This is an extract of the article published in USA Today on January 23rd.

By Tresa Baldas, Detroit Free Press
DETROIT — A University of Michigan janitor. A Ukrainian nightclub owner. A Detroit man nicknamed “Gruesome.”
The three men, authorities say, are all tied to a growing crime: human trafficking.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, human trafficking has become the second fastest growing criminal industry — just behind drug trafficking — with children accounting for roughly half of all victims. Of the 2,515 cases under investigation in the U.S. in 2010, more than 1,000 involved children.
And those are only the ones we know of. Too often, authorities say, victims stay silent out of fear, so no one knows they exist.

That’s why President Obama declared January National Human Trafficking Awareness month.
The National Human Trafficking Resource Center estimates it’s a $32 billion industry, with half coming from industrialized countries.
Over the last decade, numerous human trafficking cases have been prosecuted in Michigan. The court dockets detail the horror stories: Children being sold for sex at truck stops, servants held in captivity and forced to clean for free, and women forced into the sex industry, forfeiting their earnings.

Several human trafficking cases are now making their way through state and U.S. District Court.
Jean Claude Toviave, a former University of Michigan janitor and part-time tennis instructor, is federally charged with trying to pass off four African immigrants as his own children, giving them fake names and birth dates to sneak them over in 2006. Documents accuse him of abusing them for years in his Ypsilanti home, which he got through Habitat for Humanity, and forcing them to do housework.

Read the full article, click here

 By Katie Davenport ‘14/World Staff

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the war, confusion, and poverty that followed were not the only problems. Human trafficking in Iraq was also a very serious consequence, one that has yet to disappear. Thousands of Iraqi girls and women have become victims of sexual exploitation; some are targeted by sexual traffickers within Iraq, and others are sold over the borders. Unfortunately, this problem of trafficking has remained highly unreported due to corruption, religious and cultural restrictions, and disinterest from the region’s authorities.

The exact number of female refugees subjected to sex trafficking remains unknown, but according to an Iraqi non-governmental organization, the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, approximately 4,000 women, one fifth of them under the age of 18, have disappeared in the seven years following the war.

The findings released from Social Change for Education in the Middle East (SCEME), a London-based non-governmental group, reveal that victims are being transported to neighboring Middle Eastern countries, especially to Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, but also as far as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. A report called “Karamatuna,” or “Our Dignity,” highlights the trouble of young Iraqi refugee women and girls since Saddam Hussein’s downfall; girls as young as 10 years old have been trafficked from post-war Iraq. The report adds that other victims within Iraq end up in brothels or nightclubs, often in Baghdad.

Read full article: here

This story is extracted from Seth Barnes’ website.

Backed by corrupt government officials, an orphanage where Seth Barnes works with in Carrefour/Port-au-Prince, Haiti has been trafficking its orphans.

Suspecting foul play, Seth Barnes has been investigating for the last year.

As a result, the orphanage director is now in jail, but the 75 children left in the orphanage are still in danger. A worker said, “The kids are in terrible condition - the doctor gave them some prescriptions, but we doubt that the medicine will ever be administered to the children. Instead, the medicine will probably be sold.”

The problem is that those running the orphanage are still protected by corrupt government officials.

Read more :  click here

From BBC News service:

A free phone line for the victims of human trafficking has been launched.
The Metropolitan Police Service wants people who have been brought to the UK and forced to work for little or no wages to report the crimes.

The number is featured in a poster campaign produced for the force and the charity Stop The Traffik.

The force’s SCD9 unit, which fights human exploitation, has secured 12 convictions in 12 months and a further 20 people are awaiting trial.

Det Ch Supt Richard Martin, head of SCD9, said: “I hope that this poster and the freephone number it shows will encourage and enable victims who are suffering at the hands of traffickers to get in touch with us.
“Since SCD9 was formed in April last year, we have been working to raise awareness and understanding of all aspects of human trafficking, including trafficking for sexual exploitation and trafficking in the context of domestic servitude and forced labour.”

The Number is: 0 800 783 2589

Link to BBC News story: click here

On March 15, 2011, the Embassy of Great Britain to France, in collaboration with the Chamber of Commerce Franco-British, organized a seminar on “Empowering Women in the 21st century”.

Guests of Honour:
Marie Drucker,
Journalist, TV & Radio-program Presenter
Célhia de Lavarène,
Journalist, President & Founder of Stop Trafficking Of People, (S.T.O.P.)
Presented by Maïtena Biraben,
TV-program Presenter & Producer

Themes :

• Women’s rights in the world and the realities of human trafficking – Celhia de Lavarène,
• Importance of education and sport in the girls’ education - Marie Drucker, godmother of “Sport in the City”
• Women and business

Among the many guests in attendance, 150 members of the Chamber of Commerce Franco-British.

To see photos of the party, please click here: UK in France

Although today is International Women’s Day, we should not forget that 80% of trafficked victims are women, among them minors, suffer through modern day slavery and that they still lack their rights, opportunities, and freedom.
Int’l Women’s Day should celebrate the wealth of equal opportunities.

Sabah Gouty and Elise Gourbin are organizing an event to support S.T.O.P.
The party will take place March 23rd at the Raffles at 8.00PM,
287 King’s Road, Chelsea
Bring your friends. Help us to help the victims.
Complementary cocktails and canapes, surprises and more.
RSVP @ wedesnday@raffleschelsea.com

Some facts on human trafficking for sexual exploitation in Australia:

Australia is a destination country for women from Southeast Asia, South Korea, Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and reportedly Eastern Europe trafficked for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation. Some indigenous teenage girls are subjected to forced prostitution at rural truck stops.
Although most operate through a network of informal contacts in their native countries, experienced and increasingly sophisticated traffickers are adjusting their methods to try to sidestep provisions of anti-trafficking laws. There are traffickers who file asylum claims in the false names victims use to enter the country; victims who later go to the police for help appear unreliable and are at risk of deportation because of their false asylum claim.

Unscrupulous recruiters entice undocumented foreign women into prostitution, coaching them to apply for student visas in real or false names, as students may legally work 20 hours a week. Men with legal residence in Australia marry foreign women whom they coerce into forced prostitution.

Traffickers routinely respond to women’s initial complaints, including their requests to return home, with sexual, physical and psychological violence. Threats can include something as subtle as threatening to send a woman’s child a pornographic picture of her. One of the great skills of traffickers is their ability to move beyond simple brute force. In this way, women can be effectively imprisoned with well-applied and strategic physical violence that may appear minimal to outsiders, cemented by devastating psychological violence. Traffickers engage with women’s psychology. They learn what women value, and work to their strengths and weaknesses

Australia’s records in combating human trafficking were among the worst in the developed world, according to a University of Queensland researcher.  Dr Andreas Schloenhardt, a senior lecturer in UQ’s TC Beirne School of Law said trafficking in persons remained a phenomenon not well understood and poorly researched.  “This is despite greater public awareness and acknowledgement of the problem by government agencies,” he said.  “Strategic policies, concerted government action, along with prosecutions and convictions of traffickers are only slowly forthcoming and the support available to victims of trafficking is only marginally developed.”

“It’s not just a foreign problem”, says Childwise chief executive Bernadette McMenamin. “Australian sex offenders feed the slave traders, making up 31 per cent of sex tourists prosecuted in Thailand. The federal government and police don’t do enough about it. There is this apathy in Australia and in many Western countries that there is this inevitability,” Ms McMenamin said. “It’s not just about poverty, it’s about all the other factors combined, it’s about organized crime, it’s about sex tourism and we are one of, if not the biggest, offender in South-East Asia.”

If government agencies spent more time trying to understand how trafficked women see things, rather than seeing them as problems that don’t understand how we work, we would have more success in challenging trafficking.

 As I was checking my messages on Facebook, this came out of the blue. Patricia, whom I don’t know, was writing to me about Amal, the young Moroccan woman for whom I wrote “A Visa To Hell.”

“Dear Célhia,

I am a consultant working on gender issues, on mission in Morocco. Completely by chance (in a taxi) I met a young woman, who has been trafficked and lured into the sex trade. She told me that her hell came to an end when you helped her to escape. I just wanted to tell you what a sparkle she had in her eyes just talking about you. How ready to face the future she is. She is now married and is starting a small business, all because of the help she got from you. I was formerly at UNDP Policy Advisor of the Gender Team, and we worked a bit on trafficking issues. But to hear the story of Amal, and understand how important it is to reach out and help, made this so real. Not sure how I can help. If you have ideas, please let me know. ”
Patricia

The most comprehensive inquiry into sex trafficking and off-street prostitution in the UK identified 17,000 migrants working in brothels.

Of these, about half – 9,000 – were from Eastern Europe, of which police believe 400 had been trafficked.

The report, completed last year by the Association of Chief Police Officers after an investigation named Operation Acumen, found a further 4,128 women from eastern Europe, which they categorized as “vulnerable”. The classification included women whose experience the police concluded fell below the threshold of trafficking but were vulnerable to sexual exploitation in that they spoke little English, were overly reliant on their “controllers” and faced other barriers preventing them from exiting prostitution.

The police investigation detected another 5,000 women from eastern Europe working in brothels who were willing to work as prostitutes and could not be considered trafficked or vulnerable.
Campaigners, however, say the police’s definition of “vulnerable” included many victims of trafficking and that their inquiry significantly underestimates the problem. The Poppy Project argues that many women find it difficult to disclose issues such as rape and that the police’s methodology, which involved officers entering brothels and asking women if they had been trafficked, was unlikely to glean accurate information.

The definition of trafficking has long been controversial. The most favored defines it as involving the use of force, fraud, deception or coercion to transport a victim into an exploitative context.

Read the story of Marinela: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/feb/06/sex-traffick-romania-britain