tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68857498181734794842024-03-05T18:37:10.052-08:00The Next Top Beauty Model Of American, Germany and IndonesiaThe show takes the form of a modeling competition whose winners typically receive a contract with a major modeling agency and a cover shoot and fashion photo spread in a fashion magazineAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02736009893839164762noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6885749818173479484.post-83566316578885402632009-01-11T05:02:00.000-08:002011-02-06T13:40:16.330-08:00More on Kristof's battle against the brothels<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjulSvM-Ihq-BpKX7_XR4UazjRfp-KTik8WDHIJOjJjTAUHHbdkK-Qk4xM55cRt6IgCHDYcagdkz2IuoGbGH_XTt1t5nDft6cW2CTAnkiRd3VF83Nwo01Usqp7KlosoxXjxhg3Dlb1X2A4/s1600-h/brothellarge.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjulSvM-Ihq-BpKX7_XR4UazjRfp-KTik8WDHIJOjJjTAUHHbdkK-Qk4xM55cRt6IgCHDYcagdkz2IuoGbGH_XTt1t5nDft6cW2CTAnkiRd3VF83Nwo01Usqp7KlosoxXjxhg3Dlb1X2A4/s320/brothellarge.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5290021700976720082" border="0" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >Two teenage girls in the room they share in a brothel run by Sav Channa.<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Photo: Nicholas Kristof/New York Times<br /></span></div><br /><hr size="1" align="left"> <div class="timestamp">January 11, 2009</div> <div class="kicker"><nyt_kicker>Op-Ed Columnist</nyt_kicker></div> <h2><nyt_headline version="1.0" type=" "> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/opinion/11kristof.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink">Striking the Brothels’ Bottom Line </a></nyt_headline></h2> <nyt_byline version="1.0" type=" "> <div class="byline">By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF</div> </nyt_byline> <p>POIPET, Cambodia</p> <p>In trying to figure out how we can defeat sex trafficking, a starting point is to think like a brothel owner.</p> <p>My guide to that has been Sok Khorn, an amiable middle-aged woman who is a longtime brothel owner here in the wild Cambodian town of Poipet. I met her five years ago when she sold me a teenager, Srey Mom, for $203 and then blithely wrote me a receipt confirming that the girl was now my property. At another brothel nearby, I purchased another imprisoned teenager for $150.</p> <p>Astonished that in the 21st century I had bought two human beings, I took them back to their villages and worked with a local aid group to help them start small businesses. I’ve remained close to them over the years, but the results were mixed.</p> <p>The second girl did wonderfully, learning hairdressing and marrying a terrific man. But Srey Mom, it turned out, was addicted to methamphetamine and fled back to the brothel world to feed her craving.</p> <p>I just returned again to Ms. Khorn’s brothel to interview her, and found something remarkable. It had gone broke and closed, like many of the brothels in Poipet. One lesson is that the business model is more vulnerable than it looks. There are ways we can make enslaving girls more risky and less profitable, so that traffickers give up in disgust.</p> <p>For years, Ms. Khorn had been grumbling to me about the brothel — the low margins, the seven-day schedule, difficult customers, grasping policemen and scorn from the community. There was also a personal toll, for her husband had sex with the girls, infuriating her, and the couple eventually divorced bitterly. Ms. Khorn was also troubled that her youngest daughter, now 13, was growing up surrounded by drunken, leering men.</p> <p>Then in the last year, the brothel business became even more challenging amid rising pressure from aid groups, journalists and the United States State Department’s trafficking office. The office issued reports shaming Cambodian leaders and threatened sanctions if they did nothing.</p> <p>Many of the brothels are owned by the police, which complicates matters, but eventually authorities in Cambodia were pressured enough that they ordered a partial crackdown.</p> <p>“They didn’t tell me to close down exactly,” said another Poipet brothel owner whom I’ve also interviewed periodically. “But they said I should keep the front door closed.”</p> <p>About half the brothels in Poipet seem to have gone out of business in the last couple of years. After Ms. Khorn’s brothel closed, her daughter-in-law took four of the prostitutes to staff a new brothel, but it’s doing poorly and she is thinking of starting a rice shop instead. “A store would be more profitable,” grumbled the daughter-in-law, Sav Channa.</p> <p> “The police come almost every day, asking for $5,” she said. “Any time a policeman gets drunk, he comes and asks for money. ... Sometimes I just close up and pretend that this isn’t a brothel. I say that we’re all sisters.”</p> <p>Ms. Channa, who does not seem to be imprisoning anyone against her will, readily acknowledged that some other brothels in Poipet torture girls, enslave them and occasionally beat them to death. She complained that their cruelty gives them a competitive advantage.</p> <p>But brutality has its own drawbacks as a business model, particularly during a crackdown, pimps say. Brothels that imprison and torture girls have to pay for 24-hour guards, and they lose business because they can’t allow customers to take girls out to hotel rooms. Moreover, the Cambodian government has begun prosecuting the most abusive traffickers.</p> <p> “One brothel owner here was actually arrested,” complained another owner in Poipet, indignantly. “After that, I was so scared, I closed the brothel for a while.” </p> <p>To be sure, a new brothel district has opened up on the edge of Poipet — in the guise of “karaoke lounges” employing teenage girls. One of the Mama-sans there offered that while she didn’t have a young virgin girl in stock, she could get me one.</p> <p>Virgin sales are the profit center for many brothels in Asia (partly because they stitch girls up and resell them as virgins several times over), and thus these sales are their economic vulnerability as well. If we want to undermine sex trafficking, the best way is to pressure governments like Cambodia’s to organize sting operations and arrest both buyers and sellers of virgin girls. Cambodia has shown it is willing to take at least some action, and that is one that would strike at the heart of the business model.</p> <p>Sexual slavery is like any other business: raise the operating costs, create a risk of jail, and the human traffickers will quite sensibly shift to some other trade. If the Obama administration treats 21st-century slavery as a top priority, we can push many of the traffickers to quit in disgust and switch to stealing motorcycles instead. </p> <nyt_author_id><div id="authorId"><p>I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/ontheground">On the Ground</a>. Please also join me on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/kristof">Facebook</a>, watch my <a href="http://www.youtube.com/nicholaskristof">YouTube videos</a> and follow me on <a href="http://twitter.com/nytimeskristof">Twitter</a>.<br /></p><p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/opinion/11kristof.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink">View source article</a><br /></p></div></nyt_author_id>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6885749818173479484.post-67579208802152139382009-01-04T05:10:00.000-08:002011-02-06T13:40:16.408-08:00Kristof: A call to outrage<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl4xrHkFwqZRPXjMUixzDSsJTtA6ihaH9b-swo35BBqVUExZAB0B5xroK8m6ztGwQy3dgp51n0T5ibUxYyIZBQlcAJzQjdWxQhep9ua7bDHoxM5ZWHT2qgp7gS-HKpCDl3PK9cgQgU__c/s1600-h/Long+Pross+former+sex+slave.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl4xrHkFwqZRPXjMUixzDSsJTtA6ihaH9b-swo35BBqVUExZAB0B5xroK8m6ztGwQy3dgp51n0T5ibUxYyIZBQlcAJzQjdWxQhep9ua7bDHoxM5ZWHT2qgp7gS-HKpCDl3PK9cgQgU__c/s320/Long+Pross+former+sex+slave.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5287427101544635586" border="0" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;">Long Pross</span><br /></div><p><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">If this isn't slavery, what is?</span></span><br /></p><p>Anyone who thinks it is hyperbole to describe sex trafficking as slavery should look at the maimed face of a teenage girl, Long Pross.</p><p>by New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Nicholas Kristof</p><p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opinion/04kristof.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink">View source article</a></p><p>PHNOM PENH, Cambodia</p>Barack Obama’s presidency marks a triumph over the legacy of slavery, so it would be particularly meaningful if he led a new abolitionist movement against 21st-century slavery — like the trafficking of girls into brothels.<p>Anyone who thinks it is hyperbole to describe sex trafficking as slavery should look at the maimed face of a teenage girl, Long Pross.</p><p>Glance at Pross from her left, and she looks like a normal, fun-loving girl, with a pretty face and a joyous smile. Then move around, and you see where her brothel owner gouged out her right eye.</p><p>Yes, I know it’s hard to read this. But it’s infinitely more painful for Pross to recount the humiliations she suffered, yet she summoned the strength to do so — and to appear in a <a href="http://video.nytimes.com/video/playlist/opinion/1194811622299/index.html">video</a> posted online with this column — because she wants people to understand how brutal sex trafficking can be. </p><p>Pross was 13 and hadn’t even had her first period when a young woman kidnapped her and sold her to a brothel in Phnom Penh. The brothel owner, a woman as is typical, beat Pross and tortured her with electric current until finally the girl acquiesced. </p><p> She was kept locked deep inside the brothel, her hands tied behind her back at all times except when with customers.</p><p>Brothel owners can charge large sums for sex with a virgin, and like many girls, Pross was painfully stitched up so she could be resold as a virgin. In all, the brothel owner sold her virginity four times.</p><p>Pross paid savagely each time she let a potential customer slip away after looking her over. </p><p>“I was beaten every day, sometimes two or three times a day,” she said, adding that she was sometimes also subjected to electric shocks twice in the same day. </p><p>The business model of forced prostitution is remarkably similar from Pakistan to Vietnam — and, sometimes, in the United States as well. Pimps use violence, humiliation and narcotics to shatter girls’ self-esteem and terrorize them into unquestioning, instantaneous obedience. </p><p>One girl working with Pross was beaten to death after she tried to escape. The brothels figure that occasional losses to torture are more than made up by the increased productivity of the remaining inventory.</p><p>After <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/opinion/01kristof.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=kristof&st=cse">my last column</a>, I heard from skeptical readers doubting that conditions are truly so abusive. It’s true that prostitutes work voluntarily in many brothels in Cambodia and elsewhere. But there are also many brothels where teenage girls are slave laborers. </p><p>Young girls and foreigners without legal papers are particularly vulnerable. In Thailand’s brothels, for example, Thai girls usually work voluntarily, while Burmese and Cambodian girls are regularly imprisoned. The career trajectory is often for a girl in her early teens to be trafficked into prostitution by force, but eventually to resign herself and stay in the brothel even when she is given the freedom to leave. In my blog, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/ontheground" target="_">www.nytimes.com/ontheground</a>, I respond to the skeptics and offer some ideas for readers who want to help.</p><p>Pross herself was never paid, and she had no right to insist on condoms (she has not yet been tested for HIV, because the results might be too much for her fragile emotional state). Twice she became pregnant and was subjected to crude abortions.</p><p>The second abortion left Pross in great pain, and she pleaded with her owner for time to recuperate. “I was begging, hanging on to her feet, and asking for rest,” Pross remembered. “She got mad.”</p><p>That’s when the woman gouged out Pross’s right eye with a piece of metal. At that point in telling her story, Pross broke down and we had to suspend the interview.</p><p>Pross’s eye grew infected and monstrous, spraying blood and pus on customers, she later recounted. The owner discarded her, and she is now recuperating with the help of Sina Vann, the young woman I wrote about in my last column. </p><p>Sina was herself rescued by Somaly Mam, a trafficking survivor who started the <a href="http://www.somaly.org/">Somaly Mam Foundation</a> in Cambodia to fight sexual slavery. The foundation is working with Dr. Jim Gollogly of the <a href="http://www.csc.org/">Children’s Surgical Center</a> in Cambodia to get Pross a glass eye. </p><p> “A year from now, she should look pretty good,” said Dr. Gollogly, who is providing her with free medical care.</p><p>So Somaly saved Sina, and now Sina is saving Pross. Someday, perhaps Pross will help another survivor, if the rest of us can help sustain them.</p><p>The Obama administration will have a new tool to fight traffickers: the Wilberforce Act, just passed by Congress, which strengthens sanctions on countries that wink at sex slavery. Much will depend on whether Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton see trafficking as a priority.</p><p>There would be powerful symbolism in an African-American president reminding the world that the war on slavery isn’t yet over, and helping lead the 21st-century abolitionist movement. </p><nyt_author_id><div id="authorId"><p>I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/ontheground">On the Ground</a>. Please also join me on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/kristof">Facebook</a>, watch my <a href="http://www.youtube.com/nicholaskristof">YouTube videos</a> and follow me on <a href="http://twitter.com/nytimeskristof">Twitter</a>.</p><p><a class="more" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html">Go to Columnist Page »</a> </p><p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opinion/04kristof.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink">View source article</a><br /></p></div></nyt_author_id>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6885749818173479484.post-70643063194209814292008-12-19T15:48:00.000-08:002011-02-06T13:40:16.912-08:00Joy at slave's return to Uganda<!-- S BO --> <!-- S IIMA --> <table width="226" align="right" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr><td> <div> <img src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45314000/jpg/_45314384__kampinewvision226.jpg" alt="Sara Aisha Abdul Hakim at Entebbe Airport with her children (Photo: New Vision newspaper - www.newvision.co.ug) " vspace="0" width="226" border="0" height="170" hspace="0" /> <div class="cap">Sara, now in her 30s, was kidnapped at the age of five (Photo: New Vision)</div> </div> </td></tr> </tbody></table> <!-- E IIMA --> <!-- S SF --><p class="first"><b>A Ugandan mother and daughter have told the BBC about their joy at being reunited this week after 26 years.</b> </p><p>Five-year-old Florence Kampi was kidnapped at her father's funeral by a family who used her as a slave. </p><p>She was taken to Yemen where she was eventually rescued by a Tanzanian oil worker who, after he paid the family money, was allowed to marry her. </p><p>"I feel so happy," she said about the reunion. Her mother said, "I burst out crying... but they were tears of joy." <!-- E SF --></p><p>Language is now a barrier for the pair as Florence, now called Sara Aisha Abdulhakim, speaks Swahili and Arabic. </p><p> <!-- S IBOX --> </p><table width="231" align="right" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td width="5"><img src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/shared/img/o.gif" alt="" vspace="0" width="5" border="0" height="1" hspace="0" /></td> <td class="sibtbg"> <div> <div class="mva"> <img src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/img/v3/start_quote_rb.gif" alt="" width="24" border="0" height="13" /> <b>I don't know what God has in store for us, what matters is we are together</b> <img src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/img/v3/end_quote_rb.gif" alt="" vspace="0" width="23" align="right" border="0" height="13" /><br /></div> </div> <div class="mva"> <div>Sesiriya Biryeri</div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody></table> <!-- E IBOX --> <p>Her mother, Sesiriya Biryeri, speaks Lesoga, the local language in the eastern Ugandan district of Iganga. </p><p>"We have a few people here helping with translations from Swahili to Lesoga and vice versa; it is a nice confusion," Ms Abdulhakim, who arrived in Uganda on Wednesday with her four sons, told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme. </p><p>Her return was organised by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) - who she contacted at her husband's suggestion. </p><p>“Language is a big problem for her," Alia Hirji, Uganda's IOM programme officer, told the Ugandan New Vision newspaper. </p><p>"We shall help her re-integrate socially and economically," he said. </p><p>Ms Abdulhakim says her happiness will be complete when her husband can join her. </p><p>He returned to Tanzania earlier in the year to look after his ill father, who died last month. </p><p>Meanwhile, Ms Biryeri says she will do her best to learn Swahili. </p><p>"I don't know what God has in store for us, what matters is we are together," she said. </p><p><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7792626.stm">View source article</a><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6885749818173479484.post-27766511698408617572008-03-07T09:12:00.000-08:002011-02-06T13:40:45.710-08:00The more things change...Marc Herold, a professor of Economics at the University of New Hampshire, has found that the price of a modern-day sex slave (based on 2005 data obtained from Israel) is about the same as that of an African slave in Salvador, Bahia, in 1873. Converting 2006 US dollar values, a young female slave would have cost $6,703-$8,705 back then. The price in 2005 for women trafficked in Israel was $8,000 to $10,000. See Amnesty International, <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on"><i style="">Israel</i></st1:country-region></st1:place><i style=""> -</i> <i>Briefing to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women</i>, June 2005. Further details at <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE15/037/2005">http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE15/037/2005</a><br /><br />Then there's this report on the BBC news website:<br /><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7282711.stm">"Sydney Police Free Sex Captives"</a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><b>Australian police say they have broken up an international sex-trafficking ring after rescuing 10 South Korean women from Sydney brothels</b></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0