Tag Archives: Child Trafficking

Shocked and Dismayed: Key California Assembly blocks bill to make Child Trafficking a ‘serious felony’

Mathew 24:12 And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.

Important Takeaways:

  • California lawmakers in the Assembly Public Safety Committee on Tuesday blocked a measure that would have classified human trafficking of a minor as a serious felony under state law, an effort that attempted to keep repeat offenders behind bars and make them ineligible to be released from prison early.
  • The measure was halfway through the state’s legislative process, having cleared the State Senate unanimously with broad, bipartisan support. None of the six Democrats on the Assembly Public Safety Committee were willing to cast a vote on the measure Tuesday. Republican Assemblymen Juan Alanis and Tom Lackey were the bill’s only yes votes.
  • Following the vote, those in the audience could be heard yelling, “You’re horrible!” and “You should be ashamed of yourselves!” to the committee members. Human trafficking victims embraced and sobbed in front of the dais.

Read the original article by clicking here.

Stolen and sold: Armenia probes babies lost to Europe

By Nvard Hovhannisyan and Umberto Bacchi

YEREVAN/TBILISI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A probe into the suspected sale of dozens of Armenian babies to foreign families has left hundreds of women wondering what became of their own lost children in the biggest illegal adoption scandal to hit the former Soviet republic.

Police say a criminal ring tricked mothers out of their newborns in what is the latest smear on a lucrative international adoption market, with growing calls for a total shutdown to end similar abuses.

While the scale of the problem is hard to estimate, child protection experts say high adoption fees of up to $100,000 fan a black market that affects children from India to Uganda.

Anti-slavery groups consider illegal adoptions, when a child is brought to another country in breach of regulations or as a result of wrongdoing, a form of child trafficking.

The scandal in the Caucasus surfaced in November, when authorities revealed that more than 30 children had been sent to Italy for adoption between 2016 and 2018 after their mothers were pressured into giving them up.

Some women were coerced into giving birth despite wanting abortions, while others were wrongly told their newborns were ill, Armenia’s security services said in a statement.

Those charged deny any part in the scandal.

The probe, described by a United Nations expert as “very disturbing”, has pushed hundreds of Armenian mothers into a quest to find out what became of their own lost children.

“I am sure my baby is still alive,” said Haykuhi Khachatryan, who was told by the Yerevan clinic at the centre of the scandal that her third child was born dead in September.

“It’s not just my maternal instinct. There is nothing to prove otherwise,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.

Investigating authorities told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that more than three dozen mothers worried their children might have been adopted without their approval have made contact since the illicit trade came to light.

Detectives are now checking all adoptions by foreigners since 1991, said Naira Harutyunyan, a spokeswoman for Armenia’s Investigative Committee, a law enforcement agency.

WAKE-UP CALL

The U.N. Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, who raised concerns about Armenian adoptions in 2015, said the scam should act as an urgent “wake-up call”.

“This looks like …there is a mafia treating children as commodities and making financial gain out of trading children. This is absolutely scandalous,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.

“There is a real need for clarification and mothers are entitled to know what has happened to their children,” she said.

Inter-country adoption should be a measure of last resort for children who cannot be placed in foster care or adopted in their country of origin, according to the U.N.

But five-figure fees paid by adoptive parents in the West often prove too alluring, leading to unethical practice in poor countries, said Iara de Witte, a child trafficking expert at the Dutch child rights organisation Defence for Children.

“It is said that one of the reasons for inter-country adoption is poverty,” she said by phone.

“But with the thousands of euros that adoptive parents have to pay for a child…the original family could have been supported to raise their own child.”

In her 2015 visit to Armenia, De Boer-Buquicchio said she had witnessed children housed in orphanages because their parents lacked the money to raise them.

Some had their disabilities overstated to deter adoption locally, she said, but with no international agency in Armenia, foreign adoptive parents relied on unsupervised middlemen.

Mushegh Hovsepyan, assistant to the minister of social affairs, said the government was mulling reforms, emptying orphanages and strengthening the foster care system.

“We hope that in the near future we will be able to assert that the sale of children in Armenia is not possible or that the risks are reduced,” Hovsepyan said in a statement.

LAST HUG

Armenia’s Investigative Committee said five people – including the heads of a private maternity clinic and a public orphanage – had been arrested as part of the probe.

The suspects face charges, including illegally separating a child from his or her parents, said Harutyunyan.

In at least two cases, adoptions followed payments of up to $20,000, she said.

Lawyers for the head of Yerevan’s Republican Maternity Hospital, Razmik Abrahamyan, and the director of Yerevan’s Children’s Home, Liana Karapetyan, said their clients denied the “unreasonable” and “groundless” accusations.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation was unable to contact representatives for the other three suspects, two of whom have not been named.

The health ministry said it could not comment on a probe involving a private hospital.

The Italian ambassador to Yerevan, Vincenzo Del Monaco, said Italy was ready to cooperate with investigating authorities.

Meanwhile a growing group of women wants answers.

A Facebook group ‘Armenian Mothers’ set up by Khachatryan has organised protests demanding a thorough investigation.

The 33-year-old said she grew suspicious about the death of her child after medics repeatedly refused to show her a body and later requests to get a DNA sample were turned down.

“I asked to give my baby a hug but I was told it was not allowed,” she said. “I’ll fight as much as I can (to have him back)”.

Khachatryan’s lawyer, Susanna Sargsyan, said she had been contacted by the relatives of more than 600 children whose parents had been told were born dead or with serious illnesses.

Manya Hovhannisyan, 36, wants to find out whether one of her children had been sold off – and voiced hope that a new era of openness in the ex-Soviet republic might even elicit answers.

“Previously sharing this kind of a story would be like sharing the story with the wall, you would hear your echo back,” the woman said by phone from Germany where she now lives.

Hovhannisyan said she was told that her first child, a girl, had died days after a premature birth in 2010 but now doubted this was the case, as she was never shown a body.

“The most important thing for me is to know that (my child) is alive and lives somewhere.”

(Reporting by Umberto Bacchi @UmbertoBacchi and Nvard Hovhannisyan, Writing by Umberto Bacchi, Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s and LGBT+ rights, human trafficking, property rights, and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Most children in orphanages are not orphans; child trafficking

A girl writes the names of body parts on a chalkboard at an orphanage outside Gulu, Uganda, June 10, 2007. REUTERS/Edward Ou

By Emma Batha

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Millions of children around the world live in orphanages, but child rights experts say most are not orphans.

Orphanages have become a lucrative business in developing countries, attracting generous funding. This has led to the trafficking of children to fill them, according to charities Forget Me Not and Lumos.

The two charities, which will talk about orphan trafficking at the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Trust Conference in London on Wednesday, are calling for an end to orphanages which they say cause immense harm to children.

Here are some facts:

– An estimated 8 million children live in orphanages and other institutions worldwide, but 80 percent are not orphans.

– Research shows orphanages harm children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development.

– Institutionalisation of very young children has a similar impact on early brain development to severe malnutrition or maternal drug use during pregnancy.

– Young adults raised in institutions are 10 times more likely to fall into sex work than their peers, and 500 times more likely to take their own lives.

– Placing a child in an orphanage quadruples the risk of sexual violence.

HAITI

– The number of orphanages in Haiti jumped by at least 150 percent following the 2010 earthquake.

– Some 30,000 children live in 750 orphanages in Haiti, but Haiti’s government estimates 80 percent have at least one living parent.

– Only 15 percent of orphanages are registered.

– Lumos estimates that funding to all Haitian orphanages is upwards of $100 million a year.

– Its research suggests 92 percent of orphanage funders are from the United States, and 90 percent are faith-based.

– Institutional care is four times more expensive than providing health, education and social support to keep a child in its family.

CAMBODIA

– Cambodia has promised to return thousands of children in orphanages to their families.

– A survey published in 2017 found 16,579 children living in 406 orphanages with nearly 10,000 more living in other care facilities. Most had at least one living parent.

– The number of orphanages jumped by about 60 percent between 2005 and 2015, and the number of children in them by nearly 80 percent.

– The growth in orphanages comes despite a decline in the number of genuine orphans.

– Half of the orphanages are in the capital Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, both tourist destinations.

“VOLUNTOURISM”

– The growth in orphanages is fuelled by tourism, including “voluntourism” where people work short stints in orphanages.

– Orphanage volunteering is a concern in at least 18 countries including Cambodia, Nepal, and Uganda.

– Countries such as the United States, Britain, and Australia are major contributors to the supply of volunteers.

– The continuous rotation of volunteers harms children psychologically, leading to attachment issues in adult life.- There is often no screening of volunteers, leaving children vulnerable to sexual abuse.

– Australia is the first country to recognize orphanage tourism as a form of slavery.

Sources: Lumos, Forget Me Not, Save the Children, UNICEF

(Reporting by Emma Batha @emmabatha; Editing by Katy Migiro. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s and LGBT+ rights, human trafficking, property rights, and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Child Sex Trade Soars In Brazil Ahead of World Cup

Soccer’s major world event, the World Cup, arrives in Brazil in June 2014 and officials in the city say they’ve seen a rise in child prostitution as the event draws closer.

The National Forum for the Prevention of Child Labor, a non-government agency, says the government has been pledging to stop child prostitution for 13 years but has taken very few steps to stop it.

The NFPCL said that at the end of 2012, around 500,000 children were being forced into prostitution in Brazil. The total was five times higher than the total in 2001.

“We’re worried sexual exploitation will increase in the host cities and around them,” Joseleno Vieira dos Santos of Brazil’s Human Rights Secretariat told the Guardian newspaper. “We’re trying to co-ordinate efforts as much as we can with state and city governments to understand the scope of the problem.”

The increase in child sex trafficking is being attributed to a number of growing problems within Brazil’s poorer populations including extreme poverty and drug use.