24/03/03

Sex Trafficking

Hi G

... 

Returning to the issue of the 'slave sex' rackets run by the Mafia, it is important to realise that there seems to be a great deal of the customary sex hysteria over this matter - at least in some places.

A recent TV programme that claimed to have uncovered evidence of these heinous rackets fell rather flat when ...

1. A supposed sex slave turned out to be the long-time girlfriend of her so-called pimp. In fact, she simply worked in a brothel to provide money for the pair of them while her boyfriend, her 'pimp', busied himself with trying to find a job.

2. A pair of Ukrainian girls allegedly being sold to any westerner who could come up with £5,000 turned out to be quite prepared to sell themselves further down the line if they could be allowed to stay in the country.

3. Because such prostitution is illegal in many places, it was quite clear in at least some of the raids on the foreign brothels, that the women involved had a powerful vested interest in claiming that they had been coerced into the job - to avoid prosecution - when, in fact, not long earlier they did not appear to be suffering from any coercion at all.

None of this is to say that criminal gangs are not involved in abusing women through the sex trade. They undoubtedly are.

But with so many women wanting desperately to get into the west (and one can also see them offering themselves in western lonely hearts columns) the waters are rather muddied.

As a parallel example, we are often told that heinous criminal gangs are helping to smuggle people out of various countries into the west (e.g. from China) but, in fact, many of these gangs are seen as heroes in their host countries - in much the same way that those who helped to smuggle Jews out of Nazi Germany are seen as heroes.

For many of these people, the west seems to be paved with gold in comparison to where they live. And they often look forward to getting jobs so that they can send money to their loved ones back home. And so they will do a great deal very willingly in order to get into the west.

Having said this, I do not know the real extent of the coercive sex trade. I have never researched it.

But where there is much money to be made out of illegal activities, the most serious of criminals will also be found to be engaged in them.

One imagines that there is a whole range of criminal activity within the area of illegal sex, just as there is a whole range within the illegal drugs trade. There are the serious and dangerous criminals at the top - doing the very worst of things - and there are those who are far less serious, dangerous or terrible at the bottom - the vast majority. 

This is the way that it tends to be!

However, the hysteria that is usually generated these days by those who seek more funding and/or more power tends to exaggerate the problems enormously. And the abuse industry - particular when supported by the feminist lobby - is one of the very worst offenders in this respect.

The usual trick of the abuse industry is to take one truly horrible and extreme example of some type of 'abuse', and then to quote statistics concerning this 'abuse' (the vast majority of which relate to exceedingly trivial manifestations of it) in order to give the impression that all the statistics reflect the extent of the extreme example alone.

AH

05/04/03

Happy Hookers of Eastern Europe 

Phelim McAleer

The Spectator

The truth behind the myth of sex-slave trafficking.

The reports of Eastern European women being forced into prostitution in the West are as numerous as they are horrific. They have worried the government so much that the Home Office has plans for a new scheme to provide ‘safe-houses’ for the victims of sex trafficking. But for many who work with these ‘sex slaves’ the women’s accounts are just that — stories. It is seldom reported, but widely known, that most women volunteer for the trip westward because of the money they can make.

The sex-slave stories are suspiciously similar. The women are usually from some deprived backwater. They have naively answered advertisements for jobs as waitresses or nannies in the West. However, when they arrived to start their new life, their documents were confiscated, they were beaten and raped into submission, and forced to become prostitutes. They then claimed to have been kept as sex slaves, sometimes chained to beds, terrified and servicing as many customers as the brothel owner demanded.

According to the International Office of Migration which rescues and shelters these women, there are an estimated 400,000 enduring this existence. But as anyone who works closely with the prostitutes and who isn’t infected with victimitis knows, the IOM version of events is nonsense.

Take Assistant Chief Constable Andy Felton, a British police officer who has been working in Romania for the past three years. Most of his time has been spent on Project Reflex, a unique Romanian/British venture to stem illegal immigration into the UK. As part of the initiative, Felton has interrogated those deported from the UK. ‘Some are tricked into becoming prostitutes, but the overwhelming majority of girls going to the West understand before they leave that they will be working in prostitution,’ says Felton.

He has found that far from being gullible peasant girls, as portrayed by the IOM, most were seasoned prostitutes before they left. For brothel owners ‘experience is essential’; it makes poor business sense to trick unsuspecting girls into the trade. Those without experience but who still want to go are tried out in the nearest big city to avoid making a dud investment.

So the sad and perhaps unpalatable fact is that most Eastern European women working abroad as prostitutes do so out of choice. This choice may be dictated by appalling poverty and lack of opportunity in their home countries but it is, nonetheless, a choice.

The minimum salary in Romania is $50 a month — even less in Moldova and Ukraine. It is not surprising that many women become sex workers, if only to support their families. But if the punters are all living on tiny wages, the amount left over for prostitutes will also be small. No wonder the temptation to do the same work in the West for $100 a client proves just too tempting.

In the sex-slave myth, the recruiters scour Eastern Europe with smooth talk and big promises. These latter-day big bad wolves lure women with offers of jobs and a bright future. A frightening scenario, indeed. It just isn’t true. ‘There is no huge international prostitute recruiting team travelling around Central and Eastern Europe. There is no fleet of Mercs with blacked-out windows and a madam in the back luring women abroad,’ says Felton.

His investigations have found that almost all the women’s westward journeys were arranged by someone they know. ‘This tends to be a family member, or a local person, or someone who has herself been a prostitute in the West.'

Then there are the traffickers/brothel owners: a particularly well-organised bunch — normally the Albanian mafia — we are told. Again, nice story, nice villain, but just not true. ‘It’s more a case of, I know someone with a bus in Timisoara and somebody else knows somebody in Italy who will meet them. It is a loose alliance of contacts. There is no huge criminal structure with a mafia godfather running it,’ says Felton.

He wishes it were that simple. ‘One of the problems tackling these networks is that they are so loose they can easily fall apart,’ he says.

Accounts of widespread cruelty by brothel owners are easy to believe, but do not stand up to scrutiny. The owners are in a business that thrives on the customer who visits regularly and very often has a ‘relationship’ with his favourite girl. No doubt a small number of men get a kick out of seeing women chained to beds or battered and bruised, but for most it would be a turn-off. That is not to say there are not bad and crooked brothel owners. But the women come West voluntarily, and very quickly learn through word of mouth which establishments to avoid.

Despite seldom being reported, Felton’s findings are not news to his Romanian counterparts. Major Marin Banica used to be Romania’s most senior police officer investigating ‘women trafficking’. ‘Very few go abroad without knowing exactly why they are going,’ he says.

However, the Eastern European prostitute as victim is a powerful image, and ever more influential NGOs are reluctant to let the truth get in the way of their story. Take the case of the Cambodia Seven. In 2001, seven Romanian ‘sex slaves’ were found in Cambodia. Their rescuers, who included the IOM, reported how they had been offered jobs as dancers but were then forced into prostitution. Their plight received international media coverage and was mentioned by Brunson McKinney, the IOM director, at an anti-trafficking conference in Bucharest. He said it was an indication of the growing problem.

Yet, according to Banica, the full story of the Cambodia Seven was not told. Before the Romanian authorities could reach Cambodia to organise bringing the women home, one managed to slip away from her ‘rescuers’. Banica does not know where she ended up, but believes she returned to prostitution. Legitimate job opportunities for Romanian women in Cambodia are limited.

Banica does know what happened to the six who returned. ‘Within weeks three of the women had gone to work in Albania — again as prostitutes,’ he says.

The sex-slave myth also portrays Eastern European women as idiots. Banica asks how hundreds of thousands of women from the same pockets of the country could have been repeatedly tricked. For this to be true, it also means no duped woman has ever come home and, if they have, they have never talked to family and friends about their experiences.

To accept the sex-slave myth, one must also accept that none of the women or their families or friends has ever read a newspaper or watched Romanian television, where the story is given widespread and often sensational coverage. Or maybe they do and that is exacerbating the problem.

A recent Romanian television public-awareness campaign shows faceless men recruiting naive women while salivating over the massive sums of money to be made. The emphasis on the huge amounts of cash available could be all the encouragement that some women need.

Phelim McAleer is the Financial Times correspondent for Romania.

31/03/03

AH receives an unsolicited email.

Hello

During search in the Internet: search engine 'AllTheWeb', with the help of key words: 'forum single marriage'

I have found you and wanted to write very much. You seemed to me an interesting person to know.

Once upon a time there lived a woman Alla with a soul of a romantic and deeply feeling little girl. She was fond of helping people to understand each other. Yes, she was an interpreter, a simultaneous translator - to be more precise. After work she liked going out with her friends(to the theatre, opera, ballet, concerts) or singing in the University chorus or reading at home a book on history or a good novel. She also loved children and had spent a lot of time babysitting. She didn't like arguing however she had her principles i.e. Christians values... and she still believes in true love(not a cupboard one).

That Alla , living in the Wonderland of St.Petersburg, Russia, dreams of a man who would love her. He is not very old in order to see the beauty of the sky and apreciate kindness, honesty ( "is such a lovely word..."), warm-heartedness and tender. And he is not obsessed in finding 90 x 60 x 90 barby girl. All in all he loves life and people.

I would be happy to hear your reply , to know you better. You can find more information about me at my home page: http://alla75.narod.ru

My email: alla75@yandex.ru

Take care,

Alla

You have found me! 

The internet has brought our two lonely hearts together. We need weep no longer. We have found one another. You are the perfect woman for me. And I am the perfect man for you.

I am definitely not too old to see the beauty of the sky and apreciate kindness, honesty ( "is such a lovely word..."), warm-heartedness and tender."

In fact, I see them all the time!

Day and night!

And what kind of foolish man would be "obsessed in finding 90 x 60 x 90 barby girl"?

No Sirree! Not I.

Come hither to me. Let us marry and have babies. And let us engage in lots and lots and lots of warm and fulsome sex. Let us entwine our hungry bodies and become as one with each other. Me in you and you in me.

Together we shall see the beauty of the sky and dance through sunny fields. Together we shall sit on riverbanks and caress each other's hands. Together we shall run and laugh and sing with joy and revel every day in our good fortune. And together we shall celebrate our love for each other with lots and lots and lots of warm and fulsome sex. 

Oh I can't be bothered to go on with this.

But there will be dipsticks among you out there who are dumb enough to fall for this sort of thing. 

Take it from me, I know that you're out there. I read your emails!

'Alla' is probably a Mafia man who has a photograph and who will manage eventually to entice some mindless imbecile into sending him $3000 for an aeroplane ticket.

He probably took one look at this website and thought, Aha, this looks like an excellent place to fish for mindless imbeciles.

And, who knows? He might be right!

So, don't let that mindless imbecile be you!

AH

If any one of you takes up "Alla's" offer and corresponds with her and, as a result, you find yourself spending the rest of your life with the very woman as described in her email, DON'T tell me about it!

Cyber Love If you find yourself on the brink of a steamy cyber-relationship with a woman who looks like a model, talks only about herself and is strangely secretive about her job there are only two explanations.

February 2006

The "Teen Sex Slave" Scams

Debbie Nathan

CounterPunch

"Tonight our cameras take you into a dark world you've never seen," intoned John Quinones darkly on last week's edition of ABC Primetime. "American girls being snatched right off Main Street USA. And they could be your very own daughters." Shocking! The program went on to tell about two Arizona teens ñ both white and girl-next-door cute, who purportedly were minding their own business before being snatched from home and coerced into prostitution. Or "trafficking," as Primetime put it. That was the show's point: We already know that impoverished immigrants from the Eastern Europe and Mexico are enslaved here, but now we've got a new problem, the trafficking of our own, middle-class girls. Shocking! The show was full of dire warnings by government officials. Not surprising, since the Bush Administration's mission to find foreign "sex trafficking" victims has gone belly up since it began in 2001. Almost no victims have been located, but the feds want to keep their law and rhetoric afloat and broaden it to other areas, including the culture wars. For ballast, they're trolling for a domestic demographic, warning that kids and prostitution is a new "trafficking" problem.

But the claim is specious. To make it, you have to play with language and omit facts ñ or bend them so far that they break. That's what Primetime did, Thursday, February 9, with two teens, one pseudonymed "Debbie," and the other called by her real name, Miya.

Miya, according to ABC, was working in an Arizona mall when she was approached by a couple who asked if she'd like to come with them to California and be a model. She agreed, and before she knew it, she was being forcibly pimped through an Internet escort service and terrorized into sex slavery. One morning she managed to escape from the seedy hotel she was imprisoned in. Authorities were notified. Now one of her captors is in jail awaiting trial.

That's the Primetime version, but the "sex slave" part is a hoax. Police in Mesa, Arizona and Union City, California, say that Miya -- who was 19 and thus legally an adult -- willingly went to California and willingly had sex, both with the couple she was with and with others. Said Tom Haselton, investigating sergeant for the case in Union City, "I can understand the family might be embarrassed and want to tell a different story. But by the time we were done talking with [Miya] we determined that what she did was consensual. There was no force used on her and she had plenty of opportunities to leave. And when she did leave, who did she call? Not the police, but a friend, just saying she wanted to get home to Arizona." No charges regarding Miya were filed. The man she'd been with was charged because the female member of the couple was 16 -- underage. Creepy, exploitative and illegal, but she wasn't coerced either. "She seemed to be in love with the pimp," says Haselton. "It's an age-old story."

Primetime's other example of a "sex trafficked" teen, 15-year-old Debbie, is the alleged victim of some truly horrible assaults, and police don't contest this. Even so, Primetime left out details of the case, making it seem more novel than it is. Debbie has said she was held at gunpoint in a Phoenix apartment and threatened with death and harm to her family unless she had sex with dozens of men. Often she was stuffed by her captors into a dog carrier and a bed frame. Her ordeal lasted over six weeks until she managed to sneak a call to her mother. Then she was rescued, and returned to what Primetime called her "close-knit" family. She'd been separated from them in the first place, Primetime reported, when she was "snatched" ñ as host John Quinones put it -- right off her front lawn. That happened when a girl she knew only casually drove up to Debbie's suburban house. Debbie stepped out of the house wearing Sponge-Bob pajamas. Suddenly she was pushed into the car and kidnapped.

But Phoenix Police Department press releases describe Debbie as a runaway. Police spokesman Andy Hill told me earlier this week that she was having problems with her family. She left home willingly with a friend, the girlfriend of a pimp, and a few hours later was herself dragooned into prostitution. Debbie's is a story of gross coercion, but clearly there's some background here. The vast majority of US kids who get involved with prostitution are runaways; this has been so for a very long time. That fact makes for yet another stale story. So it was left out of Primetime's because it didn't fit the boogie-man theme pushed these days when sex trafficking gets discussed -- in the media and lately by the feds as well.

In that telling, little children are enslaved right in plain sight. Four-year olds are passed to pedophiles at Disneyland, 11-year-olds in communion dresses are sold to Mexican farmworker perverts. Despite ample evidence that these stories are urban myths, the New York Times Magazine cited them anyway and conjured dozens of child sex slaves in a piece by Peter Landesman that the magazine ran two years ago. Its title? "The Girls Next Door." And last fall, the Lifetime television network ran a much- publicized drama in which a prepubescent white girl is kidnapped off the streets by a hi-tech trafficking ring that operates all across the globe and plans to sell her to "the Saudis." This despite the fact that no such rings are known to exist.

Paranoid "white slavery" crusades date back to 19th-century England and America. Back then they promoted anti-immigrant and racist sentiments against Jews and others scapegoated for being kidnappers and panderers. They drove prostitutes who had heretofore worked independently into the hands of pimps. Meanwhile, they did virtually nothing to end prostitution.

Now, white-slave panic is being reincarnated by the federal government. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) was launched five years ago with much fanfare from evangelicals in the Bush administration, feminists (many of who earlier worked with conservatives to try to outlaw pornography), and liberals concerned about forced-labor trafficking in general. Proponents predicted that thousands of forcibly sex-trafficked immigrant women would be found. Instead, a couple of hundred have turned up, at most.

But there are plenty of U.S.citizens who spend a little or a lot of time in prostitution. Quite a few are minors -- as many as 300,000, estimates the new TVPA, which was enthusiastically rolled out by President Bush at a ceremony in January. Legally speaking, minors are always considered victims, even if they are not coerced. The new TVPA earmarks funds to label them as sex slaves.

No matter that most of these new "trafficking" victims are runaways and throwaways: often minorities, often poor, and often gay. No matter that they are seldom kidnapped or forced into prostitution, rarely fit the image of the girl next door, usually don't think of themselves as "trafficking victims," and typically distrust the police. No matter that we lack social services for them so they can live on their own and thrive if home is unbearable. These children are just an old story. They're not ready for prime time.

But they are ready to fuel a movement most of the public hasn't heard of yet. The domestic trafficking language of the TVPA was lifted from another piece of legislation, the "End Demand Act." That bill aims to crack down on all prostitution in the U.S., by defining every bit of it as "domestic sex trafficking," even when it's between consenting adults. End Demand is sponsored by Sen. John Cornyn, R-TX (who recently equated gay marriage with humans copulating with box turtles). The act has bipartisan support but has not yet been passed. End Demand's wording about minors, however, was imported into the latest TVPA.

The government has not yet turned consensual adult prostitution into a federal crime. But last summer, the feds and other organizations, many of who have supported the End Demand Act and the new TVPA, started working the zeitgeist by pitching to the media about American kiddie slaves on Main Street. Primetime responded. Defending last week's story, ABC spokeswoman Paige Capossela said that "Our producers found two cases that illustrate what the FBI, other law enforcement and child protection agencies described to us as trafficking." That's a nice excuse for some high yellow journalism. And, no doubt, for some high Nielsen ratings as well.

END

....

Yes indeed. The demonisation of men, the stirring up of hatred towards men and, hence, between men, is a great way to accumulate money and power.

Whether it's the phony David Cameron trying to sweet-talk women into voting for him by articulating falsehoods about men discriminating against women in the workplace, or Gordon Brown's wife drumming the domestic violence beat, or blatant government lies about sex-trafficking, or, indeed, the selling of supposedly humorous knife blocks in the form of men being stabbed, there is one thing that they all have in common - the stirring up of hostility and aggression towards men - FOR PROFIT!

The groups of people who do the above are precious little more than selfish parasites - parasites on men. They take away from men (in the form of taxes, liberty, dignity etc) and they use their resources to inflict further harm on men.

And these deceitful self-serving malicious groups - organisms - are still growing in number and size.

Meanwhile, ...

New Brunswick's Moosehead Breweries has pulled an ad that implied women should speak no more than 50 words a day.

... Yes indeed. Merely making light-hearted jokes about women talking too much, and off the air you go. But making very serious false and damaging allegations about men, and no-one gives a damn.

Why's that Angry Harry?

Well; Junior. If you are a woman then you are a very lofty and superior being that no-one must even make jokes about. You are the Muslim equivalent of Allah.

Cartoons not allowed!

But if you're a man, then you are just a piece of worthless sh*t.

Women > Man