Sex Trafficking and Prostitution
5 Steps to Fight Human Trafficking with a Movie Night
Published September 10, 2009 @ 03:00PM PT
On Friday, Oct. 2, 2009, the Kids with Cameras Foundation will celebrate Mahatma Gandhi's 140th birthday and the United Nations' declared International Day of Non-Violence with a historic worldwide screening event of the Academy Award-winning film Born into Brothels. We are asking our fans and supporters to help make a difference in the lives of more children in Calcutta like those featured in the film - just by having a house party.By hosting a movie night in your house, community center, school, house of worship or other local venue, you will join our supporters on four continents already registered to host a "House Party for Hope." All proceeds raised on October 2, 2009 will help us to build the film's legacy project called "Hope House" - a home that will provide mentorship, counseling, and a private day school education for 100 daughters of prostitutes living in Sonagachi - the largest red light district in Calcutta. Hope House will be the source of necessary support and opportunity to provide a different future for these vulnerable young girls who have been or will be another statistic of human trafficking.
Here's how to host a movie night:
1. Log on to www.kids-with-cameras.org
2. Sign up on our home page to be a host of a "House Party for Hope" as part of our worldwide screening event of Born into Brothels on October 2, 2009.
3. Donate $20 to KWC to receive a copy of the film and our special companion DVD to introduce your guests to the plans and vision for Hope House.
4. Using our online event management system, invite your friends to your party and encourage them to donate to Hope House either when they register or at your event. KWC has suggested a guideline of $30 per person, $50 per couple, or $20 for students but your guests are welcome to contribute any amount of their choosing.
5. If you can't host a party, check back on the KWC website to find a party in your area to attend. If there is not one nearby, consider making a donation to Kids with Cameras or buying one of the prints, books, or copies of the Born Into Brothels DVD available here.
Born into Brothels by Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2005. A tribute to the resiliency of childhood and the restorative power of art, Born into Brothelsportrays several unforgettable children who live in Calcutta's largest red-light district, where their mothers work as prostitutes. Zana Briski, a New York-based photographer, gives each of the children a camera and teaches them to look at the world with new eyes. As Ross Kauffman, said
"It was a dream of ours as we made the film to have a place for these children to learn and grow. The dream is close to becoming a reality. There is no better way for anyone that watches the film and falls in love with these kids, just as we did, to make a difference in their future."
Here's the Born into Brothels trailer. Now you have a chance to make a difference in their future as well, just by hosting a little hope.
From Budapest to Toronto: Timea Eva's True Story of Slavery
Published September 06, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
This story was collected from KMBC. Timea Eva's experiences as a trafficking victim are common. They're so common that situations like her's -- a young, Eastern European woman tricked into the commercial sex industry -- have become the norm for mainstream coverage and examples of human trafficking. But this situation was real for Timea Eva and thousands of other women from Eastern Europe from the 1990s to today.
The summer Timea Eva Nagy was 20, she decided to take a summer job in Canada. It was far away from her home in Budapest, Hungary, but she would earn money and have an interesting international experience. Shortly arriving in Toronto, however, she was kidnapped and forced to strip and sell her body for sex.
During her captivity, Nagy desperately wanted to leave, but her traffickers threatened to harm her family back in Hungary if she tried to escape. They starved her to keep her weak and thin. She tried to find help. She eventually even tried suicide. But it seemed nothing would release her from this nightmare. But despite it all, Nagy suppressed the urge to panic and break down. She stayed calm and went into "survival mode", determined to finally find a way to break free.
Finally she found a way out. Nagy managed to use a Hungarian-English dictionary to explain to a DJ and a security guard that she was being abused, and that she wanted to leave. They helped her escape her captors and find safety.
Nagy's story has as happy an ending as such a story can have. She now tours the U.S. talking about her experience and educating people on the reality of human trafficking. She has even written a book called "Walk with Me: A Memoir of a Sex Slave Worker."
Photo credit: Mysi anne
Miley Cyrus, Dolls Market Pole Dancing to Tweens
Published September 03, 2009 @ 12:03PM PT
The newest sensation to sweep the tween market seems to be .... pole dancing? Miley Cyrus shook her underage stuff (what little she has of it) up and down a pole at the Nickelodeon Teen Choice awards in August, in front of an audience of kids and tweens. And now, kids can buy their very own Poll Dance Doll. What's next -- sexy thongs for kids? Oh wait, that already happened ...
Marketing pole dancing to kids gross and dangerous. Both the Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana empire and dolls are marketed to girls in the 7-13 age range. And girls 7-13 have no business pole dancing. There's a great scene in the movie Mean Girls where the popular girl's clueless mom (Amy Poehler) is smiling as she watches her 9-year-old daughter imitate an MTV spring break show by dancing provocatively and flashing the TV set. I always thought that scene was a funny hyperbole of what happens when children are parented soley by pop culture, but now it looks like a scary tarot-like prediction of a Tweens Gone Wild video. Watch the press coverage of Miley Cyrus closely, and you can see the media salivating for her to turn 18 so they can find a good-girl-goes-bad angle. They did it to Brittany and to Jessica and to the Olson twins. And they're going to do it to Miley.
This cultural Madonna-whore complex that eats young teen pop stars alive is moving to devour more and younger girls. At the end of the day this isn't just about a doll or a dance move. It's about the fact that kids are being sexualized at younger and younger ages, and that over-sexualization has serious consequences. It glamorizes commercial sex for young girls that have no understanding of the realities of the commercial sex industry. Desensitizing kids to commercial sex makes it easier for "friendly" pimps to lure them into prostitution and pimp control. Pimps prey on the natural sexual curiosity of teens, which has been warped and over-stimulated by a media culture which tells girls they are only valued for their complete purity or complete depravity. And once a pimp has control over a girl, it becomes exceedingly harder for her to leave.
I'm sure a lot of people will look at this and say, "big deal, it's just a doll." It is just a doll, but this doll and the carnage of fallen teen pop stars and the sexy thongs for kids and MTV and all the other sexy things that are marketed to kids start to add up into a pretty big pile of hyper-sexualized garbage.
Kids play in that garbage. And we're surprised when they come home dirty.
Photo credit: Gizmodo
Beef Tacos and Forced Prostitution
Published September 03, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
La Cabana, a Mexican restaurant in Atlanta suburb Woodstock, GA, was famous for two things -- the beef tacos in the front of the house and the young women and teen girls selling sex in the back. That's because this Mexican restaurant was a front for a human trafficking operation from Central and South America to metro Atlanta. Selling ethnic foods by day and human beings by night is a trend among traffickers all over the country.
At La Cabana, women and girls as young as 15 were smuggled from Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador into the U.S. While the restaurant was open, they served customers plates of Hispanic delicacies. But after the kitchen closed, the restaurant became a gentleman's club, and they serviced the mostly Hispanic male audience sexually. In a back room, the women and girls were forced to engage in prostitution to pay off their smuggling debt. Interestingly enough, none of the news reports I found on this case called it human trafficking. But if this isn't human trafficking, then I'll buy Rush Limbaugh's greatest hits tape.
Keeping trafficking operations within one cultural, racial, or ethic group are one technique traffickers use tp avoid detection by the police. The philosophy is that operating a criminal enterprise within a community of "friends" is safer. This happens often with suburban brothels in private homes that sell cater exclusively to Korean men, Hispanic men, East African men, etc. But large numbers of men going in and out of a private home at odd hours might look suspicious to neighbors. Therefore, an ethnic restaurant provides an ideal cover for the traffickers. Plus, they have two sources of income from the women they are exploiting: their labor in the restaurant and their sexual exploitation. In this case, fortunately, the police were a couple steps ahead.
The La Cabana trafficking ring got busted because someone, presumably who lived in the area, called in a tip about the loud music late at night and Hispanic women going in and out of the building frequently. This is one more example of how people like you, just by being aware of your surroundings, can help trafficked people to safety. If you see something suspicious, don't trick yourself into believing you're the Dark Knight and go running in guns-or-video-cameras-blazing. But do call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-3737-888 or call local law enforcement.
Photo credit: Loco beef taco by jasonlam
Rambo 5: Rambo vs. Sex Traffickers
Published September 01, 2009 @ 07:14AM PT
Rambo -- America's most loved, most parodied, and most clichéd action hero -- is prepping for his fifth big screen adventure. And this time, he's kicking some serious sex trafficker ass. Will the film ultimately hurt or help the anti-trafficking cause?
Sylvester Stallone returns as the title role in Rambo 5, this time to find and save a young girl kidnapped on the U.S.-Mexican border. In the process, he fights his way through hoards of sex traffickers and drug lords, one assumes by employing the usual tactful etiquette and diplomacy the Rambo series has come to embody. Production for the new Rambo, not yet given a working title, will begin in the Spring of 2010. Rumors predict it will be set and filmed in the character's hometown in Arizona. Common sense predicts people will get shot and big things will blow up.
The number of films that revolve around human trafficking is increasing as the issue gets more and more media attention. In the beginning, trafficking films were mostly small-budget, indy productions like Trade and Holly, both of which I've recommended. However, big studios are finally starting to realize that human trafficking, or more specifically sex trafficking, involves most of the elements that make a good action movie -- gobs of violence, really evil villains, hot young women in peril, macho law-enforcement-type heroes, and of course, sex. But just because the studios understand the elements of trafficking doesn't not mean they understand trafficking. Taken (the film where Liam Neeson is an ex-CIA agent whose rich, white, well-connected daughter is kidnapped in Paris) is the perfect example of how a major film company can completely fail to see how human trafficking really works. Real life spoiler alert: Traffickers prey on vulnerable people, not the educated and resourced daughters of American intell professionals. So will Rambo 5 be true to the issue? Or will it take the Taken route and focus explosion height than on actual substance?
I'd love to be wrong, but my money is on the machine gun fire being the most accurate and educating part of Rambo 5. Still, at the end of the film the score is sure to be Rambo: 1, Sex Traffickers, 0. And I'll probably shell out the $9.50 just to see them loose.
Photo credit: Nukeit1
Prostitution or Starvation: Refugees Face Few Options
Published August 31, 2009 @ 09:17AM PT
The New Canaan camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Kenya is named to sound like a promised land, but for many of the women living inside, it is anything but paradise. That's because increasingly, women living in this and other refugee camps in Kenya are faced with a terrible choice: feed themselves and their families via prostitution or risk starvation and death.
Many of the women at New Canaan fled their homes during the post-election violence in Kenya a year-and-a-half ago. Some were abandoned by their husbands after being raped, demonstrating the polar opposite of the concept of a "supportive partner". Others left their husbands in search of a man who could provide for and feed their children, which given the abandonment of their victimized sisters isn't surprising. Either way, once in the camp, these women have very few options to earn a living and to support their children. They see prostitution as the only viable option, and in their defense, they're sometimes right. According to Dr. Regina Karega, chairperson of the National Commission on Gender and Development, women who have no food reason that if a man is offering to feed them or their children in echange for sex, they'll "take the risk and feed [their] children.” What mother wouldn't?
The risk Dr. Karega refers to is contracting HIV/AIDS or another STD via unprotected sex in the refugee camps. However, women who have entered prostitution out of desperation, such as those in IDP camps, face additional risks, including rape, beatings, severe emotional and psychological trauma, and social isolation. Prostitution is dangerous for women, and often those dangers are exacerbated in camps like the ones at New Canaan.
Because these women are adults and no other person is forcing, coercing, or tricking them into prostitution, they are not considered victims of human trafficking. But isn't the lack of options for survival other than prostitution a form of coercion? If the choice is prostitution or watching your children starve, is that really a choice? The women of Kenyan IDP camps (and other refugee camps) are perfect examples of women who enter into prostitution out of desperation and a lack of other viable options. They can't be called victims of human trafficking because another person or group of people is not exploiting them. But surely they are victims of circumstance, victims of a gender-biased system, victims of a dearth of choices. They are not empowered women making active choices; they are fighting for survival despite the terrible risks.
In the Bible, Canaan was supposed to be a land flowing with milk and honey. New Canaan and the camps like it are lands overflowing with desperate women, hungry children, and increasingly, a coerced form of prostitution. It's not human trafficking, but it's exploitation nonetheless. Prostitution or starvation is not a choice anyone should have to make. In fact, it's not even really a choice.
Polygamy and Prostitution
Published August 27, 2009 @ 12:50PM PT
What do men who use prostitutes and polygamists have in common? According to Marci Hamilton, quite a lot. They are both populations of men who get away with raping, abusing, and degrading women, even in places where what they're doing is illegal. And like polygamists, johns are rarely prosecuted.
I've never really heard johns and polygamists compared in such stark terms, but I think Hamilton may be on to something. Both prostitution and polygamy reduce a woman to a commodity. In prostitution, a woman becomes an object, a tool for the pleasure of a man no more human than a sex toy. Because the transaction of prostitution is about money, (not mutual desire, affection or pleasure), it commodifies as woman's body and values it only as a means of male pleasure. In polygamy, a woman also becomes an object, though in this case a tool of reproduction, social status, and occasionally pleasure for a man. Polygamy, as is practiced in fundamentalist religious communities, values women as commodities- suppliers of children. They are just as much a machine designed to work for men as women in prostitution are.
Prostitution and polygamy are both symptomatic and catalystic of a fundamental gender inequality, where women are objectified and commodified without regard to their humanity or agency. And yet, the male perpetrators of both these crimes, the johns and the polygamist husbands, are rarely held accountable for their actions. I once worked on a case where a 40-something man was caught having sex with a 15-year-old girl, for whom he had paid $200. The police arrested the girl, put her in the back of the cop car, and brought her to jail. They told the man what he was doing was wrong, but let him drive away. When asked later why the cop let the john go, he replied,
"He had a wife, and I thought it would be bad to embarrass him like that."
Having sex with a kid should be embarrassing! It sould be a lot more embarrassing, in fact, it should result in an actual punishment. How are we afraid to embarass men who are engaging in prostitution, but we're not afraid to embarass the women and girls?
What interests me the most about the parallels between prostitution and polygamy is that many people who see prostitution as an opportunity for empowerment for women see polygamy as the opposite. In fact, I would argue the contrary. Prostitution and polygamy share more common values than dissimilar ones. Those values include a view of women as tools of men, female bodies as tradable commodities, and social superiority of men over women.
Photo credit: Jasonsager
