These crime rings have revolutionised an industry that turns ordinary citizens into slaves.

Trillion-dollar industry

Interpol says human trafficking and scam compounds in Southeast Asia are worth more than US$3 trillion in illicit revenue a year.

The industry emerged from Cambodia's south coast during the Covid-19 pandemic, where Chinese syndicates honed their criminal enterprises with impunity.

Cambodia has insisted the scourge has been exaggerated by journalists.

This is despite the rescue and repatriation of thousands of people from across Asia who were duped into accepting false job offers.

They were then forced into "pig butchering" out of hidden compounds in secret locations.

Slavers' tools

Romance scams, cryptos, real estate, online gambling, and extortion are just some of the tools of a dark trade.

It was developed alongside legitimate Chinese investors who turned Sihanoukville into a casino mecca known as the "Las Vegas of the East" by the mid-2010s.

Those who fail to meet quotas are beaten, tortured and held for ransom or traded among the criminal networks.

Those who give in and perform are rewarded with cash payouts and promises they can go home and have sex.

"Many women have been trafficked and traded," said a European rescue specialist, who declined to be named.

"If they refuse to scam, they are offered as prizes and passed around. Some even work as models in love scams, performing online for a targeted victim."

Trafficking rife

Rumors of Chinese and Southeast Asians being trafficked first surfaced in late 2020 when some 400,000 legitimate Chinese workers fled Cambodia as the pandemic took hold.

Thousands more, who were associated with illegal gambling, remained, predominantly in Sihanoukville.

More than a thousand buildings, including dozens of casinos, were left empty and at least 500 half-built skyscrapers were abandoned.

That's when human trafficking was kicked from traditional perceptions — of men being press-ganged onto fishing boats or young village girls sold into brothels — into the billion-dollar orbit of cyber-crimes.

Diplomatic sources say this industry makes about $20 billion annually in Cambodia.

Neighboring governments were soon flooded with pleas for help from stricken families whose loved ones had answered advertisements for high-paid jobs only to find themselves trapped in and around Sihanoukville.

Crisis in Cambodia

By late 2021, the embassies of Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, and China had all taken what was then a highly unusual step.

They issued warnings about "the situation" and told Cambodia to act, but those reports remained off the radar in Cambodia's well-oiled state-run press.

By March the following year, a group of 35 NGOs told the Cambodian government to urgently address "a crisis of forced labour, slavery and torture".

At the same time, reports detailing kidnapping and extortion rackets began hitting the international headlines.

"The continued existence of these operations is a tragedy, and we are horrified that Cambodia is being used as a base for such inhumanity.

"All relevant actors must immediately guarantee that no one is subject to slavery or torture within Cambodia," they said in a joint communique.

Even an annual report by Cambodia's National Committee for Counter Trafficking reported caseloads in 2021 had more than doubled to 359 over the previous year.

Numbers had been expected to fall given travel and security restrictions imposed because of Covid.

It also found that surrogate mothers, babies, organ transplants, labourers, and sex workers were among those trafficked.

Cambodia had emerged as a trafficking destination as opposed to its history as a transit point, the Committee discovered.

Slaves and slavers

At two press conferences, well covered by the international media in Kuala Lumpur, heartbroken parents cried and pleaded for the release of their children, some as young as 17.

Their children also spoke to reporters from mobile phones they had been handed to scam people with.

"We work more than 15 hours a day. They give us instructions to scam people worldwide," one victim said.

"If we do not perform, they hit us. More than 30 of us have been mistreated because we under-performed."

The evidence was mounting and pointing to senior leaders, real estate tycoons and corrupt businessmen with ties to organised crime, and Chinese nationals with Cambodian passports, as the culprits.

Wan Kuok-koi popularly known as Broken Tooth, former leader of the Macau branch of the 14K triad, was among them.

That should have been enough to prompt Cambodian authorities into action, but they again claimed these stories were exaggerated.

One official described such cases as "immigration misconduct," and another even implied that they, too, were victims.

"Criminals are choosing human trafficking as a career," then interior minister Sar Kheng said, adding: "They won't let it go. They are taking advantage of us when we are facing a crisis."

Pig butchering — where the victim is gradually lured or forced into handing over more money — continued.

This angered the Chinese government amid perceptions that Beijing was, at best, incapable of controlling its criminal element abroad or, even worse, supporting those networks.

China's response

Authorities in Phnom Penh declined the Chinese government's request for special powers to arrest its own nationals involved in criminal activity.

Instead, they swore they would end the scourge before local elections were to be held in mid-2022. That didn't happen.

But China withheld Cambodia's much needed investment dollars and in making its displeasure known, Beijing censors approved the release of "No More Bets" — a movie.

It tells the story of a Chinese pair trapped and trafficked into compounds in Southeast Asia.

The movie was a smash hit in the People's Republic, where authorities refused a Cambodian request to have the film banned.

The United States then dropped Cambodia to its lowest tier on the annual human trafficking list and later imposed sanctions backed by Canada and the United Kingdom.

Rescue and repression

Rescue operations emerged with the help of independent NGOs, foreign embassies, and Interpol operating with local police.

They gathered pace as fears the country's tourism industry — still reeling from the pandemic — would not recover amid all the negative headlines.

A crackdown did follow, and criminal networks scattered, initially to the Vietnamese and Thai borders and further afield into Laos and Myanmar.

There criminal syndicates have taken advantage of the civil war and can operate with impunity from places like Shwe Kokko, where some 10,000 victims are housed in one compound.

Tourism has still not recovered in Cambodia, but the crackdown has escalated in conjunction with Chinese law enforcement.

Two operations in March netted 700 Chinese nationals, all are suspected cyber criminals and to be deported for running scam and human trafficking operations.

However, the scourge is far from eliminated, and recruiters in Cambodia have shifted targets.

No longer favoring Chinese and Southeast Asians, human traffickers are now focused on Central Asia, luring in nationals from Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

• First published in UCA News
• Luke Hunt is a UCA News columnist and author and academic. He is an expert on East Asia's socio-political issues.

Experts in history, philosophy, sociology, political science, psychology and education came together at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University April 17-19.

They presented talks including: the effects of mass violence waged by colonial powers; the misuse of the memory of the Holocaust; sexual predation in the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages; and slave holding by Jesuits in the United States.

Jesuit slavers

Jesuit Father David Collins, a professor of history at Georgetown University, presented a case study of his order's work in the United States.

This described "large communities of descendants of those who were held in slavery by Jesuits to develop programs of redress, repair and racial healing."

Their work started because a building on the Georgetown campus was being remodeled and people thought it would be opportune to change the building's name, he told Catholic News Service April 18.

The building had been named after an early 19th-century Jesuit who had played a role in the sale of hundreds of slaves in 1838.

The university's president could have, "with a swipe of the pen," changed the name right then and there to "something wholesome and edifying," Father Collins said.

He said the president saw "that would be sort of erasing history, making it disappear,".

He instead decided to make the name change "an opportunity to bring this history to the university's attention" and get the wider community involved in the process.

This resulted in the 2015 creation of the working group on slavery, memory and reconciliation that Father Collins chaired.

The benefit of time

"How do good people become involved in bad things?

"How do good people have blindnesses that make them incapable of seeing something that we're seeing with a certain amount of clarity a hundred years later?

"Those are important things to preserve," Father Collins said.

Memorials, for example, are just "partial stories" that select and tell one side of an historical event, he said.

A city like Rome, he said, is "full of memorials that are about the exercise of power and for the good,".

However, "these very exercises of power have had their victims and have done their violence.

"We need to understand that better than we have" and "to add to the part of the story that is neglected, which is that it's come at a cost."

The abuse crisis

Kathleen Sprows Cummings, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and former director of its Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, spoke to CNS.

She said part of her work is "to think about saints as a way to … think about who we remember and why.

"This is also occurring in the backdrop of a conversation we're having in the United States" and elsewhere about "who do we honor and why through our memorials and monuments," she said.

Her talk to the conference, she said, wove together clerical sex abuse in the United States, "how this is impacting the saints we remember and the saints we're making and the saints we're not making, and how that is connected to public enshrinement."

One example of reinterpreting existing saints, she said, is looking at the life of St. Maria Goretti.

She died in 1902 at the age of 11 after she was stabbed by a 20-year-old for refusing his sexual advances and attempted rape.

"When I was growing up in a Catholic high school, the suggestion was that she was resisting temptation. She was being chaste," Sprows Cummings said. More to the point, "she was a child."

Today, the patron saint of chastity and purity is more often upheld as a patron saint of abused children and rape victims.

Furthermore, she said, "some dioceses call her the patron saint of safe environments for their training."

The abuse crisis has affected not only how people see saints from the past, but also future candidates, "perhaps saints who were whistleblowers or saints who did what they could," she said.

For example, she said, there is a change.org petition for the cause for canonistion of Sister Catherine Anne Cesnik, a member of the School Sisters of Notre Dame.

She was found dead near a garbage dump in Baltimore in 1970. Her unsolved murder was featured in the Netflix documentary series, The Keepers.

"I don't think she's going to be canonised but the very fact that they're calling for it is indicative of a search for heroes," she said. Read more

Carol Glatz is a Senior Correspondent at Catholic News Service, Washington DC-Baltimore Area

They should be spending money on those battles, not on fighting each other, nation against nation. Yet vast sums are spent on armaments for waging war.

This is "a scandal" that just drags civilisation backward, Francis told a group of Italian volunteers from an organisation called "I Was Thirsty."

Founded in 2012, the group sets up projects that provide clean drinking water to communities in need around the world.

"What is the point of all of us solemnly committing ourselves together at international level to campaigns against poverty, against hunger, against the degradation of the planet, if we then fall back into the old vice of war, into the old strategy of the power of armaments, which takes everything and everyone backward?"

As all life on Earth depends on water, "why should we wage war on each other over conflicts that we should resolve by talking to each other?

"Why not, instead, join forces and resources to fight the real battles of civilisation together: the fight against hunger and thirst; the fight against disease and epidemics; the fight against poverty and modern-day slavery?"

Not all choices are "neutral," he told the group.

Choosing to allocate a large percentage of a national budget on arms, which means taking resources away from those who lack basic necessities, is not a "neutral" choice.

There's another aspect to choosing to spend money on weapons. Doing so "dirties the soul, dirties the heart, dirties humanity," he explained.

In a separate message written on the pope's behalf, the Vatican Secretary of State told those taking part in the World Water Forum in Senegal this week that managing the world's water resources sustainably and cooperatively across national boundaries helps contribute to peace.

His words supported the forum's aims, which focus on water security's role in building peace and development.

"Water is a valuable asset for peace. As a result, it cannot be considered simply as a private good, generating commercial profit and subject to the laws of the market," Cardinal Pietro Parolin wrote.

The right to drinking water and sanitation is closely linked to the right to life and "water is a gift to us from God" meant for all people and generations.

Parolin said Francis hopes the forum will be an opportunity for people to work together to guarantee the right to drinking water and sanitation for every person.

This would lead to water becoming"a true symbol of sharing, of constructive and responsible dialogue" that promotes peace and is built on trust.

Source

• Crux Now
• Image: MadeBlue

Read by some as a surrender to the "woke brigade" and by others as a reasonable response to the accusation the lyrics glorify "slavery, rape, torture and paedophilia", the decision highlights the changing ethical considerations musicians must navigate in order to maintain a social license.

Brown Sugar was recorded in Alabama in late 1969 and released on the Rolling Stones' 1971 album Sticky Fingers.

The song is emblematic of the Stones' energetic rhythm and blues sound and has been a mainstay of their set list for decades.

The lyrics explore the sexual exploitation of a black woman by slave traders and slave owners in America's south, presenting a sexualised view of a marginalised group.

Brown Sugar, how come you taste so good?
Brown Sugar, just like a young girl should.

Contemporary and informed audiences would also recognise "brown sugar" as a reference to heroin.

Through the course of the song, the singer moves from observer to an agent of this sexualisation.

And all her boyfriends were sweet 16
I'm no school boy but I know what I like
You should have heard them just around midnight.

While some interpretations of the song would like to see it primarily as a celebration of a drug counterculture, any pretence the phrase "Brown Sugar" is other than a reference to a black woman falls away in the final lyric of the studio album.

Just like a black girl should.

This combination of sexual imagery and illicit drug references in the song's lyrics contributes to the culturally transgressive place the Rolling Stones occupy in popular music history.

A question of race

Some have little to say about matters of race in the Stone's music.

A recent essay in the Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones examines the contribution of non-band members to Brown Sugar, notably pianist Ian Stewart and saxophonist Bobby Keys, and interprets the lyrics as nothing more than "famously bawdy".

But for many race is central to any consideration of the Stones' output from this period.

Patrick Burke, in Rock, Race and Radicalism in the 1960s sees the Stones as wallowing in racist stereotypes.

He asserts Brown Sugar is a "lascivious celebration of sexual clichés associated with slavery."

The song undeniably deals in confronting subject matter.

Its removal from the set list causes us to question whether the song is racist and speaks to the changing parameters of ethical practice for musicians.

Keith Richards highlights this ambiguity in his comments on the removal of the song.

"I don't know. I'm trying to figure out with the sisters quite where the beef is. Didn't they understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery?"

Richards' mildly defensive tone fuels broadcaster Piers Morgan bellicose defence of Brown Sugar as a "song aimed at defending and supporting black women".

Morgan also draws attention to what he sees as a "double standard" for rap music where racist and misogynist tropes abound.

Pulling the song from the set list seems to Morgan an unacceptable confession of guilt.

Ethics in music

I would argue that whether Mick Jagger, in writing Brown Sugar, intended it to be racist misses the point.

My research examines how non-Aboriginal Australian composers have interacted with Australian Indigenous music.

The use of Indigenous music, instruments and language by Australian composers was once commonplace - and even viewed as a form of advocacy. More recently, Australian composers have come to realise the damage cultural appropriate can cause.

As we learn more about other cultures - including greater knowledge of what causes offence and what is painful - our behaviour needs to change.

Even if the style of Brown Sugar was once heard as an innocent rendering of an upbeat rhythm and blues sound (and as far back as the mid-1960s there have been critiques of the Rolling Stones co-option of Black culture), the ecstatic guitar riff, energetic piano and vigorous saxophone create an unacceptable dissonance in the ears of contemporary listeners.

To use such joyful music to accompany lyrics exploring the sexual exploitation which accompanied slavery clearly causes hurt to marginalised people. As music producer and author Ian Brennan notes, were someone in customer service was to utter the line "Brown Sugar how come you taste so good?", they would be immediately fired.

The freedom to not play Brown Sugar

So does the Stones decision to pull the song damage their reputation? Is this an act of censorship, injuring artistic freedom?

I would argue the ethical musician should defer to the sensibilities of the marginalised group.

The cost here is the Rolling Stones won't play Brown Sugar live.

This isn't censorship; the song is readily available. It isn't even iconoclasm - music history is not damaged and no idols have been smashed.

The Stones' decision to pull the song isn't a confession of racism. It is an ethical act and, in itself, an act of artistic freedom that preserves their social license and affirms their ongoing cultural significance.

• Timothy McKenry is Professor of Music, Australian Catholic University.
• First published in The Conversation; republished with permission.

It's the follow-up to another investigation in September which revealed that many of the same palm oil plantations made use of child labour and outright slavery.

Palm oil products have come under fire in New Zealand many times before, but usually, for the devastating environmental impact the plantations can have.

Clearing land for any tropical crop often necessitates clearing hectares of native forest, home to endangered species such as tigers and orangutans.

While a huge number of goods sold in New Zealand are potentially linked to these practices, there is no labelling or certification requirement for products which use palm oil, nor any real legal ramifications for companies which benefit from slave labour and other forms of abuse.

Tracking palm oil from the worst offending plantations all the way to supermarket shelves is extremely difficult, but there's no doubt that palm oil is a mainstay of some of New Zealand's most popular cosmetics and skincare products.

The reports also cast further doubts about the role of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), an NGO which promotes "sustainable" palm oil products, but which was alleged to have ignored instances of worker abuse.

How palm oil came to be in everything

Palm oil is mainly extracted from the African oil palm, a tree which was brought by western colonists to many of the world's tropical climates. The reddish pulp is milled, refined, bleached and deodorised into an ingredient in a huge number of products.

Once just one of many oils used worldwide, western industrialists soon found palm oil had near endless versatility. T

he palms produce more oil per hectare than any other crop while delivering a product that stays solid at room temperature, rarely goes off, doesn't smoke when cooked, forms a lather in soaps, and even raises the freezing temperature of ice cream.

About a third of the world's palm oil is burnt by trucks as a component of biodiesel.

Needless to say, this cheaply produced oil generated huge demand, and western colonists in the tropics cleared vast swathes of forest for palm oil plantations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Nowadays, 85% of all palm oil is produced by corporations in Indonesia and Malaysia.

It has been estimated that each person on Earth consumes an average of just under 8 kilograms of palm oil every year, and much more if we consider cosmetics or fuel.

New Zealand is a major importer of palm oil, not only inside various products but also as a raw resource.

Dairy giant Fonterra imports more Palm Kernel Expeller, a palm oil byproduct and low-cost cattle feed, than any other company in the world.

Slavery and child labour on palm oil plantations

Millions of labourers work in palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia.

The first AP report focused primarily on workers who are undocumented migrants, often from the poorest corners of Asia, trafficked by their employers and living in fear of police raids.

One man, working for the state-owned Felda corporation in Malaysia, said his bosses confiscated and lost his passport, leaving him stranded and forced to sleep on the open ground of the plantation, constantly in fear of an attack by tigers.

His story was by no means unique: of the 130 workers interviewed in the report, nearly all reported similar experiences of being trafficked across borders. Many became indentured labourers, forced to work off debts to their employers for helping them enter the country.

However, the vast majority of palm oil workers are Indonesians who cross the porous border into Malaysia to take the low-paid jobs that Malaysians won't take.

The best-case scenario is to find a job making $2 a day, but many end up saddled with huge debts, or are forced to work for nothing under threat of having their passports destroyed.

Even under ideal conditions, working on the plantations is tough, dangerous work.

Workers must carry long sickles on poles to hack off palm branches large enough to injure or kill those below.

To meet the high quotas set by the companies, many workers bring on their families as helpers, where they act as unpaid labourers picking up the red pulp from the ground.

The first AP report was the most comprehensive investigation ever conducted into the industry, with workers from the majority of palm oil companies surveyed.

The report found that abuses and indentured labour were common in companies that had been given a seal of approval by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a watchdog organisation which promotes environmental justice and better conditions for workers.

Women workers on plantations

The most recent AP investigation into palm oil plantations was much more specific in its goals, focusing on the treatment of women workers alone. The report found that women working in the palm plantations were much more likely to be abused by bosses, and found a slew of reproductive health problems endemic to the industry.

Investigators interviewed over 200 workers, government employees, activists and lawyers who confirmed that abuse, including sexual assault, was widespread across the industry.

An Indonesian official from the government's women and children's office in West Kalimantan province said the isolated location of palm plantations made sexual assaults common. In most cases, these were perpetrated by the plantation bosses and managers.

In addition to assault, many women workers reported health problems, often the result of chemicals used in tropical agriculture.

One woman said she suffered from fevers, coughing and nose bleeds after spraying pesticides without protective equipment.

Another woman mourned the babies lost through late-term miscarriages after being forced to carry heavy loads. Indeed miscarriages and infertility are alarmingly common, as women are forced to wade in the chemical runoff and carry loads so heavy that their wombs can collapse.

The report also notes that despite the enormous issues facing women workers, the RSPO has never investigated reports of abuse. Continue reading

And by Saturday afternoon another Serra statue was toppled at Placita Olvera in downtown Los Angeles.

"Pull it! Pull it! This is for our ancestors," a person shouted.

In a video of the San Francisco toppling, people can be heard cheering as the statue of the 18th-century Franciscan priest holding a cross fell to the ground. People strike and kick the statue in the video, and it's clear the statue has also been tagged and splashed with what appears to be red paint.

Meanwhile, in the city of Ventura, the mayor, a pastor and a tribal leader announced in a letter that a statue of Serra near Ventura City Hall would be removed. This announcement was made after an online petition demanded the statue be taken down.

"Serra is not the historical hero people thought when this landmark statue to him was erected, one of many throughout California, as a historical emblem, he is toxic and should be removed," the petition reads.

In the wake of Black Lives Matter demonstrations, statues honouring Christopher Columbus and Confederate leaders have also been defaced and toppled.

In light of these nationwide events, Californians are once again re-evaluating their statues of Serra — who led the Catholic Church's missionary efforts among Native Americans on the West Coast.

Serra in 2015 was canonized as a saint by Pope Francis during a trip to the U.S.

While Serra is credited with spreading the Catholic faith across what is now California, critics say Serra was part of an imperial conquest that beat and enslaved Native Americans.

Serra, who was born in Spain, came to the Americas in 1749, and in 1769 he founded the first of what would become 21 missions along the California coast.

Native Americans brought into the mission to be evangelized were not allowed to leave the grounds. Many laboured for no pay. There is evidence of beatings, imprisonment and other abuse at the hands of the missionaries.

Serra defenders say it's unfair to judge him by 21st-century standards. They say he frequently pleaded for more merciful treatment for the Native Americans under their control.

Months before Serra was canonized, Cliff Trafzer, director of UC Riverside's California Center for Native Nations and a history professor, told the Press-Enterprise in Riverside that the church continued to ignore the Indigenous American viewpoint on Serra.

"Father Serra represents the invasion of California and the taking of native lands," he told the newspaper.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles Archbishop José Gómez, in the Los Angeles Times, said Serra was an inspiration in his ministry.

"He preached God's compassion, fought for the dignity of women and the rights of America's native peoples, and he was probably the first person in the Americas to make a moral case against capital punishment," Gómez said.

The Catholic News Agency detailed how Serra asked Spanish authorities to spare the lives of the California natives who had attacked a San Diego mission.

In Ventura, the letter announcing the removal of the Serra statue was signed by Mayor Matt LaVere; Father Tom Elewaut, pastor at the San Buenaventura Mission Church; and Julie Tumamait Stenslie, tribal chair of Barbareño/Ventureño Band of Mission Indians (Chumash).

"We have listened and we have heard the calls from those in the community and believe the time has come for the statue to be taken down and moved to a more appropriate non-public location," the letter reads.

"We all believe that the removal of the statue should be accomplished without force, without anger, and through a collaborative, peaceful process."

• Kimberly Winston and David Gibson contributed to this report. First published in RNS.

Speakers from the Talitha Kum organization headlined a United Nations panel on the eve of the U.N. annual observance of the World Day Against Trafficking in Persons.

"Human trafficking is one of the darkest and most revolting realities in the world today, ensnaring 41 million men and women, boys and girls," said Father David Charters, second secretary of the Vatican's permanent observer mission to the United Nations.

"It is, as Pope Francis has repeatedly stressed, ‘an open wound on the body of contemporary society,' a ‘crime against humanity' and an ‘atrocious scourge that is present throughout the world on a broad scale,'" he said.

Father Charters said the international response to the global phenomenon includes three specific targets in the U.N. 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

They commit the organization's members to fight trafficking and sexual exploitation, take immediate action to eradicate forced labor, end modern slavery and human trafficking, and end all forms of violence against and torture of children.

Comboni Sister Gabriella Bottani is the international coordinator of the Rome-based Talitha Kum.

She said it is a network of networks established by the International Union of Superiors General to coordinate and strengthen the anti-trafficking work being done by consecrated women in 77 countries on five continents.

"Talitha Kum" were the words Jesus addressed to a young apparently lifeless girl in the Gospel of Mark.

The Aramaic phrase is translated, "Young girl, I say to you, ‘Arise.'"

The network seeks to free people, raise them up and restore their dignity.

Sister Bottani said Talitha Kum uses a victim-centered approach to identify people in need and support them with shelter, social reintegration and education.

"We do not have a model to export. Each of the organizations in the network promotes initiatives against trafficking in its particular local context," she said.

Some of the sisters dedicate their entire ministry to trafficked and enslaved people, while others provide housing and emergency intervention as needed. Continue reading

• Image: Crux

"I can see later down the line that parents or caregivers who allow their very young children to be exposed to hardcore pornography on their phone and on their devices …that may be considered, in terms of social welfare and social services, as the active abuse of a child," said Mary Aiken, Adjunct Associate Professor at University College in Dublin and an Academic Advisor to the European Cyber Crime Centre at Europol for Ireland.

Aiken told Crux the widespread diffusion of sexual content online has been described in some circles as "the ‘pornification' of society."

This is a problem for youngsters, because "children are vulnerable to being damaged by what we call legal but age-inappropriate content," she said, explaining that in the UK, there is currently talk of developing an "A" and "B" internet, where households who actually want porn will have to put their name on a list and sign up for it.

Currently, the exposure of children to pornography is only considered a crime when predators intentionally expose children to hardcore porn as part of the grooming process.

Part of the problem, she said, is an increase in sexual assaults on children by other children, and while there isn't yet hard evidence to support it, her belief is that it's related to "the availability of hardcore pornography online."

Aiken was a keynote speaker at a Nov. 29-Dec. 1 conference on "Drugs and Addictions, an Obstacle to Integral Human Development," organized by the healthcare section of the Vatican department for Integral Human Development.

In addition to substance addiction, the conference touched on what experts are referring to as "new dependencies," which include addictions to gambling, sex and the internet.

Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Vatican's development office, opened by saying addictions to drugs, the internet, gambling and sex, including pornography, "strongly undermine the freedom of the person, which is the fundamental expression of the dignity of every human being."

Drugs and other dependencies "are a wound inflicted on our society, which traps many people in a spiral of suffering and alienation," Turkson said, emphasizing the need to reach out to those weak and suffering, helping them to regain hope and take charge of their lives.

Professor Umberto Nizzoli, a member of the National Commission of Experts on Addiction and a professor at the University Institute (IPU), in Italy, said that when people become dependent on something, without it they feel a "continuous hunger" whether it's an object, a person or a behavior.

The correct term for those who become dependent, he said, is not "addict," but "slave," because they lose control on both a biological and psychological level. Continue reading

Making good his statement, Fisher has publicly committed the Archdiocese of Sydney to a pilot programme aimed at ridding the archdiocese's services, schools and parishes of slavery-tainted goods and services.

The pilot program Fisher is referring to is the fruit of work the Archdiocese of Sydney began last year.

It started with a fact-finding Antislavery Task Force that assessed the archdiocese's reliance on dubious suppliers.

The task force eventually established a response that included anti-slavery diocesan-wide procurement guidelines, anti-slavery education for officials charged with procurement and parish families, and welfare services for victims of trafficking or slavery.

John McCarthy QC, a former Australian ambassador to the Holy See, says victims of modern slavery are everywhere and in every industrial sector.

Because of the extent of the supply chains that eventually reach Catholic institutions, the possible exposure of the church to modern slavery is enormous.

McCarthy says the Catholic Church in Australia is both the largest employer and the largest procurer of goods and services in the country outside the public sector.

He says as one-in-five Australian children are educated in Catholic schools and one-in-10 hospital patients and elderly care residents receive care in Catholic health facilities, ridding the church's supply lines of slavery should have a meaningful impact in Australia.

Given this, he wonders what the impact would be like if the global Catholic Church committed itself to purging slave-produced goods from its supply chains.

Source

• America Magazine
• Image: Everything Girls Love

Sessions is quoting St Paul's letter to the Romans, Chapter 13, saying it is a "clear and wise command ...to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes."

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders endorses Sessions' view, saying: "It is very biblical to enforce the law."

Christian leaders of various denominations have other views on this.

"While protecting our borders is important, we can and must do better as a government, and as a society, to find other ways to ensure that safety," Cardinal Daniel Nicholas DiNardo says.

DiNardo, who is the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, says: "Separating babies from their mothers is not the answer and is immoral."

Rev. Franklin Graham, son of the late Rev. Billy Graham and a supporter of President Donald Trump, says he cannot support Sessions' actions in ripping families apart, which he finds "disgraceful."

Matthew Schlimm, a professor of the Old Testament at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary in Iowa, says Sessions has taken the passage from Romans 13 completely out of context.

"Immediately beforehand and afterwards, Paul urges readers to love others, including their enemies. Anyone with half an ounce of moral conviction knows that tearing children away from parents has nothing to do with love."

He says the same passage Sessions cited has been used to justify slavery and Nazism to tear children away from their parents.

"Sessions follows the pattern of history," he says.

"What's chilling is to think that we again live in such morally deranged times."

Sessions, who is a Methodist, does not have his church's support in his views.

"Tearing children away from parents who have made a dangerous journey to provide a safe and sufficient life for them is unnecessarily cruel and detrimental to the well-being of parents and children," says Bishop Kenneth Carter, president of the Council of Bishops of the United Methodist Church.

Source

• New York Times
• USA Today
• Huffington Post
• Image: Buzz Feed

A church-led app is targeting "modern slavery" at Britain's 18,000 hand car washes to protect children and other vulnerable groups by urging users to report suspected cases to authorities. Read more

"Most people think human trafficking and slavery a thing of the past that need not concern them. But as we speak, there are 4,300 slaves in Australia and 40.3 million slaves worldwide," Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP says.

He is appealing to everyone, including citizens and institutions, to join forces against human trafficking and to help the victims.

His plea is echoed by English Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster, who says churches, governments, police and business leaders must do more to tackle the growing phenomenon.

Nichols was one of several Church leaders and police department leaders from over 30 countries who attended a meeting of the ‘Santa Marta' group at the Vatican last week. The meeting's focus was on combatting modern slavery and trafficking.

At the papal audience which concluded the meeting last Friday, Francis said migrants are often victims, as many are forced to choose illegal channels of migration.

These people are exposed to "abuse of every kind, exploitation and slavery."

Francis says criminal organizations engaging in human trafficking make use of migratory routes to hide their victims among the migrants and refugees.

He asked for prayers so "the Lord may convert the hearts of traffickers and give hope to those who suffer because of this shameful scourge so they may regain their freedom".

Source

• Vatican News
• Vatican News
• Image: A Celebration of Women

Bank of Montreal senior manager Joseph Mari yesterday presented the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PASS) with an overview of the role crypto-currencies play in money laundering.

He also explained blockchain's potential in the money-laundering and slavery fight.

Pope Francis has made slavery a top priority of his pontificate and helped inspire the recent PASS efforts, according to an internal document provided to CoinDesk.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) says forced labour including human slave trading generates annual profits of approximately US$150 billion.

The profits are gleaned from more than 21 million men, women and children in forced labour, commercial sexual exploitation and forced economic exploitation.

The slaves are mostly engaged in domestic work, construction, manufacturing, mining and utilities, agriculture, forestry and fishing.

PASS has held workshops, seminars and plenary meetings and has a "core" recommendation to resettle slaves where they are found, if they so choose, rather than repatriate them.

"Blockchain and cryptocurrency need to be on their [PASS's] radar, it needs to be recognised as something that is current, is being utilised and, the quicker the learning curve is surmounted, the quicker we can start working towards the risks that are presented," Mari says.

Mari also presented PASS with the most recent results of Project Protect.

Project Protect was founded in 2015 to teach anti-money laundering (AML) officers how to identify transaction patterns that might suggest evidence of human trafficking.

It identified an increase in the use of crypto-currencies by slave traders in Canada and other regions.

The Project has worked with blockchain data startup Chainalysis and other financial institutions to create new methods to identify patterns in crypto-currency transactions that might indicate a slave has been purchased or is being advertised.

"... I'm just really stressing from an AML standpoint that this is something that has been going on for the better part of 10 years," Mari says.

"And its [bitcoin's] uses are diversifying across the board, in terms both positive and negative."

Mari described the potential impact the PASS event could have on jump-starting the fight against slavery transacted in crypto-currency:

"The quicker we can start coming to terms with the fact that this is something that is most likely going to be here for the foreseeable future, the quicker we can start getting towards mitigating the risk."

Source

• Coindesk
• Ethereum World News
• Image: bravda.bg

It's vacation season for much of the world, with travelers flocking to airports to jet off for some hard-earned R&R.

But it's not just holidaymakers who fly on planes. Airports are also hubs for human trafficking — where adults or children are transported into forced labor or commercial sexual exploitation.

Almost every country in the world is affected by trafficking, and traffickers often use air travel to move their victims. Sometimes, victims are flown into another country on the promise of a legitimate job, other times traffickers move their victims within a country, to keep them powerless or to avoid detection.

But you can help. By being aware of the telltale signs that someone is being trafficked, you may be able to keep them from a life of modern slavery.

We asked four organizations involved in anti-trafficking initiatives to share some of the signs that could indicate that a passenger is being trafficked through an airport.

It's important to remember that even if you spot a number of these signs, it doesn't necessarily mean someone is being trafficked. But if you do suspect someone is being trafficked, do not confront suspected traffickers or attempt to rescue suspected victims — instead, call emergency services or alert the airport authorities.

1 — A traveler is not dressed appropriately for their route of travel.
You might notice right away that a traveler has few or no personal items. Victims may be less well dressed than their companions. They may be wearing clothes that are the wrong size, or are not appropriate for the weather on their route of travel.

2 — They have a tattoo with a bar code, the word "Daddy."
Many people have tattoos, so a tattoo in itself is obviously not an indicator, but traffickers or pimps feel they own their victims and a barcode tattoo, or a tattoo with "Daddy" or even a man's name could be a red flag that the person is a victim. Continue reading

Sources

• CNN
• Image: Verde Independent

Ending this "modern slavery" has been a major priority for Pope Francis, Gallagher said.

The Catholic Church is collaborating "with both the public and private sectors, including with government authorities."

Gallagher says the problem can be fully addressed only by "promoting effective juridical instruments and concrete collaboration at multiple levels by all stakeholders".

Hosted by UK Prime Minister Theresa May, the event Gallagher was speaking at was entitled "A Call to Action to End Forced Labour, Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking."

Gallagher, who is the Holy See's Secretary for Relations with States, highlighted the special role of women and religious personnel in offering an avenue of trust.

"Experience has shown that many victims are wary of trusting law enforcement authorities, but that they confide their stories more easily to religious personnel, especially religious sisters, who can build their trust in the legal process and provide them safe haven and other forms of assistance."

Source

• Crux
• The Islamic Monthly

She spoke about her charitable work in many of the most dangerous areas of the world and in particular about the redeeming of slaves in Sudan.

What struck me at the time was her comment that not only is slavery alive and well in the twenty-first century, but also that there are more human beings in slavery today than at any time in history.

That talk came back to me when I read this report from the Guardian. According to a new report, not only is slavery still with us, but the practice is thriving.

Modern-day slavers can make 25 to 30 times the return on their investment than their counterparts in the 18th and 19th century.

A slavery economist (isn't it depressing that there even is such a thing!?) at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Havard Kennedy School, Siddharth Kara, has calculated that the average profit on each slave in the world is just shy of USD 4,000 per year.

And that the comparable figure is nine-times that amount if the victim is in the sex trafficking trade.

Indeed, according to Kara, while 50% of the total profits of modern day slavery are made up by sex trafficking, only 5% of modern slaves are sex trafficking victims.

What is interesting (and terribly sad) is that slavery is lucrative not because there is a paucity of slaves in the world today. Instead, there are twice as many people trapped in some form of slavery today than were traded throughout the entire 350 year history of the transatlantic slave trade!

While roughly 13 million people were captured and sold in the transatlantic trade between the late 15th and 19th centuries, today the UN's International Labour Organisation believe that at least 21 million are in some form of modern slavery. Continue reading

• Marcus Roberts has just started a new job teaching contract law at Auckland University.

Unembarrassed and unrepentant, the smuggler was still touting for business among the crowds flooding into Agadez, an oasis town on the fringe of the Sahara desert in central Niger that has for centuries been a trading centre and gateway to shifting paths across the desert.

"I told him ‘my friend died in Libya because of you'," Yusuf said a few days after the meeting.

Then, desperately hungry, he asked him for some food.

The man shrugged off both appeals, and walked away, saying only: "I am sorry, but God will help you."

Yusuf, a 24-year-old Nigerian, was one of thousands of people who had travelled to Libya looking for work, or hoping to sail to Europe, who were instead sucked into a grim and violent world of slave markets, private prisons, and brutal forced brothels.

The dangers of attempting to cross the Mediterranean to Europe, in overcrowded, unseaworthy vessels, have been highlighted by a series of desperate rescue missions and thousands of deaths at sea in recent years.

Last week, at least 245 people were killed by shipwrecks, bringing the toll for this year alone to 1,300.

Less well-known are the dangers of Libya itself for migrants fleeing poverty across West Africa.

The country's slide into chaos following the 2011 death of dictator Muammar Gaddafi and the collapse of the government have made it a breeding ground for crime and exploitation.

Two rival governments, an Isis franchise and countless local militias competing for control of a vast, sparsely populated territory awash in weapons, have allowed traffickers to flourish, checked only by the activities of their criminal rivals.

Last year, more than 180,000 refugees arrived in Italy, the vast majority of them through Libya, according to UN agency the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

That number is forecast to top 200,000 this year - and these people form a lucrative source of income for militias and mafias who control Libya's roads and trafficking networks. Continue reading

Sources

• The Guardian article by Emma Graham-Harrison
• Image: The Nation

Speaking at the parliamentary inquiry into human trafficking in New South Wales, Archbishop Anthony Fisher outlined his personal experience of these practises.

He said when he was a parish priest a South American nanny asked him for help.

Her passport had been taken away, she hadn't been paid, nor was she even allowed to leave the home in which she worked without permission.

The inquiry is hearing from many organisations that slavery is rife in some Australian industries.

These include the sex, construction, food processing, agriculture and domestic industries.

The Australian Catholic Religious Against Trafficking in Humans told the inquiry most victims are immigrants, who have been lied to by traffickers.

They avoid going to the authorities because they fear being sent to detention centers for illegal immigrants.

Earlier this month, former Australian representative to the Vatican, John McCarthy, told the committee about the anti-trafficking efforts being promoted by Pope Francis.

Francis has called slavery "an open wound on the body of contemporary society."

Source:

• Crux
• Image: ABC