coolness" of pimps is a dangerous reality for many teens.

The verdict?  Video games are cool. Exploitation of women is not. Take that PIMPtendo. 

Duke Official Arrested for Pimping 5-Year-Old Son

by Amanda Kloer

Published July 01, 2009 @ 01:33PM PT

After working with issues of sexual violence for almost ten years, few stories make me physically nauseous anymore.  But this is one of them.  My excellent colleague Michael Jones has a companion post on this incredibly disturbing story as well. 

Yesterday, Duke University official Frank Lombard was arrested for pimping his 5-year-old son to a man on the Internet for sex- a man who turned out to be an undercover police officer.  Lombard admitted in online chats with the undercover officer that he had molested his adopted son several times, drugging him with Benadryl first.  He also complained that the child was starting to resist the abuse as he got older.   

At this point, unimaginably, the story takes a more perverse and ironic twist.  Lombard adopted two African-American children for the sole purpose of molesting and pimping them, a process he described as "not too hard... especially for a Black boy."  Ironically, Lombard works for Duke researching HIV/AIDS in the rural South and often spoke out about the exploitation of poor African-Americans, all the while exploiting his own adopted African-American children.  

The other twist to this story is that Lombard is gay.  I mention this halfway into the post for a reason.  In much of the media coverage, the central themes of the story have been framed as "homosexual molestation" or "gay adoption horror," but I cannot stress enough that this is not a story about gay adoption!  This is a story about an incredibly sick individual who was intent on having sex with children and used adoption as a way of accessing a child.  It is a story of a child being sold over the Internet for sex, and the sting operation which saved him from further abuse.  To lose sight of the issues of sale and exploitation undermines the importance of continuing to protect all children from anyone who would exploit them. Pedophilia is a psychological disorder separate from a sexual orientation; both gay people and straight people can be pedophiles.  Michael Jones discusses the eroneous use of this story to attack LGBT families in more detail. 

This story should spread the message that a well-resourced, well-educated police force is an effective tool for catching those who would sell and abuse children.  It should help the adoption community in North Carolina improve their policies.  It should help prevent those two children from ever being harmed again.  To make this story a tool in a toolbox used to discriminate against healthy, loving LGBT families or deny them rights would lose sight of what this story is really about: keeping children safe. 

NYC Teens Tackle Child Sex Trafficking Via Digital Film

by Amanda Kloer

categories: Human Trafficking in the Western Hemisphere, International Human Trafficking and Migration, Sex Trafficking and Prostitution, Technology and the Media, Trafficking in Women

Published July 01, 2009 @ 07:30AM PT

What do you get when you combine a group of New York City teens, digital animation, and a passion for ending child sex trafficking?  You get Discovered, a machinima (digital animation created by filming video games) film on child sex trafficking, produced entirely by high school students.  You also get a group of teens who know what it means to put the "act" in activism.

"We picked child sex trafficking because it wasn't as popular, people don't talk about it as much," said Megan Butcher, 17, one of the filmmakers.  "We want more people to be aware of this problem and we hope it will end soon."

Discovered was created as part of the Virtual Video Project, a project of Global Kids, which works to transform urban youth into successful students and global and community leaders by engaging them in socially dynamic, content-rich learning experiences.  This past weekend, the filmmakers presented their work at the first annual (o.o) Festival on digital media.  The youth project fair featured a wide variety of digital media, including digital comics, serious game designs, animated movies, assistive technology projects, and do-it-yourself tech support.  But it was the Global Kids Youth Leaders who innovatively used digital animation and design to educate their peers about issues of human trafficking.

"I hope when people watch this movie, they will feel that there is a problem, that this can happen to anyone easily," says Evin Cruz, 16, of his film.  "Now they are aware of this, they can help.  I hope people can be more aware of what goes on, and I hope the government can play a stronger role in what's happening to end the suffering."

You can watch Discovered below.  It tells the story of a young girl who is lured from her home in Mexico to America, the abuses she suffers while in the U.S., and the challenges the government faces in combating human trafficking.  It is eloquently written, creative, and mature; I would not have ordinarily guessed it had been created by young people.  Then again, these are obviously extraordinary young people.

Can Obama Save Afghanistan and Pakistan from Walmart?

by Amanda Kloer

categories: Government & Legal Efforts on Human Trafficking, Human Trafficking in Europe and the Middle East, Labor Trafficking and Trade, Money and Economy

Published June 30, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT

President Obama is currrently deep in negotiations with national retailers and Democrats about giving duty-free access to imports from Afganistan and Pakistan to U.S.-based companies, particularly Wal-Mart.  The legislation has hit some snags, however, in part because of Wal-Mart's complaints over the "pretty onerous" labor rules.  I'll wait while you pick your jaw off the ground. 

The labor regulations are not, in fact, onerous.  They would require the U.S. to appoint an indepepndent party to monitor labor conditions at textile and apparel factories in Pakistan or Afghanistan.  They would also refuse to allow duty-free imports from factories that don’t adhere to core international labor standards, such as prohibiting forced labor and child labor and guaranteeing the right to organize a union. In other words, these regulations would provide workers their basic human rights and attempt to prevent trafficking in factories in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The Chamber of Commerce and other business groups, however, have complained that these labor regulations are “counterproductive and unworkable new labor criteria and monitoring requirements.”

I'm sure very few of you will be surprised to hear that Wal-Mart has a long, long history of being a terrible company for workers, both those who work in their stores and those who make the products they sell.  And I'm sure even fewer will be surprised to know that the recent conflict, political turmoil, and economic toubles which have plagued Afghanistan and Pakistan have left thousands jobless and vulnerable to trafficking.  Plus, Pakistan especially has had significant child labor problems.  Without proper safeguards and protections for workers, Wal-Mart plus Pakistan sounds like a recipe for trafficking.   

So can Obama and the Democrats stand up and save Afghanistan and Pakistan from "jobs" that may be little more than forms of exploitation?  Can they strike a blanace between business interests and workers' freedom from exploitation?  Or will Pakistan be the next hotspot fo men, women and children trafficked into textiles? 

Image from latenightwallflower.com