Friday, I loaded the backseat of a car headed to Miami with giant packs of condoms, bottles of hand sanitizer, and snacks. Was this going to be the best Superbowl party ever? No, it was part of a massive outreach effort to the child sex trafficking victims who are expected to be brought to Miami this weekend to service men attending the Superbowl. Last year, they found at least 24 kids trafficked to Tampa for sex. And this year, they predicted even more.
Why does the Superbowl mean an uptick in the amount of sex trafficking in a given city? It’s because sex trafficking, like all forms of modern-day slavery, are driven by consumer demand for a product. And when large numbers of men gather in a city, especially without their families, some of them demand commercial sex. Pimps know that demand for prostitution will be higher in Miami this weekend because of the number of out-of-towners flying in for the big game. So they’ll ship the women and girls who they sell to meet the demand and make them the highest possible profit. It’s the exact same business model other entrepreneurs who will travel to Miami use. Except instead of selling hot dogs or t-shirts, they’ll be selling children.
Fortunately, this year advocacy groups were prepared. A team of hundreds of outreach workers from organizations both local to Miami and national were on the streets, perhaps even in greater number than the pimps and traffickers, looking for trafficking victims, armed with outreach supplies like condoms and business cards with subtly scripted hotline numbers. And the volunteers have been trained to recognize that even the girls who are smiling and flirting may be women and kids forced into prostitution by a pimp.
Whether you rocked a blue pony hat or some black and gold Mardi Gras beads this Sunday, just remember that we’re all cheering for at least one team. And that’s the one standing on the street corner, throwing a Hail Mary pass to the girls they see. And unlike the boys on the field, these folks are actually hoping for a safety.
Discipline, honor, and patriotism. These are the reasons, for some people to join U.S. military services. However, for most people, when they think of the U.S. service members abroad, these are not the words that they associate the service members with. Rather, the U.S. service members are notorious for violence, alcoholism, low education, and prostitution in places where they are stationed. And, such notoriety of U.S. soldiers are well evidenced by the prostitution and sex trafficking place around the U.S. military base abroad.
Sex trafficking around U.S. military bases in South Korea
Recently, the Philippines government banned work permits for women seeking to work for bars in South Korea. [1] Aggravated by the nonstop sex trafficking incidents involving Filipino women around the U.S. Military base in South Korea, the Philippine government decided to stop sending their women to the sex industry abroad. For the past decade or so, Filipino women are hired to serve U.S. military service members and flirt with them to lure them into buying expensive drinks to meet the daily quota required by their employers. When the women fail to meet the daily quota, they are required to sell their bodies to the U.S soldiers to make up the difference. [2] The element of sex trafficking enters when these women are lured into coming to South Korea with the belief that they will be singing and dancing at the clubs and bars as entertainers. However, it is only after their arrival to the clubs and bars that they realize that their works involve prostitution in times.
U.S. Military policy on prostitution and sex trafficking
in 2004, Pentagon drafted anti-prostitution policy specifically aiming at reducing sex trafficking around the U.S military base stationed abroad. Under the policy, the U.S. service members could face court martial for patronizing prostitutes. [3] However, sex trafficking and prostitution in South Korea have been rampant even after the draft of anti-prostitution policy. Though the U.S. military just began to put off-limits on clubs and bars which are involved in prostitution or human trafficking in South Korea, only four out of 25 clubs and bars retain off-limits status by the U.S. military base. One report on prostitution and sex trafficking around U.S. military base in Korea reveals more disappointing result. While South Korea vigorously cracks down on prostitution, the areas surrounding the U.S. military base are exempted from the crackdown by the Korean government. Therefore, prostitution and sex trafficking thrives because of the U.S. military service members in South Korea, according to the report [4]
Awareness raising along with harsh penalty are the keys
Doing a massagy is almost a rite of passage for male sailors… sex trade is more permissible here [Japan] than at home and easily available… It’s not like the U.S.
A U.S. service member stationed in Japan in 2006. [5]
Thriving demand for prostitution and sex trafficking by the U.S. military service members questions the enforceability of the U.S. military anti-prostitution/sex trafficking policy. Though the policy has been implemented to deter sex trafficking and prostitution around the military base abroad, the news reports consistently say that they are still very much in existence. Though the policy caused many service members from revealing their identities when interviewed about their visits to prostitutes, it did not stop them from going back to prostitutes again for sex. The problem then lies on lack of awareness among the U.S. soldiers. Visit to brothels or prostitutes have been so widely accepted that the service members consider it almost as a rite. Further that the U.S. military, in fact, encouraged prostitution business around the military bases also contribute to their desensitization to prostitution. [6] While the penalty against human trafficking and prostitution must be doubled, the military should ensure to educate the service members on such misconducts as serious crimes.
School, work and fun nights downtown consume most students’ time. But one new student group is advocating that everyone take a minute to think about sexual slavery in other countries instead of last night’s “Sex and the City” in hopes of igniting students to action.
Sarah May
Organizer Sarah May, a junior from Atlanta, first realized she wanted to fight against the sex slave trade after she read the book “Half the Sky” by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn.
Her friend happened to pick the book up after seeing something about it in Oprah and told May that this was a must-read.
After feeling empowered by the book about her ability to make a difference to young girls, May decided to make a University-approved club to raise awareness.
She came up with EGGS, which stands for Educating Girls to Guarantee Survival.
Since she closed the back cover on the book, she has organized the group, planned fundraisers and gotten a group of early members together to help raise money to build a school in Cambodia.
“This book is interesting because they write it from the perspective that we can do something to help,” May said. “They talk about the best ways to make a difference. We were inspired by that.”
According to May, EGGS has been in direct contact with the chair for American Assistance for Cambodia, and the group plans to raise $19,000 to build a school for children so that they can avoid situations like sexual slavery.
“We set that goal for the end of next spring,” May said.
“I think the most important things EGGS will do is establish a school that will serve not just as a place for education, but also a safe place for children to go during the day, reducing their vulnerability to sex traffickers and kidnappers,” said Lily Feinberg, an EGGS’ group member . “Knowing that I could hypothetically be changing girls’ lives through EGGS is a good feeling.”
The group believes that families in extreme poverty are sometimes forced to put their children on the streets to earn what money they can.
EGGS strives to eliminate this sad reality and let families know they have other options.
Once the $19,000 mark has been hit, EGGS plans to continue to raise money for the Girls be Ambitious Program.
The program, which is run through American Assistance for Cambodia, provides incentives for families to keep their young girls and for the girls to attend school.
The organization pays monthly stipends of $10 a month to children who attend school and $120 a year if they have perfect attendance.
“A lot of times the girls will be promised a job far away, and they accept it because the family needs money,” May said.
“Then these girls are kidnapped and chained and forced to work against their will, and their parents don’t hear from them.”
The monthly stipends are designed to allow for these families to have a steady income while allowing their children to continue with their education.
“Women who are more educated are more likely to stand up for themselves in these cases,” May said. “And if they set their goal for going to school, they won’t feel like they have to take this certain job that they know nothing about.”
Sonia Chopra, a junior at UGA, recently joined the group because she said the cause is very important to her.
“There are so many horrible things going on in the world right now that so few people know about, and I believe that child trafficking and the sex-slave industry are two of the worst,” Chopra said.
“Advocacy and raising awareness are such important parts of any organization involved in social justice, which is why it’s great to see a group like EGGS on campus. It’s a group that can get people involved to make a difference in girls’ lives.”
What: EGGS first meeting
When: 7:30 tonight
Where: Tate room 481
More Information: Email the group at eggsuga@gmail.com
Aaron Cohen first met Jonty Thern and her older sister, Channy, in 2005 while singing in a karaoke bar in Battambang, Cambodia. He has come back to see them every year since.
The California native often schedules his trips for November, the month when Cambodians celebrate the Bonn Om Teuk water festival, marking the end of the rainy season.
“The whole country comes together for boat races. Hundreds of thousands of people descend on the waterfront and it’s filled with colors and flags,” said Cohen. “You know my thoughts about the water festival always include Jonty, because she and her sister would get a day pass during the festival.”
There was a smile on his face when he started the sentence, but by the time he had finished, it was gone.
Abolishing slavery
Cohen is a human rights advocate. He founded a charity called AbolishSlavery.org last year, but his work freeing victims of human trafficking began more than a decade ago.
At 6′5″ (195 cm) with long, black hair, he stands out in almost every crowd. But Cohen often goes undercover to obtain the information needed for law enforcement officials to conduct raids and make arrests.
His trips have taken him around the world, from Sudan to Nicaragua to Israel. But, he says, in Southeast Asia the problem is especially bad.
“I would rank Cambodia right up there with India as one of the worst places in the world for sex-trafficking.”
A bad problem getting worse
According to the NGO, End Child Prostitution, Abuse and Trafficking (ECPAT), as many as one-third of all sex workers in Cambodia are children. Government entities, including the U.S. State Department, are pressuring countries like Cambodia to do more to stop the modern-day slavery epidemic.
“We are making major strides in the fight against human trafficking. But it is a major problem, we know that,” said Ambassador-at-Large Luis CdeBaca, who leads the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. “You have estimates as to the number of people in servitude worldwide and it’s anywhere from 12.3 million on the low end as cited by UN’s International Labour Organization — to as many as 27 million people on the high end. That’s a number coming from the research done by (the aid organization) Free the Slaves. But 12.3 million is a baseline number that everybody agrees that there are at least that many people in forced labor, and that’s far too many.”
In its comprehensive 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report, the State Department put Cambodia on its Tier 2 Watch List. The ranking means the Cambodian government does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking, but is making an effort to do so.
“[In Cambodia] the number of victims is increasing and the number of prosecutions has gone down from the previous year,” says CdeBaca. “The report shows that despite the overall effort, the government has not shown enough progress in convicting and punishing human trafficking offenders or protecting trafficking victims.”
Cambodia is categorized as a destination country for foreign child sex tourists, with increasing reports of Asian men traveling to Cambodia in order to have sex with underage virgin girls. The State Department report states a significant proportion of trafficking victims in Cambodia are ethnic Vietnamese women and girls who are forced into prostitution in brothels and karaoke bars.
A chance encounter
Jonty Thern’s short life could be a case study for that assessment. Jonty’s family immigrated to Cambodia from Vietnam shortly after the Vietnam War.
Faced with gripping poverty and a debt, Jonty’s mother sold her daughter, who was 10-years-old at the time, to a person on Cambodia’s border with Thailand.
There, the mother was told, Jonty would sell flowers and candy to customers in bars and nightclubs. It was only later the mother says, she would learn that while there, Jonty would be repeatedly raped and beaten.
After three years of physical and sexual abuse, Jonty was released by her captors and allowed to return home to Battambang. Soon after, she and her sister willingly went to work at a karaoke bar to help the family pay off their debt, according to her parents.
The scenario in which Cohen describes meeting Jonty Thern, then 13-years-old, is as appalling as it is prevalent.
“I was working as an undercover sex vice,” Cohen said. “I was posing as a sex tourist, going from karaoke bar to karaoke bar, massage parlor to massage parlor, looking for underage workers, to see if I could get them on camera soliciting me for sex.”
As evidenced in the State Department report, it is a poorly-kept secret in Cambodia that many of these establishments are also operating brothels.
“I went to a number of karaokes and about my second or third karaoke of the night and I immediately notice this one really young looking girl. I requested Jonty and her sister and a group of other girls,” Cohen said.
“In these bars, the girls are told to drink as much as they can, because they’ll charge you for the beers. So this girl comes in and I noticed, man, she downed that beer in like 2 seconds. She seemed to be having a good time, she didn’t seem unhappy or anything. But here she is nonetheless, a 13-year-old girl in a brothel drinking 10 beers in the time that I drank two,” he added.
He said he invited several friends who work at a nearby victims’ shelter to come join him. They posed as partiers as well, until Cohen felt comfortable to ask the manager an important question.
“After the girls began to dance and sing, I asked the mamasan what more can I get besides karaoke and so then she says ‘well, for sex it’s $50.’”
Cohen used the solicitation video from that night, recorded on a cell phone camera, to provide police with the information they needed to raid the karaoke brothel.
More than a dozen girls, including Jonty and her sister, Channy, were freed that night and sent to live in a victim’s shelter, where they received counseling, care and an education.
Final Respects
Cohen’s most recent trip to see Jonty and Channy in Cambodia was not a happy reunion. It was a trip planned so that he could say goodbye to one of them.
Three days before arriving in Phnom Penh for the water festival, Cohen and Channy, along with Channy’s mother, spent the morning in an 8th century pagoda in Siem Reap, watching as monks conducted an ancient funeral ceremony. They were transferring Jonty Thern’s ashes into a marble urn.
Jonty died of liver failure at age 17. Her family claims it was the result of years of alcohol and drug abuse she was subjected to while working first in the nightclubs as a 10-year-old, and then later in the karaoke bars.
“The ashes of my goddaughter are the symbol of why we have to do this. This doesn’t have to happen. These girls do not have to be enslaved,” Cohen said.
“We tried our best with Jonty and we failed because we lost her. But if there’s meaning in her death, the meaning is that there is more work to be done. When I’m in that karaoke now, or when I’m in that massage parlor, she’s my little angel. She’s watching over me and she’s protecting me,” he added.
That evening, after watching the festival’s fireworks display and saying goodnight to Channy, Cohen strapped an undercover watch camera to his wrist, and went to a karaoke bar.
Don’t let the title of “From Paris with Love” fool you. It’s about as American as an action movie can get.
Even though the film is a thoroughly French production in respect to its crew, “From Paris with Love” adheres to what has become the modern-Hollywood formula for making an action picture. You know the formula I’m talking about. It’s roughly as follows:
Step 1. Team up a pair of opposites to serve as protagonists, and milk the resulting conflict for comedic effect.
Step 2. Run these protagonists through a plot built around a series of car chases, shoot-outs and explosions. Also, find somewhere to toss in several attractive women (and maybe a few ethnic stereotypes as well—the audience shouldn’t be required to think too much).
Step 3. Once in post-production, chop up the film’s set pieces with a quick-cut style of editing, so that these action sequences become practically impossible for an audience to visually process.
And, voilà — Hollywood action, made to order.
“From Paris with Love” doesn’t merely follow these rules. It celebrates them, and the result is somewhat unexpected. There’s a vaguely satirical quality that arises from the trashy excess found within it. And while such a quality may not be enough to justify labeling the film a success, it certainly does make “From Paris with Love” interesting.
But let’s get to the film, shall we? Jonathan Rhys Meyers stars as James Reece, a straight-laced diplomatic lackey working at the American Embassy in Paris. When he’s not sharing unbearably sappy moments with his French girlfriend, James moonlights as a low-level CIA liaison, picking up vehicles and changing out license plates, all in the hope of one day becoming a full-time operative.
His chance for advancement soon surfaces in the form of a trial-assignment: escort CIA agent Charlie Wax (John Travolta, looking like Mr. Clean’s doppelganger) on a mission. From this point onward, the film’s body count steadily rises as its I.Q. hopelessly plunges.
Such a result might be considered inevitable, as “From Paris with Love” comes from the minds of French filmmakers Luc Besson and Pierre Morel. Not exactly known for their cinematic restraint, producer Besson is a purveyor of over-the-top action films such as “Crank,” “The Transporter” and “War,” while Morel’s last film as director (“Taken”) was anything but subtle.
Besson and Morel make good on their reputations, as “From Paris with Love” is essentially one long action sequence — a film captured through hyperactive camera lenses, subjected to overzealous editing, and cued to a bombastic score. It’s an approach that’s been taken so many times before, and always to the same effect: mind-numbing exhaustion.
Still, there’s something slightly different about “From Paris with Love.” At times, the movie seems distinctly aware of its abrasiveness. And rather than backing down, “From Paris with Love” decides to take its vulgar extravagance to the next level.
Consider the movie’s penchant for employing stereotypes. The Paris found in “From Paris with Love” is defined by cultural oversimplification. Asians are nameless, disposable gunmen. Eastern-Europeans have monopolized the sex-trafficking business. Every Arab immigrant is a secret-terrorist. And no black Parisian appears outside the city’s slums.
Oh, and the film’s most prominent American character? He’s a gun-loving, coke-snorting egotist with an insatiable appetite for both cheeseburgers and destruction.
By becoming so casual with its clichés, “From Paris with Love” starts to undermine the very logic which fuels it. The same could be said for the movie’s cinematography—a production-style so shamelessly manipulative that it occasionally comes across as self-deprecating.
This crude self-awareness makes “From Paris with Love” a tolerable exercise in cinematic excess. It may not be any different from its worn-out Hollywood brethren, but at least “From Paris with Love” isn’t delusional. This is a movie that knows it’s terrible—and embraces that fact wholeheartedly.
“Fifteen-year-old Jeanette Maples died despite warnings that she was being abused. A state investigation is looking at whether state welfare workers are less likely to investigate reports of abuse of older children.”
State and private social service leaders say they see no evidence in the Portland area that child welfare workers are reluctant to act on abuse reports about older children.
Still, Department of Human Services officials want to know more about how their workers weigh age in deciding how to respond to reports of child abuse and neglect. They suspect age might be part of the reason child welfare workers failed to respond to calls over a four-year period reporting the abuse of Jeanette Maples, a 15-year-old girl who died Dec. 9 in her Eugene home. Her parents have been charged with murder in her death.
In the 1990s, state child welfare workers responded less to reports of abused older children because of a system that categorized older children as less vulnerable. The rationale, in part, was that older children could flee abusive homes.
Youth advocates challenged the practice, arguing that older children don’t have legal or practical alternatives to living in abusive homes. State officials say child welfare workers have stopped using age as a measure of vulnerability.
“They have tried to get over that (age) mentality,” said Kevin Donegan, director of homeless youth services for Janus Youth Programs Inc. in Portland. “Unfortunately, there is still some of that mindset in the state.”
To determine if Donegan is right, state investigators will audit a sample of cases that abuse screeners closed to see whether age “inappropriately influenced the decision.” That review is scheduled to be complete by March 1.
Investigators say they want to determine whether the flawed screenings in Maples’ case were due to individual misjudgments or to a systemic problem of screeners “over-relying upon a child’s age as part of their evaluation of child vulnerability.”
State guidelines say social workers should consider a child’s vulnerability, but not age, when they are screening calls, said Stacey Ayers, program manager for child protective services.
“If the caller says a 16-year-old got punched in the face by his dad or a 4-year-old got punched in the face by dad, we’re assigning both of those,” he said. “The responses will be immediate.”
Mark McKechnie, executive director of the Juvenile Rights Project Inc., agrees that Portland-area social workers have responded better to abuse reports on older youth in recent years. But he said he still worries that state guidelines for screening abuse reports established two years ago could lead some workers to conclude that older children are not vulnerable.
The model says a child’s vulnerability should be judged “according to the child’s physical and emotional development, ability to communicate needs, mobility, size and dependence.”
Those terms could be equated with age, McKechnie said.
In a report released last week, state investigators said Maples’ age appears to have been “considered as a major factor in the conclusion that she was not vulnerable.”
At least three reports in 2007 and 2009, when Maples had become isolated in home school, should have triggered visits to her home by state child protection workers, the investigation concluded.
Instead, screeners chose against intervention after each call.
In the state’s Multnomah County Child Welfare Hotline office in Portland, social workers do not assume older children are less vulnerable because of their age, said Miriam Green, program manager. Older children may have cognitive or developmental deficits, may be unable to defend themselves or may be isolated with nowhere to go, she said.
As a safeguard, she said, every report is shown to at least one supervisor and sometimes to police.
“We have to get it right 100 percent of the time,” Green said, “and we’re human beings.”
Her 18 screeners fill cubicles flowing over half of the second floor of a Department of Human Services building in east Portland. Police and prosecutors specializing in child abuse occupy the first floor.
The hot-line screeners take child abuse calls for Multnomah County around the clock, seven days a week, and for Washington and Clackamas counties on evenings and weekends. Last year they assigned about 8,000 cases in Multnomah County to social workers in field offices for further investigation. They closed about 6,800 other calls at the screenings.
Cindy Tillman, a part-time child welfare screener for the Portland hot line, said nearly half of the 20 or so calls she takes each week involve teenagers. She received one call this week, for example, of a girl being strangled by a parent. Tillman assigned the case to a social worker. The girl, who is now out of the home in a protective shelter, was interviewed by police and examined at a medical clinic specializing in child abuse. A social worker also interviewed her siblings at her home.
Green said her office has stepped up efforts recently to help older children pulled into sex trafficking and prostitution. The team also is exploring ways to better protect older kids who are home-schooled and isolated — children like Jeanette Maples.
A Belgian police official, quoted in one of the chapters in the DCAF report on police counter-trafficking challenges, described how traffickers operated in his country:
“In the past, the Albanians were the main pimps and traffickers of women for sexual exploitation in Belgium. They used violence frequently and their crimes had high social impact … [Therefore,] they quickly attracted international attention. The police focused extensively on the suspicious Albanians. Now, the offenders have learned from their mistakes. For various types of activities they make use of Belgian or Dutch women who look more innocent than the tough Albanians. The Albanian pimps and traffickers live in one city while the Dutch or Belgian “madams”—appointed by the traffickers to control the prostitutes—live in another. The Albanians come occasionally to check their business and to collect the money while the “madams” act as the main pimps. Since Albanians are involved in multi-crimes, they also use the same madams, or other women with EU passports as drug couriers. The women drive the cars and transport cocaine from Belgium and Netherlands to Italy. The police are less suspicious of blond Belgian girls than of Albanian men driving frequently to Italy.”
This brief narrative describes the business of human trafficking in today’s world. The modern-day trafficker, according to the DCAF report, will most likely share many of these characteristics:
They are most often part of loosely-defined and structured groups who form alliances with other groups to manage human trafficking networks;
Often, the traffickers supplement their business with illicit drug deals and other crimes;
They work easily across national borders, often in plain sight of police and border guards;
They are nimble and adopt quickly to any actual or perceived actions by law enforcement that would threaten their business.
Trafficking, like slavery itself, is not a new phenomenon. As a profit-generating (albeit morally repugnant) enterprise, human trafficking became a flourishing black market business in the 19th and early 20th centuries even as governments formally abolished slavery throughout most of the world. What defines slavery today is that the per unit costs of the goods — human beings — has continued to decline. Men, women and children have become inexpensive commodities, bought, sold and discarded like sneakers and plastic dinnerware. Demand for labor — the cheaper the better — knows no national boundary or cultural limitation. Profits can make trafficking quite lucrative, and with apparently rising demand and low risks, there’s no shortage of “entrepreneurs” looking to get into the business.
Today, networks of traffickers cover the globe in constantly changing, fluid arrangements. Ever vigilant to capitalize on opportunities, helped along by strategic bribes of police and border guards and fraudulent travel documents, traffickers roam the world looking for vulnerable populations. They were busy in the aftermath of the South Asian tsunami, sweeping up suddenly orphaned children and they are hard at work in Haiti today, according the UNICEF and other relief agencies. Human trafficking operators, captilizing on every opportunity, often augment their business with illicit drug trades and body organ trafficking.
Of course, not everyone engaged in trafficking is a member of a crime gang. Trafficking also arises from extreme poverty and is seen, heartbreakingly, in families selling their children because they can’t afford to raise them. This is a source of ongoing supply for experienced traffickers, which explains why trafficking has increased in step with collapsing national economies. Organized trafficking operators, often with police complicity, are known to prey on desperate parents by promising to arrange good paying jobs for their children or an opportunity to learn a trade or craft. Untold thousands of vulnerable children have disappeared via the promise of a better life.
According to the DCAF report, the nations of Southeast Asia represent the major countries of origin of trafficking victims, while the major destination nations are — no surprise — the relatively prosperous countries of northern Europe, the UK and the U.S. and Canada. While organized gangs (especially in Russia and eastern Europe) are a major criminal presence in trafficking, far more common are smaller, less formally structured groups that form syndicates specializing in particular kinds of slavery — sex, child labor, agricultural work. Trafficking expert John Picarelli (quoted in the DCAF report) says these networks follow three basic models:
“The first are small trafficking groups comprised mainly of a handful of entrepreneurial individuals. Second are cooperatives comprised of individuals, small groups and even criminal organisations that combine specialised skills to form larger trafficking syndicates. Last are situations where one large criminal organisation controls all aspects of a trafficking network.”
While some headway is being made in penetrating and breaking up trafficking cartels, the DCAF report says serious progress will only happen when law enforcement agencies begin working in concert, such as through sharing intelligence and offering best practice training. Despite some glimmers of progress, Most national and local police appear locked in the mindset that trafficking is primarily a border control or immigration issue, best solved by catching and deporting individuals who either got into the country illegally, don’t have the proper ID, or who have been caught in a crime. Looking beyond the situation of a violation (soliciting for sex, for example) to investigate who the people involved are and how they got into trouble is still the exception in police work, the DCAF report says. And if police aren’t trained — or interested — in pursuing trafficking situations, there will be fewer prosecutions, which will increase pressure on law enforcement to shift focus and resources to crimes that are not as difficult to solve. This cycle, the DCAF experts write, is difficult to break, and won’t likely happen until nations and governments — and their law enforcement agencies — decide that trafficking in humans is a top priority crime.
Next: how police corruption compounds the trauma of human trafficking.
A DeLand High student and her ex-boyfriend, found on her porch, died in a murder-suicide.
Mike Cummings has mulled over some difficult thoughts since his 17-year-old stepdaughter Natasha La’May Hall was shot to death Friday night at the hands of her ex-boyfriend, 19-year-old Daniel Clayton “Clay” Kufer, who then took his own life.
Why didn’t she call the police?
Where did he get the gun?
FOR THE RECORD – **********CORRECTION OR CLARIFICATION PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 20, 2008**********
********** CORRECTION OR CLARIFICATION PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 23, 2008 **********
The continuation of an article about the deaths of two people in DeLand on Page B7 of Sunday’s Local & State section reported incorrectly the location of Camp Lejeune. It is in North Carolina.
****************************************************************************** *Because of erroneous information provided to the Sentinel, an article about the shooting deaths of two people in DeLand, and the caption with accompanying photographs on the front of Sunday’s Local & State section, contained a misspelling of the last name of one of the two. His name is Daniel Clayton Kufner.
He killed my daughter.
“I’m just trying to make it through the day,” Cummings said. “I am emotionally drained.”
“It’s tragic,” said Jim Cummings, Natasha’s stepgrandfather. “She was loving, bright, beautiful and sharp as a tack.
“It’s tragic a young girl’s life was taken.”
DeLand police, who classified the deaths as a murder-suicide, found the bodies on Mike Cummings’ front porch.
Police couldn’t confirm the events that led to the teens’ deaths, and Kufer’s family couldn’t be reached for comment Saturday. But Cummings said the pair’s relationship was shaky.
“They had been dating eight or nine months. It had been a very rough relationship,” Natasha’s stepfather said.
Natasha, a DeLand High School student, decided to break it off with Kufer a month or so ago, Cummings said.
Then she started seeing someone else, a Marine stationed at Camp LeJeune, S.C., Mike Cummings said.
Natasha’s new suitor came down to DeLand to visit, and the two were supposed to go to the Daytona 500 Saturday night.
But they never got that far.
Here’s how Mike Cummings described what happened Friday night:
Natasha and a friend went shopping for clothes for the race.
Cummings and Natasha’s mother, Cheri, went out to dinner with their younger daughter in Daytona.
Kufer broke into their DeLand home on West May Street and looked through the caller ID on the house phone.
He found the Marine’s number and called. “He pretended to be an Air Force recruiter because Natasha wanted to enroll in the Air Force. He started interrogating him and said that Natasha listed him as a reference,” Natasha’s stepfather said.
The Marine hung up, but Kufer called back.
“Clay explained to him that Natasha was his girlfriend and that she was only 17,” Natasha’s stepfather said.
The Marine then called Natasha and warned her that Kufer had broken into her house.
“But she didn’t call the police,” Mike Cummings said. “Natasha, probably more brave than smart, went back to the house and changed clothes.”
Kufer was hiding behind the bushes near the front door, and as Natasha and her friend were leaving the front door, Kufer confronted the girls.
“He shot her in the head, then started talking crazy. He told her friend if she didn’t want to die she should leave, then put a bullet in Natasha’s chest,” Natasha’s stepfather said. “He then took his life on my porch.”
“Seriously. Who in their right mind would give this boy a gun. He’s been on edge for a while.”
Kufer was known to take out his aggression on Natasha and hit her, her stepfather said.
But Cummings said he and the girl’s mother had agreed that if Kufer took a military placement test and got into the Air Force they wouldn’t press charges.
“We didn’t want to ruin Clay’s life,” Mike Cummings said. “Unfortunately, he chose the exactly wrong way to end it.”
Even after the breakup, Natasha thought she could still communicate with Kufer.
“She was an average kid who ended up in a 30-year-old relationship,” Natasha’s stepfather said. “It wasn’t a typical teenager relationship. It was so serious.”
Friday, I loaded the backseat of a car headed to Miami with giant packs of condoms, bottles of hand sanitizer, and snacks. Was this going to be the best Superbowl party ever? No, it was part of a massive outreach effort to the child sex trafficking victims who are expected to be brought to Miami this weekend to service men attending the Superbowl. Last year, they found at least 24 kids trafficked to Tampa for sex. And this year, they predicted even more.
FOR THE RECORD – **********CORRECTION OR CLARIFICATION PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 20, 2008**********
