Interpol rescues 350, arrests 22 in Caribbean human-trafficking operation
By Ed Adamczyk
Interpol announced the arrests on Monday of 22 people and the resucue of nearly 350 people involved in sex trafficking and forced labor. The investigation centered in Caribbean countries. Photo courtesy of Interpol
UPI -- Nearly 350 potential sex-trafficking and forced labor victims were rescued in an Interpol operation, the international police agency announced Monday.
A statement issued at Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France, said the operation was centered in Central and South America and in the Caribbean, with its operations center in Barbados. Men and women, including minors, were found working in nightclubs, farms, mines and markets in a weeklong action called Operation Libertad.
Twenty-two people were arrested, and computer equipment, mobile phones and cash were seized.
The statement mentioned women in Guyana, working as prostitutes near a gold mine, were unable to escape.
"Isolated locations make it difficult for officers to avoid detection when traveling to these camps. By the time intelligence is acted upon, perpetrators have had the opportunity to act and move the victims," said Diana O'Brien, assistant director of public prosecutions of Guyana's Ministry of Public Security.
The 2 1/2-half year investigation was funded by the Canadian government, which provided special training to investigators and immigration officers. It is one of several projects of the Interpol Global Task Force on Human Trafficking. Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Barbados, Belize, Brazil, Curacao, Guyana, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands and Venezuela participated in the police operation.
in Queensland
Children as young as 10 are among hundreds being charged with sex crimes – including rape – every year in Queensland.
An estimated 450 sexual offences were committed by children between the ages of 10 and 16 last year, according to statistics obtained by The Sunday Mail.
More than 90 rapes were committed, with most offenders found to be overwhelmingly male – 450 compared to 52 females.
Griffith Youth Forensic Service deputy director and criminologist Danielle Harris said that most of these offences involve other young people, the Mail reports. Half of all sex abuse nationwide is committed by children.
Brother released after pleading guilty to incest with slain 12-year-old foster sister Tiahleigh Palmer
Dr Harris said sexual offences by children can be sparked by factors from existing psychological makeup to incidents of severe trauma.
“For one kid, that might be he was sexually abused since he was six months old... but it might also just be maltreatment or neglect,” she said.
Or, might part of it be a matter of children getting easy access to pornography?
Dr Harris said that the forensic service she represents has been able to rehabilitate most offenders through one-on-one counselling.
She nevertheless believes young children as young as six should be exposed to education programs teaching them what constitutes appropriate behaviour.
"(Children) need to have that language that allows you to describe to a trusted adult if someone – even one of your trusted people – has done something that made you feel uncomfortable,” she said.
Japan's children snared by social media crime
By Thomas Beecher
Last February, a 14-year-old girl arrived at a Tokyo train station to meet Ryusei Nakama, a 21-year-old ramen shop worker from the city’s bustling harbourside Shinagawa neighbourhood.
Nakama, who was later arrested on suspicion of kidnapping, had contacted the teenager four days earlier on Twitter, saying he wanted to “shelter her” after learning about the girl’s abusive father, he later told police. Along with another 18-year-old male, she spent more than 10 days in his apartment.
Japan's national police chief says rates of social media-related crimes are "alarming”.
Photo: Illustration by Richard Giliberto
A month earlier, 28-year-old newspaper deliveryman Kazunari Saito had raped and attempted to murder a teenage girl he became acquainted with online.
Saito had lured the girl, who was allegedly suicidal, into his residence and strangled her with a plastic rope. According to Saito the girl, who managed to escape the following morning, said she “wanted to die” on Twitter.
Crimes like these are not uncommon in Japan. According to the latest data from Japan’s National Police Agency (NPA), close to 1000 minors – mostly 15 to 17-year-old girls – were victims of social media-related crimes in the first half of 2017 alone. The number is “on the rise", said NPA chief Masayoshi Sakaguchi. “The situation is alarming.”
Of the 919 cases – which included 20 incidents of rape and assault, 350 violations against child-protection ordinances, 289 cases of child pornography and 243 cases of child prostitution – more than 30 per cent were linked to Twitter. The previous year’s report indicated that cases involving Twitter had more than quadrupled since 2014.
Some of these crimes begin in the commonplace - a young person running away from home. Every day, dozens of posts appear on Twitter with hashtags like “iede shojo” (“run away”), from mostly teenage girls looking for a place to spend the night. Many of their tweets include phrases like “I had a fight with my parents” and “is there anywhere I can stay?”.
A car carrying "Twitter Killer" Takahiro Shiraishi leaves a Tokyo police station in November.
Photo: Yomiuri Shimbun via AP
On March 25, one 14-year-old girl posted: “I’m currently in the city. My parents kicked me out and I’m looking for somewhere to stay. I only have ¥4000 (around $50) on me. I only need to stay one night, will someone please help me?”
For other young people living outside Japan’s major urban areas, this “dangerous subculture” may also be a route to the big cities, said Professor Shinichi Ishizuka, head of the Criminology Research Centre at Kyoto’s Ryukoku University: “Girls come to Tokyo to see Tokyo culture, youth culture.”
Lurking on the other side of the Twittersphere are people like 37-year-old freelance programmer and photographer Konosuke Yokota, who is believed to have given lodging to several underage runaways.
Youth culture: a party in Tokyo's Shinjuku district. Runaways are often drawn to the bright lights of the capital.
Photo: Supplied
He was arrested in 2010 on suspicion of paying a minor for sexual acts, and again in June 2016 for keeping a 16-year-old girl in his Tokyo apartment after she reportedly tweeted: “I have no money, is there anyone that can let me stay over?”
More than three weeks passed before she was found, after another runaway – a 16-year-old girl from Osaka who was also invited into Yokota’s apartment – called the police.
“This classification of crime is traditional, but the method to commit [them] is new,” said Professor Ishizuka. And “it is very difficult for police to control freedom of expression, freedom of interaction”. This, he says, “is a new problem" for Japan.
Other minors take to Twitter with the hashtag “enjo kosai” to find “compensated dates” – a thinly-veiled euphemism in Japan for child prostitution.
Stories like these are routine in Japan’s crime-hungry media. In late 2016, 35-year-old businessman Takayuki Hirakawa was arrested when a 15-year-old girl he met on Twitter reported him to authorities after he didn’t pay her a promised ¥40,000 for sexual acts at a hotel in Nerima, in Tokyo’s west. Hirakawa, who once gave a lecture on protecting minors from sexual abuse to a Tokyo primary school PTA, confessed to police that he had “committed similar acts before”.
The following year, 39-year-old temp worker Haruomi Onishi was arrested for paying a 16-year-old girl he met on Twitter ¥20,000 for sexual acts at a hotel in Kasukabe, outside of Tokyo. A month after that, 51-year-old high school teacher Tadatomo Ebihara was arrested for paying another 16-year-old girl he met on Twitter ¥16,000 for sexual acts at a karaoke parlour in Saitama prefecture.
But the role of Japanese social media in luring vulnerable young people burst into the national spotlight towards the end of 2017 after a string of gruesome murders in Zama, a quiet suburb outside of Tokyo.
An image of Takahiro Shiraishi on Japanese TV. He was arrested after severed body parts were found in picnic coolers in his apartment.
Photo: Screengrab/ANN News
Takahiro Shiraishi, 27, was arrested on suspicion of killing nine young people aged between 15 and 26, whose mutilated remains were found throughout his apartment.
Shiraishi – soon dubbed the “Twitter Killer” – lured his victims by targeting young people who took to the social media platform expressing suicidal thoughts.
Portrayed on one account as a scarred, noose-necktie-wearing manga character, Shiraishi described himself as a hanging expert, offering to “help people who are really in pain”. “Please DM me anytime,” he disquietingly wrote on @hangingpro.
In one post, Shiraishi tweeted: “Bullying is everywhere, in school and at work. There must be many people in society who are suffering after attempting suicides, thought their cases are not reported in the news. I want to help such people.”
His victims included Hitomi Fujima, a 26-year-old divorced mother of one; and 15-year-old Kureha Ishihara, who apparently sent out one final tweet – complaining about homework – before she went missing last August.
Police discovered Shiraishi while investigating the disappearance of 23-year-old Aiko Tamura, who was hanged after tweeting: “I want to die, but doing so alone is terrible. I’m looking for someone to die with me.”
Shiraishi was finally apprehended when police used Twitter to lure him into a fake meeting. When they entered his house, they found the severed heads of his victims rotting away inside water coolers, some covered in cat litter.
Responding to Shiraishi’s “extremely dirty trick to lure victims and murder them”, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga promised that the Abe government would “take steps to prevent this happening again”.
But despite current laws safeguarding minors, internet services like Twitter are broadly protected under Article 21 of Japan’s constitution, which prohibits censorship.
“The Japanese legal system makes it difficult to tackle the problem,” said Yushi Okajima, an associate professor at Chuo University’s Faculty of Policy Studies. “If you try to remedy the negative aspects of Twitter, it would also take away some of the positive ones.”
Authorities largely rely on cyber patrols and volunteers to flag online misconduct. This includes monitoring sites like Twitter, which allows its users to sign up anonymously and does not require age verification.
The Internet Hotline Centre Japan is one group that works with national police to receive and direct reports of online abuse. In 2016, they claimed to have logged close to 280,000 reports ranging from child pornography to broader misconduct such as promoting illegal substances – around 30,000 more cases than in the previous year and close to twice as many as in 2014.
In 2008, the government sought to curb crimes stemming from online dating services by revising a 2003 law requiring Japanese dating sites to prohibit sexual content involving minors and verify their customers’ ages. It was an apparent success: only 42 crimes were recorded in 2016, according to NPA data.
Another forthcoming effort will require smartphone providers to activate filtering mechanisms for customers under 18 from June this year. The measure follows a similar initiative by the popular messaging app LINE – which also appears in the NPA’s soon-to-be-released annual report – restricting the ability of users under 18 to search for or be searched by others.
For its part, Twitter claims to have suspended at least 75 per cent of those Japanese users in violation of child sexual exploitation laws during the second half of 2017 before the user made their first tweet, using Microsoft PhotoDNA image technology and complaints received. That number rose from 50 per cent in the first half of the year, Twitter says.
“We take a proactive approach to combat child sexual exploitation on our platform,” a spokesperson told Fairfax Media by email. “Twitter has a zero-tolerance policy for child sexual exploitation and we remain steadfastly committed to preventing the sexual exploitation of minors everywhere.”
Japan remains one of Twitter’s largest and fastest-growing markets, with around 45 million users. Earlier this year, the company reported a 34 per cent rise in sales from the previous year to over ¥11 billion (over $130 million) during the last three months of 2017.
Takahiro Shiraishi, dubbed the "Twitter Killer", leaves a Tokyo police station to face prosecutors in November.
Photo: Kyodo
Speaking in Tokyo just days after Shiraishi’s arrest, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told the Japanese public broadcaster NHK that the company needs to “take on a responsibility to make sure [the] tool is being used in positive and healthy ways”. At around the same time, Twitter announced revisions to their rules to ensure that users do not “promote or encourage suicide or self-harm” on the platform.
Twitter’s rules also state that the company will “permanently suspend accounts promoting or containing updates with links to child sexual exploitation”. According to their terms:
“We do not tolerate child sexual exploitation on Twitter. When we are made aware of links to images of or content promoting child sexual exploitation they will be removed from the site without further notice and reported.”
Despite this, 2018 has shown little sign of the growing trend being contained. This month, a 48-year-old night school manager was arrested for paying a middle-school boy ¥5000 for sexual acts in a Tokyo parking lot. Predictably, they met on Twitter.
“Safety got away from Twitter,” one former Twitter vice-president was quoted as saying recently. “It was Pandora’s box. Once it’s opened, how do you put it all back in again?”
Gang rape verdicts spur 3rd day of protests in Spain
The Associated Press 
People shout slogans during a protest against sexual abuse in Pamplona, northern Spain, on Saturday.
(Alvaro Barrientos/Associated Press)
Tens of thousands of people marched in northern Spain for a third consecutive day to protest the acquittal of five men on gang rape charges.
Local police in Pamplona estimated the size of the crowd at Saturday's march was 35,000.
An 18-year-old woman was attacked during the city's famed San Fermin bull-running festival in 2016.
Local police in Pamplona estimated the size of the crowd at Saturday's march was 35,000.
(Alvaro Barrientos/Associated Press)
The five men, whose members named their WhatsApp group "The Pack," were convicted Thursday on a lesser felony of sexual abuse and sentenced to nine years each in prison. Lawyers say the victim is appealing.
The court's decision has also prompted thousands of women to share their experiences of abuse on Twitter under #cuentalo, Spanish for "tell it."
The Spanish government has announced plans to convene discussions on possible legal reforms.
Hundreds of people chanted 'We want justice' and waved signs that read 'No means No' and 'Justice!'
(Alvaro Barrientos/Associated Press)
India Rules Sex With a Child Bride Is Always Rape in a Massive Win for Girls’ Rights
It’s a landmark change to India’s marital rape laws
The Supreme Court’s landmark decision on Wednesday closed a legal loophole that has historically allowed perpetrators of rape to escape punishment.
While the age of consent in India is 18, there was a clause in India’s rape laws that lowered the age of consent to 15 if the girl was married.
But the court has now ruled that the clause is “discriminatory, capricious, and arbitrary”, and “violates the bodily integrity of the girl child”.
“This is a landmark judgement that corrects a historical wrong against girls,” Vikram Srivastava, the founder of campaign group Independent Thought, told the BBC . “How could marriage be used as a criteria to discriminate against girls?”
Girls under 18 will now be able to report their husbands for rape, as long as they lodge a complaint within a year of it happening.
“The judgement is a step forward in protecting girls from abuse and exploitation, irrespective of their marital status,” Divya Srinivasan, from women’s rights organisation Equality Now , told Global Citizen.
“This positive decision by the Supreme Court will hopefully encourage the Indian government to protect all women by removing the marital rape exemption in all cases,” she said.
Commentators say the ruling will be difficult to enforce in the country, however, due to the high rates of child marriage.
India is ranked 10th in the world for child marriage, with an estimated 47% of girls married by the time they turn 18, according to the campaigning organisation Girls Not Brides.
Girls are often seen as an economic burden, particularly in poor, rural areas, and many parents marry off their children in the hope of improving their financial security.
There is also a shame associated with pre-marital sex that can lead to girls’ parents forcing them to marry their rapists, according to news agency AFP .
Child marriage is a serious barrier for the girls involved, often leading to them dropping out of school to focus on their domestic responsibilities, or suffering health problems from giving birth at a young age.
India’s rape laws have, prior to this ruling, specifically excluded married couples. Men can currently still have non-consensual sex with their wives without it being classed as rape.
While Wednesday’s ruling represents progress, there are still steps to be taken in criminalising marital rape.
A challenge to the laws on marital rape is currently going through the Indian courts, reported AFP , but the government has said it opposes criminalising marital rape as it would damage the institution of marriage.
The government has said that criminalising marital rape could “destabilise” marriages and could be used by wives as “an easy tool for harassing the husbands”.
Police charge West Australia man with
historical child sexual assault offences
by Lisa Thomas The Advocate NEWSA GERALDTON man is due to face court today on a series of historical child sexual abuse charges.
The 61-year-old man allegedly assaulted a girl known to him between 1982 and 2001, who was five years old at the time of the first offence.
It is further alleged between July 2017 and February 2018, the man also sexually assaulted another girl who was known to him, who was seven years old at the time of the first offence.
The man has been charged with five counts of knowingly sexually penetrating a child (lineal relative), two counts of indecent dealings with a child who is a lineal relative or defacto child, 10 counts of indecent dealings with a child under 14 years and three counts of unlawful and indecent assault.
He will appear in Geraldton Magistrates Court today.
Anyone with information on this matter is asked to call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
If you are, or have been a victim of sexual abuse, or have information about someone being abused, please contact police on 131 444.
‘Too young to testify’: Rape case of 2yo alleged victim is shelved in South Africa
Alleged rapist will soon return to work at creche
FILE PHOTO: A protester holds on October 18, 2013 a placard reading "Stop Raping and Kill(ing) our Children" during a demonstrating in Diepsloot, north of Johannesburg. © Alexander Joe / AFP
A child rape case in South Africa was dropped after a court ruled that the alleged victim, 2, was too young to testify, her mother said. The case was reportedly reopened Friday after the girl’s parents complained to police.
"The perpetrator [creche employee] was arrested. We have a case number, and my daughter's forensic examination confirmed that she was raped,” the mother told News24 in an email. “The prosecutor said they could not pursue the conviction due to lack of evidence and my daughter was deemed too young. My daughter has outstanding language ability [and] was able to identify the perpetrator and provide details of what happened."
A creche is a daycare for pre-school children.
In a newsletter, the principal of the creche told parents that an employee, who had been arrested, would be returning to work in the near future – without specifying exactly why they had been taken into police custody in the first place.
"A 38-year-old was arrested and his first appearance was [on December 7, 2017]," explained Police spokesperson FC Van Wyk. "On [April 17, 2018], the case was provisionally withdrawn by the Wynberg court. Consultation was done with parent and child on [February 13, 2018], by the prosecutor, and [it was] explained that the child is too young.”
"[The] case will be placed back on the court roll as soon as [the] child is ready and done with her forensic social worker assessment," Van Wyk added.
Meanwhile, the pervert can go back to work and rape more babies. Good grief!
The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) reportedly withdrew the case as the “investigation is not complete.” Western Cape NPA spokesperson Eric Ntabazalila told News24 that, after an initial consultation, the child was found to be unable to testify. "We also asked for a forensic social worker's report since the outset, which would obviously assist us [in] dealing with the case and the matter, but we have not received it."
"We were also hoping that the school would be able to access video footage (even though we do not have an exact date of the incident), but the video footage for that time period has been 'over-written.'" The NPA will re-examine the child in October.
"Apart from the child's version and a J88 which shows old injuries, we have no other evidence and at this stage, we will not be able to secure a conviction," Ntabazalila said.
J88 forms record all forensic evidence taken and processed in examinations following an alleged rape. The child's parents removed her from the school and opted for a police rather than a school investigation reports news 24.
"The school confirmed to social workers that, since the alleged perpetrator was arrested, he had been suspended and has not returned to the school to date," Sihle Ngobese spokesperson for the Department of Social Development in the Western Cape.
Everything about this case is so 3rd world.
