Youth join campaign vs human trafficking
Date: Thursday, April 14 @ 11:29:22 EDT
Topic: Human Trafficking


Yong B. Chavez,
Apr 13, 2005

LOS ANGELES — Different organizations advocating against human trafficking recently came out with separate yet strong statements highlighting the urgent need for action.

“Personally, the presence of human trafficking is still very shocking to me. Here we are believing that we live in a civilized country, and yet in L.A. alone, slavery exists,” Ingo Lehmann, Los Angeles deputy director of Youth for Human Rights International, or YHRI, said.

The existence of human trafficking is extensive, added Lehmann. “Even the clothes we wear today could have been made by trafficked individuals,” he said.

YHRI networks with young people worldwide on the human trafficking issue, “because many of the victims are minors,” he said.

A month ago, his group mounted an international video conference on human trafficking in the city where one of its spokesperson, “Grounded for Life” TV actress Lynsey Bartilson called on the world’s youth to increase its activism and fight together to eradicate this modern-day slave trade.

At the event, the Philippines was mentioned as one of the countries where victims, who are trafficked as sex slaves or domestic and sweatshop servants, come from.

“As easy as it is to believe that sex trafficking is a distant phenomenon occurring in remote areas such as Thailand and the Philippines, sex trafficking occurs within major cities across the U.S. and even in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles has become a targeted destination for sex traffickers because of the location of LAX, our proximity to the harbor, and our extensive immigrant population,” said another spokesperson, Lilly Chau, who presented the research results of several UCLA students.

Their report revealed that the Philippines “is primarily a source and transit country for trafficking in persons for the purposes of sexual exploitation and forced labor.”

Filipinas, who are lured by fraudulent promises of employment abroad, are trafficked across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America. The Philippine government passed a law in 2003 that makes human trafficking illegal. And yet, the problem persists, not just for Filipinos, but for many citizens of poor countries.

The U.S. State Department estimates that 14,000 to 17,500 women and children are trafficked into forced labor and prostitution into Los Angeles each year. Most of the victims come from Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe.

Last year, authorities raided a Los Angeles brothel and discovered 12 undocumented Mexican women and girls forced into prostitution to pay off trafficking fees.

As a result, Tony Cardenas, the city’s 6th district councilman, formed a task force and coordinated a joint effort with the Commission on the Status of Women, the local police, state and federal authorities, and various advocacy groups to come up with the city’s report on human trafficking.

The report, released in March, mentioned the lack of awareness in the community and among law enforcement officials about the extent of human trafficking and how victims are identified. It also discussed the ominous presence of organized sex trafficking rings, which distribute videotapes of victims being sexually abused within the porn industry and on the Internet.

Monster of Many Faces

“We’ve taken on a monster of many faces. Forced labor, forced prostitution, mail order brides and child pornography are all forms of this disgusting billion-dollar trade,” Cardenas said in a press statement.

Cardenas recently launched a 24-hour human trafficking hotline, 1-888-373-7888, and a public awareness campaign as a response to the findings.

Imelda Buncab, national program director of the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, or Cast, said that calling police authorities as soon as possible is a crucial step for human trafficking victims. Cast is the only organization in the U.S. dedicated to serving trafficked persons.

“We have several Filipino clients who are in domestic servitude cases,” she said. She added that some of them were recruited from the Philippines who found out upon arriving in the U.S. that there’s really no job, and if there were, they were not the kind of jobs that were promised to them. They get stuck in the U.S. and are left to fend for themselves, she said.

“They sold properties and borrowed a lot of money back home in order to get here,” she said.

In most trafficking cases, Buncab said that recruiters belong to the same ethnic background, which accounts for the amount of trust that would-be victims extend toward the criminals.

Meanwhile, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement-led international initiative called Operation Predator recently reported that more than 700 out of 5,000 child sex offense arrests were made in the Los Angeles area.

Operation Predator targets human traffickers, international sex tourists, Internet pornographers, and foreign national predators. Through their efforts, an 87-year-old man who was traveling to the Philippines intending to have sex with young girls was arrested.

The U.S. State Department released early this year an interim assessment on its Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000: Trafficking in Persons Report, which mentioned that the Philippine government “has made increased but uneven progress in implementing strategies to combat trafficking in persons.”

The report also said that the Arroyo government has assigned four state prosecutors to work on trafficking-related cases. Origionally published http://www.philippinenews.com/news/view_article.html?%20%20article_id=1411c6ee67ed7e8eff71fb1f9f436a2b





This article comes from genderberg.com
http://genderberg.com/phpNuke

The URL for this story is:
http://genderberg.com/phpNuke/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=115