Earthquake orphans sold into sex trade

The Sunday Times October 23, 2005

Earthquake orphans sold into sex trade
Dean Nelson, Islamabad


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 her, trying to forget the devastation of her village home and the deaths of her parents 15 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 (£500) 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 the hundreds of girls and boys orphaned by the earthquake are being targeted by gangs intent on turning them into prostitutes or street beggars.

Other children are being sold for adoption by their parents in acts of desperation prompted by the destruction of homes and livelihoods.

The Pakistani government is so alarmed by the threat to vulnerable children that it has placed armed guards at all hospitals and ordered that no child is released to anyone until proof of kinship has been verified.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1838452,00.html

rid of us. Is there any hope for a species that treats it's most vulnerable members in such a manner.

:shrug:

a rabid wombat over these scum.

or the people who would buy them?

Surely you aren't, somehow, defending pimps and procurers?

But they wouldn't exist if there weren't sickos who would buy the product.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=18


"...Indeed a group of Ecuadoran peasants filed a class action against the company in September 2001. The suit alleges that herbicides spread by DynCorp in Colombia were drifting across the border, withering legitimate crops, causing human and livestock illness, and, in several cases, killing children. Assistant Secretary of State Rand Beers intervened in the case right away telling the judge the lawsuit posed "a grave risk to US national security and foreign policy objectives."

What's more, Kathryn Bolkovac, a U.N. International Police Force monitor filed a lawsuit in Britain in 2001 against DynCorp for firing her after she reported that Dyncorp police trainers in Bosnia were paying for prostitutes and participating in sex trafficking. Many of the Dyncorp employees were forced to resign under suspicion of illegal activity. But none were prosecuted, since they enjoy immunity from prosecution in Bosnia.

Earlier that year Ben Johnston, a DynCorp aircraft mechanic for Apache and Blackhawk helicopters in Kosovo, filed a lawsuit against his employer. The suit alleged that that in the latter part of 1999 Johnson "learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorp were engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports and other immoral acts."

The suit charges that "Johnston witnessed coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased." "DynCorp is just as immoral and elite as possible, and any rule they can break they do," Johnston told Insight magazine. He charged that the company also billed the Army for unnecessary repairs and padded the payroll. "What they say in Bosnia is that DynCorp just needs a warm body -- that's the DynCorp slogan. Even if you don't do an eight-hour day, they'll sign you in for it because that's how they bill the government. It's a total fraud."

What makes me sick it the men who think getting off is more important than human rights and the suffering of others. I swear, I am beginning to think that it wouldn't be such a bad idea if humans disappeared from the face of the earth.

:puke: What men. Ugh. Sometimes hearing stories like that turns me off relationships with guys all together and makes me glad I'm single.

"The more I know of men, the more I like my dog." I don't recall who said it, and it's been attributed to a few different sources, but I have taken it to heart.

Given a choice, I will take a dog any day.

and I would get lambbasted if I said I would like to kill guys like that. Damn guys can't win.

Katrina, and what might have happened to them.

I worry that some predator might get them

and I am sick at the thought of them forever being lost to their families

It's BIG BIDNE$$. It's also GLOBAL. There are networks and rapid reponse teams. The BFEE, among others, has had a hand in it for DECADES. Solly, the very thought sickens us to the core of our beings.
However the REALITY is going on right under our noses. :cry::cry::cry:

You're right though - there are all kinds of predators.

One night while watching the faces of the missing children of New Orleans play across the screen, I said to myself, "Please don't let there be some horrible 'made for TV movie' based on how, after years of looking, a child is finally reunited with it's parents"

Why?

Because it made me sick that such a thing would be so exploited - considering I just know no real effort is being made to reconnect these families - but it would be just like America to create some "feel-good" saga that screams "Ain't we just great!"...and the real story is swept under the carpet...

It's 2005 and black babies, native babies, and the children of the poor are still being ripped from their mothers.

How do you heal a wound when someone keeps picking at the scab?

you're looking at a massive infection.

I despise them every day.

That's why I'm here. It's a pocket of humans that don't suck.

(I know this sounds really awful. But it's pretty much the truth. Don't laugh, or I'll have to write a novel explaining why.)

:hug:

The traffiking of human beings everywhere is an issue that should be non-partisan and universal, in terms of doing everything we can to stop it.

How very Republican of them... making money off of other people's misery.

Snip...

The Neil Bush Sex Scandal. After being placed on the board of a semiconductor firm managed by the son of a former Chinese president, Neil Bush — brother of the U.S. president, former S&L scammer, and a fellow who knows nothing about the semiconductor businesses — receives sex from beautiful Asian women who show up unannounced at his door when he is staying in hotels in Thailand and Hong Kong . . . Oh, whoops, sorry — this scandal already happened. These revelations came out in 2003 and received little media attention.

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/05/the-corn.php

how liberal the media is eh? :eyes: There are all types of scandals with this family people don't know about. "Christians" my ass.

where is all the help this time?

or the exploited children issue? Their absence shows their hand, IMO.

:( Didn't Clinton try to close down places like that? I remember reading how Clinton wanted to and when the vote came in the House Tom DeLay went to "investigate" for himself and came back and voted "no" and to keep them open. Young pre-teens!

The child deserves love and a family. Not that life. :mad:

We have a responsibility to uphold not just the international law, but the law of human dignity.

Leaders should be very affraid of ignoring these kinds of things. I guarantee Bush could give a shit about this.

Wasn't Poppy involved in some sort of child procurement scandal?

I am pretty sure there was a DU thread on this a while ago.

Young Lives For Sale
By Bay Fang Tue Oct 18, 5:50 PM ET

LOS ANGELES--Kristie was 13 when she met the first of her four "daddies." She had run away from home in the Southwest, and friends introduced her to a tall, good-looking man, who said the red-haired teenager was sexy and had potential. Pretty soon, he had her prostituting herself on the streets of Las Vegas--and then Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Phoenix. She and her "wifies," the other girls working under the same pimp, most of whom were also in their teens, would be brought to a city, work from 7 p.m. until sunrise, then move on. The now 15-year-old (who, like the other girls, doesn't want her real name used) stopped only after she was arrested, in July. From the beginning of the year until then, she estimates, she had over 100 sex partners--but she had long since stopped counting.

The trafficking in children for sex was once thought to be a problem beyond America's borders. But the FBI and the Justice Department have now started focusing intently on the issue--and what they've found is shocking. Thousands of young girls and boys are falling victim to violent pimps, who move them from state to state, which makes it a federal matter. The younger they are, the more they're worth on the street. "There is a greater and greater demand for younger and younger kids," says Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "America doesn't look. People are shocked and horrified when they hear these girls' stories. They say, 'That doesn't happen here. It happens in Thailand. Or the Philippines.' But once you start shining a light on it, you find it everywhere."
...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnews/younglivesforsale

The lack of response on DU to these threads. Of course, the response to Abu Graib was overwhelming, but that was because ADULT MEN were being raped and sexually humiliated.

For some reason when it's women and children undergoing the same treatment and worse, many DU'ers are silent.

everywhere. Why is it this issue is so ignored? Not just the trading of children into the sex industry, but those who are abused? The laws are laughable. What is wrong with humanity???

n/t

The majority of DUers view prostitution as a consenting act between adults and refuse to acknowledge any information that contradicts that meme.

However, as of today, I think we need to focus our attention on election fraud and rigging rather than prostitution. Without clean elections, no social problem will be solved or alleviated.

but the issue got zero traction until it was clear that men and boys were being sodomized.

Lindy England becomes the center of a media feeding frenzy, but the male soldiers who also participated, whom we can see in a multitude of pix gleefully punching, raping, electocuting, attacking with dogs...well, guess they're just guys, they won't get the public up in a dander like an EVIL woman will...... :nuke:

And fucking FCC cracks down on pornography by/for consenting adults in the US, but Bush gives a pass to Saudi Arabia and other big middle east players in the sex trafficking biz. (that news was posted here a month or so ago.)--makes me so angry, I could implode.

I hope the ACLU wins their current lawsuit against prison rape.

if I were to speculate as to why, I would say it had to do with "bad men deserving what they get". Part of the "tough on crime" culture of Amerka...and by that, I mean tough on the kind of crime that can be easily understood by an ignorant black and white (pun not intended; or maybe it was intended. Hard to decide) thinking, reactionary society.

Yay for the ACLU...hated by corporate RW fascists everywhere.

I can't imagine that being done to an innocent, vulnerable child. It makes me sick.

around waiting for a natural disaster to occur so they can swoop down and f* the children? "Oh, goody, a tsunami! Hurry up, go buy the kids!" This is so strange, considering rescue workers have a hard time getting to these remote areas to provide foood and aid, but prostitutes can saunter in and buy a couple kids? I hope I'm very right when I say this sounds like a modern day boogey-man story. I really hope I'm right.

Been to Karachi, and lots of other places in Asia and S.E. Asia where there are hundreds of thousands of abandoned kids living on the streets.

Why would anybody go to the effort of going way up into the mountains, into the disaster zone to bring more back down into the cities for the "sex trade", or to be street beggars when theres already so many there already.

Sounds like a hyped up article for one of the big corporate relief agencies to me.

.....and there it is in the first paragraph:

"How you can help: To make a donation through the Disasters Emergency Committee call the 24-hour hotline on 0870 606 0900"