the bistro off broadway

Morrow County Sentinel
Human predators seek prey in rural Ohio
By Ed Taylor, Mt. Gilead 

In the twenty-first Century slavery is still a global abomination. Human trafficking victims, modern-day slaves, are taken from their homes to new locations and are forced to work without pay; some in agriculture, fishing, mining, construction, hotel housekeeping and some in the sex trade. 

Recently, four hundred Thai workers were promised good jobs in Hawaii. When they arrived, ready to begin work, their passports were confiscated by the traffickers who had “hired” them and they served as slave laborers for six years until one escaped and brought freedom to the rest. Some trafficking victims are sold as unwilling organ donors. Pregnant women are trafficked for their newborn babies, who are then sold on the black market. According to a Washington Times article, the Taliban will pay $7 — $14,000 for a child to be used as a suicide bomber. In America, 35% of sex-trafficked girls are sold to traffickers by parents desperate to get money for drugs. These cruelly exploited girls can earn for their pimps as much as $720,000 per year tax free. The buying and selling of people is a big business, bringing in revenues estimated at $32 billion annually, worldwide. 

It is impossible to imagine the life of a girl held captive, forced into prostitution by beatings and threats and sometimes coerced into drug use. She might earn for her trafficker more than $1,000 per night servicing as many as 12  15 “customers.” Michelle Hannon of the Salvation Army, long involved in helping trafficked girls, said, “… the girl gets a trip to McDonald’s or gets her nails done as her only reward.” Younger girls mean a higher profit for the trafficker. Recently, when a prostitution ring in Harrisburg, PA was shut down, it was learned that seventynine of the girls were from Toledo, OH  one was only ten years old. Toledo is ranked number four in the nation, per capita, in terms of arrests, investigations and rescues of domestic minor sex trafficking victims. 

Even when these girls escape their captors, they can experience long-term suffering from STDs, HIVAIDS, unwanted pregnancies, malnutrition, Hepatitis B and C, improperly healed bones from repeated beatings, etc. Sixty-eight percent of these girls suffer from PTSD, the same rate as treatment-seeking combat veterans. 

Not so long ago, when sex-trafficked girls were arrested, their sufferings were ignored and they were treated not as victims, but as criminals. They received little sympathy from a public which seemed to believe that they were bad girls who had deliberately chosen to follow this immoral lifestyle. But we are entering a more enlightened era, thanks to the efforts of Ohio House 45th District Representative Teresa Fedor of Toledo. She introduced H.B. 262, the Safe Harbor bill, to toughen Ohio’s human trafficking laws. In June, 2012, the bill was passed and signed into law by Governor John Kasich. 

The Ohio Attorney General’s 2012 Human Trafficking Report states: “One of the most important things the legislation (The Safe Harbor Law) does is ‘view the person being trafficked as a victim instead of as a criminal … to keep them out of the juvenile justice system.’” The law also provides a mechanism for victims of human trafficking to apply to the court to have their prior solicitation and prostitution convictions expunged. It provides for harsher penalties for traffickers who now face first degree felony charges with a mandatory prison term of at least ten years. The law also requires traffickers to register as sex offenders and gives victims the right to sue their traffickers for damages. Rep. Fedor wants to further strengthen the Safe Harbor Law in the new legislative session by extending the statute of limitations for filing trafficking charges and to make it more difficult for “johns” to claim they didn’t know the girl was underage. 

Read the rest of the article at the Morrow County Sentinel


 
site search by freefind
senior scribes
senior scribes

Submit
YOUR news ─ CLICK
click here to sign up for daily news updates

County News Online

is a Fundraiser for the Senior Scribes Scholarship Committee. All net profits go into a fund for Darke County Senior Scholarships
contact
Copyright © 2011 and design by cigs.kometweb.com