A federal grand jury in Los Angeles has indicted nine people on charges of human trafficking, including six members of the same family. It is alleged that they lured young Guatemalan girls, one of whom was only 13 years old, with promises of work in the US, but instead they were allegedly forced into prostitution. It is claimed that one underage girl was forced to solicit customers from a car. They were allegedly threatened with violence to themselves, their families and even with curses from witchdoctors.
“This case is particularly egregious because the victims, some of whom were as young as 13 years old, all came here believing they would have a better life and could make money that they could send back to their families,” federal prosecutor Caroline Wittcoff said. “Then, when they got here, they were all forced into a nightmare of prostitution.”
For more on this and related stories, please go to
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-sexring10aug10,1,599384.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california

Police in the English county of Durham are using iPods to help in the fight against human trafficking. The police are aware that it can take several hours to locate translators who speak the appropriate language for a victim who often speaks no English. The iPods are pre-loaded with basic messages to re-assure the victims, who might be from states where they cannot trust the police. Audio files have been recorded in Albanian, Portuguese, Czech, French, Lithuanian, Malay, Mandarin, Romanian, Russian and Thai. To read more about this and related subjects, please go to
http://www.sunderlandecho.com/news?articleid=3093920

John Donnelly writes in the August 1, 2007 edition of the Boston Globe (boston.com)

WASHINGTON — A rare glimpse into the harrowing lives of girls and women forced into India’s sex trade found that the youngest among them — girls age 14 or younger — faced another cruel risk from their bondage: 60 percent became infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The study, published in today’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, reviewed the health records of 287 Nepalese girls and young women who were lured into prostitution in several cities in India from 1997 to 2005. It found that 38 percent of them tested positive for HIV when examined after they were rescued by Maiti Nepal, a nongovernmental organization based in Kathmandu.

Read the entire article at

http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2007/08/01/for_youngest_girls_enslaved_in_sex_trade_more_woe/

The US House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has heard allegations that construction workers were trafficked to work on building the new US Embassy in Iraq. Testimony such as that from Rory Mayberry seem to confirm an earlier report by the US State Department that human trafficking was happening. In this case it is alleged that First Kuwaiti who were in charge of the project and for whom Mayberry was a sub-contractor, trafficked 51 Filipino nationals to work on the project. To read more about this and related subjects, please go to
http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2007/07/under-the-radar.html