Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Nail Salons and Human Trafficking

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phillip-martin/nail-salons-and-human-tra_b_669076.html


Phillip Martin

Phillip Martin

Posted: August 3, 2010 01:53 PM

Nail Salons and Human Trafficking

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In recent years, law enforcement officials nationwide have reported increases in human trafficking. By some estimates there are around 20,000 victims brought into the United States each year. The victims come from countries around the world including China, the Ukraine, Estonia, Brazil, Vietnam, Korea, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, among others. Many victims were born in the US. The vast majority were smuggled to areas like Boston for the purposes of prostitution and were set up in apartments, massage parlors, and other "traditional" venues. But investigators have also noted something else in recent years. The growing use of nail salons to hide and legitimize human trafficking activities. Our investigative team at WGBH Radio in Boston took a close look at this issue and the following is the first of four-stories series on human trafficking in New England and elsewhere around the country.
NOT IN AMERICA
At a nail salon in South Boston, a customer holds out both hands and waits for the young technician sitting in front of her to perform her magic. 
2010-08-03-hand_sm.jpg
The fingernails transform from a natural beige to a vibrant orange in a matter of minutes with the expert dab of a brush. It's an everyday routine performed at hundreds of nail salons around the state -- in a business that many view as oversaturated. Nevertheless, more and more nail salons are opening up seemingly by the day in strip malls and along shopping avenues in even the tiniest of towns. The majority, which are owned and operated mainly by Vietnamese immigrants, function straightforwardly as nail salons. But state and federal law enforcement officials believe that the owners of some shops are engaged in illicit activities that may include money laundering and human trafficking, where women are forced or coerced to work for free or engage in sex for a fee. Until recently, this shop in South Boston was owned by a man who is suspected of running one such enterprise and is now being investigated by a federal grand jury.
Much further along Dorchester Avenue in the Fields Corner area of the city, people are darting in and out of mom and pop stores. In the air, you can hear smatterings of Haitian Creole, English minus the R's, and Vietnamese. Two souped-up cars are double-parked on this street. Life seems normal. So normal that Quac Tran, the director of the Vietnamese American Civic Association, is astounded to hear that human trafficking might be taking place in his community.
"Not human trafficking," says Tran. "Not in America. Human trafficking in the sense of prostitution? It's not happening here. Let's put it that way. It's not happening here."
Immigration lawyer Julie Dahlstrom thinks otherwise. Dahlstrom represents women who have been victims of sex and labor trafficking across the state. A Worcester-based advocate for Lutheran World Services, Dahlstrom also sits on the Massachusetts joint task force on human trafficking.
2010-08-03-JulieDahlstrom.jpg
Julie Dahlstrom, advocate
for Lutheran World Service


"I think there is a reluctance to believe that this is happening in our communities and I'd say especially in affluent communities in and around Boston," says Dahlstrom.
People believe that this is an international problem, that it happens in other countries. It happens in Third World countries; it doesn't happen within our communities. It doesn't happen in nail salons or massage parlors that we frequent or with women that we might know or interact with, but it does.
"Wherever you have immigrants, you have potential for human trafficking," says Tom Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights in the US Justice Department, which under the Obama Administration has made human trafficking a priority issue. "People can be brought in and forced to work in a number of different employment settings. And the settings range from nail salons to sweatshops."
Norma Ramos, executive director of the New York-based Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, says there's often a thin line between sex and labor trafficking.
"With nail salons for instance, the labor trafficking of Asian women, you can have those women being labor trafficked to work in those salons during the day, and then pulled into sex trafficking at night."
One Boston-area man is alleged to be engaged in both: As mentioned above, WGBH has learned that federal, state, and local law enforcement officials are currently investigating a Dorchester businessman suspected of running a human trafficking operation and using the nail salon business as a cover. But it's not as unusual as one might think.
IT'S HAPPENING NATIONWIDE
This past year, police in Springfield, Massachusetts, raided a nail salon suspected of being a front for prostitution and similar arrests have taken place around the country.
In York, Pennsylvania; East Orange, New Jersey; Salem, Virginia, and just outside of San Jose, California, over the past year, police have discovered women who have been virtually enslaved in nail salons. Some for sex. Others exclusively for labor. In New York last year at the Babi Nail Salon, six Chinese immigrants came forward to say that they had been forced to work without pay for the owners, who also allegedly abused them physically. In a separate case in New York, police arrested a woman in Queens for allegedly forcing Korean women to work in a nail salon, which reportedly advertised a "stimulus plan" on a sign in the window, and offered sex acts for prices ranging from $60 up to $120. But why nail salons?
Twenty-six-year-old Donna, who was forced into prostitution at an early age, thinks she knows why:
"One of the girls that I was around was told, 'It's okay, he just wants a massage,'" says Donna. "And of course the john would sort of ask for more and of course it was always in exchange for money. So I think that the police at this point probably have caught onto their game and are looking for new cover-ups. So if nail salons is their new thing, it's not a surprise to me."
The nail salon business is flourishing nationwide. In Massachusetts alone, individual cosmetology licenses -- including for nail technicians -- are up 16 percent in the last two years. And George Weber, the director of the Mass Division of Professional Licensure, says licenses for cosmetology shops themselves are up 39 percent over the same period.
"To open a nail salon," says Weber, "You first have to have a manicurist license and that is the license that requires the least number of hours to open. That's a hundred-hour program. Then you have to have the occupancy permits from your locality and you have to have us inspect it. So the reason in part for the proliferation is it's the easiest way to get into business."
"But the other is, nail salons are -- for the most part -- a cash business," says Paul Taylor, a former cop and inspector for the Division of Professional Licensure, who for years has been investigating the connections between nail salons and human trafficking. "So you can launder all the money you need out of there. You never need a customer."
Weber adds, "Now, it cannot be overstated, that the vast majority of nail salon and cosmetology shops in New England, including those operated by new immigrants, perform the services for which they were set up: hair, face, nails, and feet. But have there been allegations of money laundering? Yes. Have there been allegations of people coming from out of state, of transporting individuals to engage in prostitution? Yes. Have we been cooperating and working diligently with law enforcement officials to prevent that? Yes."
2010-08-03-HumanTraffickingGraphic.jpg
Sergeant Arlin Vanderbilt, who heads the vice crimes unit in San Francisco, relies on common sense and a fluent command of Korean to sniff out human traffickers, but he says they are becoming a lot smarter.
"Same situation here. We regulate massage in this town at a municipal level. The police department used to handle those duties, now the health department does it. We work together with them to do inspections. So it doesn't take long for the crooks to figure out that the City doesn't directly regulate cosmetology. That's a pretty simple transition for a lot of these places to make. They usually tend to do it on a smaller scale than the traditional massage parlors. And they are finding how to use the 'ordinariness' of nail salons to their advantage."
"Back 5 or 8 years ago during the peak, we had massage parlors that had capacity for up to 20 customers at a time,"
adds Vanderbilt.
"The nail salons now are usually much smaller, usually only two or three rooms. I think that's especially where we see these women who are former victims of trafficking. Especially in the smaller places if you're considering the issue of the proprietor's relationship with the trafficker, it's much easier if you're running a small nail salon to just deal directly with the women."
Nail salons may be the more unusual setting for sex trafficking, but most victims around the country and here in southern New England continue to be prostituted in ways that are familiar -- via massage parlors, strip clubs, and in so-called gentleman's clubs. Often times these venues are connected to nail salons for the purpose of moving trafficking victims from one location to another.
TOMORROWPimps, Minors and Sex Traffickers in America "Sexual and Human Trafficking" is a four-part series produced by WGBH Radio.

Tulsa man arrested on human trafficking complaints: Not OK

Tulsa man arrested on human trafficking complaints

Updated: 11/25 10:04 amPublished: 11/25 7:25 am


Tulsa police arrested a man accused of forcing minors into prostitution at a Tulsa motel Friday morning.

According to the arrest report, police found Damien Wardell in a motel room with four juvenile girls and a juvenile boy. Officers responded to a report of a runaway at the Rest Inn and Suites.

Wardell is being held on more than $200,000 bond.

Updated: 11/25 10:04 amPublished: 11/25 7:25 am


Tulsa police arrested a man accused of forcing minors into prostitution at a Tulsa motel Friday morning.

According to the arrest report, police found Damien Wardell in a motel room with four juvenile girls and a juvenile boy. Officers responded to a report of a runaway at the Rest Inn and Suites.

Wardell is being held on more than $200,000 bond.

Friday, November 22, 2013

The Followup in London: Psychological Coercion and "Invisible Handcuffs"

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/world/europe/british-police-say-women-were-brainwashed.html?emc=edit_tnt_20131122&tntemail0=y

British Police Say ‘Invisible Handcuffs’ Restrained Women for 30 Years

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LONDON — Police detectives investigating the case of three women who claim to have been held against their will for 30 years said Friday that the victims had been brainwashed and imprisoned by “invisible handcuffs” in an unremarkable house in South London.
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A police commander leading the investigation also revealed that a couple in their 60s, arrested Thursday on suspicion of holding the three women, had also been detained in the 1970s, but he refused to elaborate. The two suspects, both 67 and unidentified under police protocol, were released on bail late on Thursday after surrendering their passports.
“What we have uncovered so far is a complicated and disturbing picture of emotional control over many years,” Commander Steve Rodhouse of the Metropolitan Police said at a news conference. “Brainwashing would be a simple term, but I think that belittles the years of emotional abuse these victims have had to endure.”
Commander Rodhouse said the case was different from others involving domestic servitude because it was “not as brutally obvious as women being physically restrained inside an address and not being allowed to leave.”
Through careful questioning of the traumatized victims, the police are trying to determine “what were the invisible handcuffs that were used to exert such a degree of control over these women,” he added.
A Malaysian woman, 69, an Irishwoman, 57, and a British woman, 30, were freed from the house in the Lambeth district last month after one of the women contacted a charity that helps victims of forced marriage, the police said Thursday. They said the youngest woman had apparently been held captive her entire life.
The police said the suspects in the case were not British but declined to identify their nationality.
The police say that at least one of the victims complained of beatings. However, all this went on behind the facade of an “unremarkable” house, Commander Rodhouse said.
“To all intents and purposes, to the outside world this may have appeared to be a normal family,” with both the suspects and the victims probably coming into contact with public services, he added.
Kevin Hyland, a detective inspector in the Metropolitan Police’s Human Trafficking Unit, said on Thursday that there was no evidence that the women had been sexually abused.
But an official close to the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said that at least one of the women might have been forcibly married to the man in the house.

Rescued London Women Say They Were Held 30 Years

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/22/world/europe/3-women-said-to-be-held-30-years-rescued-from-london-home.html?emc=edit_tnt_20131121&tntemail0=y&_r=0

Rescued London Women Say They Were Held 30 Years

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LONDON — The London police announced Thursday that three women had been rescued from a city home where they claim to have been held against their will for about 30 years, and that a married couple who lived there had been arrested.
Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Kevin Hyland, a detective inspector, discussed the rescued women in London on Thursday.
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A Malaysian woman, 69; an Irishwoman, 57; and a British woman, 30, were freed from the house in the Lambeth district in South London in October after one of the women contacted a charity that helps victims of forced marriage, the police said at a news conference. They said the youngest woman had apparently been held captive her entire life.
The two suspects, an unidentified man and a woman, both 67, were arrested Thursday morning and were being held in a South London police station pending charges. The British police generally do not identify suspects until they have been charged. The police would not say whether the couple owned the home, and they declined to elaborate on other details of the women’s ordeal or the arrests.
Although the captive women had enjoyed some “controlled freedom,” the police said, they had been forced to perform domestic tasks. Kevin Hyland, a detective inspector in the Metropolitan Police’s Human Trafficking Unit, said most of their days were probably spent indoors, though it remained unclear under what conditions and whether they had been held in more than one house. They did not appear to be related, the police said.
“We have had some other cases we have dealt with previously where we know that people have been held for periods of up to 10 years, but never anything on this scale before,” Detective Hyland said.
At least one of the women may have been forcibly married to the man in the house, according to an official close to the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. Although Detective Hyland said that there was no evidence that the women had suffered sexual abuse, this official said the police suspected otherwise.
“The woman appears to have been through some kind of religious marriage ceremony with the male member of the couple that kept them,” he said. All three appeared to have been used as unpaid domestic helpers, but “manipulated” into believing that staying was in their best interest, he said. The oldest one, the Malaysian, had been with the couple the longest, 30 years, he said.
The story dominated the evening news on the main broadcasters and led the home pages of all major newspapers as Britons tried to grasp the idea that three adult women might have been kept as domestic slaves in their capital. A statement from the Home Office emphasized that the police still needed to get to the bottom of the matter, but also expressed “determination to tackle the scourge of modern slavery.”
After a television documentary on forced marriages was broadcast in October, the Irish woman contacted Freedom Charity, which specializes in helping victims of such marriages and whose work was featured in the program, according to the charity’s founder, Aneeta Prem.
“I can’t go into too many details, but they managed to get to a phone and make a call to us,”she told Sky News. “We started to talk to them in depth when we could. It had to be prearranged when they were able to make calls to us and it had to be done very secretly because they felt they were in massive danger.”
Working with Freedom Charity, police officers managed to track down the home where the women were living. They moved swiftly to free them, but then spent several weeks assembling evidence before making the arrests on Thursday.
Ms. Prem said she was still investigating how the women could have remained hidden from view for so long. “In a very busy capital city we often don’t know our neighbors,” she told the BBC. “We’re looking at people who were kept against their will in an ordinary residential street in central London.”
The women are at a secret location and are being questioned by interrogators who specialize in dealing with trauma victims, the police said.
“All three women were deeply affected by this activity and traumatized,” Detective Hyland said. “It was essential that we took things slowly in order to establish the facts of the period in what was alleged to be servitude or domestic labor.” He added that because interrogators were treading carefully, many of the details of the women’s ordeal remained unknown or were emerging only slowly.
Detective Hyland said it was “fair to suggest that the 30-year-old had no contact with the outside world that we would see as normal.”
He added that he could not say whether she was the daughter of the arrested man.
“We don’t know whether the 30-year-old was born in the house, but the 30-year-old has spent her whole life we believe in servitude or forced labor,” Detective Hyland said.

Thursday, November 21, 2013

When Children Are Traded

This article is not about human trafficking, but it is about the dehumanization of children or at the very least, it is about vulnerable children who are susceptible to abuse of all kinds.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/opinion/kristof-when-children-are-traded.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131121&_r=0

OP-ED COLUMNIST

When Children Are Traded

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A few ads offering free children on the Internet:
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof
On the Ground
Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels.
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Readers’ Comments


“Born in October of 2000 — this handsome boy, ‘Rick,’ was placed from India a year ago and is obedient and eager to please.”
“We adopted an 8-year-old girl from China. ... Unfortunately, we are now struggling, having been home for 5 days.”
“Prayerfully seeking a loving and nurturing family for our 14-year-old daughter who has been with us for almost a year. She honestly is almost a model child.”
This is “private re-homing,” something that once meant finding a new home for a dog that barked too much. Now it refers to families recycling their adopted children, often through Internet postings.
There are commonly no courts involved, no lawyers, no social service agencies and no vetting of the new parents. There’s less formality than the transfer of a car.
Private re-homing of adoptive children was explored in a devastating five-part investigative series this fall from Reuters. The reporters found that on one Yahoo message board, a child was offered for re-homing on average once a week (Yahoo has since closed the board). Most of the children ranged in age from 6 to 14 and had been adopted abroad, but some were American-born.
When one troubled Russian girl was 12 years old, she was re-homed three times within six months and told Reuters that, by the time she was 13, a boy at one of the homes had sex with her — and then urinated on her.
A Chinese girl crippled by polio ended up in a home where a woman with an explosive temper was eventually overseeing 18 children. The girl says that the woman confiscated her leg brace, which she needed to walk. And, according to court records, the woman, as a form of punishment, once ordered her to dig a hole in the backyard — for her own grave.
“You die here and no one will know,” the Chinese girl quoted the woman as saying. “No one will find you.”
The families handing over the children are at wit’s end. They typically adopted children with serious emotional troubles who, they say, brought fear, chaos and sometimes violence to their homes. Parents of one adopted boy said they felt they had to lock him in his room every night for the safety of everyone else.
“I am totally ashamed to say it, but we do truly hate this boy,” one woman in Nebraska wrote about her 11-year-old adoptive son from Guatemala.
Another mother wrote of re-homing her 12-year-old daughter: “I would have given her away to a serial killer, I was so desperate.”
By some accounts, 10 percent to 25 percent of adoptions don’t work out. That could mean 24,000 foreign-born children are no longer with the families that adopted them, Reuters calculates.
When an adopted child is American, he or she can go into the foster care system. With foreign adoptions, it can be harder. State foster care systems are more reluctant to take custody of children from international adoptions, and giving a child to the authorities may entail an investigation for abuse or paying for the child’s care until new parents are found.
For those who take in re-homed children, it amounts to free adoption, saving many thousands of dollars. A dangerous pitfall is that because there is often no screening to protect the vulnerable children, re-homing can lure pedophiles.
The heart of the Reuters investigation concerns a woman, Nicole Eason, who lost custody of her own two children after one suffered broken bones and who was the last to see a friend’s baby alive before he drowned in a bathtub. Eason acquired six children through re-homing on the Internet.
Meanwhile, Eason’s former housemate, Randy Winslow, used the screen name “lovethemcute” on one pedophile site on the Internet, Reuters says. Before being arrested and convicted on child pornography charges, Winslow explained his thinking in one chat room: “just have to raise them to think it’s fine and not tell anyone.” He added: “what is done in the family stays in the family.”
Eason contacted an adoptive mother one morning and Eason and Winslow took custody of her 10-year-old son that same day in a hotel parking lot.
A first step to address this issue would be to make adoption agencies responsible for children they bring to America, including finding new homes when adoptions fail. If we have rules about recycling bottles, we should prevent children from being abandoned and recycled.
The larger point is a more basic failing in America: inadequate child services. Kids don’t get the protection they need from predators, nor the nutrition they need, nor the books and reading programs they need for mental nutrition. The threat to the food stamp program, whose beneficiaries are 45 percent children, is emblematic of this broader problem. Children don’t have votes and are voiceless, so America’s most vulnerable become its most neglected.