Human Trafficking In The News 7-17-12: Hollywood Edition

A special Hollywood addition of human trafficking in the news highlighting actresses who are speaking out against sex trafficking and the dark scourge of modern slavery. The victims of human trafficking in all its many evil incarnations have had some very passionate and dedicated Hollywood advocates the past 5 years. Among them Julia Ormond, Ashley Judd, Demi Moore, Daryl Hannah and Lucy Liu. This week several more women have stepped forward to vocalize why they are demanding justice for these exploited women and care for those that have been rescued.

Below, The Walking Dead's Laurie Holden (pictured above) talks about the charity she works with, Somaly Mam Foundation, which fights to stop child trafficking all over the world.





Below, actress and activist Victoria Pannell and Andrea Powell of Fair Girls discuss the campaign targeting backpage.com, a site that child advocates charge is openly facilitating sex trafficking online. 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

You can sign the campaign here which has already produced 250 thousand signatures!

Jada Pinkett Smith on Capitol Hill with her husband, actor Will Smith, and their daughter. She also brought along three trafficking survivors.

Wearing a T-shirt that declared “Free Slaves” actress Jada Pinkett Smith testified before Congress today to draw attention to human trafficking and forced labor, not only in the United States, but around the world.


“This old monster is still with us,” Pinkett Smith told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “This is an ugly, and too often invisible, problem.” 


She continued, “Fighting slavery doesn’t cost a lot of money,” she said. “The costs of allowing it to exist in our nation and abroad are much higher. It robs us of the thing we value most — our freedom. We know what that freedom is worth.”

And finally, last but not least, Mira Sorvino (above) stars in the movie Trade Of Innocents that comes out in September which co-stars Dermot Mulroney and is about the slave trade of children in Cambodia. 

Human Trafficking in the News 1-28-12

Stories of human trafficking, child exploitation, child prostitution and forced labor in the news. 


As I checked the days headlines for stories related to these topics it seemed to me there were 5 times as many stories of exploitation each more grotesque, more horrifying than the next. I hope it is because of the concerted effort to expose these evils, but if anything it shows that the work to be done is great and that it will take all of us being deeply committed and tireless, to end these evils in our lifetime. Thank you for educating yourself and caring about justice. (Click the bold headings to go to the full articles.) 

An African witch-doctor. 

Witchcraft: The demonic realities of human trafficking: African and South American girls flee their captors and live to tell of their harrowing escapes and the sadistic rituals that their traffickers tried to use to enslave the young girl's minds.


Human Sacrifice in Uganda: 'In Uganda, traffickers buy and sell children to use their genitals, heads, and blood for ritual sacrifice. The U.S. Department of States recently reported 9000 children missing in Uganda over the last four years. Traffickers transport children both inside Uganda and to other countries for use in ritual sacrifices. In 2008, police arrested a witchdoctor couple and a real estate mogul, Godfrey Kajubi, for trafficking 12 year old Joseph for ritual sacrifice. According to the police, Kajubi promised the witchdoctor couple $4021 in exchange for the heads of four children, which he planned to use for ritual.'

Young child working at a gold mine.

Forced child labor in Gold mines and young girls raped for good luck: In Ganzourgou Province new gold veins are found and thousands of young children are exploited in these mines. Boys 'dig, crush, and carry rocks, facing great risks on a daily basis. The young girls are responsible for carrying water, crushing stones and rebuilding. Some of them look after their younger siblings while their mothers are at work. Owing to various superstitions linking sex to finding gold, the little girls also become victims of sexual exploitation or prostitution on the sites.'


New York Author trafficks girls from Brazil, Hungary and France: 3 women promised gainful employment and green cards get instead coercion and sexual deviancy.

Woman trades sexual favors with a child for painkillers: Below,  Debra Annmarie Blackmon, 25, and Tony Marcel Hammond, 23, face sex trafficking and other charges. The couple even gave the child marijuana to help her complete the act.

Selling girls on the web, Nicholas Kristof takes on Backpage.com: The classified ads for The Village Voice have been used all to often to sexually exploit minors. The magazine claims it is a matter of censorship vs. free speech. Pulitzer Prize winning author Kristof takes them to task.


The world's 5 most dangerous countries for women: Incredible resource from Rueters as published on trust.org that highlights the most dangerous places in the world to be born female. The map below. Please click the link to read about the most egregious crimes against woman. From the 1152 women and girls raped everyday in the Congo, to the 70-80% of young women in Afghanistan in forced marriages.

Other heartbreaking statistics from the Rueter's chart:


1000 honor killing in Pakistan every year.


95% of woman in Somalia face forced genital mutilation.


50 million. The deficit of women in India to men. Mass infanticide of baby girls has eradicated a whole generation of women equal to the population of Texas, Florida and Tennessee combined. 

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From all of us at Conspiracy Of Hope. Thank you for being a voice for the voiceless.

Human Trafficking In The News 9-03-2011

Human Trafficking in the news. Stories of forced labor, sex trafficking and child exploitation. Click the bold headings for links to the whole story.

45 states bring lawsuit against The Village Voice's Backpage.com: Backpage.com makes an estimated $22.7 million per year from ads in their “adult” section. Backpage.com vice president Carl Ferrer acknowledged the company identifies more than 400 “adult services” posts that may involve minors.

Dutch probe uncovers child porn sites in US: Investigators found some 220,000 child pornography photos and videos. One of the hidden sites police discovered was called "Violent Desires". Along with child pornography, it also contained "a discussion forum that included chats about abducting, abusing and killing children," prosecutors said.

Woman gets life plus 20 in child-sex-for-sale case: Rebecca Wiggins (pictured below) took $10,000 in payment from an east Cobb man, David A. Ray, in exchange for providing access to her 7-year-old niece, who was in her custody.

House introduces H.R.2830!: The bill will re-authorize appropriations for fiscal years 2012 and 2013 for the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. Read the entire text of the bill here. National call-in day to voice support for the bill is Sept. 8th. Info here.

Justin Timberlake featured in new anti-trafficking ad: The 30 year-old actor for Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore's "Real Men Don't Buy Girls" campaign.

As always, from all of us at Conspiracy Of Hope, thanks for caring about justice and for being a voice for the voiceless victims of trafficking.

The Village Voice vs. Ashton Kutcher: The Debate Over Child Trafficking Statistics In America.

VS.

There has been considerable bickering back and forth between several high profile reporters and members of several anti-trafficking groups about the actual # of US kids trapped in sexual exploitation here in the States. One of the main skeptics being from the Village Voice, who questions the veracity of the statistic that there are between 100 and 300 thousand kids forced into illegal prostitution and pornography every year in the US. The same Village Voice who owns (and profits greatly from) Backpage.com, which has a prolific adult services section that has been well documented to facilitate prostitution and has also been used as a vehicle for the exploitation of minors. (After Craigslist shut down their Adult services section in the US Backpage's revenues jumped 15% the next month, online prostitution ads in 23 U.S. cities increased to $1,671,685 for the month of September.)

What's worse is the Voice singled out Ashton Kutcher, and then proceeded to berate him for what they percieved as poor movie choices, poor acting, and poor anti-trafficking activism, degrading Ads run by Kutcher's anti-trafficking non-profit as "frat boy humor". Below, one of the Ads from the Demi and Ashton Foundation that Kutcher founded with movie star wife Demi Moore. The ads are built around the slogan "real men don't buy girls".

The Village Voice article, smugly entitled, "Real Men Get Their Facts Straight". Like countless abolitionists and government officials, Kutcher has used a range of 100,000 to 300,000 when estimating how many kids are involved in domestic trafficking.

The Voice argues the 2001 University of Pennsylvania study that Kutcher and others quote estimated only the number of children who are "at risk" of commercial sexual exploitation, not the actual number currently trafficked. And it castigates Kutcher for not clarifying. Kutcher responded with a series of Tweets (he has 7 million followers) attacking Village Voice Media for the adult classifieds in its alternative weekly and on its website BackPage.com.

"It is true that Village Voice Media has a stake in this discussion," responded Voice editors, "But the facts speak for themselves." This seems a somewhat peculiar if not open admittal of the causal link between the trafficking of children and the adult services section of the Voice's publications.

“Adult services sections are little more than online brothels, enabling human trafficking and sexual exploitation of women and children,” says Connecticut’s attorney general Richard Blumenthal.

Dear Village Voice, does it really matter if there are one to three thousand or a hundred times that many kids trapped in prostitution in the US?? I mean if it were your daughter, one child would be enough. What do you have the problem with? Does irresponsible reporting somehow offend your sense of impeccable journalistic standards? What about irresponsible business practices? Does it endanger children if the statistics are skewed in the wrong directions, inflated by the passions and good intentions of the tireless abolilitionists on the front-line of the anti-sex trade fight? Or does the real danger come when those with money on the line pollute the discussion by disingenuous, half-hearted arguments with suspect motives. What are you doing to stop child trafficking? Why not follow Craigslist's example and shut down your Backpage adult services section. If anything, the statistics in question will go down. What do you have to lose- besides a little face, and oh yeah, a lot of cash. Real papers don't sell girls.