"Police are failing to investigate alleged cases of modern slavery due to "chronic weaknesses" in crime recording, the UK's anti-slavery commissioner says."
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Modern slavery: England and Wales police investigating 'too few' cases - BBC News:
Showing posts with label Romania. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Romania. Show all posts
Sunday, October 16, 2016
Saturday, April 23, 2016
Friday, August 31, 2012
Slavery in the UK: how it happens today: Voice of Russia
http://english.ruvr.ru/2012/02/06/65448888.html
Source: Voice of Russia
Download
Source: Voice of Russia
Feb 6, 2012
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© Flickr.com/Richard Scoop/cc-by-nc
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Interview with Aidan McQuade, the director of Anti-Slavery International.
How big of a problem is the slavery and who are the most vulnerable people?
In the world today the International Liberal Organization estimates that there is a minimum of 12.3 million of people in slavery for forced labour. Generally speaking it has been thought that people coming from some of the more developed countries would be relatively safe from this. But the investigation undertaken by the BBC has demonstrated that the British people vulnerable socially and economically are also vulnerable to slavery. So, the point that has been made is that this is not just about nationality\race necessity but also about vulnerability. So, anybody one could imagine could fall into this trap if they make the wrong choice in terms of trying to get a job to provide for themselves or their families.
Who do this? Who makes these people slaves?
They are certainly people from all different blocks of life are involved in this and in the UK at the moment you see some very well free people in a diplomatic community as well as free British people who keep an essentially forced labour – the domestic workers. The particular case which the BBC uncovered suggested that it was Irish people who have been responsible for the enslavement of these vulnerable British people. But right across the world you see all sorts of different groups of people enslaving others and the critical factors are that they are vulnerable and that there is some degree of prejudice against them. And on top of that are the government policies and practices which are inadequate to protect them.
Is there any respond from the Government and what can be done to prevent this?
The Government seems, in its initial reaction to this report, to feel that they are doing enough. I would feel that they are not doing enough. They seem to be responding to the issues of slavery as if it is an immigration question which is something which only affects foreigners and which has to do with them breaking emigration law. The trick of the matter is that this is a problem of vulnerability and exploitation, it affects everybody and the Government’s response should be making sure that everybody on this island, on the island of Britain, whether they are of British nation or people from the other parts of the world are properly protected.
At the moment British policy is inadequate in this regard. Despite the fact that at least in some other law enforcement agencies are taking these issues seriously, the broader policy environment is poor and in that regard they have much in common – the British Government has much in common with many other governments in the world in a way that their responses are poor and uncoordinated. So, there is a need for better coordination at an international level and greater sensitivity to the needs of victims on a national level.
What can de advised to those vulnerable people, for instance not to work abroad or what else?
I think they need to be aware as they can be of the risks that may be involved in something. Many people, I concluded have worked abroad, have worked as migrant workers and part of the way that we have progressed in our careers is because we have taken this work. So, one must understand – people who are getting into these situations are often the best type of people, they wanted better for themselves and for their families. But it is important for them to be aware of the risks that they may fall into, be aware as far as they can of their rights and have some plan about how they may seek help if they find they are getting into a dangerous situation. I think those are the three things which are very important for individuals to be responsible for. But more generally governments need to be serious about this issue and put in place more international systems particularly in the European Union but wider Europe as well that will ensure that people are properly protected.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Modern day slavery : Voice of Russia
http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_08_22/Modern-Day-Slavery/
Source: Voice of Russia
Source: Voice of Russia
Aug 22, 2012
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© Flickr.com/Katayun/cc-by-nc
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Approximately 30 million people are entrapped in some form of slavery, according to Not For Sale. Despite the fact that The International Day for the Remembrance of Slave Trade and its Abolition is August 23, it feels like only a partial victory. In Thailand, India, Latin America, The Netherlands, and Romania people are still being kidnapped and forced into the sex industry.
Spectators never see the whip being cracked, the unstoppable tears, or the constant tension both slave and master have with one another, but the truth is only half the reality.
“Slavery is going on today. It is still going on and is allowed to continue because there’s not enough public outcry,“ said Sarah Symons, founder and executive director of madebysurviviors.com, an organization which empowers survivors of slavery by teaching them how to make jewelry and other goods, to the Voice of Russia.
A persistent problem, that is not a just a national stigma, but an international uproar. As poverty is one of the top contributors of the slave and forced labor trade, more victims are created by the traffickers’ keen manipulation techniques and threats of death or destruction to their family.
Trade in the modern day does not discriminate against anyone, no matter what gender, color, or nationality. A person is deceived by being lured in with promises of making lucrative wages in another country. Yet that is only a pipedream, and they are made to work without wages until they are drained of their dignity, pride, and what looks to be their soul.
Women may be in the spotlight as a woman from Cambodia tells her story of struggle and courage that really puts a face on the issue of slavery. Her visual example is a video that can be seen on YouTube by the name of Sex For Sale In S/E Asia 1 from jdoodlesdocumentarie.
Symons knows all too well as the victims who come into her program are reluctant to make eye contact and may come off as very angry and sad individuals. Often times, they are distrustful of others which can be seemingly understandable at the same time. After the first 6 months of recovering from the trauma, progress can definitely be seen.
Traffickers are sneaky as they find ways to stay off the radar by either hiding their property in brothels or selling them off. “Exploitation happens behind the scenes,” said Jessica Henry director of marketing and communications of Not For Sale, an organization dedicated to decreasing the number of humans that are taken for slave purposes.
Over half of the time, the trafficker is a stranger, yet over 40 percent of the time, it is a family member or friend who sells the person into the trade. In various instances, this is by accident. Members of the family may give their child willingly to a stranger and are promised their child will go to a nice school or be able to make money for the family. However, the opposite happens, and they may never see their flesh and blood again. The traffickers are all around, but no one can see them.
“I think we’re seeing hotspots in Thailand, India, Latin America, Amsterdam, and Romania,” mentioned Henry about the various people kidnapped and forced into the industry. Though these are reported incidents, other countries with low or no activity at all still face scrutiny, as it is unclear if slaves aren’t there or if they are just being hidden really well.
“To me, they are possessed by an evil,” said Venita Benitez founder of globalslaveryremembranceday.com and activist against the slavery of all humans. She believes all traffickers have a cruelty inside of them that makes them do what they do.
During The International Day for the Remembrance of Slave Trade and its Abolition, people can do more than they think to reverse the cycle of slavery in the here and now. “We have to rage war on slavery,” said Benitez. Assisting organizations like End Slavery Now or donating to the Protection Project are ways to contribute.
A smaller way to help is to be more aware of what is being purchased. If people are what they eat, then people should realize they are what they wear. Many times, goods people buy are made from the hands of children, who are held captive. Free2work.org, who weighs out a company’s efforts to ensure that children and forced labor are not part of its supply chain, is a useful resource for consumers to use.
In retrospect, the slaves of the past are not like the slaves of the present. The desire to save others seems to have grown stronger as can be seen on the Polaris Project ‘s website, where advocates give guidance to real victims, whose stories are so gut wrenching, they are near impossible to ignore.
“Be honest about it, start talking about it and take action,” expressed Symons.
Unfortunately, as long as there are buyers in the market, the slave trade will stay alive. With the power of education, resources given by non-profits and assistance from the government, people can reverse this. “We’re seeing improvements and progress,” told Henry. A day will come when the word slave will be as extinct as the dinosaurs.
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Moldova: UN Trust Fund supports provision of legal assistance to victims of human trafficking
Moldova: UN Trust Fund supports provision of legal assistance to victims of human trafficking:
When Dana read an ad from a travel agency inviting women from the Republic of Moldova to spend a summer in Italy working as waitresses in a nightclub, she did not think twice about seizing the opportunity. The 19-year-old had long dreamed of going to Italy; now she could do so - and even earn good money. Dana responded to the ad and soon after made the fateful journey from her country, nestled between Ukraine and Romania, west to Italy. Upon arrival, Dana found herself trapped in a nightmare.
When Dana read an ad from a travel agency inviting women from the Republic of Moldova to spend a summer in Italy working as waitresses in a nightclub, she did not think twice about seizing the opportunity. The 19-year-old had long dreamed of going to Italy; now she could do so - and even earn good money. Dana responded to the ad and soon after made the fateful journey from her country, nestled between Ukraine and Romania, west to Italy. Upon arrival, Dana found herself trapped in a nightmare.Friday, April 27, 2012
Human Trafficking Victims: 2.4 Million People Across The Globe Are Trafficked For Labor, Sex
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/03/human-trafficking-victims_n_1401673.html#s842340
Source: The Huffington Post
By EDITH M. LEDERER 04/ 3/12 10:17 PM ET
Related articles
Source: The Huffington Post
By EDITH M. LEDERER 04/ 3/12 10:17 PM ET
Romanian students dressed as caged brides attend an event to raise awareness to the risks of human trafficking and sexual exploitation faced by young girls lured by the prospect of a better paying job abroad, in Bucharest, Romania, Saturday, Nov. 19, 2011. (File/AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)
UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. crime-fighting office said Tuesday that 2.4 million people across the globe are victims of human trafficking at any one time, and 80 percent of them are being exploited as sexual slaves.
Yuri Fedotov, the head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, told a daylong General Assembly meeting on trafficking that 17 percent are trafficked to perform forced labor, including in homes and sweat shops.
He said $32 billion is being earned every year by unscrupulous criminals running human trafficking networks, and two out of every three victims are women.
Fighting these criminals "is a challenge of extraordinary proportions," Fedotov said.
"At any one time, 2.4 million people suffer the misery of this humiliating and degrading crime," he said.
According to Fedotov's Vienna-based office, only one out of 100 victims of trafficking is ever rescued.
Fedotov called for coordinated local, regional and international responses that balance "progressive and proactive law enforcement" with actions that combat "the market forces driving human trafficking in many destination countries."
Michelle Bachelet, who heads the new U.N. agency promoting women's rights and gender equality called UN Women, said "it's difficult to think of a crime more hideous and shocking than human trafficking. Yet, it is one of the fastest growing and lucrative crimes."
Actress Mira Sorvino, the U.N. goodwill ambassador against human trafficking, told the meeting that "modern day slavery is bested only by the illegal drug trade for profitability," but very little money and political will is being spent to combat trafficking.
"Transnational organized crime groups are adding humans to their product lists," she said. "Satellites reveal the same routes moving them as arms and drugs."
Sorvino said there is a lack of strong legislation and police training to combat trafficking. Even in the United States "only 10 percent of police stations have any protocol to deal with trafficking," she said.
M. Cherif Bassiouni, an emeritus law professor at DePaul University in Chicago, said to applause that "there is no human rights subject on which governments have said so much but done so little."
Laws in most of the world criminalize prostitutes and other victims of trafficking but almost never criminalize the perpetrators "without whom that crime could not be performed," he said.
Bassiouni said the figure of 2.4 million people trafficked at any time is not reflective of the overall problem because "at the end of 10 years you will have a significantly larger number who have gone through the experience."
He urged a global reassessment of "who is a victim and who is a criminal" and called for criminalizing not only those on the demand side using trafficked women, children and men, but all those in the chain of supplying trafficking victims.
In addition, Bassiouni said, "we must change attitudes of male-dominated police departments throughout the world who place this type of a crime at the lowest level of their law enforcement priorities."
General Assembly President Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged donors to contribute to a new trust fund aimed at helping victims of human trafficking.
At the start of the meeting, Fedotov said the U.N. Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Trafficking had pledges of around $1 million but just $47,000 in contributions, and he urged those who offered money to send their checks.
At the end of the meeting, Al-Nasser announced three new pledges – $200,000 from Australia, $30,000 from Russia, and 30,000 Euros from Luxembourg – and encouraged other U.N. member states to follow their example.
Related articles
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Women Enslaved by Spain’s Brothel Tourism Boom - NYTimes.com
Women Enslaved by Spain’s Brothel Tourism Boom - NYTimes.com
Marta Ramoneda for The New York Times
A prostitute waits for customers on a road in La Jonquera, on the border with France and Spain on December 11, 2011. More Photos »
By SUZANNE DALEY
Published: April 6, 2012
LA JONQUERA, Spain — She had expected a job in a hotel. But when Valentina arrived here two months ago from Romania, the man who helped her get here — a man she had considered her boyfriend — made it clear that the job was on the side of the road.
Multimedia
He threatened to beat her and to kill her children if she did not comply. And so she stood near a roundabout recently, her hair in a greasy ponytail, charging $40 for intercourse, $27 for oral sex.
“For me, life is finished,” she said later that evening, tears running down her face. “I will never forget that I have done this.”
La Jonquera used to be a quiet border town where truckers rested and the French came looking for a deal on hand-painted pottery and leather goods. But these days, prostitution is big business here, as it is elsewhere in Spain, where it is essentially legal.
While the rest of Spain’s economy may be struggling, experts say that prostitution — almost all of it involving the ruthless trafficking of foreign women — is booming, exploding into public view in small towns and big cities. The police recently rescued a 19-year-old Romanian woman from traffickers who had tattooed on her wrist a bar code and the amount she still owed them: more than $2,500.
In the past, most customers were middle-aged men. But the boom here, experts say, is powered in large part by the desires of young men — many of them traveling in packs for the weekend — taking advantage of Europe’s cheap and nearly seamless travel.
“The young used to go to discos,” said Francina Vila i Valls, Barcelona’s councilor for women and civil rights. “But now they go to brothels. It’s just another form of entertainment to them.”
There is little reliable data on the subject. The State Department’s 2010 report on trafficking said that 200,000 to 400,000 women worked in prostitution in Spain. The report said that 90 percent were trafficked.
But police officials and advocates say that whatever the number of victims, it is growing. Thousands of women are forced to work — often for even lower pay now, because of the economic downturn — everywhere from fancy clubs and private apartments to industrial complexes and lonely country roads.
Europe woke up to the problem of trafficked women in the 1990s, as young women from the former Soviet Union began to arrive in large numbers, and it has spent much of the last decade developing legal frameworks to address the issue. But, some advocates say, this decade will test Europe’s commitment to enforcing its new laws.
“The structures, by and large, are in place,” said Luis CdeBaca, the ambassador who leads the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. “Now it’s time to take them out for a drive.”
Fueling the boom in the sex industry in Spain are many factors, experts say, including porous borders in many parts of the world and lax laws. Until 2010, Spain did not even have a law that distinguished trafficking from illegal immigration. And advocates say arrests of traffickers and services for trafficked women remain few. The State Department’s report on trafficking said that according to preliminary information, the Spanish government prosecuted 202 trafficking suspects and convicted 80 in 2010.
More important, some advocates say, is the growing demand for sex services from younger tourists. Of course, there is a local market. One study cited by a 2009 United Nations report said that 39 percent of Spanish men admitted having visited a prostitute at least once. It is widely accepted here for business meetings to end in dinner and a visit to a brothel.
But more recently, experts say, Spain has also become a go-to destination for sex services.
In La Jonquera, tucked behind an all-night gas station, is the newly opened Club Paradise, which, with 101 rooms, is one of the largest brothels in Europe. It caters in large part to young men from France, where many aspects of prostitution are illegal, and perhaps more to the point, buying sex is more expensive.
On a recent evening, one young man from Paris stood in the parking lot of Club Paradise, bragging about his sexual exploits while his friends looked on. The women, he said, did not talk about whether they were being forced to have sex.
“Maybe,” he said. “But I think they are having a good time.”
If any of them actually are, they would seem to be the exceptions. Thirty years ago, virtually all the prostitutes in Spain were Spanish. Now, almost none are. Advocates and police officials say that most of the women are controlled by illegal networks — they are modern-day slaves.
The networks vary enormously, and shift constantly. Some are “mom and pop” operations out of Eastern Europe, like the one that controls Valentina. Others have far greater reach, like the Nigerian organizations that first began to surface in Spain in the last decade. Deputy Inspector Xavier Cortés Camacho, the head of the regional antitrafficking unit in Barcelona, said the Nigerian groups moved women through northern Africa to Spain, and then controlled them by threatening to rape or kill their family members back home.
But Mr. Cortés said that people of maybe a dozen nationalities were involved in the trafficking. Until recently, for instance, the police in Barcelona did not even realize that Chinese mafias ran prostitution rings in the city. Then they began noticing more and more advertisements for Chinese, Japanese and Korean women — all of them, it turned out, Chinese — working in a network of about 30 brothels.
The working conditions were brutal, Mr. Cortés said. On wiretaps, he said, “we listened to them complain that they needed to rest, they were in pain. But they had to keep working. One woman committed suicide after finding out she was H.I.V.-positive.”
Some of the women are sold into the business by their families, Mr. Cortés said. The police came across one case in which Colombian traffickers were paying one family $650 a month for their daughter. She managed to escape, he said. But when she contacted her family, they told her to go back or they would send her sister as a replacement.
Of the 1,605 women identified in 2010 as victims of traffickers, the biggest number — about 30 percent — came from the Balkans.
Many tell a story much like that of Valentina, who hoped to earn enough money in Spain to build a house and live in peace with her children.
So far, she said, she has earned a bit more than $2,000. But she has not been allowed to keep any of it. “They say I eat too much,” she said. “They are angry if I buy something to drink.”
In the meantime, her cellphone kept ringing, and the threats from her former boyfriend kept coming, she said.
The visibility of prostitution has become an issue here. A battle has raged over whether to allow advertisements for prostitution in newspapers, but they remain legal and appear even in the most reputable papers.
After one Barcelona newspaper ran a series last year on sex acts conducted in plain view near a main tourist attraction, the boulevard Las Ramblas, the city council said it would ban street prostitution and expand services for the women.
In La Jonquera, Mayor Sonia Martínez Juli says the town, population 3,000, has few resources to help the women.
“We feel completely abandoned with this problem,” she said.
Some politicians would like to see prostitution outlawed in Spain, though that does not seem imminent. Many women’s groups say that this would only force prostitution underground, making it even harder to help trafficked women.
For now, prostitution is legal, though not regulated, in Spain. But pimping is illegal, so most brothels like Club Paradise operate more like hotels. It charges the women who work there about $90 a night for room and board.
José Moreno, one of the owners, said the women who worked there did so freely.
“Sometimes there is a problem with a boyfriend,” Mr. Moreno said recently, as scantily clad young women began to gather at one of the bars inside his club, readying for a night’s work. “But that is usually cleared up quickly.”
Some weeks after the interview, however, Mr. Moreno was convicted on charges relating to smuggling Brazilian women into Spain to work as prostitutes. He was sentenced to three years in prison and is appealing the decision. The authorities say the women can seek help, but many are reluctant. On a recent evening, Valentina, speaking a mix of Spanish and Romanian, said she was unsure where to turn. She said she had already been to the local police, but had been told she had to go to the regional police in Figueres, about 15 miles away.
A few days later, she stopped answering her cellphone and could not be found at her usual spot along the road. Inspector Cortés said that she had indeed gone to the police in Figueres. But at the last minute, she refused to go to a shelter and left on her own.
LA JONQUERA, Spain — She had expected a job in a hotel. But when Valentina arrived here two months ago from Romania, the man who helped her get here — a man she had considered her boyfriend — made it clear that the job was on the side of the road.
Multimedia
He threatened to beat her and to kill her children if she did not comply. And so she stood near a roundabout recently, her hair in a greasy ponytail, charging $40 for intercourse, $27 for oral sex.
“For me, life is finished,” she said later that evening, tears running down her face. “I will never forget that I have done this.”
La Jonquera used to be a quiet border town where truckers rested and the French came looking for a deal on hand-painted pottery and leather goods. But these days, prostitution is big business here, as it is elsewhere in Spain, where it is essentially legal.
While the rest of Spain’s economy may be struggling, experts say that prostitution — almost all of it involving the ruthless trafficking of foreign women — is booming, exploding into public view in small towns and big cities. The police recently rescued a 19-year-old Romanian woman from traffickers who had tattooed on her wrist a bar code and the amount she still owed them: more than $2,500.
In the past, most customers were middle-aged men. But the boom here, experts say, is powered in large part by the desires of young men — many of them traveling in packs for the weekend — taking advantage of Europe’s cheap and nearly seamless travel.
“The young used to go to discos,” said Francina Vila i Valls, Barcelona’s councilor for women and civil rights. “But now they go to brothels. It’s just another form of entertainment to them.”
There is little reliable data on the subject. The State Department’s 2010 report on trafficking said that 200,000 to 400,000 women worked in prostitution in Spain. The report said that 90 percent were trafficked.
But police officials and advocates say that whatever the number of victims, it is growing. Thousands of women are forced to work — often for even lower pay now, because of the economic downturn — everywhere from fancy clubs and private apartments to industrial complexes and lonely country roads.
Europe woke up to the problem of trafficked women in the 1990s, as young women from the former Soviet Union began to arrive in large numbers, and it has spent much of the last decade developing legal frameworks to address the issue. But, some advocates say, this decade will test Europe’s commitment to enforcing its new laws.
“The structures, by and large, are in place,” said Luis CdeBaca, the ambassador who leads the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. “Now it’s time to take them out for a drive.”
Fueling the boom in the sex industry in Spain are many factors, experts say, including porous borders in many parts of the world and lax laws. Until 2010, Spain did not even have a law that distinguished trafficking from illegal immigration. And advocates say arrests of traffickers and services for trafficked women remain few. The State Department’s report on trafficking said that according to preliminary information, the Spanish government prosecuted 202 trafficking suspects and convicted 80 in 2010.
More important, some advocates say, is the growing demand for sex services from younger tourists. Of course, there is a local market. One study cited by a 2009 United Nations report said that 39 percent of Spanish men admitted having visited a prostitute at least once. It is widely accepted here for business meetings to end in dinner and a visit to a brothel.
But more recently, experts say, Spain has also become a go-to destination for sex services.
In La Jonquera, tucked behind an all-night gas station, is the newly opened Club Paradise, which, with 101 rooms, is one of the largest brothels in Europe. It caters in large part to young men from France, where many aspects of prostitution are illegal, and perhaps more to the point, buying sex is more expensive.
On a recent evening, one young man from Paris stood in the parking lot of Club Paradise, bragging about his sexual exploits while his friends looked on. The women, he said, did not talk about whether they were being forced to have sex.
“Maybe,” he said. “But I think they are having a good time.”
If any of them actually are, they would seem to be the exceptions. Thirty years ago, virtually all the prostitutes in Spain were Spanish. Now, almost none are. Advocates and police officials say that most of the women are controlled by illegal networks — they are modern-day slaves.
The networks vary enormously, and shift constantly. Some are “mom and pop” operations out of Eastern Europe, like the one that controls Valentina. Others have far greater reach, like the Nigerian organizations that first began to surface in Spain in the last decade. Deputy Inspector Xavier Cortés Camacho, the head of the regional antitrafficking unit in Barcelona, said the Nigerian groups moved women through northern Africa to Spain, and then controlled them by threatening to rape or kill their family members back home.
But Mr. Cortés said that people of maybe a dozen nationalities were involved in the trafficking. Until recently, for instance, the police in Barcelona did not even realize that Chinese mafias ran prostitution rings in the city. Then they began noticing more and more advertisements for Chinese, Japanese and Korean women — all of them, it turned out, Chinese — working in a network of about 30 brothels.
The working conditions were brutal, Mr. Cortés said. On wiretaps, he said, “we listened to them complain that they needed to rest, they were in pain. But they had to keep working. One woman committed suicide after finding out she was H.I.V.-positive.”
Some of the women are sold into the business by their families, Mr. Cortés said. The police came across one case in which Colombian traffickers were paying one family $650 a month for their daughter. She managed to escape, he said. But when she contacted her family, they told her to go back or they would send her sister as a replacement.
Of the 1,605 women identified in 2010 as victims of traffickers, the biggest number — about 30 percent — came from the Balkans.
Many tell a story much like that of Valentina, who hoped to earn enough money in Spain to build a house and live in peace with her children.
So far, she said, she has earned a bit more than $2,000. But she has not been allowed to keep any of it. “They say I eat too much,” she said. “They are angry if I buy something to drink.”
In the meantime, her cellphone kept ringing, and the threats from her former boyfriend kept coming, she said.
The visibility of prostitution has become an issue here. A battle has raged over whether to allow advertisements for prostitution in newspapers, but they remain legal and appear even in the most reputable papers.
After one Barcelona newspaper ran a series last year on sex acts conducted in plain view near a main tourist attraction, the boulevard Las Ramblas, the city council said it would ban street prostitution and expand services for the women.
In La Jonquera, Mayor Sonia Martínez Juli says the town, population 3,000, has few resources to help the women.
“We feel completely abandoned with this problem,” she said.
Some politicians would like to see prostitution outlawed in Spain, though that does not seem imminent. Many women’s groups say that this would only force prostitution underground, making it even harder to help trafficked women.
For now, prostitution is legal, though not regulated, in Spain. But pimping is illegal, so most brothels like Club Paradise operate more like hotels. It charges the women who work there about $90 a night for room and board.
José Moreno, one of the owners, said the women who worked there did so freely.
“Sometimes there is a problem with a boyfriend,” Mr. Moreno said recently, as scantily clad young women began to gather at one of the bars inside his club, readying for a night’s work. “But that is usually cleared up quickly.”
Some weeks after the interview, however, Mr. Moreno was convicted on charges relating to smuggling Brazilian women into Spain to work as prostitutes. He was sentenced to three years in prison and is appealing the decision. The authorities say the women can seek help, but many are reluctant. On a recent evening, Valentina, speaking a mix of Spanish and Romanian, said she was unsure where to turn. She said she had already been to the local police, but had been told she had to go to the regional police in Figueres, about 15 miles away.
A few days later, she stopped answering her cellphone and could not be found at her usual spot along the road. Inspector Cortés said that she had indeed gone to the police in Figueres. But at the last minute, she refused to go to a shelter and left on her own.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Human trafficking in Romania -- low risk, high income business (SETimes.com)
Source:
http://www.setimes.com/cocoon/setimes/xhtml/en_GB/features/setimes/articles/2011/10/31
/reportage-01
http://www.setimes.com/cocoon/setimes/xhtml/en_GB/features/setimes/articles/2011/10/31
/reportage-01Iana Matei, a psychologist by training, is the leading figure in Romania's fight against human trafficking. In an interview with SETimes correspondent Paul Ciocoiu, she describes her efforts to rescue young girls amid a flawed legislative system.
By Paul Ciocoiu for Southeast European Times in Bucharest -- 31/10/11
 Reaching Out founder Iana Matei. [Victor Barbu/SETimes] |
SETimes: Tell us how your organisation, Reaching Out, started.
Iana Matei: It was established in 1999, becoming the first such organisation directly protecting victims of human trafficking, at a time when the Palermo Protocol was not in place yet, nor did we have specific legislation in Romania. The first victims I worked with were under age -- we would call them abused children -- and had been trafficked in the former Yugoslav countries where they had been lured with the promise of well-paid jobs.
SETimes: A method which is still being used, isn't it?
Matei: Indeed, but now we also have this so-called lover boy method in which traffickers pick the future victims one by one after they spend a couple of months with a girl until they convince her they allegedly want to marry her. What is worse in these cases is they start recruiting girls at the age of 12 and13, when they are easy to manipulate and control.
SETimes: Are most of the victims under age?
Matei: At this moment, yes. Unlike the first years of our activity in 1999-2003, when 70% of the victims were over 18 years old, and 30% were under age. Now this percentage has reversed. At this very moment, the youngest victim in my care is 13 years old.
The first funds came from the US Department of State. Then an American partner organisation … a German governmental organisation, UNICEF, then came the European funds. Lately, we have received funds from Make Way Partners, a US organisation.
I started by raising awareness among the women and girls in the whole country about what human trafficking really was. I did that by means of a movie I myself shot with a hidden camera in Macedonia and that I showed in schools. The movie showed the entire route from recruitment, transportation to exploitation based on the testimonies of the girls I had saved.
SETimes: How many employees are there here? And how many girls have you saved so far?
Matei: Eight employees, me included. And we have managed to save about 460 girls since we started.
SETimes: Why did you choose to work with trafficked women?
I started doing prevention in the orphanages to talk kids out of running away. One day, the police called me and told me they had three prostitutes in custody and needed my help to take them to a medical examination. But when I got there, I found three scared girls still crying, with their faces smeared with mascara. They were 14, 15 and 16 years old.
 Reaching Out requires girls to go to school and to learn a skilled trade. [Victor Barbu/SETimes] |
When I asked them how they ended up in the street they told me pointblank they had been sold [by their parents]. I remember being furious for the following couple of months that something like that could happen in Romania.
When I started asking around, I realised no one wanted those girls, not even the Child Protection Authority, which said the girls would be taken to an orphanage. This is how I started my programme.
SETimes: How do the girls get to your organisation?
Matei: They are brought by the police, by the NGOs in the destination countries and girls we identify and take them away from traffickers. We currently have 12 girls at the centre, the most was 19.
SETimes: A small number compared to the proportions of the phenomenon.
Matei: I agree, but the assistance we give them is a complex process and cannot be done in haste, as happens in the state institutions. These kids have problems, have special needs; they need attention. They go out in the street because they lack love, care in their families; this is the starting point.
SETimes: How much time does a victim spend at your centre?
Matei: That depends on their age. Those who are above 18 integrate faster; we work with them more easily because they are mature. Those under age spend an average of one year here because otherwise they risk falling victims to human trafficking again.
SETimes: What exactly do they go through here during this reintegration process?
Matei: First, medical assistance. Then psychological assistance, individual and group therapy.
Also life skills: that is what they weren't taught in their families. Every day a girl is on duty, she cooks or cleans for the rest of the group. We also have a sewing workshop, then professional training and school.
If they are under age they go to school, regardless of the educational stage. I insist they graduate at least from primary school (8th grade) and professional training. We place a great accent on education because they have to know they can do something in this life, and they ended up this way because they were told at home they are good for nothing.
 Matei says family dysfunction is a root issue and anti-trafficking legislation is flawed. [Reuters] |
SETimes: How many of them do reintegrate in the end?
Matei: About 86%. These girls complete a school cycle, get a job and keep in touch with us afterwards.
SETimes: What is the main obstacle that prevents reintegration?
Matei: The flawed system, the lack of co-operation among state agencies. Then, even the school. We have to conceal the real stories of these girls when enlisting them back in school because they risk being discriminated against or even harassed.
SETimes: What about their families? Do they accept them back?
Matei: We always started from the premise children are born good. We do family counseling, negotiate the parent-child relationship and if all goes well, the child returns home and we keep an eye on her. But most of the time the obstacle resides in the parents themselves and that is the main obstacle in preventing them from reintegrating.
SETimes: Overall, what is the main cause of human trafficking?
Matei: Disorganised families, lack of education and information about human trafficking, an educational and health system that malfunctions, child protection that malfunctions. And all these components pass the responsibility to each other.
SETimes: What has been concretely done by state authorities to approach this problem? And what still needs to be done?
Matei: Anti-traffic legislation, a national strategy and an action plan, but all these have been done in haste, by fits and starts, because these measures were asked for by the EU and the US State Department. It was all put on paper to look good to the West but then we realised what was written there doesn't work.
Another obstacle is Article 44 of the Romanian Constitution, which says all the assets are legally obtained. We are interested in confiscating a trafficker's fortune because this is how we deal him a serious blow. Money is the very reason he does human trafficking.
But in Romania, it is the prosecutor who has to prove this money was illegally obtained, unlike the legislation in many Western countries, where the defendant has to prove he got his assets in a legal manner.
In Romania, human trafficking occurs at low risk, with high profit.
This content was commissioned for SETimes.com.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
‘They never think it will happen to them’ - Cyprus Mail
Source: http://www.cyprus-mail.com/crime/they-never-think-it-will-happen-them/20111022
REGULAR beatings and sex with strangers round the clock were only some of the experiences noted down in a police statement by a Bulgarian victim of human trafficking, according to the Office for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings’ head, Rita Superman.
REGULAR beatings and sex with strangers round the clock were only some of the experiences noted down in a police statement by a Bulgarian victim of human trafficking, according to the Office for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings’ head, Rita Superman.
She was speaking at a news conference yesterday on the role of the media in combating human trafficking.
“I’m sure that statement explains it all and this is one of the cases that we deal with on a daily basis,” said Superman, adding that the issues were not easily dealt with as they involved cross-border crime, mainly Bulgaria and Romania.
The Bulgarian woman who submitted the statement had come to Cyprus under the pretext that she would make a quick €2,000 just by marrying someone, but ended up caught up in a prostitution ring.
Around 4 million people are exploited every year worldwide, mainly children and women, with human trafficking involving men, women and children of all ages for either labour or sexual exploitation.
According to Superman, the police investigated 34 cases in 2009, around 35 in 2010 and 11 cases from January to July 2011.
A drop in the number of victims from countries such as Romania and Bulgaria, Superman said was because these countries were beginning to create awareness about human trafficking, whereas women from poor countries like Vietnam were still falling victim.
“Leaflets do not work, that doesn’t mean we should stop them but all of these people never believe that it will happen to them,” said Superman.
She also pointed out that many of the women are tricked into coming into the country under false pretences, with the promise of a legitimate job or marriage to a Cypriot for money. “Many of them are told that they can have a drink with someone and if they like them they can have sex with them for money but usually they end up being forced to have sex with them,” said Superman. “A lot of these women end up alcoholics just to numb themselves to the exploitation,” she added.
Other issues that were addressed was the way in which the media present human trafficking stories and many of the policies that the state already has in place to combat the phenomenon.
“In the majority of cases the media promote and bolster traditional gender stereotypes instead of fighting them,” said Josie Christodoulou, policy coordinator at the Mediterranean Institute for Gender Studies (MIGS).
“The problem is that when they present the story they try to shock with a result that many times they end up re-victimising the victim,”
Interior Minister Neoclis Sylikiotis noted that progress has been made over the last three years in combating the phenomenon but there was still a way to go. “We have updated our legislation so it is fully harmonised with the EU acquis and in accordance with international conventions,” said Sylikiotis.
A ‘Multidisciplinary Coordination Committee Against Human Trafficking’ has also been set up, chaired by Sylikiotis, and with an aim to identify the extent of the problem and formulate concrete solutions.
“We have two years to adopt the EU Directive and I’ve given instructions for this to be adopted as soon as possible,” said Sylikiotis.
Related articlesMonday, September 12, 2011
Cutting Edge: The Child Sex Trade | Watch Free Documentary Online
Liviu Tipurita returns to his homeland of Romania to investigate stories he has heard that there has been a sudden rise in the trafficking of children into the sex trade. He meets an old friend, fifteen-year-old street kid Laurentiu, who tells him he’s been selling sex to foreign pedophiles since he was twelve, and that a wealthy German has bought him a passport so that he can be trafficked to the West. Laurentiu introduces Liviu to his gang of street kids, some as young as eleven, being preyed on by the pedophiles.
Liviu follows up stories of kids trafficked to Italy, and on the streets of Milan films a fourteen year old boy being pimped by his own father. Over weeks of investigation, several more cases of families selling their own children for sex are documented.
Back in Romania, he hears about an English pedophile/trafficker called Tom. Co-producer/director Andrew Smith infiltrates Tom’s pimping network, and films damning evidence of how underage boys are preyed upon and trafficked to wealthy pedophile clients in the West. (Excerpt from hardcashproductions.com)
Click below to watch the full documentary.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Helsingin Sanomat - INBI says beggar phenomenon linked with human trafficking
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One criminal gang enticed 18 Romanian citizens to Finland, promising agricultural work for a reasonable wage.
The NBI says that the members of the group were forced to work as beggars and street musicians. Some were also coerced into shoplifting.
Violence and threats of violence were employed in the racket, and the earnings were given to the leaders of the group.
Those who were recruited into the scheme stayed in Finland for a few months.
Another group was led by a Romanian citizen living in Finland, who ran a personnel agency. The NBI says that his organisation brought 21 Romanians to Finland where they were put to work in the construction industry for 12 to 14 hours a day for insignificant wages.
The main suspect has fled Finland and a search warrant has been issued for him.
The main suspects on trial in Romania were found guilty and were given sentences of 8-10 years for extended trafficking in humans, the NBI says. Both sets of crimes took place about two years ago, but the trials in Romania are recent.
“The Finnish police reported on the cases to Romania, and Romanian officials took care of the actual investigation”, says detective inspector Ari Karvonen of the NBI.
The NBI says that the cases are examples of how international organised crime operates in Finland.
According to the NBI, domestic organised crime has already infiltrated the structures of society. Karvonen says that organised crime groups in Finland run hundreds of businesses which are used to operate the “grey economy”, and through which criminally earned money is laundered.
“Crime is very mutable. A typical example is that certain criminal groups set up companies to drop snow off roofs and recruited undocumented labour from abroad”, he says.
Karvonen says that criminal groups have taken control of doorman services of restaurants and divided territories among themselves.
NBI chief Rauno Ranta says that there are examples of attempts by organised crime to influence municipal decision-making in matters of building permits and zoning.
Karvonen says that in Lappeenranta, for instance, the Hell’s Angels group sought a change in the urban plan for a construction project of a company under its control.
“Both the NBI and local police took issue with this.”
The National Bureau of Investigation celebrated its 85th anniversary in Helsinki on Tuesday.
Helsingin Sanomat - International Edition - Home
Source: hs.fi
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