There are already so many layers to child exploitation and sex slavery to comprehend and it is this Survival Sex, which is the most common within the refugee crisis.

Whilst the military style camps are far more controlled and effective at managing who comes and goes, the majority of the camps here are open and uncontrolled. It is in the relative safety of these camps that predators seek out the destitute, the alone and hungry. Whether this is a mother wanting to feed her family or one of the many unaccompanied children, the idea that people are having to give over their bodies to meet primary human needs is horrifying.

Having recently attended ‘Breaking the Chains’, a gathering of counter trafficking organisations (from state and private sectors in Athens), we learned that an estimated 92% of young refugees are male. It is a challenge to our paradigms and sensibilities to be confronted with sexual exploitation that is not primarily happening to girls.

Its difficult to imagine being a child in a refugee camp stuck in limbo as many are, not moving onto any obvious future in Europe. To be one of those who is slipping between the gaps, falling prey to those who want to abuse your body and mind.

This isn’t new in Greece, even before the crisis in one port, we met with a group who were having to deal with 40 new unaccompanied children a month. We witnessed these kids sleeping rough near the ports where they were being intimidated by police and being groomed or coerced by men for sex.

But the crisis is here and so even away from the camps young boys with all their belongings packed inside Save the Children, Samaritans Purse or a myriad of other charity ‘back packs’ are wandering the streets aimlessly, continuing to be vulnerable to traffickers and abusers.

Fortunately, there are those trying to locate and identify children who have fallen through these gaps or even those who appear safely in the system but are still being abused in the camps or on the streets.

It is our hope that CBI can soon take activities into the camps as a means of engaging these children, to make them aware of the risks and to whom they can report or seek safety. Hearing the term Survival Sex and children in the same sentence is something we would like to never hear again. If we the ‘good people sounds better’ are not able to meet the primary needs of safety, food and shelter for children there are those who will exploit those needs.

Children are always worst hit in a crisis, always first to be exploited and most in need of our focused action.

The post Survival Sex appeared first on Cross Border Initiatives.

Well, I’ve still been head down ass up focused on the trafficking work, mostly in Greece these days as I’ve really needed to nail down one of the projects I was running for Love146 (who have stepped back from the youth prevention education in Europe to focus on care, requiring me to re establish www.crossborderinitiatives.org). As a friend once said, ‘you need to aim at something if you want to hit something’. So it’s been Greece Greece Greece for a while now.

It’s very difficult to say your focusing your energy on working in Greece with an eventual move there (this year) and not feel a twinge of awkwardness. For some reason I am pre wired to feel you cant say your working on Justice and Mercy work in a country which is for many a very beautiful holiday destination.
It’s like fundraising or trying to draw attention to a horrible issue in the Bahamas but perhaps recent global reporting on Greek problems means I have no need to worry.
The thing is, even with the last 5 years of suffocating austerity since the financial crisis you could still visit all the main tourist traps and be oblivious to a proud nations crumbling underbelly.

Now

I wanted to share my stay in Greece from a week ago while it is still fresh in my mind, because in the 8 weeks since I was there previous, even I could see that things were much much worse.

Vic (my wife Victoria) and I were there to meet state and private organisations that work with children, migrants and human trafficking. Vic was getting a feel for how she might engage usefully when we move this year with her experience as a senior occupational therapist working with social services in England.
In addition to this we endeavoured to bring a video snapshot of our unique perspective of the dark side of Greek life to our friends in the UK.

I have been visiting the brothel streets and ‘white light’ districts of Athens for some years now, since 2009 when I first came to Greece in the middle of a 5,000 mile research road trip. At this time we were visiting projects, safe homes and street work to expand our understanding on Human Trafficking issues. I remember being shown around by a lady working to educate school aged children about the sex industry who asked that we “please wear sensible shoes or at least, no flip flops ! ? “
She didn’t explain but I realised pretty soon that the rough low rent neighbourhoods, which are home to hundreds of brothels, were also home to addicts and dealers with discarded needles everywhere.

Needles

I need to digress a little here away from trafficking because each little thing triggers a myriad of nasty stories in my mind, like this one and perhaps my writing here is meant to be not just informative for you, but cathartic for me.

My first experience of addiction and HIV was the ‘no open shoes’ visit I’ve mentioned. My second was stepping over semi conscious addicts on main street as I walked just yards from major tourist traps and then it was a visit with my 16 year old son and a co worker Daisy. The counter trafficking group we were visiting who work to support the girls in forced prostitution exclaimed that, “you must be pretty hard core and serious about the work!” What? “Well you have picked a hotel next door to the bar where the pimps drink while the girls are working, and just across the road from our drop in centre”.
Thank you easy Jet for your hotel recommendation, ill be sure to leave positive comments on trip advisor for you, like how interesting it was to arrive with a guy pissing up the hotel wall, and walk past the guy who had dropped his trousers to inject a freshly loaded needle of heroin in a vein in his crotch.

I visited a clinic once, which gave clean needles, counselled addicts and gave free HIV screening only to be told that the Government policy for giving a bundle of cash to people who had tested positive to get an apartment, had backfired. Some desperate people were now deliberately contracting HIV to get the cash for their drugs.
Mostly the addicts are destitute Greeks but there are migrants too who have hit rock bottom. I have learned too that Heroin’s ability to briefly take you away from all the crap in your life is no respecter of age. The dealers are pretty obvious; they have a bum bag at the front to deal their pre-loaded needles from. They seem a helpful bunch, never too busy that they wouldn’t find a vein and inject for you if your totally shit faced or In this instance your too old and disabled. Ill never forget the image of a sun soaked side street with a dealer injecting into the groin of a wheel chair bound man who must have been in his seventies.

On this occasion I didn’t see many addicts as I normally would clustered into one street, I figured the annual purge had occurred, where the police move addicts and dealers on to another location to give this neighbourhood a break and the next a nightmare.

Its just part of life, that you cant just be somewhere and only be aware of the part that you have chosen to work on. Just this week I saw elderly men asleep on pavements so narrow that two people cannot pass, they were asleep with a begging cup in their hands and literally every single person had to step over them, one old man, with a history and story of what led them to this, after the other.

Scenery Clash

There is the massive toy shop in the centre of Monisteraki, a window 30 feet by a hundred feet full of every bright playful colour imaginable, and outside this were make shift homes with people sleeping on blankets, people, like the men sleeping on the pavements, who were not there two months before. I say they were make shift homes because these were not the long term homeless of London or New York with a blanket and a dog, these were people who had just landed in desperation, with boxes and boxes of their life possessions next to them.

What’s crazy to me is there is all this going on for the Greek people and the horrors inflicted on the estimated 20,000 women and children in forced prostitution… and then the refugee crisis land on your doorstep, literally.
Oh my word, the insanity now of EU leaders, stopping refugees moving out of Greece yet doing nothing to stop the 2,000 plus refugees arriving every single day.

Vic and I had a less than cheery little day filming for our newsletter. We had walked the many brothel streets and addict hang out and were trying to make our way to Victoria Metro Station on foot, as this has become a central public bed space for the refugees. It’s an attractive square with restaurants all around and people eating from a table full of plates chatting and ruminating, just ten feet from refugee families eating food hand outs from foil trays, almost as culturally disposable as its recipients.
The square was full of people in limbo with no easy solutions in site.
The startling, mind-boggling thing is that a few squares away, I was as likely to find a public feeding programme with a queue of Greek people of all ages desperate from growing poverty. It gives me an unavoidable sense that when I return in a few weeks time that the scale of issues In Greece will be tangibly worse.

It is actually possible to walk in many places in Athens and see that life is normal, or at least come away feeling that Greece and its resilient people are doing ok and that it is all going to work out. Holding this view would be foolish I think. Whilst many are still finding ways to keep their heads up and whilst so many young people and couples are ‘getting by’ being subsidised by their parents who have probably had their pensions slashed in half, there are those who wont make it.
I’m not saying any of this to make you depressed but neither can I say this to give you any false sense of optimism that things wont get worse before they get better. For some individuals I don’t think things could possibly get any worse at all.

Indignity

Finally just one more picture of the clashing cultural and economic world that is Greek society today, witnessed as Vic and I took our daily walkabout.
On our way to one square I saw a man probably in his mid sixties, he didn’t look homeless but as I saw him lean/fall forward to support himself with his head on a car roof I could see he had been drinking. This was outside a packed restaurant with people eating happily oblivious at street side tables.
I felt for them and I assumed the man was about to urinate in the street (as we had seen an elderly woman do the day before) but why he was supporting himself with his head was that he needed to have both hands free to lift his shirt, removed his colostomy bag and drain its contents into the street. If you don’t know, a colostomy is a surgical procedure, which bypasses the bowel and requires you to have a bag attached to the outside of your body.

For me, sadly I was just another voyeur passing by the complexity of what this man had been through and would continue to go through. But at least I am a passer buy who is trying to address one of the issues which has run riot in Greece over the last decade, that of human trafficking in a destination and transit country for people treated as meat. As I suggested earlier, you have to aim at something.

Scale

There is a problem of scale in Greece; this is obvious at every level.
There is a crisis of the scale of hungry destitute people and those who have allowed their lives to be sufficiently disrupted to provide food and address housing needs.
There is a crisis of scale for the disorientated groups of refugees sitting on street corners or camping out in squares and those helping them feel human and perhaps caring enough to let them know their story and futures matter. That whether they stay or move on – their humanity matters.
There is a crisis of scale between the long established sex industry and its demand in Greece (now largely full of trafficked girls) and those who seek to bring emancipation and make this psychological and physical abuse less acceptable.
In reality, Greece has a huge trafficking problem and in my experience, the least amount of people seeking to address it compared to the rest of Europe

One thing the Greek people know better than the rest of us is that you cannot wait, nor rely on Government to solve your personal problems nor that of your society. This crisis of scale can only be addressed by people like you, sufficiently disrupted by what you see around you to aim at something… and hopefully hit it.

The post GREEK SALAD WITH A SIDE OF EXCREMENT SIR? appeared first on Cross Border Initiatives.

Having taken a road trip from the U.K. through Eastern Europe in January, I’m now on the road (or the air, more accurately) toward the Love146 Round Home in Asia. I have to move quick while the Icelandic volcano is on lunch break. I found myself in a window seat next to a couple of what my dad would call “hard working lads”: sun-drawn skin from a construction site causing an unnaturally furrowed brow, one in his 50s the other mid-20s.
break
I’m flying out of the U.K. at a time where the first three pages of most tabloids are still the story of the Cumbria shootings of Derrick Bird which left 12 dead. On the morning I leave, the headline is “Gunman’s Double Life as a Sex Pervert” accompanied by images of a Thailand sex bar with scantily clad girls dancing. My neighbor for the flight introduces himself by showing and tapping his finger on the page, stating, “Now that’s got to be a bar we need to find.” Our destination for this flight is Bangkok, Thailand.
He seemed to assume my travel had similar interests. I commented that I wouldn’t be stopping there, but heading on to the Philippines. “Not been there,” he replied with a grin and a wink, “We’ll have to try that on our next trip.” As though I had superior knowledge as a fellow sex tourist.
As it turned out, this was the older gentleman’s fourth trip to Bangkok. This occasion it was to be a celebration of his divorce. He, followed by some other friends on a later flight, would be spending six weeks in Bangkok to watch England play their world cup matches in tacky English-friendly bars and to have sex with girls. In fact, the five friends’ common denominator was that they all go to the same pub in the U.K. It was clear the guy in front of me had been primary evangelist to the group concerning the draw of sex tourism. He was a true believer, and this, the best possible use of his time and money.
I sat and wondered at how the sexualisation of culture and the normalization of sexual exploitation is far from something passive. In fact, it is being assertively pushed along with a nod, a wink and a wry smile. It’s not hidden smoky corners, but around the open public places of life and work. In fact, the U.K. killer in today’s tabloids had often shown his friends video footage of his own sex acts with young girls in Thailand.
I asked the older gent, “Is it true that girls come up to you as soon as you walk into a bar?”

“You bet.” 

“But doesn’t that just get on your nerves?” 

“Only when you have been up all the previous night having sex with them!”
I could tell I was in the presence of a genuine stereotype: a guy who travels for sex because it’s easy, uncomplicated and no longer on his moral compass as even questionable behavior. He was another one of those guys who genuinely feel that the girls he pays for sex want to be there. He believes he is in fact doing them a favor, or worse (such a common statement), that they are there because they enjoy it. He has no comprehension that the smile masking their suffering is to avoid a beating from their pimp for disappointing a client.
I found out later in the flight that these weren’t rough tough co-workers. It was a father and son. Slightly stunned, I sat and pondered our own Western mindset and moral decay where a father would want to share his participation in sexual exploitation as a bonding experience with his own son.
Those who travel for sex tourism undertake a dehumanization of the other, in this instance those who are in the bondage of sexual slavery, either forced by fear of violence or through the oppression of economic poverty. For those of us who live in places where our fellow countrymen are booking sex holidays, we must re-sensitize ourselves to the humanity of these wonderful, beautiful and precious people. We must spread the word that these women and girls are someone’s daughter, sister or mother. Let’s work to abolish myths that tell us they are less than worthy of our high regard and respect. Let’s tell their stories. Let’s honor their lives. Let’s sing and shout about their humanity.
I have been asking myself a lot of questions since I arrived in Manila and will, I am sure, be kicking myself all the way to my next encounter with a sexual predator. The sad answer is no, I didn’t confront their thinking. I have been around pimps, pushers, traffickers and victims in Europe where it is the girls who are crossing borders to a location for sex. Until this moment, I had not had contact with “users,” where it is they who are crossing borders for sex. This was totally new.
Honestly, I was utterly shocked and rattled by the normality of it all for them. My thinking process was dominated not by confronting “them,” or challenging “their worldview,” but by the confrontation taking place within “me,” the challenge to my own worldview. I was very uncomfortable as I realized the stewardess and others on the flight probably thought we were traveling together and may have assumed I was a sex tourist as well. As I looked around the plane, I wondered how many would even care. How many were going for the same reasons. This thought has plagued me since arriving in the Philippines.
Sometimes there are encounters with sexual exploitation where I am an activist; engaging with people and on behalf of people around these issues—where confrontation can be appropriate action. And sometimes there are times, like many this past January driving the trafficking routes of Europe, where I am a painfully silent observer, learning and gathering intelligence for later battles.
Occasionally I walk away wondering if I lost a fight or missed an opportunity. In this instance, I wore the mask of an interested party and gained as much real information as I could. Sometimes I walk away feeling I have failed someone—a victim or a perpetrator. In reality, I have to draw comfort that I did learn and gain understanding and while I may lose some fights, we will ultimately win the war. This helps me sleep at night, on the increasingly rare occasions that I am able. It certainly makes me value those who work covertly on the streets in victim identification and those who work undercover as a primary focus of their contribution to ending child sex slavery.
As I have said above, much of what took place in the interaction with my two traveling companions was about a work going on in me, and trust me, it has and will continue to add fuel to the fire of my own abolition endeavors alongside you.

The post 12 Hours with a sex tourist appeared first on Cross Border Initiatives.

I have been involved in counter trafficking for around six years now, and whilst I have learned a great many things about trafficking and made use of that time, the reality is I could have been engaged in this issue much sooner than I was.

When I speak to groups I often ask how people came to find out about the issue for the first time and it is almost without question via one form of media, arts or film. In fact I first became aware of human trafficking when I watched a tv drama called Sex Traffic about how Moldovan women were being trafficked into the UK for prostitution under the guise of a network of language schools run by the traffickers.
I was particularly disturbed by the rape scene which is how the girls will was broken to be more accepting of their new work. Perhaps this is one reason that whilst it won 8 respected TV awards, so few people have seen it, after all, its not a nice night in on the sofa viewing.

When I say I was disturbed, I mean I took personal offence at what was taking place, and so often people involved in social movements are angered or disturbed by a personal experience or that of another person.

My question to myself is, why? Why, if I had been so impacted and offended by my newly found knowledge of this issue, did it take me another 5 years to actually get involved, to turn my anger in to action and my offence into fruitful engagement?

As I have spoken with others over the years it has become clear that many people are shocked when they hear about the issue for the first time. First there is a moment of disbelief, and then it slowly sinks in that this is actually happening to someone, somewhere right now.
The next thing that happens is deeper awareness, often people sit at a laptop and type ‘trafficking’ into Google to find there are pages and pages of news articles about how and where this happens. Not to mention the sudden reality check that this is not an ‘over there’ issue, but an ‘over here’ and down our own street issue.

It is here that the Ice Monster begins to do his thing, at this early stage, the moment of realization that this is happening, but also the colossal scale of the issue, the numbers involved and the diversity of exploitation that is taking place. Then it happens – BOOM, The Freeze Factor set in as we become unable to see how little old me as an individual could possibly make any difference what so ever to something so big.

Maybe we join a few Facebook groups or feel a nudge of guilt once in a while and make a donation. But the reality is that yes its huge, yes it’s everywhere and happening at such a rate it doesn’t seem possible in this age. Welcome to modern slavery.
It is on a scale that governments cant stamp it out, on a scale that charities and ngo’s cant fence it in and is happening at the hands of professional criminals for whom it is their biggest most profitable business and they are good at it.
This means that it is going to take all of us, and it means that it is going to take you sticking with it, and pushing through The Freeze Factor long enough to find something that you can do.

As I meet people I think one of the hurdles to progress here is the Right question being asked all too frequently to the Wrong people. It can be really limiting in scope to make people like CBI and other charities and ngo’s the primary place you ask ‘What Can I Do’.
The reason for this is as groups we only have a small number of things we tend to reply with? Sign a petition, do a bake sale, join a local group, wear a badge or buy a T shirt. All of which have their place and we will always have important things that need you to be midwives to see them born and making a difference.

But in reality the responsibility for finding a pair of shoes with your name on, for your unique attributes, skill set and perhaps entrepreneurial gifting needs to remain your own. To simply settle for one of our containers of ideas, could greatly limit your reach and long-term involvement with the issue, which is going to take you, me and us, time and energy to crack

Just keep going long enough to find your part to play, keep moving, keep growing in your understanding of the issue and don’t stop long enough to let the frost settle on you.

Gaz Kishere

The post The Freeze Factor appeared first on Cross Border Initiatives.