Liberty Line: US Launches New National Center To Combat Human Trafficking, Texas Becomes First State to Hire an Anti-Trafficking AI Expert, COVID Leads to Child Trafficking Crisis in India
Newly Proposed EARN IT Act Seeks to Hold Big Tech Companies Accountable for Child Sexual Abuse Imagery, and Listen to a New York Times Podcast on the Online Criminal Underworld of Child Abuse
Good morning activists,
We hope you were able to get through a nerve wrecking Election Week! As usual, this week we are bringing you the latest news and developments on human trafficking in the U.S and around the globe. We hope you will join us in spreading awareness on this issue and taking local action to protect your communities. Remember this fight is three fold, we must PREVENT exploitation, EDUCATE people on how to spot and report abuse, and RESCUE people currently trapped in exploitation. For more resources check out this resource library powered by the Polaris Project or call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 888-373-7888.
As always, thanks for being part of our growing community of activists and as a reminder, we love hearing from you! All feedback is welcome!😊 Enjoy the read!
Our “Why”:
The United Nations defines human trafficking as any form of recruiting, transporting, transferring, harboring, or receiving a person by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, abduction, fraud, or deception, for an improper purpose including forced labor or sexual exploitation.
600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders annually and, of these, 80% are women or girls and 50% are minors. Trafficking exploits individuals in some of the most heinous ways imaginable, raking in an estimated $150 billion for traffickers. This effects men, women, and children, both globally and domestically.
For information on trafficking in your state, click here
For trafficking statistics in your country, click here
Our desire is that this newsletter would build and bring together a community that’s fiery about this topic, informing individuals to action through the sharing of stories, initiatives, and people who are spearheading the counter-trafficking movement.
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In a letter written by the late Edmund Burke,
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
And without further delay,
This Week..
ACTIVIST OF THE WEEK:
Blessing Okoedion
Blessing Okoedion is a Nigerian survivor turned activist. When she was 26, she was forced into sexual slavery after being trafficked from Nigeria to Italy. In 2017, she published an account of her experiences, The Courage of Freedom: A Woman Escaped From the Hell of Trafficking as both a call to action and a source of empowerment for survivors. Today, she is working hard to eliminate the very crisis that forced her and thousands of Nigerian women into sexual exploitation by working closely with the Italian government and law enforcement to ensure that survivors receive ample resources. She has also worked in Nigeria to provide general preventative education for young girls and women vulnerable to trafficking. She was one of 10 people honored for these efforts in June by the U.S. State Department at the 2018 Trafficking in Persons Report launch ceremony in Washington, D.C. The report is an annual assessment of foreign governments' anti-trafficking efforts. She received the State Department award "in recognition of her extraordinary courage in using her lived experiences to ... prevent human trafficking [and] her selfless efforts to assist survivors and lend a helping hand to those still subjected to the crime.”
“It is my hope and desire that young people, me included, will become more aware of such a risk of becoming the new slaves of an opulent society where with money everything can be bought and sold, even a boy of a child for pornography and prostitution, begging and organs transplant, child labour and false marriages. As young people we too have a role to play to offer our contribution to stop human trafficking so that every human being, mainly youth can enjoy the gift of freedom and dignity as given to us by God the Creator.”
FOR YOUR EYES:
Texas is the First State to Hire an Anti-Human Trafficking AI Expert
India’s Covid Pandemic Has Created a Second Crisis- Child Trafficking
Bill Would Make Tech Firms Accountable for Child Sex Abuse Imagery
FOR YOUR EARS:
‘The Daily’: A Criminal Underworld of Child Abuse, Part 1 (podcast)
👉 If you enjoy staying informed about the stories, initiatives, and people within the counter human trafficking movement, share to tell others about it:
FOR YOUR EYES:
U.S Launches New Center to Fight Human Trafficking: The U.S. government has just launched a new national center fully dedicated to combating rising rates of sex and labor trafficking in the country. Read more about it here.
“The center is the U.S. government’s first integrated law enforcement operations center focused on human trafficking to support federal criminal, civil and administrative investigations, victim assistance efforts and intelligence analysis, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.”
Texas is the First State to Hire an Anti-Human Trafficking AI Expert: This past Tuesday the state of Texas awarded $330,000 to Collective Liberty, a startup that uses machine learning to help law enforcement agencies identify human traffickers operating in the United States.
“This year represents the second year Texas has worked with Collective Liberty, which is based in Austin and Washington, D.C. Since 2019, Collective Liberty has trained about 920 local law enforcement professionals on how to use its platform, assisted with more than 75 arrests and worked with 60 agencies across Texas.”
👉Click HERE to read more about Collective Liberty!
India’s Covid Pandemic Has Created a Second Crisis- Child Trafficking: As India’s economy crumbles under the pandemic, more families face the eminent threat of extreme poverty. As a result of more children losing access to schools and parents facing high unemployment, traffickers have taken advantage of the situation and increased their efforts to traffic children for labor.
“Rescued children describe being forced to work without pay in grueling conditions. Some say they have also experienced physical abuse. Without resources and under the control of traffickers, many have no way to leave or communicate with their families.”
Bill Would Make Tech Firms Accountable for Child Sex Abuse Imagery: Back in March, a newly proposed bipartisan bill called the EARN IT Act caused panic among big tech conglomerates. If passed, the bill would take the extraordinary step of removing legal protections for tech companies that fail to police the spread of child abuse imagery. Last year, the New York Times reported that nearly 70 million images and videos related to child sexual exploitation were reported by tech companies. However, while reporting is mandated, companies are not legally required to investigate the spread of that content on their platforms. The EARN IT Act would change that.
“The bill would create a 19-member commission — including members representing law enforcement, the tech industry and child advocates — to recommend a set of strategies: for instance, how to spot illegal material, categorize it in standardized ways and verify users’ ages. These practices would be subject to approval by the Justice Department and other agencies, as well as Congress and the president.”
FOR YOUR EARS:
‘The Daily’: A Criminal Underworld of Child Abuse, Part 1: (podcast, 26 minutes) This episode contains descriptions of child sexual abuse. A months long New York Times investigation has uncovered a digital underworld of child sexual abuse imagery that is hiding in plain sight. In part one of a two-part series, this podcast looks at the almost unfathomable scale of the problem — and just how little is being done to stop it.
“45 million images a year. That’s more than 120,000 images and videos of children being sexually abused every day. Every single day. But to put it in perspective, 10 years ago, there were only 600,000 images and videos reported to the National Center. And at that time, they were calling it an epidemic.”
COMING UP:
DELTA 8.7:
The Path to 2025: Lessons From Efforts to Combat Child Labour
When: Tuesday, November 10th at 9:00AM EST
Delta 8.7 will convene a virtual panel to continue and deepen the conversation from the recent written Symposium focused on lessons from efforts to combat child labour. The symposium brought together practitioners from GoodWeave International, World Vision, the International Labour Organization and UNICEF. Each contributor reflected on lessons learned from their experiences implementing and evaluating programmes and projects to combat child labour in different contexts. In addition, they offered valuable insights into what their work has shown to be most effective, and outlined persistent challenges, including those that emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this virtual convening, panelists will further discuss “what works” to combat child labour from the perspective of programme implementation, how programme effectiveness is gauged and how programming on the ground has adapted to the realities brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.Delta 8.7 is a global knowledge platform exploring what works to eradicate forced labour, modern slavery, human trafficking and child labour, an aim set out in Target 8.7 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
👉Register for this online event here.
👉 Learn more about Delta 8.7 here.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of Liberty Line, a weekly newsletter dedicated to providing you with the most pertinent information surrounding the stories, initiatives, and people within the counter human trafficking and sexual exploitation movement. To learn more about the The Liberty Coalition, visit: www.thelibertycoalition.com