Showing posts with label Sex trade. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sex trade. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
Criminal gangs monitoring enslaved sex workers via webcam with 'impunity' - Crime - UK - The Independent
Women tricked into travelling to Britain to work in the sex trade have been told they are being constantly monitored in a new trend that police say has the power to “industrialise” the nature of human slavery.
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Criminal gangs monitoring enslaved sex workers via webcam with 'impunity' - Crime - UK - The Independent:
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Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Human trafficking in Mexico targets women and children - CNN.com
January 13, 2010 -- Updated 1557 GMT (2357 HKT)
[TRAFFICKING MONITOR: Click on URL at the bottom of the article to listen to audio report]
Human trafficking in Mexico
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
* The Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez is one of the world's most dangerous
* Hundreds of young women and children disappear each year in Mexico
* Maria told her story to U.S. authorities who are now working on her case
(CNN) -- Even before her 18th birthday, Maria had already been enslaved by a gang of human traffickers and held in captivity for four months in her homeland of Mexico.
While a prisoner, Maria witnessed a sickening trade in human life and recalls how young girls were drugged, forced into prostitution and then murdered.
What makes Maria's story so special is that she was one of the lucky ones who were able to escape.
Maria, whose real name we aren't using, used to live in the border town of Ciudad Juarez.
The city is home to two drug cartels that fight a bloody turf war for lucrative smuggling routes to America.
In a four-day period, 41 people were murdered, while over the past decade, 450 women were killed and 3,000 went missing.
"Today girls are still going missing but their bodies are never found," Miguel Perea, a local journalist told Britain's Channel 4.
"There's no trace of them and their mothers and families of these girls -- they haven't got a clue what's happened to them."
Maria described how at the age of 16 she was lured off the streets by a young man who promised the world, but delivered nothing but pain.
She was raped, drugged and sold for sex. "They took a gallon of gasoline and started pouring it over a girl," Maria said.
"One of the men told me if you don't do as I say I will do the same to you.
"I wanted to look away, but they didn't let me. Even though the girl was on fire they kept hitting her and they were laughing as if they were enjoying what they were doing."
Maria described a cross-border trade in young children and babies -- with orders coming in regularly from the U.S.
"They stole the children and one of the gang members took a six-year-old kid that I had to look after for three hours.
"He told me he wanted to see his mummy then I started crying and said 'I don't think you're ever going to see your mummy again.'"
The claims that Maria made were so serious that she was asked by the Department of Homeland Security to come to the U.S. to tell her story.
Mexican authorities accompanied Maria on her trip to Houston to work alongside U.S. authorities on the case.
The U.S. State Department estimates that more than 20,000 people are trafficked into the U.S. each year -- mainly destined for the sex trade.
Authorities have launched an immediate investigation into Maria's story.
"I want to tell the story so that in the near future, other girls don't go through the same," Maria said.
"Women are sold, they are abducted, bought and even killed by these men.
"If these men are ever found, jail won't be enough to make them pay for the way they've made us feel."
Human trafficking in Mexico targets women and children - CNN.com
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[TRAFFICKING MONITOR: Click on URL at the bottom of the article to listen to audio report]
Human trafficking in Mexico
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
* The Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez is one of the world's most dangerous
* Hundreds of young women and children disappear each year in Mexico
* Maria told her story to U.S. authorities who are now working on her case
(CNN) -- Even before her 18th birthday, Maria had already been enslaved by a gang of human traffickers and held in captivity for four months in her homeland of Mexico.
While a prisoner, Maria witnessed a sickening trade in human life and recalls how young girls were drugged, forced into prostitution and then murdered.
What makes Maria's story so special is that she was one of the lucky ones who were able to escape.
Maria, whose real name we aren't using, used to live in the border town of Ciudad Juarez.
The city is home to two drug cartels that fight a bloody turf war for lucrative smuggling routes to America.
In a four-day period, 41 people were murdered, while over the past decade, 450 women were killed and 3,000 went missing.
"Today girls are still going missing but their bodies are never found," Miguel Perea, a local journalist told Britain's Channel 4.
"There's no trace of them and their mothers and families of these girls -- they haven't got a clue what's happened to them."
Maria described how at the age of 16 she was lured off the streets by a young man who promised the world, but delivered nothing but pain.
She was raped, drugged and sold for sex. "They took a gallon of gasoline and started pouring it over a girl," Maria said.
"One of the men told me if you don't do as I say I will do the same to you.
"I wanted to look away, but they didn't let me. Even though the girl was on fire they kept hitting her and they were laughing as if they were enjoying what they were doing."
Maria described a cross-border trade in young children and babies -- with orders coming in regularly from the U.S.
"They stole the children and one of the gang members took a six-year-old kid that I had to look after for three hours.
"He told me he wanted to see his mummy then I started crying and said 'I don't think you're ever going to see your mummy again.'"
The claims that Maria made were so serious that she was asked by the Department of Homeland Security to come to the U.S. to tell her story.
Mexican authorities accompanied Maria on her trip to Houston to work alongside U.S. authorities on the case.
The U.S. State Department estimates that more than 20,000 people are trafficked into the U.S. each year -- mainly destined for the sex trade.
Authorities have launched an immediate investigation into Maria's story.
"I want to tell the story so that in the near future, other girls don't go through the same," Maria said.
"Women are sold, they are abducted, bought and even killed by these men.
"If these men are ever found, jail won't be enough to make them pay for the way they've made us feel."
Human trafficking in Mexico targets women and children - CNN.com
Monday, November 2, 2009
NPR: Emma And Elena, Exposing The Sex Trade
Enlarge Simon Clark/Eyebox
"I Wasn't Me Anymore:" Emma Thompson tours Journey, an art installation she co-created with a woman who was victimized by sex traffickers. Viewers who look through this porthole see their own faces superimposed on the bodies of woman wearing "prostitutes' weeds" — tattered lingerie and other worn, used clothing.
"I Wasn't Me Anymore:" Emma Thompson tours Journey, an art installation she co-created with a woman who was victimized by sex traffickers. Viewers who look through this porthole see their own faces superimposed on the bodies of woman wearing "prostitutes' weeds" — tattered lingerie and other worn, used clothing.
Via YouTube:
Emma Thompson may be best known for the stories she's been part of on screen and stage, but now she wants to tell you a different sort of tale. It's the story of a young girl, Elena, who was forced into the global sex industry.
Elena is from a small town in the Eastern European republic of Moldova. At the age of 18, she was promised a job and a future in the U.K. When she arrived, she was made into a prostitute.
Thompson, who met Elena through her involvement with a group that works to help survivors of such experiences, has curated and championed an art installation inspired by Elena's story. It's called Journey, and it has its New York opening this November. The installation comprises seven shipping containers, each designed by a different artist to interpret one part of what Thompson calls Elena's "journey into hell."
Thompson tells Scott Simon that she was immediately drawn to Elena — to protect her privacy, NPR isn't using Elena's last name — because "she's a survivor, and most survivors are extraordinary people." As they got to know each other better, however, one of Elena's qualities struck a particularly special chord with Thompson: "Her capacity to tell this story whilst laughing and smiling and being positive about it and herself."
Simon Clark/Eyebox
Destination London: Journey outside Britain's National Gallery, where it was installed in 2007.
"She had already been objectified," Thompson says, "and I think sometimes watching those things on the screen actually furthers or deepens that sense of objectification. ... The person who's watching is just sitting there watching. They're not walking, they're not doing, they're not seeing and feeling things in a different way."
Shipping containers were an obvious choice, Thompson says.
"They resonate so strongly; they're such powerful, huge objects, and we associate them with the movement of goods, which is essentially how she was treated."
The containers are arranged in a kind of chronological order. The first, which invites viewers to look through a series of keyholes at scenes from Elena's childhood, imagines what it was like for her to lose her father and then be offered the hope of a better life elsewhere. That hope came in the form of the woman who approached Elena in a marketplace, dangling the prospect of a job as a secretary in London. She's represented in the installation as a vaguely menacing figure looming over a suitcase-toting Elena. The writing on the wall reads, in a childlike chalk scrawl: "'Would you like to go to England?' she said."
The next container represents Elena's journey from Moldova to London. It's pitch-dark, and all you hear are repetitive sounds of movement.
When Elena arrived in London — her passport confiscated, a stranger alone in a foreign city — her handlers gave her a new set of work clothes. Thompson calls them "prostitutes' weeds" — tattered underwear and stockings "that had been worn by other women, old used stuff." Elena's handlers forced her to wear them.
Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell, who designed this part of the installation, wanted to convey what it would be like to look in the mirror and realize that you had lost your identity. So when visitors walk into this container, they look through a sort of porthole at a mirror, seeing their own face superimposed on a picture of a prostitute's body. The experience, not surprisingly, can be deeply moving for women who walk through. But Thompson says that men "didn't laugh or find it funny. They understood absolutely what it meant."
Thompson curated the last container herself. She built it around what she calls "the language of rejection and disbelief:" It's a 15-minute tape of Elena telling her own story, juxtaposed with government documents expressing skepticism about the claims of asylum-seekers who, like Elena, were trafficked into Britain.
Thompson isn't merely flying into New York for the grand opening of this exhibit. She'll be staying for all of its week-long installation in Washington Square Park, Nov. 10-Nov. 16.
It's "a very personal journey for me as well," Thompson says. "It's very important for me to try to explain this as best as I can to people."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114328601
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