In February, the website's owners, MindGeek's senior staff, stood before Canadian Government and were scrutinized before an ethics committee where multiple cops and victims came forward exposing the company's failure to monitor videos and remove those that included child exploitation and rape.

Now, 70 Canadian lawmakers are calling for an investigation into the organization. In a letter to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner, the lawmakers called for "a full criminal investigation into MindGeek and its subsidiaries."

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The Catholic Diocese of Westminster's Caritas Bakhita House enabled the traffickers' 20-year old victim to report their crimes to the police.

The traffickers were sentenced to prison terms of 15 and 16 years.

Their victim's nightmare began when she arrived in the U.K. from Romania in April 2019 to take up a factory job.

However, the traffickers forced her to work on the streets of London as a prostitute instead, even after she became pregnant.

She then acquired a mobile phone, which she used to phone her family. They alerted the Romanian police, who contacted their U.K. counterparts.

The Metropolitan Police, which is responsible for law enforcement in the Greater London area, rescued the young woman and took her to the Caritas Bakhita House.

She was seven months pregnant.

According to the Westminster diocese's website, Caritas Bakhita House has helped the woman access medical support, registered her with a midwife, helped he get new prescription glasses and provided her with clothing and toiletries.

Other assistance given to the woman includes English classes and budgeting lessons.

Working with the police and U.S.-based NGO the International Justice Mission,Caritas Bakhita House helped the woman to fulfill her wish to give birth to her baby back home in Romania.

The International Justice Mission collected her from the airport in Romania, reunited her with her family, and is continuing to offer her care and support.

After the two traffickers were sentenced, Detective Inspector Grant Anderson, from the Metropolitan Police's Modern Slavery and Child Sexual Exploitation Unit, said:

"This was an awful crime which subjected a vulnerable young woman to a hideous way of life. We know she will never forget her time in captivity but I can report she gave birth to a healthy baby boy."

"I hope she now has some closure after knowing these men will be behind bars for a long time."

"We are committed to bringing these offenders to justice and will continue to work with local and overseas partners to do this."

The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates 24.9 million people worldwide are trapped in forced labour, with 4.8 million suffering sexual exploitation. Women and girls account for 99 per cent of victims in the commercial sex industry, according to the ILO.

In 2019, the Vatican released an online guide seeking to combat the "ugly business" of human trafficking, which generates an estimated $150 billion a year.

Caritas Bakhita House is a Catholic safe house named after St. Josephine Bakhita, the patron saint of trafficking survivors.

Source

Catholic News Agency

Image: MintPress News

This was not a one-time incident for the willful teenager, who developed a habit of disappearing after her family moved from Austin, Tex., to California in 2010.

Whenever Riana clashed with her mother over her restrictive house rules or curfew, she would take off for a few hours to hide out with her new friends.

It was not unusual, then, when Riana decided to run away one night after getting into another argument with her mother for missing curfew.

This time, however, she reached out for help from the wrong person—an older man (we will call him J.) who had given her his phone number earlier that day.

Though Riana was suspicious of J.'s interest in her, she felt she had run out of options: "It was cold and nighttime. I had nowhere else to go, so I ended up calling the number."

J. offered to put Riana up in a hotel room for the night. On the way, he gave her a drug that made her feel lightheaded and woozy.

Riana remembers the room being occupied by another teenage girl, who started taking pictures of her.

"It kind of felt like a dream. It was my first time doing drugs, so I was kind of out of it. I didn't know what was going on," Riana told me over the phone.

The next morning she woke up, disoriented, to J. knocking on her hotel room door.

At first, he downplayed what had happened the previous night, refusing to answer any of Riana's or the other girl's questions about their current situation or their hazy memories of their encounters with J. It was not until a week and a half later that his intentions with the photographs were made clear: J. was a sex trafficker, and Riana was his next victim.

Human trafficking remains a vast yet largely hidden criminal industry that generated an estimated $32 billion annually in 2012; and sex trafficking, in particular, exploits roughly four million people around the world.

Hearing people like Riana recount her own experiences as a sex-trafficking survivor in her sometimes shaky yet persistent voice can help many put a face to these numbers and ask hard questions:

What will it take to end human trafficking?

And how should people of faith respond to this injustice?

Inside a Hidden Crime

Human trafficking is a unique, 21st-century social issue, in part because labour trafficking, including commercial sex trafficking, was not internationally recognized as a distinct crime until Nov. 15, 2000, when the Palermo Protocol was drafted at the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime.

Before that, the legal definition of human trafficking was murky at best, with virtually no uniform consequences for those who exploited individuals for labour or sex acts.

The Palermo Protocol sought to change that by constructing the first global, legally binding agreement, one that includes a universal definition of trafficking in persons and encourages cooperation among the signatory polities to investigate and prosecute trafficking cases. Continue reading

The first two generally come in the form of packages from the United Nation's World Food Program or other nonprofit organizations.

The latter, however, traditionally came in the form of kerosene lamps, which are less than ideal. In fact, they're often dangerous.

According to the Word Health Organization, roughly 1.5 million people a year die from toxic kerosene fumes.

In India, where the impoverished population heavily depends on kerosene, the lamps cause over 30,000 yearly house fires.

In South Africa, 200,000 people are injured or lose property due to kerosene-related fires.

Not to mention, kerosene users spend 30% of their income buying it.

"They can save that money for food, education, building homes," explains Alice Min Soo Chun, founder and CEO of Solight Design, who created a unique alternative: a slim solar lantern.

The SolarPuff is a two-ounce, flat-pack solar lamp which quickly expands into a 4.5-inch cube.

The lantern can last eight hours and easily recharges with clear sunlight.

It provides enough light for refugees or people in impoverished areas to perform tasks at night, without instigating any dangerous fires or needing batteries. There are even different settings (high or low), and a blinking option to scare off wild animals or signal distress.

To some degree, we likely take light for granted, but 1.06 billion people have no access to electricity or clean sustainable lighting, according to the World Bank.

Child trauma, kidnappings and sex trafficking

Chun explains how many Syrian refugees—often starving and sick—arrive by boat in the middle of night, at times when they cannot see where to land or how to safely disembark.

They are handed lights by NGO volunteers to navigate the waters so they don't crash into rocks.

From there, they might need to walk up to 30 miles in the dark to arrive at a camp, where there are no lights. (Refugees without access to kerosene lamps often find themselves burning plastic trash, "which is even more toxic," notes Chun).

SolarPuff brightens the trek—and their new life.

"A lot of times the kids are suffering from trauma and they're frightened, but when they're handed the light, they perk up."

The popping element of the design, she explains, "gives them a sense of wonder."

The SolarPuff has proven to be extremely useful in reducing camp crime, such as child kidnappings or sex trafficking. Continue reading

The conference was attended by representatives from ANZRATH (Aotearoa New Zealand Religious against Trafficking in Humans)

ANZRATH is a group made up of New Zealand religious from a variety of congregations based in Auckland

Sister Gemma Wilson who is a member of ANZRATH and attended conference says ANZRATH is trying to raise awareness of humane Trafficking and to address some the issues involved.

Some possible trafficking offences in New Zealand discussed at the conference included:

• Strong anecdotal evidence of underage street prostitution in Auckland and other cities
• Last year a survey of NZ brothels revealed that 5% of the sex workers had had their passports taken from them.
• There are many internet sites depicting violent sexual abuse against children and though these are not New Zealand children, the sites are accessed by up to 50,000 New Zealanders each day.
• There is growing evidence that the exploitation of migrant workers is still quite common in New Zealand (underpayment, excessively long hours…) despite the introduction of a Bill in 2013 which will impose penalties on those employers found doing this.

Speakers included the Minister of Immigration Michael Woodhouse, Human Rights Commissioner David Rutherford, UN legal advisor Dr Anne T Gallagher, activist Matt Friedman, and US Embassy Deputy Chief of Mission Marie Damour and a range of academic, NGO and government representatives.

New Zealand has stringent anti people trafficking laws. Prevention is a key strategy. However there have been no prosecutions in the last 9 years.

The US State Departments report on People Trafficking for 2013 maintains this is because the "evidentiary bar" set by our laws is too high.

At the international level though there are many organisations working to prevent trafficking, it seems that for a variety of reasons, the numbers of those trafficked is on the increase.

Read the Conference report

Source

• Supplied: Sister Gemma Wilson
• The Salvation Army

This is, of course, typical of the willingness of women of faith to make new commitments, innovate, and take risks. The women who have inspired me most recently have shared these attributes: they are the Catholic Sisters who are dealing with sexual trafficking.

It would be hard to pick out any particular one. That would be the last thing they would want. They work together, across continents, in networks. They call sexual trafficking the new slavery. Some work at the UN, the equivalents of the William Wilberforces of old. But the work of most is much more at grassroots, demanding and sometimes dangerous.

Nuns work with the police, get girls out of brothels, brave local mafias. They seem a long way from the old Hollywood movie nuns with their wimples and distinctive habits, bobbing out of cloisters to smile at Bing Crosby in a clerical collar. It is hard to remember that, not too long ago, they had to seek permission from bishops to study gynaecology, and some were even advised by their Mother Superior on how to vote.

Their celibacy is chosen. They give themselves entirely to caring for trafficked women, protecting them in safe houses, educating about the dangers of "attractive" job offers overseas, helping them escape from vicious pimps, making safe their return to their families in the midst of threats. This does not make celibacy easy or less of a sacrifice. Their spirituality is not incidental either. Read more

Sources

• Tony Blair in The Huffington Post
• Image: Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity