From Common Dreams, but originally written by Paul Harris for The Guardian, UK:

Human trafficking has become a major issue in the Midwest heartland of America, causing some campaigners to dub it a modern form of slavery.

Figures from the State Department reveal that 17,500 people are trafficked into the US every year against their will or under false pretenses, mainly to be used for sex or forced labor. Experts believe that, when cases of internal trafficking are added, the total number of victims could be up to five times larger. And increasing numbers of trafficked individuals are being transported thousands of miles from America’s coasts and into heartland states such as Ohio and Michigan.

“It is not only a crime. It is an abomination,” said Professor Mark Ensalaco, a political scientist at the University of Dayton, Ohio, who organized a recent conference on the issue. In Ohio a human trafficking commission has just been set up to study the problem, while in the northern Ohio city of Toledo a special FBI task force is tackling the issue. For many local law enforcement officials, it is a bewildering new world.

In one recent incident a 16-year-old Mexican girl was found to have been trafficked across the US border. Doctors noticed the heavily pregnant girl showed clear signs of physical abuse when she was brought into a hospital in Dayton to give birth. The police were called but the couple who had brought her had already fled. When the girl’s story emerged, it became clear she had been kept against her will in the nearby city of Springfield and used for labor and sex. “I thought slavery ended a few centuries ago. But here it is alive and well,” said Springfield’s sheriff, Gene Kelly.

He emphasized the risks to the girl’s baby after it had been born if the doctors had not been so alert: “Like the mother, the baby could have ended up a victim for years to come. Who knows? Future labor? Future person to traffic?”

The colorful buildings of Goree, built at what was sea level a few years ago.

UNESCO World Heritage site Ile de Gorée bears witness to West Africa’s role in the Atlantic slave trade.  An island in the ocean just a short ferry ride from downtown Dakar, Goree also bears witness to the plight of sea-level human settlements that are slowly slipping under water (58mm rise in sea level since 1993).

We left Dakar in what seems to be the usual downtown tumult:  people pushing in line, officials making rules to fit their needs (I was making the case for why we should receive the resident rate, armed with our utility bills with my name on them, passports, and year-long visas; I finished the negotiation with only me counted as a resident, despite the fact that my husband and 14yo son live with me); and lots of smells and noise.  We arrived in Gorée just 15 minutes later but it seemed like another universe:  no cars, few people, lots of quiet punctuated mostly by the sounds of the sea.

The port of entry to Goree.

Well, there were some officials at the local tourist bureau directing us to a line to pay an entry tax, but that negotiation – with our feet, not words – was more successful. And there were also lots of good friends who wanted us to buy their art/jewelry/clothes/tour guide services . . . , but this distraction seemed minor in comparison to the overall beauty of the island.  The colors were the first thing to wow me, with old houses painted in shades of yellow, orange, and red.  We wandered the small streets or alleyways randomly, following an interesting bend in the wall, sign over a doorway, sprays of flower bougainvillea, or at one turn, the surprising discovery of a recycling and compost center!  Yes, we definitively have become fixated on Senegalese sanitation.  Our first escape from the big city, to the Siné-Saloum, confirmed our shock at how the ocean around Dakar is used as a garbage can.  It also added a new layer, when we saw the village garbage dumps perched next to the mangrove restoration projects.  It was the pigs on Fadiout, the island twin to coastal Joal (President Leopold Senghor’s birthplace) that put me over the top, as I watched them eat garbage all along the water’s edge. The tidiness of the recycling center on Gorée was so alluring that we spent some time exploring it from end to end.

The Dutch fortification, next to the port.

We also enjoyed the local art scene, watching artists paint with sand while listening to a balafon player perform.  Atop the island’s fortified hill, the base of which is called the Castel and was built by the Dutch in the 1600s, sit large, rusted WWII guns and a commemorative statue.  Although I’m not sure how a British warship ended up sunk in the harbor, I think the Rough Guide’s description of French and British fighting over Gorée gives a funny hint:  “ . . . who repeatedly captured and recaptured Gorée from each other – the score for the 18^th century being France 5, England 4.”  This spot is also where an older man, tending a small display of sand paintings and wooden sculptures, helped me to distinguish between baobabs and fromager trees.  On the way down the hill, music wafting out of the Saint Charles Borromée Church drew us inside, as worshippers went up to the alter for communion and we could slip in and out discreetly.   The plaza in front of the church was being readied for a post-service foodspread and while we were tempted to join in, we moved on to another shady plaza where kids played foot and men sat talking in an enclosed courtyard.  Then it was time for lunch and the search for Matthew’s new favorite meal, thiéboudienne (pronounced cheh-bou-jen), or spicy fish and rice.

The door of no return.

We finished the day with a tour and time for quiet contemplation and discussion at the Maison des Esclaves.  It’s one of the last trading houses dating from the 18^th century still standing, where the merchants lived on the upper floors while storing their cargo on the ground floor.  In the case of slave trading, this meant hundreds of chained Africans living directly below the European families upstairs eating, drinking, and entertaining guests.  Our tour of the lower floor was filled with visceral reminders of slavery’s inhumanity:  the men’s cells housed at least 15 men bigger than me (those under 60 kilos were deemed unfit for sale), which, by my estimation, would require standing in the small space, shoulder to shoulder, for all but the one time per day when let out for some air and exercise.  The curator described how women were kept separately from the men and regularly (and legally) raped by the traders.  He also described how slaves were bartered for goods of equivalent value:  a gun for a healthy male, necklace or cloth for a female.  Finally, we saw the door of no return, a simple stone arch that faced westward to the sea and eventually, the plantations of the Americas.  All very poignant, and combined with the historical display of artifacts and the description of the overall slave trade in West Africa, very informative too.  Little did we know last Sunday that there is a vigorous debate in the academic community about how Goree is portrayed as a major player in the triangle trade.

I recently published a story on the Foreign Policy Association Blog Network, Trafficking? Not in my town…Yes, in every town, which featured the story of 5 year-old, Shaniya Davis, from Fayetteville, North Carolina. Shaniya was reportedly kidnapped and her body was later found on the side of a rural highway in North Carolina. Her mother was later charged with human trafficking for placing her daughter into ’sexual servitude’.

The story lead me an interview with Blog Talk Radio’s DC based show, “A Measure Of Truth”. I sat down with host, Michael Fordham to discuss some of the harsh realities of human trafficking/modern slavery and how it can effect every town, and we can all make an impact in helping to bring awareness to, and an end to, this horrendous crime against humanity. Click here for the recorded pod cast.

The case in NC has led many to seek to ask tough questions on whether this tragedy could have been prevented, however while the general issue of abuse has been addressed, few have touched on the realities of human trafficking. Out side of the human trafficking field few have questioned or mentioned the demand for sex, sex with a child, that factored into this story, which is haunting reality for many children across the globe. The demand for children that exists in Fayetteville, NC or, Washington, DC is the same demand that fuels sexual slavery in India, Thailand and beyond. This brings me back to an older article I published, Are we still clueless about modern slavery?. The hard truth is overall, yes! However we are progressing, we do have a long way to go. First steps are to educate yourself on what human trafficking is, then make yourself aware of the signs and how to report any suspected cases or potential victims.

What is Human Trafficking, or Modern Slavery? It is when the use of fraud, force, or coercion is used in which to exploit an individual for the mere means of profit or economic gains. There is no stereotypical face of human trafficking, for the chains of modern slavery can bind anyone, of any gender, race, religion or age. Those bound by slavery do not have to cross borders to be victimized, for one can be exploited within their own home, community, as well as half across the globe. Modern slavery comes in many shapes and forms, such as; child soldiers, forced labor through debt bondage, and forced prostitution or sex slavery. And as we have seen, not even rural North Carolina is immune to this disease of power and greed, which binds some 27 million people around the world.

It does happen right her in our nations capital, and not rarely. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) considers Washington, DC one of the top 14 sites in the country for sex trafficking of American children. (FBI, 2005). According to the Department of Justice (DOJ) Task Force members maintain that hundreds of sex and labor trafficking cases in the Washington, DC area remain undiscovered each year.

Anyone can become a victim; there isn’t one face to human trafficking and modern slavery. How do you know if you have come across a victim? The following is a list of potential red flags and indicators of human trafficking. If you see any of the following red flags, call the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline at 1-888-3737-888 now to report the situation.

• Is unpaid, paid very little, or paid only through tips

• Is not free to leave, or come and go

• Works excessively long and/or unusual hours , has no breaks or unusual restrictions at work

• Owes a large debt and is unable to pay it off

• Is under 18 and is providing commercial sex acts

• Was recruited through false promises concerning the nature and conditions of his/her work

• Is fearful, anxious, depressed, submissive, tense, or nervous / paranoid behavior

• Exhibits unusually fearful or anxious behavior after bringing up “law enforcement”

• Avoids eye contact

• Appears malnourished or is in poor physical health

• Shows signs of physical and/or sexual abuse

• Has little to no personal possessions

• Is not in control of his/her own money, no financial records, or bank account

• Has numerous inconsistencies in their story

Note: This list is not exhaustive and rather represents a selection of possible indicators and may not be present in all trafficking cases. Please see www.slaverystillexists.org for a more conclusive list

source: http://www.examiner.com/x-7661-DC-Human-Rights-Examiner~y2009m11d24-Facing-the-realities-of-human-trafficking-in-our-own-back-yard

Maria Suarez

Maria Suarez

The case of Maria Suarez, a sex trafficking victim who was unjustly imprisoned by her abuser – then unjustly imprisoned for 22 years in the California Institution for Women for the 1981 death of her abuser – is notable for many reasons.

Hers is a case that has left many asking: How did this happen?

Suarez’s horrifying experience — imprisoned from the age of 16 for five years in the home of a 67-year-old Azusa man who repeatedly raped her — reveals how she slipped through several cracks. It also shows how, subsequently, she was betrayed by a justice system that instead of aiding her put her behind bars for life.

But her case also reveals a ray of hope. That’s because someone – Elizabeth Dermody Leonard – was paying attention. And she helped kick off the process that would eventually free Suarez, now 49.

Friday, Suarez spoke before a group gathered at the Borders bookstore in Costa Mesa brought together by the nonprofit Live2free, a group that seeks to raise awareness about human trafficking. And it was Leonard, a sociologist and criminologist who teaches at Vanguard University, whom Suarez acknowledged as her “inspiration” during her talk.

“She’s the one who actually started to open up files (of people who) were wrongfully convicted… And a lot of people started coming out, to be free. And… I thank you for that because you are part of my freedom,” Suarez told Leonard, who was in the audience.

The two women met for the first time in 1995. At the time, Leonard was working on her dissertation, researching the cases of women who had been imprisoned for the death of their abuser. It was a unique study on a rarely examined population of women who languished, voiceless, behind the walls of their prison in Corona.

Or, rather, that was their situation before Leonard showed up. Initially, she spent six months observing their support group, Convicted Women Against Abuse. Then she interviewed them one by one.

“It was very hard to open up to other people,” Suarez told Leonard, publicly, on Friday. “But by you being there… you made me feel secure.

“…You showed me that you cared. So, actually, I thought that was a light for me…”

Leonard, through her research, discovered that of the 42 women in her study, all had been held responsible for the death of their batterer even though about a third of them had not been the person who killed the batterer. That was the case in Suarez’s situation, where the man who enslaved her was killed by a male neighbor, who implicated Suarez in the homicide. Years later, the man and his wife recanted.

Leonard also discovered that many of the women in her study were (like Suarez) convicted of first degree murder. At that time, a woman accused of killing could not submit evidence that the person killed had, in life, been their abuser or batterer. In 1992, California law changed, making so-called “burning bed” evidence admissible.

“Looking back at their cases, I could say that most of the women, if they had a fair trial at the time, many of them would not have been convicted,” says Leonard, who published her study in 2002 in the book “Convicted Survivors: The Imprisonment of Battered Women Who Kill.”

“If anything, some of them might have been convicted on manslaughter, but certainly not first degree murder.”

To publicize her findings, Leonard took her research to conferences and published articles in academic journals. In 2000, she was asked to testify in a state hearing on prisons where she presented her research to a legislative committee. Leonard recalls that the committee was “appalled” by what she told them. She also shared another important finding: that many of these women were given psychotropic medications while in county jail (with no medical or psychological evaluation) with side effects that “profoundly” affected their ability to testify on the stand.

“I created the context for them to understand what the women’s stories meant, that these were not just isolated things,” Leonard says.

After the hearing, Leonard says an investigator from the state’s Board of Prison Terms asked if Leonard would provide the board with a list of names of the women inmates she had interviewed. Suarez was on that list and her case was subsequently re-examined.

“My case was one of the ones that was picked by the parole board investigator. When they investigated, they found out everything that I had been saying was true,” says Suarez, who was approved for parole in 2001, but denied by then-Gov. Gray Davis.

In 2004, it was Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger who granted Suarez parole, but her saga did not end there. Although she was a legal resident, the felony on her record prompted the Department of Homeland Security to detain her for deportation.

Many lawmakers, advocates and experts like Leonard wrote letters of support. Suarez was granted a temporary visa designed for human trafficking victims. Last year, the courts reduced her criminal conviction from first degree murder, which carries a 25 years to life sentence, to involuntary manslaughter.

Had she been convicted of involuntary manslaughter initially, her sentence might have been a year in prison, says her lawyer, Charles Song.

For now, that’s all behind Suarez. She obtained a green card this year and is counseling victims of abuse and abusers.

The first time Leonard saw Suarez after Suarez’ release was in the spring of 2006, when Suarez returned to her former prison to see a play based on Leonard’s research. Leonard says she strives to either talk by phone or meet the former inmates in person at least once after their release. She notes that their voices, among other things, change dramatically.

“It’s like they’re 20 years younger.”

When she saw Suarez for the first time as a free woman, Leonard noted the difference: Shoulders back; a confident stance, a smile.

“She came back to the prison to help others. I can’t imagine the type of courage it takes to walk back (behind) those walls, to hear the sound of the door clanging shut,” Leonard says.

“But she knew that it gave hope to the others, and she wanted to encourage hope.”

source: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/leonard-220903-suarez-women.html

COLORADO SPRINGS – A Colorado Springs church is joining forces with an international organization to bring attention to the problem of child sex trafficking. The partnership was announced Sunday at the City Auditorium.

“These children are being sold and they’re being beaten, and they’re being raped and they’re locked in rooms for years without seeing the light of the sun,” said Clayton Ross, Pastor of Grass Roots Church.

The statistics are surprising.

“One in three people between the ages of 10 to 13 are going to get sold to sex slavery once they’ve run away from home or they get kicked out of their house,” said Marcus Reid, who attended Thursday’s gathering.

Now, Grass Roots Church is joining forces with an organization called Love 146, to raise awareness and prevent child sex trafficking. “So it was kind of awesome to see two organizations come together and just talk about how we can work together,” said Reid.

Love 146 is an organization with one goal: to end child sex trafficking. The group has established safe houses all over the world for children who have been rescued from prostitution.

Grass Roots Church is also supporting the cause with monetary donations. “As a church body we’re giving ten percent of everything that comes through our doors for them,” said Pastor Ross. “And beyond that, we just want to raise awareness. If it was our son or daughter, we would raise the banner and put up fliers, and would go all out. We would get on the news. We would make things happen. We would make sure that every person knew that our child is missing.”

To get the word out, the unified group will participate in the Parade of Lights on December 5, 2009. They are also working on organizing some concerts that will take place at the City Auditorium next year.

source: http://www.krdo.com/Global/story.asp?S=11555528

My best luck has been with blind girls. Not a little blind or sight impaired but totally in the dark.

When I saw the girl on the Gainesville train I was traveling to ‘Hog City’ from Jax from a look-see of cheapo slaves, a bruised lot. The container being disposed of had 2,500 in it and some had trouble standing up. Some of the wretches were sick and most buyers were totally turned off. Some were bummed out because they didn’t speak our language. Those are aspects in my favor (as a slum dog of the slave trade). I even heard Ros a trader from Atlanta say, “The whole China lot has the ’stinks’.” The importers sold me first pick of the first thousand. My shipment to Gainesville was in three double sized trucks heading toward Hog City (Gainesville). I could have gone with the trucks, or on a truck, but if I had I wouldn’t have met Les Eller on the train.

Les got on at Jax, probably from a troop ship, he looked discharged. The girl, who was most interesting, got on at Lake City. The girl was a young blond, stunning I thought, but she didn’t seem to notice me. Well girls did notice me, but stayed a distance away from ‘the ugly, wrinkled dwarf’.

She had no success in begging the money and I planned to step in at the last-minute and offer the toll, for a written indenture — slave dealer that I am I carried blank ones with me. But I’m so much a figure of fun for most young girls that she probably would have bolted and gone in for prostitution, rather than submit to me.

I was amazed when she offered to be the ex-soldiers slave for passage money, amazed. So I tried to be the soldier’s friend and gave him some good advice, about leashing her, to save him toll money, and then on the street offered him a large profit on the girl — she was a good-looking piece.

As a slave most women don’t kill themselves quickly after a dwarf buys them.  But they often DO kill themselves. It’s not very pleasing that women would rather be dead than have to sleep with you.

I had one of my truck drivers follow this Les fellow and as I guessed Les had little or no money.  He rented a metal container to sleep in with the girl, that’s the very cheapest place to sleep in the whole city.  I sent Les a note about a sit-down at my slave establishment, and my shop on Urban Drive and Millhopper  is impressive.  I keep a better quality of male and females out front, but my place is known for cut-rate flesh. 

Maybe Les thought I still wanted to buy the girl when he came to my office.  Of course I did, but he just stood there after I offered him a chair.  I said,  “I have many more women, foreign-born females, than I could ever vend in my store.  So if I can help you get a choice location would you buy women from me and sell them on the street, all day, every day?”

“Sure,” he said, “if their good-looking things that people will buy.  Do I need a license?”  Well he didn’t know about lawless Hog Town.

“No, none of us has to buy a license here, we just pay the toll when we come in or out of Gainesville, and that’s the tax.  It’s one credit, and that’s high, but it’s better than government with its hand out all the time.

If you stay in the city, and never leave, you are tax-free for life.”

I sent him over that night to see the place.  One of my slave men went with him to show him the jewelery corner.  What I didn’t tell him about the area is that I had another slave seller there for two years, until he was murdered early one morning.  Twenty slaves saw it done and they were still standing there two hours later when someone came by and told me, and I got over there.

That’s Gainesville for you, no law and order and one of the corner jewelers did it.  They don’t want girl flesh vended in front of their shop.  So some old paper seller has a plywood thing set up there now.  He was an easy one to run off.  I sent Roscoe my man, around that very night to tell him that someone was going to castrate him tomorrow.  That’s all it took, and Les and I became in charge of the jewelery corner.  Of course I never went there.

_________________________________________________________

Send comments to Ray Cates at rcates2@cox.net

Fax him at: 1-352-629-1573

For links and another story go to: http://unsightlyteeth.wordpress.com

Someone wrote me the following:

A chemistry professor in a large college had some exchange students in the class. One day, while the class was in the lab, the Professor noticed one student who kept rubbing his back, and stretching as if his back hurt.

The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists who were trying to overthrow his country’s government and install a new communist government.

In the midst of his story he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked, “Do you know how to catch wild pigs?”

The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line. The young man said this was no joke.

“You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up – with a gate. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, come through the gate now to eat and then you slam the gate down on them and catch the whole herd.

Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity.”

The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening to America.

My response was as follows:

This is a favorite story of corporate America that has captured most Americans through television, teaching us year after year what we must buy in order to be cool Americans. We buy on credit. We mortgage our homes and cars. We shop, as the saying goes, until we drop. Then the corporate master teaches us how to get out of debt by going to a debt-consultant who takes more of our earnings to help us pay the corporate overlord.

Corporations do not build fences to catch people. They throw propaganda nets over the people called advertising. The bait in the nets are the TV shows the people watch, and as we watch we are gradually dumbed-down and captured by endless corporate ads that tell us how we must spend our earnings to be acceptable – the new car –the new TV set – the right clothes – on and endlessly on.

Now that we are in debt and need help, the corporations love to tell the pig story. The question they ask is: Why don’t you work to feed yourself and your family? Why aren’t you independent like you should be? Why do you want something free?

I have rarely seen a corporate executive who was hungry. As a corporate executive who tells the pig story he also comes begging to the government to save his company from bankruptcy, and, at the same time, like a true pig, awards himself and his fellow pigs millions in bonuses while over twenty-five percent of America’s children go to bed hungry.

Please tell the children and their parents the pig story.

It is being called modern-day slavery by human rights groups, and is claiming the lives of hundreds of women each year in the Middle East.

You wouldn’t think it, but domestic labor is a deadly business for migrants here, where up to 30 women have committed suicide, or died trying to escape intolerable working conditions in the last few weeks alone.

Rather than being anomalies, unfortunately, their deaths are the most recent in an alarming trend.

The women, mainly from developing countries Ethiopia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, come in their millions to the Middle East in search of better pay and opportunities, but soon discover the move comes at a higher price.

Last month, 26-year-old Ethiopian Matente Kebede Zeditu, was found hanged from an olive tree in southern Lebanon. Kassaye Atsegenet, 24, jumped from the seventh floor of a Beirut building days later, having left a suicide note. Another, a Madagascan named only as Mampionona, leapt from the balcony to escape her high-rise virtual prison, tired of the daily grind of cleaning and minding the children.

Without the legislation to protect their basic human rights and with little access to justice in their host countries, sadly it is not uncommon for many women working as maids to experience forced confinement, food deprivation, excessively long hours and even sexual abuse at the hands of their employers.

One of the girls left a simple parting message for her employer, reading “Here are your f***ing bedsheets, Madame. I will not be cleaning them today,” before tying a noose around her neck and jumping from the balcony.

“She is one of the brave ones,” a young woman named Angelique working as a maid for a Lebanese family in Beirut tells me. “I think about killing myself almost every day. When I am hanging clothes out to dry, I watch the tiny people going by from the seventh floor and wonder how long it would take me to hit the ground.”

At 19-years-old, Angelique should not be thinking about ways to end her life, but that is all she has done since leaving her home in rural Ethiopia eight months ago.

“Anything would be better than my life as it is now,” she says, during the first time out of her employer’s house in over two months.

Angelique, who did not wish to give her full name, has had her hair cut short by her female employer, who complained she looked too pretty with it long. She is forced to wear the traditional pink maid’s uniform six days a week, 14 hours a day, and sleeps on the floor of the kitchen.

Like many other women in her situation, she was lured to the Middle East with false promises made by the agency that employed her. These agencies sell women to “sponsors,” or employers, who then pay wages depending on their nationality.

The newest on the market; Nepalese women can earn as little as $150 a month, while the older hands, the Filipinos, known for their good English and affable manner, can make as much as $300.

Angelique gets just $175, which she sends home to support her family each month. “But I don’t get paid if I am ‘bad’,” she says, “or when Madame is not in a good mood. I didn’t get any money for four months when she was arguing with her husband.”

It is not surprising human rights workers in the region are calling it slavery when these women are literally being worked to death, often for nothing in return.

US-based organization Human Rights Watch has found that at least one woman dies a week in parts of the Middle East, while many more are injured trying to escape their abusive employers and harsh working conditions.

Lebanon, Jordan, UAE and Kuwait have seen the highest suicide rates, where it is not uncommon for women to have passports confiscated or to be locked inside the house for years at a time.

In the past year, both Ethiopia and the Philippines took the step of banning all travel to Lebanon and Jordan due to the high number of suspicious deaths among the domestic worker community.

 The ban has only pushed the trade underground, however, and agencies in the two countries now smuggle women through third countries like Yemen. As long as there are women from developing countries desperate enough to be smuggled in, the onus should be on the countries letting it happen to pass the legislation ensuring their basic human rights.

Yet all but three countries in the Middle East have refused to sign the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers, as cheap labor makes up an integral part of the region’s economy.

Not even the needless deaths of hundreds of women have given governments the impetus to sign; leaving migrant workers’ rights the gap in the law that seems no one is willing to fill.

Middle Eastern countries should sign the convention, or at least introduce their own labor laws, in order to stop more women returning home to their families in coffins.



New EU President: 2009 is the “first year of global governance”
Sees Copenhagen as step towards global management

“2009 is also the first year of global governance, with the establishment of the G20 in the middle of the financial crisis. The climate conference in Copenhagen is another step towards the global management of our planet.”

Rompuy attended a Bilderberg dinner at Hertoginnendal, Brussels on November 15th, during which he announced a plan to implement EU wide taxes that will be paid directly to Brussels. Recently Mario Borghezio (Italy), member of the European Parliament, spoke openly against the influence of globalist organizations such as the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission. “Is it possible that no one has noticed that all 3 (EU Presidential candidates) frequently attend Bilderberg or Trilateral meetings?,” asked Borghezio. Rompuy will undoubtedly serve globalist interests during his reign of the European Union.

The Road to Copenhagen part III: A “Planetary Regime” in the Making

Jurriaan Maessen
Infowars
November 22, 2009

Global strategy. That’s the talking point we hear over and over again from all agencies, UN or otherwise, who have an interest in profiting from the deal they are proposing. Never mind that all nation-states who sign on to the Copenhagen treaty will effectively forfeit their representative systems to this global authority, deciding which taxes will be paid by which nation-state. In the end, all roads seem to lead to a “planetary regime” envisioned by the elite long before “global warming” was even heard of.

The pin marks the position of New Bern, North Carolina. James City lies immediately due south, and slightly to the east. The harbor extending eastward is Pamlico Sound.

On March 14, 1862, Federal forces captured the inlet port city of New Bern, North Carolina, which they would hold through the rest of the Civil War. Slaves soon gathered behind the new Union lines. Local white landholders fled. A chaplain in one of the Massachusetts regiments occupying the city, a man named Horace James, undertook to organize the “contraband,” as the dislocated slaves were then called, after the ingenious fashion of General Benjamin Butler. He arranged for them to settle along the Trent River on plots of land that had been abandoned. To honor their protector, the now freed slaves named their settlement James City.

Brigadier General Benjamin Butler.

Democratic Party Governor Elias Carr, North Carolina

The freemen prospered and, according to James, by 1865 most of them had laid up considerable property, in the form of livestock, carts, and the like, and a number had succeeded as merchants. And there they lived for twenty-eight years until, in 1893, Governor Elias Carr dispatched a regiment of the First North Carolina Militia to evict the men and women of James City. Title to the land had long been in dispute in the courts—that is, until a decision was made, in 1891, to transfer the land to its antebellum owners so as to make enforceable certain deeds possessed by the white family who had, at the end of a long series of exchanges, most recently purchased it from them (or rather, from their successors). In 1893, when the eviction orders were put into effect, the black men of James City had no choice but to sign three-year leases to work the land they had owned, or so they believed, for thirty years. They had nowhere to turn; all frontiers were closed. For a while these men had dwelt in possibility, a fairer house than prose. But soon enough the “swarthy specter” of slavery took “its accustomed seat” at the nation’s Post-Reconstruction feast. America was again what W.E.B. DuBois said it really had always been: an armed camp for the intimidation of black folks.

Cover, first edition of "The Conjure Woman" (1899). Uncle Julius is depicted in the center. This particular constellation of images was doubtless meant to remind readers of Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus tales, which "The Conjure Woman" so brilliantly subvert.

The James City farmers’s predicament, however sensational its details may be, was hardly unusual in the North Carolina that Charles Chesnutt knew as a young man. Something about the tenuous hold that black farmers always had on the land is subtly communicated in “The Goophered Grapevine,” the first story in Chesnutt’s first book, The Conjure Woman.

Chesnutt, at about age 40.

In that story, we are told of how Uncle Julius, who had, since 1865, been making a “respectable living” on the land he once worked as a slave, is displaced in 1877 by a new white owner—in fact, by an Ohioan named John, who had been seduced southward into North Carolina by the promise of cheap land. In short order, John secures a legally binding deed to Uncle Julius’s old estate, the title to which had been in dispute, amongst Old Master’s heirs, since the war. Uncle Julius might as well have been living in James City. What, then, was life like in North Carolina for men and women like Uncle Julius—of whom there were some 330,000 in 1865? They were, of course, subject to the same uncertainties, as to political and economic arrangements, that affected white folk when the Confederacy collapsed. But their situation was unique, and new laws were passed (and old ones retained) that specifically limited their freedom of movement, and their ability to seek employment on fair terms. Black “souls,” because they inhabited “black” bodies, were not allowed to “select their own society,” if I may steal the line from Emily Dickinson. The new Black codes (as they were called) allowed for $500 fines to be levied “from time to time” against blacks who entered North Carolina from other states; a native North Carolinian freedman, on leaving the state for six months, was liable to same sanctions. Black girls were to be bound out as apprentices until the age of twenty-one, whereas white girls achieved their majority at eighteen. County courts could hire out the children of any black parents who were, in the eyes of the court, not profitably engaged in “some honest, industrious occupation”; no such provision existed in the case of white parents. And in all cases former masters were to be granted first right to apprentice men and women whom they had previously owned. Vagrancy laws, while artfully written to avoid mention of race, were clearly intended to apply disproportionately to blacks, and of course they did. White employers were allowed, under the law, to pay black laborers in kind (i.e., in clothing, food, etc.) rather than in cash. And marriage between whites and blacks was a criminal offense. (For details regarding the legal and social contexts in which a man like Uncle Julius had to live, see Sharon Ann Holt, Making Freedom Pay: North Carolina Freedpeople Working for Themselves, 1865-1900, on whose fine work I have, here, drawn.)

In short, when Chesnutt’s fictional Ohio couple, John and Annie, stroll onto the old plantation in 1877 with an eye toward turning it, again, to profit, Uncle Julius has little choice but to charm them, by whatever wiles he has, into a relationship of patronage: on his own, and without white protectors, he would indeed be insecure. His sole asset—and his friends and family alike depend on him to use it well—is his wit. He must wear the mask and sing for his supper; The Conjure Woman tells the story of how he set about to do exactly that.

"The Union As It Was," a sketch by Thomas Nast for Harper's Weekly in 24 October 1874. The skecth portrays a black family between a lynched body hanging from a tree and a burned-out schoolhouse. The caption reads: "Worse than Slavery."

“The Goophered Grapevine” appeared first in 1887 in the Atlantic Monthly, and, in that text, Chesnutt makes clear at once when the action of the story takes place: “ten years ago”—or 1877. That year, of course, saw the collapse of the last of the Reconstruction-era Republican state governments (the freedmen and their children were now, again, at the tender mercies of the Southern Democratic Party). And John and Annie, the white couple who have come south from Ohio to buy some land “for a mere song,” typify certain post-Reconstruction developments—to wit, the influx of Northern capital into cheap Southern labor markets, and the like. Chesnutt has so arranged things as to represent, in this engagement between John and Uncle Julius, the new regime whereby Southern blacks would answer not to white “owners,” as they had before the war, but to white capitalists. In this connection, consider John’s account of his first impression of the plantation he ultimately buys:

I went several times to look at a place that I thought might suit me. It was a plantation of considerable extent, that had formerly belonged to a wealthy man by the name of McAdoo. The estate had been for years involved in litigation between disputing heirs, during which period shiftless cultivation had well-nigh exhausted the soil. There had been a vineyard of some extent on the place, but it had not been attended to since the war, and had lapsed into utter neglect. The vines—here partly supported by decayed and broken-down trellises, there twining themselves among the branches of the slender saplings which had sprung up among them—grew in wild and unpruned luxuriance, and the few scattered grapes they bore were the undisputed prey of the first comer.

John’s eye is naturally, inevitably proprietary. As we soon learn, and as John himself admits, the vineyard had not at all been “neglected”: Uncle Julius has been farming it, if on a modest scale, for 12 years—from 1865 to 1877, in fact, precisely the years of the Reconstruction. But John looks out on the land with what must be called a “white” gaze: a thing not used by a white man is, for him, simply a thing not genuinely “used.” His sense of entitlement is manifest—as manifest as had been the entitlement of white folks, in the 19^th century, to the western lands that had so long been “neglected” by Native Americans. So there is inevitably a note of finger-wagging, if indulgent, disapproval in John’s voice—as if he had caught a child nicking a bit of candy—when he first lays eyes on Uncle Julius: “Upon Annie’s complaining of weariness I led the way back to the yard, where a pine log, lying under a spreading elm, afforded a shady though somewhat hard seat. One end of the log was already occupied by a venerable looking colored man. He held on his knees a hat full of grapes, over which he was smacking his lips with great gusto, and a pile of grapeskins near him indicated that the performance was no new thing.” John wastes no time in sizing Julius up, in an ethnological sort of way: “He was not entirely black, and this fact, together with the quality of his hair, which was about six inches long and very bushy, except on the top of his head, where he was quite bald, suggested a slight strain of other than negro blood. There was a shrewdness in his eyes, too, which was not altogether African, and which, as we afterwards learned from experience was indicative of a corresponding shrewdness in his character.”

Uncle Julius, detail. From the cover of the first edition of the book.

For John, race is a question of blood, and in this he is a typical late-19^th century American; in those days there was much interest, of a pseudo-scientific nature, in character traits associated with Anglo-Saxon blood, or Gallic blood, or Teutonic blood, or Negro blood, and so on. Any cunning, or “shrewdness,” Julius might display must, of course, derive from white blood of some sort. (As for Julius’s authentic Negro blood: some indication of what its legacy means to John may perhaps be gleaned from his later report that Julius “was a marvelous hand in the management of horses and dogs, with whose mental processes he manifested a greater familiarity than mere use would seem to account for.”) But all the while, in this story, Chesnutt lets us see that “race” is much more likely a role we learn to perform than an identity we are simply born into. And Julius is a consummate performer, shrewd in ways that John’s facile theories make him utterly unable to understand; Julius always wears a mask. He puts John and Annie at ease by playing the deferential, self-deprecating “darky”: “But ef you en young miss dere doan’ min’ lis’nin’ ter a ole nigger run on a minute er two w’ile you er restin’, I kin ‘splain to you how it all happen,” he says, in introducing his tale of the “goophered,” or bewitched, grapevine. He evokes, when it suits his purposes, nothing so much as the minstrel stage:

A Watermelon-Eating Contest Between Two Colored Men. From "Puck," 21 September, 1891.

“Now, ef dey’s an’thing a nigger lub, nex’ ter ‘possum, en chick’n, en watermillyums, it’s scuppernon’s. Dey ain’ nuffin dat kin stan’ up side’n de scuppernon’ for sweetness; sugar ain’t a suckumstance ter scuppernon’. W’en de season is nigh ’bout ober, en de grapes begin ter swivel up des a little wid de wrinkles er ole age, – w’en de skin git sot’ en brown, – den de scuppernon’ make you smack yo’ lip en roll yo’ eye en wush fer mo’; so I reckon it ain’ very ’stonishin’ dat niggers lub scuppernon’.” He doesn’t so much affect naiveté as affect an affected naiveté, a thing sure to delight the more paternalistic instincts of a man like John: “Nex’ spring, w’en de sap commence’ ter rise in de scuppernon’ vime, Henry tuk a ham one night. Whar’d he git de ham? I doan know; dey wa’n't no hams on de plantation ‘cep’n’ w’at ‘uz in de smoke-house, but I never see Henry ’bout de smoke-house. But ez I wuz a-sayin’, he tuk de ham ober ter Aun’ Peggy’s . . .” Surely this is calculated. Otherwise, why all this coyness over a theft that supposedly happened decades earlier? Is it simply to put the white couple at ease as to his essential honesty? I rather doubt that. Julius is playing out the script of the darkie who “professes too much,” let us say, which, indeed, as he probably well knows, has the paradoxical effect of putting his auditors at ease. Notice also that Julius exercises great tact when criticizing—mocking, really—his old white master: “So atter a w’ile Mars Dugal’ begin ter miss his scuppernon’s. Co’se he ‘cuse’ de niggers fer it, but dey all ‘nied it ter de las’. Mars Dugal’ sot spring guns en steel traps, en he en de oberseah sot up nights once’t er twice’t, tel one night Mars Dugal’ – he ‘uz a monst’us keerless man – got his leg shot full er cow-peas. But somehow er nudder dey couldn’ nebber ketch none er de niggers. I dunner how it happen, but it happen des like I tell you, en de grapes kep’ on a-goin’ des de same.” Julius knows perfectly well how it happened: Old Massa was a fool. To call him a “monst’us keerless” man understates things in a highly artful fashion—all the more artful, given that the story allows us to suppose, without ever quite specifying the matter, that Julius is making most of this up on the spot. His portrait of Mars Dugal’ is ingeniously satirical.

But what does Julius intend to accomplish with the conjure tales that so delight his white auditors? First, of course, it appears that Julius hopes to dissuade John from buying the old plantation (which Julius can claim by right of long labor, if not by legal title). This is precisely what John thinks he is up to: “I found, when I bought the vineyard, that Uncle Julius had occupied a cabin on the place for many years, and derived a respectable revenue from the product of the neglected grapevines. This, doubtless, accounted for his advice to me not to buy the vineyard, though whether it inspired the goopher story I am unable to state.”

Detail, last page of the original edition.

But the reader has to ask: Is Julius really naive enough to suppose that a conjure story might frighten a calculating, up-to-date, white man like John out of buying a likely spread of land—a white man who amuses himself, as we later learn, by reading hyper-rationalist (and pretentious) treatises on epistemology? Hardly. Julius’s motives must be much more complicated. Telling the stories gives him a sort of “mastery.” At times he can, of course, affect John’s behavior in ways beneficial to him; he gets a stipend out of John, and more. But he also exercises a certain moral and intellectual authority over John. The stories Julius tells are sophisticated parables about slavery, and also about post-Reconstruction race relations. For example, in “The Goophered Grapevine” the slave Henry is bewitched in a special way: when the sap rises in the vines each spring, old Henry grows spry and energetic (even to the point of “cuttin’ up didos” with the women); his hair grows back and curls up “in little balls, des like dis yer reg’lar grapy ha’r, en by de time de grapes got ripe his head look des like a bunch er grapes.” When the sap falls in autumn the transformation runs in reverse: Henry’s hair falls out, and he begins to get “ole and stiff in de j’ints ag’in.” Master McAdoo soon enough cashes in—it has to be “a monst’us cloudy night when a dollar git by him in de dahkness,” Uncle Julius tells us—by selling Henry dear in the spring and buying him back cheap in the fall, and in this way makes $5000 in five years. The parable couldn’t be plainer: the body of the slave is identified with the crop and with the land; essentially, the slave’s body, like the land, is harrowed, plowed, inseminated, harvested. And Master McAdoo’s exploitation of the slave’s body perfectly complements his exploitation of the body of the land, which he exhausts and impoverishes out of greed to the point where, by the time the war breaks out, it yields him nothing. In spinning his tale of “The Goophered Grapevine,” Julius quietly contrasts two sorts of ownership of the land, two kinds of relationships to it. The ways of old Master McAdoo and of John are alike essentially exploitative and capitalistic; they would subordinate the land. Julius’s way—for he has been working the vineyard between 1865 and 1877, a considerable length of time, and one perfectly aligned with the Reconstruction—is altogether different. It is, as we say now, sustainable, and one inescapable moral of the “The Goophered Grapevine” story is that slave agriculture is literally “unsustainable”: McAdoo was doomed to failure.

But does Julius really believe in all this “conjure” business? Likely he does not, at least not in any naively “superstitious” way. His interest in the tales he spins is moral, political, and even, by all appearances, “literary.” Such tales as “Po’ Sandy,” “Hot-Foot Hannibal” and “The Gray Wolf’s H’ant” seem made to order, as even John comes to believe. These and other tales so perfectly suit Julius’s ulterior motives that it is hard to believe he hasn’t designed them expressly for the purpose of realizing those motives. So it is probably not accurate to say that Julius “believes” in the conjure stories in quite the way that he pretends to, though this is not to say that his relation to the folk-culture of the slaves is purely instrumental and artful. What Julius seems to see in the old stories is how “conjuring” was itself a politically interested enterprise. Almost always in these tales, conjuring is a way for slaves to exercise some kind of power over their masters. So, Chesnutt, through his mouthpiece Julius, offers up what is really a penetrating analysis of the folklore of the slaves: he shows us how that folk-culture rose up out of specific material conditions, and how it was in fact a way of managing those conditions, both literarily (that is, symbolically), and also practically. The old folk tales Julius draws on, then, are quite complex in their motivation and social function—every bit as complex as the goopher stories Julius himself makes up (for we have to conclude that a good deal of what he relates is improvised). For this reason, the issue of whether or not Julius “believes in” the “truth” of these tales is doubly complicated: the tales surely do, as he feels, have a kind of mythic “truth,” quite apart from any merely “factual” truths about the fate of Henry (in “The Goophered Grapevine”), or Tenie and Sandy (in “Po’ Sandy”), they may propose to set forth.

The Conjure Woman, as many have pointed out, belongs alike to the post-war genres of “local-color fiction” and the “plantation tale.” The development of both these genres is intimately linked to the social, economic and cultural transformation of America in the post-Reconstruction years. These years saw the nationalization of markets for industrial and consumer goods, as intercontinental transportation and communication became a fait accompli; the nationalization (at least in the letter of the law) of patterns of social relations and civil rights, as regional political differences were diminished, in part, by passage of the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th amendments to the Constitution; and, in a sense, the nationalization of a common American “culture,” as disseminated through magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, for example, which now enjoyed a truly national readership, and in which a number of Chesnutt’s stories first appeared. The effect of these developments was, almost inevitably, a gradual attenuation of radical “regional” differences, though this took a good many years to work itself out. So, “local color” fiction, evolving out of this cultural matrix, and existing against its background, performed what Richard Brodhead calls “the work of “mourning”: precisely at the moment when authentic regional differences were vanishing, these same differences became a kind of literary fetish. Much local-color writing is therefore marked by a nostalgia, and at times it tends, when it turns its attentions to the past, to clothe the antebellum years in an almost idyllic dress.

President Rutherford B. Hayes (Rep.) in 1877. Photo by Matthew Brady and Levin Handy.

The “plantation tale” was a specific sub-genre in the local-color tradition, and, as historians and literary critics have shown, its cultural function seems to have been quite complex: it arose just as Reconstruction ended—that is to say, just as President Rutherford B. Hayes, making good on the bargain that had resolved the controversial 1876 presidential election, withdrew the last Federal troops from the last of the Southern capitals still harboring them, and as political and economic “reconciliation” became a fact of American life.

Thomas Nelson Page

Against this backdrop, it becomes clear that plantation tales, such as those published by Joel Chandler Harris (author of the “Uncle Remus” series) and Thomas Nelson Page, had, as Brodhead explains, “the more or less overt function of excusing the North’s withdrawal from the plight of the freed southern slave.”

Freed slaves in these stories seem to have little but nostalgia for the old days, and remain with their former owners as what used to called “faithful retainers.” A typical statement of the plantation ideal is given by Colonel Owen in Chesnutt’s story “The Passing of Grandison,” collected in his second book, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. The Colonel has just elicited from one of his slaves an expression of devotion, which, unbeknownst to him (so caught up in the plantation myth is he), will prove to be terrifically disingenuous: “The colonel was beaming. This was true gratitude, and his feudal heart thrilled at such appreciative homage. What cold-blooded, heartless monsters they were who would break up this blissful relationship of kindly protection on the one hand, of wise subordination and loyal dependence on the other! The colonel always became indignant at the mere thought of such wickedness.”

J.C. Harris

In the “plantation tales,” black men and women seem perfectly content with a condition of political inequality, and the stories in which they appear often seem devoted to the purpose of assuring Northern readers (and Southern ones) that things in the South really aren’t so bad at all, and that relations between former slaves and former owners are essentially cordial and healthy.

Cover, first edition of "The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line" (1901).

Chesnutt himself was well aware that “plantation tales,” together with other, cognate media—from minstrelsy to popular novels—fulfilled precisely this function. In any case, it was into these combined literary and economic circumstances that Chesnutt introduced his much more complex and subtle (even counter-cultural) version of the “local-color” “plantation tale.” There is an analogy to be drawn between the “conjures” described in Uncle Julius’s stories and the stories themselves: both are exercised (partly effectively, partly not) against “white” authority. And we can regard The Conjure Woman itself in this light: as a partly effective, though not completely satisfactory, effort on Chesnutt’s part to subvert “white” literary authority. The antagonism, here, is played out even in the history of the book’s composition and publication. It was Chesnutt’s first book, and its contents were arrived at though a kind of compromise on Chesnutt’s part with his (white) establishment publisher, Houghton Mifflin and Company, of Boston. Chesnutt considered the plantation tale genre too constricting. It did not allow for a broad range of representation of African-American life, and he had determined to abandon it. Houghton Mifflin, however, declined at first to publish the “non-plantation fiction” he had begun to write, and asked him instead to submit a number of new “conjure” stories, together with those he had already published; out of these, Houghton selected what became The Conjure Woman. So, generally, we can see that Julius’s position as a storyteller addressing, and being constricted by, an exclusively white audience is analogous, in certain respects, to Chesnutt’s position as an African-American author writing within an almost exclusively white literary establishment: he is able to do remarkable things, many of them subtly and ironically subversive, but there is something unsatisfactory about the fact that he, like Julius, is never really given complete liberty. At the end of the day, at th end of the tale, there really is nowhere to turn.

It is worth asking now what Chesnutt intends to accomplish in The Conjure Woman. We have already seen that he essentially “dramatizes” his relation to his white audience in the relationship between Julius and the white Northerner, John. The stories perform, for Chesnutt, a certain ironic “educative” role. He is (like Julius) at once charming his readers, and criticizing and admonishing them; and he does this in ways that no doubt remain unknown to some of his white readers (for that matter, many of his early readers assumed that he was white). Chesnutt is also engaged in an indirect sort of literary criticism: he is revising and critiquing the “plantation tale” genre, and the “plantation myth” itself (as he does in “The Passing of Grandison”)—and doing so, moreover, in astonishingly ingratiating ways. Citing Chesnutt’s aspiration, as expressed in an 1890 entry in his journal, to “elevate” his white readers, Joseph McElrath and Robert Leitz speak tellingly of Chesnutt’s effort to “mask his condescension toward unregenerate white readers,” the better to win their confidence. McElrath and Leitz continue, again quoting from Chesnutt’s journal: “The `trumpet tones’ used by the abolitionists would not work: `the subtle almost undefinable feeling of repulsion toward the negro, which is common to most Americans—and easily enough accounted for—cannot be stormed and taken by assault; the garrison will not capitulate: so their position must be mined, and we will find ourselves in their midst before they think it.’ [Chesnutt] would win `social recognition and equality’ for the African-American by accustoming `the public mind to the idea; and while amusing them . . . lead them on imperceptibly, unconsciously step by step to the desired state of feeling.’” This Chesnutt accomplishes, insofar as anyone can, in The Conjure Woman. In the years to come he would rely increasingly on the trumpet tones of the abolitionists, in novels of bitter protest, like The Marrow of Tradition and The Colonel’s Dream, whose sales never met those of the “conjure” stories, causing his publisher to drop him. After that he continued to write, but for the most part published little—a few essays here and there. Having been “post-bellum” but “pre-Harlem,” as he puts it in one of those essays, sums up his predicament. And to support himself and his family he had, as I say, nowhere to turn other than to the successful legal stenography business he had established in Cleveland.

N.B. As for the fact and concept of treating fugitive slaves as “contraband of war”—for which innovation Gen. Butler was largely responsible—our Wikipedians explain: “At Fort Monroe in Virginia’s Hampton Roads, Brigadier General Benjamin Butler, commander, came into the possession of three slaves who had made their way across Hampton Roads harbor from Confederate-occupied Norfolk County, Virginia and presented themselves at Union-held Fort Monroe. General Butler refused to return escaped slaves to masters supporting the Confederacy, which amounted to classifying them as “contraband,” although credit for first use of that terminology occurred elsewhere. Three slaves, Frank Baker, James Townsend and Sheppard Mallory had been contracted by their owners to the Confederate Army to help construct defense batteries at Sewell’s Point across the mouth of Hampton Roads from Union-held Fort Monroe. They escaped at night and rowed a skiff to Old Point Comfort, where they sought asylum at the adjacent Fort Monroe. Prior to the War, the owners of the slaves would have been legally entitled to request their return (as property) and this would have in all likelihood have occurred. However, Virginia had just declared (by secession) that it no longer considered itself part of the United States. General Butler, who was educated as an attorney, took the position that, if Virginia considered itself a foreign power to the U.S., then he was under no obligation to return the 3 men; he would instead hold them as “contraband of war.” Thus, when Confederate Major John B. Cary made the request for their return as Butler had anticipated, it was denied on the above basis. For a link to Chesnutt’s works at Documenting the American South, click here. For a link to his works at Project Gutenberg, click here. And for his works at the Internet Archive, click here.

She ran away from her group home in Medford, Ore., and spent weeks sleeping in parks and under bridges. Finally, Nicole Clark, 14 years old, grew so desperate that she accepted a young man’s offer of a place to stay. The price would come later.

They had sex, and he soon became her boyfriend. Then one day he threatened to kick her out if she did not have sex with several of his friends in exchange for money.

She agreed, fearing she had no choice. “Where was I going to go?” said Nicole, now 17 and living here, just down the Interstate from Medford. That first exchange of money for sex led to a downward spiral of prostitution that lasted for 14 months, until she escaped last year from a pimp who she said often locked her in his garage apartment for months.

“I didn’t know the town, and the police would just send me back to the group home,” Nicole said, explaining why she did not cut off the relationship once her first boyfriend became a pimp and why she did not flee prostitution when she had the chance. “I’d also fallen for the guy. I felt trapped in a way I can’t really explain.”

Most of the estimated 1.6 million children who run away each year return home within a week. But for those who do not, the desperate struggle to survive often means selling their bodies.

Nearly a third of the children who flee or are kicked out of their homes each year engage in sex for food, drugs or a place to stay, according to a variety of studies published in academic and public health journals. But this kind of dangerous barter system can quickly escalate into more formalized prostitution, when money changes hands. And then, child welfare workers and police officials say, it becomes extremely difficult to help runaways escape the streets. Many become more entangled in abusive relationships, and the law begins to view them more as teenage criminals than under-age victims.

Antoin Thurman-who-was-sentenced-in-2006-recalled-that-as-a-pimp-he-would-work-to-win-a-girls-trust-get-her-nails-done-take-her-to-buy-an-outfit-take-her-out-to-eat-make-her-feel wanted. Antoin Thurman, who was sentenced in 2006, recalled that as a pimp, he would work to win a girls trust get her nails done, take her to buy an outfit, take her out to eat, make her feel wanted.

Estimates of how many children are involved in prostitution vary wildly — ranging from thousands to tens of thousands. More solid numbers do not exist, in part because the Department of Justice has yet to study the matter even though Congress authorized it to do so in 2005 as part of a nationwide study of the illegal commercial sex industry.

But many child welfare advocates and officials in government and law enforcement say that while the data is scarce, they believe that the problem of prostituted children has grown, especially as the Internet has made finding clients easier.

“It’s definitely worsening,” said Sgt. Kelley O’Connell, a detective who until this year ran the Boston Police Department’s human-trafficking unit, echoing a sentiment conveyed in interviews with law enforcement officials from more than two dozen cities. “Gangs used to sell drugs,” she said. “Now many of them have shifted to selling girls because it’s just as lucrative but far less risky.”

Atlanta, which is one of the only cities where local officials have tried to keep data on the problem, has seen the number of teenage prostitutes working in the city grow to 334 in February from 251 in August 2007.

The barriers to rescuing these children are steep: state cuts to mental heath services, child welfare agencies incapable of preventing them from running away, a dearth of residential programs where the children can receive counseling.

After years of abuse, trauma and neglect, the children also tend to trust no one. The longer they are on the streets, experts say, the more likely they are to become involved in crime and uncooperative with the authorities.

“These kids enter prostitution and they literally disappear,” said Bradley Myles, deputy director of the Polaris Project, a nonprofit organization based in Washington that directly serves children involved in prostitution and other trafficking victims. “And in those rare moments that they reappear, it’s in these revolving-door situations where they’re handled by people who have no idea or training in how to help them. So the kids end up right back on the street.”

The Flip Interview

That revolving door is what an F.B.I. agent, Dan Garrabrant, desperately hoped to stop in Interview Room One at the Atlantic City Police Department on Sept. 5, 2006.

Conducting what the police call a “flip” interview, Mr. Garrabrant was trying every tactic he knew to persuade a petite 16-year-old girl named Roxanne L. from Queens, N.Y., to stop being a prostitute and to inform, or flip, on her pimp.

Sending the girl home was not the answer. Home was where her mentally ill, crack-addicted mother lived. Home was where the problems had started.

But Mr. Garrabrant also knew that she would flee if he sent her to a youth shelter. And with her would go his best chance at prosecuting the real criminal, her pimp.

A social worker for six years before joining the F.B.I. almost two decades ago, Mr. Garrabrant has been honored by anti-trafficking experts, prosecutors and the police as one of the best flip interviewers in the country.

On this day, however, he was getting nowhere, according to a recording of the interview and his notes.

While Roxanne had all the signs of being controlled by a pimp — a tattoo with initials on her neck, a rehearsed script about how she was new to the work — she adamantly denied working for anyone.

Mr. Garrabrant had only an hour before the local police would take Roxanne to a shelter. Trying to ease the mood, he started by asking her why she had run away from home. She told him she had been raped by a relative when she was 12 years old. At 14, she left home because her mother’s boyfriend had become abusive.

Soon, running out of time, he zeroed in.

“What’s the worst part about working the streets?” he asked.

“Honestly,” Roxanne said, giving him a cold stare, “having to look at the tricks and tell if they are cops or not.”

“So a pimp never approached you and tried to turn you out?” Mr. Garrabrant asked.

“Yeah, they tried, but I ran,” she said, maintaining that she was “renegading,” or working without a pimp.

Mr. Garrabrant’s task was to get Roxanne to consider leaving her pimp without forcing her to admit she had one. He needed to push hard enough to break her from her rehearsed script, without descending into a frustrating game of wits, a contest in liar’s poker. And he had to do all this at exactly the wrong time and place — at the police station after an arrest for solicitation, when the girl felt most panicked and most angry about being treated like a criminal.

“Look, I want to help you,” he said, after several failed attempts to get her to acknowledge her pimp. He told her that he might be able to enter her into a residential program in California that offered counseling and classes to girls leaving prostitution.

“Yeah, I know,” she said, as she looked down and pensively picked at her nails.

“Give me some time,” Mr. Garrabrant pleaded as he handed her a card and asked her to keep it handy. With no time left, he released Roxanne back to the local police, who took her to the youth shelter.

Four hours later, she disappeared. Seventeen days after that, according to the F.B.I, she was found stabbed to death by the pimp she had so adamantly denied existed.

In one of her pockets she had Mr. Garrabrant’s card.

“Two days, that’s all I needed to get her to stay away from her pimp and I think things would’ve ended up differently,” said Mr. Garrabrant, shaking his head in frustration. “I still don’t understand how these guys loop these girls in so far.”

A Dangerous Dependency

A runaway’s relationship with a pimp does not occur by accident. It takes work.

After using court records to compile a database of over a hundred convicted pimps and where each is incarcerated, The New York Times wrote letters to each more than two years ago. In the ensuing interviews by phone and in letters, more than two dozen convicted and still incarcerated pimps described the complicated roles they played as father figure, landlord, boss and boyfriend to the girls who worked for them. They said they went after girls with low self-esteem, prior sexual experience and a lack of options.

“With the young girls, you promise them heaven, they’ll follow you to hell,” said Harvey Washington, a pimp who began serving a four-year sentence in Arizona in 2005 for pandering a 17-year-old and three adult prostitutes. “It all depends on her being so love-drunk off of me that she will do anything for me.”

While most of the pimps said they prefer adult women because teenage runaways involve more legal risks, they added that juveniles fetch higher prices from clients and are far easier to manipulate.

Virtually all the juveniles who become involved in prostitution are runaways and become pimp-controlled, according to law enforcement officials and social workers. Built of desperation and fear, the bonds they form with their pimps are difficult to break. Some girls continue working for pimps even after the pimps are incarcerated.

“The problem is that there is no methadone for a bad relationship,” said Rachel Lloyd, a former child prostitute and the director of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, a program in New York that helps girls escape and stay away from prostitution.

The pimps view themselves as talent managers, not exploiters.

“My job is to make sure she has what she needs, personal hygiene, get her nails done, take her to buy an outfit, take her out to eat, make her feel wanted,” said another pimp, Antoin Thurman, who was sentenced in 2006 to three years for pandering and related charges in Buckeye, Ariz. “But I keep the money.”

Wayne Banks Jr., a pimp serving at least 40 years in Hazelton, W. Va., for the sex trafficking of a minor and related charges, wrote that the girls have to be convinced that the pimp is best equipped to handle their clients and finances.

“Seems more despicable to me to give something so valuable away as opposed to selling it,” he wrote, describing his pitch to persuade girls that prostitution was a smart business decision.

When recruiting, some pimps said they prowled homeless shelters, bus stations and shopping malls or posed in newspaper advertisements as photographers and talent scouts. Others said they worked Internet chat rooms and phone-sex lines.

“I’ll look for a younger female with a backpack,” said Mr. Thurman, describing how he used to drive near schools after hours. “I’m thinking she’s leaving home, she’s leaving for a reason, she had a fight with her parents or she just wants to leave home.”

Mr. Banks wrote that he preferred using “finders’ fees”: $100 to anyone who sent a prospect his way. His only condition was that the girl had to be told up front that he was a pimp.

Runaways are especially attractive recruits because most are already engaging in survival sex for a place to stay, said Evelyn Diaz, who is serving a nine-year sentence in a federal prison in Connecticut for three counts of sex trafficking of minors.

“Some become very loyal to you since you take them under your wing,” she wrote.

Controlling girls through beatings or threats was common, but coercion was not an effective basis for a lasting relationship, most pimps emphasized.

“Everything about the game is by choice, not by force,” said Bryant Bell, who is serving a four-and-a-half-year sentence in Georgia after pleading guilty in 2002 to helping run a prostitution ring that involved girls as young as 10 years old.

For those girls not already engaged in survival sex, the grooming process was gradual and calculated. At first, the sex is consensual. Before long, the girl is asked to turn occasional tricks to help pay bills.

“I might start by asking her to help me by sleeping with a friend,” Mr. Washington said in a telephone interview. “Then I push her from there.”

A Better System

Ten years ago, the Dallas Police Department found an average of fewer than 10 minors working as prostitutes every year, along with one pimp working with them. In 2007, the department found 119 girls involved in prostitution and arrested 44 pimps.

The city’s child prostitution problem has grown over time. But the bigger reason for the change is how the department handles the cases, using a special unit and some unusual techniques.

Previously, said Sgt. Byron A. Fassett, who leads the department’s effort, girls working as prostitutes were handled as perpetrators rather than sexual assault victims. If a 45-year-old man had sex with a 14-year-old girl and no money changed hands, she was likely to get counseling and he was likely to get jail time for statutory rape, Sergeant Fassett said. If the same man left $80 on the table after having sex with her, she would probably be locked up for prostitution and he would probably go home with a fine as a john.

The department’s flip interviews almost always failed, and even if they worked, there was no place to put the girls to receive treatment. Officers resisted investigating what they viewed as a nuisance, not a crime. Prosecutors regularly refused the cases against pimps because the girls made for shaky witnesses and unsympathetic plaintiffs.

Frustrated with this system, Sergeant Fassett started combing through old case files, looking for patterns. One stuck out: 80 percent of the prostituted children the department had handled had run away from home at least four or more times a year.

“It dawned on me, if you want to effectively deal with teen prostitutes, you need to look for repeat runaways,” he said.

In 2005, Sergeant Fassett created the “High Risk Victim” unit in the Dallas Police Department, which flags any juvenile in the city who runs away from home four or more times in a given year. About 200 juveniles per year fit that description. If one of those children is picked up by the police anywhere in the country, the child is directed back to Sergeant Fassett’s unit, which immediately begins investigating the juvenile’s background.

The unit’s strength is timing. If the girls are arrested for prostitution, they are at their least cooperative. So the unit instead targets them for such minor offenses as truancy or picks them up as high-risk victims, speaking to them when their guard is down. Only later, as trust builds, do officers and social workers move into discussions of prostitution.

Repeat runaways are not put in juvenile detention but in a special city shelter for up to a month, receiving counseling.

Three quarters of the girls who get treatment do not return to prostitution.

The results of the Dallas system are clear: in the past five years, the Dallas County district attorney’s office has on average indicted and convicted or won guilty pleas from over 90 percent of the pimps arrested. In virtually all of those cases, the children involved in the prostitution testified against their pimps, according to the prosecutor’s office. Over half of those convictions started as cases involving girls who were picked up by the police not for prostitution but simply as repeat runaways.

In 2007, Congress nearly approved a proposal to spend more than $55 million for cities to create pilot programs across the country modeled on the Dallas system. But after a dispute with President George W. Bush over the larger federal budget, the plan was dropped and Congress never appropriated the money.

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/us/27runaways.html?sq=child%20sex%20trafficking&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=4&adxnnlx=1258977630-dky9yyJIGUdUfzgiOPdQlA&pagewanted=all

Britain will take ”pre-emptive action” to stop sex traffickers from targeting the 2012 London Games.

Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell told Parliament on Monday the government will work with London police and voluntary organizations.

”We are absolutely determined to take all pre-emptive action that we can … to make sure the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics don’t become a target for this vile trade and don’t become tainted as a result,” she said.

Some lawmakers suggested the influx of visitors for the Olympics would lead to an increase in sexual exploitation of women and men.

”We will be making sure that a very clear message goes out to the traffickers, that there is no point coming to London,” Jowell said. ”I want the House to be under absolutely no misapprehension about how seriously this threat is taken and its planning well advance of the games will make sure it does not materialize.”

source: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/11/09/sports/AP-OLY-London-Sex-Trafficking.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=child%20sex%20trafficking&st=cse

The room is recreated with exquisite attention to detail: a scribbled price list for sexual services on a whiteboard. A large bowl with condoms spilling onto the end table. Half-used lipstick scattered among twisted thongs, high heels and toilet paper. A sickly perfume-type smell that clings to the torn wallpaper. A grimy stained bed designed to shudder under the weight of invisible, moving bodies. Men’s voices that alternately issue commands and groans.

The room is part of an immersive art exhibit, “Journey,” that depicts the experience of being a sex trafficking victim. The installation, made of seven shipping containers, was opened on Monday on Washington Place near Washington Square Park and will be open through Sunday. Visitors under 17 must be accompanied by an adult.

The exhibit is a collaboration of a dozen artists and was done under the aegis of the Helen Bamber Foundation, a British group that works with survivors of torture and abuse. Developed with a budget of 70,000 British pounds, “Journey” was originally shown in Trafalgar Square in London in September 2007, and now travels internationally.

The exhibit is a brainchild of Emma Thompson, the Oscar-winning British actress, who introduced the installation at a press conference with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Tuesday morning.

Ms. Thompson, who is chairwoman of the foundation, said she became aware of the issue of human trafficking when she was introduced to a woman who had essentially been a slave at a massage parlor that Ms. Thompson walked by every day on the way to the London subway “I was mentally, completely excoriated by it,” Ms. Thompson said. The inspiration for the project came from the woman’s request that people be able to understand, “just for five minutes, what it’s like.”

London and New York are hubs for human trafficking, though the victims’ countries of origin vary. London has many from Eastern Europe and Africa, and New York sees more from Latin America and Asia.

At the news conference, the mayor also announced a $2 million multilingual public advertising campaign to raise awareness of human trafficking. The campaign, which is to start in March, has the slogan “It’s happening here” and will include advertisements on buses, bus shelters and other media, said Norma Abbene, deputy counsel to the mayor, who is overseeing the campaign.

New York, Florida and California are all centers for human trafficking, according to Carol Robles-Roman, deputy mayor for legal affairs — New York, in large part, because it is a transportation hub with three airports, two of them international. The problem spills outside city boundaries. Long Island has also been identified as a region where trafficking is rampant.

The ads, which are designed by New York University students, will try to alert people to the existence of covert slavery. “When you walk, it’s in plain sight, but you don’t see it,” Ms. Abbene said. The campaign will use the languages that dominate in specific neighborhoods. At minimum, the languages will include Arabic, Chinese, Haitian creole, Korean, Russian and Spanish. Funds will come from outside sources, rather than from the city budget, Ms. Abbene said.

The advertisements dovetailed with the arrival of “Journey.” Each of the exhibit’s seven shipping containers are named for a different stage of human trafficking: “Hope,” “Journey,” “Uniform,” “Bedroom,” “Customer,” “Stigma” and “Resurrection.”

Contributing artists include Anish Kapoor, a winner of the Turner Prize; Sandy Powell, an Oscar-winning costume designer; MODE2, a British artist; Simon Stephens, a playwright; and James Oster, a photographer.

Mr. Oster went to six brothels in three British cities and hired prostitutes to take pictures of him, which were assembled for the “Customer” exhibit. It is unusual to have so many artists working on a mutual goal, he said. “There is so much ego in art,” said Mr. Oster, who flew in from London for the opening. “To remove the ego, to have a common objective, is brilliant.”

The exhibit is open at the following times: Tuesday through Friday, from noon to 8 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sunday, Nov. 15, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

source: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/art-show-shines-light-on-sex-traffickings-victims/