ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 24 — The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) today announced that it has just received its 475,000th report to its CyberTipline. These leads and tips have led to the arrest and successful prosecution of thousands of offenders.
An estimated 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 10 boys will be sexually victimized in some way before they reach the age of 18. The CyberTipline provides a vital reporting mechanism to get leads into the hands of law enforcement.
CyberTipline reports are received in seven categories. However, more than 89 percent of the reports received were regarding child pornography. In recent years, NCMEC has observed a consistent growth in child pornography, which is attributed to its commercial viability as well as the popularity of peer-to- peer networking sites, and widespread use of new technology such as digital cameras and videos.
The statistics surrounding child pornography are alarming. An estimated 58% of children used in child pornography today are prepubescent and 6% are infants. NCMEC is seeing an alarming trend in which victims are becoming younger and younger, and images are much more violent. Read the rest of this entry »
By Jennifer Squires
From MediaNews
Article dated: 04/20/2007
A Santa Cruz man will serve more than four years in prison for sexually abusing a 14-year-old boy while working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica.
A U.S. District Court judge handed down the sentence to 39-year-old Timothy Ronald Obert on Monday.
Obert is one of the first people convicted under a four-year-old federal law that seeks to crack down on the child-sex tourism industry.
Obert, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica from September 2001 to July 2003, was arrested at his Santa Cruz home and indicted in June 2004. As part of a plea deal, Obert admitted in February 2006 to one count of having `illicit sexual contact` with the boy while he was in the country as a Peace Corps volunteer working with PANI, the country’s child welfare agency.
The indictment alleged Obert performed oral sex on the boy and provided him with money, drugs and alcohol. He faced up to 15 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a requirement he register as a sex offender. Read the rest of this entry »
TRADING WOMEN: Human Trafficking and the Global Sex Trade
Filmed in Burma, China, Laos, and Thailand, this is the first film to follow the trade in women in all its complexity and to consider the impact of this ‘far away’ problem on the global community.
Narrated by Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie, Trading Women follows the trade of women in all its complexity, entering the worlds of brothel owners, trafficked girls, voluntary sex-workers, corrupt police and anxious politicians.
The film also explores the international community’s response to the issue. Trading Women is the first film to demonstrate to viewers the relationship of the trade in drugs to the trade of women. The film dispels common beliefs about the sex trade, such as: “The problem is the parents - it’s part of their culture to sell their daughters;” “The sex trade exists because of Western sex tours;” and “They sell their girls for TV’s.”
Scarlett is a highly successful madam with 30 years experience in the sex trade business; Simone is a high-class sex worker who services wealthy clients in five Western Canadian cities; and Jennifer is a former drug addicted prostitute who now works tirelessly to offer support to sex trade workers on the streets. These women have had different experiences in the sex trade business, but they’re united by one concern-the safety of women in their stigmatized industry.
Jennifer exposes the ugly side of Vancouver’s streets, where Canada’s current laws have led to the increasing marginalization of street walkers and have made the women at the front lines of the notorious Downtown Eastside particularly vulnerable. It’s a danger that made international headlines last year with the arrest of Robert Willie Pickton, charged with the murder of 26 women, many of them Vancouver sex trade workers.
On the other side are high-priced sex workers like Simone, who are not at such risk. Their expensive services are advertised in the yellow pages as escort agencies, and are taxed and operated under tacit approval of the police.
“The sex trade is a valid career option today if managed properly,” says Scarlett, who now speaks publicly about her work as a madam and her belief that prostitution should be legalized.
A Safer Sex Trade explores this double standard at work by putting faces to the women who represent both perspectives: life in the high rise and on the street.
A Safer Sex Trade was produced and directed by Carolyn Allain and co-written with David Ray. The documentary is produced by Cheap and Dirty Productions Inc., in association with CBC Newsworld.
SAN FRANCISCO- A federal judge sentenced a man to more than five years in prison after he admitted paying for sex with underage girls in Cambodia.
Michael John Koklich, 49, was arrested by local police in Phnom Penh on Feb. 17, 2006 after a non-governmental organization, Action Pour Les Enfants, reported that Koklich had been spotted with several young Cambodian girls.
He was deported a month later and is the latest in a series of Americans arrested in Cambodia on suspicion of sexually abusing children to be sent back to the United States under the Protect Act, which allows the U.S. to handle Americans accused of abusing children in foreign countries.
Koklich pleaded guilty Tuesday to traveling to Cambodia to have sex with children.
U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker also ordered Koklich to pay restitution to two minor female victims totaling $10,000.
Koklich spent as many as nine months a year living in Cambodia. The rest of the time he spent living a recreational vehicle in the Bay Area.
The following is a discussion about the trafficking of Vietnamese children into Cambodia from an episode of “Diễn Đàn Khoa Học” produced by the Vietnamese channel, Saigon Broadcasting Television Network.
For those with access to CBC Newsworld, “Selling Sex in Heaven“, a documentary about the sex industry in the Philippines, will be shown on Tuesday April 10, 2007 at 10pm ET/PT. Below is an excerpt about the documentary from the CBC’s website.
Mila works at Heaven, a little bar located in “blowjob alley”, a notorious magnet for sex tourists in the Philippines. Like many young women forced into prostitution, Mila hopes that she’ll be rescued from Heaven and taken to America for a better life. Narrated by actor Kiefer Sutherland, Selling Sex in Heaven is a heartbreaking documentary that examines the sex trade industry in the Philippines and how this nasty but lucrative business traps many young women.
Selling Sex in Heaven visits the social hygiene clinic where hundreds of young women line up daily for health checks. Following these visits, the women are issued passes certifying their good health. They wear badges around their necks or on their bikinis while dancing for Western men. In a more sobering scene, the film captures a dramatic rescue of 17 young girls (some as young as 10 years old) from a local brothel.
Told through the eyes of two female Canadian students and a male university professor from Nova Scotia now living in the Philippines, Selling Sex in Heaven captures two years of Mila’s life and the people who befriend her. Witness the complexity of prostitution and the conflicting attitudes of people affected by this demeaning industry, including prostitutes, community workers and even clients.
Selling Sex in Heaven was produced and directed by Meredith Ralston of Ralston Productions (Halifax).
HA NOI — More and more Vietnamese women and children are being sold into slavery by human traffickers, said Deputy Prime Minister Truong Vinh Trong yesterday at a national workshop in Ha Noi.
Nearly 6,000 Vietnamese women and children have been sold as cheap labour or prostitutes in foreign countries, according to reports released by the Ministry of Public Security.
Another 8,000 are suspected to have been smuggled out of the country illegally by traffickers.
Deputy Minister of Public Security Le The Tiem said the number of human smugglers that were caught increased by 72 per cent in 2006 when compared to statistics from 2005. Read the rest of this entry »
The Cambodian government has launched the country’s first national task force to combat human trafficking.
Thousands of people are trafficked in or through the south-east Asian nation every year.
The new task force will bring together government ministries, law enforcement groups and international agencies.
Cambodia has hundreds of different anti-trafficking organisations, and reducing duplication of effort will be one of the task force’s main goals.
Clearer picture
Anti-trafficking is a fashionable cause, and donors have poured untold millions of dollars into efforts to help victims and punish traffickers.
But in Cambodia at least, that eagerness to help has also been the cause of consternation.
There are so many organisations operating here that it can be difficult to measure the success of anti-trafficking efforts, and many of them are competing for donor funding, muddying the waters still further.
The new task force hopes to co-ordinate efforts and get a clearer picture of what is actually going on. Read the rest of this entry »
Scarlett is a highly successful madam with 30 years experience in the sex trade business; Simone is a high-class sex worker who services wealthy clients in five Western Canadian cities; and Jennifer is a former drug addicted prostitute who now works tirelessly to offer support to sex trade workers on the streets. These women have had different experiences in the sex trade business, but they’re united by one concern-the safety of women in their stigmatized industry.
On the other side are high-priced sex workers like Simone, who are not at such risk. Their expensive services are advertised in the yellow pages as escort agencies, and are taxed and operated under tacit approval of the police.
Michael John Koklich, 49, was arrested by local police in Phnom Penh on Feb. 17, 2006 after a non-governmental organization, Action Pour Les Enfants, reported that Koklich had been spotted with several young Cambodian girls.
Mila works at Heaven, a little bar located in “blowjob alley”, a notorious magnet for sex tourists in the Philippines. Like many young women forced into prostitution, Mila hopes that she’ll be rescued from Heaven and taken to America for a better life. Narrated by actor Kiefer Sutherland, Selling Sex in Heaven is a heartbreaking documentary that examines the sex trade industry in the Philippines and how this nasty but lucrative business traps many young women.
Clearer picture
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