ALBANY, N.Y. — Sex trafficking victims gathered in Albany on Tuesday to share their stories and urge lawmakers to pass stronger criminal penalties for forcing someone into sexual servitude.
Despite widespread support, the measure failed last year after it was included in legislation that also contained a controversial abortion provision. This year, it's been introduced as a stand-alone bill.
The women who spoke at Tuesday's event near the Statehouse said lawmakers shouldn't delay action on human trafficking because of unrelated debates about abortion policy.
One 18-year-old New York City woman related how she was kidnapped at age nine, sold into sexual slavery and forced to sleep in a locked closet. She says the bill would crack down on trafficking while making it easier for victims to get help.
"Every minute that passes there is a child or a teen who is being sexually trafficked," the woman said. "It is happening right here in New York."
The Associated Press does not identify the victims of sex crimes.
Last year, the bill foundered after it was included in a multi-faceted bill that also contained a measure that would have matched New York abortion law with the rights spelled out in the Roe v. Wade decision. The Senate objected to that piece of the legislation, but supporters of the abortion language in the Assembly refused to split up the bill.
On Tuesday, Andrea Miller, president of the group NARAL Pro-Choice New York, said the human trafficking and abortion measures — along with several other components from the failed bill — should remain linked.
"We shouldn't be forced to choose which of our rights will be protected," she said in a statement.
Assemblywoman Amy Paulin is the bill's sponsor in the Assembly. The Scarsdale Democrat said she's optimistic that tougher penalties for trafficking will pass this year as a stand-alone bill.
ROME — A boat packed with hundreds of migrants trying to reach Europe sank in the Mediterranean Sea about 45 miles off the Libyan coast on Monday. At least 14 people died, but more than 200 were rescued in an operation led by the Italian Navy.
Officials would not estimate the number of people who were still missing because it was unclear how many people had been aboard the vessel. The nationality of the migrants was not immediately made public.
Italian officials said that military and merchant ships searching the waters where the vessel went down had found 14 bodies, though “the number was not definitive.”
The rescue operation was conducted under an Italian military and humanitarian program called Mare Nostrum, Latin for “our sea,” the Roman name for the Mediterranean. The program is meant to control the flow of migrants who try to enter Europe by boat, and to assist vessels in distress. It has been monitoring the southern Mediterranean since last October, after a boat sank off the small Italian island of Lampedusa and 350 migrants died.
The Mare Nostrum program has come under political attack in recent weeks because of a surge in migrants reaching Italy, putting a severe strain on the government’s resources for receiving them. Critics said that about 9 million euros ($12.4 million) a month was too costly and not effective enough: as of Monday, 36,627 migrants had landed along Italy’s southern coast in 2014, according to Interior Ministry statistics. Most came from Africa or the Middle East.
Italy has been calling on the European Union to do more to help the country deal with the inflow, and Angelino Alfano, the interior minister, added his voice on Monday. “Europe isn’t helping us,” he said, according to ANSA, the Italian news agency. “While Italy was saving survivors of the shipwreck,” he added, Europe “must take care of the living.”
Roberta Pinotti, the defense minister, told Parliament last week that since it began last October, Mare Nostrum had saved the lives of 27,790 migrants, including more than 3,000 children, and had arrested 207 people for human trafficking. “The numbers are shocking,” Ms. Pinotti told lawmakers, “but let’s think of how tragic the count of the loss of human lives could have been.”
Flavio Di Giacomo, the Italian spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, said that “Mare Nostrum has saved many lives, but it’s clear that these trips are dangerous, so shipwrecks are not possible to avoid.”
Nine out of 10 refugees who enter Italy by sea pass through Libya, a former Italian colony and the closest part of North Africa to Italian territory, Ms. Pinotti said. More than two-thirds of them could qualify for political refugee status.
The flood of migrants is a major issue in Italy, one that the populist Northern League has made a cornerstone of its campaign in the European Parliament elections later this month. One candidate created a video in which migrants from various countries are seen warning their compatriots that Italy is not the Promised Land and that the traffickers who would smuggle them across the sea by boat “are assassins and fraudsters.”
Correction: May 13, 2014
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the defense minister of Italy. The minister, Roberta Pinotti, is a woman.
Last weekend, 11 Nigerian girls were kidnapped in two remote villages in northeastern Nigeria, adding to the nearly 300 girls who are currently missing in that part of the country.
Just last month, 230 Nigerian Christian school girls were kidnapped by the Islamist group, Boko Haram, which means “Western education is forbidden.” This group is also responsible for many other recent kidnappings, church bombings and other terrorist attacks throughout the country. Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan’s attempt to retrieve the girls has been entirely unsuccessful and has undermined his standing with the people.
According to Manuel Fontaine — UNICEF regional director for west and central Africa — Boko Haram has been terrorizing villages in northeastern Nigeria for years, while nothing has been done to stop them. Throughout last week, large groups of Nigerian protesters and other marchers worldwide have urged the government to do more to rescue the kidnapped children.
The leader of the Islamist terrorist group behind the kidnapping — Abubakar Shekau — has taken responsibility. He recently released a video in which he promised to sell the girls as slaves in the “marketplace.” Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters: “We warn the perpetrators that there is an absolute prohibition against slavery and sexual slavery in international law.”
Although I applaud the words of Mrs. Pillay, I’m angered over the lack of action taken against Mr. Shekau by the Nigerian government and the United States. More must be done to put an end to Mr. Shekau’s terrorist attacks and to rescue these innocent Christian schoolgirls.
David Curry, president of Open Doors USA, an international Christian organization that advocates for persecuted Christians around the globe, shares the same sentiment. He told Fox News: “Instability is growing because of the failure of western governments, including the U.S. government, to forcefully identify the clear and present danger Boko Haram is to a peaceful Nigeria.”
Thankfully, the Senate passed a bipartisan resolution on Tuesday calling for the safe return of the kidnapped Nigerian girls. Furthermore, President Obama has assured the Nigerian people that the U.S. is going “to do everything we can to recover these young ladies.”
At the White House press conference Tuesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters that the U.S. is sending a team of military and law enforcement personnel skilled in intelligence, investigations, hostage negotiating, information sharing and victim assistance to aid in the rescue attempt.
But time is running out to save these girls, who may soon become human trafficking victims if the rescue operation proves unsuccessful.
Human trafficking continues to be a major issue not only in Africa, but in the rest of the world as well. According to UNICEF estimates, more than 1.2 million children worldwide become human trafficking victims every year. Abducted from their families and communities, millions of children are sold as sex slaves in foreign countries as human trafficking operation networks include “immigration, customs, police, army and even foreign embassies.” Often, these children contract various diseases, such as AIDS, and go without food for days. Many die or are killed at a very young age.
Human trafficking isn’t limited to nations outside the U.S. — it happens right here in America. Human trafficking has been uncovered in multiple venues including “residential brothels, hostess clubs, online escort services, fake massage businesses, strip clubs, and street prostitution” all across the country. In fact, every year the Super Bowl becomes the single largest occurrence of human trafficking in the U.S.
The abomination that is human trafficking must end. Terrorist groups, like Boko Haram in Nigeria, must be brought to justice. The Nigerian government and the U.S. have clearly not done enough to curtail the amount of kidnappings and human trafficking conducted in Nigeria or in America.
The White House’s decision to aid the Nigerian government in its rescue operation is an encouraging first step to fight human trafficking. Let’s pray we’re not too late.
• Armstrong Williams is sole owner/manager of Howard Stirk Holdings and executive editor of American Current See Online Magazine.
When the leader of the Boko Haram extremist group threatened to sellhundreds of kidnapped Nigerian girls “in the market” in a rambling online video posted this week, he was not necessarily making an irrational boast.
Doing just that is entirely possible in parts of Nigeria and elsewhere in the developing world, human rights investigators and researchers of child trafficking, sexual slavery and forced marriage said. However egregious it may sound, in some areas the buying and selling of women and children, particularly young girls, has long been an underlying problem.
“It is very well documented,” said Benjamin N. Lawrance, a scholar at the Rochester Institute of Technology who has spent much of his academic career studying and writing about human trafficking. In Africa in particular, he said Tuesday in a telephone interview, “there has never been a period of time where child slavery didn’t take place.”
Professor Lawrance said that if he were to visit any number of West African countries, for example, “I would have no difficulty, within a matter of hours, in finding a place to procure children.”
While the imagery of a slave market conveyed by the Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, may have been aimed partly at attracting attention, Professor Lawrance said, “it is not a stretch of the truth to imagine where you could buy children, sitting and waiting to be sold.”
Child trafficking is considered such an insidious problem that the United Nations Human Rights Council has assigned special rapporteurs to investigate it for nearly 25 years.
The last rapporteur, Dr. Najat Maalla M’jid, a Moroccan pediatrician who specializes in the protection of vulnerable children, said in a report to the council in March that they were more at risk than ever to sexual slavery. “Millions of girls and boys worldwide are victims of sexual exploitation, even though this issue in recent years has gained increased visibility,” she said.
In a report she issued in December, Dr. Maalla M’jid said that cases of child trafficking represented 27 percent of all detected human trafficking in 2007-10, up from 20 percent in 2003-6, according to statistics from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. In recent years, the increase has been greater for girls. In Africa and the Middle East, the report said, more than two-thirds of the detected victims of trafficking were children, and globally, trafficking for sexual exploitation represented 58 percent of the total of detected cases.
Rights advocates say many cases go undetected. Susan Bissell, the chief of child protection at Unicef, said Wednesday in a phone interview that there were 1.2 million known cases a year of child trafficking globally, “and that’s a gross underestimate, because of situations in this context; it’s totally clandestine.”
Ms. Bissell also said that for every 800 victims, one person is convicted, a powerful indicator of why traffickers often operate with impunity. Groups like Boko Haram, she said, “are functioning in a part of the country where there just doesn’t seem to be any rules.”
Rights groups have conducted numerous studies documenting the trafficking of girls and women in Africa, which is often done through deceptive means. In a 2010 report, for example, Human Rights Watch found networks in Ivory Coast and Nigeria that systematically trafficked in Nigerian women who had thought they were being recruited as apprentice hairdressers or tailors. The report said that many were minors, and that victims “said repeatedly that ‘bad things’ would happen to them or their families if they escaped, but were too afraid to provide further details regarding the precise threats or the person who would hurt them.”
Free the Slaves, a Washington-based advocacy group, documented systematic forced marriage in the Democratic Republic of Congo in a report issued last June, which broke the practice down to four classifications: “marriage by rape, marriage by sale, marriage by kidnapping and child marriage.”
Ms. Bissell said part of the enforcement problem lay in many victims’ lack of official identities — 230 million children do not have birth certificates, which makes them virtually impossible to trace. “This is 2014, and we have the technological capacity and we’re interconnected, and yet we can’t seem to protect our children,” she said.
