The Ricky Martin Foundation has targeted the sexual exploitation of children since 2004. Over the next six months, Martin will appear on Dominican television and radio to warn about human trafficking and sexual exploitation.
“According to some reports, more women are trafficked from the Dominican Republic than from any other country in the Western Hemisphere,” said Jemini Pandya of the [International Organization for Migration], which is working with Martin’s foundation. (Metromix)Martin’s work has received extensive media coverage on Oprah and elsewhere.
He says he became involved in fighting child exploitation after working in an Indian orphanage. “I had the opportunity to meet with victims of child trafficking,” he says. “I rescued three girls from the streets that were literally living in a plastic bag. They were two days away from being trafficked.”From the website of Martin’s foundation:
“I started educating myself about this issue and then I realized how intense it is,” he says. “We’re talking about raping children… The governments need to do something. We need to change laws.”
Since People for Children was launched in 2004 to combat human trafficking, with special emphasis on children’s exploitation, Ricky Martin Foundation has positioned itself among the global community as a respected and influential voice to denounce this abominable crime where 1.2 million children fall victim of this global nightmare, year after year. We serve as catalysts for awareness-raising efforts on the grave issues regarding child exploitation and human trafficking.The Foundation provides information about the nature of child trafficking today:
For the inaugural campaign “Slaves of a New Era” we partnered with the InterAmerican Development Bank to create various Public Service Announcements featuring Ricky Martin as an advocate of children’s rights. The campaign was disseminated in Latin America to educate people about this modern day slavery.
A year into the campaign, the Ricky Martin Foundation and the Human Health Services Division forged an historical alliance that included a 1-800 bilingual call to action as part of the Public Service Announcements disseminated in television and radio across continental USA and Puerto Rico.
To further strengthen our fight against human trafficking, last November we partnered with the International Organization for Migration in Latin America and established a 1-800 Colombian number as a prototype model to be follow in the region.
The goal of People for the Children is to syndicate Public Service Announcements, and support other programs geared toward the elimination of sex trafficking, debt bondage, forced labor, and sex slavery. We believe that global campaigns will enable us to combat and monitor the problem of trafficking in persons. Disseminating relevant and timely information, will allow us to influence policy making in the battle against the exploitation of children.
Traffickers are: members of highly sophisticated networks of organized crime. Ukrainian officials uncovered and detained a criminal group in the city of Dnipropetrovsk, which trafficked Ukrainian girls and women to the United Arab Emirates. They made $2,000 on each girl forced into prostitution. This gang managed to traffic more than 15 Ukrainian young women aged between 16 and 30 to the United Arab Emirates.
Traffickers are: family members and friends of the trafficking victim. A six-year-old boy, Mohammad Mamun, was taken from his poor Bangladeshi parents by a neighbor, and ended up in a foreign desert land being exploited as a camel jockey. Mamun is one of hundreds of young Bangladeshi boys who are trafficked into the United Arab Emirates (UAE) either after being abducted or sold by impoverished parents to human traffickers.
Victims of trafficking are later used to traffic other women and children. Traffickers from Benin see themselves as helping the home community–facilitators for families looking for some extra income. One trafficker commented, “Every girl who travels and who doesn’t get deported is a potential sponsor for more…”
Taking into account the high incidence of sexually transmitted disease, including HIV (human immunodeficiency virus or better known as AIDS) and HPV [human papillomavirus]…clients are willing and spare no expense to have sexual contact with children, since they assume they have a better chance of being virgins and thereby not be infected.
According to that expressed by a specialist and social researcher, fear of AIDS has lead men to seek younger and younger girls and boys, a situation which worsens this social problem even more…
…an investigator states: “The thing that scares them the most and makes them helpless is that the majority of them were molested in their own houses.”
Sexual Tourism
…Poverty and illiteracy fuel the problem. Many children are lured away from their villages by vice rings, often with the involvement of poor parents. They end up in the beach resorts, where drugs such as hashish and heroin are also available cheaply – providing an added attraction to foreigners…
Americans are a major part of the problem, as discussed on Oprah:
According to World Vision, an international children’s watch group, a quarter of all who travel internationally so that they may solicit sex from children are U.S. citizens…
The issue is cloaked in a “conspiracy of silence” due to the shame these girls and their families feel, Christiane [Amanpour, CNN reporter] says.
In order for these children to have hope, they need to believe that they have a chance at a better life. The few children who are rescued often have mixed emotions.
Christiane says that everything is working against these girls when they try to rebuild their lives. “In many instances they’re too afraid [to return],” she explains. “Cultures in many parts of the world simply exclude and shun women who have been raped or who, what they consider, brought shame on the family. But equally there are many families who just want their kids back. There’s not enough psychological counseling for many of these kids, not enough awareness…”
Gary Haugen, President of the International Justice Mission, says that the worst areas in the world for child sex trafficking are South Asia, with an estimated 2.5 million forced prostitutes, and Southeast Asia, home to a booming sex tourism industry.
However, he adds that this “industry of rape for profit” is not only found oceans away, it might be right under your nose.
“One group was able to identify 12 brothels within a mile radius of the White House,” he says. “They’re right in our neighborhoods, in our cities. Sometimes they’re hard to find, but they’re part of our community…”
An estimated $9.5 billion is generated in annual revenue from all trafficking activities, with at least $4 billion attributed to the worldwide brothel industry…
An estimated 1.2 million children are trafficked each year…
Around the world between 50 and 60 percent of the children who are trafficked into sexual slavery are under age 16…
Human trafficking is the second-largest organized crime in the world…
Oprah’s website provides resources for additional information and prevention.
See also:
Strip Clubs Are the Next Hot Thing on Wall Street, Fund Manager Tells Barron’s
“…the girls who work there, the dancers, or what the industry calls the “talent,” pay $150 to $200 a shift for the privilege of working…
“I asked one guy in the business, ‘What’s the biggest risk to your business model?’ He said if the government stops immigration from Eastern Europe.”
New York Times: “The Girls Next Door”; Worldwide Sex Trafficking; Role of Porn
In Eastern European capitals like Kiev and Moscow, dozens of sex-trafficking rings advertise nanny positions in the United States in local newspapers; others claim to be scouting for models and actresses…
”…[Young women’s] idea of prostitution is ‘Pretty Woman,’ which is one of the most popular films in Ukraine and Russia. They’re thinking, This may not be so bad…”
Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves says: ”The physical path of a person being trafficked includes stages of degradation of a person’s mental state. A victim gets deprived of food, gets hungry, a little dizzy and sleep-deprived. She begins to break down; she can’t think for herself. Then take away her travel documents, and you’ve made her stateless. Then layer on physical violence, and she begins to follow orders. Then add a foreign culture and language, and she’s trapped…”
”There’s a vast misunderstanding of what coercion is, of how little it takes to make someone a slave,” Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission said. ”The destruction of dignity and sense of self, these girls’ sense of resignation…”
If anything, the women I talked to said that the sex in the U.S. is even rougher than what the girls face on Calle Santo Tomas. Rosario, a woman I met in Mexico City, who had been trafficked to New York and held captive for a number of years, said: ”In America we had ‘special jobs.’ Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.” She said that she believed younger foreign girls were in demand in the U.S. because of an increased appetite for more aggressive, dangerous sex. Traffickers need younger and younger girls, she suggested, simply because they are more pliable. In Eastern Europe, too, the typical age of sex-trafficking victims is plummeting; according to Matei of Reaching Out, while most girls used to be in their late teens and 20’s, 13-year-olds are now far from unusual.
Gloria Steinem at Smith: Cooperation, Not Domination
…there are more slaves in proportion to the world’s population–more people held by force or coercion without benefit from their work–more now than there were in the 1800s. Sex trafficking, labor trafficking, children and adults forced into armies: they all add up to a global human-trafficking industry that is more profitable than the arms trade, and second only to the drug trade. The big difference now from the 1800s is that the United Nations estimates that 80% of those who are enslaved are women and children…
Pornography Trains and Indoctrinates Prostitutes
In a study of 475 people in prostitution (including women, men, and the transgendered) from five countries (South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, USA, and Zambia)…92% stated that they wanted to escape prostitution immediately…
Salon: Atlanta’s underage sex trade
The problem isn’t restricted to so-called Hotlanta; Herbert notes, dispiritedly, that “the overall market for sex with kids is booming in many parts of the U.S.” But the city’s role as a convention and travel hub has given it a particular boost. And advocates say that the prevailing preference for ever-younger prostitutes–fueled by “the cultural emphasis on the sexual appeal of very young women and girls” and “the widely held belief among johns that there is less risk of contracting a disease from younger prostitutes”–has pimps and sex traffickers recruiting more at-risk kids than ever before.
Realities of Teen Prostitution Mock Notions of ‘Sex Work’, ‘Sex-Positive’, ‘Freedom’ and ‘Empowerment’; Media Glamorizes Pimps
Advocates for ‘sex work’ say it is or should be about free choice and the empowerment of women. They claim that if prostitutes have troubled lives, this stems from the fact that many (unenlightened) people find prostitution offensive and the government doesn’t care enough about prostitutes’ working conditions, rather than anything inherent in exchanging sex for money or the common power differences between prostitutes vs. pimps and johns. They ignore the fact that a large proportion of prostitutes begin when they are underage…
The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that between 100,000 and 3 million American kids under age 18 are involved in prostitution and they’re often targeted by sexual predators…
The average age of a child when he or she is first sexually exploited is 11, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Even if the child is a somewhat willing participant, according to U.S. and international agreements, children can never consent to prostitution: it is always exploitation…
As many as 40 percent of all forced prostitutes are juveniles, according to the FBI…
“I think in the last couple years we’ve seen a real increase in the
glorification of pimp culture,” Lloyd says. “Girls growing up now, and boys too, are beginning to see this as cute and sexy or glamorous and not really understanding the realities of the sex industry…”
“What you see in the movies, what you see on TV — it’s not like that,” Sara says. “They don’t tell you the part about the rapes. They don’t tell you about getting beat up. They don’t tell you that you might die every day…”
Prostitution: Factsheet on Human Rights Violations
The average age of entry into prostitution is 13 years (M.H. Silbert and A.M. Pines, 1982, “Victimization of street prostitutes”, Victimology: An International Journal, 7: 122-133) or 14 years (D. Kelly Weisberg, 1985, “Children of the Night: A Study of Adolescent Prostitution”, Lexington, Mass, Toronto). Most of these 13 or 14 year old girls were recruited or coerced into prostitution. Others were “traditional wives” without job skills who escaped from or were abandoned by abusive husbands and went into prostitution to support themselves and their children. (Denise Gamache and Evelina Giobbe, Prostitution: Oppression Disguised as Liberation, National Coalition against Domestic Violence, 1990)…
Estimates of the prevalence of incest among prostitutes range from 65% to 90%. The Council for Prostitution Alternatives, Portland, Oregon Annual Report in 1991 stated that: 85% of prostitute/clients reported history of sexual abuse in childhood; 70% reported incest. The higher percentages (80%-90%) of reports of incest and childhood sexual assaults of prostitutes come from anecdotal reports and from clinicians working with prostitutes…
A Canadian Report on Prostitution and Pornography concluded that girls and women in prostitution have a mortality rate 40 times higher than the national average. (Special Committee on Pornography and Prostitution, 1985, Pornography and Prostitution in Canada 350)…
In one study, 75% of women in escort prostitution had attempted suicide. Prostituted women comprised 15% of all completed suicides reported by hospitals. (Letter from Susan Kay Hunter, Council for Prostitution Alternatives, Jan 6, 1993, cited by Phyllis Chesler in “A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense: The Case of Aileen Carol Wuornos”, in Patriarchy: Notes of an Expert Witness, 1994, Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine)…
…67% of those in prostitution from five countries met criteria for a diagnosis of PTSD–a rate similar to that of battered women, rape victims, and state-sponsored torture survivors. (Melissa Farley, Isin Baral, Merab Kiremire, Ufuk Sezgin, “Prostitution in Five Countries: Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” (1998) Feminism & Psychology 8 (4): 405-426)…
Old Navy Celebrates Notorious Thailand Prostitution Center on T-Shirt
“Go-Go Pattaya Thailand, Open 24 Hours”, says one of Old Navy’s Summer Destination Tees for Men, now on sale for $8.70. Pattaya, for those who don’t know, is a notorious center for Thailand’s prostitution industry. Many sailors in the US Navy are familiar with it. Salon writes,
Pattaya Beach — which the Toronto Star once called a “cross between Acapulco and Coney Island” — is well known for its ample sexual entertainment. Anywhere from 80,000 to 200,000 child prostitutes work throughout Thailand, according to UNICEF, and 1 million children in Asia are involved in commercial sexual exploitation…
Coalition Against Trafficking in Women provides a broad survey of prostitution in Thailand:
Letter to the Gazette: “Addressing prostitution, promiscuity in war on AIDS”
Around 80,000 women and children have been sold into Thailand’s sex idustry since 1990, with most coming from Burma, China’s Yunan province and Laos. Trafficked children were also found on construction sites and in sweatshops. In 1996, almost 200,000 foreign children, mostly boys from Burma, Laos and Cambodia, were thought to be working in Thailand. (Mahidol University’s Institute of Population and Social Research, “Trafficking of children on the rise,” Bangkok Post, 22 July 1998)
Pattaya has a multi-billion dollar multinational sex industry with links to drug trafficking, money laundering and an expanding regional cross-border traffic in women. (Mark Baker, “Sin city can’t shake vice’s grip,” Sydney Morning Herald, 17 May 1997)
In Thailand, trafficking is a Bt500 billion annual business, which is 50%-60% of the government’s annual budget and more lucrative than the drug trade. (Authorites and activists, Kulachada Chaipipat, “New law targets human trafficking,” The Nation, 30 Novermber 1997)…
Of the estimated 20,000 prostitutes in Pattaya, hundreds are children who are either lured from their villages by the idea of opportunity or by criminal networks. (Mark Baker, “Sin city can’t shake vice’s grip,” Sydney Morning Herald, 17 May 1997)…
Victims of trafficking from other nations are easily deceived or lured because they face poverty, unemployment, broken families and unstable governments in their own countries. (Sirinya Wattanasukchai, “Flesh trade shrugs off new risks,” The Nation, 1 May 1997)…
Russian women, looking for a better life and to escape the Russian economic crisis, are being trafficked to Pattaya. Most of the women became involved with job placement agencies offering high-paying work as dancers, waitresses, domestic servants or sale representatives. Trafficking networks in Russia charge the women anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 (60,000 to 120,000 baht) and once in Thailand, the women are kept in constant fear. They have their passports taken away upon arrival. The women are forced to work long hours for little pay and threatened with death or the death of their families if they don’t cooperate. (“Pattaya: Murder, prostitution and tourists,” Bangkok Post, 22 April 1998)…
Of 16,423 foreign persons engaged in prostitution in Thailand, 30% are younger than 18. (Mahidol University’s Institute of Population and Social Research, “Trafficking of children on the rise,” Bangkok Post, 22 July 1998)…
Men who use women in prostitution are the largest cause of the spread of AIDS in Thailand. Young boys often have their first sexual experiences in brothels. Grown-up men regularly buy prostitutes. (“Opening our eyes to the Aids problem,” The Nation, 20 May 1997) There are more brothels than schools in Thailand. (CATW – Asia Pacific, Trafficking in Women and Prostitution in the Asia Pacific)…
The rate of HIV infection is 50% or higher among female prostitutes in Northern Thailand. (New England Journal of Medicine, Sarah McNuaght, “Prohibition,” The Boston Phoenix, 23-30 October 1997)…
Thailand has the fourth largest number of AIDS cases in the world with nearly 60,000. This is only the number of officially reported cases and health workers say the actual number is sveral times higher. (Sutin Wannabovorn, “Thai Prime Minister vows end prostitution, AIDS victims react,” Reuters, 29 July 1997)…
Most sex workers in developing nations are more like slaves than they are like the “D.C. Madam”. Trafficking in women is a human rights violation that self-styled progressives like Garrett should oppose. Moreover, heterosexual women in the Third World, who lack the social power to enforce safe-sex guidelines in their relationships, are being infected with AIDS at an alarming rate by husbands who patronize prostitutes.
Dartmouth Law Journal Article: It Should be Legal to Possess Child Porn; Our Rebuttal
States criminalize the possession of child porn because they feel it is a serious problem that cannot be sufficiently addressed by merely targeting its production and distribution. Crucial to Kenney’s argument is to ignore or minimize the problem of child sexual abuse in America. The National Center for PTSD estimates that 10% of boys and 25% of girls are sexually abused. The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry says that, “The long-term emotional and psychological damage of sexual abuse can be devastating to the child.” Nevertheless, Kenney does not seem convinced that the problem is substantial. She says the Ferber decision that permitted states to regulate child porn (see below) was motivated by “the perceived ‘national emergency'”. She makes a point of saying that the “satanic day care center scandals…proved later to be unfounded”. (p.41) The massive reality and harm of child sexual abuse in America disappear into an attack on prudery…
If the star of “Rhoda” hesitates before suing [for misuse of her likeness], what are the prospects of civil legal redress in the case of, say, these 1,500 Ukrainian child porn “models”? It is unreasonable to ask government to blind itself to the realities of the situation. Civil recourses are not adequate to the problem of child porn…
…Levine’s claim that child porn is primarily made overseas is false. 55% of the child porn industry is based in the United States…
While Kenney is aware of the Ferber and Osborne decisions that support the states’ rights to regulate child porn, she fails to rebut adequately many of their key arguments. One of these is that children have a right to privacy in their personal matters. Another is that porn is a nontrivial factor in child molestation. Kenney appears to be unaware of the work of Diana Russell, one of the world’s foremost researchers on issues of pornography and child sexual abuse. Kenney goes so far as to claim “there is absolutely no evidence that an individual looking at pictures directly or indirectly facilitates future child abuse.” (p.51) We invite Kenney to spend some time with the 40+ articles in our Child Molestation category and see if she retains that opinion.
Kenney claims that “images, unlike the acts which underlie them, cannot be guilty.” (p.33) This argument ignores the humiliation and anxiety felt by children who know that embarrassing images of them may be circulating around the world. Pornographic pictures are also used to blackmail people into doing things and/or keeping silent about them. See “Child Pornography on the Internet”, “Child pornography: images of the abuse of children” and this St. Louis case. As the court reasons below, the states do have a strong, legitimate interest in encouraging those who possess child pornography to destroy it.
D.A. Clarke: Women Adopting Men’s Bad Habits Is Not the Answer
People often talk about the abuses endured by women and children in the sex trade and pornography as the price of a free society, implying that the lives of these people are a tragic but necessary sacrifice if we are to avoid totalitarianism, censorship and so on. My first reaction is always one of stunned outrage – it is so very evident that the people making the sad preachments about necessary sacrifices are never the ones who are being sacrificed, and the freedom about which they have such tender and righteous feelings does not extend to those who are enslaved to ensure it. Then
comes a second reaction: What free society? For if the conditions under which the vast majority of prostitutes, and many unpaid sexual servants, live is not fascism, then what is?