Maria Teresa Ramos, grandmother of Jerzi Esli, kidnapped with other 11 people from a bar in May, reads a newspaper on August 23, 2013, in the popular neighborhood of Tepito, in Mexico City. The victims were kidnapped from a downtown bar in broad daylight on a Sunday morning three months ago in a case that raised concerns about security in Mexico City, which has been relatively immune from the country’s drug cartel violence. AFP PHOTO/RONALDO SCHEMIDT | Getty
Few crime statistics are as sobering as the ones coming out of Mexico these days.
The latest public security report, (pdf, Spanish link) released by Mexico’s statistics bureau (INEGI) earlier this week, reveals the extent of the country’s rampant and virtually unpunished kidnapping problem. According to the report (p.21), a mind-boggling 105,682 kidnappings were committed in Mexico last year, of which an incredibly small 1,317 were reported to local or federal authorities. In other words, 99% of kidnappings in Mexico flew under the radar last year.
Many kidnappings are drug-related, and therefore often kept from authorities because victims involved in the drug trade want to avoid backlash or crackdowns on other offenses. But a good deal of the 100,000+ abductions went unreported on suspicion that nothing would be done, or worse, that more harm would come to the involved parties, according to local digital news siteAnimal Politico (link in Spanish). A survey taken by INEGI and included in the statistics bureau’s report found that millions of crime victims simply considered reporting crimes “a waste of time.”
Mexico’s local police are famously negligent when it comes to identifying, pursuing and reporting crimes. A study in 2011 (link in Spanish) found that Mexican police investigated a mere 4.5% of crimes. Even when detained, criminals are rarely convicted because of the country’s broken justice system—one which the US has been trying (and failing) to help Mexico with for years. Only 31% of those arrested on drug charges between 2006 and 2011 were actually convicted, according to a report (link in Spanish) released by Mexico’s attorney general’s office last year.
Mexico’s government is equally ineffective with murders, disappearances and other serious crimes. Less than 20% of roughly 4,000 disappearances in 2012 were reported, and 98% of murders last year went unsolved. The federal government only investigated 6% of all crimes in Mexico last year.
Understandably, Mexicans tend to look behind their back in public places. Take a look at this chart:
Thanks to fallout from the government’s continued crackdown on the illegal drug trade, the country’s crime rate—the number of crimes committed per 100 heads—is above 34, a near historic high. According to local security and justice watchdog the National Citizen’s Observatory, Mexico’s crime problem is at its worst since at least 1997. No wonder Mexicans are more concerned with security (p. 12) than they are with unemployment, inflation, corruption or even health.
Editor’s note: In this series, CNN investigates international adoption, hearing from families, children and key experts on its decline, and whether the trend could — or should — be reversed.
(CNN) — Srey Powers’ earliest memories in Cambodia are “waking up each morning, climbing trees to forage for fruit and berries with my cousins, and sitting around a fire each night with the one meal provided,” the 19-year-old said.
Born in a refugee camp, Powers remembers traveling at age 6 for two days by moped, car and foot “only to be left at a building with many infants and toddlers and strange adults,” she said.
At the orphanage, she met her new American family — Claudia and Patrick Powers from Long Island, New York.
“From day one, I had a bond with my mother. Our first language was through playing soccer,” recalled Powers, who was named most valuable player after leading her high school to the 2010 girls soccer state championship.
Powers was adopted from Cambodia in 1999.
Two years later, the U.S. closed Cambodia to adoptions due to allegations of corruption.
The U.S. adoption story of another 19-year-old is different.
“When I was 13, I was sold,” said Tarikuwa Lemma, who grew up in Ethiopia.
She and her two sisters were adopted by an Arizona family who were told Lemma’s parents died of AIDS.
“The truth was that our mother had died as a result of complications during childbirth, and our father was alive and well,” said Lemma.
Tarikuwa Lemma thought she was being sent to the U.S. for a home study program.
Lemma’s family was scammed by a man who said the girls were being sent to the United States on a study program, she said. Only when the sisters arrived did they realize their legal rights had been signed away to new parents.
“I wanted to escape from the people I felt had kidnapped us from our homeland, our culture and our family,” said Lemma, who hopped from three different U.S. adoptive homes before becoming independent after turning 18. “My sisters and I had a father, a brother and older sisters, plus a large extended family that cared for us and loved us. We were middle class by Ethiopian standards, not poor.”
These tales paint the divide on which, experts say, the legal and ethical debate on international adoption rests: Do the risks of abuse in a minority of cases outweigh the larger good that most adoptions provide?
Healing or ‘hostage taking’?
As international adoption becomes more difficult, a growing number of voices in the U.S., Australia and elsewhere are pushing to reduce restrictions that limit adopting from abroad.
“In every human endeavor, there is a chance for abuse,” said Elizabeth Bartholet, director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School, who adopted two children from Peru in the 1980s.
“But if a plane goes down, they don’t ground the whole airline industry … the only institution I can think of that when there’s a problem, they shut it down, is international adoption.”
Critics argue the hunger to adopt children from developing nations helps feed nefarious practices, as families are often deceived or coerced into giving their children up for adoption.
“The same story happens again in country after country,” said David Smolin, director of the center for Children, Law and Ethics at Samford University.
Smolin became a legal expert on international adoption issues after he and his wife adopted two daughters from India in 1998 only to discover that the girls were stolen from their mother.
Smolin, along with many other experts and organizations — including UNICEF and the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption — believe that orphans being adopted from abroad should be a last-case scenario, with more emphasis placed on helping keep children in their home country, such as providing day care, foster care, better orphanages and more domestic adoption.
Asked whether abuse in a minority of adoption cases should result in the closure of entire countries, Smolin said: “That’s a false choice. I don’t appreciate our family or my daughters’ family in India being used as collateral damage. That’s like hostage-taking.”
Srey Powers, adopted from Cambodia when she was six years old, visits her birth sister’s village in 2010.
International adoption ‘Stuck’
Adoption advocates argue the current system is holding children hostage, that developing in-country programs are at least a generation away — time that the millions currently languishing in orphanages can ill afford.
“The de facto result (of in-country preference) is they would prefer to have the children in institutional life rather than intercountry adoption,” Bartholet said. “The results are more developmental problems, more kids on the street and more cost to the government to institutionalize these kids.”
Until the global decline of transnational adoption in 2004, “40,000 kids a year were getting really good homes and moving from devastating circumstances,” according to Bartholet. “That’s an amazing social program that changes people at no cost to the home country. To shut that down is tragic.”
Craig Juntunen, a former quarterback in the Canadian Football League and an entrepreneur who retired at age 43, toured a Haiti orphanage in 2006.
The experience changed his life, as he watched children “climbing over each other” to get a hug.
Later that year, he and his wife adopted three children from Haiti.
“Looking into their eyes when they first came, we were filled with a happiness we had never felt before,” said Juntunen, who lives in Scottsdale, Arizona. “But, I was constantly reminded of how kids living in institutions, deprived of such simple things as human contact, are robbed of the opportunity to grow into happy, healthy people.”
He wrote about his experience in a book, “Both Ends Burning,” which is now the name of the international adoption advocacy group he founded.
The group produced a documentary, “Stuck,” documenting the travails and successes of people attempting to adopt in Vietnam, Ethiopia and Haiti. In each case, children matched for adoption continue to spend years in institutions while adoption requests move at glacial speeds across two countries.
Juntunen’s group took the film on the road, showing it in cineplexes, film festivals and churches across 60 cities in 78 days, culminating in an “empty stroller march” on Capitol Hill in Washington.
Craig Juntunen with his wife Kathi, and their children (from left) Espie, Amelec, and Quinn.
A goal of Juntunen’s group is to raise international adoption in the U.S. to 50,000 children a year and cut the average time to approve adoptions to nine months.
In 2011, fewer than 10,000 overseas children were adopted in the U.S., with an average wait time of three years.
“We have to create the social and political will to deal with these things,” he said.
The boom-bust cycle
One country closes, and another country becomes this popular hotspot
Kathryn Joyce, author of “The Child Catchers”
To debunk the idea that corruption is the exception in the current international adoption systems, critics point to Guatemala, which was shut down in 2007 for adoption after allegations of families being coerced and children kidnapped to feed U.S. demand.
Before Guatemala closed to U.S. adoptions, the ratio of children adopted hit one per every 100 live births, according to the Adoption Council — more than double the rate in Latvia, the next-highest nation.
Two years later, the number of foreign adoptions from Guatemala dropped 90%.
As Guatemala closed, adoptions in Ethiopia — now the second-largest supplier of orphans to American families — skyrocketed from fewer than 900 in 2003 to 4,564 in 2009.
“International adoption tends to work in this boom-bust cycle … one country closes, and another country becomes this popular hotspot,” said Kathryn Joyce, author of “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption.”
Many adoption agencies went from Guatemala to Ethiopia where “the number of agencies leaped from five to 50 in a few short years,” said Joyce, who traveled to Ethiopia while researching her book.
Brokers who source children for agencies can earn as much as $5,000 per child — “five times the amount they might expect to earn a year,” she said. “The influence of all this U.S. money can be distorting.”
Born in Liberia, Cynthia Newton, left, and her brother, James, say the Pledge of Allegiance during their 2011 citizenship ceremony.
Whole economies can emerge when international adoption blooms in a developing nation. Employment from agencies, new guesthouses and hotels for the influx of prospective parents, and even a rise in “searchers” — people paid to investigate the birth origins of a child like Lemma when U.S. families begin to doubt the stories agencies provide.
“Adoption is a business, there is no question, sadly,” said Susan Soonkeum Cox, vice president of policy and external affairs at Holt International, a nonprofit Christian adoption agency based in the U.S. “Many people got into this because it’s an opportunity to help (orphans), but for other people it was a lucrative business opportunity. You could see this in the explosion of adoption agencies and practitioners.
“There are so many cases of corruption … as an adoption agency, no one is more appalled, because we all get stuck with it and have our reputation smeared.”
Haiti earthquake and adoption theology
The international adoption debate played out on the world stage in the aftermath of the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake, which killed 200,000, when a group of U.S. Christian missionaries were accused of kidnapping “orphans.”
Laura Silsby led a group of 10 missionaries from Idaho that was stopped at the Dominican Republic border as they tried to cross the border with 33 children without proper legal documentation.
Silsby originally claimed the children were orphaned or abandoned, but the Haitian government and the orphans’ charity SOS Children later found that all had at least one living parent.
Laura Silsby, the head of New Life Children’s Refuge, arrives for a Port-au-Prince court hearing in February 2010 in Haiti.
Charges against all but Silsby were dropped; Silsby was jailed for four months before being tried on charges of arranging illegal travel by a Haitian court and released on time served.
Some parents told CNN they placed their children in Silsby’s care because that was the only way they knew to ensure a better quality of life for them.
Silsby’s group, New Life Children’s Refuge, said it was going to house the children in a converted hotel in the Dominican Republic and later move them to an orphanage.
According to the itinerary of Silsby’s mission, part of the group’s plan, in addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, was for the planned orphanage to “equip each child with a solid education and vocational skills as well as opportunities for adoption into a loving Christian family.”
While the incident — which some labeled “kidnapping for Jesus” — painted a dark picture of good intentions for international adoption advocates, the Haiti earthquake also offered a victory when in April 2010, the Obama administration granted “humanitarian parole” to speed up U.S. adoptions of Haitian children already in progress.
By August of that year, some 1,500 Haitian orphans joined U.S. families.
Can the system be fixed?
Smolin of Samford University says the problem with the current international adoption system comes down to one issue: money.
“I’m not a proponent of shutting down intercountry adoption,” Smolin said. But when a large amount of cash comes to developing countries with weak governments, “it reproduces systematic problems over and over again.”
Smolin wants to see limits on the amount of money and number of agencies that can operate in a given country.
Bartholet of Harvard says limiting agencies will place more control in weak governments of developing countries.
“If you shut down private intermediaries, you shut down international adoption,” she said.
Children play at Amani Baby Cottage, an orphanage in Uganda.
Juntunen’s group wants a U.S.-led effort to help developing countries with technology and training that will improve records — such as the creation of accurate birth certificates — and faster adoption procedures.
“I believe we have to start bringing nations together to talk about this,” he said.
Tarikuwa Lemma, who seven years ago was taken from her mother in Ethiopia, is writing a book about her experiences as she’s about to start college.
“I am fighting to make sure that first families and adoptive families know the truth about the possibilities of fraud and human trafficking in adoption,” she said.
Meanwhile, Srey Powers is a sophomore studying accounting at State University of New York at Oneonta. While visiting Cambodia three years ago, she found her grandmother, who spoke of the difficult choice to give Srey up for adoption.
At one point, her grandmother turned to her adoptive mother and asked in a harsh tone if she had her “working in servitude, farming the fields.” Her Cambodian grandmother assumed Powers’ suntan was from working outside, not playing soccer.
“Watching my mother’s attempt to put my (grandmother) at ease, I had a new level of gratitude for her, my father, my siblings and my life in America,” she said.
Women look out the windows of a building on Garstin Bastion Road, the red-light district in New Delhi. Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg
By Andrew MacAskill & Bibhudatta Pradhan
Like many Indian girls, Suchitra was taught her future profession by her mother. In her village, there was only one path. Even before she’d reached puberty, Suchitra had learned different sexual positions and other ways to please a customer.
At age 14, a man she had never seen before showed up one day at the family’s house near Bharatpur in northern India. At her mother’s urging, Suchitra got into his car. Six hours later they reached their destination. It was a brothel in New Delhi’s red-light district. She had been sent into sexual servitude.
“I always knew that this would be my life,” said Suchitra, sitting in her wardrobe-sized room and wearing a low-cut green top and jeans, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. “I can never forget what I’ve done but it is the only way for my family to earn a living.”
Suchitra, now 20, is from one of hundreds of villages in India where centuries-old tradition dictates that most girls enter into a life of prostitution. Rising wealth hasn’t reduced the trafficking of girls for sex in the world’s second-most populous nation: The number of child prostitutes is growing and the average recruitment age has dropped to between nine and 12 years old, according to the Delhi-based National Human Rights Commission.
“We are witnessing an unprecedented growth in prostitution,” said K.K. Mukherjee, a sociologist who has studied sex workers for more than three decades and has written government reports on the subject. “It is being driven by rising levels of income but also by a change in sexual attitudes and the increasing migration of women to cities.”
A prostitute stands at the entrance of her room as her customer sits on the bed in a village red light district in Rajasthan, India.
Trafficking Girls
Districts such as Bharatpur, where half of the women are illiterate, are breeding grounds for the country’s $4 billion sex trafficking industry. India has 3 million sex workers, of whom 1.2 million are below the age of 18, according to a government estimate, and the South Asian nation traffics more women for sex than any other country.
The growth of underage prostitution in a country whose gross domestic product has risen on average about 8 percent annually in the past decade is testimony to the treatment of women and the power of caste in the world’s biggest democracy. India, which carries out almost 40 percent of the world’s female sterilizations, where a woman is raped on average every 21 minutes and where a third of all women are illiterate, is failing to change views that undercut the status of women.
Whole families from some castes at the bottom rungs of India’s social hierarchy rely on income from their daughters’ sex work, with fathers and brothers often acting as pimps. The girls often have their virginity auctioned to the highest bidder once they reach puberty.
Ignoring Rape
Suchitra, who is of the Bedia caste, shows how the caste-based system determines access to occupations and social status. Rooted in religion, the millennia-old structure marginalizes certain groups, imprisoning women in a cycle of isolation and abuse. Many female members of the Bedia community, which numbers about 20,000, say they are treated like outcasts. They can’t marry if they have worked as a prostitute, are refused service in shops, are called “whores” and are greeted with disinterest by police when one of them is raped.
“Caste remains a defining feature for most Indians,” said Satish Misra, a political analyst at the Observer Research Foundation, a policy group based in New Delhi. “These attitudes bring an enormous cost in terms of a lack of social mobility and lost economic opportunities.”
Cheap Perfume
A single bare bulb exudes dim light in Suchitra’s room, just enough to see the black water stains on the peeling, faded pastel-green walls. Used condoms lie on the floor. The stench of urine, sweat and cheap perfume hangs in the air. Rats gnaw at piles of garbage in the corridors outside.
Suchitra, who would only give her first name for fear of arrest by the police, said she has sex with as many as a dozen men a day for as little as 100 rupees ($1.60) a time. A concrete slab that takes up most of her room serves as a bed, where she sleeps and does her work. Customers have threatened her with knives, guns and beer bottles, she said.
Government officials and activists working to break the born-into-prostitution custom say that high levels of illiteracy and caste-based prejudice make it difficult for the women to earn a living any other way.
“It is going to be very difficult to stop,” said Niraj Pawan, the top government official in Bharatpur, who is struggling to curb the practice among the Bedia community. “How do you convince these illiterate girls, with no skills, facing enormous family pressure to be a prostitute to take a job where they will earn a tenth of their current pay?”
A young prostitute covers her face in a village red light district in Rajasthan, India.
More Income
Bedia women say they can earn between 1,000 and 2,000 rupees a day working as prostitutes. That compares with the average daily income in India of 188 rupees.
The Bedias trace their roots to a 16th century battle in Rajasthan known as the Siege of Chittorgarh in which the Mughal forces defeated the Hindu Rajputs. The losers fled into the forests where they led a nomadic life on the fringes of the law. As told by members of the Bedia community, their women were driven into prostitution by the ensuing economic deprivation.
Many of the girls who are raised as prostitutes are injected with the hormone oxytocin to make their breasts grow faster, Pawan said. Unlike in the rest of India, where there is a traditional preference for boys that has led to a skewed sex ratio, Pawan said the Bedia community prefers girl babies because they are a potential source of income.
Kidnapping Children
It was because she gave birth to a boy that Swati Kumari, a 25-year-old member of the Bedia caste in Bharatpur, said she endured months of abuse by her husband and parents-in-law. She fled to her parents’ house after she repeatedly had her hair pulled, was punched in the face and had objects thrown at her. She said her son also faced physical abuse from her husband and his family.
“I don’t want to tell you all the things that they did to me,” said Kumari, sitting on a charpoy, or rope bed, in the courtyard of the home of her parents, who filed a complaint with the police over their daughter’s abuse. “They told me that to make up for the loss of earnings I had to go work as a prostitute instead. When I refused, the torture got worse.” Kumari declined to provide contact information for her husband and in-laws.
To bolster their income, the Bedia, Nat and Kanjar communities are involved in trafficking rings that kidnap children from other communities, who are then raised in their villages, the United Nations said in a 2013 report. Some of the girls are sent to Mumbai and Middle Eastern countries to work in dance bars and escort services, the report said.
Forged Passports
Sex trafficking rings prey on the poor and illiterate among India’s almost 600 million female population. The traffickers often operate with impunity due to poor police enforcement, compliant officials and ingrained traditions of caste, said Siddharth Kara, a fellow with the Carr Center Program on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Harvard University in Cambridge,Massachusetts.
“Law enforcement officials are often complicit,” said Kara. “They either take bribes or look the other way or just don’t see it as something they need to be concerned about.”
Two policemen were among six people arrested for operating an extortion and prostitution ring in Delhi, the police announced last month. A police team investigating a sex racket last year in the south-western city of Kochi revealed that about a dozen girls had been taken out of the country on forged passports to the Persian Gulf with the aid of local airport officials, the UN said in its report.
Prostitutes wait for customers in a village red light district in Rajasthan.
Police Role
“Official complicity in trafficking was a serious problem that remained largely unaddressed by the government,” the U.S. State Department said in the India section of its 2013 human trafficking report. “Some corrupt law enforcement officers facilitated the movement of sex trafficking victims, protected suspected traffickers and brothel keepers from enforcement of the law, took bribes from sex trafficking establishments and sexual services from victims, and tipped-off sex and labor traffickers to impede rescue efforts.”
The police regularly carry out raids to rescue women and girls trafficked into prostitution, said Alok Kumar, a deputy commissioner of Delhi Police who is responsible for the area that covers the capital’s red light district. Kumar said he wasn’t aware of the involvement of any policemen in assisting sex trafficking rings.
Krishna Tirath, the minister for women and child development, did not respond to emails, phone calls and visits to her office seeking comment. A secretary in the office of Nita Chowdhury, the top civil servant in the department, said she didn’t have time to meet.
Rape Increase
In India it is illegal to live off the earnings of a prostitute, run a brothel or solicit for sex in public places. It isn’t illegal, though, to take money for sex.
Parliament passed a bill in March that mandated tougher sentences in rape cases and broadened the definition of trafficking, after thousands of people took to the streets in December to protest the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old Delhi student. A New Delhi court on Sept. 13 sentenced four men to death for the crime.
There has been a 16 percent jump in the number of reported rapes nationally in India in the five years ending in 2012, and a 902 percent jump since 1971, according to police records. The increase may be the result of growing confidence in reporting assaults, police said.
The changes to the penal code aimed at bolstering women’s safety include allowing rape that results in the death of the victim to be treated as a capital offense. Lawmakers also mandatedlife imprisonment for police officers found to have aided in trafficking.
Purple Lipstick
The town of Bharatpur, located about 160 kilometers south of Delhi and the place where Suchitra was schooled in prostitution, is one of the main homes of the Bedia. The community has also spread out into the surrounding villages, located among rolling green fields.
At first glance Panchi Ka Nagla looks like many other villages in rural India, with its mud-brick homes, tea stalls and foraging goats. The women and teenage girls wearing bright purple lipstick and revealing tops suggest something different.
They loiter by the road running past the village, waiting for customers. Once the price has been negotiated, they head off to one of the houses or into the bushes with the customer. Children playing nearby watch the scene play out over and over. The village men lounge on cots on thatch porches, prodding their daughters and sisters to hook more customers.
Signage warning of the penalties for trafficking minor girls hangs from a building on Garstin Bastion Road, the red-light district in New Delhi.
Virginity Auction
“Of course it makes us sad that we have to force our women into this line of work, but how else can we earn this sort of money?” said Pratap, 30, who uses a single name and lives off the earnings of his sister, Manju, who was soliciting customers nearby. “It is easy for them. They don’t have to work hard for it.”
Manju’s virginity was auctioned for 25,000 rupees 11 years ago to a hotel manager from the northern city of Agra shortly after she had her first period at age 13. A ceremony called nathni utarna, which literally means “taking off the nose ring,” was held to signify that she was ready to enter the sex trade.
Keeping the money from the auction sale is considered inauspicious, so a lavish party was held. Guests from nearby Bedia villages were invited and Manju was adorned with new jewelry and clothes, she said. The festivities culminated in a feast at which alcohol was served and a goat was slaughtered.
Marriage Ban
“The first time I was so scared, I cried a lot,” said Manju, spitting a mouthful of paan, a betel leaf concoction, onto the floor of her mud shack. A small woman with dark eyes exaggerated by the use of thick mascara, Manju said she has sex with about six men a day and doesn’t know who the fathers of her three children are.
The rules of Manju’s caste dictate that she will never be allowed to marry because she has worked as a prostitute. Women married to Bedia men usually come from outside the community and are exempt from working as prostitutes. A Bedia girl can only begin sex work once she’s had her period and Bedia men are prohibited from having sex with prostitutes from their community, villagers said.
“Of course it is very difficult to understand why you want your own daughter or wife to sleep with other men,” said sociologist Mukherjee. “In a patriarchal society like India women are just considered a commodity to exploit and to earn you money.”
‘Good Business’
Stiffer financial penalties for running a brothel and successfully prosecuting sex traffickers would reduce the number of women drawn into prostitution, said Kara. The current penalty for operating a brothel is between one and three years in jail and a fine of as much as 2,000 rupees.
“Even if all the owners of brothels in which sex slaves were exploited were convicted each and every year, sex trafficking would still be a high-profit, minimal-risk venture,” Kara said. “It is a very good business model” for the brothel owners, he said.
Ultimately, the key to extracting women from a world of sexual slavery is schooling, said Soumya Pratheek, who works for Apne Aap, a Delhi-based group that campaigns against sex trafficking in India. Some 73 percent of children aged 11 in schools in the state of Rajasthan are unable to subtract and 79 percent can’t recognize numbers between 10 and 99, according to the 2012 Annual Status of Education Report.
“The most important tool that we have is education,” said Pratheek. “Girls must go to school. They need to know that their body is theirs. It is not something that other people can trade in.”
Role Model
In Bharatpur, Kumari, who took refuge in her parents’ home, said she is the first woman from the local Bedia community to finish college. After graduating with a degree in Hindi, Sanskrit and political science this summer, she said she wants to work as a teacher. Because she is from a low caste she won’t be given a job at a private school and so will seek employment at a government school, she said.
“I want to be a role model in my community and show people that there is a way out,” Kumari said. “I understand the pull of this tradition is very strong. But if women can get a good education and earn more money then maybe one day they won’t be forced to work as prostitutes.”
Like Suchitra, other Bedia girls also end up working on Garstin Bastion Road, the red-light district in New Delhi. The area, just a few minutes’ walk from the city’s main train station, is home to shops selling water pumps, paint, tiles and toilet seats, as well as 92 brothels and about 4,000 prostitutes, according to data cited in the UN report.
Too Late
Hundreds of women stand on balconies behind black metal grills overlooking the mile-long road, beckoning to passersby to come inside. Customers walk through dark stairwells to reach the brothels. Signs on the walls carry a warning: “Beware of the pickpockets and pimps.”
The entrance to the brothel where Suchitra works opens onto a room with wooden benches, where the women sit talking and brushing their hair in between soliciting customers. Men fasten their trousers as they emerge from adjoining chambers.
Suchitra, who was talking about the dangers of her job, suddenly broke off the interview to join a group of her colleagues trying to solicit a customer who had entered the brothel. She arrived too late and the man headed off with another woman.
“This is my life, I can never do anything else,” she said. “I just pray that one day other girls like me will be able to do something different.”
Egypt’s political unrest has brought suffering not only to its own people but also to hundreds of African refugees. Their goal is Israel but many end up as hostages on the Sinai Peninsula.
Egypt’s political unrest has brought suffering not only to its own people but also to hundreds of African refugees.
By Adrian Kriesch / cm
Kahassay Woldesselasie simply wanted to get away from Eritrea. He planned to begin a new life in a country where citizens are not as brutally suppressed as in his East African homeland. Eritrea, located in the Horn of Africa, is one of the world’s most secretive and repressive regimes.
Woldesselasie initially fled to neighboring Sudan. While there he heard rumors of good jobs being offered in Israel. A human trafficking syndicate offered to take him there. Woldesselasie agreed and fell into their trap. The traffickers abducted him and took him as a hostage to the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula.
On the journey they blindfolded him, there was little food and water. The gangsters threatened to kill him if he did not pay ransom. “You have no choice but to call your relatives,” Woldesselasie told DW in an interview. “If they agree to pay, you might be lucky. But if they don’t, you’re dead.”
The lucky and theunlucky
Israel refers to asylum seekers from Africa as ‘infiltrators’
Woldesselasie was one of the lucky ones. Family members living abroad agreed to pay for his release.
He was set free and finally managed to cross the border into Israel.
Not many are as lucky as Woldesselasie, says Hamdy al-Azazy, an Egyptian human rights activist who lives in al-Arish, the capital of the North Sinai region. He has met Eritrean refugees who had been held captive for weeks in torture camps.
While their families are listening over the phone, the victims would be subjected to burnings or have their limbs broken. Such painful experiences would then push even the poorest of families to send money. Those who don’t comply risk having their relatives being buried in the desert. According to al-Azazy, more than 500 remains of dead bodies of Africans were discovered in the desert in the past years.
The Sinai equation
The Sinai Peninsula has long been a powder keg. The indigenous population consists of Bedouin Arab tribes who settled there several hundred years ago. Today, they only represent about half of the approximately 500,000 inhabitants.
Israel withdrew from the area back in 1982 and left it to the Egyptian state. Egypt then took the best land from the Bedouins, says Günter Meyer, director of the Center for Research on the Arab World at the University of Mainz. “This goes back to a long period of discrimination against the Bedouin population.” According to Meyer, the Bedouins were seen by Egyptians as Israeli collaborators, drug smugglers and illiterate.”
Meyer however emphasizes that only a small minority of the Bedouin is involved in the criminal gangs that deal in human trafficking.
According to Human Rights Watch over 1,500 Eritreans flee the country every month. Several men who are refugees in the Sinai are seated on the ground .
Following the Arab Spring which began in 2011, security forces have been weakened in the Sinai Peninsula giving the traffickers more leeway. The situation has “escalated dramatically,” Meyer warns.
There are no known figures for the number of refugees detained in torture camps in the Sinai or how many of those hostages have perished. According to the Israeli government, more than 10,000 illegal immigrants crossed the Sinai border into Israel in 2012. Most of them came from Eritrea and Sudan. But in Israel, a nation once founded by immigrants, the refugees are not welcome. They have little chance of obtaining political asylum. Instead Israel has built a more than 200-kilometer – long (124 miles) fence against them. In the first five months of 2013, only 33 refugees managed to cross the border.
Little international support
The world, including the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), has turned a deaf ear to the plight of these refugees, says human rights activist Hamdy al-Azazy. “They write their reports from their air-conditioned offices in Cairo,” he laments.
“Nobody is on site to assess the real situation. I’m the only one here in the midst of all these dangers.” There have been several attacks on him, he adds.
His office was ransacked, his children have been attacked.
African asylum seekers meet with harsh reality in Israel. The few meager belongings of a refugee lie scattered around the area of the park which he has made his home.Ashley Gallagher, Tel Aviv May 2013via: DW/ Robert Mudge,
Al-Azazy also raises serious allegations against the Egyptian security forces. According to him victims who manage to escape from the hands of the traffickers are detained as criminals because they are in the country illegally. But the perpetrators of human trafficking enjoy a life of luxury in large villas. He believes the traffickers are supported by Egypt’s security agencies.
“Traffickers pay a lot of bribes so that they can freely bring refugees to the Sinai.”
Kahassay Woldesselasie does not feel at home in Israel. He hopes that one day peace and freedom will reign in his East African nation so he can return.
In a country where many families are allowed only one child, the notion that one’s son or daughter could be abducted and sold feels almost impossibly horrible. And yet, as a new documentary makes clear, it happens in China with stunning frequency.
“Most of foreigners don’t know this is happening at all,” says Charlie Custer, a blogger who co-produced and directed the film, “Living With Dead Hearts,” with his wife Leia Li. “Chinese don’t know it is happening or they know it is happening but don’t know it is happening in this scale.”
Simultaneously compelling and hard to watch, Mr. Custer’s film, released online last week, is the result of roughly two years of shooting, funded in part by $7,500 in donations solicited through social media. The blogger-turned-filmmaker was motivated to make the film, he says, because child abduction is a long-running problem in China – and because it’s an issue that transcends political divisions inside the country.
“I thought about doing a piece on censorship in China, or political dissent, but the government and those who defend it have a rationale behind it,” said Charlie. “Kidnapping of children is one of the China social issues that everybody, at least from moral perspective, agrees should not happen.”
The market for stolen children is growing, according to state media reports, which put the price for an abducted child at between 30,000 and 80,000 yuan ($4,900 to $13,000). Some are sold into families, some into prostitution or marriage and some into begging gangs.
Authorities disagree over just how many children are abducted in China. In June, state broadcaster China National Radio estimated 200,000 children are abducted in the country every year (in Chinese) – a number that was rejected a few days later by a senior police official. The film puts the number at around 70,000.
“The statistics are terrifying, but they’re just statistics, especially for people outside China,” Mr. Custer said.” We want to do a film that puts people in front of you and puts a more human face on the statistics.”
The first-time director got started by making cold calls to families that had reported losing children. He ended up with three families, whose stories form the backbone of the film. One is the family of Liu Liqin, a worker in the industrial central China city of Taiyuan whose son was abducted while playing in an alleyway with two other children in April 2010. “For a month after we lost him, she and I couldn’t even tell day from night,” he says, referring to his wife, who was sterilized on orders of planning officials in their home village after the birth of their son because he was their second child.
Mr. Custer notes that a number of documentaries have been made about the subject, but says many take a simplistic approach. “They blame one-child policy for the whole problem,” he says. “Certainly it is one of the reasons, but if you abolish one-child policy tomorrow, kidnapping will not disappear.”
When he was in the northeastern city of Harbin during his first year in China, Mr. Custer says, he noticed children begging on the streets and mentioned it a to friend who was a former local policeman. The friend told him it was likely some of the kids had been kidnapped and sold. That’s when he started to follow the issue, taking notes on kidnapped kids wherever he travelled to China.
“It is happening everywhere,” he says.
One of the great barriers to solving the problem is the complicity of local officials. In some cases, Mr. Custer says, police are in the trafficker’s pocket. In other cases, family planning officials themselves are engaged in trafficking.
“Some officials take the kids (from more-than-one-kid family) and sell them to orphanage for 500 bucks a pop, and there are a thousand kids,” he said. “That is a lot of money.”
Parents of stolen children are often poor and uneducated, and often don’t know what their rights are, he said.
Another barrier to dealing with the issue is cooperation and persistence necessary to find a lost child, and the low chances of success, which together discourage police from dedicating themselves to the task.
“Our main goal was to make [the film] emotionally affecting enough to create some more consciousness,” Mr. Custer says. “Hopefully, the more people get to think about it and engage with it, the better the chance that more solutions may come up.”
He says one of the best solutions currently being tried is a national DNA database set up by the Ministry of Public Security that theoretically allows for testing of children to determine whether they have been abducted (in Chinese). The problem is few parents know about or are willing to register their children in the database, and in some cases police have illegally charged parents money for tests. It’s also not clear, he adds, whether the government is willing to do wide-scale DNA testing of children in orphanages and on the streets.
The film now can be watched online for free, though there are options to buy it on DVD or in a downloadable version with deleted scenes and director’s commentary. Mr. Custer says a Chinese version is roughly a week away from being uploaded to Chinese video sites.
Traffick Alerts 