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Archive for the ‘families’ Category

Genesis Ramirez was 15 years old when she turned her first trick.  The following years blended together in a traumatizing series of rapes, beatings, stabbings, miscarriages, and addictions.  Now, at 18, Genesis has pulled herself out of the abyss of Chicago’s sex trade and is trying to forge a life with integrity for the sake [...]

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They go and capture other people’s children. They bring the heart and the blood directly here to take to the spirits.
In January the BBC aired an episode of Newsnight on what it claims is a rise in human sacrifices and ritual child killings in Uganda:
One man said he had clients who had captured children and [...]

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Dutch filmmakers Chris Relleke and Jascha de Wilde’s 2002 film, Starkiss, depicts a young girl gripping a rope with her teeth as she is spun several meters in the air in front of a mesmerized audience. The film explores the enslavement of children in Indian circuses, what the filmmakers describe as “a world hidden [...]

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(photo: Monica Almeida/The New York Times)
On Halloween this year, the little mountain town of Ashland, Oregon reverberated with the rhythms of drum circles and laughter.  Following the annual Halloween parade, the streets were throbbing with Little Bo Peeps and Buzz Lightyears, offbeat zombies and chuckling middle-aged women in street clothes.
I sat in a small cafe [...]

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Democracy Now! interviewed Free the Slaves founder Kevin Bales, a lifelong abolitionist and author of several pivotal works in the corpus of today’s anti-slavery literature, including Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, and the recent The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America. He defined slavery for interviewer Amy Goodman as,
“One [...]

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“I’m looking at a piece right now, and it’s flashing red.  It is very exotic,”
London jewelry designer Stephen Webster told Time’s Sarah Larenaudie in 2007.  “In top-end jewelry now, the client is way over branded luxury goods.  They are looking for limited availability or one of a kind.”
But when it comes to mining Tanzanite, the [...]

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A UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre report entitled “South Asia in Action: Preventing and responding to child trafficking” is calling on South Asian nations to crack down on the enslavement of children, a problem that is widespread in much of South Asia.
Allison Alert reports for the UNICEF Innocenti Research Center, which authored the report:
Children in South [...]

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The people of Afghanistan have never gotten a break. Newsweek recently reported on the “Opium Brides of Afghanistan,” referring to the now relatively common practice of poppy farmers selling off daughters to their debtors because the poppy market– a huge cash crop in many parts of Afghanistan– hasn’t been bringing in adequate money since the [...]

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(photo: gpf2009/flickr)
Holly Fox’s Familienpolitik blog recently posted on a Washington Post article that describes U.S. allegations of baby-selling and trafficking in Vietnam. According to the article, some brokers go to rural Vietnamese villages to buy babies that eventually get adopted.  Inconsistencies in adoption paperwork led authorities to investigate, and new parents most likely would never [...]

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