The US senate has approved tough new laws against child sex offenders, including new measures against people who traffic children into sexual exploitation. Child advocates have called it the most sweeping sex offender legislation to target paedophiles in years. The measures include a mandatory 10 year sentence for sex trafficking involving children, or coercing children into prostitution. The legislation also allows for a DNA data base to be collected from convicted molesters, federal funding to track paedophiles, allows victims of child abuse to sue their molesters and a mandatory minimum sentence for child rape.

A woman from Boston, USA, has pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy, transporting minors across state lines to New York for prostitution, and child sex trafficking. It is alleged that Evelyn Diaz, 22, trafficked girls as young as 13 across state lines to New York City and Roxbury. It is alleged that she left a message on a social worker’s answer phone claiming that she could not be caught, saying; “When you have evidence that I am actually doing something, come and get me, OK ,” and later adding, “I am untouchable, I have lawyers.” It is also claimed that she said “Next time they’re going to be on a . . . Greyhound on their way to D.C. or New York or somewhere else,” “You won’t find them next time.”
Ms Diaz was arrested soon afterward, and now faces federal charges.
FBI special agent Tamara Harty testified to the court that Diaz trafficked two thirteen year olds, one fifteen year old and a sixteen year old into prostitution during the period July 2003 to April 2005. The case high-lights once again the trafficking of minors within the US.

Italian police have freed 113 Polish workers from what have been described as “labour camps” in the southern region of Puglia. Italian prosecutor Piero Foggi said, “There were inhuman conditions, they were real labour camps.” It is alleged that the victims were forced to work 15 hours a day for one Euro per hour and were beaten with metal posts and threatened with guns. At least four of the workers had apparently committed suicide, but these deaths are being treated as suspicious. The operation to end these forced labour camps was conducted by a special unit of Italian Carabinieri and the unit for human trafficking at the Polish Chief Police Headquarters with the help of Europol and Interpol. Twenty people have been arrested in the joint operation. It is alleged that they recruited people in Poland by advertising safe agricultural jobs in Italy, but then trafficked them into slavery.

Thousands of Korean women are being lured by internet adverts and then trafficked to the US and other countries, and sexually exploited. Timothy C. Lim, associate professor from California State University’s Department of Political Science, reported to an international symposium in Seoul that “it wasn’t difficult to conclude that a minimum 5,000 Korean women in the United States are either victims of sex trafficking or who otherwise trapped or entangled in situations of prostitution such that they are not free to leave, even if they came to the United States voluntarily.”
“Most or all were lured to the United States by Internet sites, newspaper advertisements, and word of mouth. Many of these ads made extraordinary promises: $5,000 a month to work in Guam, read one advertisement. $7,200 monthly to work in a Los Angeles salon, with guaranteed entrance to a ‘state government vocational school,’ said another.
“The naivete of women who are fooled by outlandish promises in Internet or newspaper ads may be hard to swallow, and more in-depth examination may prove that a little skepticism is, in fact, a good thing… most of the Korean women who respond to these advertisements have limited education: junior high school and some high school,” he said. Canada is being used as a hub to traffick Korean women into the US, with many arriving in British Columbia.

In another crack down on human trafficking as part of Bulgaria’s preparations to become part of the European Union, Bulgarian police have smashed a human trafficking ring which is thought to have trafficked at least 14 Bulgarian women into Germany. Working with German police, Bulgarian law enforcement agencies have arrested the alleged head of the group and his two accomplices in the Bulgarian city of Varna. The women, who were trafficked into sexual exploitation often travelled voluntarily after having been offered jobs as maids and baby-sitters. When they arrived in Hamburg, however, their passports were removed and they were forced into prostitution. It is alleged that the gang made around 300 Euros from each woman every day.
The crack down shows that the Bulgarian police are making efforts to fight human trafficking, but efforts must also be made to fight the corruption in official institutions which helps traffickers in the country.