U.S. Senate advances bill to penalize websites for sex trafficking

People walk by the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, U.S., February 8, 2018. REUTERS/ Leah Millis

By Dustin Volz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate voted 94-2 on Monday to advance legislation to make it easier to penalize operators of websites that facilitate online sex trafficking, setting up final passage of a bill as soon as Tuesday that would chip away at a bedrock legal shield for the technology industry.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the legislation overwhelmingly last month. It is expected to be sent to and signed by President Donald Trump later this week.

The bill’s expected passage marks one of the most concrete actions in recent years from the U.S. Congress to tighten regulation of internet firms, which have drawn scrutiny from lawmakers in both parties over the past year because of an array of concerns regarding the size and influence of their platforms.

The Senate vote to limit debate on the sex trafficking legislation came as Facebook endured withering scrutiny over its data protection practices after reports that political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica harvested the private data on more than 50 million Facebook users through inappropriate means.

Several major internet companies, including Facebook and Alphabet’s Google, have been reluctant in the past to support any congressional effort to dent what is known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a decades-old law that protects them from liability for the activities of their users.

But facing political pressure, the internet industry slowly warmed to a proposal that began to gain traction in the Senate last year.

The legislation is a result of years of law enforcement lobbying for a crackdown on the online classified site backpage.com, which is used for sex advertising.

It would make it easier for states and sex-trafficking victims to sue social media networks, advertisers and others that fail to keep exploitative material off their platforms.

Some critics have warned that the measure would weaken Section 230 in a way that would only serve to help established internet giants, which possess larger resources to police their content, and not adequately address the problem.

Republican Senator Rand Paul and Democratic Senator Ron Wyden cast the only no votes.

(Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Peter Cooney)

U.S. House passes bill to penalize websites for sex trafficking US

FILE PHOTO - The U.S. Capitol Building is lit at sunset in Washington, U.S., December 20, 2016. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

By Dustin Volz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed legislation to make it easier to penalize operators of websites that facilitate online sex trafficking, chipping away at a bedrock legal shield for the technology industry.

The bill’s passage marks one of the most concrete actions in recent years from the U.S. Congress to tighten regulation of internet firms, which have drawn heavy scrutiny from lawmakers in both parties over the past year due to an array of concerns regarding the size and influence of their platforms.

The House passed the measure 388-25. It still needs to pass the U.S. Senate, where similar legislation has already gained substantial support, and then be signed by President Donald Trump before it can become law.

Speaker Paul Ryan, in a statement before the vote, said the bill would help “put an end to modern-day slavery here in the United States.”

The White House issued a statement generally supportive of the bill, but said the administration “remains concerned” about certain provisions that it hopes can be resolved in the final legislation.

Several major internet companies, including Alphabet Inc’s Google and Facebook Inc, had been reluctant to support any congressional effort to dent what is known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a decades-old law that protects them from liability for the activities of their users.

But facing political pressure, the internet industry slowly warmed to a proposal that gained traction in the Senate last year, and eventually endorsed it after it gained sizeable bipartisan support.

Republican Senator Rob Portman, a chief architect of the Senate proposal, said in a statement he supported the House’s similar version and called on the Senate to quickly pass it.

The legislation is a result of years of law-enforcement lobbying for a crackdown on the online classified site backpage.com, which is used for sex advertising.

It would make it easier for states and sex-trafficking victims to sue social media networks, advertisers and others that fail to keep exploitative material off their platforms.

Some critics warned that the House measure would weaken Section 230 in a way that would only serve to further help established internet giants, who possess larger resources to police their content, and not adequately address the problem.

“This bill will only prop up the entrenched players who are rapidly losing the public’s trust,” Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, an original author of Section 230, said. “The failure to understand the technological side effects of this bill – specifically that it will become harder to expose sex-traffickers, while hamstringing innovation – will be something that this Congress will regret.”

(Reporting by Dustin Volz; editing by Sandra Maler and Lisa Shumaker)

Senate panel advances crackdown on online sex trafficking

Senate panel advances crackdown on online sex trafficking

By Dustin Volz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. Senate committee on Wednesday advanced legislation to make it easier to penalize operators of websites that facilitate online sex trafficking, the most concrete action from Congress this year to tighten regulation of internet companies.

The approval came after major U.S. internet firms dropped their opposition to the measure, which amends a decades-old law that is considered a bedrock legal shield for the companies.

In a unanimous voice vote, the Senate Commerce Committee passed a measure that gives states and sex-trafficking victims a means to sue social media networks, advertisers and others that fail to keep exploitative material off their platforms.

The bill rewrites Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally protects companies from liability for the activities of their users. The changes, which have bipartisan support, will still need to pass the full Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives and be signed by President Donald Trump to become law.

“This is a momentous day in our fight to hold online sex traffickers accountable and help give trafficking survivors the justice they deserve,” Republican Senator Rob Portman, who co-authored the bill, known as the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, said in a statement.

After decades of little oversight from Washington, the internet industry is facing increased scrutiny from lawmakers in both parties over concerns about their size and how their platforms were used by Russia during the 2016 election.

More than 40 senators have co-sponsored the bill, and Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, has endorsed it.

“Great to see the public & private sector come together in support of this bipartisan legislation to stop sex trafficking online,” she tweeted on Wednesday.

Internet firms had long objected to proposals in Congress to rewrite Section 230, arguing the measure had allowed innovation in Silicon Valley to thrive.

But the Internet Association, a major industry group whose members include Facebook <FB.O>, Amazon <AMZN.O> and Alphabet’s Google <GOOGL.O>, announced support for the Senate bill last week after a series of changes.

Those edits clarified that criminal charges are based on violations of federal human trafficking law and that a standard for liability requires a website to “knowingly” assist in facilitating trafficking.

Some opposition remains. In a letter on Tuesday, a dozen civil liberties organizations, including the Center for Democracy & Technology and Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the bill would threaten free speech online and unevenly harm smaller companies with fewer resources to police their platforms.

(Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Colleen Jenkins)

In reversal, U.S. internet firms back bill to fight online sex trafficking

A computer keyboard is seen in Bucharest April 3, 2012.

By Dustin Volz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Major U.S. internet firms on Friday said they would support legislation to make it easier to penalize operators of websites that facilitate online sex trafficking, marking a sharp reversal for Silicon Valley on an issue long considered a top policy priority.

The decision to endorse a measure advancing in the U.S. Senate could clear the way for Congress to pass the first rewrite of a law adopted 21 years ago that is widely considered a bedrock legal shield for the internet industry.

Michael Beckerman, president of the Internet Association, said in a statement it supported a bipartisan proposal advancing in the U.S. Senate making it easier for states and sex-trafficking victims to sue social media networks, advertisers and others that fail to keep exploitative material off their platforms.

“Important changes made to (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act) will grant victims the ability to secure the justice they deserve, allow internet platforms to continue their work combating human trafficking, and protect good actors in the ecosystem,” Beckerman said. His organization represents tech companies including Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet’s Google.

This week, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee said it would vote next week on the bill authored by Republican Rob Portman and Democrat Richard Blumenthal.

The internet industry has fought such a change in the law for years, but now Washington is stepping up scrutiny on the sector on a range of policy issues after decades of hands-off regulation.

U.S. technology companies had long opposed any legislation seeking to amend Section 230 of the decades-old Communications Decency Act, arguing it is a bedrock legal protection for the internet that could thwart digital innovation and prompt endless litigation.

Bill negotiators agreed to make a handful of technical changes to the draft legislation, which Beckerman said helped earn support of the internet companies.

Those changes include clarity that criminal charges are based on violations of federal human trafficking law and that a standard for liability requires a website “knowingly” assisting of facilitating trafficking.

 

(Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by David Gregorio)

 

Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney to defend Yazidi women, ISIS sex slaves

Lawyers meet with Syrian refugees

By Lin Taylor

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – International human rights lawyer Amal Clooney will defend Yazidi women who have been victims of sexual slavery, rape and genocide by Islamic State militants in Iraq, her law firm said on Friday.

Clooney, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers in London, is seeking to prosecute the Islamist group through the International Criminal Court for their crimes against the Yazidi community.

“We know that thousands of Yazidi civilians have been killed and that thousands of Yazidi women have been enslaved,” Clooney, who is married to actor George Clooney, said in a statement.

“We know that systematic rapes have taken place, and that they are still taking place,” Clooney said. “And yet no one is being held to account.”

Islamic State militants have killed, raped and enslaved thousands of Yazidis since 2014, accusing them of being devil worshippers and forcing over 400,000 of the religious minority to flee their homes in northern Iraq.

Yazidi campaigners, including Nobel Peace Prize nominee Nadia Murad Basee Taha, have been pushing for international justice for the crimes committed against them by Islamic State.

Taha, 21, took her message to the U.N. Security Council in December last year, and has spoken to successive governments, appealing to the international community to act.

Taha said she was abducted by Islamic State militants from her village in Iraq in August 2014, and taken to the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul, where she and thousands of other Yazidi women and children were exchanged by militants as gifts.

She was tortured and repeatedly raped before she escaped three months later.

According to the United Nations, the Sunni militants enslaved about 7,000 women and girls in 2014, mainly Yazidis whose faith blends elements of Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Islam, and is still holding 3,500, some as sex slaves.

The United States, the European Parliament and the Council of Europe have all described the Islamist militant group’s actions as genocide.

(Reporting by Lin Taylor @linnytayls, Editing by Astrid Zweynert. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters that covers humanitarian issues, conflicts, global land rights, modern slavery and human trafficking, women’s rights, and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories)

Sex Trafficking on American Indian Reservations – old problem, new name

Tribal elder Tommy Christian, who lives on Montana's Fort Peck Indian Reservation, speaks at an anti-trafficking conference at the Fort Peck Community College in Montana, April 28, 2016.

By Ellen Wulfhorst

POPLAR, Montana (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A victims’ advocate on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation figures she first saw sex trafficking more than a decade ago, a local nurse says it happened in her own family and a women’s counselor is sure she has seen it countless times.

But while it was sex trafficking, it had no name, they say.

Law enforcement, advocates and residents of Fort Peck, a vast, remote reservation of windswept plains in the U.S. state of Montana, say they have been seeing cases of sex trafficking for years without labeling them as such.

Tribal law at Fort Peck only added sex trafficking as a distinct crime earlier this year, distinguishing it from rape, sexual abuse or kidnapping, experts say.

Public awareness of the crime is critical, say activists who held a conference last month on recognizing trafficking on the reservation.

“We have to acknowledge and say that sex trafficking is happening in our communities,” said Toni Plummer-Alvernaz, a conference organizer.

“Native women are trafficking their relatives. People are often trading their bodies for drugs,” she said.

Colleen Clark estimates she has counseled some 8,000 victims of violence during her three decades working at the Red Bird Women’s Center in Wolf Point, the reservation’s largest town with a population of fewer than 3,000 residents.

“When I look back through those years, I can see where some of those women were victims of human trafficking,” Clark said.

“But we didn’t have a name for that then. There was not a whole lot of public awareness.”

Even now, numbers don’t tell the story, and there is little in the way of statistics to quantify what experts, advocates and authorities say is happening.

“Based on our investigation of trafficking on Fort Peck, the scope of the problem is far larger than any information we have so far in terms of statistics would reflect,” said Melina Healey, a trafficking expert at the Child Law Policy and Legislation Clinic at Loyola University Chicago.

She helped write the tribal law against trafficking.

Updating the law with trafficking will help in efforts to collect data and “demonstrate to the community and to other governments, to the public at large that there’s a problem here and it’s reaching crisis levels,” she said.

One obstacle is overcoming myths and stereotypes, experts said.

“The popular idea of what sex trafficking involves often is people chained to a basement, Russian women brought over to this country in container ships and sold into slavery,” Healey said. “But sex trafficking doesn’t look like that most of the time.”

It can simply involve a person being exploited for sex, someone buying the sex and someone else orchestrating the deal, she said.

“There’s no movement across borders or physical confinement necessary,” she said.

UNDER-REPORTED

Evidence of trafficking on the Fort Peck reservation won’t be found in federal statistics, said Cyndee Peterson, an assistant U.S. Attorney in Montana who heads up a task force teaching law enforcement and attorneys to recognize trafficking.

Records, she said, do not show federal prosecutors handling any trafficking cases on Fort Peck going back five years.

“How do we know these cases are here? Because the advocates that actually are on the ground talking to the victims are telling me,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Don’t look at our numbers and think that it’s not happening,” she said. “People did not know what they were seeing.”

Now, she said, after every training session held by her task force, a law enforcement officer will approach her and say: “You know what? I actually have had trafficking cases in the past and I didn’t recognize it as trafficking.”

Tribal elder Tommy Christian, a member of the Fort Peck tribes’ executive board, blames some of the lack of evidence to Indian problems falling on deaf ears in the white community.

“I think it’s just an attitude of well, we’re all savages and it’s just another dead Indian,” he said.

Twenty-five years after her half-brother was sent to prison, Tami Adams-Martens, 59, a nurse at Poplar Hospital, said she now realizes the case involved trafficking.

Her stepsister had been hooked on crack cocaine and in debt to a dealer but had no money, she said.

“(The dealer) said, ‘Look, somebody is going to get hurt if you don’t pay up. Do you have anything else I want?’ and she said, ‘Well, I’ve got a 13-year-old daughter,'” she said.

A fight broke out, and the dealer was killed by Adams-Martens’s half-brother who stepped in to block the deal, she said. He spend 17 years in prison.

“I didn’t realize it was trafficking,” she said, adding: “I think everyone here has a story like that or is very close to a story like that.”

NO NAME FOR IT

Joni Johnson, who helps crime victims on the reservation, works with two young women who have suffered domestic violence, are drug users and who she is certain are trading sex for drugs.

“They don’t realize when they’re doing, but it is human trafficking,” she said.

A more haunting case was some 15 years ago when a sexual assault victim revealed that she was selling her nieces for drugs, she said.

“There just wasn’t a name for it,” she said.

Name or not, the problem stretches far back in time, Clark said.

“We could go back to the day that the settlers came, the day that fur trappers came, those days when colonization hit and demeaned the significance and honor and sacredness of women and children,” she said.

(Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Sex trafficking reaches crisis on Native American Reservations

By Ellen Wulfhorst

POPLAR, Montana (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Life on the remote Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northern Montana has all the ingredients for sex trafficking – poverty, isolation, joblessness and violence, topped with an epidemic of crystal meth addiction.

Drug users are selling their babies, daughters and sisters for the potent stimulant that is ravaging Native American communities such as the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes living on the desolate plains of Fort Peck, say community leaders, experts and federal authorities.

“We’re in crisis mode,” said Tribal Chairman Floyd Azure. “We have mothers giving their children away for sexual favors for drugs. We have teenagers and young girls giving away sexual favors for drugs.”

No numbers record specific rates of local sex trafficking, which can often be buried in crimes of sexual assault, abuse, prostitution, abandonment or kidnapping. But it is a crime, poorly documented and fuelled by drug abuse, plaguing Indian reservations across the United States.

The rate of meth use among American Indians is the highest of any ethnicity in the country and more than twice as high as any other group, according to the National Congress of American Indians.

The number of drug cases on Indian lands nationwide rose seven-fold from 2009 to 2014, and crime rates on some reservations are five times higher than national averages, according to a federal Drug Enforcement Administration report.

On Fort Peck, a reservation of some 10,000 people, six newborn babies tested positive for meth in just two weeks in April and were taken to a hospital 300 miles away, said Howard Bemer, the Bureau of Indian Affairs Superintendent for Fort Peck.

Meth use and other crime exploded with the tapping of reserves in the Bakken oil fields to the east and south of the reservation in the last decade. The boom brought tens of thousands of workers, flush with cash, to the region.

With the drop in world oil prices, many of those workers are gone but the crime has not, said Melina Healey, a trafficking expert at the Child Law Policy and Legislation Clinic at Loyola University Chicago.

“The boom brought problems that don’t disappear when the boom disappears,” she said.

The drug trade helps incite sex trafficking, as people exchange themselves, family members or friends to get high, she said.

“If someone is addicted to meth, they’re not in their right mind. It is much easier to get them to do things that they never would have done if they weren’t addicted,” she said at a recent anti-trafficking conference in Poplar, the reservation’s tribal headquarters.

Drug debt is a forceful driver of trafficking, and dealers threaten users to pay up by any means, said Sgt. Grant Snyder, a trafficking investigator with the Minneapolis Police Department.

“Maybe it’s your 12-year-old daughter, maybe it’s your 5-year-old daughter,” he said.

FAMILY

A harrowing number of victims are trafficked by their own family members.

“Traffickers are not just scary men who drive around in Cadillacs in their leather trench coats,” said Healey.

“A trafficker can be a parent or guardian. A trafficker can be an aunt or an uncle or it can be a boyfriend or another friend.”

The often close relationships between abuser and abused present a web of problems such as forcing victims to leave home for their protection, experts said.

Victims may fear the community and authorities won’t believe them and will instead defend the trafficker, said an Indian Health Service social worker who did not want to be identified.

“Nobody wants to go after a family member,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

On the bleak, windswept reservation along the Missouri River just 20 miles from the Canadian border, more than half the children live in poverty and jobs are scarce.

Most people work in ranching, mining and farming, but one in three is unemployed. The largest communities are Wolf Point and Poplar, rundown hamlets that are little more than crossroads with a smattering of stores, gas stations, bars and fewer than 4,000 residents between them.

Outside of town, dirt roads link the weathered houses and tumble-down trailers that dot the seemingly boundless grasslands.

Demand for foster care for children removed from homes due to substance abuse is showing a sharp increase, said Courage Crawford, a program director at the Spotted Bull Recovery Resource Center in Poplar which offers rehabilitation programs.

“There aren’t a lot of places in the country that have a perfect storm of both being this rural and this under served of basic services … and also such high rates of poverty and also such rates of abuse,” Healey said.

Last month, the reservation was mourning the death by beating of a 13-month-old girl. A woman responsible for caring for her, while the child’s mother was in jail, has pleaded not guilty to murder.

A memorial service program showed a photograph of the smiling chubby-cheeked girl with shining eyes and a flowered headband.

“With the loss of this child I think we’ve hit the bottom of the barrel,” said Azure, the tribal chief.

Also this year, a Wolf Point man was accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 4-year-old girl grabbed at a local playground.

Meth is blamed for 40 percent of crime on native land, and most tribal police say domestic violence and assault has increased as a result of addiction, according to the NCAI.

Just thirteen tribal police patrol Fort Peck’s 3,200 square miles, according to the local Journal newspaper.

Across the country, fewer than 3,000 tribal and federal officers patrol more than 56 million acres of Indian country.

(Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Canadian Court Strikes Down Anti-Prostitution Laws

Canada’s Supreme Court voted unanimously Friday to strike down all of the country’s anti-prostitution laws.

Anyone in Canada will be able to engage in prostitution in any form and be free to own & operate a brothel in the country. The order from the court has been placed on a one-year hold to give the Parliament an opportunity to respond with new legislation.

The laws struck down make it illegal to run a brothel; to live off the avails of prostitution and soliciting on the street for prostitution.

An appeals court in Ontario had previously struck down the brothel ban saying it exposed women to more danger.

Sex trade workers across the country celebrated the ruling.

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.

Lori’s House and Stella’s House – Watch This Week!

I am very excited that we are planning to build a home here at Morningside for unwed mothers called “Lori’s House”. This is a fulfillment of many prophecies given to me, and the plan of God to use all the bad in my life for good in these Last Days.

We are also helping Philip Cameron and his wife, Chrissie, in Moldova to build a safe home for girls who are orphans but at 16, they are turned out into the streets to fend for themselves. Many of these girls are kidnapped and sold into sex trafficking. Moldova is the engine of the sex traffic machine across Europe. Countless girls are kidnapped or tricked into leaving the country. Hours later they are shipped to Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia and other nations where they are beaten, drugged and forced into prostitution.

Philip rescues as many as he can and brings them to safety. Philip’s homes for girls are called “Stella’s House” in honor of a handicapped girl who lost her life to AIDS after only 3 years in the sex trafficking industry.

We believe that in the coming days, there is nothing more important than caring for the unborn and the orphans. I can never go back and restore my children that I aborted so many years ago when I was living a sinful life, but I can go forward and help others make right decisions to give the gift of life.

I have never been more excited or more sure about building “Stella’s House” in Moldova and “Lori’s House” here at Morningside. This is the ministry for which I was called out of darkness into light – to take the stick which the devil beat me with and beat him back!

When I think about my life and purpose in the Kingdom of God, I know this is the “religion” I can live and die for.  There is no doubt, there is no hesitation, that caring for the unborn and the orphans is a purpose that is perfect before the Lord.

“A religion that is pure and stainless according to God the Father is this: to take care of orphans and widows who are suffering, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” James 1:27 ISV

I want my life to count for something, don‘t you?  I want to help young girls navigate through all the circumstances and pain surrounding a difficult situation of an untimely pregnancy, and help them to make a right decision to give life to the innocent.  That’s something of VALUE I can do in this life that will carry on into eternity.

“But on the judgment day, fire will reveal what kind of work each builder has done.  The fire will show if a person’s work has any VALUE.” 1 Cor 3:13 NLT

We can do much more together than any of us could do alone.  Some people say well Lori, you can’t save them all.  No, but the Lord values each and every life – and we will save those we can.  We need your help to do all that we can for the orphans and the innocent.  Become a partner with us today!

Remember, “when you give… your Father in heaven sees everything and will reward you.”  Matthew 6

Love,

Lori