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Want a sexual slave? That is the question hundreds of thousands answer each year, as they purchase a child or young person from traffickers in a multibillion-dollar international business known as the global sex trade. When in many countries a young woman can be kidnapped for $500 and yield $250,000 annually from sexual servitude, it doesn't take much economic ingenuity to understand why corrupt capitalists crave some buy-in to this repulsive form of commerce. These victims of sexual slavery come from some of the most well-known sexually trafficked areas in the world, including Cambodia, Thailand, Latin America, Eastern Europe (countries...

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/thomas100806.htm Paedophiles, Cheb sex capital of Europe Captive market, "Girls who've shown signs of disobedience have had their feet cemented into washbasins before being dumped in the Aegean Sea. Others have been horrifically tortured. The Albanian gangs have a seemingly endless supply of women, and their power extends way beyond their homeland to the underworlds of Italy and parts of New York. The victims do not officially exist and are powerless to resist." Most Albanian gangsters are men in their twenties from the backward north of the country. Rather than being based around individual gangland bosses, they are organized in...

Nearly 50 percent of men in Scotland who pay for sex at home or abroad have a partner and the percentage could be greater, researchers said on Monday. One in 10 men questioned in a survey in Glasgow admitted that they had paid for sex recently and 27 percent said they repeatedly visited prostitutes. "Approximately half of all men paying for sex were in a concurrent relationship," said Dr Tamsin Groom, of the Sandyford Initiative in Glasgow, in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections. The men visited prostitutes abroad or at home but rarely did both. Most used condoms but unprotected...

I'm posting this because I think this organization's approach to the problem of child pornography has merit, and I like to support worthwhile causes. Looks like the start of a good, general referral source on this topic, and a place to report child porn activity. I've recently seen this commercial on the FOX News Network. You can check out the video on the link. BTW, if anyone has heard that song before and knows if there is a recording, I'd be interested in knowing about it.

SIX-YEAR-OLD Aisha loves the orange blouse and jeans given to her by the kind woman who rescued her from the chaos of the Kashmir earthquake. She snuggles up to the woman, trying to forget the devastation of her village home and the deaths of her parents 16 days ago. What Aisha does not know is that the woman, Kausar, is a prostitute who has bought her from relatives for 50,000 rupees ($1500) and plans to put her to work in the sex trade as soon as she reaches puberty. Aisha is not alone. According to welfare agencies, many of...

Ministry seeks to rescue potential victims of sex trafficking By Craig Bird Baptist Child & Family Services CHISINAU, Moldova--Homeless teenaged girls vulnerable to victimization by the international sex slave trade are the focus of a new ministry of Children's Emergency Relief International. The Chosen for Life Project in Moldova aims to make a difference in the lives of teenage girls who are too old for the state orphanage system and are left homeless, said Steve Davis, executive director of Children's Emergency Relief International, the overseas arm of Baptist Child & Family Services. These girls are prime targets for intentionally deceptive...

Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions that may be difficult for some readers. A crowd of people gathered on Capitol Hill last Thursday to hear experts* in obscenity law and sexual crimes speak in recognition of Victims of Pornography Month. What they said in that room should be heard by every American. (It just so happens that you can download and listen to the presentations, including one by CWA’s chief counsel, Jan LaRue, on our Web site by clicking here.) First, if you aren’t convinced yet that we, as a society, should crack down on pornography, consider some of the...

Fears of trade in children as 300 boys disappear By Alistair Foster, Evening Standard 13 May 2005 Scotland Yard today revealed it has been unable to trace all but two of 300 black boys aged four to seven reported missing from school in a three-month period. That is 100 boys a month and they waited this long????????

LONDON: The money Rosa was earning in a Turkish shoe factory was not enough to support the three children she had left behind in Ukraine. Then her new friend in Turkey, Katerina, told her she could earn $US700 a month as a casino waitress in Bosnia and convinced Rosa to come home with her to Moldova and then make their way to Bosnia. "I began to think of all the things I could do to change my life to help my children, my family." As the time came to leave Moldova, Katerina said she had a problem with her passport...

Phuket Gay Festival set to earn Bt100 million PHUKET, March 19, (TNA) – The pink baht will help revive the tsunami-damaged tourism industry on the southern island of Phuket next month when over 5,000 homosexuals from across the world descend on the island for the province’s 6th annual Gay Festival. According to Mr. Chanok Kaewsrinual, head of the Phuket Gay Association, the festival on Patong Beach on 7-10 April will include a range of events, including the unmissable drag parade. This year the event will take on particular significance, as it will be seen as a means of reviving the...

They call it modern-day slavery. Young children, teenagers, women and men promised riches and a better life arrive in the United States from overseas -- but instead find themselves working for pitiful wages or are forced into the sex trade. And it's happening more often than people think. Human trafficking is second only to drug dealing as the largest criminal industry in the world, and officials say the business has become so lucrative that it's growing. And although the numbers are hard to nail down because most incidents go unreported, government officials estimate that roughly 600,000 to 800,000 victims are...

Nicholas Kristof’s recent New York Times columns on sex trafficking in Cambodia drew a lot of reader mail. Many asked, “What about the johns?”—the men who buy the services. “Why aren’t the men written about?” one reader asked Kristof, “Embarrass them, expose them, not the women.” Kristof responded, “[F]oreign countries just are not going to arrest a lot of the johns, while they could be persuaded to arrest traffickers of young girls.” Okay, of course, we want traffickers arrested. That was the goal of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act that Bill Bennett, Michael Horowitz, and I along with many others...

January 13, 2005 DID GOD DO IT? Patrick Rooney It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea, rather than that he should cause one of these little ones to stumble. --Luke 17:2 The great majority of the talk I have heard since the great tsunami of 2004 may have missed the most important point of all. Immediately after this cataclysmic event, we were subjected to many questions, such as which countries were being cheap in their relief support, or was the corrupt United Nations fit to take...

PHUKET, Thailand, Jan 4 (Reuters) - Thai police said on Tuesday they would draw up an identikit of a Western-looking man who may have kidnapped a Swedish schoolboy in the confusion following the Dec. 26 tsunami. A Thai doctor has told the family of 12-year old Kristian Walker that he is convinced he treated the boy for an ear injury following the disaster and that the child was then taken away by a moustachioed man wearing a red shirt. "We are still interviewing the doctor and we will draw up a sketch of the man," Police Capt. Chaiyapong Kanpai told...

Suffer the Children: The child sex trade is a global nightmare, but a former Interpol agent and a Boulder nonprofit are doing something about it. by Pamela White “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” –Friedrich Nietzsche from Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future David Race Bannon has nightmares that would freeze your marrow. In his dreams, he sees dismembered children, 4-year-olds chained to beds in Bangkok brothels, photographs of infant...

Kosovo UN troops 'fuel sex trade' The presence of peacekeepers in Kosovo is fuelling the sexual exploitation of women and encouraging trafficking, according to Amnesty International. It claims UN and Nato troops in the region are using the trafficked women and girls for sex and some have been involved in trafficking itself. Amnesty says girls as young as 11 from eastern European countries are being sold into the sex slavery. The UN and Nato forces said they had not yet seen the report to comment. Trading houses Amnesty's report, entitled "So does that mean I have rights? Protecting the human...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California's multi-billion-dollar adult porn industry ground to a virtual halt on Thursday after a popular actor tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS (news - web sites). Industry advocates immediately called for a 60-day moratorium on filming so that others could be tested. Actor Darren James tested positive for HIV (news - web sites) on Wednesday in screening conducted routinely on the industry's 1,200 regular actors by the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare (AIM) Foundation, the foundation's Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell (news) said. They must show negative tests to keep working in the industry, Mitchell said, adding...

Thai police have accused the former Australian diplomat Robert Scoble of running a secret child-sex recruitment network behind the facade of one of South-East Asia's biggest gay tourism agencies. Police officers told the Herald they found more than 100 albums containing sexually explicit photographs of boys - some believed to be as young as 10 - when they raided the Bangkok apartment of the former deputy ambassador to Vietnam and Telstra executive. "They were like catalogues, and we believe he was sending these pictures to people overseas," said Major Choowong Uthaisang of the Royal Thai Police immigration department. Major Choowong...

HNOM PENH, Cambodia — Cambodia, whose postwar opening for tourism went as far as to include child prostitution, has begun a campaign against suspected pedophiles, increasingly deporting them for trial in their home countries. Private child protection groups, foreign governments and police forces in Cambodia are working together on the problem. Free city guidebooks and maps now carrying ads warning in red type, "Sex with children is a crime." "It was total impunity before in Cambodia," Rodney Hatfield, a representative for Unicef, which has started its own ad campaign. "Now it is getting harder and harder" for adults to prey...

The Thai Government has begun a public debate on whether prostitution should be legalised. Justice Minister Pongthep Thepkanchana opened the debate attended by academics, officials and sex workers. Proposals being considered include registering sex workers and thus urging them to pay taxes. Prostitution is a $4.3bn industry in Thailand which could generate big revenues - currently it accounts for about 3% of the country's income. Some brothel owners support calls for the trade's legalisation, as they say it would relieve them of various expenses. "The government should licence brothels," Anan Atpruang, the owner of a gay massage parlour, told the...

Prostitutes 'very, very good,' viewers are told "If what you're after is fun, sun and an overload of hedonistic pleasure, you've got to get yourself to Pattaya, Thailand," advises D. Garnet Harding, the host of a show about sex tourism in that country. CREDIT: Outdoor Life Network The episode, which included the above scene, and which received a tax credit from the Canadian government, has outraged child advocates because Thailand has a huge child prostitution problem. CREDIT: Outdoor Life Network Taxpayers have helped fund a TV series on the Outdoor Life Network that enthusiastically promotes sex tourism to the bars...

This week George W. Bush declared another war -- on the global sex trade, a problem in need of 'urgent attention and moral clarity.' Is the U.S. President being too dramatic? No, the Globe's MARK MACKINNON reports from tiny Moldova. So many of its girls have been shanghaied to the fleshpots of the world that the impoverished former Soviet republic is starting to run out. Sofia, Moldova -- She says her name is Valentina and she's six years old. But that's all she'll say before bolting to take refuge behind a nearby cow. Valentina has good reason to be wary...

At the United Nations, before key world leaders and an international body that symbolizes human rights, President Bush put the fight against the global sex trade on par with the campaign for democracy in Iraq and the war on terrorism. A significant portion of his U.N. speech was dedicated to a "humanitarian crisis...yet hidden from view," by which he meant the trafficking and prostitution of hundreds of thousands of women and children. In keeping with Bush's speeches on threats to freedom and democracy in the world, there were no qualifiers or exceptions; he boldly named this activity for what it...

Two flights are due into Montego Bay Airport, one from Toronto, the other from London. Clinton waits on the beach for the new arrivals, hoping that one of them will bring him good fortune. "I look for the milk bottles," he says, explaining how ultra-white skin is a giveaway, "the ones who've just arrived. Milk bottles that need filling ..." Negril, with its 11-kilometre stretch of pristine sand and turquoise sea, attracts the majority of Jamaica's 1.3 million tourists every year, primarily from the United States, Canada and Europe. It is known as a "swinging" resort. Many white Western women...

Sex for sale, legally Jul 11th 2003 From The Economist Global Agenda Though some governments are still trying to crack down on prostitution, others are realising that it is better to legalise and license it than to suffer the ill effects of driving it underground. New Zealand has just done so; Belgium looks set to be next Reuters An honest Dutch taxpayer at work THE selling of sex has been widely practised, and roundly condemned, throughout history. The Bible constantly rails against whores and whoremongers, from Genesis through to Revelation, and the book of Leviticus gives the stern injunction: “Do...

Virgins Meet in Sin City, Tout Abstinence By CHRISTINA ALMEIDA The Associated Press Sunday, June 29, 2003; 7:54 AM LAS VEGAS - In a city known more for sin than virtue, a group of virgins from around the country gathered this weekend to send a message: wait until marriage. It was a clash of the "Good Girls" and the sin-seekers as about 200 teens, parents and youth counselors descended on the Strip to pass out cards promoting abstinence. "What better place to bring this than Sin City?" said participant Deanna Grimm, 24, of Sioux Falls, S.D. "They need to hear...

<p>Colin Powell wants to do something about Castro's reliance on prostitution.</p> <p>Fidel Castro has a nasty sex problem. And he's livid at Colin Powell for exposing it to the world. "Despicable," "rude," "cynical" and "repugnant" are only a few of the words Fidel used during a recent tirade.</p>

Cheers, tears as prostitution bill passes 26 June 2003 Parliament erupted in cheers last night, as a landmark law to decriminalise prostitution passed by a single vote. Christchurch MP Tim Barnett's Prostitution Reform Act will become law next Monday and soliciting for sex and brothelkeeping will no longer be illegal in New Zealand from that day. In one of the closest votes in Parliament's history, the Act passed 60-59, on the abstention of Labour's Muslim MP Ashraf Choudhary. Had Mr Choudhary, who opposed the bill, not abstained the bill would have fallen because a 60-60 tie is counted as a...

Albanian connection to the teenage sex slaves in London By Jason Bennetto Crime Correspondent 19 June 2003 The Romanian girl was 15 when she was smuggled into Britain. She arrived in Dover, via Brussels and Ostend, on a hovercraft in July 2001 and was met at Victoria station and taken to a flat in north-west London. A day later, a man named Mustapha Kadiu, 31, arrived and made the girl, later known in court as Miss X, phone saunas and massage parlours to work as a prostitute. Kadiu, an Albanian who persuaded her to travel to Britain to start a...

Saratov's human rights commissioner urged skeptical State Duma deputies Tuesday to follow his region's lead in decriminalizing prostitution, arguing that regulating the country's growing sex trade would help crack down on disease and delinquency. The governor of the southern Saratov region, Dmitry Ayatskov, has given prostitution de facto legal status and hopes to further regulate the world's oldest profession to cut down on sexually transmitted disease and tuberculosis in the region, human rights commissioner Alexander Lando said. "This is about the health of the nation," he told reporters. Lando has helped draft a bill on legalizing prostitution that would oblige...

A 30-year-old Ypsilanti man is accused of running a small prostitution ring with girls as young as 13. Jesse Swanson, 30, was charged Thursday with six counts of prostitution -- pandering, accepting and transporting. He pleaded innocent to each. Police said Swanson arranged prostitution jobs for at least two Ypsilanti High School freshman, set prices, drove them to and from appointments and took half the money they were given. He also threatened to harm the girls if they told anyone of the sex acts, according to police. Swanson apparently kept a notebook that described the ways in which the...

BAGHDAD, April 29 (Reuters) - Um Jenan used to wear gold jewellery, tight jeans and see-through blouses to attract VIP clients to her apartment in Baghdad -- until the masked men in black packed her into a minibus and drove her away.When they laid out her body in front of her home the next day, she was dressed in loose-fitting sweat pants and a T-shirt. A banner on the wall above said "God is greatest!."Beside her lay her severed head."I couldn't stop looking at her," said Ali Waad, who was 11 when Um Jenan was murdered by a death squad...