Victimizing Children and Women: 101

From Yahoo News
Lawyer: third woman alleges mass rape of children
AP – 14 hrs ago

VIENNA (AP) — The lawyer for two women who claim they and other children were systematically raped in a public foster home says a third woman has come to him with the same allegations.

Johannes Oehlboeck says that woman additionally asserts that two children died of physical or sexual abuse at the Vienna home.

The two sisters who originally made the accusations in a weekend newspaper interview say the abuse occurred in the 1970s. The institution is now closed. Oehlboeck said Tuesday the third woman spoke of similar acts in the late 1940s and early 1950s, during her time in the Schloss Wilhelminenberg home.

The sisters allege the abuse began when they were 6 and 8, and ended in their early teens.

Marianne Gammer, the head of a victims' aid organization, says psychologists find the sisters' claims plausible.

18 October 2011 Last updated at 05:31 ET

Spain's stolen babies and the families who lived a lie

By Katya Adler BBC News, Spain

Manoli Pagador recalls her first-born child being taken away

Spanish society has been shaken by allegations of the theft and trafficking of thousands of babies by nuns, priests and doctors, which started under Franco and continued up to the 1990s.

I first met Manoli Pagador in Getafe, in a working-class suburb of Madrid. She was attending a meeting for people affected by the scandal Spaniards call "ninos robados" - stolen children.

She has three daughters and lots of grandchildren, but she has never got over the loss of her first-born - a son - nearly 40 years ago.

She had come to think she was crazy for believing he was alive, instead of dead and buried as hospital doctors had told her.

"Now," she said, gripping my hand tightly. "Look around the room at the other women here. All like me. The same background. The same experience. I'm not mad and my family finally believes me."

How many? More than 900 cases are being investigated, but new cases are still coming to light - lawyers say the total could reach 300,000

How long? Over a period of 40-50 years, beginning under Franco, up to the 1990s

Who benefited? Initially the Fascists by bringing up the children of their enemies - later children were taken from parents judged to be morally or economically deficient and placed with approved Catholic, often childless, families

Why did it take so long to expose? The Church and medical profession are highly respected, and Spanish law does not require the biological mother's name on the birth certificate

From Yahoo News
Mexican drug cartels recruiting Texas children
By Jim Forsyth | Reuters – 10 hrs ago

 

SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - Texas law enforcement officials say several Mexican drug cartels are luring youngsters as young as 11 to work in their smuggling operations.

Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, told Reuters the drug gangs have a chilling name for the young Texans lured into their operations.  "They call them 'the expendables,'" he said.

McCraw said his investigators have evidence six Mexican drug gangs -- including the violent Zetas -- have "command and control centers" in Texas actively recruiting children for their operations, attracting them with what appears to be "easy money" for doing simple tasks. "Cartels would pay kids $50 just for them to move a vehicle from one position to another position, which allows the cartel to keep it under surveillance to see if law enforcement has it under surveillance," he said. "Of course, once you're hooked up with them, there's consequences."

McCraw said 25 minors have been arrested in one Texas border county alone in the past year for running drugs, acting as lookouts, or doing other work for organized Mexican drug gangs. The cartels are now fanning out, he said, and have operations in all major Texas cities.

This month, "we made an arrest of a 12-year-old boy who was in a stolen pickup truck with 800 pounds of marijuana," he said. "So they do recruit our kids."

McCraw says the state of Texas is joining a program initiated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection called "Operation Detour," in which law enforcement officers meet with children and their parents in schools and at community centers to warn them about the dangers of what appears to be the easy money the Mexican drug gangs offer.

Law enforcement officers say children are less likely to be suspects than adults, are easily manipulated by relatively small sums of money, and face less severe penalties than adults if arrested.

Last month, Texas officials released a report indicating Mexico-based drug gangs are intent on creating a "sanitary zone" on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, and are "intimidating landowners" in south Texas into allowing them to use their property as "permanent bases" for drug smuggling activity.

(Editing by Corrie MacLaggan and Jerry Norton)

From Today's Zaman

Cacho: Turkey transit route for human trafficking

25 September 2011, Sunday / YONCA POYRAZ DOĞAN, İSTANBUL

 

Lydia Cacho, the first woman in Mexican history to trail an organized crime ring involved in child pornography and trafficking women, arrived in Turkey in mid-September to receive her award from the Hrant Dink Foundation.

She has interviewed hundreds of victims of human trafficking around the world, including Turkey, and has put her life at risk for her investigative work. She has written several books about the issue and has been honored by many prestigious institutions, the most recent being the Hrant Dink Foundation, established in 2007 after the Jan. 19, 2007 assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. Cacho came to Turkey two years ago and stayed for a month to investigate human trafficking. As she followed the trail of the Russian mafia, she discovered that it had links to the British mafia and that Turkey is a transit route. “Turkey is very similar to Italy, where the mafia is well-known and intertwined with the state. Drug dealing in the mafia is controlled by the state in both Italy and Turkey,” she told Sunday’s Zaman in an interview in İstanbul. She told the story of a Croatian woman to demonstrate how women, especially young ones, are conned. “A pretty 17-year-old woman from Croatia was hired to provide some nursing assistance to an elderly woman in İstanbul. But upon arrival she was put in a small house downtown and they told her that she no longer had a job and should pay for her trip back through prostitution. She was exploited every day and, after six months, an immigration officer came to raid the brothel with police and she told me that one of the policemen in the raid was a client. She was then deported back to Croatia,” she said. After interviewing women around the world, Cacho wrote the book “Slaves of Power: A World Map of Sex Traffickers.” She also interviewed many women’s rights activists and academics in Turkey while writing the book. “Many female academics in Turkey do great academic work, but I am surprised that there is not a big women’s movement here. They all told me that they know women trafficking is a big problem in Turkey, but why isn’t that issue in the media?” Cacho asked, adding that it is obvious that women’s studies departments at universities have increased in Turkey, but young women are not yet political. “Young women are not politically visible,” she said in regard to Turkish women, as opposed to women in her home country of Mexico. She noted that 8,000 women and girls are being sold as slaves in Mexico a year. The drug lords in Mexico and Colombia are not just involved in drug dealing, she said, they are also involved in the trafficking of women. “They are making more money from selling women than selling drugs,” she added. About her connection to investigating the trafficking of women, Cacho said she has some early childhood memories. “My mother told me when I was as young as 7 years old not to go to certain places in the city to avoid getting abducted,” she said, but she has no personal attachment to the issue beyond being a curious journalist. She has been imprisoned for her work and faces continued threats on her life. “A month ago, I received an email and phone call threatening me. I used to have three federal agents protecting me day and night. One mobster wanted to kill me, so the government gave me protection, but I was suspicious that the agents might be involved in the mafia so I have no guards anymore. I take care of myself. I take safety precautions all the time,” she said. Cacho’s work has touched many people’s lives. She founded a high security shelter for battered and sexually exploited women and children in Mexico. Defamation laws were also decriminalized after she was jailed when one of the pedophiles she named sued her. Because of her work, new laws were passed against sex trafficking and child prostitution and pornography in Mexico. Cacho stepped into the public spotlight after exposing a pedophilia ring in Cancún, Quintana Roo, with her book “Los Demonios del Edén” (Demons of Eden). Cacho became renowned for both her refusal to back down from those in power and her staunch defense of freedom of the press. Her latest book “Slaves of Power” was released in Mexico last September and in only seven months the book has been translated into French, Italian, German, Swedish, Croatian, English, Dutch and Portuguese and has also been published in Spain, Argentina and Colombia. It will soon be published in Turkey and Japan. She is a member of the Red Internacional de Periodistas con Visión de Género (International Network of Journalists with a Vision on Gender), which is dedicated to addressing gender issues within journalism. Big reaction to Hrant Dink’s assassination in Mexico Lydia Cacho recalls that Mexican journalists and the Armenian population in Mexico reacted strongly to Hrant Dink’s assassination, which remains unsolved after almost five years. The public prosecutor recently linked a cell of Ergenekon -- a clandestine underground network accused of inciting chaos and plotting to overthrow the government -- to the defendants in the case. However, Dink family lawyers point out that the prosecutor has still not called for testimonies from a significant number of public officials to determine their involvement in the preparation and perpetration of the Dink murder or their efforts to conceal and tamper with evidence afterwards. Dink, founder and editor-in-chief of the Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos, had become a target for the General Staff after writing an article. He was charged with “insulting Turkishness” and sentenced to six months in prison, despite an opposing expert opinion, and became a target of negative mass media propaganda. The Hrant Dink Foundation states that the International Hrant Dink Award is presented to “individuals, organizations or groups that work for a world free of discrimination, racism and violence, take personal risks for their ideals, use the language of peace and, by doing so, inspire and encourage others.” This is the third year that the award has been given on Dink’s birthday, Sept. 15, when it was presented to the Taraf daily’s Editor-in-Chief Ahmet Altan and Mexican journalist Cacho. “I first received an email over the summer and replied that I knew Hrant Dink. It was so magical that I published my book and then got the award,” Cacho said.

The Poker Bride: A Story of Escape from Sexual Slavery

A book review, from The Wall Street Journal online:
From Far East to American West
Thanks to a poker game, she escaped the grim fate of so many Chinese women in 19th-century America.

By MELANIE KIRKPATRICK
In 1923, an old woman arrived on horseback in the central Idaho town of Grangeville. She rode down from the remote Salmon River Canyon where she had lived for 50 years with her late husband. She had never seen a train, been to a movie or ridden in a car. A local newspaper dubbed her a modern Rip Van Winkle.

Thus begins one of the more curious stories in the history of American immigrants. The woman, Polly Bemis, was Chinese. She had left her village in the Pearl River Delta, in southern China, more than a half-century earlier, sold by her starving parents to brokers who roamed the countryside looking for pretty girls to work in the sex trade in California. She was shipped to San Francisco, where she was purchased for a wealthy Chinese merchant in a mining town in the Idaho Territory. The year was 1872.

Not long after Polly arrived in Idaho, the merchant lost her in a poker game to a saloon keeper by the name of Charlie Bemis. When Charlie was badly injured in a shootout over a gold stake, Polly nursed him back to health. He then did something almost unheard of for a white man in the Wild West: He married her.

Polly's story, as told by Christopher Corbett in "The Poker Bride," is also the history of the first Chinese immigrants to arrive in the American West. While Mr. Corbett's focus is on the women, he provides a colorful overview of the Chinese experience in general and the appalling discrimination they suffered.

Before the transcontinental railroad, a ship could cross the Pacific Ocean faster than the Pony Express could travel from the West to the East Coast. So in 1848 the news of gold in California reached Hong Kong before it reached Boston. Thousands of Chinese risk takers set sail for what they called the Golden Mountain. In the U.S., they were dubbed "Celestials" or "Sojourners" or "Chinamen," a designation that did not become a slur until later, Mr. Corbett says. Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce—all writers he describes as sympathetic to the Chinese—called them "Chinamen."

At first, Mr. Corbett observes, Americans welcomed Chinese as exotic "curiosities." But as their numbers increased, so did public sentiment against them. Chinese, who were willing to work for low wages, were accused of stealing jobs from Americans. Virtually all newspaper accounts "portrayed the Chinese as thieving, shifty, and untrustworthy."

Yet at the height of the Chinese Must Go campaign of the 1880s, there were only about 100,000 Chinese in the country. Given that there were 50 million people in the U.S. at that time, Chinese accounted for a mere one-fifth of 1% of the national population. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred the entry of Chinese for 10 years. The Geary Act of 1892 required Chinese in the U.S. to carry residency permits. Charlie Bemis may have married Polly in 1894 in part to reduce the risk that she would be deported.

Polly was one of the lucky ones. Most Chinese women who reached the U.S. in the second half of the 19th century were forced into prostitution. Under the discriminatory laws of the day, which were aimed at encouraging Chinese workers to go home, wives were prohibited from coming to join their husbands in the U.S. Young Chinese women were either smuggled into the country or allowed to enter by officials who knew that they were destined for the sex trade.

There was a class system among prostitutes, Mr. Corbett notes, and Chinese women ranked at the bottom. Chinese prostitutes rarely worked in high-class brothels alongside white women. The most fortunate, like Polly, were sold as concubines. But most were destined for "cribs" or "hog ranches"— essentially huts partitioned by curtains—where they serviced many men in a single night. Mr. Corbett quotes a reporter of the day who visited San Francisco's Chinatown and who related the pitch of a Chinese crib girl: "Two bittee lookee, flo bittee feelee, six bittee doee."

The crib girls usually succumbed to venereal disease at a young age. As recounted in an 1869 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, an ailing prostitute would be locked into a "hospital," where she would be given a cup of water, a cup of rice and an oil lamp. If she wasn't dead by the time the lamp went out, the doctor would hasten the process along. "They come for a corpse, and they never go away without it," as the reporter put it.

Mr. Corbett is a journalist, formerly with the Associated Press and now teaching at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and "The Poker Bride" has a journalistic quality. The book is crammed full of quotations from contemporaneous sources and from books by scholars who have written on the Chinese experience. But it's too much of a good thing. While the quotations often add authority and color, they can also be distracting and impede the narrative flow.

At the close of "The Poker Bride," a photo shows Polly at home on the Bemis ranch. She is standing with two horses and a bushel basket at her feet. Her hair is pinned up neatly in a bun, and she is dressed in an ankle-length cotton dress that is protected by a long white apron. The only thing that differentiates her from other American frontierswomen is her face.

Before settling down on the ranch, Polly had run a boarding house and worked as a nurse. By all accounts she was energetic, hard-working and generous to those in need. In short, she thrived. Her success was not typical of the Chinese in America at that time. But on one level it reflects the essence of the American immigrant experience.

Ms. Kirkpatrick is a former deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page.

***********************************************************************

The trafficking of women and especially children for sexual exploitation is rampant today.  It is worse than it ever was.  In China, where there is a growing and severe shortage of marriageable age females, these crimes will only get worse.  Already the Communist authorities are worried about potential political unrest due to the unavailability of marriageable-age women.  There are millions of young men ready to marry - and they cannot find a mate.

This is what happens in a society that does not respect the natural balance between the sexes, but aborts female fetuses by the millions and exposes female infants to die in gutters and gullies because sons are preferable.  The entire problem is exascerbated by the "one child" rule in over-populated China.

India faces similar problems, although they do not have a "one child" rule - yet.  In India it is easy for even the poorest families to obtain an ultrasound of a pregnant woman's fetus to determine the child's sex.  Female fetuses are routinely aborted because of the cultural preference for sons.  Add to that the practice of systemically murdering widows in the age-honored (although long outlawed) practice of sutee - well, you get the picture. 

These two countries represent more than two-fifths of the world's entire population.  Instead of serious discussions about the warped cultural values that allow female fetuses, infants and grown women to be killed with impunity, the governments are allowing the increasing sexual imbalance beween males and females to spin out of control.  In China, I believe the present imbalance is 134 males for every 100 females of "marriageable" age.  Contrast that ratio with the traditional birthrate of 105 males to 100 females:

The reason for the difference, says Christopher Wills, professor of ecology, behavior and evolutionary biology at the University of California at San Diego, is that Mother Nature stacks the deck in favor of male births. Nature gives males an edge at birth because male fetuses and babies are less hardy than female fetuses and babies. So, by the time males reach the age at which they can reproduce, there should be a one-to-one ratio.   Article.

Just on a guess, after I read this book review earlier today, I did a quick search under "poker bride" and - sure enough - a story emerged that has nothing to do with the book of 19th century sexual slavery in the United States per se, but everything to do with the inequities visited on females by perverted societies:

From ctv news online:

Pakistan girl was to be poker debt bride
Associated Press
Date: Tuesday Feb. 27, 2007 11:29 PM ET
KARACHI, Pakistan — Police are seeking 10 men, including several tribal elders, accused of pressuring a Pakistani woman to hand over her teenage daughter as payment for a 16-year-old poker debt, officials said Tuesday.

In the latest case highlighting how conservative customs threaten women's rights in Pakistan, Nooran Umrani alleges that, despite paying off her late husband's debt of $165, she was threatened with harm if she failed to hand over her daughter, Rasheeda.

The 17-year-old was to be surrendered as a bride for the son of Lal Haider, the man who won the card game years before, Umrani told reporters on Monday in Hyderabad, 100 miles northeast of Karachi.

Umrani said her husband was a gambler who ran up the debt at a poker game when Rasheeda was 1 year old. He promised Haider that he would get Rasheeda in lieu of payment when she grew up, the mother said.

Koral Shah, a Hyderabad police officer, said both families belong to the Umrani tribe of Pakistan's impoverished Baluchistan province.

He said a group of elders from the tribe came to Hyderabad in January to investigate the case and had ruled that, under tribal custom, the girl should be married to Haider's 23-year-old son Abdul Ghani.

Police want to arrest the elders, he said.

Police said Tuesday the mother and daughter were in their protection and that an investigation was opened against Haider, his son and eight others.

"We are investigating the matter and vigorously searching" for the men, Hyderabad police chief Irfan Bhutto said.

President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has vowed to give women more rights in line with his policy to project Pakistan as a moderate, progressive Islamic nation.

In December, Musharraf signed into law a bill that makes it easier to prosecute rape cases in the courts, and the country's ruling party recently introduced a bill to outlaw forced marriages, including under tribal custom in which women are married off in order to settle disputes.

So, warped religious values too, have a role to play in the growing grievous issue of gender imbalance in the so-called "developing" nations.  Developing, my ass.

I would say ha ha, you deserve what you get, stupid males in stupid backward countries and believers in stupid backward religions, and I hope you all go the way of the do-do bird, except that it is always women and children who suffer for the stupidity of men, no matter where. 

I feel a great deal of sympathy for the Amazons, they may have had it right after all.