Looking for old friend

Looking for Ann Cole. Use to live in Oakdale Farms in 60's early 70's Cathy Myrick little Cat looking. If anybody knows please advise.

UPDATE:
I found some of my old friends from Oakdale Farms. I found the Ruttenbergs switch wasn't to hard they never moved. Barry Nixon and Jesse Southall, Clem Southall died. Their sister Gail died also. Still looking for Ann Cole I was told she moved out of state.

There's Something about Jessie at OneTrueMedia.com

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Remembering Natasha LaMay Hall

“If you keep calling 911, we’ll arrest you both”. That was the last message 17 year old Natasha heard from police before she was murdered, according to Natasha’s mother.

Natasha Hall was a 17 year old junior at DeLand High School. Her boyfriend Clay Kufner was a DeLand graduate who was preparing to enter the Air Force. They had a rocky relationship that Natasha was attempting to bring to a close when she broke up with Clay in the fall of 2007.

Cheri Hall, Natasha’s mother said her daughter had been trying to break up with Clay for the past few months. “She was trying to let Clay down easily,” Cheri lamented.

But Clay wouldn’t accept it. His Mustang was a regular fixture in front of the Hall’s residence and his calls were unending. If he wasn’t invited in, he threatened to beat the door down. If he wasn’t told where Natasha was going, he tried to follow her. According to friends and neighbors, he was a controlling, jealous young man who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Natasha’s Mom began calling police for help in the late summer of 2007. She reported his stalking behavior, hoping it might deter him. She called again in November – advising police that the possessive man was beating on their door and threatening them. Another call went out in December. The Halls reported that Clay had beaten Natasha up, but didn’t file charges.

A short time after, a police report was finally filed when Clay physically restrained Natasha after she refused to agree to his demands. This did not stop Clay. It only made him more abusive.

The new year, brought more abuse – which increasingly became more physical. In late January Clay punched Natasha, and yes, the police were called again.

When Clay arrived again at the Hall’s door, beating on the door, Natasha was afraid and called police one more time, never knowing it would be her last. She was told that if she called one more time, she would be arrested.

A series of police reports from the DeLand Police Department indicate there were nine incidents of harassment involving Clay between November of 2007 and February 13th. At no time did the police ever arrest him.

Friday, the day after Valentines day, Clay broke into the Hall’s house when no one was home, filtering through the house for evidence of another boy in Natasha’s life. He found what he was looking for, evidence that Natasha truly was trying to move on. Clay snapped.

He parked his familiar Mustang down the street and awaited Natasha’s return to the house. He watched as she went into the house and waited for her to come back out. Her friend had come with her, and the two had planned to go back out. Clay stopped them on the porch to confront Natasha.

Neighbors report hearing an argument break out on the front porch of Natasha’s house. They didn’t think much of it, because they knew who Clay was. They knew the couple’s stormy history. They knew his temper. That all changed when the sound of a gunshot echoed through the neighborhood.

Clay had shot Natasha in the head, as he screamed at Natasha’s friend to leave. She did. Clay pointed the gun again at Natasha and shot again. He turned the gun on himself and shot again. Florida police found both youth on Natasha’s porch, marinated in a pool of blood. There was no longer a need to arrest either of them, as the police had promised.


Link to another story I posted :http://cjaye57.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/natashas-voice/



source: http://cjaye57.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/natashas-voice-3/

Man goes undercover to combat child sex slavery

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.



source: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/02/09/cambodia.wus.child.sex.trafficking/

Child sex trade study shines light on Ohio

Nearly 1,100 American-born youths in Ohio, or about one in every three runaways who have been gone for more than two weeks, are forced into the sex trade each year, according to a new study released Wednesday, Feb. 10.

Another 783 foreign-born people have been forced into labor or sex trafficking in Ohio, according to the first-of-its-kind study.

“There are victims now in modern day slavery,” said Celia Williamson, a University of Toledo professor and lead author . She said the estimates are conservative.

In additon to the 1,078 children estimated to be forced into the sex trade, another 2,879 American-born children ages 12 to 17 are at-risk for sex trafficking and 2,534 foreign-born people are at risk of forced labor or sex trafficking, according to a 69-page study by the Ohio Trafficking in Persons Study Commission.

“This is clear evidence that we need to do more, much more, to protect our youth in Ohio,” said Attorney General Richard Cordray, chairman of the commission.

Contributing factors include untrained first responders, the lack of a stand-alone law addressing trafficking and the state’s high numbers of vulnerable youth, the study said.

“The people who are likely to encounter trafficking aren’t likely to recognize it. It is very analogous to domestic violence 30 years ago,” said Mark Ensalaco, a professor in the University of Dayton’s Human Rights Studies Department.

The criminal justice system mistakenly treats teens as prostitutes who should be arrested and punished rather than as victims, the study said. Additionally, customers in the sex trade remain protected, rarely facing prosecution in Ohio.

State Sen. Teresa Fedor, D-Toledo, who serves on the commission, said she plans to introduce a bill this month that will mirror federal law prohibiting human trafficking. A year ago, lawmakers added stiffer penalties for crimes associated with trafficking but did not pass a stand-alone statute like those in 42 other states.

“State laws do play a role in the decision-making of human trafficking organizations that are sophisticated and networked,” the report said. “Those more sophisticated trafficking rings are aware of the laws and potential risk of doing business in a particular U.S. state.”

Toledo ranks fourth behind Miami, Portland and Las Vegas among U.S. cities in terms of arrests, investigations and rescues of minor sex trafficking victims.

Dayton Police Chief Richard

Biehl said there has been no direct evidence of human trafficking in the city in recent years. But, he said, it would be naive to believe it is not happening here.s

“If it’s that close, to say it doesn’t exist here would be blind,” he said. “We lack good data or intelligence to the degree to which it exists.”



source: http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/ohio-news/child-sex-trade-study-shines-light-on-ohio-541564.html

Slavery Today Modern Day

Man Sells Foster Daughter Into Prostitution

Pimps can be strangers to their child victims, but they are often someone the victim trusts, like a boyfriend, a parent, or a family member. In a case out of Maryland recently, Shelby Lewis sold his 12-year-old foster daughter, along with three other girls, into prostitution — the price of the “rent” he charged them for living in his home. This case is an excellent case study of what domestic minor sex trafficking looks like in the U.S., since it has a number of very common factors present.

* First, the victim was a part of the foster care system. It’s common for American girls who are eventually trafficked by pimps to have been in foster care at one point in their lives. The connection between foster care and trafficking is due to both the vulnerability of young people without stable homes and the dysfunction of many foster care systems in the U.S.

Second, the pimp was someone the victim knew as a protector. While pimps can be strangers, they often approach victims first as boyfriends, friends, stepfathers, family members, etc. They groom the victim to rely on them and then claim, as Lewis did, that the cost of their protection and love is prostitution.

Third, the victims started in their early teens. Lewis first began pimping his foster daughter out when she was 12. He also sold three other girls, who he began exploiting at 13, 14, and 16. The average age of entry into prostitution is 12-14 in the U.S., so the ages of the victims in this case are typical.

Fourth, one of his victims was registered with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It’s not unusual for children who are reported missing, either as runaways or as kidnapping victims, end up in the hands of pimps like Lewis.

Lastly, child pornography makes an appearance in this case, as it does in many others. Lewis had pictures of his victims tied to beds in sexual poses at his apartment. Pimps can earn money by selling pornographic images of the girls they exploit in addition to selling the girls themselves.

While one of these factors might not be present in all cases of domestic minor sex trafficking, they are certainly present in a number of them. This case is an example of how the issue of child trafficking in the U.S. is deeply connected to the need for reform of the foster care system and better education for girls. The questions this case begs are much broader than just those related to human trafficking: Why are foster youths so susceptible to trafficking? Why are men buying girls so young for sex? It’s a reminder that we must always view trafficking within the context of social issues pimps utilize to help them traffic girls.



source: http://humantrafficking.change.org/blog/view/man_sells_foster_daughter_into_prostitution