Free Republic

No one wants to talk about America's growing addiction to pornography. Certainly not me, but I do quite often because I know it is one of the greatest evils of our day. Like a toxic plague, pornography usage is sweeping our nation and destroying our humanity. Tragically, the largest demographic consuming internet pornography is children between the ages of 12 and 17. As deadly as pornography is to the innocence and development of our children, it has a stranglehold on millions of men too. Walk by any magazine stand and you’ll see that although porn is difficult to avoid on...

The United Nations, which aspires to protect human rights around the world, is struggling to deal with an embarrassing string of sexual-harassment complaints within its own ranks. Many U.N. workers who have made or faced accusations of sexual harassment say the current system for handling complaints is arbitrary, unfair and mired in bureaucracy. One employee's complaint that she was sexually harassed for years by her supervisor in Gaza, for example, was investigated by one of her boss's colleagues, who cleared him.

A GROUP of Asian women forced to work as sex slaves for Japan's soldiers during World War II urged the country's lawmakers on Tuesday to pass a resolution demanding an official apology. 'Survivors are quickly ageing, still suffering from pain and complications from damage in the days of sexual slavery,' said a statement from a committee representing the so-called 'comfort women' and their families. 'Due to the delay to an apology and compensation by the Japanese government, the situation has become even more painful for the survivors,' it said. The group is calling for a fact-finding body, an official apology...

Five people have been taken into custody after police said broke up a prostitution ring in the Twin Cities. Officials confirmed raids conducted in Bloomington and Minneapolis last week, were connected to a yearlong prostitution investigation. In Bloomington, a home in a quiet neighborhood across the street from Thomas Jefferson High School was one of the locations of the raid. State and federal authorities said the home served as a brothel, where men bought sex and the women were kept under watch. Police said the ringleaders sold sex with women they picked up at the airport. During 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS’...

Chicago (AP) -- The son of an Illinois congressman is accused of having sexual contact with two female inmates and inappropriate contact with a third while working for the state Department of Corrections, officials announced Friday. Jeffrey M. Rush, 41, the son of U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, was a supervisor of security at the Fox Valley Adult Transition Center in Aurora, a facility which houses female offenders. Between February and June, Rush met two inmates for sexual contact on numerous occasions and offered a third inmate a ride, according to the Kane County state's attorney's office. Rush drove a state-issued...

Large ring kept up to 120 women in virtual slavery The picture, with its implicit threat, was all it took. It was taken just before Christmas 2004. She had been thinking about running away from the windowless bar on Houston's northwest side, where he kept her and other women, forcing some of them into prostitution while they paid off their "debts." But Maximino "Chimino" Mondragon knew of her plans. Carrying a camera and Christmas presents for the woman's daughter, he had appeared unannounced at her family's home in El Salvador. The woman, who was not identified by authorities, told investigators...

First it was tattoos; a pimp put his name on the shoulder of his “girls” as indication that they “belonged” to him. Now, unbelievably, those guys are branding their “babes.” It’s happening not in a foreign underdeveloped country but right here in America. Earlier this month, a 40-year-old man, Shawn Bailey, and a 22-year-old woman were arrested in Phoenix for actively pimping girls aged 14-17. The charges against the man included aggravated assault because one of the girls had been branded! Appalling! Those of us who work to combat sex trafficking are aware that the horrendous act of branding is...

US Human Trafficking Report Calls Canada "Transit and Destination" for Sexual Slavery Trade By Hilary White WASHINGTON, July 23, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The US State Department has issued its 2007 report on human trafficking and has named four wealthy US Arab allies - Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar - as among the worst offenders in failing to act to stop the international trade of human beings.The report listed Canada as a "tier 1" country, one that complies with the minimum standards of combating the trade. It describes Canada as "principally a transit and destination country" for women and children trafficked,...

TOKYO - Anyone who doubts that the Japanese army forced Asian women into sexual slavery in World War II should "face the truth," South Korea's foreign minister said Friday as outrage grew over comments by Japan's prime minister that there was no evidence of the enslavement. Women's rights activists in the Philippines and a group of lawmakers in South Korea also denounced the remarks by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday that there was no proof that so-called "comfort women" were forced into prostitution during the war. But one of the harshest comments came from 81-year-old Hilaria Bustamante of...

The Russian military is reported to be investigating claims that army conscripts were forced to work as male prostitutes in St Petersburg. The command of the interior ministry unit denied the claims made by the Soldiers' Mothers human rights group. The group says it was contacted by a parent of a conscript who had been forced to work as a male prostitute. Last year, an 18-year-old soldier was so badly beaten that he had to have his legs and genitals amputated. The BBC's James Rodgers in Moscow says the latest claims follow a series of scandals which have damaged the...

February 05, 2007, 0:00 a.m. Does “Freedom” Mean Freedom From Slavery?A glaring omission. By John R. Miller Freedom House released its ratings in January on the status of freedom in countries around the world. The ratings produced the usual smug smiles from those highly rated and the usual whining and wailing from governments criticized. But no one has commented on a gap in the annual report that has been evident for years. Once again, as in the past, there is no mention of how countries are doing in fighting the antithesis of freedom: slavery. Look at this and other...

Rulers of the United Arab Emirates were accused in a lawsuit of enslaving tens of thousands of boys over three decades and forcing them to work as jockeys in the popular sport of camel racing. The lawsuit was filed last week by unnamed parents of boys suspected of being abducted, sold and enslaved. They claim more than 30,000 boys could have been victimized and seek class-action status. The lawsuit alleges Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the crown prince of Dubai, and Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid al Maktoum, the deputy ruler, were the most active perpetrators. The lawsuit was filed...

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian prostitutes will have to get used to doing more paperwork after a court ruled they must have a tax number to pursue their trade. A court in the southern town Pecs rejected a prostitute's appeal against a 50,000 forint ($225) fine by the tax authority and said she should have had a tax number, judge Roza Meszar told the national news agency MTI. The claimant, who was unnamed, argued a treaty signed by Hungary banned the registration of prostitutes, but the court ruled they still needed to pay taxes, must have a tax number and an...

A SENIOR member of an Islamic organisation linked to Al-Qaeda is funding his activities through the kidnapping of Christian children who are sold into slavery in Pakistan. The Sunday Times has established that Gul Khan, a wealthy militant who uses the base of Jamaat-ud Daawa (JUD) near Lahore, is behind a cruel trade in boys aged six to 12. They are abducted from remote Christian villages in the Punjab and fetch nearly £1,000 each from buyers who consign them to a life of misery in domestic servitude or in the sex trade.

The number of men paying women for sex has nearly doubled in a decade, UK research shows.Surveys of 11,000 British adults in 1990 and 2000 found the rate increased from one in 20 to nearly one in 10 men. Rising divorce rates, sex tourism and increasing availability of commercial sex are blamed by the Sexually Transmitted Infections journal. It warns men's lifestyles put them at risk of catching sex diseases, yet few are getting checked in clinics. Only a fifth had visited a sexual health clinic and even fewer had been tested for HIV. The findings come as experts call...

GLOBAL: UN deals with sexual abuse allegations against peacekeepers11 May 2005 17:56:16 GMT Source: IRIN JOHANNESBURG, 11 May (IRIN) - The United Nations has requested funds for hiring additional staff to beef up preventative measures aimed at tackling allegations of sexual abuse perpetrated by some UN peacekeepers. In a report to the General Assembly this week, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan noted that the number of claims of sexual abuse and exploitation lodged against UN peacekeepers last year was more than double the number reported in 2003. In March the UN released a report by Annan's special adviser on the issue,...

Washington Post ran a 1000-word March 13 article about U.N. sexual abuse scandals. It began this way: "The United Nations is facing new allegations of sexual misconduct by U.N. personnel in Burundi, Haiti, Liberia and elsewhere, which is complicating the organization's efforts to contain a sexual abuse scandal that has tarnished its Nobel Prize-winning peacekeepers in Congo." But what about Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the former director of U.N. peacekeeping? Does any of this affect him or his reputation? In a curious omission, the story by Colum Lynch, a member of the U.N. Correspondents Association, didn't even mention...

I ask this question without a flinch: Why are such issues as pornography, gay marriage, and other moral issues something government should regulate? One of my beliefs is that a person should be free to do want they want so long as they do not inhibit another person's freedom. This is a good rule of thumb, but it does mean some people are going to say or do things I would not personally do or do not personally agree with. A popular issue today is gay marriage. Although I would not personally engage in homosexual practices, I am obligated to...

The media in the United States have been oddly fastidious in failing to report one aspect of last week’s horror in Beslan: that several Russian girls were raped by Muslim terrorists in front of their parents and classmates. The failure to report rapes in the Russian school was at odds with the eagerness of American journalists, a decade ago, to report ad nauseam on the entirely fictitious "rape camps" supposedly run by Bosnian Serbs in which Muslim women were allegedly subjected to similar degradation. That Muslim propagandists and their Western abettors should have resorted to this particular whopper is especially...

UN getting sexy in new TV series Wed Sep 8, 3:41 PM ET UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - Move over, "Sex in the City." Miramax Television has signed on to develop a television series based on "Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures," a tell-all memoir by three staffers who worked on UN peacekeeping missions in the 1990s. The book stoked controversy at the normally staid world body when it was published in June against the wishes of senior UN officials who feared it sullied the image of the United Nations (news - web sites). The authors -- UN staffers Andrew Thomson...

"Most Americans today believe slavery was outlawed in the United States many years ago, and they are correct. But they falsely believe that slavery doesn't exist in the United States and on that, they are sadly mistaken," said Wade Horn, assistant secretary U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families. During a news conference in Newark announcing the program, U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie said federal prosecutors are conducting several investigations into trafficking rings. Archbishop John Myers promised a new anti-trafficking clearinghouse in Newark. Victims are often smuggled into the U.S. from their home countries with the...

A judge has dismissed charges against two New York men accused by state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of promoting prostitution through "sex tourism" in Asia. Douglas Allen, 59, and Norman Barabash, 58, were indicted last year on felony and misdemeanor counts of promoting prostitution in the operation of Big Apple Oriental Tours. Spitzer accused them of using their tour business -- run from Allen's Poughkeepsie home and Barabash's Queens home -- to solicit customers for prostitution rings operating in the Philippines and Thailand. Dutchess County Court Judge Gerald Hayes dismissed the charges, finding prosecutors failed to provide sufficient evidence that...

WASHINGTON - The trafficking of human beings constitutes a ''growth industry'' in the United States, with more than 15,000 people forced into bondage each year as sex slaves or captive laborers, according to testimony before a Senate panel on Wednesday. Although federal laws enacted over the past three years have enabled prosecutors to crack major trafficking rings, two U.S. attorneys and leaders of victim advocacy groups warned that ''modern-day slavery'' is spread across the nation and appears to be growing. ''It seems like we're just touching the tip of the iceberg,'' said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who presided at Wednesday's...

When Alex Acosta talks about the Justice Department's battle against modern-day slavery, the passion in his voice comes from one stark image in his memory. It's a photograph he saw a few years ago of a tiny room where a 14-year-old Mexican girl was held captive: just three walls, a curtain and a twin bed. The girl slept there, lived there and was forced to have sex there with man after man, up to 30 a day, he said. There was only one personal item in the room: a teddy bear, the last remnant of her lost childhood. ''This is...

United Nations peacekeeping troops are sexually exploiting teenage rape victims fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to an investigation by the The Independent newspaper of London. Many of the girls, as young as 13, are mothers who give up their bodies to the U.N. soldiers in exchange for food to feed their hungry children. The girls, who live in the Internally Displaced People camp in Bunia, northeastern Congo, already are victims of multiple rape by militiamen. The British paper interviewed girls and aid workers who said every night girls crawl through a wire fence to an adjoining...

UN-Eritrea row sinks to new low UN peacekeepers have been accused of severe crimes The UN has delivered an ultimatum to Eritrea after relations between the two sunk to a new low. The UN said Eritrea must cooperate with its peacekeeping force patrolling the border with Ethiopia, or else ask the UN to leave. The UN says its staff have been illegally detained, while Eritrea accuses the peacekeepers of serious crimes including paedophilia. Eritrea also claims the UN is destabilising the region. The UN Mission to Ethiopia and Eritrea (Unmee) patrols a 1,000km (620 mile) border between the two Horn...

<p>Aug. 18 issue — Like many teenage girls in Minneapolis, 17-year-old Stacey liked to hang out after school at the Mall of America, Minnesota’s vast shopping megaplex. Cute, blond and chatty, she flirted with boys and tried on the latest Gap fashions. One day last summer, Stacey, which isn’t her real name, says she was approached by a man who told her how pretty she was, and asked if he could buy her some clothes. “He was an older guy, dressed really well,” she recalls. “He said he just wanted to see me in the clothes.” Stacey agreed, and went home that night with a $250 outfit.</p>

<p>NEW YORK, Aug. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Over the last year, local and federal law-enforcement officials say they have noted a marked increase in teen prostitution in cities across the country, reports Assistant Editor Suzanne Smalley in the August 18 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, August 11).</p> <p>Law-enforcement agencies and advocacy groups that work with teen prostitutes say they are increasingly alarmed by the trend lines: the kids are getting younger; according to the FBI, the average age of a new recruit is just 13; some are as young as 9. And, while the vast majority of teen prostitutes today are runaways, illegal immigrants and children of poor urban areas, experts say a growing number now come from middle-class homes.</p>