By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

Published: May 23, 2011

Kalea, a 15-year-old Cambodian-American girl who grew up in Oakland, kept coming in to be examined for sexually transmitted diseases, the beginning of a grim cycle of diagnosis and treatment. “I started asking, ‘Are you having sex with new people?’ ” Dr. Chang, 37, recalled. “It was always, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ Eventually she confided that she was worried about ‘a friend.’ That’s when I asked, ‘Are you trading sex for money?’ ”

Emerging from a long, dark tunnel, Kalea slowly began to spill her stories. How her father beat her. The childhood rape. The out-of-control john who tied her up in a motel bathtub and filled it with scalding water.

Seven years and hundreds of patients later, Dr. Chang’s clinic, Asian Health Services, is in the vanguard of a new public health approach to treating American-born minors lured into the sex trade, a problem enforcement officials and child advocates say has exploded with the Internet.

Once viewed as criminals and dispatched to juvenile centers, where treatment was rare, sexually exploited youths are increasingly seen as victims of child abuse, with a new focus on early intervention and counseling. There is growing recognition that doctors can be first responders, intervening before long years of exploitation and abuse can take an even greater toll.

In Oakland, a handful of organizations that grew out of Asian Health Services have developed new programs for Southeast Asian minors that “take into account the complex culture of foreign-born parents and their American-born children,” said Dr. Sharon Cooper, a forensic pediatrician and child abuse expert at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 American-born children are sold for sex each year. The escalating numbers have prompted national initiatives by the F.B.I. and other law enforcement agencies, and new or pending legislation in more than a dozen states, most recently Georgia, which enacted a toughened human trafficking law this month.

The Oakland health clinic is confronting an underground within an underground — the demand for Asian-American girls, with Cambodian-Americans among the most vulnerable. Many immigrant Cambodian parents struggle with poverty compounded by the experience of genocide and its traumatic aftermath, depression. The emotional fallout is ricocheting through generations.

“Oakland is an open-air sex market for young children,” said Sharmin Bock, assistant in charge of special operations for the district attorney’s office in Alameda County, where Oakland is.

The abusers may be pimps, even brothers, who recruit or kidnap girls from the streets and market them online through sites, where they are featured in pulsating ads for massage parlors, escort services, strip clubs, even acupuncturists.

“Asian women are exoticized in our culture,” said Elizabeth Sy, the co-founder of a program for at-risk girls called Banteay Srei that grew out of Dr. Chang’s clinic. “Many Southeast Asian girls come from new refugee populations. Recruiters target these girls because they know they are struggling with issues of cultural identity.”

Girls from many Southeast Asian families chase “an Americanized idea of love,” Ms. Sy said, growing up in emotionally distant households in which, she said, “parents never ask ‘How was school today?’ or say ‘I love you.’ ”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24oakland.html

NEW YORK TIMES

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Published: May 30, 2011

Wal-Mart is facing new pressure to monitor and disclose how its international suppliers treat their workers.

At its annual shareholder meeting on Friday, the New York City pension funds, which own a small percentage of shares in Wal-Mart, plan to ask the company to require vendors to publish annual reports detailing working conditions in their factories.

Michael Garland, who oversees shareholder activism efforts as executive director for corporate governance at the city comptroller’s office, said the proposal was meant to improve workplace safety and worker rights at companies making goods for Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer.

“No matter how much Wal-Mart and other companies are doing, or claim they are doing, to monitor their suppliers, they just don’t have the capacity to do it in a comprehensive way,” Mr. Garland said. “They put tremendous pressure on their suppliers to cut money out of the system,” which can lead to long hours, low pay or other problems.

Wal-Mart opposes the request, citing the difficulty of persuading suppliers to issue reports. The company contends that even if it could enforce such a plan, to do so might threaten the availability of certain products from those who did not comply.

While Mr. Garland acknowledged that the proposal was unlikely to succeed, he said casting a spotlight on the problem could prompt Wal-Mart to begin considering how to address its association with suppliers who did not treat workers fairly.

Kalpona Akter, a Bangladeshi labor organizer who will present the proposal at the meeting in Fayetteville, Ark., complained that many of the Bangladesh factories that produced goods for Wal-Mart mistreated their workers.

At Wal-Mart suppliers, “very often, first of all, the factory does not enforce the law” regarding minimum wages, she said.

“Though the minimum salary has been cleared by the government, and many factories implemented that,” she said, “we haven’t seen any Wal-Mart suppliers giving a living wage to workers.”

Though Wal-Mart sometimes sends auditors to check on working conditions, “when the auditor goes to the factory, the worker is coached by the management to tell lies in front of the auditors — that they are being paid living wages, that they are not being harassed,” she said.

READ MORE AT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/business/31walmart.html?_r=1

The proposal states that there is a “significant gap between general policies against labor and human rights abuse and more detailed standards and enforcement mechanisms required to carry them out.”

A couple of months ago, The CNN Freedom Project brought you the harrowing tale of a sex slave ring run by a Romanian father and son, with reporting from CNN’s Jonathan Wald and Dan Rivers.

Now, explore the story further with these excerpts from the documentary, “Sex slavery: A family business,” which examines the flourishing sex trade in Romania and provides an inside look at the authorities’ struggle to bring it under control.

http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/27/sex-slavery-a-family-business-2/

KOLKATA, India

Nicholas Kristof

At the beginning, I knew only about a young teenage girl imprisoned on the third floor of a brothel in a red-light district here in Kolkata.

The pimps nicknamed her Chutki, or little girl. She had just been sold to the brothel-owner and seemed terrified.

Investigators with International Justice Mission, a Washington-based aid group that fights human trafficking, had spotted Chutki while prowling undercover looking for prostituted children. I.J.M. hoped to convince the Kolkata police to free the girl, but it would help to have more evidence that the girl was still imprisoned. So an I.J.M. official asked: Would I like to accompany him as he sneaked into the brothel to gather evidence?

India probably has more modern slaves than any country in the world. It has millions of women and girls in its brothels, often held captive for their first few years until they grow resigned to their fate. China surely has more prostitutes, but they are typically working voluntarily. India’s brothels are also unusually violent, with ferocious beatings common and pimps sometimes even killing girls who are uncooperative.

Unicef has estimated that worldwide 1.8 million children enter the sex trade each year. Too many are in the United States, which should prosecute pimps much more aggressively, but the worst abuses take place in countries like Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Cambodia.

So I set off with the I.J.M. investigator (who wants to remain anonymous for his own safety) into the alleys of the Sonagachi red-light district one evening, slipped into the brothel, and climbed to the third floor. And there were Chutki and three other girls in a room, a pimp hovering over them. Perceiving us as potential customers, he offered them to us.

We demurred but said we’d be back.

The Kolkata police agreed to raid the brothel to free the girl. I.J.M. told them the location of the brothel at the last minute to avoid a tip-off from police ranks. The police casually asked us to lead the way in the raid since we knew what Chutki looked like and where she was kept.

So along with a carload of police, we drove up to the brothel and rushed inside to avoid giving the pimps time to hide Chutki or to escape themselves. With the I.J.M. representative in the lead, we hurtled up the stairs, brushed past the pimp and found Chutki and the three other girls in the same room where we had seen them before.

Two female social workers from I.J.M. immediately began comforting Chutki, who police said was about 15 and looked terrified. They explained that this was a police operation to rescue her, and they helped her put on a robe for modesty’s sake.

Then another of the girls in the room asked if she could be rescued — but a few days later. She explained that if she left now, the brothel-owners would blame her for the raid and possibly harm her grandmother, whose address they knew.

We told the girl that this chance might not come again. She dissolved into tears, wavered and then decided to come out. Then a third said that she wanted to escape as well.

The girls tipped off the police that the brothel-owner was in another building, arranging to sell a new girl named Raya for the very first time, either that evening or the next night. The police hurried off and returned with Raya, a wide-eyed girl of about 10 years.

It seemed that the brothel had purchased Raya just a week earlier, after her own brother-in-law tricked her and trafficked her. If the raid had been delayed by a few hours, she might have faced the first of many rapes.

With Raya was a 5-year-old girl who seemed to have been abandoned. Perhaps the brothel-owners were grooming her for sale in a few more years. So we emerged from the brothel with five lives that had just been transformed.

Equally important, one pimp had been arrested and arrest warrants had been issued for two more. There are no quick fixes to human trafficking, but experience in several countries suggests that prosecuting pimps and brothel-owners makes a difference. A study in Cebu, Philippines, found that helping police and courts target child prostitution resulted in 87 arrests over four years — and a 79 percent reduction in the number of children in the sex trade.

We drove the five girls to a police station to fill out paperwork so that they could move into shelters and receive schooling or vocational training. Raya, the 10-year-old who otherwise at that moment might have been enduring her first rape, was giggly and carefree as she pretended to drive the car. She behaved like a silly little girl — which was thrilling.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/opinion/26kristof.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss#

The two Swedish IT-experts jailed for life in the Philippines for running a cybersex den say they are living a nightmare among hardened criminals and maintain that they have done nothing wrong.

Emil Andreas Solemo, 35,and Bo Stefan Sederholm, 31, were convicted of human trafficking this week after being found running an operation in which 17 naked women in an office building performed in front of cameras for overseas internet clients.

The government hailed the verdict as a landmark victory in the battle against human trafficking because the Swedes were the first to be handed life sentences for what has in recent years become a booming cybersex industry.

But both men claim most of the evidence against them was fabricated or obtained illegally, and appear bewildered why they should be jailed for Internet pornography when prostitution is rampant across the Philippines.

“We don’t see ourselves as human traffickers at all,” Solemo, 35, said in an exclusive interview with AFP on Thursday from a crowded jail in the southern city of Cagayan de Oro where they have been since their arrest in April 2009.

Sederholm, 31, bristled at their portrayal by the Philippine press as modern-day slave traders.

“The women were not forced to do it. It was nothing like that at all,” said Sederholm, who like his business partner was wearing a prison-issue yellow T-shirt, long shorts and a sandals.

Solemo, a tall man with gold-rimmed glasses and a goatee, said he and Sederholm were IT consultants who had been hired to set up the computer systems at the cybersex shop where the women worked in Cagayan de Oro.

Although they refused to say who hired them, they denied police charges that they owned the business and recruited the women, saying they only arrived in the country a month before being arrested.

The Swedes also pointed out that the women working in the cybersex operation were all adults – prosecutors never alleged that minors were involved – and said the case against them smacked of hypocrisy.

“Some say it’s (cybersex) demeaning and horrible, but you can go to any city in the Philippines and see girls who are dancing on poles in skimpy clothes. It’s absurd…there are places there that openly sell girls,” Solemo said.

http://www.scandasia.com/viewNews.php?coun_code=se&news_id=8822

Dhaka, Bangladesh (CNN) –  Deep scars crisscross the frail body of a seven-year-old boy at the center of a criminal case that investigators say exposes “pure evil.”

His father pulled the boy’s pants down, wanting to show the injuries that fill him with rage and anguish. His son’s penis had nearly been cut off.

“They beat me. They said they would make me beg. They would kill me,” the boy said. “I threatened to tell my father and police on them. They cut my throat, they cut my belly, they cut my penis.”

They also bashed his skull with a brick.

Investigators say members of a criminal gang were trying to force the boy to become a beggar on the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital.

The boy was slashed many times, his healed wounds now forming a large cross in scar tissue across a section of his chest and from his throat to his pelvis. Investigators with Bangladesh’s elite police force, the Rapid Action Battalion, say the gang members were trying to kill him because he refused to beg and would be able to identify them to the police.

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Huffpost

Quentin Tarantino is coming back home to America — and entering one of the darkest times in its history — for his next major film.

After taking on Nazi Germany with the Brad Pitt-led band of “Inglourious Basterds,” WME, Tarantino’s agency, confirmed that he’s finished writing the script for “Django Unchained,” a Spaghetti Western that, according to Tarantino Archives (via Indiewire), will pay homage to Italian director Sergio Corbucci’s original “Django” and Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike’s “Sukiyaki Western Django.”

Tarantino actually appeared in “Sukiyaki,” making a cameo as a character named Ringo.

“Django,” it seems, will be the eighth film of his career, which, in an interview at the Morelia International Film Festival in 2009, he promised to release before coming out with “Kill Bill: Vol. 3″ in 2014. According to HitFix, he was also pondering producing a ’30s-style gangster film, which would certainly fit his penchant for violence-filled movies.

After helping launch the American film career of Christoph Waltz, who gave an Academy Award-winning performance as Nazi Col. Hans Landa, aka “The Jew Hunter,” in “Basterds,” Tarantino has cast the German actor as a lead in “Django Unchained,” WME also confirmed.

“It’s a western whose lead character is a former slave who is in league with Waltz to save his wife from an evil plantation owner,” the agency said.