I was sold by Mum and Dad to make images of child abuse

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abuse, Children, dissociation, family, parents, relationships, sexual exploitation, support, Trafficking, trauma

I was sold by Mum and Dad to make images of child abuse

One of Raven Kaliana’s earliest memories is being taken to a family portrait studio by her parents, at around the age of four. The studio was in the basement of a department store in a town 50 miles from their home. Once they had arrived, they waited for another couple to arrive with their own child.

“Would you like to have your picture taken with this cute little boy?” her mother asked, before the parents left the kids with the photographer and retired to the cafe upstairs. But while they sat eating ice cream, the images being made in the studio down below were far from happy family portraits. Raven and her companion had just been sold into the child abuse industry.

It was to be the beginning of a 15-year ordeal, which saw Raven regularly trafficked by her parents and other members of an organised crime ring from her home in a middle-class suburb in the American north-west to locations all over the US and abroad. In her teens, the crimes were often perpetrated in Los Angeles, where many film studios provided ample opportunity for the underground child abuse industry in the 70s and 80s.

Her father, precariously self-employed after losing his teaching job, was violent towards her younger brother, but since she had become the family breadwinner, Raven was granted a peculiar status. “My father always favoured me because I brought in the money – I was supporting our whole family. My younger brother was jealous because of my dad’s special treatment of me.

“My father was also quite affectionate towards me whereas he would beat my brother to a pulp. Although he did hit me, he wanted me to stay intact because the less scars I had, the more I was worth.”

Inevitably, as she grew older, Raven’s value to her abusers decreased and subsequently the kinds of films she was required to take part in became more extreme and violent.

Yet from a young age, she had learned from her parents to rationalise and deny what was going on within the family. “It’s the same way that someone who has a problem with alcohol will rationalise their behaviour – ‘It’s only this many drinks. It’s before noon but, oh well, just today’.

“I remember my mother saying things like, ‘Oh, they’ll never remember it,’ like people do when they get their babies’ ears pierced. I told myself that my parents meant well, that what I was going through was what was necessary to help my family. It was paying our mortgage.”

As we sit talking in a central London cafe, there are two large suitcases on the floor next to us, both full of puppets she has made. A graduate of the puppetry course at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama in London, Raven turned to this artform as a way of telling her story without the gaze of an audience focusing on her directly – something she finds too uncomfortable.

Her adult life has been driven by the belief that it is important for survivors of child sexual exploitation and trafficking to tell their stories, in order to make people realise that these aren’t crimes that happen “somewhere else, to someone else”. She moved to the UK to create Hooray for Hollywood, an autobiographical play in which the children are represented by puppets, while the adults – their parents – are only shown up to waist height, from a child’s eye view. This critically acclaimed drama has toured the UK, Poland and France, and has been made into a film.

One of the most shocking aspects of Hooray for Hollywood is the banality of the adults’ conversation, as they rationalise the choice they have just made to sell their children, from the cosy confines of a cafe. These appear to be ordinary people, struggling a little to make ends meet; not monsters or weirdos, but the kind of people who might be your nextdoor neighbours.

“You hear about a perpetrator being processed in a certain way, you hear about the police getting hold of the images, but you don’t hear about the reality for the children in those images – whose children are they? How did they come to be in this situation? And how have they been traumatised or damaged by what happened?”

Through her organisation Outspiral, Raven recently launched a national campaign to raise awareness of sex trafficking and familial abuse. She now uses the film of Hooray for Hollywood for public education and training for professionals working in social services, education, law enforcement and children’s charities.

The biggest challenge, she says, is getting the bystanders in the child’s life – neighbours, relatives, teachers, care workers, counsellors – to consider the possibility that a child might be a victim of this form of abuse. Child abuse is such a taboo subject, and the concept of parents being complicit in the crime so unthinkable, that frequently there is a failure to recognise that it might be going on. Yet since Raven’s childhood, the internet has led to an explosion in the industry, which now has a worldwide market value of billions of dollars, according to the UN.

Britain’s Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre, a division of the police, says the number of indecent images of children in circulation on the internet runs into millions, with police forces reporting seizures of up to 2.5m images in single collections alone, while the number of individual children depicted in these images is likely to be in the tens of thousands. The commonest way that offenders found their victims was through family and personal relationships.

A report by the NSPCC highlighted the particular psychological suffering that children who have been sexually abused within the child abuse industry endure, especially through the knowledge that there is a permanent record of their sexual abuse: “There is nothing they can do about others viewing pornographic pictures or films of themselves, and sometimes their coerced sexual abuse of others, indefinitely.”

For Raven, the psychological effects of her abuse have been extreme. From an early age she began to experience dissociative amnesia – a psychological phenomenon common in victims of inescapable trauma, in which painful experiences are blocked out, leading to gaps in memory. “I started putting things into little rooms in my mind, and it was like: OK, we don’t look in that room,” she says. “When there’s no relief, there’s no one stepping in to save you, and it’s clear you’re just going to have to endure something, then your mind just does that. As a child, dissociation is a serious survival advantage, but in adulthood it can become a disability.”

It was at the age of 15 that the coping mechanisms of denial and dissociation began to break down. “At school, I started getting flashbacks – like remembering being in a warehouse the night before – and I could feel in my body it was true, but it was terrifying because I didn’t want those things to be true.”

Astonishingly, she passed through most of school without anyone picking up on what was happening at home. “I got good marks at school, so teachers tended to think everything was fine. Most survivors I’ve known who experienced extreme abuse did very, very well at school, actually, because that was their sanctuary, a place they could go to be safe.”

Eventually, however, a teacher noticed that Raven was getting thinner. Her mother, by now separated from her father but still facilitating the abuse, had simply stopped buying food for her. “The teacher invited me to stay after school and talk with her one day, and she asked, ‘Tell me the truth, are you anorexic? Bulimic?’ And I started laughing.”

Raven confided some but not all of what was happening at home, but begged the teacher not to report it for fear of reprisals. What the teacher did do, however, was to help her find the wherewithal to move out of home eventually, get a job in a restaurant, and start saving up for college.

At university, Raven finally made a break from her family, changed her name and started to get counselling – the beginning of a long road to recovery that still continues. “I got into a support group for rape survivors, and it was a great help because all of a sudden I was around other people healing from abuse, too. It also gave me some perspective about how the things that had happened to me were really on the extreme end. I saw people completely devastated by one experience of being raped by a stranger, so it was sobering to realise, ‘Oh, I’ve been raped by hundreds of people.'”

Once she was in a safe environment, finally the rage about what had happened to her bubbled to the surface. “I couldn’t believe how angry I was when I first escaped – so angry. In one support group they let us take a baseball bat to a punching bag and told us to think about a specific abuse event and imagine that we were fighting back against it, and that was very helpful.”

She also saw an integrative bodywork therapist, who used touch, guided movement and vocal expression. “Her premise was that post-traumatic stress is a physical reaction in your body, and that reconnecting the symptom to the source helps you let it go, helps you release it, and that you don’t have to talk out every single thing that ever happened to you. It was very helpful for me because there were a lot of strange things that my body was doing. For example, I used to find any kind of physical touch excruciating – even if someone brushed me in the street I would shudder. She told me that was called armouring, which happens when your body makes a shield out of its muscles to protect the bones and internal organs during physical abuse.”

The therapy made it possible for her to move on and start to enjoy life. “I realised that it is possible to get your life back. I started to gain an appreciation for life and a recognition that I only have so many breaths, so I’ve got to use them well.”

But Raven believes she will always need counselling and that her experiences have made it difficult not to fall into a pattern of emotionally abusive romantic relationships.

Perhaps surprisingly, sex has not been a significant issue, but love is inextricably connected for her with betrayal, as the people who were meant to love her most as a child were the ones who orchestrated her abuse.

Yet, incredibly, she says she felt love for her parents as a child and still does, although she has cut all contact with them. Despite their behaviour, she believes they did love her.

“When I screen my film, a lot of times in the Q&A session afterwards people want to know: how could parents do this to their own children? I tell them that abuse is generational: my parents were also abused themselves, so that was normal to them. They had dissociated in the same way I did; they were in denial. Unlike my generation, they didn’t have access to counselling when they were young, and weren’t born in a time when child abuse was beginning to be acknowledged by society. It’s important to recognise that they weren’t born evil – they were damaged.”

Raven thinks that the way in which child abusers such as Jimmy Savile are demonised is counterproductive. “Demonising the perpetrators elevates them to the realm of the surreal. We need to shift that, so people recognise that they are very sick humans and that there’s a context for their crimes.

“Only then can we tackle the source of this suffering.”

 Outspiral.org.uk

China’s stolen children: parents battle police indifference in search for young

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abduction, child kidnapping, Children, China, police, Trafficking

China’s stolen children: parents battle police indifference in search for young

“Back then, they just told me to keep looking,” said Yuan Cheng, punctuating the sentence with a lengthy drag on his cigarette. Sitting in his mud-floored home in Hebei province, a few hours north of Beijing, the farmer is talking about the lack of interest from the police when his 15-year-old son, Xueyu, went missing from a construction site in Zhengzhou in 2007.

Six years on, Yuan says the police have finally admitted to him that there was a string of child abductions in the area around the time his son disappeared. But when he went to them, two days after Xueyu went missing, the police said: “Keep looking on your own and we’ll talk about it again in a couple of days.”

Tens of thousands of children are kidnapped in China each year for sale into adoption, street life, forced labour and prostitution.

The horror faced by parents whose children are stolen is highlighted in Chinese and international media whenever there is a particularly disturbing case. Recently police arrested a hospital doctor in Shaanxi province over her alleged role in stealing newborn babies and selling them. The police investigation managed to track down some of the missing babies and reunite them with their parents.

But that is an unusually happy ending in a country where parents say they are battling police indifference as well as traffickers in the hunt to find missing children.

In 2011, Chinese police rescued 8,660 abducted children, but it is likely that at least double that number were kidnapped. China does not release official figures relating to child trafficking, so estimates are based on the numbers of missing-child reports posted by parents online and of children reported rescued each year.

Estimates range from 10,000 kidnapped per year to as high as 70,000. Most parents who lose children stand very little chance of seeing them again.

At the national level, China takes child abduction very seriously. It has a national anti-kidnapping taskforce that investigates and infiltrates trafficking rings, and there are frequent anti-kidnapping campaigns that encourage citizens to report anything suspicious. But at local level, where the first, crucial reports will be made when a child goes missing, parents say the police just don’t seem to care.

“The evening we reported it they went out and patrolled a bit, after that we never saw them looking [for her] again,” said Zhu Cuifang, whose 12-year-old daughter, Lei Xiaoxia, went missing in 2011. The police also failed to check surveillance tapes at her school or interview any of her classmates.

Critics say that the slow reaction of local police plays into the hands of the traffickers. The involvement of organised rings means a kidnapped child could be taken thousands of miles and passed between numerous handlers over the first couple of days.

Pi Yijun, a professor at the Institute for Criminal Justice at the China University of Political Science and Law, says: “An important problem is that when a child is lost, the parents go and talk to the police, and the police need to judge whether the kid has got lost or has been kidnapped.

“At present, in Chinese law, they need to be missing for 24 hours to be listed as a missing person or as kidnapped, but that 24 hours is also the most crucial time – so there is a major conflict there. How can you judge quickly whether the child has got lost or is being hidden as a prank or really has been kidnapped? That’s a serious problem.”

Often, it is a problem that is never fully resolved. In rural areas and the outskirts of cities where migrant workers live, children aren’t too difficult to acquire, adds Pi.

China’s one child policy has created an environment where finding a buyer for a boy is rarely difficult; there are always parents somewhere who want a son to support them in their old age but don’t want to pay the fines for additional children just to end up with more daughters.

Child kidnapping is so prevalent in China that even when a stolen child tells people what has happened, sometimes nothing is done.

Wang Qingshun was kidnapped and sold to “adoptive” parents in the 1980s. The couple who bought him already had two daughters and thought it would be easier to buy a son than keep trying to have one naturally.

While he was growing up, Wang told his neighbours that he had been kidnapped and that the people he lived with were not really his parents. But they didn’t report this to the police until a decade later.

While individual stories of stolen children make the headlines briefly and then fade, parents never stop looking. Many say they are spending thousands of dollars searching, unsupported, for their children, fighting to raise awareness of cases that will never be solved.

In the six years that Yuan Cheng has been searching for his son, he has helped rescue other children who had been kidnapped and sold into forced labour, but he hasn’t found Xueyu yet.

Zhu Cuifang and her husband, Lei Yong, haven’t found Xiaoxia either. Still, they press on, because as Zhu put it, “if we can’t find our daughter, life is meaningless”.

Demands grow for child guardians to end shame of modern slavery

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Children, human trafficking, traffickers, Trafficking

Demands grow for child guardians to end shame of modern slavery

Pressure is growing on Theresa May to tackle human trafficking and halt the disappearance from care of hundreds of children. Despite unveiling a parliamentary bill to end what she called an “evil in our midst”, May will this week face criticism for failing to include proposals that would see professional guardians caring for suspected victims, a system likely to be urged in a Children’s Society report.

The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, joined the calls for child guardians. “The system is failing them. Those who work with trafficked children, including charities and organisations that support victims, see this as a vital change to prevent modern slavery,” she said.

Cooper added: “Independent advocates can ensure a trusted adult becomes known to the child, rather than their trafficker being the only person they know in the country. When these children go missing, when they should be safe having been identified to the authorities, there is a strong chance the children return to their traffickers.”

The number of children identified as potential victims rose by 12% last year, according to a recent report by the UK Human Trafficking Centre. It identified 2,255 potential child victims – up from 2,077 the previous year.

Advocates of guardianship say it would ensure secure housing, education and legal support to stop trafficked children falling back into the hands of their exploiters.

Solicitor Philippa Southwell, of London-based Birds solicitors, works with young people who have been convicted and jailed for crimes committed as a result of being trafficked. She specialises in helping them overturn their convictions. Within days of her clients being released, many of them will have gone missing, believed to be back in the hands of traffickers. “You have to prepare for the event that they are going to disappear, it’s happened in a huge number of my cases.” Most never know that she has managed to overturn their criminal conviction and clear their names.

Southwell usually meets her clients in prison after they have been convicted. Most are Vietnamese and have been brought into the country by their traffickers and forced to work in cannabis factories or in other forced labour.

“It’s explained to them that there are things we can do to help them rebuild their life and that the first step is to appeal [against] their conviction. But these are very vulnerable young people who have a real distrust for authorities.

“It’s very difficult to build the trust, because the legal system has previously let them down. I often have to explain to them that they are not criminals but victims,” added Southwell.

Philip Ishola, director of the Counter Human Trafficking Bureau, believes that preventing children from falling back into the hands of traffickers can also be achieved through the provision of specialist accommodation.

“The missing rate is alarming. For trafficked children there are so many risks, and for Vietnamese children that risk is magnified because it’s such a closed environment that children are trafficked within. It’s a really specialist knowledge and understanding. That knowledge is there – thousands of social workers have been trained – but the huge gap is in safe accommodation. For a Vietnamese placed in foster care or a children’s home, we know from experience that in two days you will be lucky if the child is still there.”

Despite a growing understanding of the need to protect trafficking victims from prosecution, experts say there are still major flaws in how victims are treated within the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, claims for damages against police and local authorities for failure to properly support victims of trafficking is a growing area for lawyers. Tony Murphy, a partner at Bhatt Murphy, said: “We are using the Human Rights Act to call public authorities to account for failing to protect these victims. It is an indictment on our society that the state should need to be forced by litigation to address a crime as heinous as human trafficking.”

For Southwell, the problem of finding missing children will remain difficult because of the absence of anyone to pressure police. “They have little or no support in the UK by way of family or friends because as soon as they are smuggled into the country they are immediately taken to a cannabis house and forced to work for months and sometimes years without leaving the premises,” she said.

Case study

“Rachel” (not her real name) was trafficked into the UK from Nigeria when she was 15. She was placed in foster care but her traffickers found her, approaching her as she walked to school, and took her to work in a brothel in London. She was picked up by police in a raid on the brothel following a tipoff.

Despite the fact that they were told an underage girl was working there, they arrived with a journalist in tow. “The police said ‘put your head down’,” because a reporter was around, Rachel said. “They took me to the police station, took my fingerprint and bag and locked me in a cell. Then they let me out onto the street.” The police didn’t ask her any questions about who was running the brothel, she said.

With nowhere to go, Rachel had no option but to move in with a client from the brothel and was eventually picked up again, this time in an immigration raid. She was detained at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre, where a solicitor recognised that she had been trafficked.

“She said I looked like a trafficking victim and that because of my age I didn’t have control over myself. I felt ashamed and I was crying. It shocked me that she knew about these things – at first I didn’t trust her.”

Rachel’s lawyer put her in touch with the Poppy Project, which supports trafficked women, and she is now studying at college, having been given leave to remain in the UK. Human rights law firm Bhatt Murphy is currently suing the Metropolitan Police, Home Office and the London Borough of Newham over Rachel’s treatment.

Trafficked Women In UK Prisons Have No Support Or Protection, University Of Cambridge Report Finds

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Trafficking

Trafficked Women In UK Prisons Have No Support Or Protection, University Of Cambridge Report Finds

Women who have been trafficked into the country to work as prostitutes, drug mules or domestic servants can end up in UK prisons without any protection or support, while traffickers walk free, new research has found.

Many of the vulnerable women get none of the protection from UK authorities that they are entitled to under international law, with a police investigation into the traffickers launched in just one out of 40 cases.

Responding to the University of Cambridge study into trafficking, Prison Reform Trust director Juliet Lyon, said: “It is shameful that terrified women who have been repeatedly raped and abused could find no one at police stations, courts or jails that they could trust or turn to for help.”

There were 58 foreign women in prison or detention centres whose crimes are directly linked to what they were forced to do by traffickers, the report by Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe and Dr Liz Hales found. Forty-three were identified as victims of human trafficking, and five more who had entered the country independently had worked under “slavery like conditions.”

Nearly half – 20 – were forced to work in prostitution and 15 had been made to work in producing cannabis.

Eight had been forced into domestic service, two had travelled as drug mules and eight were involved in street robberies and the sale of fake goods.

Five of the women had been trafficked to the UK as children – and one had been trafficked from her home country twice, coming to the UK after she was deported from the first country her traffickers sent her to.

Of the trafficked women in prison, 24 women said they had experienced multiple rapes. For two of the women this was an on-going threat.

And some women asked prison doctors for help with severe abdominal pains, heavy bleeding and discharge following extensive rape and sexual abuse.

Prof Gelsthorpe, at Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology, said: “There should be renewed efforts to recognise that ‘offenders’ can also be ‘victims’, and to ensure that appropriate credence is given to women’s accounts of their own experience.

“This is important research in terms of access to justice. The message is clear – the powerlessness of these women in the hands of their traffickers is terrifyingly replicated within the criminal justice system.

“Yet the legitimacy of the criminal justice system stands or falls on the way in which we treat victims as well as offenders.”

There were 616 foreign national women in prison, as at the end of September, accounting for one in seven of the total female prison population.

Guidelines were introduced in 2009, the National Referral Mechanism, to identify victims of human trafficking and ensure they receive appropriate protection and support.

But just 11 women had been dealt with according to NRM advice.

The report’s findings will be debated on Wednesday by MPs and peers at a seminar in the House of Lords convened by the Prison Reform Trust.

Parliamentarians will consider recommendations for a national strategy on foreign national women in prison and better monitoring of the UK’s obligations under international law.

The UK Human Trafficking Centre, run by the Serious Organised Crime Agency, which works with first responders like police to implement the NRM, told HuffPost UK that they believe the guidelines are being successfully implemented, but it was up to individual forces to decide whether to use the guidelines when dealing with victims.

A Government spokesperson said: “We are working harder to identify victims of trafficking earlier.

“We are doing this by raising awareness of how to identify victims, providing expert training to law enforcement officers and providing £2 million a year to help and support victims, including those identified in either the Prison or Probation service.

“We try not to detain victims of trafficking. People who have been trafficked can find it very hard to talk about what has happened to them, which means that sometimes they may be detained for a short period before they are identified as victims.

“We must ensure they get every possible support, and that offenders of this sickening crime are brought to justice.”

Trafficking girls in India

Tags

abuse, Bangladesh, discrimination, girls, India, infanticide, Nepal, rape, Sexual Violence, stigma, support, Trafficking, young people

The BBC Radio 4 iplayer website currently has a podcast available on Trafficking girls in India

From the blurb:

In a major investigation, Natalia Antelava reports on the abduction of tens of thousands of young girls in India for forced marriages. Thousands more are sold as prostitutes and domestic servants. She follows the route of the traffickers, who take girls from destitute households in places like West Bengal to wealthier areas in Northern states, where a shortage of women is blamed by many on sex-selective abortions. It’s a problem the United Nations describes as of ‘genocidal proportions’. Natalia joins campaigners and police fighting the trade and hears the stories of the trafficked girls and from a trafficker himself.