Human trafficking, much of it for sexual purposes, is a worldwide phenomenon. It can be found everywhere from Vietnam to the United States. Estimates of its victims run from 4 million to 27 million, which numbers provide a window on how difficult it is to get a handle on the crime. Each year since 2004, the U.S. Attorney General has presented Congress a report on human trafficking, which includes children and adults sold for sexual purposes and other forced labor. In other words, they are slaves. The number of children in this grim trade are estimated at one million, 80% of them girls. But, really, nobody knows for certain.
While many of these slaves are transported over international boundaries - perhaps 800,000 a year - the majority stay in their country of origin, far from family members, captive to the traffickers who make as much as $15 billion a year worldwide. But again, the real numbers are, at best, educated guesswork.
At the Daily Beast, Michelle Goldberg writes about how one victim in India has become a tireless advocate for others as co-founder of Prajwala.
When Sunitha Krishnan arrives at one of the shelters she runs for sex-trafficking victims in the Indian city of Hyderabad, several of the young women who live there throng around her, their high voices excited and quick. Just moments before, they tell her, a brothel madam and three of her goons had shown up at the shelter’s metal gate, screaming threats and abuse. No one seems particularly frightened—in Krishnan’s world, this sort of thing happens a lot. She’s been beaten up by traffickers 14 times in the last 18 years. Mere words don’t rattle her.
Only one girl, who hangs back from the others, looks shaken. She’d been rescued only the night before, and seems both confused and extremely wary. Her wrists are scarred with thick gashes. At first, Krishnan assumes they’re from suicide attempts—almost everyone in the shelter has at one time tried to kill herself—but the girl says she was cut by a customer. The truth, whatever it is, will probably come out later, when Krishnan has had time to win the girl’s trust. Right now, she has to head back to the headquarters of Prajwala, her anti-trafficking organization, because she has a meeting to plan another rescue. ...
Krishnan says her political awakening began when she was gang raped by eight men when she was 16. The worst part of it, she says, wasn’t the rape itself, but the way the surrounding society, including her own family, seemed to blame her for what happened. "Of course, being violated by eight men is not a pleasant experience, but that part of it faded," she says. "But the psychological part of it, the social part of it, continued for many years, that’s when things started becoming more and more clear to me." She realized, she said, "that women who are victims of sexual violence are doubly victimized by the society," and she committed her life to fighting such victimization.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2007:
The Army is sending troops back to Iraq whose injuries prevent them from wearing protective gear, firing a weapon, or even moving quickly enough to take cover to avoid enemy fire.
Jack Murtha seeks to change all this, simply by requiring that the Army adhere to its own standards on readiness, rest, and retraining.
But "Support the Troops" Republicans say no.