Children

Quarter of kids don’t meet vaccine schedule, as more than a quarter of American children do not meet the U.S. government’s recommendations for childhood vaccinations, according to researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers.

Viral outbreak hits China province, as the deaths of 19 children and the infection of more than 900 people with enterovirus 71, which can cause hand, foot and mouth disease, have panicked residents of China’s Anhui province and pushed authorities to set up a daily reporting mechanism to track the virus’ spread. World Health Organization officials are urging parents to keep their children away from public places until the outbreak subsides.

Cambodian school food program faces suspension as the continual rise in global food prices are now endangering a World Food Program initiative supplying free breakfast to 450,000 Cambodian children at more than 1,300 schools across the country. In just under a month, the schools’ rice stocks will be gone and the breakfast program suspended indefinitely.

Radiohead song to raise awareness on human rights Pioneering rock band Radiohead has lent its song “All I Need” to an MTV campaign to raise awareness about sweatshop labor and human trafficking. The move builds on the British band’s previous efforts to highlight slave labor and environmental issues.

UNICEF: Climate change mainly hits poor children, according to UNICEF warned in a new report. Problems such as floods, droughts and malaria, which experts say are worsening because of global warming, already are taking a big toll on children in developing nations, the UN agency says.

…it’s afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.” -Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

The rape of anyone is one of the most atrocious crimes that can be committed against a person, especially a child.

The ever increasing use of rape as a weapon of war not only impacts the victim, but their family, community and entire nations. Thus rape effects our entire global community, it shapes our future. Victims are sentenced to a life of shame, silence and fear. Mothers are forced to live in guilt, traumatized by the faces of their own children. Children’s lives are forever changed and molded from the violence of rape, as victims, witnesses and products of rape. Children who feel inevitable guilt over their mothers suffering, their own reason for being.

Rape is not only a crime…it is a crime against humanity. Rape murders ones soul and paralyzes their future.

For the millions upon millions, many children, who are the survivors of sexual violence, one must not forget their struggles in this month of awareness, as their battle is never ending. Therefore in conjunction with April being Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I wanted to share these words of survival from Nancy Venable Raine, After Silence, Rape and my Journey Back.

I was not only a survivor, but a witness to my own survival. I saw, too, that however painful my feelings of the past year had been, the pain had not, after all, replaced other feelings, but only hidden them from sight. For traumatic experiences, “forgetting” is impossible, yet remembering is the last thing you want to do. I learned that some redemption can come from even the deepest of losses. The victims of rape must carry their memories with them for the rest of their lives. They must not also carry the burden of silence and shame.

Shame and fear leads many victims, especially children to a life of silence, but we must brake the silence on such brutal crimes. As an international society we must not sit idly back and allow such acts to continue. The world is full of armed conflicts and in these conflicts the use of rape as a weapon of war continues, yet the victims live in fear of persecution, they are ostracized by their own families and communities, and healthcare and support systems are far and few in between. Thus as a global community we must take action to see that victims are allowed to become survivors and that they no longer have to live in shame and silence. So let us listen…let us here! The following passage from Charlotte Pierce-Baker’s, Surviving the Silence, illustrates how braking the silence is a major step in healing the wounds of sexual violence.

Still I weep for what I cannot change. Healing is a continuous process. Rape affects all aspect of one’s life and being and one has to work continuously to become whole and intact. Pieces of myself are coming slowly together. I am different, but I accept that. The way out is to tell: Speak of the acts perpetrated upon us, speak the atrocities, speak the injustices, speak the personal violations of the soul. Someone will listen, someone will believe our stories, someone will join us.

“Street children…are prey to anything and they know things children should not.” - Nevine is 18, has lived on Cairo’s streets for 4 years (Still dreaming of a better future : a Cairo street girl recounts her traumatic experiences).

The issue of street children is nothing new on the international children’s right radar, however in Egypt the issue has only become more substantial in recent years. There is estimated to be some one million street children in Egypt, many of whom have left rural areas to look for work in the city, or who are looking to escape abusive homes. Once on the street, children find themselves working shining shoes, collecting rubbish, begging, cleaning and directing cars into parking spaces, and selling food and trinkets, in order to survive. Children living on the streets are more pron to violence, more susceptible to disease and malnutrition, and are prime victims for traffickers and pedophiles.

According to UNICEF, the results of a study in 2000, showed 86% of street children stated violence was a regular issue, while another survey showed 50% had been exposed in some manner to rape (Egyptian Street children: issues and impact -UNICEF).

I have come across a few videos this past week, which I think you will find both very interesting and heartbreaking.

Living in a cemetery (IRIN video) - Near one million poor people live in ‘the City of the Dead’, one of Egypt’s largest cemeteries, located on the outskirts of the capital, Cairo. Many of the residents are families with children.

Girls forced to sleep rough in Cairo (IRIN video) - 10-year-old Sayyida, has been living on the streets of Cairo for at least two years, this video shows many of the battles she faces nightly on the dangerous city streets.

Links and Articles:
Egypt: Street children and substance abuse
Human Rights Watch - Egypt
Hope for Street Children

When it comes to issues of children’s rights there is no debate as to the fact that children should not be abused either physically or sexually. Therefore when the debates do arise, they are mostly on the fact that we seem to be doing little as an international community to stop the continuous and often blatant human rights violations against children. Other debates rage on in regards to funding, legislation, and other related issues which seem to sit more at a political level than a human level.

The issue of child porn is a sensitive one, for its victims are never allowed to escape their abusers, as their abuse continues indefinitely, once circulated. While the persecution of pedophiles and the efforts of law enforcement have increased, so has the difficulty to catch these offenders and find their innocent victims.

However it is not these obvious and blatant abuses that I want to talk about today, it is a new kind of victim…a virtual victim! In our ever growing technological age abusers are continuing to grow more and more savvy about hiding their identities and and avoiding the law and persecution. But what do we do when the victim in a case of child porn is not a living breathing child, but a virtual child?

What is Virtual Child Porn?

It is pornographic material that appears to depict children, but doesn’t use real children. The use of the term “virtual,” with its connotations of “virtual reality”, makes some think that virtual child porn must involve the use of the Internet, however it doesn’t have to.

The types of virtual child porn:

1. Composites: The “models” in these virtual images appear underage, and are presented as such in the surrounding text, advertisements, etc. However, these “models” don’t really exist: they were “assembled” from perfectly legal photographs using an editing program such as Photoshop, and perhaps using the face of a child on the body of a underdeveloped adult. Therefore, the creation of this kind of pornography didn’t actually involve children. However it can be argued that it promotes child abuse, or does involve a child if a ‘real’ child’s face is used or if one believes that it is that ‘real’ child’s body.

2. Pictures of people who look underage with surrounding text claiming them as underage, but who are actually legal. Thus the pornographer has used an 18-year-old who looks 15 or 13 for example.

*In a recent United States Supreme Court decision (Ashcroft vs. The Free Speech Coalition), the Supremes held that these two forms of pornography were protected by the First Amendment.

Here are my non-researched, non-academic thoughts and fears on the idea of ‘virtual child porn’:

I wonder if the idea of ‘virtual porn’ is just a ticking time bomb to bigger things. To me it is like giving a person a teaser, a taste of something naughty, which only has them wanting more…wanting the real thing. My analogical comparison is to cake: it’s there all the time and with easy access, but you don’t want to eat cake all the time. However when you walk by a bakery and you smell cake, you suddenly want cake. You’re having dinner and someone orders cake, they offer you a bite, you eat it, and then you are not satisfied by a bite and you want a whole piece. You know you have cake down stairs just waiting there, so you want it, and you eat a piece and then think “well why not? I will just finish it!”. All the while you know that cake is bad for you, but it’s just there tempting you, so your inherent cravings get the best of you. However if there is no cake in site you don’t think much about it, nor do you continually crave it.

As they say, “The only way to kill a monster is to starve it!”

Therefore I wonder if by giving people the opportunity to experiment with the idea of child porn, are we allowing them an opportunity to increase their craving for the real thing. I am slightly divided personally on the legalization issue, for two main reasons; One, as it is hard enough to catch a person who is in possession of ‘real’ child porn, and spending resources on ‘virtual predators’ may not be the best use of already strained resources. Secondly, I know there are a lot of people with ‘bad thoughts’ or desires that have managed to avoid the temptation: people who have had the urge to kill but did not act on it, yet maybe if some one had handed them a gun they would have. However there is a flip side to this argument, and that is the argument that the use of ‘virtual porn’ keeps pedophiles and would-be pedophiles away from children, by giving them an outlet for their “sickness”. While it is surely a subject that could use more research and debate, I am not a scientist, but I do know that sex or thoughts of sex with a child are wrong, regardless of if ‘virtual child porn’ is legal or illegal.

Please share your thoughts on this subject, I look forward to hearing your view points.

Related Papers and Articles mostly on the Legal Aspects of ‘Virtual Child Porn’:
Virtual Child Porn Riles Law Enforcement 2007
Dutch demand ban of virtual child porn in Second Life 2007
2002 Supreme Court strikes down ban on ‘virtual child porn’
Does Virtual Child Porn Equal Child Exploitation? 2002
“VIRTUAL CHILD” PORNOGRAPHY ON THE INTERNET: A “VIRTUAL” VICTIM?
Virtual Child Pornography - a paper for the legalization
Virtual Child Pornography - An overview written by a First Amendment Scholar
Japanese Poll on Manga Child Porn Regulation 2007
Web a playground for child porn

While the bruises of the body fade in time, the scars of child abuse never fade. Children are never the same again after an abuser has entered their lives, they loose not only the innocence of childhood, but also the chance at a normal future. One cannot erase the memories of abuse, they live in conscious and the subconscious, invading every aspect of ones life. Child abuse victims are given a life sentence, forced to live in the shadows of their abusers.

The use of the internet to sell things comes as no shock in our high tech digital age; however, what about the distribution of child pornography and the selling of children? The sad reality is that the use of such sites as MySpace and Craigslist have been at the forefront of these illicit and horrendous crimes. When people tell you that ‘you can literally buy anything online’, they are not kidding! The policing of such activities is has always been difficult for the authorities, but many question the sites themselves for even allowing services of such a sexual nature to even be advertised, thus opening the door for a multitude of illegal activities.

Last month, Love146 initiated a “Call to Action” campaign to ask Craiglist, popular public marketplace website, to make a New Year’s resolution of better monitoring its “Erotic Services” section in order to pro-actively prevent the sale and trafficking of children for sexual purposes. However Craigslist has thus far failed to respond to Love 146’s letter, and thus they are asking supporters to boycott the Craigslist website “until they publicly declare a 2008 resolution to implement safeguards and monitoring procedures that will eradicate the sale of human beings on the erotic services section of the website”. You an find Love 146’s petition letter here

Other organizations including, the Salvation Army, Polaris Project, The Loose Change to Loosen Chains Campaign, the NOT FOR SALE Campaign, Students and Artists Fighting to End Human Slavery, and many others are joining the fight against the use of sites such as Craigslist.

Stories such as the one about an Oakland Man who was Indicted For Pimping Teens On Web, are becoming all to common. The man was charged with the trafficking of two underage girls, for which he used sites, including Craigslist, to sell the girls as escorts.

Over the past year alone a number of pedophiles have have used craigslist to search for and solicit, including Brian Lee Nestor who’s ad posted this past September in the “Casual Encounters” section read; “Anybody into family fun? …bring your son and hang out with us.” (Craigslist.org a source of crimes). The site also has an “Erotic Services” section, which while trolling one can easily see a number of suspicious ad’s for young providers claiming to be 18, however looking at many photos the question of age is quick to come to mind. Seeing ad’s that read; “It’s my duty to please and perform your unforgettable desires”, one has to question who is really behind the numerous faceless young boys and girls who litter the various sections of craigslist. Other ad’s reading, “Older guy looking for young…”, “Daddy type seeking single young girl for fun and more.”, “Sugar Daddy For Young Hottie”, are ripe for traffickers to pawn their young victims on.

“…despite its millions of users and various social benefits, there’s a dark side of Craigslist that most users don’t see. In the “Erotic” section, human traffickers have found Craigslist to be one of the most efficient, effective (and free) ways to post children and women for sale.” -Katherine Chon Executive Director and Co-Founder of Polaris Project.

The sad reality is that the fight to end child trafficking has only just begun, and the road ahead is a long and difficult one, however the first big steps are being made. With the help of organizations and individuals we can work to eradicate this monstrous crime, to see that children are no longer seen as commodities availible for sale on the open market.

Links:
Craigs Crime List - The craigslist crime blotter
International Developments Section of Regulation of Child Pornography on the Internet - Cases and Materials related to Child Pornography on the Internet

The special screening was held in Washington DC last night for the acclaimed film, HOLLY, opened by Ambassador Mark Lagon, and was followed by a question and answer session, with Ambassador Lagon, Guy Jacobson, and Adi Ezroni.

A young girl running desperately through the streets, being chased by two men, her tiny feet taking her as fast as they can. Loosing her breath and her gain over her predators, she is finally caught despite the watchful eyes on the street, no one sees Holly’s (Thuy Nguyen) fate. Her eyes full of fear as she is brought back to her brothel owner, “You run again, I’ll kill you!”, she says. Locked in her room, “Let me out…Let me out…Let me out”, she screams, but Holly knows her efforts are futile and she quickly gives up and again excepts her dire fate.

A bell rings and girls quickly run from all directions to line the streets, a car approaches and they put on their best smiles. “I have new girl, she is virgin…very special!” Holly cowards away from the window as her ‘Mama San’ points to her, her virginity is priced at $1,000 for one week. Today Holly escapes her fate, as the Jon thinks the price is to high.

Patrick (Ron Livingston) is a lost soul, an American expat consumed by the desire to escape life he spends most of his time playing cards and drinking his troubles away. He finds himself stuck in the town laden with young children enslaved in prostitution, sadly this is no shock to Patrick and he continues to look blindly on his surroundings. But this time he cannot escape, and while it may seem like it only begins with a Pepsi, it begins the moment he looks up and into Holly’s eyes.

Shot on location in Cambodia, Holly will send you on an emotional journey through the streets of Phnom Penh an take you right into the heart of the notorious red light district where many scenes where filmed, some in actual brothels, which gives Holly the realness the film needed to drive it’s message home. Holly is not a film made to be a box office hit, it was not made to bring fame and glory to the films actors, producers and director, it was a film made to make a difference and that is exactly what it does. After you see Holly you will not have seen a movie, but you will have stared straight into the world of human trafficking and sexual slavery. Writer/producer Guy Jacobson, set out on a mission with this film, a mission that has now become a tireless life long mission for Jacobson and the rest of the films cast and crew. Holly doesn’t end at the box office, the film is only the beginning of a long journey to save millions of children like Holly.

Can Holly be saved? Patrick is told by Marie (Virginie Ledoyen) who works at AFESIP, a shelter for girls rescued from sexual slavery, when he inquires about what to do now that he saved Holly, from her fate, “You didn’t even save her yet. It takes five minutes to rescue a girl, but five years to reintegrate her into society”. Like Patrick we are often overrun with hopelessness as saving a child from slavery is no easy feat, but like Patrick and those who work tirelessly in the field, we cannot give up hope, we cannot stop working to to save those we can. Most of all we must work at the roots of the problem, demand and poverty, and see that prevention is the number one priority world wide.

As Patrick says in the film, when asked why he was trying to save Holly, “You develop this glazed stare…and as long as you don’t look into their eyes you are fine…, but I stopped, I looked into her eyes!” And like Patrick I too have looked into the eyes of slavery and no longer can I ever look away. I hope Holly gives you the incite you need so that you too can never look away. If we begin to open eyes around the world, then we will begin to see the enormity of the problem of this $12 billion dollar criminal industry. An industry in which more than 1 million children, women and men around the world are sold into sexual slavery every year, according to UNICEF. The U.S. State Department estimates 800,000 victims are trafficked across international borders annually. More than a quarter of the victims of sex trafficking and sexual slavery are children aged 9-15 years old, but children as young as 5, and even a year old are often sent into this world of darkness.

For more information on the film, including interviews with writer/producer Guy Jacobson and producer Adi Ezroni, and Ron Livingston, go to Priority Films

Links:
Red Light Children’s Project
Somaly Mam Foundation
AFESIP
The Facts About Sex Tourism

Related MySpace and Facebook Pages
Share and promote the film to all your friends, and you will all ready be making a difference:
K-11 Project
Red Light Children Campaign
Holly
Child Sexploitation. Expose it. Fight it. End it
The Redlight Children Campaign

Where Can You See Holly?

Here are some locations, but please check your local listings, as the film will make a second launch after the holidays. Some of the cinemas will be holding special screenings with an opportunity to meet the film makers and learn more about the issues.

Dupont Theater in Washington, DC
Angelika in Houston, TX
Cinemark Westchase in Houston, TX
L.A. Music Hall in Los Angeles, CA
Regal Garden Grove in Los Angeles, CA
Regal Westminster in Los Angeles, CA
Regal Long Beach Stadium in Long Beach, CA
Uptown Birmingham in Detroit, MI
Kabuki Theater in San Francisco, CA - Nov. 30th Q&A with writer/producer Guy Jacobson
Rialto Cinemas Elmwood in Berkeley, CA
Regal Village Square in Las Vegas, NV
Regal Boulder Station 11 in Las Vegas, NV
Regal Meridian in Seattle, WA - Dec. 2nd Q&A with writer/producer Guy Jacobson
Regal Valley Art in Tempe, AZ
Regal Fox Tower in Portland, OR - Nov. 30th Q&A with producer Adi Ezroni
Regal Arbor Cinema in Austin, TX - Dec. 2nd Q&A with producer Adi Ezroni

In South Africa the battle against HIV/AIDS looks not to be a battle won, but a battle lost. UNICEF’s South Africa representative Macharia Kamau said that infection and death rates in the are outweighing the rate of treatment. The ones paying the highest price for this lost race, are the children whose parents are rapidly dying of Aids, therefore leaving a devastating image for the futture. Kamau said if this trend continues, some five million orphans may plauge South Africa by 2015. (BBC)

For the first time the World Food Program (WFP) has been forced to air drop food in Uganda following the worst flooding in 35 years. In a statement issued on October 16, the WFP said the operation was a desperate last resort to help tens of thousands of people after flooding washed away vital roads. The agency said it urgently needs around USD 20 million for food and trucks to transport September rations to around 250,000 people. (Reuters)

Suspected pedophile targeted has been arrested in Thailand, the Canadian was targeted in global manhunt, thanks to efforts to unscramble digital images. The arrested was Christopher Paul Neil, a schoolteacher who was under suspicion of sexually abusing Cambodian and Vietnamese boys. The capture of Neil was in thanks to both to border guards in Thailand and neighboring countries, who remained on high alert, after immigration cameras captured Neil arriving at Bangkok’s international airport last Thursday from South Korea. (AP)

The Lebanese government must do more to alleviate the miserable conditions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who are treated like “second-class citizens,” Amnesty International said on October 17. In a report “Exiled and Suffering: Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon,” the London-based human rights group said the refugees face discrimination in education, jobs, health care and housing. More than half the 400,000 registered Palestinian refugees in Lebanon live in 12 cramped, squalid and often unsanitary camps scattered across the country. (Reuters)

While the movie, Trade, may be a somewhat glamorized and dramatized Hollywood film, you are left with questions regarding the plot. The film does however highlight the many of the realities of modern day slavery and human trafficking…a problem which plagues our global world. By giving a face to human trafficking, the film proves to be a great tool in raising much needed awareness to an issues that is all too often forgotten.

The film weaves the stories of various aspects of human trafficking and modern slavery, with a vivid reminder of the violence that greed causes. Taking the fate of a 13 year old Mexican girl kidnapped from the streets outside her home, and a young Polish mother tricked into thinking she was becoming a model, and few sideline stories. Children sold at auction to the highest bidder…like a pair of shoes on eBay…a whim, an indulgent desire to worn once and then tossed in the back of the closet when you have gotten your best out of them. Only these are not overpriced shoes, but the purity of innocent children, sold for nothing more than greed in a market of flesh.

The movie will leave you with moments of laughter as the young girl Adrian’s(Paulina Gaitan) brother Jorge (Cesar Ramos) and Ray (Kevin Kline), a cop with a mission to find his own long lost daughter, engage in their own comedic clash of cultures and ages, while racing tirelessly across the country in search of Adrian. However these comic outtakes, are quickly broken, by the brutal images bestowed upon the human cargo, that Adrian and Veronica (Alicja Bachleda) have been thrust into like pieces of meat. Reality and desperation often take over, as time ticks away, and Jorge knows if they do not act quickly 13 year old Adrian will be lost forever.

The reality is, it’s Hollywood, and not the best of it, the movie plot doesn’t always make sense. Why is Ray willing to give up his life savings, and does a cop have that much sitting in the bank, to quickly grab to buy a girl he’s never met? The end of the movie still leaves you with many unanswered questions, like: “What happened to Ray’s daughter?, “Is she the vicious madam?”. Nontheless despite its plot and storyline pitfalls, the movie does make you think and it surely brings attention to a much need cause. For all of its woes, you will hopefully leave the theater asking yourself what you can do to help. One thing did stick with me in the movie, Ray said to Jorge when talking about his daughter:

“I realized I gave up too soon…which is something I do a lot of!’

Giving up too soon is something we all do a lot of, and we must not do in the case of modern day slavery and human trafficking. There is one such citizen activist group in DC, Stop Modern Slavery, who wasn’t about to let movie viewers give up or forget once the credits started to roll. The group was on hand outside the E Street Cinema, in downtown, Washington D.C., to hand movie goers more facts on modern slavery and human trafficking. Information was given to patrons from Free the Slaves, Stop Modern Slavery, and Dreams of Freedom (which is hosting fundraising and awareness events in DC from October 8-13).

We cannot all buy and free a slave, like Ray, but we can all raise awareness and become active in the fight to end human trafficking and stomp out slavery once and for all!

*The movie is based on the 2004 NY Times article, “The Girls Next Door”, by Peter Landesman

Human Trafficking Links