NEWS
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Children For Sale On Craigslist
Katherine Chon, Executive Director & Co-Founder Polaris Project
I'm sure most of us are familiar with Craigslist, an online Web community where people post job opportunities, items for sale, and find activity partners. Over the past years, Craigslist has grown by leaps and bounds and now has Web sites representing over 300 U.S. cities. Many of us have used Craigslist to find a garage sale or buy a used couch.
However, despite its millions of users and various social benefits, there's a dark side of Craigslist that most users don't see. In the "Erotic" section, human traffickers have found Craigslist to be one of the most efficient, effective (and free) ways to post children and women for sale.
With a bit of research, one can realize just how much of a problem this has become. In one recent case, two Chicago women were charged for selling girls as young as 14 years old on Craigslist. The girls were forced to have sex with 10-12 men per day, and the traffickers made tens of thousands of dollars. A Boston man and his niece were charged with plotting a child trafficking operation with teenagers as young as 13 by selling them on Craigslist to predators from Massachusetts to New York. These cases are just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, law enforcement efforts to fight trafficking nationwide are consistently reporting a spike in online Craigslist ads, and how sex trafficking has "moved online" lately.
In Washington, DC, we see an average of 500 of these such Craigslist ads each new day. Yet, it is important to realize that a significant percentage of these ads on Craigslist do not advertise solely "legal escort services" as Craigslist may like to believe. Instead, a considerable percentage of the ads are a thinly veiled guise for one of the many faces of human trafficking that exists here in the United States. Although Craigslist may convince itself that it has created a beneficial online venue for advertising legal escorts, in effect, what it has done is create a fertile ground for traffickers to further their trade in human misery.
Many of the victims of human trafficking that Polaris Project has served have had their pictures posted on Craigslist. Through serving them, we've learned how the pictures on Craigslist hide the pain behind the smile. Maybe Craigslist should ask itself if the marginal benefits of this form of free advertising for the sex trade are worth the far larger human costs.
The Big Think: Is Modern Slavery a Green Issue?
Popular environmental website TreeHugger.com debates the connections of slavery and environmental issues.
How could we actively engage the environmental community in the fight against slavery? While many environmentalists care about human rights and fair trade issues, they are still seen by many as 'human concerns' - and therefore removed from strictly environmental issues. On the other hand, however, it can be argued that if we are to move towards sustainability, we must recognize ourselves as part of the natural systems we inhabit - and accord each other the same respect that we are advocating for the natural world.
Either way, this is a fairly abstract argument. Digging a little deeper, however, we discovered evidence of what we suspected anyway, that there is a very real, very contemporary link between the abuse of natural resources and the abuse of our fellow humans. Read more from Sami Grover, the Director of Sustainability at The Change, a firm that helps with the media strategy for the Not for Sale Campaign.
Creative Abolitionist: Jail Me, I Ate Slave-Produced Chocolate
A Dutch journalist asked an Amsterdam court on Friday to convict him for eating chocolate, saying by doing so he was benefiting from child slavery on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast.
Teun van de Keuken, 35, is seeking a jail sentence to raise consumer awareness and force the cocoa and chocolate industry to take tougher measures to stamp out child labour.
"If I am found guilty of this crime, any chocolate consumer can be prosecuted after that. I hope that people would stop buying chocolate and thus hurt the sales of big corporations and make them do something about the problem," van de Keuken said.
Ivory Coast, the world's No. 1 cocoa producer which has been racked by instability since a brief 2002 civil war, is the target of allegations by international rights groups that children are working as slaves on its cocoa plantations.
Free To Play: University Track Athlete Runs For Freedom
University of San Francisco track runner Renee Stribling joins other athletes to make a Free to Play Challenge, linking her donations to abolitionist groups with her performance on the field.
Faith and Action: Rev. Alan Jones Interviews David Batstone
The dean of Grace Cathedral, the Rev. Alan Jones, interviewed David Batstone in a public forum at his church in San Francisco on Sunday, February 11th. In this one-hour audio broadcast, they discussed slavery in the church, how thinly veiled ads promoting sex trafficking can appear in reputable newspapers, and practical steps to becoming a modern-day abolitionist.
Students: 'Play it Forward'
Students to ‘play it forward’ Adrian, Michigan-
About 1,400 students in the fifth through eighth grades from both Adrian middle schools and Lenawee Christian School will showcase exercises similar to those used by pro athletes at the Adrian Freedom Festival in May.
“We literally prove to every child they’re an athlete,” said Gary Gray, chief executive officer of the Gray Institute.
Free2Play encourages students to believe they are athletes, commit to healthier lifestyles, respect the abilities of others and use their commitment to improve their own fitness and health to raise money to help other children who... are enslaved, according to an overview of the program.
Local funds raised will be directed to the Toledo Children’s Hospital, local public schools’ homeless education programs and the Not for Sale Campaign... working to help free an estimated 27 million people who are enslaved throughout the world, including an estimated 200,000 people in the United States.
Read more about how Gary Gray and the students of Adrian, Michigan are living out Free2Play in the Daily Telegraph.
Updates: From The Field
I traveled to Belize last week on a fact-finding mission. I discovered a major problematic trend in the country: Parents from poor families are pushing children as young as 12 years old to “date” wealthy older men, between the ages of 40 and 70, in exchange for money and services that cover their basic needs: education, health, clothes, and so on.
The governmental Human Development agency of Belize is trying to tackle this issue, but it struggles to make headway since many adults do not see anything wrong with the practice and it’s not likely that children will come forward to report the abuse.
Other prominent concerns in Belize also emerged. The bars in the south of the country bring every weekend different sex workers from the other side of the border. Additionally, farmers from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador are lured into to country to be forced to work in the agricultural fields of Belize.
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When Mark, Kique and I launched Not for Sale we did not want to get locked into fighting the crimes of injustice alone. We also hoped to build new spaces for justice where forced labor had no place. So late last year we teamed up with eco-agronomist Dirk Andrews to create a for-profit company with a beyond-profit motive, and christened it Earthware Enterprises. We equip and support sustainable agricultural enterprises to increase yields of organic crops, strengthen communities and create new market opportunities. It is a wonderful parallel activity to Not for Sale.
Our first product are greenhouses used to grow organic produce. We produce them in China using recyclable steel and sell them to organic growers in the United States. I went to China last week to ensure that the workers producing our greenhouses are free to work and that every attempt is being made to produce in an environmentally sustainable way.
I was pleased to see firsthand that the workers have safe conditions and are paid a livable pay – though the salaries are still low by western standards, they are paid overtime for extra hours of labor. Our Chinese partner is also moving aggressively toward steep reductions in its carbon emissions, and hopes to be carbon neutral in the next year.
As Earthware Enterprises grows, we aim to bring sustainable organic businesses into communities that presently have neither the expertise nor access to the organic retail market. Economic instability makes people vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.
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January 11th was National Human Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery Awareness Day in the United States, and I took part in an event at Saddleback Church organized as an educational and inspirational gathering to kick their abolitionist group into high gear.
The event was spearheaded by Not for Sale’s director for Southern California, Deb Griffith. Also, Christina Hebets, University of San Francisco junior and Mapping Slavery Project veteran, was on hand to speak about the process of searching for and uncovering human trafficking. I had the privilege of addressing attendees and took the opportunity to call for their collective shock, rage and disgust to be translated not into paralyzing anger but transformative action. Ending the stirring night, Wendy Barnes, a domestic trafficking survivor, who was coerced into prostitution at age 17, shared her harrowing story and shared her on-going healing.
The night proved successful, as people left I couldn’t shake the feeling that the event marked the beginning of something special at Saddleback, and we at Not for Sale are excited to be working with them as it revs up! ====================================
Located in Central America, Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere. Of its five million citizens, over half are under the age of 18, and its large population of children are extremely vulnerable to trafficking for labor and sexual exploitation.
During my time in the coastal city of Bluefields I was struck by the vibrancy of the people. Cristian, a local resident, shared with me his vision to teach English in Nicaragua via the Internet. He expressed his gratitude for the opportunity that learning English has given him, and explained that having an education is pertinent for Nicaraguans to make change to the surrounding poverty and to build a sustainable future. In his vision to provide education, Cristian not only would be offering his students a viable economic future, but he would be fighting the devastating poverty that leaves so many young individuals vulnerable to the vicious grasp of slave traders. Cristian’s vision was a reminder to me of how multifaceted our efforts must be if we are to prevent and abolish human trafficking.