February 13, 2009

• Human and Trafficking...

  

  I watched the movie Taken starring Liam Neeson and apprarently my dream the other night was similar, sort of, to the plot of the story about human trafficking.

  My dream started when my son asked me to go with him to the comics store and nonchalantly, I went with him without bothering to change clothes or anything. Inside the store, it started to dawn on me that I left my purse in the house; and the most important thing, we left my four year old grandson in the house by his lonesome. I started to panic and told my son to buy what he needed at the store so we can go straight home because his son is alone in the house. My son was seemed preoccupied and did not really pay attention to what I said. I keep on bugging him that we need to go, but he seemed unfazed and was just taking his time. The next scene in my dream I was on my cellphone calling home and my grandson picked up the phone and asking when we were coming home. All of a sudden, I was speaking to a man I do not know and I asked him what he was doing in our house. He said that my grandson accidentally pushed a button or switch (I don't have such a button or switch) that triggered to send a signal to the place where he works. I started to get nervous and scared because it sounded a lame excuse. I started fearing for my grandson's safety. So I grabbed and dragged my son out of the store and inside the car, I kept on telling him to drive faster as his son is in danger. But my son seemed in a daze and was just driving slowly and had no care in the world. I woke up when I started to scream at him to snap out of it and to push the pedal to the metal already.

  It is amusing that dreams sometime have something to do with what you have done or seen or experienced the day before, at least it's true in my case. The movie was really good and full of action-thrilling scenes that it was not boring to watch. It's a simple story that relates to what is happening now in other countries about young women traveling alone and getting abducted and use as prostitutes or being sold to the highest bidders. It's an eye opener to the reality of evilness at its highest peak. Although the story is simple, it had my attention because of the love of a father for his daughter that he would search the end of the world just to save his daughter from her abductors.

  UN surprised at female role in 'modern slavery'

  By CARLEY PETESCH, The Associated Press

  1:46 p.m. February 12, 2009

  UNITED NATIONS — Surprisingly, the perpetrators behind human trafficking around the world are often women, the U.N. reported Thursday.

  Women are the majority of traffickers in almost a third of the 155 nations the U.N. surveyed. They accounted for more than 60 percent of the human trafficking convictions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

  For many, human trafficking is a world they had been pulled into themselves.

  "Women commit crimes against women, and in many cases the victims become the perpetrators," Antonio Maria Costa, director of the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said in an interview. "They become the matrons of the business and they make money. It's like a drug addiction."

  Most of the world's nations reported some form of "modern slavery" last year involving mainly the sex trade or forced labor.

  And the number of victims should grow as the global financial crisis deepens, Costa said.

  The report by Costa's office was based largely on human trafficking convictions reported to the U.N. between September 2007 and July 2008. About 22,500 victims were rescued during that time. About four of every five reported cases involved sexual exploitation; most of the rest involved forced labor.

  But Costa's agency gave no overall figures for how many millions of people might be affected. He said most countries' conviction rates for human trafficking rarely exceed 1.5 per 100,000 people.

  Two of every five countries covered in the report had not recorded a single conviction from 2007 to 2008.

  "Either these countries are blind to the problem or they are ill-equipped to deal with it," Costa said.

  "We only see the monster's tail," he said. "How many hundreds of thousands of victims are slaving away in sweatshops, fields, mines, factories, or trapped in domestic servitude? Their numbers will surely swell as the economic crisis deepens the pool of potential victims."

  The report's release coincided with the appointment Thursday of Academy Award-winning actress Mira Sorvino as a U.N. goodwill ambassador to help Costa's office fight human trafficking.

  "Until a few years ago, I blissfully believed that slavery was a thing of the past. ... Well, obviously I was terribly wrong," said Sorvino, a mother with two young children.

  "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," she said, repeating a famous statement by Abraham Lincoln, whose 200th birthday was celebrated Thursday.

  The report also pointed out that women and girls suffer most from sexual abuse. About 20 percent of victims globally were children, mainly in Southeast Asia's Mekong region and parts of Africa.

  Costa, who serves as the U.N.'s chief crime fighter, said it's difficult to get nations to address human trafficking because "it's at the crossroads" of other complex occurrences such as human migration and prostitution.

  Sixty-three percent of the nations in the report had adopted some laws against human trafficking. The U.N. said most did so only after its protocol against human trafficking entered into force in December 2003.

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