Tuesday, October 30, 2012

UN unveils plans to eliminate child labour by 2020 | World news | The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/29/un-eliminate-child-labour-2020

Source: The Guardian

UN report to be launched by Gordon Brown says there will still be 190m child labourers in eight years unless issue is tackled
, social affairs editor, The Guardian



Gordon Brown
Gordon Brown, the UN's special education envoy, who is launching the report on child labour. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images
The United Nations is to announce ambitious plans to eliminate child labour by 2020 after research revealed high growth in developing nations will not substantially reduce the number of children working worldwide.
Warning that "current trends are … of great concern" the UN says there will still be about 190 million child labourers in eight years' time – a drop of just 25 million on today's figures. Even worse is that in the poorest parts of the world, the UN says, the numbers will rise: child labourers in sub-Saharan Africa will jump by around 15 million over the next decade, reaching 65 million by 2020.
A UN report – to be launched on Monday morning by the UN's special envoy on education, the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown – warns that unless the issue is tackled, the internationally agreed millennium development goal that all children should complete primary school by 2015 will not be achieved. Child labour, the UN says, "exacerbates the risk of being out of school. In India, non-attendance rates for child labourers are twice the level for children not involved in child labour."
The research says the "sheer scale of child labour is not widely recognised". About 60 million under-17-year-olds are involved in global agriculture. Mining, it says, is a "magnet" for child labour, with children as young as six digging shafts and scuttling around mounds of rock with little more than a hammer and chisel. Around half of the workforce in Afghanistan's brick kilns is aged under 14. In Ethiopia almost 60% of children work.
Multinational companies also come under fire. The report points out that in China, underage labour recruited by networks of agents from poor rural areas "has been found in factories supplying companies such as Apple, Samsung and Google".
It also chides industry for failing in the past to keep its side of the bargain in tackling the problem. US chocolate companies, the UN notes, had promised to educate all children in areas where it grew cocoa in west Africa – a commitment that would cost the industry $75m or 0.1% of annual sales. Instead it spent about $20m over eight years and reached just 4% of children in cocoa-growing communities in Ivory Coast and 30% in Ghana.
The UN says that the first step would be to make education compulsory for all children – and perhaps go as far as paying families to send their children to school, an approach that has worked in Brazil. This would mean that by 2015 an extra $13bn in funding would be needed.
Many children are forced to combine education and employment, and are consequently more likely to drop out, to complete fewer years in school and to achieve lower test scores. The UN warns that child labourers suffer a 17% achievement gap with non-working children in language and maths.
Despite a host of international treaties and domestic laws prohibiting child labour in poorer nations, authorities rarely have the will – or the money – to enforce them.
Brown told the Guardian that child labour was the "new slavery" for our age. "Efforts to combat child labour are failing in the face of inertia, indifference and an indefensible willingness on the part of too many governments, international agencies and aid donors to turn a blind eye," he writes in the foreword to the report.
The UN's roadmap takes its inspiration from how Victorian Britain first came to terms with – and then eradicated – child labour in the 19th century. The country began by offering education to child workers in the 1830s, then banned children from working in hazardous conditions a decade later. By the 1880s Britain was imposing heavy fines on industries for employing children.
The report's author, Kevin Watkins, a former UN official who now works at the respected Washington-based thinktank the Brookings Institution, said: "The conditions of millions of child labourers would shock even the most hardened Victorian social reformers. National governments and international agencies are failing these kids, and reneging on their commitments."


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Congresswoman Moves To Crack Down On Children In Fields | NBC Bay Area


CLICK TO LISTEN TO REPORT:
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/series/children-in-the-field/Congress-Focuses-on-Child-Labor-Law--175675301.html

SOURCE: NBC Bay Area

By By Stephen Stock and David Paredes
|  Friday, Oct 26, 2012  |  Updated 7:22 AM PDT


An NBC Bay Area investigation into child labor has prompted a renewed push to change the law governing children working in American fields.
Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-East Los Angeles) is calling for new protections for kids who work in agriculture, specifically large corporate farms across the United States. She is re-introducing a bill called the "Care Act," to ensure that labor laws are the same for children in all industries, including agriculture.
 In a political season where the presidential campaign is gathering nearly all the media attention, there is a quiet movement starting on Capitol Hill to change a labor law that currently allows young children to work in the fields.
But even supporters of that proposed law say that nothing is likely to happen quickly. They admit that any changes to current U.S. labor law face a tough political battle from the opposition.

As the political battle is gearing up in D.C., nearly  3,000 miles away  in California’s Central Valley, the harvest season is quickly winding down: There are only a few grapes and raisins are left to pick.
Most of the migrant farm workers and their families are packing up and moving on following the crops North. For the next few months they’ll be picking cherries in Oregon and apples in Washington state before returning South and starting the migrant labor cycle all over again.
 Among those workers are as many as a half million children working the fields, according to Norma Flores Lopez of the Children in the Fields Campaign at the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs in Washington, D.C.
That startling statistic has now caught the attention of lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
After watching NBC Bay Area’s investigation in August documenting child labor in California and North Carolina, Roybal-Allard was moved. She said things must change.
 “I was shocked. I really do believe that this is this country’s dirty little secrets,”  Roybal-Allard said. “There are today, in this country, children that are working in deplorable conditions and are not equally protected under our child labor laws. And these are the children who work in agriculture. I want to change that.”
To affect that change, she introduced, once again, the “Care Act.” It is legislation Roybal-Allard first pushed in Congress twelve years ago but has had little support so far.
 “What the Care Act does is simply provide the same protections under our current child labor laws that exist for children in every industry to have them apply to children in agriculture,”  Roybal-Allard said.
 The idea of making child labor rules the same for agriculture as for every other industry has, so far, gone nowhere on Capitol Hill. But Roybal-Allard now believes change may be possible.
  “My hope is that the American people are educated about the abuses of children in agriculture,”  Roybal-Allard said. “That that same kind of outrage about what happens to children in other countries will be felt here in this country and that Congress will then take action and pass the Care Act.”
 But there are others in Congress who aren’t so eager to pass new legislation to protect children working in agriculture.
  Among them are two of California's Republican congressmen, Jeff Denham and Devin Nunes.
  Denham and Nunes are both co-sponsors of the “Preserving America’s Family Farms Act.” This bill does the opposite of the “Care Act”: It would prevent the United States Labor Department from unilaterally changing or updating labor rules governing children working in agriculture. Those rules date back to 1938.
 The bill is sponsored by U.S. Rep. Tom Latham (R-Iowa) and has already passed the U.S. House of Representatives.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) is a co-sponsor of a companion bill in the Senate. He said Roybal-Allard’s proposal would hurt family farms.
 “It wouldn’t be unusual for members of a farm family in Iowa in the months of April, May and June and September and October to be putting in 14- or 18-hour days,” Grassley said. “There’s probably no difference between Dad putting it in and a 12-year-old boy putting it in.”

  When asked why agriculture, as an industry, is exempt from labor rules involving children that apply to every other industry in America, Grassley stressed the importance of the family farm.
 “Well, I think because of the family being involved in it and working side by side with Mom and Dad,” Grassley said.
  Others involved in the “Preserve the Family Farm Act” were less eager to talk on the record about their support of the bill.
 Denham and Nunes first agreed to sit down for on-camera interviews with NBC Bay Area in their Capitol Hill. But both congressmen canceled at the last minute.
  And the press secretary for Latham - the bill’s main sponsor - said the congressman was too busy attending to the needs of his constituents to talk to reporters from San Francisco.
In addition, NBC Bay Area reached out to a dozen different major corporations who process, package and sell the produce these children are picking. None of them would comment about this issue. The California Farm Bureau Federation also wouldn't  it down on camera and talk in depth about children working in fields, when originally asked in September. The bureau did sent in a statement, though. To read it in full, click here.
  Even as the debate splits Washington, back in California’s Central Valley there is little debate among these families working on large farms.
  For them it may be complicated politics yet it’s very simple economics.
  While the parents may not want their children to have to work the fields, most families have to have them there in order to make ends meet.
  As a property manager for migrant housing with Fresno County’s Housing Authority, Connie Saavedra knows the political debate inside and out.
  She also knows the economic side of this issue, too.
  As a young child, Saavedra worked the very same fields in the Central Valley where her clients now work.
  “They do what they gotta do,” Saavedra said. “Even two hours three hours out in the field is enough for the parents to help (pay the bills.)”
 Saavedra said that even recently she has seen children as young as 6 years old out in the fields helping their parents harvest raisins.
  “They get the little ones to give (the raisin packets) to the older ones and they dump in the raisins (in the wagon) and they pull in the paper,” Saavedra said ,describing the final collection of dried raisins from the fields.
Roybal-Allard acknowledged the quandary her bill puts migrant workers in financially. If her bill were to become law the children would no longer be able to legally work on large corporate farms to help out. But Roybal-Allard says protecting children from the dangers of working in agriculture is paramount.

  “The majority of children that the Care Act will protect are actually employees of large corporate farms not family farms,”  Roybal-Allard said. “It’s unconscionable.”
  When put in that context, even Grassley seemed to back away from the current rules when asked what he thought of 12-year-olds working on large corporate farms alongside their parents to make ends meet.
  “I think as long as I’ve not been in those fields I’d better not answer,” Grassley said.

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Monique Villa: Money, Corruption and Slavery

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/monique-villa/the-most-profitable-commo_b_1974075.html

Source: Huffington Post

Posted: 10/18/2012 12:03 pm


Monique Villa




The labor recruiter told Nayantara of a well-paying position as a maid in the Middle East. She left her job at a carpet factory in Nepal to find she had been sold to a brothel in India. Nayantara was enslaved and forced to have sex with 35 men a day or the owner would beat her with an iron pole. When police raided the brothel, the madam bribed her way out of prison. When police released Nayantara 17 months later, she was sent back to the brothel.



Anna's trafficker beat her, raped her and sliced her with knives to keep her in submission. He had abducted her from Albania and forced her into prostitution in western Europe. After five months, he tried to transport her to a second country. At the border, Anna told officials she was traveling on a false passport. The police sent her to a refugee camp where two Albanian social workers released her back to her trafficker.
It was the police who abducted Lydia Cacho, a Mexican journalist, and bundled her into a van. She had written a book accusing one of Mexico's richest businessmen and local politicians of conspiring with human traffickers in child pornography and sex trafficking rings in Cancun. For 20 hours they drove her across Mexico, a gun rammed in her face as police taunted her with threats that she would be drowned, raped or murdered. Cacho was jailed for a year on defamation and libel for naming and shaming of Mexico's elite.
A common thread runs through all these stories - corruption of public officials. Corruption is the grease that allows the spread of a global industry in human trafficking, which the International Labour Organisation estimates generates at least $32 billion in profits annually, more than the total earnings last year of Apple Inc and McDonalds Corp combined. Without the bribery and collusion of police officers, immigration and border control, government workers, transportation officials, judges or anyone in power, traffickers could not enslave an estimated 21 million women, men and children each year, transporting many from one end of the world to the other.
Bribes smoothed the smuggling on trains, trucks, ships and aeroplanes of these victims, who told their stories to the Thomson Reuters Foundation and to U.S. State Department officials. Bribes slide people daily across international borders. Bribes silence the landlords who rent buildings for traffickers to imprison their slaves. Police officers are bribed with cash and sexual favors to turn a blind eye when a fresh crop of young foreign girls turns up on the street corner.
Failure to recognize how deeply human trafficking depends upon bribery and corruption for its existence undermines efforts to combat trafficking in people. The globalization of finance and rapid communications technology have made it easier to launder money, spread corruption and grow organized crime.
Their spread goes hand in hand with the global slave trade, where a girl from the United States can end up in a brothel in Japan. Supplying the sex industry with trafficked women is vastly more profitable than drug smuggling or the arms trade because a woman's body can be sold multiple times. No surprise then that about 55 percent of trafficked people are women and girls and most of them are forced into prostitution, the ILO estimates in its June 2012 report. The bigger the dollars earned the more alluring it is to grow the trade, and the more cash criminals have to lure corrupt government officials into facilitating their enterprise.
Thursday is World Anti-Slavery Day. There is no better time to say: enough is enough.
Human trafficking and slavery depend on corruption, which depends on cash. Cutting off the global flow of money that is essential to greasing palms of corrupt officials would go a long way toward ending this barbarity. How to achieve that is another story.
Monique Villa is the CEO of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, organizers of the TrustWomenconference along with the International Herald Tribune.
Follow Monique Villa on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Monique_Villa

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Facebook Sex Trafficking: Social Network Used To Kidnap Indonesian Girls

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/29/facebook-sex-trafficking-_n_2036627.html

Source: Huffington Post

AP  |  By  Posted:  Updated: 10/29/2012 10:48 am EDT
Facebook Sex Trafficking


DEPOK, Indonesia (AP) — When a 14-year-old girl received a Facebook friend request from an older man she didn't know, she accepted it out of curiosity. It's a click she will forever regret, leading to a brutal story that has repeated itself as sexual predators find new ways to exploit Indonesia's growing obsession with social media.
The junior high student was quickly smitten by the man's smooth online flattery. They exchanged phone numbers, and his attention increased with rapid-fire texts. He convinced her to meet in a mall, and she found him just as charming in person.
They agreed to meet again. After telling her mom she was going to visit a sick girlfriend on her way to church choir practice, she climbed into the man's minivan near her home in Depok, on the outskirts of Jakarta.
The man, a 24-year-old who called himself Yogi, drove her an hour to the town of Bogor, West Java, she told The Associated Press in an interview.
There, he locked her in a small room inside a house with at least five other girls aged 14 to 17. She was drugged and raped repeatedly — losing her virginity in the first attack.
After one week of torture, her captor told her she was being sold and shipped to the faraway island of Batam, known for its seedy brothels and child sex tourism that caters to men coming by boat from nearby Singapore.
She sobbed hysterically and begged to go home. She was beaten and told to shut up or die.
So far this year, 27 of the 129 children reported missing to Indonesia's National Commission for Child Protection are believed to have been abducted after meeting their captors on Facebook, said the group's chairman, Arist Merdeka Sirait. One of the 27 has been found dead.
In the month since the Depok girl was found near a bus terminal Sept. 30, there have been at least seven reports of young girls in Indonesia being abducted by people they met on Facebook. Although no solid data exists, police and aid groups that work on trafficking issues say it seems to be a particularly big problem in the Southeast Asian archipelago.
"Maybe Indonesia is kind of a unique country so far. Once the reports start coming in, you will know that maybe it's not one of the countries, maybe it's one of a hundred countries," said Anjan Bose, a program officer who works on child online protection issues at ECPAT International, a nonprofit global network that helps children in 70 countries. "The Internet is such a global medium. It doesn't differentiate between poor and rich. It doesn't differentiate between the economy of the country or the culture."
Websites that track social media say Indonesia has nearly 50 million people signed up for Facebook, making it one of the world's top users after the U.S. The capital, Jakarta, was recently named the most active Twitter city by Paris-based social media monitoring company Semiocast. In addition, networking groups such as BlackBerry and Yahoo Messenger are wildly popular on mobile phones.
Many young Indonesians, and their parents, are unaware of the dangers of allowing strangers to see their personal information online. Teenagers frequently post photos and personal details such as their home address, phone number, school and hangouts without using any privacy settings — allowing anyone trolling the net to find them and learn everything about them.
"We are racing against time, and the technology frenzy over Facebook is a trend among teenagers here," Sirait said. "Police should move faster, or many more girls will become victims."
The 27 Facebook-related abductions reported to the commission this year in Indonesia have already exceed 18 similar cases it received in all of 2011. Overall, the National Task Force Against Human Trafficking said 435 children were trafficked last year, mostly for sexual exploitation.
Many who fight child sex crimes in Indonesia believe the real numbers are much higher. Missing children are often not reported to authorities. Stigma and shame surround sexual abuse in the world's largest Muslim-majority country, and there's a widespread belief that police will do nothing to help.
An ECPAT International report estimates that each year, 40,000 to 70,000 children are involved in trafficking, pornography or prostitution in Indonesia, a nation of 240 million where many families remain impoverished.
The U.S. State Department has also warned that more Indonesian girls are being recruited using social media networks. In a report last year, it said traffickers have "resorted to outright kidnapping of girls and young women for sex trafficking within the country and abroad."
Online child sexual abuse and exploitation are common in much of Asia. In the Philippines, kids are being forced to strip or perform sex acts on live webcams — often by their parents, who are using them as a source of income. Western men typically pay to use the sites.
"In the Philippines, this is the tip of the iceberg. It's not only Facebook and social media, but it's also through text messages ... especially young, vulnerable people are being targeted," said Leonarda Kling, regional representative for Terre des Hommes Netherlands, a nonprofit working on trafficking issues. "It's all about promises. Better jobs or maybe even a nice telephone or whatever. Young people now, you see all the glamour and glitter around you and they want to have the latest BlackBerry, the latest fashion, and it's also a way to get these things."
Facebook says its investigators regularly review content on the site and work with authorities, including Interpol, to combat illegal activity. It also has employees around the world tasked with cracking down on people who attempt to use the site for human trafficking.
"We take human trafficking very seriously and, while this behavior is not common on Facebook, a number of measures are in place to counter this activity," spokesman Andrew Noyes said in an email.
He declined to give any details on Facebook's involvement in trafficking cases reported in Indonesia or elsewhere.
____
The Depok girl, wearing a mask to hide her face as she was interviewed, said she is still shocked that the man she knew for nearly a month turned on her.
"He wanted to buy new clothes for me, and help with school payments. He was different ... that's all," she said. "I have a lot of contacts through Facebook, and I've also exchanged phone numbers. But everything has always gone fine. We were just friends."
She said that after being kidnapped, she was given sleeping pills and was "mostly unconscious" for her ordeal. She said she could not escape because a man and another girl stood guard over her.
The girl said the man did not have the money for a plane ticket to Batam, and also became aware that her parents and others were relentlessly searching for her. He ended up dumping her at a bus station, where she found help.
"I am angry and cannot accept what he did to me. ... I was raped and beaten!" said the lanky girl with shoulder-length black hair. The AP generally does not publish the names of sexual abuse victims.
The girl's case made headlines this month when she was expelled after she tried to return to school. Officials at the school reportedly claimed she had tarnished its image. She has since been reinstated, but she no longer wishes to attend due to the stigma she faces.
Education Minister Mohammad Nuh also came under fire after making remarks that not all girls who report such crimes are victims: "They do it for fun, and then the girl alleges that it's rape," he said. His response to the criticism was that it's difficult to prove whether sexual assault allegations are "real rapes."
The publicity surrounding the story encouraged the parents of five other missing girls to come forward this month, saying their daughters also were victimized by people they met on Facebook. Two more girls were freed from their captors in October and are now seeking counseling.
A man who posed as a photographer on Facebook was recently arrested and accused of kidnapping and raping three teenage girls. Authorities say he lured them into meeting him with him by promising to make them models, and then locked them in a house. Police found dozens of photos of naked girls on his camera and laptop.
Another case involved a 15-year-old girl from Bogor. She was recently rescued by police after being kidnapped by someone she met on Facebook and held at a restaurant, waiting for someone to move her to another town where she would be forced into prostitution.
In some incidents, the victims themselves ended up recruiting other young girls after being promised money or luxuries such as mobile phones or new clothes.
Police are trying to get a step ahead of the criminals. Detective Lt. Ruth Yeni Qomariah from the Children and Women's Protection unit in Surabaya said she posed as a teenager online and busted three men who used Facebook to kidnap and rape underage girls. She's searching for a fourth suspect.
"It has been getting worse as trafficking rings become more sophisticated and underage children are more easily targeted," she said.
The man who abducted the Depok girl has not been found, and it's unclear what happened to the five other girls held at the house where she was raped.
"I saw they were offered by my kidnapper to many guys," she said. "I don't know what happened. I don't want to remember it."
____
Associated Press writer Niniek Karmini contributed to this report from Jakarta, Indonesia.
On the Net: https://www.facebook.com/help/179468058793941/?q=trafficking&sid=0o4BpvxlcINe4Y6VV

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Monday, October 29, 2012

Jill Jacobs explains Jewish values’ influence on modern practices | The Pendulum

http://elonpendulum.com/2012/10/jill-jacobs-explains-jewish-values-influence-on-modern-practices/

Source: The Pendulum

A fight for social justice revolved around a tomato.
Tomato farms in Immokalee, Fla. and throughout the state are grounds for modern day slavery and human trafficking, said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America.
Jacobs spoke about the plight of tomato pickers, the road to developing ethical agricultural practices and how Jewish tradition directed her responsibility toward others in a lecture titled “Taking Judaism Public: What Traditional Wisdom Can Teach America” at Elon University Oct. 26.
“This year celebrates 150 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, but 150 years later there are still slaves here,” Jacobs said.
Jacobs described the oppressive working conditions and the interminable poverty the pickers inherit.
The tomato growers typically monitor the pickers and pay them per pound of tomatoes rather than according to an hourly wage. As a result, pickers would need to pick 2.5 tons of tomatoes to make minimum wage, according to Jacobs.
Dangerous pesticides and sexual harassment are permanent conditions as well, she said.
“Sexual harassment is so common, I thought it was part of the job,” Jacobs said, repeating the words a tomato picker had shared with her.
In order to break the cycle, a group of pickers organized the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and requested the growers sign a contract promising an improved working environment. When the growers refused, rabbis and businesses stepped in.
Initiatives informed the community of the modern day slavery. Boycotts on college campuses motivated Taco Bell to refuse to buy tomatoes produced under unethical working conditions. Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, under pressure from local rabbis and the Jewish community, later joined the boycott as well.
According to Jacobs, Jewish tradition informed the rabbis’ decision to fight against modern slavery.
“History is obligatory,” Jacobs said, referencing the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt.
The Jewish Biblical history teaches the community to defeat oppression because their ancestors experienced slavery in Egypt. The past generates obligation to those who suffer, she said.
“History is not a historical experience, but dictates laws in the present,” Jacobs said.
Although Jewish tradition does not argue against capitalism and class distinction, each person should still demonstrate responsibility for each other.
“People can earn as much money as they want, but there are specific limits on how they can treat the people who help them make that money,” Jacobs said.
According to the revered Jewish philosopher, Nahmanides, the Torah law says an employer must not keep his workers’ wages overnight in the event they need the money to survive and provide for their family.
The idea of tzedakah, which translates to “gifts to the poor,” also influences Jacobs’ views concerning contemporary and moral issues, she said. Tzedakah, derived from the Hebrew word for justice, requires each individual gives at least 10 percent of his earnings to the poor.
The practice demonstrates that God owns everything, and it is the people’s responsibility to redistribute it to those less fortunate. The tradition relates to how we think about companies, she said.
While some employers argue they do not earn enough profit to increase their employees’ wages, Jacobs explains the employees’ work contributed to the functionality of the business.
“You got that money because other people worked for it, so it is your responsibility to find out how best to distribute it,” she said.
While religion frequently weaves its way into political discussion, Jacobs recognizes positive aspects of including religion in public debates.
“Religions have something to say about our moral issues today,” she said.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Notice to US citizens: Your actions abroad may have serious consequences

http://m.ice.gov/news/releases/1210/121017washingtondc.htm?f=m

Source: ICE


OCTOBER 17, 2012

Press Release

WASHINGTON – American tourists, with twisted overseas travel plans to engage in child sex tourism, may think they are beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement. However, they should know that it is a priority for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) to apprehend and prosecute U.S. citizens who engage in sexual acts with minors in foreign countries.

Millions of American citizens travel abroad on a regular basis. While the vast majority of them are law abiding, some commit sexual crimes against minors in foreign countries. Each year, over a million children are exploited in the global commercial sex trade. Child sex tourism involves people who travel from their home country to another and engage in commercial sex acts with children. Child sex tourism is a shameful assault on the dignity of children and a form of child abuse and violence. For the minors involved, these acts have devastating consequences, which may include long-lasting physical and psychological trauma, disease, drug addiction, unwanted pregnancy, malnutrition, social ostracism and possibly death.

Tourists engaging in child sex tourism often travel to developing countries looking for anonymity and the availability of children in prostitution. The crime is typically fueled by weak local law enforcement, corruption, the Internet, ease of travel and poverty. These sexual offenders come from all socio-economic backgrounds and may hold positions of trust. Previous arrests for child sex tourism involving U.S. citizens have included: a pediatrician, a retired Army sergeant, a dentist, a Peace Corps volunteer and a university professor.

In 2003, the United States strengthened its ability to fight child sex tourism by passing the Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today Act (PROTECT Act) and the Trafficking Victim's Protection Reauthorization Act. These laws carry penalties of up to 30 years in prison for engaging in child sex tourism. In the nine years since these laws were strengthened, HSI special agents have arrested 93 suspects on child sex tourism charges.

"Our message is clear to all U.S. citizens: We take these crimes seriously," said Peter Vincent, director of HSI's Office of International Affairs. "If you dare abuse a child abroad, we will find you, send you back to the United States and prosecute you for your crimes. You might be out of the country, but you are not out of reach of U.S. law enforcement."
HSI has 73 offices in 47 foreign countries around the world that serve as the agency's liaison to counterparts in local government and law enforcement. HSI's attachés abroad are critical in investigating these crimes.

Just last week, Jesse Osmun, 33, a former Peace Corps volunteer, was sentenced in Hartford, Conn., to 15 years in prison for sexually abusing four girls, all under the age of 6, while he was a volunteer in South Africa. He never expected that HSI special agents would arrest him for crimes he committed nearly 8,000 miles away from his Connecticut home. HSI's office in Connecticut – working collaboratively with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Connecticut – has had two other recent cases involving child sex tourism. Edgardo Sensi was sentenced in January to 85 years in prison for production of child pornography and sexual tourism offenses related to his sexual abuse of minor girls in the United States and Nicaragua. Douglas Perlitz was sentenced in December 2010 to nearly 20 years in prison for sexually abusing 16 minor victims over the course of a decade in Haiti.

"I am proud to partner with HSI in prosecuting U.S. citizens who abuse children abroad," said U.S. Attorney David B. Fein, District of Connecticut. "I am hopeful that the cases we have successfully prosecuted in Connecticut will serve as a deterrent to others who would partake in these illegal acts. The Department of Justice will continue to devote resources to protecting children worldwide."

HSI's Child Exploitation Investigations Unit investigates the trans-border, large-scale production and distribution of images of child abuse, as well as individuals who travel abroad to engage in sex with minors. The unit employs the latest technology to collect evidence and track the activities of individuals and organized groups who sexually exploit children through the use of websites, chat rooms, newsgroups and peer-to-peer trading. These investigative activities are organized under Operation Predator, a program managed by the Child Exploitation Investigations Unit.

"If you are molesting children, I advise you to turn yourself in and get help," added Vincent. "The law will catch up to you no matter where you are. If you continue your crimes against children, you should always be looking over your shoulder because we will hunt you down to the ends of the earth in order to protect innocent children from being violated. There will be no refuge for child sexual predators who believe that they may victimize children outside the United States. No place is too distant or too remote to escape the attention of HSI."

To learn more about HSI, visit www.ICE.gov/HSI.

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Migration to Australia linked to rights abuses, says academic | Connect Asia | ABC Radio Australia


SOURCE: ABC Radio Australia


Updated 4 October 2012, 16:24 AEST
Professor Susan Kneebone and Dr Julie Debeljak from Monash University's Faculty of Law spent three years researching human trafficking in the Greater Mekong Subregion - which includes Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam and the Chinese provinces, Yunnan and Guangxi.
They argue Australia should take a broader look at why asylum seekers flee their home countries, as economic migration is often linked to human rights abuses.
Presenter: Liam Cochrane
Speaker: Professor Susan Kneebone, Monash University's Faculty of Law; author, Transnational Crime and Human Rights: Responses to Human Trafficking in the Greater Mekong Subregion

KNEEBONE: Well one of the most successful programs I would say is the COMMIT process. COMMIT stands for Coordinated Mekong Ministerial Initiative Against Trafficking, and in 2004 the countries in the region joined together and created a memorandum of understanding, an organisation known as UNIAP, which is the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on human trafficking in the Mekong sub--region. In fact is the lead agency on this project, because trafficking is an issue which occurs obviously across borders for the most part, although it also occurs internally, and no one country can really tackle the problem alone. So there has been terrific cooperation between the countries on these issues and UNIAP has really directed the shall we say dialogue on the issues towards, gradually towards a more protective approach to victims of human trafficking. Initially responses were very much 101 policing, teaching policemen to catch traffickers. But in countries where the rule of law is often quite fragile, where you don't have stable institutions, stable courts, you don't have many lawyers, it's really starting at the wrong end of things. And gradually over the years that I've been watching this issue I've seen UNIAP swing towards much more of a human rights and protection angle for victims of trafficking. 
COCHRANE: So on the ground how does that manifest itself, because many of our listeners will recognise a situation where police and border authorities and various other officials are actually part of the problem rather than part of the solution, so how does tackling it from a human rights perspective actually work on the ground?
KNEEBONE: Well I think what it will do eventually when people come to realise that this is the angle to take in order to get the cooperation of trafficked victims, is that police will be more concerned with assisting the person rather than pushing them towards being a witness in a prosecution. And just to give a practical example, at the moment a lot of the protection measures in fact involve detention in shelters, they're effectively detention measures rather than rehabilitation measures. But there are some excellent shelters for example in Lao PDR there are some excellent shelters, which are in fact funded by the Japanese government where the rehabilitation does include social and psychological rehabilitation. But gradually as the message gets out attitudes will change. One of the things that governments in the region have done themselves is in fact to promote safe migration. They've realised the more people are at risk of being manipulated by others, in other words under the power of others, the people who are less empowered have less knowledge are the ones who are likely to be trafficked. And so they are in fact training people to migrate themselves safely and facilitating them in crossing borders, rather than imposing impediments.
COCHRANE: Australia has a lot of controversy at the moment about people entering the country by boat and whether they're coming for genuine asylum seeker reasons or as economic migrants. Is there anything Australia can learn in terms of the asylum seeker issue that you've come across in your research?
KNEEBONE: I do think that this issue shows that people are going to move if they have to move. That people don't willingly leave their homes, and that these people are all what we could broadly call forced migrants, they are leaving because they've got very good reasons. And I think that something the Australian government could recognise is that in fact they also have to assist people to make these journeys safely, which indeed they're doing. But then they should not be penalised when they finally get to their destination, because that is not going to work as a deterrent, people are going to move and continue to move because they have to move in order to survive. 
COCHRANE: Do you think the Australian government should be more understanding of the reasons that are forcing people to migrate and not just drawing a line in the sand with human rights abuses on one side and economic factors on the other?
KNEEBONE: Absolutely, the two actually merge. Often economic reasons for moving are the result of human rights abuses, a lot of the people who are moving in the greater Mekong sub-region for example, are moving because of issues such as massive developments which unsettle their traditional ways of life. As well as it has been suggested, climate change reasons. So the economic reasons and the human rights reasons are in fact linked.

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