GABRIELA Network New York/New Jersey

Sex Trafficking in NYC - Film Screening of "Very Young Girls"

2009-07-22T00:22:00.000-07:00

GABNet screens "Very Young Girls," an award-winning expose of that follows teenage American girls as they are seduced, abused, sold and criminalized on New York streets.
Type rest of the post here

What does Sex Trafficking look like in your own backyard?

Join GABRIELA Network NY/NJ of the Mariposa Alliance

for a screening of “Very Young Girls”

Monday, July 27, 2009

7:00 pm

Bluestockings

172 Allen St New York, NY 10002

RSVP gabnetnynj@gmail. com or call (212) 592-3507

AND

Participate in a dialogue after the film with members of

Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (GEMS) , the only organization in New York State

specifically designed to serve girls and young women who have experienced

commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking.(to be confirmed)

“Very Young Girls” is an award-winning expose of that follows teenage

American girls as they are seduced, abused, sold and criminalized

on New York’s streets.

GABRIELA Network (GABNet) is the largest and oldest US-based multi-racial, militant feminist, anti-imperialist massgrassroots organization cultivating Filipina leadership. It's Purple Rose Campaign - now celebrating its 10th year - was one of the first to address how the

deleterious effects of globalization and militarism endlessly supply women and girls into sexual and labor exploitation.

Find us at Twittter, Facebook & Myspace

www.gabnet.org

http://gabnetnynj. blogspot. com/

PO Box 403, Times Square Station, New York , NY 10036 * (212) 592-3507

May Day: Demand Immigration Reform! Act to Dismantle Imperialism!

2009-04-30T18:47:00.000-07:00

Rally for immigrant women's liberation this May Day, Fri., May 1 with GABNet NY/NJ and Immigrant Communities in Action (ICA). Meet at Union Square at 6 p.m. and look for the GABNet banners. Email contact: gabnetnynj@gmail.com

May Day Statement of the GABNet/Ma-Al: Demand Immigration Reform; Act to Dismantle Imperialism

STOP ALL ICE RAIDS AND DEPORTATIONS!
LEGALIZATION OF ALL WORKING MIGRANTS!
STOP THE TRAFFICKING AND PROSTITUTION OF WOMEN!
GENUINE EQUALITY FOR ALL!
A WOMAN’S PLACE IS AT THE HEAD OF THE STRUGGLE FOR THE LIBERATION OF HUMANITY!

On this year’s International Workers’ Day GABNet of the Mariposa Alliance calls on all women to reaffirm their commitment to women’s liberation. March against imperialism and women’s exploitation; march for workers and immigrant rights!

The call for a Comprehensive Immigration Reform must be made in conjunction with steadfast resistance to the globalization policies and practices by US-led imperialism, and an equally steadfast support for people’s movements in the much-imposed upon continents of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

May First being International Labor Day, we must recognize the role that imperialism plays in the burgeoning of migration the world over. GABNet of the Mariposa Alliance understands that while comprehensive immigration reform may well solve certain basic issues afflicting our transnational communities here, the root cause of migration is US-led imperialism which has virtually made our home countries economically uninhabitable.

Women the world over have suffered exponentially under imperialist globalization, which exacerbates the patriarchal view that they are a disposable segment of the national population. Women are driven to acute poverty by the destruction of their traditional livelihood as multinational conglomerates take over national resources and re-organizes national economies into profit-generating machinery for their own benefit. Women are transformed into cheap labor and sex commodity, as witness in the export processing zones of the world and in the global sex trade. As if this injury is not sufficient, imperialist culture insults women by pandering the idea that women have value only in terms of how their sexuality can become a source of cash and profit. Women are being asked to ignore the history of prostitution as originating in slavery. Truly, imperialism exacerbates patriarchal values, disguising the objectification of women as “choice” and “agency.”

GABNet honors all women -- migrant, transnational and citizens -- for the nobility of their sacrifice to enable their families, communities and nations to survive. At this time when the financial system’s collapse reveals how greed and selfishness are rewarded the most, women continue to be expected to be selfless and generous, to the extent of suspending their own lives to become workhorses for nations ravaged by imperialism.

Women in developing countries across the world have long been the engine of development and growth, taking risks and working impossibly hard to provide for their families. Every day, approximately 3000 Filipinas leave their homes and children to enter precarious situations that can only be described as modern-day slavery. Sadly, from Nepal to Senegal, from Iraq to Palestine, our sisters have become a symbol of what imperialism means to women: sexual slavery, relentless exploitation, violence, and death.

The global economic crisis is devastating the lives of women workers and their families. In Asia and Latin America, women working in export manufacturing industries, like clothes and electronics, are often first to be laid off, frequently without pay or compensation. In the Philippines, sex traffickers prey on women who have been laid off from factory jobs, asking them if they want to go and work abroad. Over one million women and children are trafficked internationally every year, becoming victims of sexual exploitation, labor exploitation and abuse.

There is a direct line between the transformation of women into private property in 4500 B.C. and their continuing oppression and exploitation in the 21st century. Time to put a stop to this! Lay down the New Women’s Agenda! Equality for all in all spheres of human life!

Release date: April 21, 2009. Contact: Jollene Levid, Gabnet Secretary-General, secgen@gabnet.org, Tel: 323-356-4748

Sex Trafficking in Women and Girls: A Global Phenomenon

2009-04-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

Olivia J. Quinto, GABNet Education Director, speaks at:

"Sex Trafficking in Women and Girls: A Global Phenomenon," a panel presented by The Young Professionals Committee of UNIFEM/USNC/NY

A phenomenon know as "modern day slavery," sex trafficking has become increasingly pervasive. The panel will feature experts in the field who are working to promote awareness of this horrific issue and combat human trafficking. Panelists will provide an overview of the problem on the international level, and examine the steps being taken to address the problem and bring the trafficked victims to safety.

Thursday, April 23rd at 6:00 pm. DOORS OPEN at 5:30 pm.
The New School, Swayduck Auditorium
65 Fifth Ave. New York, NY

Featured Panelists:
Olivia Quinto Reyes, GABRIELA Network
Cortney Rhoads Stapleton, RedLight Children Campaign
Shamiso Mbizvo, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

Moderator: Director Michael Cohen, Graduate Program in International Affairs, The New School. Co-sponsored by The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs

Go to https://www.unifem-usnc.org.nyyoungprof for updates. RSVP BY Wednesday, April 22nd to metrony-yp@unifem-usnc.org

***SAVE THE DATE***
May 5, 2009, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm, Recent Changes to Human Trafficking
Laws: An Analysis Of The Federal William Wilberforce Trafficking
Victims Protection Re-Authorization Act of 2008 and New York’s
Anti-Human Trafficking Law (2007) and Safe Harbor for Exploited Children
Act (2008)

EXIT CUCKOO: "Women's Work?" Wed 4/22 at 8p

2009-04-20T09:07:00.000-07:00

Join GABNet member/founder Ninotcka Rosca at a special post-performance dialogue of EXIT CUCKOO - a new play by the Working Theater

Exit Cuckoo is a hilarious and profoundly moving collage of mothers, nannies, caretakers and children and the complex chemistry between them. "Lisa Ramirez gives us an inside look into the complicated, disturbing, often overlooked world of mothers, nannies and children.... Both brave and funny, Exit Cuckoo deserves our attention." -Eve Ensler

Exit Cuckoo
written & performed by Lisa Ramirez; directed by Colman Domingo
April 17-May 17, 2009
Clurman Theatre, 410 W 42nd St.
www.ticketcentral.com or 212.279.4200

Join us for these special post-performance dialogues:

Wed 4/22 at 8pm: "Women's Work?"
With Ninotchka Rosca of GABnet and Phoebe Taubman of A Better Balance. Working both inside and outside the home is continuing dilemma for women- how do we cope as individuals and as a society?

Sun 5/3 at 3pm: "Employers for Justice"
Hosted by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice
What are common employment practices among employers of domestic workers- questions, difficulties and potential for change?

PAST: Sat. 4/18 at 2pm: "The Nanny Legacy"
Hosted by Domestic Workers United
What does the nanny-parent- child relationship look like when it works? Individual accounts of experiences being a nanny, employing a nanny and being nurtured by a nanny. Bring your story and share.

GABNet Youth LA Condemns NYPD Police Brutality; Sends Message of Solidarity in Support of New School Protests

2009-04-16T21:25:00.000-07:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Maureen Ivy Quicho, Gabnet Organizing Director
organizing@gabnet.org
Tel: (951) 333-4306

^GABNet NY/NJ member Ona Mirkinson protests New School University in New York City amidst incidents of abuse by the NYPD. Photo by NYTimes.

LOS ANGELES: Gabnet Youth LA of the Civitas School of Leadership at the Edward Roybal Learning Center condemns the actions of the New York Police Department, and stands in solidarity with the students of the New School, in their efforts to oust school president Bob Kerrey, former Nebraskan senator.

As Gabnet Youth recently led a thousand students to walk-out in Los Angeles, they support the New School students’ radical methods in New York. The New School students attempted to occupy the building on April 10, 2009, in order for their demands to be heard; they were subsequently beaten, pepper-sprayed and arrested by police officers.

“We should be able to exercise our right to protest without being unjustly attacked,” says Gabnet Youth leader Teresa Avalos.

Gabnet Youth LA is fighting a similar battle the New School students are waging. While the New School students are calling for the resignation of Kerrey, “a politician without a Ph.D,” as his intentions are aimed at economic profit, rather than academic excellence, Gabnet Youth LA is protesting the efforts of the LAUSD to pull itself out of a deficit by issuing pink slip notifications that will terminate thousands of teachers. Gabnet Youth member Ivania Zepeda drew parallels between the two struggles as she stated, “Just like the New School students, we are fighting for our basic right to a quality education, which should not be sacrificed for money or power.”

Gabnet Youth is committed to highlighting the experience of young women, and has been meeting and addressing various issues including educational justice and gender violence. Gabnet Youth is a unit of the Los Angeles chapter of Gabriela Network, a US-Philippine women's organization with chapters across the country. --###

Afghan women protest law that legalises marital rape

2009-04-15T21:18:00.000-07:00

Afghan women protest against law that 'legalises rape'

April 15, 2009, The Guardian - Hundreds of angry Afghan women gathered outside the Kabul mosque run by a hardline Shia cleric today to protest against a law that human rights organisations claim legalises marital rape.

About 200 women chanted slogans and carried banners outside the imposing Khatam Al Nabi mosque and seminary run by Mohammad Asif Mohseni, the cleric who has strongly promoted a law that also bans women from leaving their homes without the permission of their husbands.

Meanwhile, a roughly equal number of largely male counter-protesters shouted "Allahu Akbar" and furiously protested against what they see as largely foreign pressure to impose western cultural norms on Afghanistan.

According to Associated Press, some of the women were pelted with stones by opponents. >>Read more

GABNet Launches New Offensive against Human Trafficking

2009-03-31T15:27:00.000-07:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: As Women's History Month draws to a close, GABNet of the Mariposa Alliance prepared to launch a new offensive through the formation of Purple Rose Campus Committees, the latest in its arsenal of weapons against the trafficking of women and children. The Purple Rose Committees, based in 12 colleges and university campuses in California, will combat the near pandemic proportions of human trafficking and modern day slavery. Other Purple Rose committees around the U.S. are in the works.

The Purple Rose Campaign was established by GABNet in 1999 in response to the 850,000 persons that are trafficked internationally. The Campaign addresses the growing numbers of Filipinas who are trafficked into the sex trade, particularly through the Filipina Mail Order Brides in the United States. The campaign recently won successes as part of the advocacy group pushing the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA), which was re-authorized last year.

“It’s not enough to just work on legislation, we have to talk about trafficking at the community level. That’s the way to identify and service victims." said Jollene Levid, Secretary General of GABNet.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
March 29, 2009
Jollene Levid, Gabnet Secretary-General
secgen@gabnet.org
Tel: 323-356-4748

GABNET PREPARES TO LAUNCH NEW OFFENSIVE AGAINST HUMAN TRAFFICKING

March 28, 2009, Los Angeles - On Saturday, March 28, 2009, GABNet of the Mariposa Alliance prepared to launch Purple Rose Campus Committees, the latest in it's arsenal of weapons against the trafficking of women and children. The initial 12 campus-based Purple Rose Committees are in the works to combat the near pandemic proportions of human trafficking and modern day slavery.

Annually, over 850,000 persons are trafficked internationally. Human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal industry in the world, generating billions of dollars in profits from the modern day slave trade. GABNet began the Purple Rose Campaign as part of an international effort in 1999.

The Purple Rose Campaign was established to address the growing numbers of Filipinas who are trafficked into the sex trade, particularly Filipina Mail Order Brides in the United States. The campaign recently won successes as part of the advocacy group pushing the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA), which was re-authorized last year.

“It’s not enough to just work on legislation. We have to talk about trafficking at the community level. That’s the way to identify and service victims. It’s also the way to address the root causes of why so many Filipinas are trafficked- namely poverty and militarization in the Philippines” said Jollene Levid, Secretary General of GABNet.

The Purple Rose Campus Committees are composed of students, faculty members,and community members who are interested in organizing and raising awareness about the trafficking issue. Each committee has pledged to hold two main events during the year: a fundraiser and a community awareness raising training. The funds raised from their efforts will benefit victim services.

“We felt it was time for students to become more involved. The youth have a great capacity to create change and educate others on what is going on. The Purple Rose Campaign is a formal way for high schools, colleges, and universities to show their support,” stated Loralei Bingamon, Director of GABNet LA’s Filipinas Not For Sale Campaign.

The first wave of the Purple Rose Campus Committees will be in the Southern California area, but will eventually be a national effort. The first 12 campuses include the University of Southern California (USC), Mount Saint Mary’s University, Universities of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Irvine(UCI), and San Diego (UCSD), California State Universities Long Beach (CSULB), Los Angeles (CSULA), and Northridge (CSUN), and Santa Monica Community College (SMCC). There are also high school committees at Civitas School of Leadership, Narbonne, and Cerritos High Schools.The creation of the Purple Rose Committees and a Women’s Month celebration in Los Angeles with over 250 people in attendance on Saturday night, March28th closed Gabnet’s 2009 national Women’s Month activities. --###

Alternative Law Groups'S Statement on "Nicole's" Affidavit

2009-03-30T20:51:00.001-07:00

The Alternative Law Groups, Inc. (ALG) asserts that the recently released sworn statement by Nicole fails to make a credible retraction of her testimony during the trial of the Subic rape case. ALG is a coalition of 20 legal-resource NGOs that work for justice system reforms in the Philippines.

Nicole's sworn statement should not bear any legal significance on the appeal of the conviction now pending with the Court of Appeals or on the issue of custody of convicted American soldier Daniel Smith. This latest development is especially relevant, however, as it clearly exemplifies how women victims of violence, as well as members of marginalized and vulnerable groups, have been at a disadvantaged position in the country’s justice system. What is particularly disturbing are the circumstances surrounding the affidavit’s execution. The preparation of the affidavit without the assistance--and without the knowledge--of Nicole’s counsel clearly established a lopsided situation with Nicole at the losing end. The affidavit glaringly presented the defense version.

The ALG has always pointed out the difficulties that are experienced by women victims of violence and members of marginalized groups in sustaining the prosecution or litigation of a case in court, caused, among others, by the lack of support systems for victims and complainants. This was reiterated in last year’s Forum on Increasing Access to Justice that was organized by the Supreme Court. In the Subic rape case, this problem took on a new and uglier twist as the government itself took the side of the accused, despite his conviction, and willingly, and even surreptitiously, relinquished custody over the convicted person to the United States authorities. With the trial court’s conviction of the accused, the successful prosecution of the Subic rape case was hailed as a triumph of our justice system. Subsequent developments would prove the reality that, in many cases, women victims of violence, and members of marginalized sectors, suffer further victimization as they seek remedy from the justice system. Read ALG's full statement.

Fil-Ams bring protest vs. VFA to Pentagon

2009-03-26T12:47:00.000-07:00

GABNet NY/NJ was quoted in ABS-CBN News article about militant resistance to war on the 6th anniversary of the U.S. invasion in Iraq:

“[Nicole, survivor of rape by U.S. military in the Philippines] was pressured by both governments to withdraw her case even though in 2006 Daniel Smith was convicted because of the evidence,” declared Catherine Judge, GABRIELA Network coordinator for New York-New Jersey.

Fil-Ams bring protest vs. VFA to Pentagon
Mar. 25, 2009, ABS-CBN North America News Bureau
WASHINGTON D.C. - Militant Fil-Ams brought their clamor for scrapping the RP-US Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) to the Pentagon, joining thousands of anti-war protesters marking the 6th anniversary of the US war in Iraq last Saturday.

“We’re here to denounce the continued occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the US support for Israel against Palestine,” said Chevy Evangelista of Alliance Philippines.

“But most of all,” he added, “we’re here to oppose the Visiting Forces Agreement in the Philippines that is a source of attacks on the people of Mindanao.”

“We want the VFA scrapped. No US troops in the Philippines, they have no business there,” Evangelista told ABS-CBN’s Balitang America.

It was no surprise his message resonated with Americans gathered for the large anti-war rally, the biggest yet since President Obama was swept to power, partly on a platform of ending the US war in Iraq.

Organizers put their numbers at 10,000 but police pegged the crowd at a lower 3,000.

The police also came in full force, blocking freeway exits and roads around the Pentagon. Backed by fire trucks and a Huey helicopter that circled continuously above the marchers, the policemen were in full anti-riot regalia.

But this didn’t stop some demonstrators from taunting the cops.

Some rode on motorcycles and squad cars, others on horses. Using binoculars, some officers took vantage positions on rooftops of office buildings, keeping a wary eye on the protesters.

The police also threw a protective ring around the offices of big US firms like Boeing, SAIC and KBR that have huge contracts with the Pentagon.

Demonstrators accused them of supporting US wars abroad.

The day’s protest action started with speeches near the Lincoln Memorial. Evangelista, who together with other Filipino protesters, came all the way from New York, was among the speakers at the makeshift stage.

“It’s very important to be here because Filipinos are affected by the US war in Iraq, especially our migrant workers in the Middle East,” Mona Lunot of the Damayan Migrant Workers told Balitang America.

“The US economic crisis is rooted in the unbridled spending for America’s wars around the world,” she averred.

Lunot blames the war for the loss of jobs as America’s recession adversely affects the rest of the world.

She asserts that the US has used the global war on terror as a pretext for posting troops in “frontline” countries, including the Philippines.

VFA tied to ‘Nicole’ saga

“American soldiers are going to the Philippines, for what? Para magkalat ng lagim?” she asked.

The VFA sets the rules of engagement and conduct for US troops posted in the Philippines. The RP-US Mutual Defense Treaty calls on the American military to come to the Philippine’s aid if it is attacked by another country, and lays the basis for annual joint training exercises.

But the accord has come under steady attack from militants back home, especially in the wake of the “Nicole” saga.

US marines Lance Corporal Daniel Smith was convicted of raping ‘Nicole’ inside the former US Navy base in Subic, Zambales.

Smith’s trial and conviction were all covered under the VFA. Invoking the agreement, however, the Philippines was only able to take brief custody of the accused before he was whisked off in the middle of the night to the US embassy in Manila.

Even after he was convicted, Smith remained in US hands.

Earlier this month, Nicole signed a new affidavit that cast doubt on her own testimony of rape. The assertion was made public by Smith’s Filipino lawyers. Before that, news leaked that ‘Nicole’ was now living somewhere in the US.

“She was pressured by both governments to withdraw her case even though in 2006 Daniel Smith was convicted because of the evidence,” declared Catherine Judge, GABRIELA Network coordinator for New York-New Jersey.

“Some people may see this as intimidation of a powerless woman because of the lack of justice in the Philippines and US,” Lunot declared.

“Some foreigners may also now see Filipinas in a bad light, as someone who can be paid off,” she said, adding, “it all depends on who is looking.”

Judge said all future military pacts by the Philippines should have clear guarantees against abuses.

“We demand clauses in all military agreements to protect women against violence from the military,” she stressed.

As the protesters snaked through DC’s streets and across the Memorial Bridge to Arlington, Virginia, they carried symbolic coffins, including one that bore the Philippine flag.

They stood for the human cost of America’s wars, waged in the name of global security.

“We don’t need them there. We can protect ourselves, we don’t have to depend on America,” Lunot declared.

Read the ABS-CBN article on their website.

GABNet/Ma-Al Protests War in D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco Anti-War Rallies

2009-03-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

^Left: GABNet NY/NJ addresses the masses at anti-war rally in Washington, D.C. Right: GABNet members carry casket draped with the Philippine flag, representing those killed by U.S. troops and puppet government in the Philippines.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: GABNet of the Mariposa Alliance was present at all three major anti-war rallies called by the ANSWER Coalition. The biggest assembly was in Washington D.C. where 10,000 marched past the PENTAGON and the headquarters of major war profiteers like Halliburton's Kellogg, Root and Brown Corporation. Several tense moments transpired when Pentagon and State police tried to block the delivery of mock caskets to the war profiteers' headquarters.

One casket was draped with the Philippine flag, to represent those killed by U.S. troops in the island of Mindanao, as well as those killed by U.S. imperialism's puppet government in the Philippines headed by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo...

Four thousand U.S. troops are in the Philippines, ostensibly for the annual joint military exercises with the Philippine Armed Forces but actually to engage in the suppression of the Moro sovereignty movement, as well as the progressive movement in the archipelago.

GABNet joined forces with the Alliance for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Philippines in Washington, D.C., women flocked to the Gabnet contingent in Los Angeles, and in San Francisco, Gabnet was pivotal to forming a women's contingent, alongside WILPF, CODEPINK, Women for Genuine Security, and other women's organizations. Pictures attached.

March 22, 2009
Jollene Levid, Gabnet Secretary-General
secgen@gabnet.org
Tel: 323-356-4748

--###

Kilos Babae! (Act Now Women!)

2009-03-22T17:59:00.000-07:00

GABRIELA Network Publishing Center released the latest edition of Kilos Babae, kaWOMENan! (Act Now Women!). kaWOMENan is a newsletter in response to the urgent need for information and education on the political, economic, social and cultural struggles confronting Filipino women and the connection of their issues with US policy decisions.

Inside the issue (Version XIX, Issue 1, Spring 2009), which is available on the kaWOMENan web page of the GABRIELA Network website:
* GABNet Demands President Obama to Protect Women’s Rights
* Stop the Traffick Jam Caravan and Concert in Southern California
* Poem by DJ Kuttin Kandi: Reflections of a Holiday Journey Home to Queens 2008
* School on Gender Rights for Filipino Domestic Workers opens in New York, led by GABNet of Mariposa Alliance and Damayan Migrant Workers Association
* In Commemoration of International Working Women’s Day
* GABNet/Ma-Al Condemns Israel’s Attack on Gaza
* 16 Days of GABNet (Against Gender Violence) & International Human Rights Day
* Exit Cuckoo, a new play about nannies and the families who employ them, opening in New York City
* A Decade of Purple Roses
* GABNet Reflections and Campaigns and more...

What’s in a name? Kilos-Babae comes from the Tagalog phrase "Act, woman," which has an effeminate connotation for men and as a derogatory command to women to do something (for men). We reclaim this phrase to mean Act Now, Women! as the foundation for militant women’s organizing and empowerment. kaWomenan combines ka from the Tagalog word "kasama" meaning companion or comrade; the English word "women;" and the Tagalog suffix "an" meaning reciprocity. Used together, "ka" and "an" mean collectiveness.

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA ON THE REPERCUSSIONS OF THE NICOLE/VFA CASE

2009-03-19T13:16:00.000-07:00

On November 1, 2005, Nicole, a 22-year-old Filipina, was observed being dumped out of a van in a semi-unclothed and semi-conscious state. The van contained three U.S. troops who were in the Philippines for the annual joint military exercises with the Philippine Armed Forces. Lance Cpl. Daniel Smith was subsequentlly charged with rape before the Philippine courts. He was found guilty and sentenced to 40 years. After spending 30 days in a Philippine jail, he was spirited out at midnight to the U.S. embassy where he is said to remain while his case goes through the Court of Appeals. This month, Nicole signed an affidavit saying she might have given the wrong signals to Cpl. Smith. She was given an immigration visa for the U.S. The Filipino people are demanding that the Visiting Forces Agreement signed by President Bush and President Estrada, who was overthrown in 2001, be abrogated for its onerous provisions against the sovereignty of the Philippines.

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA ON THE REPERCUSSIONS OF THE NICOLE/VFA CASE FOR AMERICANS OF PHILIPPINE ANCESTRY, FILIPINAS & WOMEN IN GENERAL

March 18, 2009

His Excellency, Barack H. Obama
President of the United States of America
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington DC 20500

Cc: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi

Dear President Obama:

We write to you because we are disturbed and anguished by reports that the U.S. government was complicit in the attempt to frustrate the course of justice with regard to the rape conviction of Lance Cpl. Daniel Smith in the Philippines.

A majority of our members are women of Philippine ancestry who already have to contend with the persistent reputation of Filipinas as among the most trafficked women in the world, both in the international labor and sex markets, and as among those so victimized by sexual and domestic violence.

Nine of the eleven women recently killed by intimate partners in Hawaii were Filipinas, who also comprise 40% of women killed by intimate partners in San Francisco. Filipino-American communities, from New Jersey to Honolulu, suffer a high rate of violence against women. This perception of Filipinas as "fair game" for sexual and other forms of violence was created, among other causes, by more than a hundred years of being prostituted to the U.S. military.

Enabling a member of the U.S. military now to avoid legal repercussions for having sex, to the rowdy cheers of his fellow soldiers, with an indisputably intoxicated 22-year-old woman, who was then tossed out of the van in a state of semi-undress and semi-consciousness, is certainly not the change we have been waiting nor looking for. These facts were not disputed at the trial in the Philippines that convicted Lance Cpl. Daniel Smith in 2006.

Many states in the United States itself accept by law the fact that an inebriated woman cannot consent to have sex. This inability to give consent supersedes any other circumstance that may appear to encourage sexual attention, like wearing a short skirt, being flirtatious, or even kissing the violator. In those states, what transpired between “Nicole” and Cpl. Smith would be considered rape, especially as nothing was brought forth at the trial that would imply consent on Nicole’s part.

We worry now that because of this bargain between the U.S. and Philippine governments, U.S. military personnel may return to the U.S. believing that soldiers have the right to force sex upon women in whatever circumstance. No doubt you are already familiar with the unconscionable rate of sexual harassment, rape and violence against women suffered by female soldiers and military wives. This will but add to the U.S. military’s mistaken impression that war, occupation or just being more powerful and with more weapons than anyone gives them the right to defy U.S. laws, host countries’ laws and international law.

The Nicole incident happened in November, 2005 and the following year, in September, 2006, 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Hamza was gang-raped and murdered, along with her parents and younger sister, by U.S. troops in Iraq.

If, way back in November 2005, the U.S. government and the U.S. military had taken a strong stand against our troops inflicting sexual violence/violence upon women in general and upon women of host countries in particular, then we would not have this spectacle of avowed “liberators” gang-raping and killing those they purportedly “liberate.”

Instead, the U.S. military threatened the Philippine government with cancellation of humanitarian aid, with cancellation of joint military exercises, and the U.S. Embassy in the Philippines did everything possible to frustrate the carrying out of justice for the rape of Nicole.

This is not the change we waited for.

In this era of change you vowed to bring with your inauguration as president, at the very least, we are asking for specific provisions protective of women, and against violence against women, trafficking and prostitution in each and every military agreement, every Status of Forces and Visiting Forces Agreement, that U.S. enacts with another country.

This would help institutionalize, on a global scale, the pro-women stance that your administration made visible through your signing of the Ledbetter Act and the creation of the White House Women’s Council.

Thank you. We await your reply – preferably with action.

Respectfully yours,

Annalisa Enrile (interim Chair) Candace Custodio (Chair-elect)
Jollene G. Levid (Secretary-General)
GABRIELA NETWORK OF THE MARIPOSA ALLIANCE

Women say NO to war!

2009-03-19T10:36:00.000-07:00

March on the Pentagon, Saturday, March 21, On the 6th Anniversary of the invasion of Iraq

From Iraq to Afganistan, Philippines to Palestine
OCCUPATION IS VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
Women say NO to war!

Get on the bus on March 21 from Jackson Heights, Queens!

6:30 AM Bus leaves Dunkin Donuts at 74 St. & Roosevelt Ave., Queens
11:30 AM Bus arrives in DC
5:00 PM Bus leaves from DC
$40 Bus tickets (limited)
Contact:
GABRIELA Network/Mariposa Alliance: gabnetnynj@gmail.com, www.gabnet.org, www.gabnetnynj.blogspot.com/
Alliance for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Philippines: ugnayan.nynj@gmail.com, www.alliancephilippines.blogspot.com

FAQs
- What’s special about March 21?
- How are our immigrant communities affected by the war on Iraq?
- How are we as women affected by the war on Iraq?
- How are other members of the Filipino American community affected by the war on Iraq?

What’s special about March 21?

March 21 marks the sixth anniversary of the current US war on Iraq. Organized by the Act Now to Stop the War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition, simultaneous rallies will be held in Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other major cities across the US.

In New York City, Queens-based organizations Ugnayan ng mga Anak ng Bayan (Linking the children of the Motherland), Damayan Migrant Workers Association, and Gabriela Network / Mariposa Alliance are urging immigrant communities from the borough and in New York and New Jersey to join the March on the Pentagon in Washington DC on Saturday, March 21.

Filipino-Americans, who comprise the base constituency of these organizations, have a stake in making their voices heard, as US troops pour into the Philippines, Filipinas are subjected to military rape with impunity and the war between the Arroyo Government and the people of Mindanao escalates. We do not want our ancestral country turned into a war zone for the profit of US weapons manufacturers and Blackwater mercenaries.

Obama promised that the US occupation of Iraq will end in August 2010. So why should we still join in the anti war rally on March 21?

The continuing US led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Philippines impact the current US economic meltdown. Obama has allotted $200B for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next two years - that's about $100M a day at the back of the already suffering tax payers. This includes immigrants who are the first to lose jobs, homes and government services and suffer the higher cost of living.

How are our immigrant communities affected by the war on Iraq?

While the US government is allocating more money to fund the war in Iraq, the budget for social services are being slashed. The State Medical Insurance for Children was severely limited to children whose parents are "legal" or "documented" immigrants. This means that hundreds of thousands of children, born in the USA, will grow up without medical assistance.

With the pending budget cuts in New York City, tuition fees are projected to go up astronomically by next semester. This endangers the ability of young people, especially Filipino Americans, to acquire an education which would enable them to compete in the job market.

The Filipino-American community also suffers from the highest drop-out rate among Asian American communities. We Filipino Americans are practically invisible in the US society. That’s because we occupy mostly service jobs – not jobs of decision-making status.

How are we as women affected by the war on Iraq?

Women comprise the majority of the world's population. Violence against any nation impacts women exponentially. War increases violence against and trafficking of women. Women and children comprise war's collateral damage; they lose their value as human beings and become commodity who are bought and sold for the pleasure of those with power. Even women soldiers suffer from the violent machismo that is a sub-culture of militarism. American women soldiers are raped by their fellow soldiers, while military wives are often subjected to domestic violence and murder.

How are other members of the Filipino American community affected by the war on Iraq?

While the US government bails out capitalist banks and corporations, it only gives pennies to Filipino American World War II Veterans. These are former Filipino soldiers who fought during World War 2 in the Philippines under the US army. However, they are not treated equally as US veterans and are deprived of all benefits and entitlements because “their military service were not deemed active”.

Sixty-three years later, the US government would only give $15,000 lump sum for each Filipino veteran without any recognition to our US veterans. They are also being forced to agree to the the "quit claim" provision. This means that upon acceptance of the lump sum, the veterans will release future claims including lifetime pension.

As the US government continues to humiliate the Filipino veterans, they will keep funding the War on Iraq.

War Forces Migration!
Money for Workers' Rights & Compensation, Not for War and Occupation!
Violence against Nations = Violence against Women!
Solidarity with the Women of Iraq, Aghanistan, Palestine & Philippines!
War Kills the Filipino and Working Class Youth!
Money for Jobs & Education, Not for War & Occupation!
Money for the Filipino Veterans, Not for the War!

GENDER RIGHTS TRAINING FOR DOMESTIC WORKERS OPENS

2009-03-06T10:18:00.000-08:00

When Norma’s quadriplegic employer asked her to use her hands instead of a washcloth to soap and wash certain parts of his body, she was unsure whether this was par for the course or something else altogether. When Marina ’s employer demanded massages, she wondered if this was part of domestic work in the US . Anna, on the other hand, didn’t quite know how to respond to her employer’s predilection for showing her porn websites.

Because of these and other situations encountered by domestic workers, GABNet of the Mariposa Alliance and the Damayan Migrant Workers Association have initiated a School on Gender Rights for Filipino Domestic Workers. Funded by the New York Foundation, the project is the first of its kind nationally and historically. The first session will be on April 5th, at the North Star Fund Office, 520 Eight Avenue, New York, NY 10018.

Press release

Contact: Ollie Quinto, GABNet Education Director, at 212-592-3507
or email catherine.m.judge@gmail.com

GENDER RIGHTS TRAINING FOR DOMESTIC WORKERS OPENS

NEW YORK : When Norma’s quadriplegic employer asked her to use her hands instead of a washcloth to soap and wash certain parts of his body, she was unsure whether this was par for the course or something else altogether. When Marina ’s employer demanded massages, she wondered if this was part of domestic work in the US. Anna, on the other hand, didn’t quite know how to respond to her employer’s predilection for showing her porn websites.

Because of these and other situations encountered by domestic workers, GABNet of the Mariposa Alliance and the Damayan Migrant Workers Association have initiated a School on Gender Rights for Filipino Domestic Workers. Funded by the New York Foundation, the project is the first of its kind nationally and historically. The first session will be on April 5th, at the North Star Fund Office, 520 Eight Avenue, New York, NY 10018.

Those interested are requested to register either with GABNet at (212) 592-3507 or with Damayan at (212) 564-6057.

“It is a landmark and collaborative project created by im/migrants and second generation Filipina-Americans,” said Catherine Mercedes Judge, coordinator of the GABNet NY/NJ chapter. “When it comes to gender rights, violence against women and gender discrimination, we are not so different from our mothers, aunts, even grandmothers. We have a shared experience on this issue."

Olivia Quinto, GABNet National Education Director, will lead the first session. “From the first batch of participants, we will select those with the potential to be peer counselors." she said. "They will receive further training from Dr. Annalisa Enrile, who is an associate clinical professor of the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California.”

Ms. Quinto explained that this was to ensure that the domestic workers were empowered to deal with issues of gender rights themselves. “It is an expression of respect on our part that we consider them perfectly capable of tackling such issues once they are in receipt of knowledge and training.”

Report to Be Released

At the conclusion of the two-part training, Damayan intends to release its two-year study on domestic workers from the Philippines. The report is based on a qualitative survey, in-depth interviews of and focus group discussions with about 200 domestic workers from the Philippines. A joint project of Damayan and the Urban Justice Center , the report was prepared with the assistance of the renowned journalist and novelist Ninotchka Rosca.

The report will include an analysis of the impact of the Philippine Labor Export Policy on migration, antecedents of domestic workers in Philippine history and a set of recommendations for policy makers.

Those interested in obtaining copies of the report should call Damayan at the above number or send a letter to Damayan Migrant Workers Association, 406 West 40th Street 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10018.

The Damayan Migrant Workers Association is the largest organization of Filipino domestic workers in the US. In its six years of existence, it has helped a dozen workers recover unpaid wages; it is in the leadership of a six-organization coalition of domestic workers pushing for a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. The bill is anticipated to pass the New York legislature this year. Damayan hit the headlines recently when a member, Marichu Baoanan, sued a former Philippine ambassador to the United Nations for trafficking and peonage.

GABNet of the Mariposa Alliance is a 20-year-old US-Philippine all-women solidarity mass organization. It has had a long history of advocating for the gender rights of Filipinas and Filipina-Americans. Its Purple Rose Campaign against the trafficking of Filipinas led to the passage of the International Marriage Broker Regulatory Act by the US Congress. -- ##

FREE THE NJ 4!

2009-03-04T21:22:00.000-08:00

On August 18, 2006, seven young African American lesbians traveled to New York City from their homes in Newark for a regular night out. When walking down the street, a man sexually propositioned one of the women. After refusing to take no for an answer, he assaulted them.

The women tried to defend themselves, and a fight broke out. The women were charged with Gang Assault in the 2nd degree, a Class C Felony with a mandatory minimum of 3.5 years. Patreese Johnson was additionally charged with 1st Degree Assault. Three of the women accepted plea offers. On June 14th, 2007 ,Venice Brown (19), Terrain Dandridge (20), Patreese Johnson (20), and Renata Hill (24) received sentences ranging from 3 1⁄2 to 11 years in prison.

GABNet-NY/NJ stands with the NJ4 against violence against all women!

Check out the NJ4 blog to support their efforts at http://freenj4.wordpress.com/intersectional-injustice/

Increases in wives' income contributions affect psychological well-being of husbands

2009-03-04T21:19:00.000-08:00

University Park, Pa. -- Being the main breadwinner still seems to carry an important distinction for husbands and their sense of well-being, says a Penn State researcher. In reacting to increases in their wives' percentage contribution to overall family income, men appear to experience declines in well-being as measured by their reports of depressed feelings, varying levels of life satisfaction and physical symptoms such as headaches, says Dr. Stacy J. Rogers, assistant professor of sociology and human development and family studies. She notes that, paradoxically, the husbands' marital happiness is not affected to a significant degree. "It may be that the persistence of bread-winning expectations for men in our culture contributes to personal pressure and stress when their wives increase the percentage that they are contributing to the total household income," Rogers notes. >>Read more at ScienceBlog.com

Join ANSWER's Anti-War March in DC - March 21, 2009

2009-03-04T20:58:00.000-08:00

More information to follow...

Lay Down The New Women's Agenda For Full Women's Liberation!

2009-03-04T20:51:00.000-08:00

LAY DOWN THE NEW WOMEN’S AGENDA FOR FULL WOMEN’S LIBERATION!
[Statement in support of GABRIELA Network and Mariposa Alliance by National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada (NAPWC), SIKLAB National, Philippine Canada Task Force on Human Rights, and Filipino Canadian Youth Alliance (PCYA), and affiliates]

On the occasion of International Women’ Day, we support GABNet and the Mariposa Alliance in their call to lay down a New Women's Agenda attuned to the needs of our time for the full liberation of humankind. As we continue to march into the 21st century, such a call is appropriate and correct in the amidst the rising global economic crisis and continuing growth of transnational women and their families with their own specific and particular issues.

For over ten years now, GABNet and the member organizations of the National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada (NAPWC) have been working and continue to work together for genuine development and equality of women in their respective geographical locations in North America. They have also separately and jointly supported and continue to support the struggle of women in the Philippines for national and social liberation.

We are glad that this effort of GABNet and Mariposa Alliance to start laying down a New Women’s Agenda is fully grounded in their scientific understanding of women issues and their actual experience and practice in North America. This signifies a further advance in our continuing endeavor of learning from our experience and raising this experience to the realm of theory which in turn, should guide our subsequent practice.

On the occasion of this International Women’s Day, we wish GABNet and Mariposa Alliance success in this effort and in firmly holding up “half of the sky.”

Long live GABNet and the Mariposa Alliance !
Long live International Women’s Day !
Forward to a New Women’s Agenda for transnational women and their communities !

National Alliance of Philippine Women in Canada (NAPWC) and affiliates:
Philippine Women Centre of BC
Philippine women Centre of Ontario
Philippine women Centre of Quebec
Philippine women Centre of Manitoba

SIKLAB National and affiliates:
SIKLAB - BC
SIKLAB – Ontario
SIKLAB – Quebec

Philippine Canada Task Force on Human Rights and affiliates:
BC Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (BCCHRP)
PCTFHR - -Ontario
PCTFHR – Quebec

Filipino Canadian Youth Alliance (PCYA) – National and affiliates:
PCYA – Montreal
PCYA – Ontario
KM- Montreal

CNN's GPS: Al Qaeda, Taliban and Women

2009-03-01T21:49:00.000-08:00

Good discussion in Fareed Zakaria's GPS re whether we should go to war to defend women... sigh... they always miss the point: military solutions are never the answer; empowering women is.

GABNet LA: FREE Political Fashion Art Show

2009-02-28T10:54:00.000-08:00

In Commemoration of International Women's Day
GABNET LOS ANGELES PRESENTS

A MILE IN HER SHOES
Honoring Women Defenders
A FREE Political Fashion Art Show with Special Performances
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Pre-Show: 4:30pm
Show Starts: 5:00pm
Eagle Rock Plaza, Center Court: 2700 Colorado Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90041

Join GABRIELA Network Los Angeles of the Mariposa Alliance as we commemorate International Working Women's Day by holding an event that will celebrate the brave and courageous journeys made by Women Defenders of human rights. We invite all peace loving, justice seeking and militant women to join us as we combine performance art and fashion with various women's organizations to proclaim our latest fashion statement: "Free Our Sisters, Free Our Selves!"

This March 14, 2009, we honor the journeys that Women Defenders have taken around the world and in our own local areas. We honor the road they have taken in advancing the rights and liberation of women and peoples everywhere. Though the rate of violence against women is most rampant; and though there is the highest rate of modern day slavery, especially of women, ever in history, Women Defenders have not given up. From Nepal to Venezuela to Kenya to the United States, women defenders have been organizing, demanding their rights, and fighting for countless others.

GABRIELA Network Los Angeles invites you to join us in this celebration of successes, of women who are true sheroes for their heroic acts of courage, compassion, and commitment. We celebrate women defenders past, present, and future who have never ceased to step up, stand up and perch high!

============ ========= ========= ========= ========

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 23, 2009
Amanda Martin, Gabnet LA Coordinator
losangeles@gabnet. org
Tel: 510-502-6522

GABNet LOS ANGELES TO COMMEMORATE INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY WITH ITS 6TH ANNUAL POLITICAL ART AND FASHION SHOW

On Saturday, March 14th, Gabriela Network Los Angeles of the Mariposa Alliance will host "A Mile in Her Shoes: Honoring Women Defenders." The political art and fashion show will highlight the lives of women who defend women's and human rights, honor everyday sheroes in our communities, and comment on the plight of women and children today.

"A Mile in Her Shoes: Honoring Women Defenders" is the 6th of annual political fashion shows Gabnet Los Angeles has hosted; each year, different issues women face are addressed, ranging from sex trafficking, to workers' rights, to domestic violence. This year, as the global economy sinks deeper into crisis, political repression concurrently rises. Women who struggle to survive through poverty and marginalization turn to political activism as a vehicle to change their realities, and they are punished for their resistance. Gabnet and its community partners – women's, community, youth, labor, and non-profit groups - will honor the brave women who defend their rights and their people's rights.

Please join Gabnet and its partners at "A Mile in Her Shoes: Honoring Women Defenders." Admission is free, and all justice-loving people are invited to join us. A silent auction of all fashion show pieces will follow. Photo opportunities will be available.

EVENT INFORMATION:

Date: Saturday, March 14th

Time: Pre-Show 4:30pm; Show 5:00pm

Location: Eagle Rock Plaza, Center Court; 2700 Colorado Blvd., Los Angeles, 90041

###

Politics of the Plate: The Price of Tomatoes

2009-02-28T10:47:00.000-08:00

If you have eaten a tomato this winter, chances are very good that it was picked by a person who lives in virtual slavery.

March 2009, Gourmet.com: Driving from Naples, Florida, the nation’s second-wealthiest metropolitan area, to Immokalee takes less than an hour on a straight road. You pass houses that sell for an average of $1.4 million, shopping malls anchored by Tiffany’s and Saks Fifth Avenue, manicured golf courses. Eventually, gated communities with names like Monaco Beach Club and Imperial Golf Estates give way to modest ranches, and the highway shrivels from six lanes to two. Through the scruffy palmettos, you glimpse flat, sandy tomato fields shimmering in the broiling sun. Rounding a long curve, you enter Immokalee. The heart of town is a nine-block grid of dusty, potholed streets lined by boarded-up bars and bodegas, peeling shacks, and sagging, mildew-streaked house trailers. Mongrel dogs snooze in the shade, scrawny chickens peck in yards. Just off the main drag, vultures squabble over roadkill. Immokalee’s population is 70 percent Latino. Per capita income is only $8,500 a year. One third of the families in this city of nearly 25,000 live below the poverty line. Over one third of the children drop out before graduating from high school.

Immokalee is the tomato capital of the United States. Between December and May, as much as 90 percent of the fresh domestic tomatoes we eat come from south Florida, and Immokalee is home to one of the area’s largest communities of farmworkers. According to Douglas Molloy, the chief assistant U.S. attorney based in Fort Myers, Immokalee has another claim to fame: It is “ground zero for modern slavery.” Read the rest of Politics of the Plate.

Facts on Abortion & Contraception

2009-02-28T10:08:00.000-08:00

1.94 Million Unintended Pregnancies And 810,000 Abortions Are Prevented Each Year By Publicly Funded Family Planning Services

February 24, 2009: Six in 10 Clients Consider a Family Planning Center Their Main Source of Health Care. $4 Saved for Every $1 Invested; Expanding Medicaid Services to More Low-Income Women Would More Than Pay for Itself

By providing millions of young and low-income women access to voluntary contraceptive services, the national family planning program prevents 1.94 million unintended pregnancies, including almost 400,000 teen pregnancies, each year. These pregnancies would result in 860,000 unintended births, 810,000 abortions and 270,000 miscarriages, according to a new Guttmacher Institute report.

Absent publicly funded family planning services, the U.S. abortion rate would be nearly two-thirds higher than it currently is, and nearly twice as high among poor women.

Publicly funded family planning services are highly cost-effective. More than nine in 10 women receiving them would be eligible for Medicaid-funded prenatal, delivery and postpartum care services if they became pregnant. Avoiding the significant costs associated with these unintended births saves taxpayers $4 for every $1 spent on family planning.

“The national family planning program is smart government at its best,” says Rachel Benson Gold, the study’s lead author. “Publicly funded family planning is basic health care that empowers disadvantaged women to decide for themselves when to become pregnant and how many children to have. It reduces recourse to abortion. And it saves significant amounts of taxpayer money.”

More than nine million women received publicly funded contraceptive services in 2006. Most (7.2 million) received their care from the national network of family planning centers. Another two million women received Medicaid-funded family planning care from private doctors. Six in 10 women who get care at a family planning center, including three out of four who are poor, consider the center to be their usual source of health care, according to the report.

“Many low-income women get their basic health care for the year during an annual visit to a family planning center,” says Gold. “The package of services they receive not only includes contraceptive counseling and the provision of a contraceptive method. It also includes pelvic and breast exams, tests for HIV and other STIs, screenings for reproductive cancers, high blood pressure and diabetes, and referrals to other health providers when necessary. This is essential, preventive health care for disadvantaged women.”

Public expenditures for family planning in 2006 totaled $1.85 billion, with 71% of those funds coming from the joint federal-state Medicaid program. The role of Medicaid in funding family planning has risen dramatically since the 1980s. The increase was driven by efforts in 21 states to expand eligibility specifically for family planning for low-income women who otherwise would not qualify for Medicaid.

“States as varied as Texas, New York, South Carolina and Missouri have decided to undergo the cumbersome and time-consuming process to seek federal permission, known as a waiver, to expand family planning services to more women who need them,” says Gold. “It’s a popular policy because it helps women while saving public dollars. It more than pays for itself.”

The report recommends that Congress eliminate the waiver requirement. Instead, states should be allowed to use the same income criteria to determine eligibility for family planning under Medicaid that they use to determine eligibility for pregnancy-related care.

“Cutting through the red tape and doing away with the waiver is a crucial first step that should be a high priority for policymakers,” says Gold. “Our report recommends other policy changes to help the national family planning program maintain and increase its effectiveness. These include increased funding for the federal Title X program, which provides critical support to the national family planning provider infrastructure. Policymakers also need to take a more comprehensive look at how Medicaid and Title X can best complement and strengthen each other.”

4th most illegal migrants in US from RP

2009-02-28T10:06:00.000-08:00

Filipinos make up the fourth largest group of unauthorized migrants in the United States as of January 2008, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a report released Tuesday.

MANILA, Philippines -- Filipinos make up the fourth largest group of unauthorized migrants in the United States as of January 2008, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a report released Tuesday.

Of the 11.6 million unauthorized migrants believed to still be in the US, the DHS said Mexicans comprised the most, with 7.03 million.

After Mexico came El Salvador (570,000), Guatemala (430,000), the Philippines and Honduras (300,000), Korea (240,000), China (220,000), Brazil (180,000), Ecuador (170,000), and India (160,000).

“The ten leading countries of origin represented 83 percent of the unauthorized immigrant population for 2008,” the report said.

North America, including Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, accounted for 8.8 million of 11.6 million unauthorized migrants in the US until last year. Asia follows with 1.2 million, and South America with 850,000.

The DHS also tracked where most of these illegal migrants are, with California hosting the most, with 2.85 million.

By Veronica Uy, INQUIRER.net. Posted date: February 24, 2009. Read more at http://globalnation.inquirer.net/news/breakingnews/view/20090224-190773/4th-most-illegal-migrants-in-US-from-R

LAY DOWN THE NEW WOMEN’S AGENDA FOR FULL WOMEN’S LIBERATION!

2009-02-28T09:47:00.000-08:00

As we commemorate the enduring legacy of the global women’s movement this 2009 International Women’s Day, GABNet of the Mariposa Alliance calls for the laying down of a New Women’s Agenda attuned to the tactical needs of our time and the strategic requirements for full liberation for womankind. LAY DOWN THE NEW WOMEN’S AGENDA FOR FULL WOMEN’S LIBERATION!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 27, 2009
Jollene Levid, GABNet Secretary-General
secgen@gabnet. org
Tel: 323-356-4748

BAY AREA, CA: As we commemorate the enduring legacy of the global women’s movement this 2009 International Women’s Day, GABNet of the Mariposa Alliance calls for the laying down of a New Women’s Agenda attuned to the tactical needs of our time and the strategic requirements for full liberation for womankind.

In this era of impending profound social transformation, when class society faces crisis upon crisis, and imperialism itself is reeling from the very catastrophe it has wrought upon the world, GABNet, in consonance with the cooperating organizations of the MARIPOSA ALLIANCE, calls for the coming together of all the disparate elements and forces of the women’s movement.

The changing demographics of our societies make this imperative. We are witnessing the rise of transnational women and their communities, with their own special cluster of issues. Women and men of two passports, of two cultures, of two or more languages and who are bi-racial are slowly becoming the majority population in the US. Indeed, within less than a decade, the US will become bi-lingual.

And because we are women of action, GABNet is spearheading the start of this discourse, with the founding congress of the Mariposa Alliance this Fall, in the Bay Area, California, with a gathering of individual women and representatives of women’s organizations to launch a higher level of cooperation among women of diverse origins and backgrounds.

We have reasons to celebrate the past year: the passage of the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which recognizes gender discrimination as a continuum, the defeat of Proposition K for the legalization of prostitution, the extension of the International Marriage Brokers Regulatory Act (IMBRA), the impending passage of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York, the full surge of women’s participation in the last elections that wrote finish to the Bush/GOP administration, the rise of women’s voices the world over activism over a great range of issues, from reproductive rights to right to historical signification.

GABNet of the Mariposa Alliance can boast of two decades of consistent work for the emancipation of women of Philippine ancestry. Among its accomplishments for the past year alone are:

Holding four national meetings of GABNet membership and leadership;
Organizing ten school-based committees working on the Purple Rose Campaign Against the Traffic of Filipinas;
Engaging, on a national basis, on daily activities to commemorate 16 Days of Activism on Violence against Women;
Launching a mini-campaign on a Divorce Bill for the Philippines;
Holding a Los Angeles to San Diego Caravan Against the Trafficking of Women;
Holding a concert against the Trafficking and Violence against Women;
Organizing a rally of women in Los Angeles on International Women’s Day which earned the support of the West Hollywood City Council;
Organizing women’s delegations to all anti-war marches;
Organizing new GABNet high school units;
Holding a Feminist Valentine Dinner in commemoration of the Purple Rose Anniversary;
Initiating and deepening the organizing committee for the Mariposa Alliance.

In addition to this, all GABNet members participated in theory-building sessions and educational activities to enhance their understanding of women’s oppression and social activism.

This rich and long-standing experience in work for the liberation of women of Philippine ancestry is the solid foundational basis of the Mariposa Alliance, a coalition of individual women and women’s organizations in formation.

We have reasons as well to be upset: the same-sex marriage ban in California which deprived thousands of a basic human right, the emphasis on male-dominated industries in the stimulus package passed by Congress, the huge gender-gap in political and economic leadership which continues the pervasive masculinist rule in class society that women should be “responsible but with no power; accountable but with no authority;” the continuing redaction of women’s social and political roles to being place-holders of power for others, their political work deemed of no historic value, the continued violence against women which rests on the denial of their right to historical significance, and the patriarchal surge that enables their transformation into commodity under imperialist globalization.

It is time. Machismo is so obsolete; authoritarianism is passé and women considering their collective interests as secondary went out with whalebone girdle. The need for a new women’s agenda grows greater each passing day, the imperative for coming together more urgent. Let us begin lest we be left again holding the bucket – and an empty one at that -- as women have been in the past. The Future begins Today.

To the Bay, this Fall, to lay down the New Women’s Agenda!
Liberate women, liberate all!
Free ourselves, free our sisters!
End war and all violence against women!
Dismantle gender-based oppression and exploitation!
Equality in Unity, Justice in Strength!

-- ###

Access Denied

2009-02-28T09:43:00.000-08:00

Countless women are sexually assaulted as they attempt to immigrate into the United States. What happens to their reproductive rights when they wind up in U.S. custody?

When sexual-assault counselor Elia Alvarado first met Maria in 2007, Maria was wearing a blue prison uniform, sitting in a doctor’s office at the Port Isabel Detention Center. She was in her early 30s, but looked haggard, Alvarado recalls, older than her age. Two months and more than 1,500 miles after leaving Honduras, she had been detained at the border and taken to the immigration holding facility north of Brownsville.

Maria, a single mother, had left her 8-year-old daughter at home, she told Alvarado, and paid a man to take her to the border. Her ultimate destination, she said, was the Northeast, where a friend had promised to find her work as a housekeeper. “I went to send money home for my daughter,” she told Alvarado in a subsequent counseling session. “This was how I planned to support my family.”

Maria and several other Hondurans were guided on a journey by car and train, she said. At night, they stayed in ramshackle homes, sleeping on crowded floors. One of those nights, just before she reached the border, she said that a man grabbed her near an abandoned shack where the immigrants were staying. He forced himself on her, leaving Maria defenseless, the only witness to the violent act. Afterward, Maria blamed herself. She wondered if this was what she deserved for leaving her daughter. Read on at http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2963. By Kevin Sieff | February 20, 2009 | The Texas Observer.

2 US sailors charged with prostitute's murder, attempted murder of another in Mexico

2009-02-16T22:17:00.000-08:00

Feb. 11, 2009, AP: Two U.S. sailors have been charged with the murder of a prostitute and the attempted murder of another in this northern border city, Mexican state prosecutors said.

Witnesses and a hotel camera place the two men at the same hotel where a 19-year-old prostitute was smothered to death on Jan. 17, the prosecutors said Tuesday.

On Feb. 4, prosecutors say, police found the men in a bloodstained hotel room with a prostitute and a hotel employee, both of whom had suffered stab wounds.

The sailors were taken into custody and charged with attempted murder. Authorities say they later found evidence linking them to the January killing.

A U.S. Navy statement on Wednesday said that Jarrett Monzingo and Joshua Dockery, active-duty petty officers assigned to the San Diego area, face murder and attempted-murder charges in the death of a Mexican citizen and are being held at La Mesa Prison in Tijuana.

The statement did not elaborate on the alleged crime but said that the Navy has hired Mexican lawyers to represent the petty officers.

UN surprised at female role in 'modern slavery'

2009-02-16T22:16:00.001-08:00

Surprisingly, the perpetrators behind human trafficking around the world are often women, the U.N. reported Thursday.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Surprisingly, the perpetrators behind human trafficking around the world are often women, the U.N. reported Thursday.

Women are the majority of traffickers in almost a third of the 155 nations the U.N. surveyed. They accounted for more than 60 percent of the human trafficking convictions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

For many, human trafficking is a world they had been pulled into themselves.

"Women commit crimes against women, and in many cases the victims become the perpetrators," Antonio Maria Costa, director of the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said in an interview. "They become the matrons of the business and they make money. It's like a drug addiction."

Most of the world's nations reported some form of "modern slavery" last year involving mainly the sex trade or forced labor.

And the number of victims should grow as the global financial crisis deepens, Costa said.

The report by Costa's office was based largely on human trafficking convictions reported to the U.N. between September 2007 and July 2008. About 22,500 victims were rescued during that time. About four of every five reported cases involved sexual exploitation; most of the rest involved forced labor.

But Costa's agency gave no overall figures for how many millions of people might be affected. He said most countries' conviction rates for human trafficking rarely exceed 1.5 per 100,000 people.

Two of every five countries covered in the report had not recorded a single conviction from 2007 to 2008.

"Either these countries are blind to the problem or they are ill-equipped to deal with it," Costa said.

"We only see the monster's tail," he said. "How many hundreds of thousands of victims are slaving away in sweatshops, fields, mines, factories, or trapped in domestic servitude? Their numbers will surely swell as the economic crisis deepens the pool of potential victims."

The report's release coincided with the appointment Thursday of Academy Award-winning actress Mira Sorvino as a U.N. goodwill ambassador to help Costa's office fight human trafficking.

"Until a few years ago, I blissfully believed that slavery was a thing of the past. ... Well, obviously I was terribly wrong," said Sorvino, a mother with two young children.

"If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," she said, repeating a famous statement by Abraham Lincoln, whose 200th birthday was celebrated Thursday.

The report also pointed out that women and girls suffer most from sexual abuse. About 20 percent of victims globally were children, mainly in Southeast Asia's Mekong region and parts of Africa.

Costa, who serves as the U.N.'s chief crime fighter, said it's difficult to get nations to address human trafficking because "it's at the crossroads" of other complex occurrences such as human migration and prostitution.

Sixty-three percent of the nations in the report had adopted some laws against human trafficking. The U.N. said most did so only after its protocol against human trafficking entered into force in December 2003.

U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime at http://www.unodc.org/
UN surprised at female role in 'modern slavery', The Associated Press, February 12, 2009, via International Herald Tribune at http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/02/12/news/UN-UN-Human-Trafficking.php

5 found guilty of forcing women into prostitution in L.A.

2009-02-16T22:14:00.001-08:00

5 found guilty of forcing women into prostitution in L.A. The illegal immigrants were convicted of a plot to lure poor young Guatemalans to the U.S. with the promise of legitimate jobs.

Feb. 12, 2009, L.A. Times: A federal court jury on Wednesday convicted five people in connection with a plot to lure impoverished young women from Guatemala to the United States with the promise of legitimate jobs, only to then force them into prostitution to repay their supposed debts for being smuggled into the country.

All five defendants are illegal immigrants themselves, four of them women from Guatemala who also worked as prostitutes.

As the verdicts were read, the five defendants sat expressionless, as they did through much of the monthlong trial before U.S. District Judge Margaret M. Morrow. Each of the five faces a potential life sentence, according to the U.S. attorney's office.

The case presented by prosecutors relied heavily on the testimony of 10 young women who said they were forced to work as prostitutes and turn over their pay to the defendants.

Only one woman said she knew she was going to work in the sex trade before arriving in Los Angeles. The others said they were expecting to work as baby sitters, housekeepers, waitresses or in other jobs in which they hoped to earn up to $10 an hour, far more than they could in Guatemala.

Only after they arrived in the U.S., the young women testified, were they told the truth about what they would be doing.

"These defendants exploited their hopes for a better life in the United States," Assistant U.S. Atty. Cheryl Murphy told jurors shortly before they were given the case last week.

After five days of deliberations, the panel convicted all five defendants of the most serious charge they were facing: sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion. The defendants were also convicted of conspiracy and importing and harboring illegal immigrants for the purpose of prostitution.

In often tearful testimony during the trial, the victims described having sex with up to 30 men a day. Several testified that they were forced to work while ill or menstruating, or both.

The victims said they were almost always watched by the defendants and were beaten and threatened with violence, even witchcraft, to keep them from trying to escape.

A girl identified as Esperanza, who was allegedly 17 when she arrived in the U.S. in 2005, said she was told her legs would be cut off and her entire family killed if she tried to escape. Another girl, identified as Rosaura, sobbed throughout her testimony and told jurors that defendant Gladys Vasquez Valenzuela threatened to throw acid on her face if she ever tried to leave.

After Wednesday's verdict, two of the five women on the jury said they were too upset to discuss their deliberations. Another, a 52-year-old grandmother from Altadena who asked that her name not be used, said: "It was nauseating, difficult to listen to."

At trial, prosecutors argued that five of the young women were under 18 when they arrived in the U.S. One had never left her rural village before making the dangerous trek north in the company of human smugglers. Two others continued to dress in costumes for Halloween and decorate their bedroom with stuffed animals, even after they had been taught to dress like hookers and were shown how to use condoms.

But jurors said prosecutors failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the young women were underage.

"Not that they didn't look young -- they did," said Daniel Williams, a 59-year-old Exxon Mobil employee from Hawthorne. "But they didn't have proof."

The main defendant in the case was Valenzuela. According to prosecutors, Valenzuela, her sister, Mirna, and two of their nieces came to Los Angeles years ago and began working as prostitutes in the area around MacArthur Park. The women, along with Mirna's husband, Gabriel Mendez, then hatched the plot to force other young women from their rural Guatemalan village into the sex trade. They were arrested after a former employee helped some of the women escape and began cooperating with the FBI.

During the trial, defense attorneys sought to portray the young women as lying opportunists who had agreed to work as prostitutes before they left Guatemala.

They pointed to inconsistencies between their courtroom testimony and statements the women made when they were initially interviewed by FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents more than two years ago.

They also told jurors the women had motive to lie because if they were victims in the case as opposed to defendants it would help them secure legal residency in this country.

Though the women may have appeared weepy and vulnerable on the witnesses stand, they were in fact "seasoned liars" who came into court "ready, willing and able to lie," attorney Jeff Price told jurors during his closing arguments.

Dana Cephas, another defense attorney, suggested during his closing that the women may have willingly turned to prostitution to escape the poverty and despair of their lives in Guatemala.

This drew a stinging retort from Murphy, who prosecuted the case with Assistant U.S. Attys. Curtis Kin and Anthony Lewis.

"It's better to be a whore in the United States than it is to be poor in Guatemala," the prosecutor said rhetorically as she addressed the panel before they began deliberations.

"That is an insult not only to the whole nation of Guatemala," she said, "but to all of the women in this case."

From http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-sextraffic12-2009feb12,0,1663774.story

Buffalo Man beheads his Wife

2009-02-16T22:12:00.000-08:00

Buffalo Man Who Launched TV Network to Show Muslims in Positive Light Arrested -- for Beheading His Wife: A prominent Buffalo area businessman who founded the BridgesTV network to improve the image of Muslims in the U.S. has been arrested and charged with murdering his estranged wife – by beheading her at his company’s office in Orchard Park, N.Y., on Thursday.

Feb. 13, 2009, EditorandPublisher.com: A prominent Buffalo area businessman who founded the BridgesTV network to improve the image of Muslims in the U.S. has been arrested and charged with murdering his estranged wife – by beheading her at his company’s office in Orchard Park, N.Y., on Thursday.

Police have charged the husband, Muzzammil Hassan, 44, with second-degree murder in the death of Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37.

In its logo, BridgesTV boasts of “connecting people through understanding” via its dish network available in several states. Its Web site quotes comments about the company by Jay Leno, Brian Williams and others, plus a screen shot of a CNBC interview with Hassan conducted by Maria Bartiromo.

The site also shows a picture of Hassan with his slain wife, described as playing “an instrumental role in the creation of Bridges TV since she came up with the idea for the network.” The alleged killer is called “Mo S. Hassan” at the web site.

NPR's "All Things Considered" profiled the Hassans in 2004. The segment opened, "A new cable network for Muslim-Americans is up and running in Detroit. Bridges TV says it wants to inform and entertain Muslims and, at the same time, give viewers who aren't Muslims a glimpse into their culture ...

"Mo Hassan was traveling from Buffalo to Detroit a few weeks after the September 11th terrorist attacks when his wife came up with the idea for the new network. They were in the car listening to the radio when they heard some derogatory remarks about Muslims."

Programs include kids shows, "American Muslim Teen Talk," Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now" and an interview show with James Zogby. Its news program "brings you balanced coverage from around the world. News you can trust."

He is CEO of the company after stints as a sales rep at Proctor & Gamble and as a banker in Buffalo. He got his MBA at the University of Rochester. The bio concludes: “Mr. Hassan brings to Bridges TV vision, persistence, data-based decision making and financial discipline.”

Police say the wife had an order of protection from the man. A murder weapon has not yet been recovered. The couple had two children, ages 4 and 6.

Khalid J. Qazi, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council of Western New York, said, “There is no place for domestic violence in our religion — none. Islam would 100 percent condemn it.”

From http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003941612

Amazon selling rape simulation game

2009-02-16T22:07:00.000-08:00

A game that involves the player stalking victims and then raping them in a virtual world is being offered for sale by online retailer Amazon.com, the Belfast Telegraph reveals.

Feb. 12, 2009, Belfast Telegraph: A game that involves the player stalking victims and then raping them in a virtual world is being offered for sale by online retailer Amazon.com, the Belfast Telegraph's website reveals.

The shocking 'rape simulator', Rapelay, is set in Japan and carries a sickening game description on the Amazon website. An MP said last night that he plans to raise the issue in Parliament.

Reviews by gaming websites have expressed horror at the basis for the game. One website review describes "tears glistening in the young girl's eyes" as she is attacked in graphic detail.

Players begin the game by stalking a mother on a subway station before violently raping her. They then move on to attack her two daughters described as virgin schoolgirls.

Players are also allowed to enter 'freeform mode' where they can rape any woman and get other male game characters to join the attacks.

Pregnancy and abortion are listed as 'key features'. One review said: "If she does become pregnant you're supposed to force her to get an abortion, otherwise she gets more and more visibly pregnant each time you have sex.

"If you allow the child to be born then the woman will throw you in front of a train!"

Most of the descriptions and screenshots of the game are too graphic for publication here.

The game's producer, Illusion is a company from Japan famous for making similar 3D Hentai games.

The online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, says: "Due to Illusion's policy, its games are not intended to be sold or used outside of Japan, and official support is only given in Japanese and for use in Japan."

Despite this policy consumers, including those in the UK and Ireland, are now able to buy the game through the Amazon website.

Last night Labour MP Keith Vaz said he was shocked that Amazon are allowing people to purchase such a game and plans to raise the issue in Parliament after being contacted by the Belfast Telegraph website.

Mr Vaz said: “It is intolerable that anyone would purchase a game that simulates the criminal offence of rape.

"To know that this widely available through a major online retailer is utterly shocking, I do not see how this can be allowed.

“I will be raising this matter in Parliament and hope that action is taken to prevent the game from being sold.”

Last year the MP for Leicester East was criticised for claiming such games exist.

Mr Vaz was speaking in support of of Conservative MP Julian Brazier's Private Member's Bill – which sought to introduce an official governmental body that can challenge rulings by the British Board of Film Classifications (BBFC).

Vaz stated: "People who are watching a film at the cinema cannot participate in what is happening on the screen, or if they do they are removed from the cinema.

"However...when people play these things, they can interact. They can shoot people; they can kill people. As the honourable Gentleman said, they can rape women."

Vaz's claims were questioned by Tory MP for Wantage Edward Vaizey.

He told Parliament: "...the right honourable Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), who chairs the Home Affairs Committee, mentioned that some video games allow the participant to engage in a rape act...

"I checked the point with the BBFC and found it to be completely unaware of any such video game.

"Is the honourable Gentleman aware of any video game that has as its intention the carrying out of rape or that allows the game player to carry out such an act? The BBFC and I are unaware of any such game."

At the time hundreds of gaming blogs slated Vaz for his comments. One blog poster said: "This guy has no idea what he's talking about he's more likey to of never even played a game in his life just plain stupid if you ask me."

Only one comment appears on the Amazon website. The user says: "1.0 out of 5 stars. The fact that this exists as a game makes me sad. I am saddened and appalled by the mere idea of this game. is this for real?"

Last year the Belfast Telegraph revealed that Amazon had listed a Barack Obama mask as terrorist costume. The online retailer said the offensive category was put there by someone using its "tag" feature and had removed it immediately.

Update
After being contacted by the Belfast Telegraph, Amazon today removed the web page (still viewable from Google's cache). The company would not comment on the item or say why it had been offered for sale through their website.

Rapelay Japanese PC game, by Illusion
Game description on Amazon: Rapelay is an offshoot of the Illusion series, Interact Play. You, like in previous installments, play as a public nuisance that gets away from captivity and starts scouting for new targets. This time around you find a family of a single mother and her two daughters. You quickly begin your hunt and capture each woman one by one. The gameplay involves an amusing training/disposition system with which to break each respective target to your liking....

From http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/amazon-selling-3d-rape-simulator-game-14183546.html

Ex-Prostitutes Say South Korea and U.S. Enabled Sex Trade Near Bases

2009-01-09T09:27:00.000-08:00

South Korea has railed for years against the Japanese government’s waffling over how much responsibility it bears for one of the ugliest chapters in its wartime history: the enslavement of women from Korea and elsewhere to work in brothels serving Japan’s imperial army.

Jan. 8, 2009, NY Times, SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea has railed for years against the Japanese government’s waffling over how much responsibility it bears for one of the ugliest chapters in its wartime history: the enslavement of women from Korea and elsewhere to work in brothels serving Japan’s imperial army.

Now, a group of former prostitutes in South Korea have accused some of their country’s former leaders of a different kind of abuse: encouraging them to have sex with the American soldiers who protected South Korea from North Korea. They also accuse past South Korean governments, and the United States military, of taking a direct hand in the sex trade from the 1960s through the 1980s, working together to build a testing and treatment system to ensure that prostitutes were disease-free for American troops.

While the women have made no claims that they were coerced into prostitution by South Korean or American officials during those years, they accuse successive Korean governments of hypocrisy in calling for reparations from Japan while refusing to take a hard look at South Korea’s own history.

“Our government was one big pimp for the U.S. military,” one of the women, Kim Ae-ran, 58, said in a recent interview.

Scholars on the issue say that the South Korean government was motivated in part by fears that the American military would leave, and that it wanted to do whatever it could to prevent that.

But the women suggest that the government also viewed them as commodities to be used to shore up the country’s struggling economy in the decades after the Korean War. They say the government not only sponsored classes for them in basic English and etiquette — meant to help them sell themselves more effectively — but also sent bureaucrats to praise them for earning dollars when South Korea was desperate for foreign currency.

“They urged us to sell as much as possible to the G.I.’s, praising us as ‘dollar-earning patriots,’ ” Ms. Kim said.

The United States military, the scholars say, became involved in attempts to regulate the trade in so-called camp towns surrounding the bases because of worries about sexually transmitted diseases.

In one of the most incendiary claims, some women say that the American military police and South Korean officials regularly raided clubs from the 1960s through the 1980s looking for women who were thought to be spreading the diseases. They picked out the women using the number tags the women say the brothels forced them to wear so the soldiers could more easily identify their sex partners.

The Korean police would then detain the prostitutes who were thought to be ill, the women said, locking them up under guard in so-called monkey houses, where the windows had bars. There, the prostitutes were forced to take medications until they were well.

The women, who are seeking compensation and an apology, have compared themselves to the so-called comfort women who have won widespread public sympathy for being forced into prostitution by the Japanese during World War II. Whether prostitutes by choice, need or coercion, the women say, they were all victims of government policies.

“If the question is, was there active government complicity, support of such camp town prostitution, yes, by both the Korean governments and the U.S. military,” said Katharine H. S. Moon, a scholar who wrote about the women in her 1997 book, “Sex Among Allies.”

The South Korean Ministry of Gender Equality, which handles women’s issues, declined to comment on the former prostitutes’ accusations. So did the American military command in Seoul, which responded with a general statement saying that the military “does not condone or support the illegal activities of human trafficking and prostitution.”

The New York Times interviewed eight women who worked in brothels near American bases, and it reviewed South Korean and American documents. The documents do provide some support for many of the women’s claims, though most are snapshots in time. The women maintain that the practices occurred over decades.

In some sense, the women’s allegations are not surprising. It has been clear for decades that South Korea and the United States military tolerated prostitution near bases, even though selling sex is illegal in South Korea. Bars and brothels have long lined the streets of the neighborhoods surrounding American bases in South Korea, as is the case in the areas around military bases around the world.

But the women say few of their fellow citizens know how deeply their government was involved in the trade in the camp towns.

The women received some support for their claims in 2006, from a former government official. In a television interview, the official, Kim Kee-joe, who was identified as having been a high-level liaison to the United States military, said, “Although we did not actively urge them to engage in prostitution, we, especially those from the county offices, did often tell them that it was not something bad for the country either.”

Transcripts of parliamentary hearings also suggest that at least some South Korean leaders viewed prostitution as something of a necessity. In one exchange in 1960, two lawmakers urged the government to train a supply of prostitutes to meet what one called the “natural needs” of allied soldiers and prevent them from spending their dollars in Japan instead of South Korea. The deputy home minister at the time, Lee Sung-woo, replied that the government had made some improvements in the “supply of prostitutes” and the “recreational system” for American troops.

Both Mr. Kim and Ms. Moon back the women’s assertions that the control of venereal disease was a driving factor for the two governments. They say the governments’ coordination became especially pronounced as Korean fears about an American pullout increased after President Richard M. Nixon announced plans in 1969 to reduce the number of American troops in South Korea.

“The idea was to create an environment where the guests were treated well in the camp towns to discourage them from leaving,” Mr. Kim said in the television interview.

Ms. Moon, a Wellesley College professor, said that the minutes of meetings between American military officials and Korean bureaucrats in the 1970s showed the lengths the two countries went to prevent epidemics. The minutes included recommendations to “isolate” women who were sick and ensure that they received treatment, government efforts to register prostitutes and require them to carry medical certification and a 1976 report about joint raids to apprehend prostitutes who were unregistered or failed to attend medical checkups.

These days, camp towns still exist, but as the Korean economy took off, women from the Philippines began replacing them.

Many former prostitutes live in the camp towns, isolated from mainstream society, which shuns them. Most are poor. Some are haunted by the memories of the mixed-race children they put up for adoption overseas.

Jeon, 71, who agreed to talk only if she was identified by just her surname, said she was an 18-year-old war orphan in 1956 when hunger drove her to Dongduchon, a camp town near the border with North Korea. She had a son in the 1960s, but she became convinced that he would have a better future in the United States and gave him up for adoption when he was 13.

About 10 years ago, her son, now an American soldier, returned to visit. She told him to forget her.

“I failed as a mother,” said Ms. Jeon, who lives on welfare checks and the little cash she earns selling items she picks from other people’s trash. “I have no right to depend on him now.”

“The more I think about my life, the more I think women like me were the biggest sacrifice for my country’s alliance with the Americans,” she said. “Looking back, I think my body was not mine, but the government’s and the U.S. military’s.”

From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/world/asia/08korea.html?_r=1&sq=prostitution&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all

What is violence against women?

2008-12-11T16:43:00.000-08:00

As part of GABNET's 16 Days of Activism, we asked people to talk about violence against women...

Gina George
"[To end violence against women] it has to be a life-long struggle for women, for men. We can't do it in one effort, one event or effort; we have to do it consistently in our lives whether that's publicly or privately..." Listen to audio interview

"G.," 12-years-old
"I guess violence would be aggressive force against an individual or group of individuals..." Listen to audio interview

Garrett Kaske
"Non-physical forms of violence come in many different ways. A lot of [women] working for less pay in comparison to a man's pay, that can definitely be construed as a form of violence..." Listen to audio interview

Oi Hu
a) How have you been a survivor/victim of violence, a witness of violence against women or a perpetrator of violence against women? I have never been a victim of violence, a witness to violence or a perpetrator of violence. I hope that I would be smart enough not to surround myself with people who have violent tendencies or display abusive behavior. Non-Physical Violence? Insulting/Belittling, Yelling, Controlling and overbearing attitudes. Another one is guilt - inflicting guilt. Telling someone they are childish or that they are "disappointed" in them for silly things. These types of actions do bring a person's perception of their own self worth down several notches. Making a person feel less worthy and trapped can lead to suicide or attempted suicide. Thinking about guilting a woman brings me to thinking about how not just partners/spouses/boyfriends can do this to a woman, but how parents, family and friends can also do this to a person.

b) What do you consider as violence against women? Obviously the physical abuse immediately comes to mind as violence against women. Hitting, spitting, beating, and belittling. Most definitely, domestic abuse comes to mind as well. No [I don't violence is perpetrated only against/by individuals]. I think parents, family and "friends" which can be groups of people can inflict a woman with both verbal and physical abuse. I believe that a person prone to abuse and violence, whether it is physical or not has a history of doing it to others in the past or even multiple people at once. Bullies usually don't have just one victim.

c) What do you think is the main source of violence against women? Domestic partners/or the person you are in a relationship with. Domestic abuse is the biggest problem, because a person is torn by their feelings for the perpetrator and what would happen if they reported them. This is probably what makes this type of abuse so common and the most dangerous. Common because you see the abuser so often. Dangerous because you do not want to report them because of love or loyalty. Most times, I believe that a person has low self-esteem or has been traumatized into thinking that they deserve or warrant the abuse. This type of thinking is what makes certain women (people in general) an easy prey for perpetrators of abuse. I know I am wrong though. So many women who are strong and intelligent never imagine themselves to be victims of violence/abuse, but do end up as victims. I don't want it to sound like I am making excuses for the men who abuse women. I am not. I believe that they purposely take advantage of what they mightknow about a person and use that to insult them or to hit them. I think it is a predator who knows how to pick and pull apart their victim that makes a predator so powerful. Usually the predator would have to be fairly close to a person to be able to break them down in such a manner. A person is probably extra vulnerable when they are overcome by their personal feelings (usually love or loyalty) for a person and just swallows the abuse. I feel women are more vulnerable to violence because women are more compassionate and sympathetic to their abusers than men might be.

d) How do we end violence against women? Educate women. Educate men. Make people aware that violence is not acceptable and to treat women with respect. Make women aware of their self worth so that they are not easily targeted. learn self-defense, build communities. Educating people is the only thing I can think of. Community programs. Educational PSAs. More general awareness. Believe it or not, those Truth ads about smoking do impact people. Ads with women with black eyes or hospitalized and making statistics known are also very powerful. I've seen a few in the past, but not so often. Awareness. Seems to be a big factor. those who are not aware they are victims or victimizers may get the message. Maybe not, but if others can identify the abuse, it could save a woman's life.

We asked people:
a) How have you been a survivor/victim of violence, a witness of violence against women or a perpetrator of violence against women?
b) What do you consider as violence against women?
c) What do you think is the main source of violence against women?
d) How do we end violence against women?

International Human Rights Day

2008-12-10T09:31:00.000-08:00

BURN IT DOWN!

In commemoration of International Human Rights Day and in culmination of GABnet's 16 Days of Activism against Violence against Women, GABNet NYNJ spoke to the women closest to us - our mothers, sisters, friends and allies -- about how violence against women has touched their lives. Their answers, posted below, offer a sobering picture, proving that violence doesn't just happen in far away places to people we don't know. In fact, these testimonials illustrate the violence that occurs every day, in our most intimate spaces.

Burn It Down, a video produced by GABNet NYNJ, also debuts today, communicating the source of violence for women and girls all around the world.

For far too long, those residing in powerful countries like the United States or those who occupy positions of privilege in life - whether it be through race, class or sex -- have separated themselves from their sisters living in the margins.

GABNet NYNJ knows that if we women are serious about fighting violence at home, we must also fight it every where else in the world where it occurs - whether in the conflict zones in the Congo, the war in Iraq, jails in Palestine and the United States, brothels in India or even in the pages of magazines. We know that not one woman is free until all of us are free.

How have you been a survivor/victim of violence, a witness of violence against women or a perpetrator of violence against women? What do you consider as violence against women? What do you think is the main source of violence against women? How do we end violence against women?

"I witnessed violence against a woman for the first time at about the age of two or three. Daddy was beating Mama. Shoving her up against the wall and punching her while she screamed, "Not in front of the children not in front of the children!" She was crying covering her face and trying to escape him. I moved out of their way to avoid the fury and up against I don't know what and all I heard in my head almost as loud as Mama's plea was 'Why?' 'Why is Daddy hitting Mama?'"

Incomprehensible. Thick as the thickest fog in the blackest night. Having a suffocating pillow pressed on your head so hard you feel the air leaving your body. Drowning and seeing the light of day fade. No answer. Blank. Nothing.

That's one of my earliest memories. And most disturbing memories.

My father was a raging alcoholic. Surely the source of his violence was in the bottle but not solely. I never knew much about his childhood because when I asked my grandparents they were vague. Was he repeating his childhood beatings? My brother did, after being beat by my father too. My father beat him and he beat my little brother and I.
Ending the violence against women? Stopping the pattern of domestic violence is just one way. Today with my own daughter that is how I am choosing to stop the violence against women. Ensuring that she has a safe home to grow in."

***

I was raised in a house where my father objectified women, and i was urged by my mother to not confront him when he manipulated his rights as a man and as a father. I grew up with a father who had no respect for the innate fragility and vulnerability of a girl's burgeoning sexuality and no respect for the strength of a woman. Because of this, I have scar tissue and obstacles around my heart and my ability to love and trust men. I am afraid to be vulnerable when sometimes vulnerability means intimacy.

I feel like we are constantly involved in one way or another with violence towards women. Spending eight months in a small coastal town in Spain, I was followed home a handful of times, many times with men masturbating as they walked behind me in the dark alleys to my apartment.

I also witnessed a lot, A LOT of verbal abuse towards women working as a bartender for many years. And in all of these cases, every single one, I feel like the man was not even thinking he might be doing something wrong. There's always an attitude of self-righteousness, as if it were his birthright to behave towards women this way.

We have to change the next generation by how we raise our children. I will try to teach our sons about a masculinity where abuse of his power in a patriarchal society is not an option, where his masculinity is complex and beautiful and not a weapon. And I will try to teach our daughters about a world where her femininity is strong and important, a world where she won't have to feel like she is compromising herself to love and be loved."

***

"We tend to think of violence as something that happens on a super scale, during war, in other countries, to other people, other women, not us. We are trained to ignore the violence that occurs and is directed toward us on a daily basis. This includes the objectification of women in advertisements that loom giant, over us constantly, in the city, the images we are bombarded with in magazines, television, movies and in the mainstream news media. And when we experience physical violence, either personally or through a friend, we internalize it and mold it into denial, shame, and self-hatred, or we lash out at other women, both personally and as an entire gender.

Then there is the institutional violence that manifests itself through the exploitation of over one million women a year in the sex and labor market. Some might consider this violence on a super scale, yet this large number is made up of individual women who experience violence on the personal level, both physically and emotionally. We can't separate ourselves from these millions. Their struggle is inextricably connected to ours.

I survived my father. I survived what that did to my self worth. I survived how that made me interact with boys and men. I have worked double time to love myself and my intelligence. I survived several alcoholic boyfriends. I survived an abusive relationship. I survived hearing the stories of nearly every one of my women friends. I watched my dear friend clench at the hands of the US sex industry. I survived and am surviving growing up in a world that hates women.

Violence against women is the direct result of thousands of years of a system that considers women to have very limited functions. It has a name: Patriarchy.

We have to begin to build alternative images, music, art, writing, relationships, families, education, communities, culture, and selves. We have to reassess our priorities and remember our global responsibilities to each other. And we have to say ENOUGH. We have to stop participating and corroborating in a system that is based on our subjugation."

****

a.) Yes I have been a victim of violence against women. My first week of college in Switzerland, I was followed home, held at gunpoint and robbed by a man who was never caught. He stole my cell phone, credit cards, three hundred dollars cash and my keys so I was paranoid for a long time and eventually moved apartments. Also, when I was seventeen, I was drugged at a club in Brazil and felt up. It sucked because I was wearing a skirt, fill in the blank.

b.) I define violence against women as a normal part of a woman's life. All women are bound to encounter some form of gendered violence at some point in their lives and this is totally unacceptable to me. From being psychologically bombarded with images and ideas of what to think about one's body and sexuality and what's "acceptable" behavior ... to verbal, mental, and sexual abuse taken from a dad, a sibling or a lover...to outright enslavement and wholesale torture/harassment/rape.

c.) The main source of violence against women is apathy and ignorance. It is caused by the belief of BOTH men and women that violence against women is limited to the physical. It is deepened by the denial of BOTH men and women that women's unequal recognition, treatment, security, autonomy, and history permeates our society, our world, at every level and at every stage of life
( P to the ATRIARCHY).

d.) Burn this shit down and start over.”

****

a) I have never been a victim of violence, a witness to violence or a perpetrator of violence. I hope that I would be smart enough not to surround myself with people who have violent tendencies or display abusive behavior. Non-Physical Violence? Insulting/Belittling, Yelling, Controlling and overbearing attitudes. Another one is guilt - inflicting guilt. Telling someone they are childish or that they are "disappointed" in them for silly things. These types of actions do bring a person's perception of their own self worth down several notches. Making a person feel less worthy and trapped can lead to suicide or attempted suicide. Thinking about guilting a woman brings me to thinking about how not just partners/spouses/boyfriends can do this to a woman, but how parents, family and friends can also do this to a person.

b) Obviously the physical abuse immediately comes to mind as violence against women. Hitting, spitting, beating, and belittling. Most definitely, domestic abuse comes to mind as well. No [I don't violence is perpetrated only against/by individuals]. I think parents, family and "friends" which can be groups of people can inflict a woman with both verbal and physical abuse. I believe that a person prone to abuse and violence, whether it is physical or not has a history of doing it to others in the past or even multiple people at once. Bullies usually don't have just one victim.

c) Domestic partners/or the person you are in a relationship with. Domestic abuse is the biggest problem, because a person is torn by their feelings for the perpetrator and what would happen if they reported them. This is probably what makes this type of abuse so common and the most dangerous. Common because you see the abuser so often. Dangerous because you do not want to report them because of love or loyalty. Most times, I believe that a person has low self-esteem or has been traumatized into thinking that they deserve or warrant the abuse. This type of thinking is what makes certain women (people in general) an easy prey for perpetrators of abuse. I know I am wrong though. So many women who are strong and intelligent never imagine themselves to be victims of violence/abuse, but do end up as victims. I don't want it to sound like I am making excuses for the men who abuse women. I am not. I believe that they purposely take advantage of what they might know about a person and use that to insult them or to hit them. I think it is a predator who knows how to pick and pull apart their victim that makes a predator so powerful. Usually the predator would have to be fairly close to a person to be able to break them down in such a manner. A person is probably extra vulnerable when they are overcome by their personal feelings (usually love or loyalty) for a person and just swallows the abuse. I feel women are more vulnerable to violence because women are more compassionate and sympathetic to their abusers than men might be.

d) Educate women. Educate men. Make people aware that violence is not acceptable and to treat women with respect. Make women aware of their self worth so that they are not easily targeted. learn self-defense, build communities. Educating people is the only thing I can think of. Community programs. Educational PSAs. More general awareness. Believe it or not, those Truth ads about smoking do impact people. Ads with women with black eyes or hospitalized and making statistics known are also very powerful. I've seen a few in the past, but not so often. Awareness. Seems to be a big factor. those who are not aware they are victims or victimizers may get the message. Maybe not, but if others can identify the abuse, it could save a woman's life.

GABNet NYNJ invites you to post your own answers to the questions we posed (in the comments section below). Sometimes, the first step towards ending violence is to break down the wall of silence that surrounds it.

Many Transgender Young People Turn to Prostitution to Buy Illegal Hormones

2008-12-02T13:39:00.000-08:00

"It's very class related... When we look at who murder victims are, they're generally young low-income trans women of color and very often immigrants. If you're any of those things you are more susceptible to violence and disrespect. If you're all of those things, you probably feel like you have a bull's-eye on your back."

Cast Out of Their Homes and Unable to Find Work, Many Transgender Young People Turn to Prostitution to Buy Illegal Hormones
May 10, 2007, ABC News

Kenyatta can't talk long; she has a date.

"We call them dates," she said of the men with whom she has sex for money.

Anxiously, she brushes her long dark hair off her slight shoulders and out of her smoky eyes.

Once you know that Kenyatta, 22, was born a male, her large hands and Adam's apple seem obvious. But at first -- and even second -- glance, there is little to suggest that she wasn't a girl her entire life.

She prostitutes herself "about twice a month" in order to buy the black market hormones that enlarge her breasts, raise the pitch of her voice and keep hair from growing on her face.

"Honestly," she said, "I have to pull a trick to pay for hormones."

Kenyatta is one of 25 young people spending the night at Sylvia's Place, an emergency homeless shelter for New York City's gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth.

A third of the people here this Tuesday night, like most nights, are low-income transgender women who were born male. Kicked out of their homes and ostracized by their peers, they look to each other for solace and to the streets to make a living.

In an effort to make their bodies more feminine, some "trans women" take unregulated doses of hormones bought on the black market and pump industrial silicone -- the same stuff used in brake fluid -- into their breasts. Many have hurt themselves or attempted suicide.

Being transgender is costly. It costs people their families, homes, health, educations and jobs.

It also costs a lot of money.

To pay for their transitions, many of these young women have not only lived on the streets but worked there as well. They sell their bodies to afford the treatments and trappings necessary to make those bodies look to the world as they do in their heads.

Wealthier parents with a child who begins to present as transgender, sometimes as early as 5 years old, will seek information on the Internet, with a family physician, or through a community organization. But many low-income parents can't afford access to those resources.

Children from poorer families are more likely to be thrown out of their homes and end up on the streets.

Though the transgender community in the United States is small, roughly estimated at between 1 and 3 million people, it represents a broad diversity of people.

"Transgender can be anything from feeling internal body dysmorphia [an altered body image] to acting on it, as with cross-dressing, to actually changing your body through hormones, silicone injections and surgery," said Cris Beam, a journalist who spent seven years following a group of transgender youths on the streets of Los Angeles for her book "Transparent."

Those who want surgery and can afford it can spend $10,000 to $20,000 for a sex-change operation.

But for most transgender people, surgery is not an option. Their primary concern is simply making ends meet.

"The vast majority of [transgender] people are poor," said Chris Daley, director of the Transgender Law Center. "Being trans affects their economic health and means unemployment and underemployment. There is a real material cost in transitioning."

In San Francisco -- arguably the most transgender friendly city in the country and home to the minority's largest population -- 60 percent of transgender people make less than $15,300.

Experts and advocates say that people obviously in the middle of transition are often discriminated against when looking for work. Those with jobs often cannot get their health insurance to cover the cost of hormone therapy.

"They're often turned away from places like McDonald's if they're visibly trans -- the most basic workplaces and most basic jobs," said Ray Carannante, associate director of the Gender Identity Project at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in New York.

"They're out there and they often have to rely on sex work. Very often, trans young people have to rely on sex work regardless of what other skills they have."

Britney Spears, who took her new name from the pop singer she loves, was born 22 years ago in Queens, N.Y. Then named Nick, she began wearing her younger sister's clothing when she was 5 years old -- at home and even at school.

When her mother died a few years ago, Britney went to live with a grandmother in Baltimore who later kicked her out.

Now unemployed and living at Sylvia's Place, she tried working at McDonald's and "even [has] the scars to prove it."

"I worked at McDonald's, but it was horrible," she said. "They made me dress as a boy. When I went to the interview, I was all dressed up and I looked beautiful, but the manager said, 'Don't do it around the other workers cause it makes them uncomfortable.'"

Black Market Hormones and Silicone Injections

Many transgender people use hormones to alter their sex characteristics. Estrogen adds breasts to men, stops facial hair from growing and raises the voice.

Costs for hormones vary from place to place and depend upon a person's needs. Medicaid will not pay for most hormone treatments because it considers the therapies optional.

Most transgender people cannot afford to see doctors and get the necessary tests. Instead, they buy hormones on the black market -- usually hormone replacement therapies for menopausal women smuggled into the United States from Mexico.

"The costs vary," said Carannante. "I might be able to get hormones on the street for $20, but someone else might pay $100 dollars for the same thing. The majority of trans youth of color are not getting hormones by prescription."

Janet, 25, hasn't uttered her birth name in almost a decade. She began her transition to become a woman at 14. At about the same time, she began robbing houses to afford black market hormones.

She has criss-crossed the country and bought illegal hormones in California, New York and Texas.

"Just go into any transsexual bar and someone there will be selling," she said.

The only time she ever received hormones by prescription and at regulated doses was at a county jail in San Francisco. After being raped in another prison, she contracted HIV.

On the black market, she said, 1 cc of estrogen costs around $15. A physician might charge more than five times that amount.

She has also spent $800 on laser hair removal and at one time considered pumping industrial silicone into her breasts.

Dr. Ward Carpenter, a physician at the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center who works with transgender patients, said there were numerous risks associated with both silicone injections and unregulated hormone use.

"Silicone is a huge health problem & One patient has had 20 surgeries to remove all the silicone injected into her hips 30 years ago. It solidifies, becomes very hard, and clumps into rocks," he said.

"Silicone has a tendency to migrate in the body," he added. "It can be injected in the hips and then you end up in the emergency room with silicone in the lungs."

There are also health risks associated with illegal hormones. Progesterone has been linked to breast cancer and estrogen can cause deadly blood clots in the "lungs, legs, heart and brain."
Class Matters

Low income "trans men" also face challenges in their transition from females to men.
Born Raquel Samantha Hall, 20-year-old Kels never felt comfortable in his body.

"My body never felt right to me," he said. "I always wanted to dress boyish and do boyish things. The body I'm in, I hate. I don't like my breasts or my voice.

"I want to chop off my breasts, but that will cost $8,000. I don't even have good enough credit to get $8,000. I don't even have good enough credit to get a credit card."

Affording their transition is not all low-income transgender people have to worry about.

Young transgender children in wealthier families often receive the benefit of their parents' education and access to information.

Children attending smaller schools in wealthier districts are more likely to have adults advocating for them than those in poor areas where funding is spread thin, said Daley.

Transgender people also must regularly contend with acts of violence. The young people interviewed by ABCNEWS.com all said they had been verbally harassed and some had been physically assaulted.

"For the last decade or two, about one trans person is murdered every month," said Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. "We know that number is actually higher because a lot of trans people's murders go unreported either because the police are confused or are trying to help victim's family by masking the person's identity."

"It's very class related," she added. "When we look at who murder victims are, they're generally young low-income trans women of color and very often immigrants. If you're any of those things you are more susceptible to violence and disrespect. If you're all of those things, you probably feel like you have a bull's-eye on your back."

TRAFFICKING & TECHNOLOGY: Underage prostitutes marketed on Internet

2008-12-02T13:34:00.000-08:00

Underage prostitutes marketed on Internet
May 18, 2008, Sacramento Bee

If she tried hard, 14-year-old Jasmine could have sex with nine men a day. She'd start posting ads online at 2 or 3 p.m., in time to set up appointments with early commuters.

She'd finish by 5:30 a.m., exhausted and disgusted. The money – about $100 per trick – went to whichever pimp was profiting from her lost innocence.

In September, Sacramento police Sgt. Pam Seyffert and her vice unit picked up Jasmine at a Good Nite Inn near California State University, Sacramento. They'd found her the same way so many men had: on craigslist.

Well-known as a free online community bulletin board, craigslist has gained the dubious distinction of being a popular site for pimps to market young girls to customers, or "johns."

The young prostitutes often are disguised behind photos advertising older women, Seyffert says, and almost always claim to be at least 18.

It is difficult to estimate just how many children are being pimped out, either locally or nationally. In 2003, the FBI reported about 1,400 juveniles were arrested nationally for prostitution.

Most believe the problem is much larger than that number suggests. Estimates vary wildly and are considered, by law enforcement and other experts, to be based on shaky methodology.

What Seyffert knows is this: In Sacramento, the trade in sex with underage girls is thriving. Between 2005 and 2007, her department picked up at least 65 girls, and she feels certain many more are out there.

As prostitution increasingly moves to the Web, she says, the girls are just getting harder for police to find.

For this report, The Bee interviewed three prostitutes, ages 14 and 15, along with experts, police officers and youth advocates. The newspaper is using pseudonyms for the girls because they are minors, and each girl is a victim of a sex crime...

In the shadows

Since August 2006, Seyffert and her team of four plainclothes detectives have teamed with FBI agent Minerva Shelton to recover underage prostitutes – that is, locate them and place them in another environment. They post pictures of the girls they've found on a wall in their office on Freeport Boulevard. A few smile; most look sullen. One has a black eye.

"We've opened a Pandora's box," Seyffert said.

She worries that the girls face new dangers as teen prostitution moves from the strolls of Stockton and Del Paso boulevards to the Internet. Posting from motel rooms, girls are less visible to the police and community. They can't rely on gut instinct to decide if it's safe to accept a "date."

Frequently, the detectives say, pimps pass girls along a multicity circuit; their ads go up in Oakland one week, then Sacramento, then Reno. The unit has recovered girls shipped to Sacramento from Minnesota, Texas, Wisconsin and Montana.

Some Web sites, such as myredbook.com, specifically showcase "adult content and sexually explicit material." By contrast, prostitution postings on craigslist are buried in one corner of the site, past the section for furniture and collectibles.

Clicking on the "erotic services" link brings up a disclaimer releasing craigslist from any liability. Another click leads to a list of posts featuring scantily clad young women promising pleasure in exchange for "donations" or "roses." All claim to be at least 18; police say many are not.

Jim Buckmaster, craigslist's CEO, wrote in an e-mail to The Bee that "there is nothing more gut-wrenching to our staff … than to hear that our site has been abused to exploit a child."

He said craigslist bans illegal activity and urges users to watch for exploited minors. Staff recently implemented new measures, including verifying phone numbers. The changes have reduced the volume of erotic services ads by 80 percent, he said.

Ron Weitzer, a sociology professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who studies the sex industry, says craigslist bears no legal responsibility for the exploitation of minors.

Since 1996, federal law has protected Web sites from such liability; legal experts say sites such as craigslist – which has about 30 million free postings each month – cannot be expected to monitor such a large volume of content.

In March, the Connecticut attorney general became the latest law enforcement official to raise concerns about craigslist and prostitution, demanding the site purge explicit ads. But some advocates think young girls posting on a well-known site, where police can search for them, is better than elsewhere on the Web.

"The illusion that shutting craigslist down would even put a dent in (the problem) is really a false illusion," said David Batstone, co-founder of Not for Sale, a San Francisco anti-trafficking organization.

A difficult search

On a recent evening, Seyffert and her detectives convened at a Starbucks on Alhambra Boulevard. She wore her traditional uniform: jeans and a T-shirt. The men had scruffy beards and wore beanies and cargo pants. None of the patrons appeared to notice them.

Despite the chill, the group set up shop at a table out back, armed with mochas and Americanos, laptops and cell phones.

Detective Aaron Borg opened a browser window. Click. Click.

"Sassy & Classy w4m – 18," read one ad.

"Come have some fun with Monica tonight – 18," suggested another.

The group studied the photos, trying – unscientifically – to decide if the girls were minors.

Finally, Borg picked up the phone and dialed. "Hey is Monica there?" Using a pseudonym, he requested an hourong "date." She told him to drive to Madison and Interstate 80, then call her again.

"She sounds young," Borg said, as they walked to their cars.

The detectives say that in the past 18 months, they've changed their attitudes about these girls. They see them as victims now – not lawbreakers. Most girls eventually share that they've been raped or molested by relatives or family friends. Many are runaways or foster children.

Low self-esteem is universal, and pimps prey on it. Many pimps are current or former drug dealers who've discovered that trade in sex is lucrative and often carries lighter penalties. Initially, they shower the girls with everything they crave: new clothing, affection, praise. According to the detectives and the girls, a new pattern of abuse kicks in: beatings, rapes, verbal lacerations.

As such, Seyffert's team has refocused on two missions: Rescue the girls. Nail their pimps.

Arrest statistics bear out the department's change in attitude. In 2005, the team arrested two men for pimping juveniles. In 2006, they arrested one. But in 2007, arrests jumped to 12. In the first four months of this year, they netted seven.

Over the same time period, arrests of juveniles have dropped. In 2005, they arrested 23 girls for prostitution; in 2006 they arrested 24. But they arrested just eight of the 18 underage girls they picked up in 2007.

Detectives now see incarceration as a last resort. They dislike the notion of holding young sex-abuse victims behind bars. Whenever possible, the team tries to send girls to live in foster homes, or with caring relatives.

Unfortunately, Seyffert says, if they pick up a girl in the middle of the night, juvenile hall is often the only safe place to put her.

After racing out of Starbucks the other night, the vice team hit a dead end – Monica wanted to have the "date" in an apartment that the team thought sounded risky.

They pulled into a church parking lot, and sat in their cars scrolling through the craigslist postings. "Just turned 18 and ready for fun," offered one ad. The detectives started calling.

Around 10:15 p.m., one detective arranged a date at a Motel 6 with a blonde who claimed to be 20. He went inside, carrying a wad of money. The others followed soon after.

They found the girl sitting on a neatly made bed.

She was, indeed, 20, but Seyffert felt no less determined to catch her pimp.

"Who do you work for?" she asked.

"Myself," the girl whispered, her lower lip quivering.

"Why are you protecting this guy?" Seyffert pushed.

"I'm not protecting him," the girl sniffled.

Seyffert found a laptop in a desk drawer. She noted some bank deposit slips and receipts for jewelry, and pointed out the girl's tattoo: her pimp's initials.

"You don't need to be doing this anymore," Seyffert said, wiping away the girl's tears.

Childhood lost

What is it that lures a young girl to prostitution?

For Jasmine, it started with a rape when she was 11.

She was living in her grandparents' North Sacramento home, attending elementary school. Her mother was addicted to drugs, she said. Her father was physically abusive.

She said she confided to her mother about the attack, and her mother responded that it was the girl's own fault. Jasmine ran then – first to the streets, then to a friend's house.

There, she met a man who told her all kinds of nice things – compliments she'd rarely heard. He also gave her physical affection. "In other words, sex," she said recently, her big brown eyes unblinking as she sat in Seyffert's office.

Before long, the pimp taught Jasmine to sell her body, sometimes for $80, sometimes $300. He kept the profits, buying her cheeseburgers and sexy clothes.

From him – and the other five pimps she worked for between ages 11 and 14 – she learned to keep her eyes trained on the ground, and to shut off her mind when johns climbed on top of her.

She wrote about her experiences:

"We wanted so desperately to believe that the physical, mental and emotional abuse was over. We trained ourselves to believe the lies because we wanted to believe we had found someone."

Jasmine shared this writing sample in January. She was living then with her grandmother and said she wanted to become a pediatrician. By March, detectives had found her back on craigslist.

Many girls say that, though they feel repulsed by the fast life, its pull is difficult to overcome.

"It feels like once you're in it, you're stuck in it," explained 14-year-old Ashley, a pretty, blue-eyed girl who was sitting in a south Sacramento Starbucks with Shelton on a recent afternoon. Ashley said she was lured into prostitution by a man who saw her walking through her neighborhood in a suburb south of Sacramento. He invited her home and asked if she would like to be paid to perform oral sex.

Ashley was depressed. Her family was broke, and she fought with her mother. At 12, she already was having sex, and said she was intrigued by the prospect of getting paid for it.

"Let me sample what I'm going to be selling," the man told her. Then the spiral began.

She left home to work for the man. Soon after, that first pimp sent her to another, who in turn put her on a plane to a pimp in another state. She arrived in the airport with just the clothes she was wearing – and her first pimp's name, freshly tattooed on her adolescent torso.

One john pulled a gun on her. Another stabbed her in the leg. By 13, she'd had two miscarriages.

But, until officers finally picked her up, she never thought to go home.

"It's so hard to get out of it unless you're pulled out of it," she said.

Finding a safe haven

For Seyffert, Shelton and the detectives, pulling young girls out of prostitution has become a calling.

The real dilemma comes afterward, when they can't figure out how to keep them safe.

Most officers and advocates agree that rescuing child prostitutes will prove successful only if they have a secure, therapeutic place in which to heal.

Tasha Norris, director of the WIND Center for Homeless Teens, said many of the teenagers she works with engage in survival sex. She's often reluctant to ask them what they've been through, since her agency doesn't have the resources necessary to help.

"We're overwhelmed by the trauma," she said.

The other day, Lauren, a 15-year-old with almond eyes, sat in a classroom at Norris' center, and recalled being raped by a relative and a baby sitter at 11, then gang-raped at 13.

For a while, Lauren lived in a car with the mother of a friend – the woman made her work Del Paso Boulevard. She would cry as she walked, thinking she was supposed to be in school. She picked up chlamydia, gonorrhea and genital warts.

Despite the adults who have failed her, she recently placed her faith in a new pimp, who promised a big house in the suburbs with a Jacuzzi, a pool and a photo shoot.

"He only wants the best for us," she said. "He said, 'You ain't walking no more. That's what the photo shoot is. You're going to be on craigslist.' "

In hopes of breaking the cycle, Seyffert's team has sent a few girls, including Ashley and Jasmine, to a Los Angeles program for child prostitutes called Children of the Night.

They've also begun conversations with people interested in starting a similar program in Sacramento.

Among them is Dellena Hoyer, a 46-year-old former child prostitute who now does marketing for a drug and alcohol mental health treatment provider.

Hoyer recently purchased a three-bedroom home in Elk Grove. Once she completes her foster care certification, she plans to take in adolescent girls.

"The one thing a child needs more than anything is love," she said. "If somebody knows they're loved, that can change the world."

TRAFFICKING & AIDS: Sex Slavery Reaps Increase in AIDS

2008-12-01T12:20:00.000-08:00

In commemoration of World AIDS day, below is an article published last summer regarding one of the first medical reports linking AIDS and trafficking. For the complete medical report, click here.

SEX SLAVERY REAPS INCREASE IN AIDS
Published: August 1, 2007, International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/01/healthscience/aids.1-106866.php

Adding another bleak dimension to the sordid world of sex slavery, young girls who have been trafficked abroad into prostitution are emerging as an AIDS risk factor in their home countries.

Girls who were forced into prostitution before age 15 and girls traded between brothels are particularly likely to be infected, the study found. Shunned by their families and villages on their return, they sometimes end up selling themselves again, increasing the risk.

The study, which was published Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, concerns girls from Nepal trafficked into bordellos in India, but the problem is also emerging elsewhere, said the lead author, Jay Silverman, a professor of human development at Harvard University's School of Public Health.

Girls from Yunnan Province in China sold to Southeast Asian brothels, Iraqi girls from refugee camps in Syria and Jordan, and Afghan girls driven into Iran or Pakistan all appear to be victims of the same pattern, he said, and are presumably contributing to the outbreaks of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, in southern China, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"Most authorities fighting human trafficking don't see it as having anything to do with HIV," Silverman said. "It is just not being documented."

Aurorita Mendoza, a former Nepal coordinator for the United Nations AIDS agency, Unaids, called the study very important.

"It's the first I know of that's linked HIV to sex-trafficked girls," she said.
Nepal - a poor, religiously conservative country in the Himalayas - has until recently had relatively few AIDS cases. The government estimates that it has only about 10,000. The official Unaids estimate is 75,000, but that may be too high, given that some previous estimates for other countries have been wrong. One month ago, for example, Unaids cut its official estimate for neighboring India by 56 percent, to 2.5 million infected, more than anywhere except South Africa and Nigeria.

The study was paid for by the U.S. State Department's Office of Trafficking in Persons and by Harvard and Boston Universities. It tested 287 girls and women being helped by a charity called Maiti Nepal, or Nepali Mother's Home, in the capital, Katmandu. Most had been sent home by Indian anti-prostitution groups working with the police.

Thirty-eight percent of the Nepali women tested by Silverman's team were infected with HIV. But among the youngest - the 33 girls who had been sent into sex slavery before they were 15 years old - the infection rate was 61 percent.

Brothel owners pay twice as much for young girls, Silverman said, and charge more for sex with them, sometimes presenting them as virgins, because men think young girls have fewer diseases or believe the myth, common in some countries, that sex with a virgin cures AIDS.

"It's absolutely heartbreaking," Silverman said. "Some of them are just shells, and shells of very young human beings. It's every father of a daughter's worst nightmare."

About half of those tested had been lured to India by promises of jobs as maids or in restaurants. Some were invited on family visits or pilgrimages and then sold, sometimes by relatives. Some were falsely promised marriage. Some were simply drugged and kidnapped, often by older women offering a cup of tea or a soft drink in a public market or train station, Silverman said.

Not all Nepali women are kidnapped or tricked, said Mendoza, the former Unaids official, since poverty drives some into prostitution knowingly.

Romesh Bhattacharji, a former national law enforcement official in India, said, "This heartless 'trade' has been popular for more than six decades in the subcontinent. In some parts of northern Nepal, one can tell which house has a girl working in an Indian brothel by its roof. If it's tin, that's brothel money."

Mendoza said returning girls may be rejected by their families and villages because of fear that they will either corrupt other girls or will so taint the village's reputation that no one will marry its young women.

As a result, these victims of kidnapping and rape may be forced to keep selling themselves. One survey of Katmandu prostitutes, Silverman said, found that half had worked in India. They may also become pregnant and, without treatment, infect their children.

Working in a brothel in Mumbai, one of the world's largest cities, was a risk factor in itself, the study found. The youngest also tended to have been in multiple brothels and in them for more than a year, raising their risk.

India's epidemic, concentrated among sex workers, truckers, men who have sex with men and people who inject drugs, is most common in its industrialized south and in the heroin-smuggling areas near Pakistan and Myanmar, not in regions bordering Nepal.

Worldwide, about 500,000 young women are trafficked each year, according to the State Department. Most of the 150,000 trafficked in southern Asia end up working as prostitutes in Indian cities, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service.

To view the entire report by the Journal of the American Medical Association, go to http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/reprint/298/5/536

TRAFFICKING & PROSTITUTION

2008-11-28T22:02:00.000-08:00

Prostitution realities are unlike glamor myth in wake of Spitzer scandal

March 18, 2008, AP: The call girl in the Eliot Spitzer scandal appeared to be leading a glamorous life – staying in an upscale Manhattan high-rise, traveling to seduce powerful men in swanky hotel rooms, making more than $4,000 in one night.

But the reality for most prostitutes is far different.

Many come from broken homes, were homeless at some point, were abused as children and suffer from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, says Mary Anne Layden, director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program in the Center for Cognitive Therapy at University of Pennsylvania. She says many are not making any money because of a drug habit and a pimp or madam who takes half their earnings.

“The idea of 'Pretty Woman' is a huge lie,” says Layden, referring to the hit movie about a man (Richard Gere) who hires a prostitute (Julia Roberts) and falls in love with her. “Most prostitutes spiral downward.”

Ashley Alexandra Dupre – the 22-year-old identified as “Kristen” in court documents accusing the former New York Governor of paying thousands for prostitutes' services – doesn't seem to be “Pretty Woman” either. Her MySpace page portrays her as a New Jersey native who left a broken home to pursue a music career in New York.

“I have been alone,” she wrote. “I have abused drugs. I have been broke and homeless. But, I survived, on my own.”

Prostitution takes many forms, from homeless teens who prostitute out of desperation to women and children who are trafficked from other countries and high-end escorts who drum up business online. This last group, with its seeming hint of glamour, has gotten the most media attention in the wake of the Spitzer scandal.

Former prostitute Norma Hotaling, who walked the streets and worked for an escort service, says it felt glamorous at first.

“I felt an incredible sense of power,” she said. “'Here's a way I can make money. I can work any hours that I want to work. I can call my own shots. I don't have to take the dates I don't want. It's like, 'I have my own business. Isn't this amazing?'”

But those feelings didn't last long. She was addicted to heroin; she was homeless at times; she was beaten and raped. She began to be horrified that her livelihood depended on sex with strangers on a regular basis.

“It makes it so appealing to think that it's an easy life, and it's not,” says Hotaling. “You don't find a whole lot of women speaking out about how glamorous it was.”

Melissa Farley, a research psychologist who has been studying prostitution for the last 14 years, estimates that 80 percent of prostitution is done indoors, including massage parlors, champagne rooms in strip clubs, health clubs and hotel rooms. She has interviewed 900 prostitutes in 10 countries. She says about 90 percent say they want to get out.

University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, of “Freakonomics” fame, recently studied street-level prostitution in Chicago, and estimated there were about 4,400 prostitutes active there in an average week. They made an average of about $25 an hour, a far cry from the thousands of dollars charged by the Emperor's Club VIP.

The Chicago prostitutes were also more likely to have sex with a police officer than to be arrested by one, and used condoms only a quarter of the time, Levitt found.

On the other end of the spectrum, Sudhir Venkatesh, a Columbia sociologist who collaborated with Levitt, says it is not uncommon to find prostitutes charging $10,000 per session. Still, he says those women report getting abused twice a year. (Street prostitutes report three times that amount of abuse.)

Some current and former sex workers who push for legalizing prostitution say most of the data on the subject is flawed because it is based on interviews with street hookers who are arrested, in battered women's shelters, or enrolled in drug treatment programs.

Former sex worker Veronica Monet says she was working in the business world when she decided to become a high-end prostitute. She has never worked on the streets or for a madam. She made as much as $15,000 a night as an escort, in addition to her own private hotel suite, spa services, dinner and entertainment.

“It's professional dating,” says Monet, a sexologist and sex educator. “It's not complicated. People do this all the time for free. We have learned to charge for it.”

Robyn Few, also a former prostitute and co-founder of SWOP-USA (Sex Workers Outreach Project) says she has met thousands of sex workers, many of whom are middle-class women who run their business on the Internet and consider themselves entrepreneurs. She advises against street prostitution.

“I can promise you we're not all drug addicts,” she says. “We're not all abused. We're all human. We have desires, wants, needs. 'Kristen' has huge desires. She wants to be a singer. She found a way to work towards those goals.”

Many prostitutes believe their life is glamorous, says Martha L. Shockey-Eckles, assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Saint Louis University, whether they came from lower class or middle upper class or are using prostitution to make money while pursuing another career.

She has interviewed medical school students who said they were only prostituting to pay for school. But they abandoned those aspirations after becoming enthralled with the accouterments that came with the work – she says it's not uncommon for a high-end escort to make $3,500 to $4,000 a night.

So in essence those students say, “'You know what? I'm already successful,'” she says.
But that “success” can come at a price.

For every Veronica Monet, there are horrific stories that point to the ill effects of prostitution, says Layden. There are stories of prostitutes as young as 13, women being beaten and raped by the pimp, abused by the clients, contracting HIV, committing suicide because they don't see a way out.

“The story you're not hearing being told is the violence in the sex trade, the story of the degradation, the large amount of women who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder on par with returning veterans,” says Rachel Durschlag, founder and director of The Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation (CAASE).

There is no bright future in prostitution, says Hotaling, founder of the SAGE Project (Standing Against Global Exploitation), which helps women leave and recover from sex work. Besides the physical and emotional effects, and the risk of jail time, women eventually find it hard to compete with younger and trafficked women. She says they are left penniless (most weren't investing) with no education, social life (most of their friends were in the industry) or life skills (many have never even had a bank account).

Dupre has not commented about her life as a prostitute, except to tell The New York Times she does not want to be thought of as a monster.

She has become a high-profile symbol, both as a victim – a young dropout with a drug problem – and as a woman who defies stereotypes. Madeleine Dash, a sex worker and co-founder of the Sex Workers Action New York, says “Kristen” proves that not all prostitutes are forced into this line of work out of desperation.

But Farley says prostitution is a dead-end. She says homicide is the most frequent cause of death for women in prostitution. Durschlag says prostitution impacts more than the prostitute and the client.

“When you glamorize prostitution, it doesn't just affect 'Kristen,'” she says. “But it affects all these other young vulnerable individuals because it becomes normal.”

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20080318-1108-fea-lifestyles-prostitutionrealities.html

TRAFFICKING: THE MAIL ORDER BRIDE INDUSTRY

2008-11-27T20:01:00.000-08:00

GABNet cited in Women's eNews article about the mail order bride industry

Mail Order Brides Find U.S. Land of Milk, Battery
By Asjylyn Loder, WeNews correspondent
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/1390/context/archive

As Congress considers the need for greater regulation of international marriage brokers, a Ukrainian woman is suing the brokerage that united her with her now ex-husband who, she claims, battered her and is also abusing his latest "mail-order bride."

This summer, members of Congress are expected to introduce legislation that would give a foreign woman the chance to look at a U.S. man's criminal record before accepting a commercially brokered offer of marriage from him.

The proposed legislation would mandate disclosure of past restraining orders against the man and would require immigration services to inform the woman about domestic violence protections available to her. Washington State recently passed similar legislation.

The legislative push coincides with the case of Nataliya Fox, a so-called mail-order bride who sued Encounters International, a well-known marriage agency based in Bethesda, Md., that specializes in matching Russian and Ukrainian women with U.S. husbands. Fox sued Encounters International in the U.S. District Court of Maryland for failing to give her information about domestic violence and for fraudulently informing her that she would be deported if she left her abusive husband, James M. Fox Jr., an Encounters International client. No trial date has been set for the case filed in April 2002.

Natasha Spivack, founder and owner of Encounters International, denied the charges. "This is a major scam and she happened to push all the right buttons," Spivack said of Nataliya Fox, "If you look at her, she looks very honest, like all con-artists do." Spivack, who emigrated to the U.S. from Moscow, claims that Nataliya Fox manufactured evidence of abuse and lied on her immigration applications. Spivack started Encounters International in 1993 using a fax machine and regular mail services before shifting to Web-based services as the Internet became widely available.

"In July 2000, James Fox attacked me," Nataliya Fox wrote in her declaration to the court in June 2002. "The beating lasted approximately two hours." James Fox was arrested for Nataliya's attempted murder in July 2000. In a recent telephone interview, he denied hitting Nataliya and said that his record had been expunged.

Randall Miller, a lawyer with Arnold and Porter, the prominent D.C. law firm that took Nataliya Fox's case pro bono, said in a recent telephone interview that James Fox expunged his record by completing a batterer's class. The Tahirih Justice Center, an immigrant women's rights advocacy group based in Falls Church, Va., joined Arnold and Porter as co-counsel. Tahirih has been the leading force behind the upcoming congressional initiative that would regulate the industry.
"During the entire time of my association with Encounters International and Natasha Spivack, I was never told about my rights should I encounter domestic abuse," Nataliya Fox's declaration states. "She said that if I ever left James I would likely be deported."

James Fox obtained a Haitian divorce decree from Nataliya in January 2001. In October of that year, he married Inna Fox, a woman he met through an Internet marriage agency that has since closed down, James Fox said. According to court records in her case, Nataliya Fox believes that her ex-husband is abusing his new wife. Encounters petitioned to find out the basis for Nataliya's suspicion, but the judge ruled that the potential risk to the safety of the person who is the source of Nataliya's information overrode the defense's need to know.

Thousands of Women Applying to Become U.S. Wives

Some women who enter commercially arranged marriages hope for a prince. Others just want a ticket out of economic desperation. Whatever the reason, thousands of foreign women marry near-strangers from the U.S. each year.

While services and costs vary, it generally works like this: men purchase addresses and profiles of women from a broker and initiate correspondence with the women they like. As the relationship progresses, men can choose to pay the matchmaker to send the women flowers or gifts. This is followed by a visit (immigration law requires that U.S. citizens meet their immigrating fiancee at least once), for which the matchmaker may arrange hotels, transportation, and translators--all for a fee, of course.

Because the "mail-order bride" business is almost entirely unregulated, there are no reliable statistics about how many women enter the U.S. each year to begin marriages with men they hardly know.

Between 1998 and 2001, the number of foreign fiancees entering the United States nearly doubled, from 12,306 in 1998 to 23,634 in 2001. Although no agency tracks how many of those fiancees are coming as a result of brokered matches, an Immigration and Naturalization Service report to Congress in 1999 estimated that 4,000 to 6,000 brokered brides entered the United States in 1998.

Estimating the number of fiancees in brokered matches is something more akin to divination than hard statistics. The 1998 figures--themselves an estimate--indicate that one-third to one-half of all entering fiancees met their intended through a matchmaker. If the percentage holds true, then the number of mail-order brides that entered the U.S. in 2001 could range from approximately 8,000 to 12,000.

GABRIELA Network, a Filipina advocacy group with offices throughout the U.S., believes that the congressional figure is low. It claims that more than 5,000 Filipina brides depart for the United States every year. Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia and the former Soviet states all boast thriving online matchmaking industries. The 1999 Immigration report found that most brides entering the U.S. came from the Philippines or former Soviet states.

No Government Oversight Leaves Brides Vulnerable

The lack of governmental oversight of the industry, critics say, leaves foreign women vulnerable to violence and abuse. Brokered brides leave familiar support networks and rely on near-strangers for financial security and immigration status. Many do not know that they can leave an abusive mate without being deported. And, while the women undergo rigorous background checks, their future husbands do not.

A 1996 law passed by Congress required that matchmakers provide women with domestic violence information or face a $20,000 fine. Regulations have never been put in place to implement that law and it has not been enforced. Nataliya Fox is the first woman to seek redress under that law.

"The agencies have a financial incentive to ensure the satisfaction of their paying clients--the men--but there is no comparable incentive to safeguard the woman," said Layli Miller-Muro, executive director of Tahirih.

Internet marriage agencies thrived with the rapid expansion of Web-based commerce and communication. The 1999 report found that approximately 200 international marriage brokers were operating in the U.S. In a recent count, Tahirih found more than 400 Internet marriage agencies.

Larry Gucciardo, owner of the Angelika Russian Marriage Agency Network, one of the largest U.S. marriage agencies, saw his opportunity in the Internet after his own frustratingly slow international courtship via regular post, he said in a recent phone interview.

In addition to faster communication, the Internet eliminated the start-up costs involved in producing and mailing a printed catalog, and could feature a greater number of profiles than a bulky book. "We have almost 100 Web sites," Gucciardo said. "We have 155,000 clients and about 20,000 girls. We add about 100 to 200 new girls every week."

Another problem with the business, say critics, is that it fuels men and women with false expectations about the quality of the prospective marriage. "The problem is that the organizations that market these relationships, that market these women, market stereotypes, to both sides," said Leslye Orloff, an expert on battered immigrants with the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund in Washington, D.C. "What they're doing is setting up an atmosphere that is ripe, potentially, for abuse."

U.S. men looking for foreign wives can search for such a partner by her height, weight, age and country of origin. The Christian Singles Registry promises, "Virgin Brides from 60 Countries." Another site called eMates markets "Quality Women," while One True Love--an Angelika Network site--advises potential customers that Russian women, unlike their American counterparts, "are not spoiled or greedy."

Some foreign women, like Fox, are finding that their American dreamboats turn into nightmares after marriage. One Russian woman, Svetlana, used a pseudonym out of fear of reprisal from her ex-husband. Svetlana nervously recounted how her husband repeatedly raped, beat and choked her during their 10-month marriage. When she turned to the marriage broker for help, they told her: "'It's just a different culture,'" Svetlana claimed.

"I didn't know. Is this normal marriage? My father, he never shook the shoulders of my mom, or choked her, or hit my mother's head against the wall," she said during an interview in the unmarked, secure offices of Tahirih.

Miller-Muro of Tahirih, which arranged the interview, added: "The barbarity of her torture is so severe that I think that as Americans we should be profoundly embarrassed that there's an industry that facilitates this."

Tahirih is not the only agency reporting a recent up-tick in the number of abused brides. Lillian Bykhovsky said in a recent telephone interview from her shelter for battered immigrant women in Atlanta that the abuse of mail-order brides "is quite a trend." Bykhovsky had assisted two such brides just that week. Sophia Lutsky, a counselor in Seattle, said by phone that she was currently seeing more than 10 abused brides and that she had seen an increase in such cases over the last several years.

In Colorado, Valyeria Roussakova, who came to the United States as a result of a brokered marriage, recently spoke in a phone interview about her own experiences. She said her husband terrorized her and her 9-year-old son by a previous marriage so badly that her son had frequent nightmares. Roussakova said her husband abused her emotionally and threatened her with deportation. "He said, 'If you don't like it, you can always leave,'" Roussakova said.
After she left him, Roussakova said her husband withdrew her work permit and she lost her job. According to Roussakova, the marriage agency told her that they take no responsibility for the outcome of a marriage.

"I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of the women you see on these sites come from very disadvantaged backgrounds," said Vivian Kutchon in a telephone interview, a victim's advocate with the GABRIELA Network in the Philippines. "It's just another level of control."

Recently, Encounters International held a social gathering in suburban Maryland for some its clients. Bill Lawson, an enthusiastic Encounters' client, disagreed that women who agree to these arranged marriages are being exploited. "We're not taking advantage of the women. We're taking advantage of an opportunity." He described Russian women as "a little more old-fashioned, as far as values go. A little more like American women in the 1950s or the 1930s."

Encounters' Web site says that the agency has facilitated almost 250 marriages, with only 25 divorces. Ken Meyers, an as-yet-unmarried client, hosted the recent social at his Germantown, Md., townhouse where Spivack's success was evident. One client, married eight years, held his 6-year-old daughter on his knee. Another, Joe, smiles at his wife of just over three months. A young Marine and his wife, married three years, humorously recount hard times on a rural base.

In the next room, however, an elegant Russian woman who sat with her manicured hands clasped tightly in her lap did not appear so well-adjusted to her new life. In 2000, she married a man--her "soul mate," as the Encounters' Web site described him, who had been an agency member for just two months.

"Potentially we could be a very good couple," she said, but her husband is isolated, moody, and frequently yells at her. He did not want her to learn to drive, hold a job or join a gym. On her birthday, he took out a pistol, one of his 17 guns, and put the barrel in his mouth and threatened to shoot himself. "He always carries a gun," she said. She did not want her name used for fear of angering her husband.

After the woman left the gathering, Spivack mocked the nervousness the woman had expressed to her about having possibly spoken too candidly with a reporter. "She says to me, 'I am worried I have said something wrong,'" Spivack said. She imitated the woman, by wringing her hands and continuing to quote her. "'I am afraid because my husband he has so many guns'" Spivack broke into her wide-toothed smile. As she laughed, several of her clients laughed with her.

Asjylyn Loder is a freelance writer in New York.

For more information:

Encounters International:http://www.encount.com/

Gabriela Network--Filipinas Not For Sale!End the Export of Filipinas!:http://www.gabnet.org/sale.htm

NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund--Immigrant Women: http://www.nowldef.org/html/issues/imm/index.shtml

The court case documents are from Nataliya Mikhaylovna Fox v. Encounters International, et al. pending before the U.S. District Court for the Southern Division of Maryland.

THE TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN: A Presentation by GABNet

2008-11-27T19:35:00.000-08:00

GABNet NYNJ 2007

**NOT TO BE USED WITHOUT WRITTEN CONSENT OF GABRIELA NETWORK. Contact: gabnetnynj@gmail.com**

In 2006, Christmas, a runaway Filipino maid in Kuwait was abducted and gang-raped by 17 men in desert camps. The woman who had escaped her employer’s house was found by four men who took her to a desert camp where they raped her. They then offered the maid to six of their friends who again raped her at a second camp before delivering her to seven others who finished the gang-raped her at a third camp. She was violated over and over again.

Meanwhile, earlier that summer the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration exposed a human-trafficking ring in Dubai that falsely recruited young Filipinas –mostly in their 20’s -- ostensibly as waitresses, salesgirls, mall or hotel employees but instead forced them into prostitution for bar owners and pimps when they arrived. Most of the victims who have sought the help of the Philippine consulate in Dubai were some of the lucky ones, able to escape from their pimps and recruiters. The victims experienced severe trauma, exploitation and abuse while in the custody of these syndicates.

5 coffins a day land at the Manila International Airport; three contain the bodies of Filipina women who died or were killed elsewhere in the world.

Battery, rape and murder are the top occupational hazards for Filipina who work overseas.

What circumstances have exposed these women to such danger and atrocities?

In today’s globalized world, where capital’s relentless and ruthless pursuit for markets and profits have been glossed over by multinational corporations, dubious international bodies and national governments, human trafficking – the Recruiting, Harboring & Transportation of a person by use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjecting them to sexual and/or labor exploitation -- has become our very own modern-day slavery.

Human Trafficking, with an annual profit of $5-7 billion is the third largest and fastest growing criminal industry in the world today, after arms and drug dealing. As many as 2 million women are trafficked across borders annually. Women are typically recruited with promises of good jobs in other countries or provinces and lacking better options at home “agree” to migrate. An estimated 20 million women and children are in the global sex trade.

Although sex trafficking – which involves sexual exploitation in prostitution or pornography, mail-order bride trafficking, and commercial sexual abuse of children -- is one of the most lucrative sectors of the trade in people, trafficking for labor exploitation is also increasing. In fact, the sex trade is the second most likely employment for Filipinas going abroad, the first is domestic work.

Reports have come in telling of Filipinas jumping from buildings to escape the abusive practices of their employers, some of whom have treated them little more than animals – feeding them scraps, locking them in a room and refusing payment for their work.

Filipina domestic workers all over the Middle East, where the majority of them work, have taken to wearing multiple underwear garments to sleep to prevent employers from raping them.

But the Philippine government – much like a pimp – continues to search the globe for countries to take its "surplus labor.” Today, Number of Filipinos Overseas: 8.1 million in 194 countries. Indeed, the government has deployed a yearly average of 900,000-one million OFW’s from 2001 to 2005. 75% of those who leave are Filipina women. In fact, the Philippines is the world’s top exporter of women, more than 64% of Filipino Overseas Foreign Workers are women. The share of OFW remittances to the gross national product has grown from nearly 8 percent in 2001 to 10 percent in 2005.

Meanwhile, The Sex industry – including child pornography and prostitution -- is now the fourth largest industry in the Philippines. The Philippine government has institutionalized sex trafficking under a host of “work” euphemisms such as “guest relations officer (GRO), cultural dancer, and cultural entertainers. The Majority of the 300,000 OFWs in Japan last year were women who worked as entertainers for the “rest and recreation” of the American troops based there. Women who are infected by STDs and AIDS are immediately deported to the Philippines. More than 47,000 Filipinas are in South Korea, many are on Entertainment visas. An estimated 25,000 Filipinas have been brought to the US to work in brothels, bars nightclubs, illegal sex farms and in vicinity of military bases. Some 20,000 do the sex farm tours in Europe. The number of Filipinas in the nightclubs and brothels of the Middle East is not available but it is sizable. Moreover, tourism – a quick way for many debtor countries to earn cash as recommended by the IMF – has only facilitated sex tourism – in which agencies offer “package” vacations which include commercial sex and a plethora of women to choose from. SE Asia earns $8 billion/year from tourism – 80% of tourists are males.

Moreover, In the United States, around 5,000 Filipino women enter as mail-order brides per year. In Australia, some 20,000 Filipino women have gone as Mail order brides. Out of the 4,000 Filipinos in Iraq today, Filipinas have been found working in the US military bases – in the massage parlors.

These numbers and facts are staggering. And they are only the tip of the iceberg.

How have Filipinas been so commodified and dehumanized, reduced to sexual slaves or domestic drudgery?

Some mainstream human rights organizations have actually touted that poverty and inequality as a cause of human trafficking is a myth. They instead claim that Trafficking is a criminal industry driven by the traffickers and their customers. In other words, supply is only offered by the pimps and demand is only coming from the johns of the world. This view, to put it simply, is blind to the bigger picture.

As women who struggle against the machinations of imperialism and neocolonialism, we know that globalization has established for trafficking a daisy-chain of economic operations:
1) At one end, it ensures an endless supply of poor women with no alternative except to sell their bodies via the sex trade or domestic labor. IMF/WB policies have entrenched and intensified artificial poverty in debtor countries by eliminating national self-sufficiency through so called liberal economic reforms via privatization of land and demolition of urban and rural communities. Peddling tourism as a quick source of cash has also opened the floodgate to prostitution. In addition, the open door policy for trade and investments to create export processing zones, the flexibilization of labor and the encouragement to rely on migrant remittances to shore up a country’s GDP are all factors which have pushed women out of the production process to the shadows of the “informal” economy -- making the doors wide open for legal and illegal recruiters preying on young and poor Filipinas ready to accept whatever jobs that will ease the poverty of their families. According to a Philippine government study, the biggest number of the poor can be found among women and children, comprising 49.6% of the populace, which in a country of 88 million people means 56.4 million women and children.

2) In the middle, meanwhile, globalization has created a market for trafficking such as the establishment of tourism spots or discriminating immigration policies which favors some nationalities over others for a source of cheap labor. Moreover, militarism – the armed wing of globalization – has also created a huge market for trafficking. After 9/11, when the US returned to the Philippines to help the Philippine military hunt down Islamic terrorists, trafficking of women and girls to the conflict zone in the south rose to 200%. In one instance, a town mayor bussed in a group of young Filipinas to the US base and told the GI’s that the Philippines welcomed them “with open arms and open legs.” In the international scene, America’s imperialist war in Iraq has led to the increased trafficking of Iraqi women and girls to neighboring countries – a story not commented upon in the media.

3) And, finally, at the end of the spectrum, globalization has constructed an elaborate pimping system which pumps up demand for the sex trade, including the exotification of women of color through the media (especially the Internet), pornography and drugs (like Viagra). As for trafficking in labor, how many of us can live full lives without the help of a nanny or housekeeper? how many of us would be able to afford our cheap groceries or Nike sneakers without labor exploitation?

Simply put, to enslave women in the sex industry or to exploit her labor means to FIRST enslave her economically. Thus for women of such impoverished countries as the Philippines, choice or the exercise of choice is not even a factor when survival is the goal. This argument for choice is what some critics have lobbed against our analysis – they claim, don’t these women choose to be domestic workers? Don’t they choose to be Prostitutes?

And our answer is an emphatic NO, for as long as entities like the IMF/WB and their global manifestations are enabled to afflict nations and peoples with continuing poverty there is no choice. As long as transnational corporations are enabled to plunder without hindrance nations and people there is no choice. As long as national governments oppress and suppress their people’s demands for liberation, there is no choice.

So, unless poor and oppressed women of the world unite to struggle against imperialist globalization and neocolonization, our and our sisters’ fates will remain as that of being “displaced commodified and modern day slaves”. We must educate, organize and mobilize ourselves. In our attempt to build this international solidarity with women and our allies all over the world, we ask you to join GABRIELA Network’s Purple Rose Campaign, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this Valentine’s Day. The PRC is a massive global campaign which seeks to end trafficking in women and children and advances the analysis that this type of exploitation is a creature formed in the nexus of imperialism.

Without your attention to this matter, without your commitment to this cause, Filipina women, along with others from similarly exploited situations, will continually be violated…over and over again.

**NOT TO BE USED WITHOUT WRITTEN CONSENT OF THE AUTHOR OR GABRIELA NETWORK. Contact: gabnetnynj@gmail.com**

THANKSKILLING: GABNet Draws Attention to the Plight of Indigenous Women This Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T19:20:00.000-08:00

^Click image to zoom

GABNET DRAWS ATTENTION TO THE PLIGHT OF INDIGENOUS WOMEN AROUND THE WORLD THIS THANKSGIVING, A NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING FOR NATIVE AMERICANS

United States: Native American women are 25 times more likely to be victims of sexual assault in their lifetimes. Eighty-six percent of assaults against indigenous women is by non-indigenous men who are rarely caught or charged with the crime.
In Mexico, indigenous women experience violence at the hands of the military funded by the U.S. government. Military personnel use rape as an instrument of repression and intimidation as exemplified in the 1997 massacre and mutilation of 32 Tzotzil women in Acteal.
In the Philippines, heightened militarization and state repression has killed close to 1,000 activits, including Alyce Omegnan Claver, an indigenous woman who was executed for her political activism.

GABNET AND MARIPOSA ALLIANCE PROUDLY AFFIRM NATIONAL PARTICIPATION IN 16 DAYS OF ACTIVISM AGAINST GENDER VIOLENCE

2008-11-27T19:00:00.000-08:00

Gabnet/Mariposa Alliance proudly affirm our participation in the international feminist movement's 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence campaign. Along with over 2,000 organizations in 154 countries who have participated in this campaign since 1991, Gabnet/Ma-Al launches our own 16 days of activism, beginning on November 25th, the International Day Against Violence Against Women, with a nationwide Speak Out Against Violence, and ending on December 10th, International Human Rights Day.

We in the U.S. are living in a time where words like progress, change and victory are flooding and infused in our collective discourse. We are supposed to believe that we have won the good fight; that there is nothing left to struggle for. We are supposed to believe that individual success is tantamount to the liberation of all.

We, in Gabnet/Mariposa Alliance, know that women around the world, from the United States to the Philippines to Haiti to Africa, still have everything to struggle for. We know that murder is the number one cause of death of pregnant women; that homicide is the number one occupational hazard for women in the US.

We know that somewhere in America a woman is battered, usually by her partner, every 15 seconds. At least one in three women, globally, is sexually abused in her lifetime. In the US, a woman is raped every six minutes. And in armed conflict zones around the world—in Iraq, Darfur, Columbia, South Asia—the rape of women and children is a tool of war, just the same as any gun, bomb or missile.

Over one million women and children are trafficked internationally every year, becoming victims of sexual exploitation, labor exploitation and abuse. And in the US, legislation is being passed to legalize prostitution, an institution that is responsible for the legal rape and degradation of women around the world. This violence cuts across ethnic and economic boundaries and is the result of a patriarchal and imperialist system that values power and money over human rights.

Gabnet/Mariposa Alliance stands in militant solidarity with women around the world as we affirm that women's rights are human rights. Each time a woman is attacked around the world, we hear her voice and we stand with her. We demand an end to all violence against women. --##