Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery

Lecture Resources

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Prostitution - Child

*** Featured Article ***

Iraq

Focus on Boys Trapped in Commercial Sex Trade

UN Integrated Regional Information Networks IRIN, August 8, 2005

www.irinnews.org/report/25350/iraq-focus-on-boys-trapped-in-commercial-sex-trade

[accessed 8 March 2015]

A 16-year-old boy has started a desperate new life since being forced into the sex trade in Baghdad, joining a growing number of adolescents soliciting in Iraq under the threat of street gangs or the force of poverty. "Every day I cry at night," Feiraz said. "I'm a homosexual and was forced to work as a prostitute because one of the people I had sex with took pictures of me in bed and said that, if I didn't work for him, he was going to send the pictures to my family." "My life is a disaster today. I could be killed by my family to restore their honour," he said, explaining that homosexuality was totally unacceptable in Iraq due to religious beliefs.

*** Archives ***

Argentina

Clamping Down on Human Trafficking

Marcela Valente, IPS-Inter Press Service, Buenos Aires, November 8, 2006

www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35414

[accessed 19 January 2011]

www.ipsnews.net/2006/11/argentina-clamping-down-on-human-trafficking/

[accessed 4 September 2016]

Susana Trimarco, whose daughter was kidnapped in 2002, told IPS that the proposal for a specific policy is an encouragement to her in her search for her daughter. Trimarco, who attended the seminar, was able to prove that her daughter Marita Verón, 24, fell into the hands of a sexual exploitation ring. After she was kidnapped, her mother obtained testimonies from other teenagers and young people, also victims of trafficking, who had seen her in different places of captivity in several provinces in the country. Although she has not been able to find her daughter, the investigative work she and other activists have carried out has led to the rescue of 94 people.

Bangladesh

Inside the slave trade

Johann Hari, The Independent, 15 March 2008

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/inside-the-slave-trade-795307.html

[accessed 21 January 2011]

They are promised a better life. But every year, countless boys and girls in Bangladesh are spirited away to brothels where they have to prostitute themselves with no hope of freedom. This is the story of the 21st century’s trade in slave-children. My journey into their underworld took place where its alleys and brothels are most dense - Asia, where the United Nations calculates 1 million children are being traded every day. It took me to places I did not think existed, today, now. To a dungeon in the lawless Bangladeshi borderlands where children are padlocked and prison-barred in transit to Indian brothels; to an iron whore-house where grown women have spent their entire lives being raped; to a clinic that treat syphilitic 11-year-olds.

She comes into the room swaddled in a red sari, carrying big premature black bags under her eyes. She tells her story in a slow, halting mumble. Sufia grew up in a village near Khulna in the south-west of Bangladesh. Her parents were farmers; she was one of eight children. “My parents couldn’t afford to look after me,” she says. “We didn’t have enough money for food.” And so came the lie. When Sufia was 14, a female neighbour came to her parents and said she could find her a good job in Calcutta as a housemaid. She would live well; she would learn English; she would have a well-fed future. “I was so excited,” Sufia says. “But as soon as we arrived in Calcutta I knew something was wrong,” she says. “I didn’t know what a brothel was, but I could see the house she took me to was a bad house, where the women wore small clothes and lots of bad men were coming in and out.” The neighbour was handed 50,000 takka – around £500 – for Sufia, and then she told her to do what she was told and disappeared. - htcp

Belgium

Squalid road that leads to Belgium - Children are being lured from poverty to horror in the heart of Europe

Andrew Osborne in Brussels, The Observer, 24 June 2001

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/jun/24/andrewosborn.theobserver

[accessed 22 January 2011]

It may be the spiritual capital of the grand European project but, according to a damning new report, Brussels has also become the European centre for the trade in child prostitutes, who are being smuggled into Belgium to feed a growing demand. Asylum claims from unaccompanied minors have almost trebled in six years, says the report from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), but it has also emerged that Belgium has become a 'favoured destination' for modern-day sex slaves - both boys and girls.

Djibouti

Protection Project - Djibouti [DOC]

The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), The Johns Hopkins University

www.protectionproject.org/human_rights_reports/report_documents/djibouti.doc

[Last accessed 2009]

FORMS OF TRAFFICKING - Displaced women and children fleeing conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia have ended up in prostitution in Djibouti. Some of them have also been trafficked to wealthy Arab states to work as domestic servants.

Child prostitution is on the rise in Djibouti. A government study, conducted in conjunction with UNICEF, found that 73.3 percent of street children were Ethiopian and that over a quarter of these children were exploited in the commercial sex industry. Most are girls from the Dire-Dawa region of Ethiopia. They are often brought by other girls to brothels, where they are forced into prostitution. In Djibouti’s most famous sex venue, Rue d’Ethiopie, children age 11 to 16 are forced to engage in prostitution.

Myanmar

Thai families partners in child sex trade - Border area's products are drugs and daughters

Andrew Perrin, San Francisco Chronicle, Mae Sai, Thailand, February 6, 2002

www.sfgate.com/news/article/Thai-families-partners-in-child-sex-trade-2877185.php

[accessed 16 August 2012]

When Burmese migrant Ngun Chai sold his 13-year-old daughter into prostitution for $114, his wife, La, had one regret -- they didn't get a good price for her.

"I should have asked for 10,000 baht ($228)," La Chai said. "He robbed us."

She was angry that the agent who bought her eldest child, Saikun, in 1999 took her to Bangkok, some 460 miles away, rather than a nearby city as promised. It did not concern La Chai that Saikun would be forced to have sex with as many as eight men a day.

With prices varying from $114 to $913 -- the latter figure equal to almost six years' wages for most families -- parental bonds in impoverished households are easily broken. In fact, child prostitution is so established that many brothel agents live in the village, and are often friends or relatives of the family from whom they buy the children.

Nigeria

Nigeria: Victims of Human Trafficking Contract Aids

Daily Champion, Lagos, 16 August 2007

allafrica.com/stories/200708160019.html

[accessed 30 November 2011]

Head of National Agency for the Prohibition and Trafficking in Persons and other Related Matters (NAPTIP), Kano State zone, Ahmed M. Bello has disclosed that over 60 per cent of victims of trafficking repatriated to the country tested HIV positive.

The victims who are mainly teenagers, he added, engaged in prostitution overseas.

USA

Young workers in the oldest profession - Clark County girls make up a third of the underage sex workers in Portland

Isolde Raftery, The Columbian, December 6, 2008

-- Source: www.columbian.com/article/20081207/NEWS02/712079963

genderberg.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3628

[accessed 8 January 2011]

Sarah was 16 and addicted to crack cocaine when she heard there was easy money to make in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant off Fourth Plain Boulevard. “I went there to pick up guys,” Sarah, 22, said. “They would buy me what I wanted as long as I had sex with them.” After working for a year in Vancouver, Sarah ventured to Portland. Willowy, her greasy blond hair pulled tight into a bun, she looks exhausted. “I got here on Sandy and 82nd, and this guy, D.C., asked me if I wanted to get high,” she said one morning last summer, sitting on a curb in northeast Portland. “Then he told me I owed him money and to go get money.” Sarah was trapped. She’d fallen prey to a pimp’s come-on and become one of the 20 to 30 juveniles Portland police say work the streets at any given time. Like more than a third of those girls, she is from Vancouver. And like many of them, she remains beyond the reach of police efforts to separate her from her pimp. It’s been six years, and Sarah is still on the streets.

‘SNITCHES DIE, YOU KNOW’ - “I can cite case after case of girls coming from average families, and once the pimp was able to intervene, the family didn’t matter anymore,” Dick said. “I know of officers’ daughters who got into it, a federal prosecutor’s daughter, a DA’s daughter, a politician’s daughter.” Cherise was a rebellious 15-year-old when she met her first pimp, Deandre Green, at Lloyd Center in Portland. Green was a 25-year-old Bloods gang member from Aloha, Ore. He sweet-talked her to a nondescript, two-story motel and told her the rules: This is business, don’t be out of pocket, respect your pimp and give me all your money. According to court documents, when Cherise said she had second thoughts, Green said, “I know where you live and where your family lives. I will kill you and your family if you say anything to anybody. You’re mine now.”

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