The doctor who has been accused of forcing NXIVM members to take part in horrific human experiments is finally facing charges after previous allegations were ignored.
The post Doctor For Billionaire Sex Slave Ring NXIVM, Charged for Conducting Horrific Human Experiments appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
The Rothschild-linked Bronfman sisters donated millions to the cult whose leaders, Allison Mack and Keith Raniere, have been charged with child sex trafficking.
The post Media Silent as Allison Mack’s Arrest Exposes Child Trafficking For Billionaire-Backed Sex Slave Ring appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
[image: Ira Gelb]
It’s a horrific issue that doesn’t get nearly enough coverage in U.S. mainstream media. Child sex trafficking is a booming black market business.
Most parents can’t imagine it happening in their own backyard.
While we know it’s a global issue, child sex trafficking is finally starting to become a mainstream topic in the U.S.
A film called “I Am Jane Doe,” released in February, highlights young girls between the ages of 13 and 15 years old who were picked up off the street and sold for sex online.
The film takes aim at Backpage.com. But in reality, the issue of child sex trafficking is so much bigger than one website. And the appetite for child sex abuse goes all the way to the top.
This is Reality Check you won’t get anywhere else.
Tim Swarens, a columnist and editor for The Indianapolis Star, recently began publishing a series of articles about the child sex trade, a subject he’s reportedly investigated for more than a year. He explains that the child sex trade is like any other business trade, driven by supply and demand.
According to a study by the Center for Court Innovation from 2016, between 8,900 and 10,500 children ages 13 to 17 are being sold in the U.S. each year. Swarens writes, “The researchers found that the average age of victims is 15 and that each child is purchased on average 5.4 times a day.”
To determine a conservative estimate of the demand, Swarens “multiplied the lower number of victims (8,900) identified in the Center for Court Innovation study by the rate of daily exploitation per child (5.4), and then by an average of only one ‘work’ day per week (52). The result: Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.”
Take the recent documentary “I Am Jane Doe,” a film about parents seeking justice for their young teenage girls being picked up and trafficked for sex right in their own communities.
Those parents took aim at the website Backpage.com for profiting off of its adult section, allegedly riddled with young girls being sold for sex. But even if Backpage.com is a platform for advertising and selling, a channel through which these transactions can take place, it’s just one of many online channels being used by pedophiles to buy children to abuse.
But is the problem the channels, or is it something deeper?
Swarens explains, “The critical need to reduce demand has gained far less attention and money. The result: Buyers continue to abuse children with near impunity.”
Now, in the film “I Am Jane Doe,” the people buying children to abuse are described to be white, married men with families who live in suburbia. A former pimp interviewed for the film, Homer King, says on camera that he sold girls to priests, lawyers and even politicians.
Swarens came to the same conclusion in his investigation. He writes: “This project began with a question: Who buys a 15-year-old child for sex? The answer: Many otherwise ordinary men. They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse.”
Who are some of these men buying children to abuse?
Remember Jared Fogle from the Subway sandwich commercials? He “admitted to charges of having child pornography and repeatedly having sex with minors,” according to NPR. Court documents show that one of the text messages Fogle sent to a 17-year-old he paid for sex, stated his preferences as quote: “The younger the girl, the better.”
And back in June 2008, billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was prosecuted and sentenced to 18 months in prison for paying for sex with girls as young as 14. He served only 13 of those months.
The longest serving Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who was second in line to the presidency from 1999 to 2007, admitted to sexually abusing boys while he was a high school wrestling coach. After making the admission in 2016, the judge who sentenced him 15 months in prison and two years of supervised release, called Hastert a “serial child molester.” He served only 13 months.
Now, let’s be clear: there’s no evidence that Hastert actually paid for sex. But the desire to abuse children is what fuels the global child sex trade, and demand is high.
Back in 2015, a special report aired on 60 Minutes Australia revealing that elected officials and elites in the UK were accused of buying and abusing children.
Posing as a buyer, former special agent for the Department of Homeland Security Timothy Ballard has been setting up undercover sting operations through his nonprofit Operation Underground Railroad since 2013.
Working in conjunction with governments all around the world, Operation Underground Railroad has so far busted 443 child sex traffickers and saved more than 1,000 victims. Here are just some of their 2017 operations.
Yet mainstream media does not treat it that way. Networks like CNN will give at least 40 days of daily coverage to stories like the missing Flight 370 in 2014. But in those 40 days, using Swarens’s math, about 250,000 children were bought and abused.
Even if that made the news, we make a mistake when the focus of the efforts to end this trafficking is only focused on how children are sold, instead of also focusing on to whom they are sold.
That discussion is one we need to have because until mainstream media and law enforcement is willing to go down that road… we will likely not see any real changes.
The post Reality Check: How Prevalent is the Global Child Sex Trade in the U.S.? (VIDEO) appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
Three pastors have been indicted on charges of child sex-trafficking for recruiting, grooming and soliciting girls as young as 14 years old.
The accusation that Kevin Spacey attempted to sexually assault a child raises new questions about his foundation, which specifically targets children.
From Seattle to Tuscaloosa, police arrested more than 1,000 people in just one month — including a law enforcement officer and pastor — as part of a sweeping crackdown on child sex offenders, and juvenile and adult sex trafficking in the United States.
Police from 37 departments in 17 states participated in the annual National Johns Suppression Initiative — a regular effort to ostensibly crack down on human trafficking and illegal sex work — rescuing 81 adult and child victims and arresting 1,020 people from Seattle to Chicago, and Texas to Tuscaloosa in the month-long effort spearheaded by Cook County, Illinois, Sheriff Thomas J. Dart.
Harris County, Texas, saw the largest number of people arrested, 170, while police in Seattle nabbed 160 alleged perpetrators and authorities throughout Cook County, seat of Chicago, arrested 141.
“Three brothels were shut down in Cook County by the sheriff’s office and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the sheriff’s office said. Three people were charged with operating brothels and four others were charged with patronizing them. Six adult victims were offered help,” CBS News reports.
Meanwhile, CNN reports, “In Arizona, officials said more than 400 people were discouraged from buying sex when they received texts, calls or Web browser redirects informing them about the impact of the illegal sex industry.
“Dart announced Thursday that his office will begin efforts to create a public database that lists sex buyers who are caught for a second or subsequent time.”
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Reports say more than 8,000 people have been arrested during the National Johns Suppression Initiative — just since 2011 — as the project continues taking aim at human trafficking and prostitution by arresting patrons, johns, pimps, and other sex offenders, while finding victims the assistance they may need.
On the surface, the news of more than 1,000 arrests sounds productive, if not sorely needed; but, scratch the gilding from this supposed payoff, and controversy — particularly that surrounding what many now view as an anachronistic view of sex work — bubbles furiously to the top.
As Elizabeth Nolan Brown pointed out sardonically for Reason, following a previous johns bust in 2015, “These coordinated efforts to entrap people around the country lead to large initial arrest-counts, ensuring them prominent placement in U.S. media. But few outlets ask questions about specific charges, merely accepting police PR that these were predators arrested and not largely adult men and women trying to have consensual sex. Nor do many folks follow up on the results of these stings. If they did, it would become clear that the ‘National John Suppression Initiative’ has naught to do with stopping sexual exploitation of minors.”
Charlotte Alter, who accompanied police during stings for the initiative in Cook County for TIME Magazine, notes, “some human rights organizations, most recently Amnesty International, advocate for the decriminalization of all aspects of sex work, including buying sex.”
Indeed, the International watchdog organization published its policy on protection of the world’s sex workers in 2015. Reiterating the contents of that policy in May last year, Amnesty wrote,
“The policy makes several calls on governments including for them to ensure protection from harm, exploitation and coercion; the participation of sex workers in the development of laws that affect their lives and safety; an end to discrimination and access to education and employment options for all.
“It recommends the decriminalization of consensual sex work, including those laws that prohibit associated activities—such as bans on buying, solicitation and general organization of sex work. This is based on evidence that these laws often make sex workers less safe and provide impunity for abusers with sex workers often too scared of being penalized to report crime to the police. Laws on sex work should focus on protecting people from exploitation and abuse, rather than trying to ban all sex work and penalize sex workers.”
One approach against the illicit sex industry, called the “Nordic Model,” developed in Norway and practiced by authorities in Canada, combats the entangled issues of human trafficking and consensual sex work — by arresting and penalizing customers and pimps, rather than prostitutes, who receive job and other assistance instead of jail time.
Authorities across the U.S. have employed the Nordic Model — including the head of the initiative. TIME reports,
“Dart only has jurisdiction in Cook County, but he’s encouraging officers from all over the country to try the buyer-focused approach. Some cities, like Seattle, have developed their own versions of this strategy but traded notes with Dart. Others, like Phoenix, Cincinnati and Houston, followed Dart’s lead on demand suppression. More than 70 agencies have participated in at least one of Dart’s operations, with more than 2,900 buyers arrested across all jurisdictions since 2011. […]
“Some human rights groups take issue with this approach. On August 11 [2015], Amnesty International voted to recommend the complete decriminalization of prostitution, both for the buyers and sellers, saying that criminal laws against the consensual adult sex trade violates the human rights of sex workers. While UNAIDS and the World Health Organization have previously called for the decriminalization of sex work for public health reasons (in order to stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases), and other groups have advocated the same, Amnesty International is the first major international human rights group to issue a full-throated global public policy recommendation for lifting laws against buying and selling of sex purely on humans rights grounds. Amnesty can’t make or enforce laws, but its recommendations carry international weight.”
Fraught doesn’t begin to describe contention internationally over sex work, human trafficking, child exploitation, and similar issues; but, while heavy-handed operations like the Johns Initiative perform a vital role in rescuing victims who might otherwise have slipped through the cracks or gone unnoticed, human rights advocates maintain the only means to combat sexual, criminal exploitation of youth and adults is to legalize sex work — making regulation, health screenings, insurance, and other benefits available to adults in a voluntary profession — theoretically freeing authorities to target child predators and other offenders.
Theoretically, decriminalization of sex work would play out similarly to that of drugs — a decade-long attempt by Portugal to stem violence, curb prison populations, and rein in an addiction epidemic proved taking punitive drug laws off the books works: the nation achieved all three goals and more. Advocates of legalized sex work posit a similar result, with police free to throw resources at cases of true exploitation and trafficking.
Detractors contend elevating prostitution to acceptable will exacerbate the issue by orders of magnitude, by fueling a parallel black market — similar to reports legal cannabis areas of the U.S. have reinvigorated illicit sales.
Undoubtedly, dragnets targeting prostitution and human trafficking serve victims by connecting them to the appropriate aid and locking true abusers and exploiters away from further criminal activity. Indeed, there are enough stories on a weekly basis, in America and across the globe, that show an epidemic of child exploitation is fostering and in dyer need of being brought to a halt.
However, it’s imperative to keep in mind corporate media’s penchant for shock and awe to deliver a criminally oversimplified version of exceedingly complex truths — and the National Johns Suppression Initiative has thus far been no exception.
Disingenuously presenting a law enforcement operation as only good cheats the child and adult trafficking victims who could have been rescued — were consensual sex work not a focus of policing at all.
“We realize that decriminalization is not a magic bullet for all of the harms faced by sex workers,” wrote Margaret Huang, Amnesty International USA’s interim executive director, in response to a criticism appearing in Rolling Stone of the organization’s advocacy of legal sex work, in June 2016. “Which is why our policy also calls for governments to protect sex workers from harm, exploitation and coercion, and calls for education and employment options for sex workers. Sex workers must also have a say in developing laws that affect their lives and safety. But without decriminalization, they cannot expect equal treatment under the law to achieve these ends.”
A recent report on the number of sexually exploited children in Florida gives insight into a horrific world that is often ignored by the media, and that rarely holds millionaires, politicians and even local officials accountable for their involvement.
A report from the Florida legislature’s Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability concluded that the state’s Department of Children and Family (DCF) and its lead agencies “have not resolved issues related to serving commercially sexually exploited children.”
The report found that in 2016, 356 verified commercially sexually exploited child victims were identified, as opposed to 264 identified in 2015. It noted that many of the victims who were identified earlier were, “both children in child welfare dependency and those living in the community with family—have since been re-victimized, involved with the criminal justice system, or only attended school intermittently.”
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“During 2016, DCF’s Florida Abuse Hotline received 2,013 reports alleging the CSE of children, which is a 57% increase over the 2015 reports. Child protective investigators investigated 1,386 (or 69%) of those reports. Counties with the highest number of CSE reports include Miami-Dade (248), Broward (232), Orange (150), and Hillsborough (144). DCF hotline staff did not refer cases for investigation if the allegation did not rise to the level of reasonable (74%), there were no means to locate the victim (11%), or the alleged perpetrator was not the child’s caregiver (8%). Of the reports that were referred for investigation, most came from DJJ, the Department of Corrections, or criminal justice personnel (20%) and law enforcement (15%).”
In 2016, the National Human Trafficking Hotline received reports of 7,572 human trafficking cases, which was a substantial increase from 5,544 cases in 2015 and 5,042 cases in 2014. Florida ranked third on the list with 550 cases, behind Texas with 670 cases and California with 1,323 cases.
READ MORE: Good Cops Turn In Their Own Officer After He"s Caught on Dashcam Beating Handcuffed Man
Out of the 7,572 human trafficking cases reported in the United States in 2016, the majority or 5,551 were “sex trafficking” cases, and 2,387 of the reported victims were minors.
The report on child sex trafficking in Florida suggested that the increase in victims was due to the process DCF and the Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) use to “select children to screen as well as the screening tool itself may limit accurate identification of CSE child victims.”
The report also noted that 62 percent of the children who were labeled as commercially sexually exported remained “in the community and are referred to voluntary, local services.” As a result, “no data is readily available on whether the children use these services.”
The Free Thought Project has provided extensive coverage of the sex trafficking epidemic in the U.S., especially in relation to minors who become victims after they are kidnapped from their homes and placed in foster care.
In April, two pastors who were foster care advocates were arrested for running a child sex ring in Ohio. The pastors, who had influence on their county’s Child Service’s Board of Trustees, were charged with “recruiting, enticing and transporting people the men knew were under 18 to engage in sex acts for pay.” The trafficking was ongoing for at least three years, and initially began with a 14-year-old girl.
In June, a lawsuit was filed in the case of a 5-year-old girl who was given to the leader of a child sex ring in Arizona. She was taken from her mother who was battling an addiction with substance abuse, and she was put in the custody of a pedophile who sexually abused her, tortured her, and ultimately left her fighting for her life.
READ MORE: Horrifying Video Shows Cops Do Nothing As Man They Shot Dies an Agonizing Death
The recent report from Florida is another reminder that child sex trafficking is a horrific element of the human trafficking epidemic that has been ongoing and increasing in the United States. While government involvement has always been an element, it has yet to put a stop to the increasing number of children who are subjected to life-altering abuse on a daily basis.
In late 2016, the government’s spin machine made it a point to feature “pizza gate,” only to mock anyone who would ever believe it to be true. The thought that high-level government officials in the U.S. would or could ever be involved in sex-trafficking or pedophilia was presented as far-fetched conspiracy theory, only believed by the fringe elements of society. But as The Free Thought Project has reported on numerous occasions, pedophilia involving high-level government officials is becoming the norm rather than the exception.
In the North Bengal region of India, a child welfare officer, India’s equivalent of a Child Protective Services official was arrested for her role in a child-trafficking ring. Sasmita Ghosh’s arrest makes the seventh as of late. The State’s Criminal Investigative Department (CID) made the arrests. According to the Hindu, “The CID had unearthed the child trafficking racket during raids at homes and nursing homes in Baduria area of North 24 Parganas district, in Behala in the southern fringes of Kolkata and some other parts of south Bengal in November last year.”
Abortion clinics in the area were convincing mothers to give birth to their children in exchange for money ranging between $1,400 and $4,500 USD. Other birthing centers told mothers their children were stillborn, when they weren’t, allowing the clinic to steal the babies for sale on the black market. The children were transported in bread baskets to nursing homes in the area where they would remain until they were sold into servitude, as sex slaves, or brothels.
“It is a huge network of NGOs, nursing homes, doctors and middlemen dealing in illegal adoption and baby trafficking that the police have busted. Our men are now building on the huge leads they have already got in this case,” Rajesh Kumar, CID’s Additional Director General told the press. Additionally, investigators believe foreigners were buying the children. Currency from other countries was found at the same time the children were discovered. Several corpses and skeletons of infants were also unearthed in the raided businesses.
READ MORE: Sex Trafficking Victim: Police Not Only Failed to Stop the Rape Trade, But they Participated In It
Child trafficking is on the rise in the U.S. In 2006, a woman living in North Carolina, Mercedes Farquharson, fled the country when it was discovered she’d been using two young girls as house slaves, forced to farm the land, and do all the household chores, along with cooking and cleaning. In 2009, she was arrested in Bulgaria, where she’d fled to escape justice.
The trafficking of children isn’t limited to lowly child-protective service workers either. Hama Amadou, an opposition leader in the Sahel state of Niger was sentenced to one year in prison for providing babies to Niger’s elite society. “Prosecutors claim that Amadou was one of a group of people accused of smuggling babies from Nigeria via Benin to wealthy couples in Niger by falsely claiming the parenthood of around 30 children,” according to Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international newsgroup. Childlessness is Niger is looked down upon, so one way the elitists solved their own infertility problem was to take someone else’s child as their own.
DW described what happened after they acquired a child, “At the turn of the last decade, Niger’s elite went through a baby boom. Women who had been childless for years were suddenly celebrating the birth of their first child.” The miraculous blessings of motherhood reportedly came at the expense of someone else’s presumably stolen, purchased, or seized baby. Amadou was tried in asentia and his lawyer says the allegations are politically motivated.
Closer to home, Child Protective Services, as TFTP has consistently reported, is authorized to kidnap children at will, and place those children in foster care homes. The government’s own agency charged with protecting children, routinely displaces babies, children, and adolescents away from their parents in order to supposedly protect those children. Many of those same CPS workers are abusers as well, who sometimes place those kidnapped children in the homes of sexual predators, where they are routinely victimized. The terrorist organization evokes fear in the hearts of so many parents. The power CPS possesses is legally unmatched in all of society. If you’d like to peruse our archives of CPS articles, you can do so by
READ MORE: Over 100 Children Accuse UN Peacekeepers of Rape — Not a Single Soldier Charged
Many of those same CPS workers are abusers as well, who sometimes place those kidnapped children in the homes of sexual predators, where they are routinely victimized. The terrorist organization evokes fear in the hearts of so many parents. The power CPS possesses is legally unmatched in all of society. If you’d like to peruse our archives of CPS articles, you can do so by clicking here. Children are being ripped from their parents for something as innocent and well-intentioned as homeschooling.
If child trafficking arrests of government officials can happen around the world, why is it so far-fetched to think it cannot and does not happen here in the U.S.? The reality of the situation is that it is not at all far-fetched and even admitted. But the American spin machine is able to make anyone who talks about it look like a crazy person. But the problems is getting so large, these sickos are having a hard time keeping it under wraps. As the Free Thought Project previously reported, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney says if they government actually investigated it, child trafficking would destroy both Democrats and Republicans.
It was recently reported that UN peacekeepers will not be charged for sex crimes against children that they allegedly violated while they were stationed in the Central African Republic. The French Government investigated the French soldiers who were accused of the attacks, but they found no evidence of wrongdoing, as often happens when organizations investigate their own. French prosecutors claim that they had insufficient evidence to charge the soldiers, but over 100 children have leveled accusations against them. Do they expect the world to believe that all of these children are lying?
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said that the agency defers to local governments in situations like this.
“So obviously we’ll keep an eye on this. But as we’ve said, it is the responsibility of member states to fully investigate and hopefully prosecute crimes. The fight against impunity for these horrendous actions has to be a partnership between the UN and member states,” Dujarric said.
There is a second investigation that is currently ongoing which involves UN peacekeepers and sexual assault in the Central African Republic. However, it is not clear whether or not this investigation is relating to the same accusations — or new crimes that have taken place since.
This is not the first time that UN workers have been accused of these types of crimes. After the UN has entered areas like Cambodia, Mozambique, Bosnia, Sudan and Kosovo, there was an explosion of sex trafficking and numerous reports of abuse. In the past several years, the UN was caught attempting to cover-up the fact that there were 231 people in Haiti who claimed they were sexually violated by UN peacekeepers, and were forced to perform sexual acts in exchange for food and supplies that were intended as relief packages.
There are almost too many cases to list in which high-profile public figures or organizations were accused in pedophilia or human trafficking cases. However, they almost always dodge any prosecution or public scrutiny due to their control of the legal system and media.
There have been many cases in recent history where establishment figures have been caught up in child prostitution rings but quickly had the story swept under the rug.
One such case was on June 29, 1989, when the Washington Times’ Paul M. Rodriguez and George Archibald reported on a Washington D.C. prostitution ring that had intimate connections with the White House and President George H.W. Bush. It was suspected that this was connected with the Franklin prostitution ring that was being exposed at the same time, in a different part of the country.
That story involved the manager of the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union in Nebraska. His name was Lawrence “Larry” King and he was also a prominent politician. Various unconnected victims accused him of transporting them around the country to be used as sex slaves for politicians. When the accusations finally came to light, the victims were railroaded out of court and threatened into recanting their statements, thus making themselves guilty of perjury in the process.
The perjury was unfortunately enough to drop the case and actually send some of the victims to jail. The truth of the matter didn’t come out until former Nebraska State Senator John DeCamp went back to reexamine the case and discovered that the accusations were indeed true.
Human trafficking is an industry of the ruling class, it always has been. Your average blue-collar, white-collar people aren’t buying slaves, and they certainly aren’t selling them either! This is still very much a part of western culture, even companies with major government contracts have been accused of organizing full-scale slave rings. These companies have not only been protected by their governments, but they were also able to keep the contracts and subsidies that they had prior to the accusations.
Some of the world’s largest multinational corporations such as DynCorp and Halliburton were exposed as major players in the global human trafficking market. These companies did not work alone, but cooperated with each other through various subsidiaries and had the luxury of government protection.
When suspicion was brought upon these companies it was swept under the rug by government officials. Even high-ranking members of the establishment such as Donald Rumsfeld were implicit in covering up this scandal. On March 11th 2005, he was questioned by Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and he admitted on the record that the allegations did have credibility, but he pushed the blame off onto a few “rogue” employees. He used the “few bad apples” line that the government always dishes out when they are caught up in a scandal.
Although Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials claimed that they would look into the situation, they actually prevented any serious investigations from taking place. This happens every day, even organizations like the UN and NATO have come under fire for running slave rings out of third world countries when they are on “peacekeeping missions.”
