Posted on 01/06/2005 3:07:26 AM PST by kattracks
Backed with federal money, a Boston-based task force is being launched to counter the spread of human trafficking in the region, including, according to some accounts, street gangs pressing 13-year-olds into prostitution.
``To me,'' said the American Anti-Slavery Group's Liora Kasten, human trafficking ``is one of the most atrocious things you can do. It's not just taking someone's life away from them, it's dehumanizing to the point that they don't even feel like people anymore.
``And that can be worse than killing someone.''
The growing slave trade is an international blight with a local impact. As demonstrated by the plights of an Indian nanny fed table scraps by a Brookline couple and seven Estonian women coerced by a Brighton businessman to toil in his ``erotic'' massage parlors, today's black-marketer of bodies can be the neighbor next door.
With sexual servitude their focus, Hub police have been awarded a $443,000 federal grant to create the Boston Area Anti-Trafficking Task Force with 10 law-enforcement and social-service partners, including Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan. The group's goal is to increase victim rescues by 15 percent each year.
``We've arrested girls for prostitution, but we don't get underneath the surface,'' said Deputy Superintendent Paul Fitzgerald. ``They may not be the person we should prosecute. They may be the victim.''
In the past three years, Fitzgerald, head of the Boston Police Department's major-case squad, said reports have filtered in from city schools that black and Asian street gangs are pimping playmates as young as 13.
However, Fitzgerald said, ``We've never been able to substantiate any of these allegations.''
Human trafficking, he said, is a ``new phenomenon'' for local investigators that's ``tough to uncover, but we're going to have a lot of good people involved.''
Fitzgerald has hand-picked Sgt. Detective Kelley O'Connell of the Youth Violence Strike Force, a 17-year veteran with vast contacts, to pilot the program.
``The number of actual cases of human trafficking in the Boston area remains undocumented,'' but as a prime point of entry for immigration, ``Boston is likely to be one of the major cities to which people are trafficked,'' a police report says.
The U.S. State Department believes upward of 17,500 people - some 80 percent of them women and children - are smuggled into the United States each year to labor in bondage or be sexually exploited.
But Kasten said even that number is conservative because ``most of this is so covert'' and victims, because of threats, embarrassment or mistrust of police, are reluctant to seek liberation.
Sexual lust is a hard thing for some people to control under normal circumstances..Add a drug culture, with an institutionalized breakdown in morality and authorities who look the other way or, God help us, patronize the industry in some way, and you get this kind of problem. I hope something can be done about this for the sake of the children. You know, our media has been talking about the pedophilia sex industry in Thailand. How about shining the bright light on the same in our own nation until something meaningful is done about it.
I thought slavery was just a Southern problem.....John Adams and his son JQ must be doing backflips in their graves over this.
The drug culture has NOTHING to do with this problem. It is human greed and lust that brings these people into the slave trade...
Now then, where's my bong? It's time to wake and bake!
It seems wherever the democrats have been in charge for some time, that these problems get worse and worse. What they need is a Guiliani type to come in and straighten them out.
Slavery in Boston? Say it isn't so. Slavery is the fault and problem of the south.
The bluest of all the blue states.
And the descendants of slaves vote Dem 90% of the time. The plantations are doin' fine, massah!
Kinda like the abused women that keep returning to the men that abuse them.
"In the past three years, Fitzgerald, head of the Boston Police Department's major-case squad, said reports have filtered in from city schools that black and Asian street gangs are pimping playmates as young as 13."
It just drives me batty that these gangs are allowed to exist.
The U.S. State Department believes upward of 17,500 people - some 80 percent of them women and children - are smuggled into the United States each year to labor in bondage or be sexually exploited.
This is really an immigration problem with turd world countries, primarily Indian, former eastern bloc countries and Asian people as the victims.
Unfortunately, neither party wants to touch the new third rail of politics: immigration, except of course her highness Hillary.
So let's throw money at the problem rather than the source which is the way democrats normally do things
Surely you jest. It never was just a Southern problem. In fact, Yankees were the first to have black slavery in America (think the Dutch in New Amsterdam i.e. New York). John Adams and John Quincy Adams would indeed be doing flips in their graves along with Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, both of whom either freed their slaves by their own volition (think Robert E.) or never had them in the first place (think Stonewall). All four of those were men who detested wickedness as well, and yes indeed they would all be doing somersaults if they could see what a filthy place our nation has become and, more specifically, what is happening in Boston and Massachusetts right now.
Next time put a sarcasm tag up. I wondered if you might be serious. :)
Let's not mention the anecdotal Northerners who returned the escaping slaves for money.
``We've arrested girls for prostitution, but we don't get underneath the surface,''
An oxy or moron?
Surely he puns, right?
Diversity bump.
Ever heard of Sojourner Truth? She was born a slave in the Hudson River Valley of New York state in 1797. There was at one time a slave auction block at the docks in Boston Harbor. And all those slaves being unloaded in Charleston and New Orleans in the 18th and 19th centuries? Many of them were coming off of boats owned, commanded, and manned by New Englanders.
The North has no claim to righteousness in this regard.
ping
Slavery and human trafficking is alive and well in the "free" U.S. When you have illegal aliens abound wandering around, and the government doesn't care, you will have this happening. It is a DU thing.
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