Airport employees being trained to intercept sex trafficking
Monique O. Madan The Miami Herald
Employees at Miami International Airport were trained Thursday to identify and respond to children who are being sexually exploited.
Fifty workers attended a sex-trafficking training session given by Miami-Dade police and personnel from PortMiami and MIA. The workshop is aimed at keeping watch on the tens of thousands of daily passengers who walk through the airport.
South Florida is one of the 13 major trafficking hubs in the country, according to the FBI.
Most recently, on Feb. 17, two men — former Miami Beach Police officer Lavont Flanders Jr., 41, of Miami Gardens, and Emerson Callum, 45, of Miami — were sentenced to life in prison for sex trafficking after they lured unsuspecting women to South Florida, slipped them drugs, taped them performing sex acts and sold the images to pornographers.
Last spring, advocates with Kristi House — a nonprofit that helps sexually abused victims — said they wanted to prevent child victims from being trafficked through unprepared South Florida airports.
MIA is one of the first U.S. airports to launch this type of training, according to Kristi House.
Miami-Dade County Commissioner Jose "Pepe" Diaz, led the sex-trafficking crackdown after he said he realized victims are taken across state lines or international borders through places like Miami International Airport and PortMiami.
About 293,000 young people in the United States are at risk of commercial sexual exploitation, according to Diaz’s legislation.
Experts describe these children as runaways who leave abusive and neglectful homes, becoming involved in prostitution for financial support or by force.
In March 25, 2011, Yusril became a slave. That afternoon he went to the East Jakarta offices of Indah Megah Sari (IMS), an agency that hires crews to work on foreign fishing vessels. He was offered a job on the Melilla 203, a South Korea-flagged ship that trawls in the waters off New Zealand. “Hurry up,” said the agent, holding a pen over a thick stack of contracts in a windowless conference room with water-stained walls. Waving at a pile of green Indonesian passports of other prospective fishermen, he added: “You really can’t waste time reading this. There are a lot of others waiting, and the plane leaves tomorrow.”
Yusril is 28, with brooding looks and a swagger that belies his slight frame. (Yusril asked that his real name not be used out of concern for his safety.) He was desperate for the promised monthly salary of $260, plus bonuses, for unloading fish. His wife was eight months pregnant, and he had put his name on a waiting list for the job nine months earlier. After taking a daylong bus ride to Jakarta, he had given the agent a $225 fee he borrowed from his brother-in-law. The agent rushed him through signing the contracts, at least one of which was in English, which Yusril does not read.
The terms of the first contract, the “real” one, would later haunt him. In it, IMS spelled out terms with no rights. In addition to the agent’s commission, Yusril would surrender 30 percent of his salary, which IMS would hold unless the work was completed. He would be paid nothing for the first three months, and if the job were not finished to the fishing company’s satisfaction, Yusril would be sent home and charged more than $1,000 for the airfare. The meaning of “satisfactory” was left vague. The contract said only that Yusril would have to work whatever hours the boat operators demanded.
The last line of the contract, in bold, warned that Yusril’s family would owe nearly $3,500 if he were to run away from the ship. The amount was greater than his net worth, and he had earlier submitted title to his land as collateral for that bond. Additionally, he had provided IMS with the names and addresses of his family members. He was locked in.
What followed, according to Yusril and several shipmates who corroborated his story, was an eight-month ordeal aboard the Melilla 203, during which Indonesian fishermen were subjected to physical and sexual abuse by the ship’s operators. Their overlords told them not to complain or fight back, or they would be sent home, where the agents would take their due. Yusril and 23 others walked off in protest when the trawler docked in Lyttelton, New Zealand. The men have seen little if any of what they say they are owed. Such coerced labor is modern-day slavery, as the United Nations defines the crime. (The South Korean owners of the Melilla ships did not respond to requests for comment.)
The experiences of the fishermen on the Melilla 203 were not unique. In a six-month investigation, Bloomberg Businessweek found cases of debt bondage on the Melilla 203 and at least nine other ships that have operated in New Zealand’s waters. As recently as November 2011, fish from the Melilla 203 and other suspect vessels were bought and processed by United Fisheries, New Zealand’s eighth-largest seafood company, which has sold the same kinds of fish in the same period to distributors operating in the U.S. (The U.S. imports 86 percent of its seafood.) The distributors in turn have sold the fish to major U.S. companies. Those companies—which include some of the country’s biggest retailers and restaurants—have sold the seafood to American consumers.
Yusril’s story and that of nearly two dozen other survivors of abuse reveal how the $85 billion global fishing industry profits from the labor of people forced to work for little or no pay, often under the threat of violence. Although many seafood companies and retailers in the U.S. claim not to do business with suppliers who exploit their workers, the truth is far murkier. (see the link for the rest of Yusril's story)
The Treasury Department has imposed sanctions on Japan’s biggest yakuza group, an organized-crime syndicate that operates with relative impunity there and whose far-ranging criminal activity has become a significant concern in Washington.
In an announcement on Thursday, the department said it would freeze the American-based assets of the group, the Yamaguchi-gumi, and two of its leaders. It will also bar any transactions between Americans and members of the penalized crime syndicate. Yakuza have been tied todrug trafficking and other crimes in the United States, with particular prominence in Hawaii and California. The Treasury did not elaborate on the dollar value of United States-based accounts that might be frozen under the new sanctions.
In a statement, the Treasury said the group made “billions of dollars” every year around the world. Its criminal activity includes prostitution, money laundering, fraud and trafficking in humans, weapons and drugs.
The action “casts a spotlight on key members of criminal organizations that have engaged in a wide range of serious crimes,” David S. Cohen, under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement.
“We will continue to work with our international partners to target those who deal in violence, narcotics, money laundering and the exploitation of women and children,” Mr. Cohen said.
The Treasury is using sanctions authority created by a 2011 executive order. In the order, President Obama said he had determined that criminal organizations — including the yakuza, the Camorra crime syndicate in Italy and Mexico’s Zetas drug cartel — “constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States.”
Yamaguchi-gumi; its reputed “godfather,” Kenichi Shinoda; and its “deputy godfather,” Kiyoshi Takayama, are the first to be penalized under the order.
The Treasury also announced sanctions against a major crime syndicate called the Brothers’ Circle, along with several of its top members. The Brothers’ Circle, formerly known as the Family of Eleven or the Twenty, is a multiethnic umbrella organization for criminal groups operating across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
The yakuza gangs, which boast about 80,000 members, have deep historical roots in Japan and have operated for more than a century. They recently have been tied to a wide range of businesses, including the nuclear industry and Olympus, the Japanese camera manufacturer mired in a major accounting scandal.
According to a 2009 report by Japan’s National Police Agency, the Yamaguchi-gumi had 19,000 members and 17,400 associates, making it the biggest yakuza group. Recently, Japanese authorities have been cracking down on the yakuza, with citizens becomingincreasingly intolerant of the criminal underworld. But local authorities have struggled to scrub the groups from industries where they hold considerable influence, like construction.
In “As Other Crimes Recede, Street Prostitution Keeps Its Wily Hold” (news article, Feb. 13), you report that New York City’s police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, is directing law enforcement to arrest those who buy prostituted human beings for sexual exploitation.
Commissioner Kelly, by adopting this human-rights, women’s-rights-based approach, joins the growing ranks of leaders in law enforcement who have made ending sex trafficking their priority.
For too long, prostitution laws have been enforced in a gender-discriminatory manner. Those being sold and arrested are overwhelmingly women and girls. Those who buy the prostituted, or sell them, are overwhelmingly male, and face far fewer, if any, legal consequences for their actions.
If we are to stand a chance at ending sex trafficking, we must deepen our understanding of the end point of sex trafficking, which is prostitution. Those of us who reject the notion that prostitution is sex work (when did human sexuality become work anyway?) and see it as an end result of some of the worst social conditions possible (sexual abuse in childhood, poverty, gender inequality, racism) must fashion remedies that address those conditions.
Rather than make social injustice more tolerable, we must work to end it — in our lifetime and forever.
NORMA RAMOS Executive Director, Coalition Against Trafficking in Women New York, Feb. 14, 2012
The trial for a southwest Missouri man accused of keeping a woman as a sex slave has been delayed by seven months. The Lebanon Daily Record reports that the trial for Ed Bagley Senior and his wife, Marilyn, had been scheduled to begin February 13th. But U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Larsen has ordered the trial to be rescheduled to September 17th. Prosecutors allege the couple groomed the woman to be a sex slave after she moved into their trailer in Lebanon while she was a teenager. The woman went to authorities only after going into cardiac arrest following a torture session.
13 things I learned about child trafficking from an undercover operation
Wednesday, January 11, is National Human Trafficking Awareness Day.
In honor of this day (which I hope we soon don't have to commemorate), I want to tell you about my recent experience as part of an undercover operation in a large US city.
Our focus was Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking (DMST). These are minors (under 18) and US citizens.
It was an eye-opening, two-day operation. Here's what I learned, in part from Giselle Rodriguez, state outreach coordinator for the Florida Coalition Against Human Trafficking, who trained us, and in part from my own experiences on the street:
1. We were not in the "bad" part of town but in a area popular with tourists and families.
2. We worked with undercover investigators who regularly monitor DMST happening throughout the city.
3. We saw at least one minor being trafficked, right in the open. We knew there were many more we couldn't see.
4. We talked to hotel owners about DMST and watched their varying reactions. Some said they'd seen girls being trafficked and reported it to the police. Others denied ever seeing anything--but their body language and quick, furtive glances told us otherwise.
5. Girls are controlled by a network of pimps, handlers, and others who are watching her at any given moment from hidden locations. (This is why we were told NOT to try to rescue girls we saw but to get as much information as possible and report to the investigators at our control center.)
6. We must see these girls as victims. They are doing what they do because of force, fraud, and coercion--not because they've made a lifestyle choice.
7. 2,500 children go missing every day--in the US alone. That's 1.6 million a year. Not all of them are trafficked--but they are all at-risk for trafficking.
8. Within 48 hours of running away, a teenager will be approached by traffickers. Most runaways don't bring cash, lunch, or other necessities, so they are easy pickings for traffickers who offer all that and more.
9. Today the average age of a trafficked person is 12 years old. That's the average age, so many are much younger. Traffickers are going after younger and younger children because they are easier to manipulate.
10. One of the common recruiting locations that trafficking recruiters frequent are the halls outside juvenile justice courtrooms.
11. Trafficked children don't call their controllers "pimps" but rather "Daddy" or "Boyfriend." And that's how they really see them. Traffickers work to create a feeling of family because who isn't looking for a family to belong to? Children will ignore the abuse, violence, and control because trauma bonding is so strong. In fact, if you try to rescue a victim of DMST, she will fight youbecause you have just ruined what she sees as a perfect world.
12. Victims of DMST are trained to lie for their pimps, to take the fall for their "knight in shining armor," and to distrust everyone else (that would be you and me).
13. Once a child is trafficked, her average life expectancy is 7 years.
It is very difficult to rescue a trafficked child--not to mention help them heal. That's why our goal at The Born2Fly Project is to reach kids before the traffickers do. Our goal is to cut off the supply line of kids by educating them ahead of time about the lies that traffickers tell.
My other goal is that some January in the future we will not need a Human Trafficking Awareness Day. My goal is that one day the world will be free of child slavery.
Police arrested Tony Marcel Hammond, 23, after he allegedly had sex with a child in exchange for prescription pain killers Oxycodone and Percocet for her mother. The victim's mother, Debra Annmarie Blackmon, 25, reportedly made the arrangements and her daughter agreed to have sex with Hammond in December, according to the police report. … The report goes on to say Hammond gave the young girl marijuana to "help [the victim] complete the sex act." Afterwards, Hammond provided the drugs to her mother. Hammond has been charged with sex trafficking charges and procuring a person under 18 years old for prostitution. … Blackmon has been charged with sex trafficking of a minor by legal guardian and child neglect causing great bodily harm.
