Friday, January 31, 2014

Domestic Violence Or Human Trafficking? The State Is Just Learning To Tell

http://wlrn.org/post/domestic-violence-or-human-trafficking-state-just-learning-tell

Domestic Violence Or Human Trafficking? The State Is Just Learning To Tell

Credit Creative Commons via Flickr user d'n'c
Click here to listen to the audio version of this story.
Katherine Fernandez Rundle, State Attorney for Miami-Dade County, says she had never heard of any criminal cases involving human-trafficking victims in Miami.
But the National Human Trafficking Resource Center says Florida ranks thirdin the number of calls reporting potential human trafficking cases. South Florida in particular is a hotspot.
“So clearly we weren't looking at the issue in the correct way," Rundle says. "Our vision was that [human trafficking involved] young people from foreign countries — Singapore, the Philippines — coming in.”
In fact, now, about 90 percent her of cases involve local victims, Rundle says.
So two years ago, the state passed its first law empowering local authorities to make arrests in human-trafficking cases, and Rundle’s office went from having zero cases of human trafficking in 2012 to 107 last year.
Credit National Human Trafficking Resource Center
Location of callers to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline.
On the surface, these cases often look like domestic-violence or sexual-assault cases. Dig a little deeper, though, and trafficking at its core is a crime against free movement. Victims are forced to work or engage in sexual favors -- often through drugs and intimidation.
Even though law enforcement has been trained to know what to look for, they still rely on tips from family members or suspicious neighbors to see the warning signs in potential victims: “dropping out of school, a runaway not living at home, age,” Rundle lists.
And so breaking out of the mindset that human trafficking only happens to foreigners brought into the country is essential, she says.
Katariina Rosenblatt was recruited into a sex-trafficking ring when she was 13 years old, the same age as a girl   recently found stripping at Club Madonna  . Rosenblatt was initially approached at the pool area of a South Beach hotel she and her mom were living in.
“This recruiter came across as an older sister and somebody who I could trust. One day she would introduce me to her pimp," Rosenblatt says. "He said could I call him daddy. [That was] the hole that I had because my father was abusive."
She spent four years in various trafficking circles, and despite exhibiting several of the signs Rundle lists, no one stood up for Rosenblatt. She had to find an out for herself. She now runs There Is Hope For Me, a support group for trafficking victims.
One woman in the group goes by the name Joy -- she asked not to use her real name. She was going to college in Boca Raton, living in dorms, when she fell victim to trafficking.
“At first, in the moment, I didn't really think of it as trafficking. I just saw this as my life, so may as well just suck it up and do it,” Joy recalls.
She says she spent more than six months performing sexual “favors” for friends of a guy she met, who told her he loved her. When his threats got to be too much to handle, she moved out of the state. She came back, she says, to prove to people she could change. Now she’s looking for a job that will allow her to help other people in bad situations.
Identifying victims, though, is still a challenge. About half of Rundle’s cases involve victims younger than 18, she says. Which means making a case against the trafficker even harder. Victims often get attached to their traffickers. 
“Their brain isn’t developed and so these predators are fully adept," she says. "They're [able to] completely twist their brains into believing 'I'm your boyfriend and you owe me this' and 'I love you' and it goes back and forth."
“They are our own boys and girl in our own neighborhoods," Rundle says.


Thursday, January 30, 2014

Notes on a Tour of the Indian Women’s Movement

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/notes-on-a-tour-of-the-indian-womens-movement/?_php=true&_type=blogs&emc=edit_tnt_20140130&tntemail0=y&_r=0

 

Notes on a Tour of the Indian Women’s Movement

Ruchira Gupta, left and Gloria Steinem at a book store in New Delhi.Parul Thapa, Apne AapRuchira Gupta, left and Gloria Steinem at a book store in New Delhi.
MS. GUPTA : Walking through the red-light areas of Sonagachi or lobbying in Albany for the New York State laws against human trafficking, Gloria and my life have interwoven into shared writing sessions,  rallies, meetings, dinners, books, conversations, late night phone calls across continents, brainstorming and sometimes movies. With her, I have experienced how movements move and how immense the feminist movement is.
I was excited about the new wave of feminism that hit the streets after the December 2012 gang rape in Delhi. I wanted Gloria to see how the movement was really moving in India, and to share Gloria’s courage and hope with my fellow protesters.
So armed with a new collection of her essays that I edited, “As if Women Matter: The Essential Gloria Steinem,” I set up a road trip with Gloria from Delhi to Jaipur to Patna to Kolkata to Forbesgunge – the last being a small village on the Indo-Nepal border where poverty has created intergenerational prostitution — and finally Cochin in Kerala.
This journey’s goals are meeting old and new feminists, speaking at rallies, organizing with students, sitting in circles with women and girls trapped in prostitution, sharing ideas with writers, poets, journalists and thought leaders at the Jaipur Literary Festival and the Kolkata Literary Meet and going on a girl-led journey inside a red-light district. Follow our travels here on India Ink and see how big a family the global feminist movement has become.
MS. STEINEM, FROM NEW DELHI
Jan. 11, Saturday: The airport is calm and glamorous, but the roads on the way to Ruchira’s apartment are chaos. There are bicycle rickshaws, ancient black-and-yellow taxis darting about like bumble bees, buses overstuffed with passengers and trucks covered with folk art that could be in a museum. Even the occasional cow munches at the edge of traffic.
All this I remember from the two years I lived here as a student more than four decades ago, yet every visit since then, there have been more luxury cars, sleek motorcycles and giant billboards advertising everything from the newest computers to the tallest apartment buildings.
This is the secret of India. It adds, yet it never subtracts. Nothing should work – yet it does.
When I arrive at the garden apartment of my friend Ruchira Gupta, she gives me our schedule for the next couple of weeks. It, too, is a combination of old and new. An accomplished journalist reporting on women and girls taken from poor villages into big city brothels, she could no longer write about human trafficking without doing something about it. She started Apne Aap — which means Self-Empowerment – as a center of support for women and children trying to escape brothels, and find acceptance and schools for their children.
Now 10 years later, Apne Aap has centers in New Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Forbesgunge, a town in Bihar, India’s poorest state. Now that there are more people in sex and labor slavery in the world than there were slaves in centuries past when it was legal – now due to big profits, easy transport and lax law enforcement — Apne Aap has become a beacon for other countries, too.  That’s how we met, began working and writing together, and became friends who work together in both our countries.
As a great organizer, Ruchira initiates many projects — and on this trip, I am one of them. After the December 2012 gang rape and murder in New Delhi that sent thousands of protesters into the streets, Ruchira selected some of my activist essays that she thought could be useful here, introduced each of them with the reasons why and put them in a book. That’s why we’ve been invited to campuses and literary festivals in India.
For pure pleasure, we’ll also be re-visiting the waterways and peridot green fields of Kerala — the part of India I’ve always loved the most.
This trip is a full circle for me. India taught me how to organize from the bottom up when I came here only a decade after independence and walked through villages with the land reform movement. It changed my view of the world. Now that social justice movements must be as global as the vast inequalities we are trying to change, Ruchira and I and many others are working together.
As if in proof, Vandana Shiva drops in for tea a few minutes after I arrive. She is a writer, environmental activist, physicist and eco-feminist of global influence, yet this is the first chance we’ve had to talk. She is warm, friendly, and has the mark of the truly intelligent: You can understand every word she says.
Today, she is bringing news of another genetically modified seed scandal. Like the expensive cottonseed from Monsanto that promised immunity from pests and weeds – yet produced super pests, super weeds and such high costs that many Indian farmers suffered financial disaster and at least 75,000 farmers committed suicide — a genetically modified banana is about to be pushed by global interests. They promise that if you buy this seed that will replace India’s 200 varieties of homegrown bananas, it will supply more iron to pregnant women. Of course, its iron content is less than that in turmeric, a common Indian spice.
In movements, you need a sense of humor. We consider making a T-shirt:Don’t Go Bananas. Trust Nature.
Gloria Steinem sitting with children at the Apne Aap office in New Delhi.Parul Thapa, Apne AapGloria Steinem sitting with children at the Apne Aap office in New Delhi.
Jan. 13, Monday: In the airy, simple offices of Apne Aap, I sit cross-legged in a circle with 10 teenage girls. They are the daughters of families who belong to a tribe that was nomadic for centuries, and resisted all British efforts to turn them into wage slaves. When their traditional life outlawed, the men became petty thieves, and their wives and daughters were prostituted. In the terms of the British, they became “criminal tribes.”
That label was removed with Independence, but they still had no other way to survive. Even many Indians of goodwill had come to believe they were incapable of change. Now, Apne Aap has set out to prove this untrue, one girl and one family at a time, by providing schools, respect, encouragement.
I know all this, but the sight of these fresh-faced, shy, spirited girls has driven it out of my head. They could be from anywhere. One asks how I became a writer, which is what she wants to do. Another wants to be a dancer. Others say they hope to become teachers or health professionals.
I ask what one thing would help each of them right now – the next day and the next. Most say education. Then one is silent. Finally, she says: “the truth.”
I realize that her parents are likely to marry her off to a man from the tribe who will become her pimp. If she goes to school, she will have to overcome guilt at earning no money for her husband and family.
I don’t know how she will deal with the truth – but she wants to know.
Jan. 15, Wednesday: At our formal book launch at the India International Center, I’m suddenly aware that my 22-year-old self once came to there. The auditorium is overflowing with old and young feminists, plus the curious.
On stage, Devaki Jain, the Gandhian feminist economist who is my oldest friend in the world, calls me “truthful and courageous, transparent, brave and daring.” My younger and uncertain self wouldn’t be able to imagine or believe this. Then Ela Bhatt, founder of S.E.W.A., the Self Employed Women’s Association, which is the largest women’s union in the world, gives a rare and historic speech about her feminist journey and life’s philosophy. She should have received a Nobel Prize decades ago.
When I first met Ela, she was alone in believing that the poorest women in India could organize together and advance together. Illiterate and with no employer, they were the women who sold single cigarettes in the street, or straightened out nails and old pots and pans to resell them, or bought vegetables with a high-interest daily loan from a money changer, then tried to sell them in the street. Ela started by creating street nurseries for their children, then small credit groups for their businesses. Later, an economist named Muhammad Yunus would win a Nobel Prize for an imperfect version of this.
In the meanwhile, S.E.W.A. has reached a membership of 1.9 million women in India alone, and has spread to other countries in South Asia and Africa, plus Turkey and Russia.
On the stage with Ela, Devaki and Ruchira, I feel a pleasure so profound that I don’t know how to express it. But at least I can explain to this audience that Ruchira has become that rare activist who is at home in the streets, her own Parliament, Washington and the United Nations, and so is uniquely effective in all three. She is a living bridge between the truth at the bottom and the power at the top.
At the reception afterward, Ruchira, who is some 30 years younger than me and my two friends, tells me that she feels nurtured, protected and inspired by us. That is reward enough.
Jan. 16, Thursday:  In Connaught Place, we as students once escaped to sophisticated and forbidden coffee shops. Now, its curved promenade of shops is old-fashioned next to luxurious hotels and modern office buildings.
But inside a two-story store in that arcade, the women of S.E.W.A. sell beautiful clothes and weavings of their own making. Upstairs today, there are 30 of so S.E.W.A. women who have gathered to meet with us — Ruchira, me, Devaki and several women from Apne Aap – for the first time. We are welcomed with tea, homemade sweets and a song about their movement.
I am sitting next to a woman who is the elected president of this huge union. Many women speak about their diverse work, and Ela is a presence but doesn’t direct. In the way of a rare and great leader, she knows how to pass along power.
We learn about S.E.W.A.’s small farmers who have organized successfully to keep their land away from agribusiness, but the products in this store are also threatened by Wal-Mart’s cheaper and less durable ones made in Chinese sweatshops. Women also tell their personal stories of gaining safety and independence. Apne Aap women speak about their organizing, too.
I wonder if the S.E.W.A. women will understand these activists who have been rendered less respectable by being prostituted. Ela Bhatt asks if they can tell their families what they do, and one explains that it was her husband who pimped her.
I can feel surprise – and then understanding. I realize that these two groups can organize together. Later, Ruchira tells me she realized this at the same time.
At the end of our meeting, the S.E.W.A. women sing one last song. It is “We Shall Overcome” – in Gujarati.
In organizing, I’ve always used a tree as a symbol of the fact that lasting change grows from the bottom. After today, I will say this is a banyan tree whose branches dip down in dry weather, take root, grow up again and create a forest from one trunk. Globally, we have to become a banyan tree.
Next stop: Jaipur Literature Festival

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

A Court’s All-Hands Approach Aids Girls Most at Risk

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/us/a-courts-all-hands-approach-aids-girls-most-at-risk.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20140129&_r=0

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Aundrea Brown, a public defender, with a client in the court. Jim Wilson/The New York Times
SAN LEANDRO, Calif. — Toni J., an effervescent 16-year-old who talks on speed-dial, lives with 11 family members in West Oakland, on a street buffeted by gang activity and poverty. Her mother died of an overdose, her father in a revenge shooting. In ninth grade, she was raped while on probation for shoplifting.
At odds with the law from a young age, Toni has appeared in court 38 times. But things are suddenly starting to change thanks to an unusual collaboration between the judicial and social service systems. Toni is now doing well at school and even mentoring other at-risk girls.
“You’re stepping up to the plate,” Judge Rhonda Burgess said to Toni from the bench before recommending that she be taken off probation.
Like Toni, who was picked up along International Boulevard in Oakland, a major West Coast hub for sex trafficking, the vast majority of teenage girls who appear before Judge Burgess in the Alameda County Girls Court, a special tribunal for girls, have been recruited as child prostitutes or, like Toni, been considered at risk for involvement. (All those mentioned in this article are minors.)
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Girls Court Offers Guidance and Hope

Girls Court Offers Guidance and Hope

Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Girls Court brings an all-hands-on-deck approach to the lives of vulnerable girls, linking them to social service agencies, providing informal Saturday sessions on everything from body image to legal jargon, and offering a team of adults in whom they can develop trust. And while still in its early years, the system is showing promise.
Founded two and a half years ago and carved out of the existing juvenile court, the Girls Court is for young women considered most at risk, especially those forced into prostitution. It is part of a network of a half-dozen or so Girls Courts around the country, each with a different emphasis. The results have been encouraging: The court in Hawaii, a program where both parents and girls attend counseling for a year, has led to a marked decrease in detentions, according to a 2011 evaluation. The Orange County Girls court, which was started in 2009, intervenes in the lives of teenage girls in long-term foster care, with preliminary studies suggesting better grades and fewer placements.
“It’s a unique alignment between adversaries,” Laurel Bellows, a Chicago lawyer and co-chairwoman of the American Bar Association’s anti-trafficking task force, said of the court’s collaborative approach. “These are not easy victims to deal with.”
“It’s changed me,” Toni said of the court. “Without it, I probably would have been in jail, dead or somewhere getting beaten up by some dude.”
In most states, including California, young prostitutes continue to be charged with crimes despite a growing consensus that minors who engage in sex for pay are victims of sex trafficking rather than criminals. Dr. Ellen Wright Clayton, a professor of pediatrics and law at Vanderbilt University, said the optimal strategies for helping these young people are still being developed, but that training judges, lawyers and others to identify them is a first step. “What is really needed is a collaborative approach that directs people to services rather than prosecution,” she said. “It’s an enormous problem we’re only beginning to get the scope of.”
The Girls Court is part of a national movement to address the sex trafficking of minors domestically, many with a history of childhood abuse. Among the high-profile efforts are New York State’s new network of 11 statewide Human Trafficking Intervention Courts for those 16 years and up, and the passage of so-called Safe Harbor laws, in a small but growing number of states, that define sexually trafficked youth as victims rather than offenders.
Oregon revised its child welfare practice so that a trafficked minor is considered a victim of abuse and the province of the child welfare system rather than the courts. Next year, sexually exploited minors in Minnesota will be referred to one of six regional case managers who will direct them to a network of emergency shelters.
Here in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, a survey last year of 113 sexually exploited youths by WestCoast Children’s Clinic found that 75 percent of such youngsters here and in a neighboring county had experienced abuse and neglect.
The lives that unfold in Courtroom 401 in the Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center contain few glimmers of gladness.
One girl, who was in detention in juvenile hall, entered the courtroom through a guarded, Brinks-like door. The police had found her passed out on an Oakland street, having injected drugs she could not identify. Another young woman, the daughter of a methamphetamine addict, was “sold” by her mother to an uncle in the Central Valley who sexually exploited her in exchange for drugs.
One 17-year-old wore a fuzzy pink sweater in court, looking down at her feet. She has been sexually abused since childhood, one of her molesters an older brother. Last year, she fled a group home outside Los Angeles and became homeless, at one point sleeping in a park.
In weighing such cases, Judge Burgess says she tries to understand the back story, the forces, often within their own families, that have made the young women feel diminished. Many girls come to court unaware that they are being exploited. “Once they begin to see it, they see their own power and have a chance at fashioning their own destiny,” Judge Burgess said.
Jasmine grew up with a parade of men terrorizing her household. By age 7, she had watched her mother being savagely beaten by boyfriends in drunken rages.
She spent years as a child prostitute and had numerous brushes with the law. “I was on the run from my mom,” she said. “I felt money was the only way.”
Like many of the girls, Jasmine developed a tough-girl demeanor, capable of switching like quicksilver from ‘let’s talk’ charming to knife-edge anger. Judge Burgess directed her to an out-of-state program for exploited girls, where she spent nine months.
Today, Jasmine has a job and is preparing to move into her own apartment. “I felt a lot of support from those ladies,” she said of the Girls Court team. “Even though we sometimes had problems with each other, I see why they did what they did.”
The court provides adult guidance for girls who may never have had any. The female triumvirate — Judge Burgess; the assistant district attorney, Jennifer Madden; and Aundrea Brown, the public defender — offer appropriate behavior for the young women to emulate. Ms. Brown took one shopping after she showed up for court in her most alluring outfit. “I said, ‘Oh no, baby,’ ” Ms. Brown recalled. “ ‘That’s a cute cat suit, but this is not the place for it.’ ”
The focused attention can give girls strength to confront long-buried emotional landmines. “Girls and women respond to consistency in relationships,” said Ms. Brown, who supervises the Alameda County Public Defender’s Juvenile Branch. Many flee their families to escape abuse, said Stephanie S. Covington, co-director of the Center for Gender and Justice in La Jolla. In adolescence, she said, “the risk for boys comes from people who dislike them: the police, their peers or a rival gang.
In contrast, she said, “For girls, the violence in their lives comes from relationships — the person to whom she’s saying, ‘I love you.’ ”
Many of the young women grew up in Oakland near their predators. “These kids are considered high-value property by high-risk criminals,” said Julie Posadas Guzman, the former director of girls’ services for the San Francisco Juvenile Probation Department. “A 12-year-old is way more valuable than a 40-year-old with a crack habit.”
The county’s H.E.A.T. Watch unit, started by the district attorney in 2006, was set up to aggressively go after people who traffic in women: as of last year, 111 exploiters of children under 18 had been convicted.
But being perceived as a snitch can be perilous. Erica W. was the kind of person to light up the room. She was still attending the Saturday program and preparing to testify against her pimp last year when her body was found dumped amid the eucalyptus trees along a highway in the Oakland hills.
Efforts to come to grips with what many experts consider an epidemic vary widely across the country. New York State’s Safe Harbor law, the country’s first, classifies trafficked minors through age 17 as needing supervision rather than probation. In Los Angeles County, a special sex trafficking court diverts girls to a network of local foster care agencies and social service providers; meanwhile, the probation department now has a dedicated unit to “support young victims instead of locking them up when they run,” said Michelle Guymon, the department’s director.
Nationally, safe housing for exploited youngsters remains “a systemic problem,” with trafficked girls often placed with foster parents who lack awareness of the issue, said Nola Brantley, who was trafficked herself and co-founded Missey, an Oakland-based nonprofit group that helps girls in crisis, provides mentoring and offers links to therapy and other services.
For Judge Burgess and her colleagues, success is moment to moment. For every Toni, who writes poetry and loves math, there is a Pooh, who seems to be stable until she vanishes.
Most of those involved in the Girls Court program here are sent to residential treatment programs out of state. Many are re-exploited within days of returning, sometimes “within hours of getting off the plane,” said Susan Drager, a program director of the WestCoast clinic. “It takes an adult woman an average of seven times to get out of a domestic violence relationship. How long will it take a child?”
The ebb and flow of girls’ lives sometimes reveals itself in unexpected ways. At a Zumba class in juvenile hall, bottled up emotion accompanied a group of young women into the room; they had just been marched with their hands behind their backs down an anonymous corridor. But each girl’s own aggressive universe gradually gave way to something lighter. They were a sweaty band of cacophonous teenagers dancing with a stranger: joy.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Fighting sexual and domestic slavery 'requires help of European agencies'

http://www.theguardian.com/law/2014/jan/27/sexual-domestic-slavery-director-public-prosecutions

Fighting sexual and domestic slavery 'requires help of European agencies'

Alison Saunders, director of public prosecutions, also proposes better co-operation between charities who support victims
Alison Saunders pictured on a red chair with the reflection of venetian blind on wall behind her
Alison Saunders, head of the Crown Prosecution Service. 'This cross-border crime needs a full national and international approach, as well as better focus on strengthening investigations.' Photograph: Felix Clay
European Union investigators and experts in trafficking networks should be drafted in to improve the fight against sexual and domestic slavery, the director of public prosecutions (DPP) has recommended.
An action programme agreed by Alison Saunders and an inter-ministerial committee also proposes expanding co-operation between charities that support victims so more information can be disclosed to prosecutors.
A list of 11 recommendations has been agreed following a summit on trafficking attended by the DPP, police forces, other law enforcement agencies and departmental officials on 4 December last year.
Among the changes advocated is for the police and the Crown Prosecutions Service (CPS) to "consider the earlier use of Europol and Eurojust and use of joint investigation teams to combat trafficking and slavery".
Encouragement of closer ties with EU organisations comes at a time when the government is considering opting out of EU criminal justice measures and selectively opting back into a smaller number of measures.
More specialists should be called in to "improve investigations and prosecutions", according to the DPP's plans. Expert witnesses, it is suggested, would assist understanding of how trafficking takes place and the impact it has on its victims.
Experts in foreign "cultural rituals" or trafficking routes may bring detailed knowledge of the clandestine trade. In one case, resulting in theconviction of Anthony Harrison in 2011, it was discovered that he had trafficked two Nigerian girls into prostitution in the UK by persuading them that they were under his control through juju witchcraft.
Saunders said: "This cross-border crime needs a full national and international approach, as well as better focus on strengthening investigations. We in the CPS will work with all those with responsibility in this area to improve our response for the victims not only in building stronger cases, but in the support we provide them.
"By improving awareness and developing closer, proactive working relationships across the criminal justice system both here and abroad, I am determined that these actions increase the number of cases referred to the CPS for consideration which, in turn, should result in more prosecutions."
Another recommended action is for the CPS to give advice to independent agencies and charities supporting individual trafficking and slavery victims "on their responsibilities in respect of the disclosure of files in criminal proceedings".
A memorandum of understanding is being drawn up on improving the handling of information and evidence about those who have been trafficked. It will set out what information should be exchanged with prosecutors, the provision of information to victims and how to handle information and evidence disclosed by them.
The aim of the programme is to overcome difficulties in prosecuting those responsible for trafficking vulnerable individuals from abroad into the sex trade or domestic slavery in Britain. Improved co-operation with international agencies was identified as one of the main ways of tackling cross-border crime.
Human trafficking is criminalised under two specific pieces of legislation: section 59A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 for trafficking for sexual exploitation; and section 4 of the Asylum and Immigration Act 2004 for trafficking for all forms of non-sexual exploitation.
A further offence created under section 71 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 criminalises those who hold another person in slavery or servitude, or require or force them to perform compulsory labour.
Five members of a prostitution racket, which flew more than 50 young women to the UK from Hungary and set them up in airport hotels, student accommodation and suburban homes, were this month convicted of conspiring to traffic people into the UK for sexual exploitation.
Among other recommendations in the action programme are for more research to be carried out to assess the scale of the problem in the UK, for more protection to be offered to victims at risk of intimidation if they give evidence and for better legal representation for underage victims.