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CONNECTION BY FAITH PRODUCTION posted a blog post

It's been a fruitful month in our fight against Modern Slavery. We are proud to be a part of the Greater Orlando Human Trafficking Task Force.

Things are really heating up in the fight against Modern Day Slavery in Central Florida. As we have come together with other organizations, agencies, and law enforcement in the forming of the Greater Orlando Human Trafficking Task Force, the ability to act as a network has been invaluable. We look forward to partnering in…See More
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Crossover Church - Tampa, FL

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Crossover Church - Tampa, FL
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University of Michigan janitor convicted of child slavery

"I am not an expert in Togo, but I have lived in other parts of the world. … And I've never come across a civilization or society that allows the beating of children to make a point," Tarnow said in court. "Using broomsticks or others devices is just wrong."A federal jury deliberated for less than a…See More
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Amira left a comment for CONNECTION BY FAITH PRODUCTION
"these stories brought tears to my eyes, God bless you"
Jan 13
CONNECTION BY FAITH PRODUCTION posted a blog post

State Lawmakers: Kids Not Criminals--Pass Safe Harbor Laws

Tracey’s life changed forever on a walk to the corner store. She was 15 and trying to get a few minutes of peace away from her abusive home.A guy she knew from around the neighborhood pulled up next to her and asked if she was ok. He offered her a ride and listened to her talk about how much she wanted a new…See More
Jan 12
CONNECTION BY FAITH PRODUCTION posted a blog post

Haitian orphanage in need

When most people retire they may take a cruise, play bridge on Wednesdays, go to the spa with their best girlfriends, or park in front of the television.Not so from Marlene Berthelot. She is a compassionate woman that has spent her lifes savings helping orphaned children in Haiti.Formerly a science teacher in Boston, Mass.,…See More
Oct 11, 2012
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Organizations of Interest Mission Statements

The mission of this organizations involves a multi-phase plan to deploy hundreds of teams throughout the world with a bold, new approach. One that addresses demand by targeting child predators for prosecutions and conviction.

The key is in identifying predators to arrest, charge, prosecute and convict. To do this, they must investigate and gather sufficient evidence..then sentencing must be commensurate with the crime after the conviction.

This organizations has chosen to fund a bold, new approach, one that addresses the demand side of child sex trafficking by targeting buyers/predators for prosecution and conviction. while over 260 organizations are currently focused on rescuing children, until the demand side is addressed, the supply will always exist. few people know that virtually no convictions have occurred in the U.S. in the last 10 years, thus this heinous crime grows.

A national campaign has been launched to raise money for retired elite military operatives targeting the demand side of trafficking. These Special Operative teams gather information on child predators both in the U.S. and abroad, information that will be used to convict child sex buyers.

These operatives use the skills developed in the War on Terror in this war to bring down predators. Professional law enforcement have vetted this strategy and are eager to work with with these operative teams.

Universities will have the privilege of being a part of a school to address in their criminal justice department curriculum aimed to better educate individuals in law enforcement in the field of child trafficking and pedophilia.



Human Trafficking-THE MOVIE This film deals with the issue of human trafficking, prostitution, pornography and government corruption. It contains violent including scenes only suitable for mature audience



Find more videos like this on ICM-Indy Christian Media

 

They arrived in the United States from West Africa, young girls held against their will and forced to work for hours on end. But this time, it didn't happen hundreds of years ago. Nicole's journey started in 2002, when she was barely 12, in her small village in western Ghana. She and about 20 other girls were held in plain sight, but always under the watchful eyes of their captors. "It was like being trapped, like being in a cage," said "Nicole," now 19. We agreed not to use her real name. "I always have to behave, behave, behave, behave. No freedom at all."

The girls' families sent them to the United States after being assured they would receive a better education. But once they arrived, they were forced to work in hair braiding shops across the Newark area -- just a short drive from New York City, right in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.
The girls, who are now young women, have never spoken publicly before, until now. "It was horrible," said Zena Amevor, who was 15 when she was brought over from Togo. "Sometimes there was not enough food for us to eat. ... It was like a prison. I was just stuck there. ... It was horrible."
For the first time, the former slaves provided details about their horrifying odyssey and an intimate view into the world of human trafficking and contemporary slavery.
"Jacqueline" was 13 when her family sent her to the United States, not knowing that a woman she called "auntie" was a human trafficker. It was unclear if the woman was a blood relative.
"My dad ... worked hard so I could go to school, so when my auntie came and told my family that I could go to a school in the U.S. ... they trusted her," she said. "Everyone was happy about it."
The girls worked in the salons right out in the open, in front of customers. They were on their feet all day, sometimes for more than 12 hours, weaving intricate and elaborate hair braids, seven days a week.
This went on for more than five years.
"We stood there all day, just braiding," Jacqueline said. "If they want really small braids, you stay there sometimes until 2 a.m. ... That's every day."
At times, they were forced to braid the hair of American teenagers no older than they were -- girls who were free and had no idea the people braiding their hair were slaves.

 

 

Western men who visit red-light districts in poor countries often find themselves surrounded by coquettish teenage girls laughingly tugging them toward the brothels. The men assume that the girls are there voluntarily, and in some cases they are right.

But anyone inclined to take the girls’ smiles at face value should talk to Sina Vann, who was once one of those smiling girls.

Sina is Vietnamese but was kidnapped at the age of 13 and taken to Cambodia, where she was drugged. She said she woke up naked and bloody on a bed with a white man — she doesn’t know his nationality — who had purchased her virginity.

After that, she was locked on the upper floors of a nice hotel and offered to Western men and wealthy Cambodians. She said she was beaten ferociously to force her to smile and act seductive.

“My first phrase in Khmer,” the Cambodian language, “was, ‘I want to sleep with you,’ ” she said. “My first phrase in English was” — well, it’s unprintable.

Sina mostly followed instructions and smiled alluringly at men because she would have been beaten if men didn’t choose her. But sometimes she was in such pain that she resisted, and then she said she would be dragged down to a torture chamber in the basement.

“Many of the brothels have these torture chambers,” she said. “They are underground because then the girls’ screams are muffled.”

As in many brothels, the torture of choice was electric shocks. Sina would be tied down, doused in water and then prodded with wires running from the 220-volt wall outlet. The jolt causes intense pain, sometimes evacuation of the bladder and bowel — and even unconsciousness.

Shocks fit well into the brothel business model because they cause agonizing pain and terrify the girls without damaging their looks or undermining their market value.

After the beatings and shocks, Sina said she would be locked naked in a wooden coffin full of biting ants. The coffin was dark, suffocating and so tight that she could not move her hands up to her face to brush off the ants. Her tears washed the ants out of her eyes.

She was locked in the coffin for a day or two at a time, and she said this happened many, many times.

Finally, Sina was freed in a police raid, and found herself blinded by the first daylight she had seen in years. The raid was organized by Somaly Mam, a Cambodian woman who herself had been sold into the brothels but managed to escape, educate herself and now heads a foundation fighting forced prostitution.

After being freed, Sina began studying and eventually became one of Somaly’s trusted lieutenants. They now work together, in defiance of death threats from brothel owners, to free other girls. To get at Somaly, the brothel owners kidnapped and brutalized her 14-year-old daughter. And six months ago, the daughter of another anti-trafficking activist (my interpreter when I interviewed Sina) went missing.

I had heard about torture chambers under the brothels but had never seen one, so a few days ago Sina took me to the red-light district here where she once was imprisoned. A brothel had been torn down, revealing a warren of dungeons underneath.

“I was in a room just like those,” she said, pointing. “There must be many girls who died in those rooms.” She grew distressed and added: “I’m cold and afraid. Tonight I won’t sleep.”

“Photograph quickly,” she added, and pointed to brothels lining the street. “It’s not safe to stay here long.”

Sina and Somaly sustain themselves with a wicked sense of humor. They tease each other mercilessly, with Sina, who is single, mock-scolding Somaly: “At least I had plenty of men until you had to come along and rescue me!”

Sex trafficking is truly the 21st century’s version of slavery. One of the differences from 19th-century slavery is that many of these modern slaves will die of AIDS by their late 20s.

 

 

Thank you for taking the time to read my story.

I am one of many girls who have been exploited and sold for sex online. When I was 16, I was sold for sex against my will on a website called Backpage.com, the biggest website for child sex trafficking ads in America. Tell Village Voice Media, owners of Backpage, to shut down their sex ads now. Backpage.com, makes $22 million a year from ads for prostitution.


You should know that my name is not Alissa. I’m afraid that if I use my real name, the pimps who used to sell me for sex will hunt me down and kill me. I am also afraid that Village Voice Media (which owns Backpage) will ruin my life and come after me as they have others who have stood up for girls who have been sold on Backpage.


But I’m even more afraid that if I don’t tell my story, no one will rise up to stop the people who buy and sell girls like me I was 16 when I met my first pimp -- he told me I was pretty, that he wanted me to be his girlfriend. I was just a kid, and I believed him. But soon he was selling me for sex every day:

I was raped 365 days a year. I was sold to other pimps, back and forth between them like an animal. One pimp gouged my cheek with a potato peeler as a warning not to run away, but after two years I worked up the courage and ran anyway. He tracked me down and beat me and stomped on me, breaking my ribs and jaw.That’s when I went to the police.


It’s still hard for me to believe that this web page exists, that it’s so easy for pimps to sell terrified, unwilling girls like me. Can you go buy a child at Wal-Mart? Of course not, but you can buy me on Backpage.


There is some hope, though: Craigslist used to host ads for girls like me, but after people started speaking out, Craigslist shut down their adult section. A new study says that prostitution ads as a whole have gone down by 50% since Craigslist got out of the business. 50%! If men can’t use sites like Backpage.com to buy and sell girls, maybe fewer girls will be bought and sold.


Now, I’m in college, and work at nonprofit, FAIR Girls, where I help other girls like me -- I even got to tell my story to Nick Kristof at The New York Times. I got out, which makes me one of the lucky ones. But Backpage is still making millions a year off the ones who aren’t so lucky. I see these teenage girls, some as young as 15, every day now in my work, and it breaks my heart. homeless, and desperate for food, shelter and stability. He was the first of dozens of men who would buy her thin cashew-colored body from a human trafficker who exploited her vulnerabilities and made her a prisoner for years.

"If we didn't call him daddy, he would slap us, beat us, choke us," said Graves, 24, of the man who organized the deals. "It's about love and thinking you're part of a family and a team. I couldn't leave because I thought he would kill me."

By day, she was a school girl who saw her family occasionally. At night, she became a slave to men who said they loved her and convinced her to trade her beauty for quick cash that they pocketed. Sold from Boston to Miami and back, Graves was one of thousands of young girls sexually exploited across the United States, often in plain sight.

A plague more commonly associated with other countries has been taking young victims in the United States, one by one. Though the scope of the problem remains uncertain -- no national statistics for the number of U.S. victims exist -- the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says at least 100,000 children across the country are trafficked each year.

On Tuesday, President Obama announced several new initiatives aimed at ending trafficking nationwide, including the first-ever assessment of the problem in this country and a $6 million grant to build solutions.

"When a little girl is sold by her impoverished family, or girls my daughters' ages run away from home and are lured -- that's slavery," Obama said in an address to the Clinton Global Initiative. "It's barbaric, it's evil, and it has no place in a civilized world."

Schools in at least six states and the District of Columbia have turned their focus to human trafficking, launching all-day workshops for staff members, classroom lessons for students and outreach campaigns to speak with parents about the dangers American children face.

The efforts by high school and middle-school officials in Washington, D.C., Virginia, Connecticut, Oregon, Wisconsin, California and Florida come as experts say criminals have turned to classrooms and social media sites to recruit students into forced domestic sex and labor rings.

"They are as horrific and brutal and vile as any criminal cases we see," said Neil MacBride, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. "If it can happen in affluent Fairfax County, it can happen anywhere."

Across the nation, the stories arrive with varying imprints of the callousness and depravity of the sex traffickers. One girl was sold during a sleepover, handed over by her classmate's father. Another slept with clients during her school lunch breaks. A third was choked by her "boyfriend," then forced to have sex with 14 men in one night.

Young people at the fringes of school, runaways looking for someone to care and previously abused victims fall into the traps of traffickers who often pretend to love them.

The perpetrators -- increasingly younger -- can be other students or gang members who manipulate victims' weaknesses during recess or after school, law enforcement officials say. They often bait victims by telling them they will be beautiful strippers or escorts but later ply them with drugs -- ecstasy pills, cocaine, marijuana and the like -- and force them into sex schemes.

'Too pretty to stay outside'

For Graves, who grew up in inner city Boston, her troubles began early in life. Her mother was addicted to drugs, and a dealer molested Graves as a little girl. She bounced between living with an aunt, grandparents, an alcoholic father and a sometimes-recovering mother.

At 16, Graves was homeless and had been wearing the same clothes for months when a group of girls who had dropped out of school took her in and cleaned her up. "They said they were escorts and that they made $2,000 a night," she recalled. "I figured if I go out one night, I'll never have to do it again."

She followed the girls to the "track," a term used for streets where prostitutes gather. When a terrified Graves only brought back $40 from begging, the girls abandoned her. The next night, she says she was alone on a corner in Boston during a snowstorm when her first trafficker picked her up.

"He said I was too pretty to stay outside, so I ended up going home with him because he offered me a place to sleep and clothes to put on," she said.

The man said he wanted to take care of her but that she would have to earn her keep. "He showed me the ropes," she said. "How much to charge for sex" and other sex acts.

Then came the violence. Her attempts to leave were met with brute force. "He punched me," she said. "He stripped me down naked and beat me."

In one incident, her captor took a potato peeler to her face then raped her as she bled. Years later, the light scar remains just below her left eye. Other violent episodes left her with eight broken teeth, two broken ankles and a V-shaped stab wound just below her belly button.

She stayed, however, and found comfort in other girls -- called "wife in-laws" -- who went to area schools, got their hair and nails done together and then worked the streets for the same man. "You think what you're doing is right when you're in that lifestyle," Graves said. "You drink alcohol to ease the stress. Red Bulls kept you awake, and cigarettes kept you from being hungry."

For two years, she was sold from tormentor to tormentor, forced to sleep with men in cities like New York, Atlanta; Philadelphia; Atlantic City; Miami. She posed for Craigslist and Backpage.com ads and set up "dates" six days a week for up to $2,500 a night.

A captive Graves did what experts say others have done: she recruited others. "We'd go to malls, schools, group homes, bus stations and look for girls who were by themselves or looked very vulnerable," she said.

For some of the time, Graves herself remained in high school, attending classes sporadically in boy shorts, small tank tops and worn heels.

"In the schools, they thought I just dressed provocatively," Graves said of the teachers and staff who missed chances to help her. "Now, people are actually understanding that these girls are victims."





 

 

 

 


 

 

CONNECTION BY FAITH PRODUCTION's Blog

It's been a fruitful month in our fight against Modern Slavery. We are proud to be a part of the Greater Orlando Human Trafficking Task Force.

Posted on June 19, 2013 at 5:47am 0 Comments

Things are really heating up in the fight against Modern Day Slavery in Central Florida. As we have come together with other organizations, agencies, and law enforcement in the forming of the Greater Orlando Human…

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Profile Information

Religion / Faith
Christanity
I have attended the Parliament of Religions:
Never
Local Religious Community / Interfaith Affiliation:
Crossover
Website:
http://rsheragonjo.wix.com/one-mans-journey#!
I have come to PeaceNext looking for:
networking, interreligious advocacy
I am inspired by:
Bringing Awareness Today To Tomorrows Generation. Advocating against Human Trafficking, Child Labor and Forced Labor.This page is dedicated to children in the countries of the Philippines, Haiti, Peru,Romania and Ghana
Changes I am working toward in my community:
Partnering with Christian foundation and other agency we can make a difference by confronting aggressive human violence: violence that strips widows and orphans of their property and livelihoods, violence that steals dignity and health from children trafficked into forced prostitution, violence that denies freedom and security to families trapped in slavery. Violence against the poor is not driven by the overwhelming power of the perpetrators – it is driven by the vulnerability of the victims. This violence can be stopped with my commit to create change through the rescue and restoration of those impact by such crimes. My mission is to utilize the power of the law which can be brought to bear on behalf of those who need it, and when people of good will contribute their financial and professional resources to insisting it stop..
About Me:
As a youth and children’s minister serving 23 years in the USA I believed that my final calling is to minister and serve Children, Teens, Young Adults and their families as a missionary overseas beginning in five countries Peru, Philippines, Ghana, Haiti and Romania

As I heed the call, I'’m reminded of how the 12 disciples spreaded the Gospel to known world: James to Spain, Andrew to Russia, Paul to Asia Minor and Europe, Thomas and Bartholomew to India. Each served with a committent of tremendous cost that include their life.

My main focus is to giving young people opportunities to demonstrate the love of Jesus to the whole world, according to His command in Mark 16:15.

One of my major focuses of servitude in these countries is to seek to make public justice systems work for Children victimized by abuse and oppression that urgently need the protection of the law.

One the most hideous crime force on children in international as well domestic places is Human Sex Trafficking and Slavery.

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At 9:40am on January 13, 2013, Amira said…

these stories brought tears to my eyes, God bless you