Operation Twisted Traveler

A Norwalk man and two others landed at Los Angeles International Airport on Monday and walked straight into the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

Erik Peeters, 41, of Norwalk, Ronald Boyajian, 49, of Menlo Park, and Jack Sporich, 75, of Sedona, Ariz., were the first three men charged with sexually exploiting children in Cambodia under a recent federal enforcement initiative called Operation Twisted Traveler.

Although other Californians have been caught and tried for sex crimes in Southeast Asia before, the three are the first snared under the new program.

The three men, who have been previously convicted of sex offenses in the U.S., face up to 30 years per charge if convicted. The trio are charged under the 2003 PROTECT Act, which strengthened laws related to predatory crimes committed by Americans outside of the United States.

The three were arrested by the Cambodian National Police and were detained before being expelled and placed under the supervision of ICE agents.

They are scheduled to appear in federal court today.

While Cambodians arrested for crimes in the United States are subject to prosecution and sentencing here before expulsion, an agreement between Cambodian and U.S. authorities allows the men to be sent to the U.S. for prosecution.

This is important because, according to Jeffrey Blom of the International Justice Mission, a nongovernment organization
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that helps gather evidence against sex criminals in foreign countries, some foreigners convicted of crimes in Cambodia have been able to bribe their way out of prosecution or sentencing.

Peeters is accused of engaging in sex with at least three Cambodian boys, including a 12-year-old, since his arrival there in May 2008.

Boyajian allegedly had sex with a 10-year-old Vietnamese girl in a notorious sex-trafficking area outside of Phnom Penh called Kilo-11. And Sporich is alleged to have sexually abused at least one Cambodian boy.

A joint effort by ICE and the Department of Justice working with Cambodian police and nongovernment organizations in Cambodia, Operation Twisted Traveler seeks to identify and prosecute so-called “sex tourists,” who travel to Cambodia and Southeast Asia to engage in sex with children.

Calling Cambodia “ground zero” for sex tourism, U.S. Attorney Thomas O’Brien said with the help of Cambodian officials the United States was providing a new emphasis in the country.

Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for ICE, said the cooperation with Cambodian police is a new and unprecedented development, and Robert Schoch, special agent in charge for ICE, said the cooperation has allowed the U.S. to take a proactive stance in seeking out sex offenders in Cambodia. He added that the U.S. has been working with local officials on investigation and evidence-gathering techniques that will strengthen cases in U.S. courts.

In Long Beach, the news of the arrests was well-received.

Sara Pol-Lim, executive director of the United Cambodian Community, said many Cambodian immigrant parents in the United States worry for their minor children who had to stay behind for various reasons.

Zeshan Khan, who is part of the Stella Link Children’s Foundation, a nonprofit that works to fight the exploitation of Cambodians for illicit sex, said he hopes events such as Monday’s announcement will help continue to shine light on an ongoing problem in Cambodia.

John Morton, Homeland Security assistant secretary for ICE, issued a warning to would-be sex tourists.

“To those American travelers who abuse other people’s children, no matter where you go, we will follow you to the ends of the earth if need be,” he said. “We will find you, and we will prosecute you.”

source:http://www.presstelegram.com/crime/ci_13242466

Women the new pimps in human sex trafficking trade

WOMEN are emerging as the pimps of the global trade in humans with a third of countries reporting more female traffickers than male, a United Nations study shows.

The first international report into the scope of human trafficking, published yesterday, found a disproportionate number of female perpetrators, more than in any other crime, selling other women into slavery in countries including Australia.

With demand for cheap goods and services rising with the fall of the world economy, experts fear labour exploitation will grow.

Sex slavery accounts for 79 per cent of all human trafficking, most victims being women and girls, says the UN Office on Drugs and Crime's Global Report On Trafficking In Persons.

It used data from 155 countries to establish patterns in trafficking and what individual nations were doing to fight it.

The office's executive director, Antonio Maria Costa, was alarmed by cases in which victims went on to become ringleaders in the trade. "We need to understand the psychological, financial and coercive reasons why women recruit other women into slavery," he said.

After sex, the second most common trade was in forced labour. These victims were harder to identify than sex slaves, whose work was highly visible and concentrated in cities and along major roads, the report said. By contrast, forced labourers worked in mines, factories and in private homes as domestic slaves.

"Their numbers will surely swell as the economic crisis deepens the pool of potential victims," Mr Costa said.

The view was echoed by Jennifer Burn, the director of the Anti-Slavery Project at the University of Technology, Sydney. She said Australia's visa system was open to exploitation. "We have a visa system built around the idea that we have a skills shortage," Professor Burn said.

Trafficked people could arrive as students and temporary skilled workers, and more sophisticated methods of protecting and detecting these people were needed, she said. Increased public awareness of modern-day slavery was necessary to snuff out the demand for it, she said. Instances of trafficking were under-reported, and often victims did not identify as such.

"They know they've been held in an exploitative and harsh work environment, but they don't put that into the legal definition of trafficking," Professor Burn said. Most reported cases were of women from Thailand, South Korea and China, she said.

In Australia, the UN report found eight people were convicted from the 34 charged with trafficking-related offences in the five years to 2008. According to the Department of Immigration, 17 trafficking victims had been granted three-year temporary witness protection visas. To date, none have qualified for a permanent version of that visa. No trafficked children had been detected since 2003, the department said.

Yesterday the Federal Government proposed new obligations for employers of temporary skilled overseas workers on 457 visas. These included market pay rates and co-operation with inspectors.


source: http://www.smh.com.au/world/women-the-new-pimps-in-human-trafficking-trade-20090212-85zr.html