A Notorious New York Gang Found A Lucrative Source Of Income: Junior High School Girls.
A routine domestic violence complaint uncovered a human trafficking ring organized by several Bloods gang members. Young girls as young as 15 were forced to sell their bodies and were required to earn $500.00 a day. The gang members used adult internet sites such as Craig’slist.com to advertise and used the internet to arrange dates.
Craig’s List offered a charitable donation to Advocates for Human Rights: $25K
Advocates for Human Rights refusing the donation: AWESOME!!!
Bravo, Advocates for Human Rights, Bravo!
http://www.Minnpost.com/stories/2010/05/0517923
Modern slavery is happening right now around the world. Millions of people are living in bondage. They labor in fields and factories under threat of violence if they try to escape. They work in homes for families that keep them virtually imprisoned. They are forced to work as prostitutes or to beg in the streets. Women, men and children of all ages are often held far from home with no money, no connections and no way to ask for help. They discover too late that they’ve entered a trap of forced labor, sexual exploitation and brutal violence. The United Nations estimates that at least 12 million people worldwide are victims of trafficking. Because they often live and work out of sight, that number is almost certainly too low. More than half of all victims of forced labor are women and girls, compelled into servitude as domestics or sweatshop workers or forced into prostitution. They face not only the loss of their freedom but also sexual assaults and physical abuses.
Human trafficking flourishes in the shadows and demands attention, commitment and passion from all of us. We are determined to build on our past success and advance progress in the weeks, months and years ahead. Together, we must hold a light to every corner of the globe and help build a world in which no one is enslaved.
- exerpt from an article from secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
The 2009 Trafficking In Persons report came out this week. Click here for a copy of it. It shares in length what is happening globally in the area of human trafficking. How are we doing as a nation to combat human trafficking?
This last week I felt challenged to start a blog when I saw, in a store window, an advertisement for a chocolate bar. The ad said when you bought the chocolate bar you would be helping save endangered species. It was ironic to me because many people are unaware of where that chocolate may have come from. And who may have slaved over it. Most of the chocolate we consume (about 74%) comes from the Ivory Coast in Africa. The hands that roast the cocoa beans are not free – they are slaves. Some have been deceived into working the cocoa fields and they never see a dime for their labor! And some of those slaves are children.
We buy this chocolate when we go to the store or when we go to Starbucks. It’s everywhere! What can you do to help save the humans from the cocoa fields?
