Coalition Launches Campaign for National Human Trafficking Awareness Day

by Amanda Kloer

Each year on January 11th, the U.S. celebrates National Human Trafficking Awareness Day. But this year, one coalition of anti-trafficking organizations is making today about more than just awareness. They’re launching a national initiative to make anti-trafficking efforts a priority and protect critical funding to fight trafficking.

How One Woman is Fighting Trafficking in NYC … and Winning

by Amanda Kloer

What could make a woman with a masters degree from Columbia University spend a year making no salary, living off cottage cheese and apples, and periodically asking herself if she’s insane? For Faith Huckel, it was the determined drive to meet a desperate need in New York City — a shelter for women trafficked into the commercial sex industry. Her story is one of how a woman turned her passion into a fresh start for hundreds of trafficking and abuse survivors.

As a social worker in Philadelphia, Huckel began noticing a pattern among the women whose cases she managed — sexual exploitation. In addition to issues like poverty, incarceration, and HIV, most of the women she worked with had been sexually exploited at some point in their lives. Some were molested as children, others raped as adults, still others pushed into the commercial sex industry by coercion or circumstance. When Huckel moved to New York City, that pattern added a new dimension — the sex trafficking of women from overseas into the U.S.

National Day of Action to End Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking Today

by Amanda Kloer

Today, thousands of advocates from across the country are coming together to take action against child sex trafficking in America. They’re calling their representatives in Congress, signing petitions, and supporting the grassroots campaign to pass national legislation that will provide critical services to American children who have been forced into the commercial sex industry. Will you join them?

In America, at least 100,000 children are forced into prostitution each year. With increased resources and an understanding that child prostitution is child trafficking, thousands of those kids are now being rescued. However, only a handful of shelter beds for those thousands currently exist. That means trafficked children have no place to go for safety, shelter, and therapeutic services. Too often, this lack of resources means law enforcement arrests these young victims  as  juvenile offenders, simply to get them to safety. This lack of resources means crime victims are being imprisoned while their traffickers and predators remain free.

Free2Work Smartphone App Lets Shoppers Fight Slavery

by Amanda Kloer

The Not for Sale Campaign is giving shoppers the chance to fight slavery with their smart phones this holiday season. The Free2Work app give consumers a handy guide to how their favorite brands fare in preventing slavery and other serious abuses in their supply chains. Now you’re just a touchscreen away from making every purchase support freedom and fairness for workers around the world.

DHS Blue Campaign: ICE Efforts to Combat Trafficking in Persons

The Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the largest investigative agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is responsible for enforcing a wide range of crimes related to border security, including conducting domestic and international investigations on human trafficking, child sex tourism, and forced child labor.

29 charged with sex trafficking juveniles

Imagine being stripped of everything you know, transported between states and forced to have sex with strangers. No, this isn’t a nightmare; these are details from a recent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigation. Four girls – some younger than 14 years old – were forced into a life of prostitution by a Somali-run Human Trafficking Organization.

Join the National Day of Action to End Child Sex Trafficking in America

by Amanda Kloer

At least 100,000 American children are forced into prostitution each year, right here in the U.S. You can help make that number zero by uniting your voice with thousands of people from across the country to demand an end to child sex trafficking and pass landmark legislation which will keep traffickers off the streets, punish those who buy sex with kids, and protect victims.

On November 17, the National Coalition to End Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking is organizing a National Day of Action to pass the Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking Deterrence and Victims Support Act. Right now in the U.S., there are only a handful of shelter beds for the thousands of children who are being removed from prostitution each year. This legislation will mean more young domestic sex trafficking survivors will have access to the shelter and restorative care services they need. It will also increase resources for law enforcement to arrest and prosecute the traffickers and predators who victimize our children.

Book Review: Enslaved: The New British Slavery

 Reposted from the blog:” A Passion To Understand”  http://passiontounderstand.blogspot.com

The year 2007 may have marked the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery but the reality is that many people around the world are living in conditions of forced labour or slavery.  In her book Enslaved: The New British Slavery, Rahila Gupta gets in contact with five modern day slaves and convinces them to share their stories. These are heartbreaking and shocking tales that expose the hidden and invisible world of modern day slavery. All of these testimonies were obtained in England so this is not simply a “third world problem” that we can sweep under a rug; it is happening in our neighbourhoods.

Well-Made Campaign Seeks to End Hiring Traps

by Amanda Kloer

Well-Made, a new campaign from Verite, focuses on one of the root causes of labor exploitation and slavery: hiring traps aimed at migrant workers. Hiring traps are a common way for people to end up in human trafficking. But human trafficking can be prevented by tracing supply chains back to hiring traps and exploitative hiring practices.

What is a hiring trap? Basically, it’s a situation where a labor recruiter uses some combination of deception and coercion to lure a worker into an exploitative work situation. Hiring traps and deceptive hiring practices are used by recruiters to lure workers into unfair or exploitative labor. Sometimes the job offers involve outright lies, and sometimes just omission of key details (like substandard living conditions). You can read some examples of hiring traps here.

If hiring traps are the problem, the Verite’s Well-Made Campaign has an answer. The initiative focuses on giving companies and investors the tools to trace supply chains back to the labor recruiters who are often behind hiring traps. Addressing these fair hiring issues at their root can help address many of the labor exploitation issues which show up in product supply chains. Migrant workers and contract workers are particularly vulnerable to labor broker abuses. Companies can solve a number of their labor compliance issues by monitoring the practices used to recruit and place workers in their supply chain.

Another Sex Trafficking Ring Comes Tumbling Down

by Maia Blume

Success! A small but rapidly growing mom-and-pop shop prostitution ring operating out of the Boston area and New York has been busted. Five people (three in Massachusetts and two in New York) were just arrested on multiple charges relating to forced prostitution and trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation.

The group has been operational for over five years, running brothels out of roughly 11 apartments in the greater Boston area. They would post ads on Craigslist and in newspapers in Massachusetts, New York, and California seeking Asian women to move to Boston to work as escorts (in a few instances, the women were in the country illegally). These traffickers were so aggressive in wanting to expand their business and grow their brothels, that they spent over $13,000 in one seven month period placing ads in just one local newspaper in Boston … who knows how much they spent in total! Once here, the women were picked up from a local bus station, distributed amongst the group’s apartments and forced to have sex for money. If they were not complicit, the ring leaders, Hong Wei, known as Ms. Chen, and Jing Liang Chen, known as Mike, would threaten to harm their families.