Category Archives: Sex trafficking

Child sexual abuse content growing online with AI-made images, report says

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More children and families extorted with AI-made photos and videos, says National Center for Missing and Exploited Children

Child sexual exploitation is on the rise online and taking new forms such as images and videos generated by artificial intelligence, according to an annual assessment released on Tuesday by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), a US-based clearinghouse for the reporting of child sexual abuse material.

Reports to the NCMEC of child abuse online rose by more than 12% in 2023 compared with the previous year, surpassing 36.2m reports, the organization said in its annual CyberTipline report. The majority of tips received were related to the circulation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) such as photos and videos, but there was also an increase in reports of financial sexual extortion, when an online predator lures a child into sending nude images or videos and then demands money.

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Home Office U-turns on policy to restrict help for trafficking victims

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Rights groups hail change to Braverman policy that denied support to people with criminal convictions

The Home Office has performed a U-turn on a policy to deprive some modern slavery victims of protection from traffickers.

Human rights campaigners and lawyers representing trafficking victims have welcomed the government’s change of heart, which they say reinstates vital protections to vulnerable people.

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Meta platforms are marketplaces for child predators claims lawsuit

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Facebook and Instagram ‘enabled adults to find, message and groom minors’ for sexual exploitation, alleges state of New Mexico legal filing

Meta has allowed its social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, to become marketplaces for child predators, the state of New Mexico alleges in a lawsuit filed against the company and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

The lawsuit claims that Meta “proactively served and directed [children] to egregious, sexually explicit images through recommended users and posts – even where the child has expressed no interest in this content”. It claims Meta “enabled adults to find, message and groom minors, soliciting them to sell pictures or participate in pornographic videos”. The company is also accused of fostering unmoderated user groups devoted to facilitating and selling child sexual exploitation content.

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Ex-owners of sex work site Backpage convicted of prostitution scheme

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Michael Lacey, Scott Spear and John Brunst, all men in their 70s, created complicated system to try to outwit US government

Three former owners of the website Backpage, a site mainly known as a place where sex workers advertise their services, have been convicted for federal crimes including promoting prostitution and money laundering, the US Department of Justice announced on Friday.

The recently convicted trio, Michael Lacey, 75, Scott Spear, 72, and John “Jed” Brunst, 71, came to own Backpage in 2010. Since then, the government says, they encouraged sex work ads by creating a system for “johns”, or customers, to leave reviews about the sex workers they had engaged with. Website workers and an automated system filtered out words that made it obvious that sex was being offered in exchange for money.

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UK police accused by MPs of ‘cosying up’ to ‘pimping websites’

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Home affairs select committee members criticise policy of working with businesses such as Vivastreet

Senior police officers have “cosied up” to “pimping websites” that allegedly allow trafficked women to be “raped multiple times a day”, MPs have said.

Dame Diana Johnson, the chair of the home affairs select committee, said it was “disgraceful” that police forces and the National Crime Agency (NCA) were engaging with businesses such as Vivastreet.

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Noam Chomsky and Bard College president had financial dealings with Jeffrey Epstein

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The MIT linguist says the late sex offender helped on a ‘technical matter’ related to his and his late wife’s finances

Jeffrey Epstein helped move $270,000 for renowned linguist Noam Chomsky and also paid $150,000 to Bard College president Leon Botstein, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

According to the newspaper, and also confirmed by Chomsky and Botstein, the late sex offender and financier had financial dealings with the two academics and had met with them multiple times.

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Rishi Sunak refuses to back Braverman’s widely criticised claim about racial nature of grooming gangs – live

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Prime minister says offenders have been protected by ‘political correctness’ as he announces ‘grooming gangs taskforce’

Starmer says he has not talked to Jeremy Corbyn for two and a half years.

Q: Is he a friend?

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Woman groomed and abused in care gets apology after 30 years

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Leeds city council letter accepting responsibility believed to be the first of its kind

Carrie* is no stranger to a legal challenge. In 2018, alongside other women, she won a landmark case against the Home Office when she challenged a requirement that prostitution offences, including those acquired below the age of 18, be disclosed under criminal record checks.

While Carrie, now 49, was giving a detailed statement to her lawyer dealing with this case, she described her time in care. Her childhood was dominated by neglect, sexual abuse and exploitation. It became clear to her lawyers that there was a second case – against the body responsible for the child protection services that failed her so badly: Leeds city council.

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Young girls being sold in India to repay loans, says human rights body

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Notice issued to Rajasthan state government demanding police inquiry into ‘abominable’ practice

Young girls in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan are being sold as “repayment” for loans their parents cannot afford, the national body that protects human rights has said.

The National Human Rights Commission has issued a notice to the state government demanding a police inquiry and answers within a month to what it called an “abominable” practice.

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Venezuela’s mining region a hotbed of sex trafficking and violence, UN says

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Fact-finding mission reports brutal massacres and sexual slavery in gold-rich arc where armed gangs fight for control

Struggling to get by amid Venezuela’s runaway inflation, widespread shortages and rampant unemployment, a young woman left the city of San Félix for the promise of a job deep in the forests of Bolívar state.

The offer made on Facebook promised a good salary in exchange for working in a booming mining town.

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UK refugee scheme could lead to exploitation of Ukrainians, say experts

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Promise of ‘light touch’ checks prompts fears traffickers could see arrival of mostly women and children as opportunity

More than 120,000 Britons have expressed interest in hosting Ukrainian refugees, amid concerns that the new government scheme could lead to exploitation of vulnerable women and children.

The figure was released by the government on Tuesday evening, little more than 24 hours after Homes for Ukraine programme was launched to take in those fleeing Russia’s invasion, most of whom are women and children.

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Italian police arrest alleged Black Axe Nigerian mafia members over trafficking

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Four arrests of cult-like criminal gang members made in southern Italy after Nigerian woman forced into prostitution comes forward

Four alleged members of the Nigerian mafia have been arrested in southern Italy after a young sex trafficking survivor spoke out against them.

The men, who were arrested in Palermo and Taranto in the early hours of Tuesday, allegedly belong to the feared Black Axe, a cult-like criminal gang that emerged in the 1970s at the University of Benin, according to police.

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Witness willing to testify she saw Prince Andrew with a ‘young girl’ at London nightclub

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Virginia Giuffre’s lawyers seek her statement to counter the royal’s insistence he has never met their client or visited the club

A woman who may have seen Prince Andrew with Virginia Giuffre at a London nightclub 20 years ago is “willing” to provide testimony in Giuffre’s civil lawsuit against the royal, whom she accuses of sexual abuse, the witness’s lawyer said.

“I am proud to represent Shukri Walker, who has bravely stepped forward as a witness and encourages others who may have information to do so as well,” the lawyer Lisa Bloom said in an email.

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Ghislaine Maxwell to be sentenced in New York in late June

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Maxwell was convicted last month of recruiting and grooming teenage girls for Jeffrey Epstein to abuse

Ghislaine Maxwell is due to be sentenced in late June after her conviction last month on charges including sex trafficking and conspiracy relating to the recruitment of teenage girls for financier Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse.

US district judge Alison J Nathan announced the 28 June date on Friday even as she waits to resolve defence claims that a new trial should be ordered after a juror’s public admissions after the verdict about his childhood sexual abuse.

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Ghislaine Maxwell, the Demon Queen, is behind bars. Does she have a secret that could unlock her shackles?

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Our writer sat through the trial in New York and reports on the humiliation of the mwah-mwah princess, her repeated failures to end Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse and the chances of her cutting a deal with the Feds

Guilty, five times over, Ghislaine Maxwell, shackled, sits in the sweat box as it crawls over Brooklyn Bridge along with the rest of the rush-hour little people she used to fly over, saying a last goodbye to the Imperial City’s billion-dollar stalagmites. The one-time Princess Mwah-Mwah is now the Demon Queen, facing 30 years, the rest of her life in prison, not some Disneyland of rightwing fantasy but a bone pit of the bad, the mad and the broken locked up until the end of age.

She has a secret key that could unlock her shackles. What if she sings, tells the feds what she knows, gives up the overmighty men who, along with her one-time lover Jeffrey Epstein, abused women more child than adult back in her pomp? She could cut her jail time down to 10 years and be out in seven, thanks to good behaviour.

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Urgent action needed to halt trafficking of children in world’s orphanages – report

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Millions of children worldwide are at risk of abuse and exploitation in institutions, often to attract funding from donors, says Lumos charity

Immediate action must be taken to prevent trafficking and exploitation of children in orphanages, according to a report published on Monday.

International children’s charity Lumos says that an estimated 5.4 million children worldwide live in institutions that cannot meet their needs and neglect their rights and where they are exposed to multiple forms of exploitation and harm.

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Epstein’s dark legend wraps Maxwell trial in web of conspiracy theories

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Analysis: The task of Ghislaine Maxwell’s defense may be to tangle her so deeply in Epstein’s shadow that they cannot find her guilty

The graphic testimony presented to jurors in Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal sex abuse trial last week seemed at times to mesh and then detach from broader theories – criminal, conspiratorial or both – about the nature of Jeffrey Epstein’s world.

Whether prosecutors and defense attorneys are successful in separating criminal conspiracy from the conspiracy theories that run through the entire Epstein-Maxwell narrative may determine how the criminal complaint against the 59-year-old former British socialite is ultimately resolved.

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Ghislaine Maxwell accuser says she met Trump at 14 and flew with Prince Andrew

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‘Jane’, who did not accuse Trump or duke of misconduct, testifies in court she was introduced to former president by Jeffrey Epstein

  • This article contains depictions of sexual abuse

The first accuser in Ghislaine Maxwell’s child sex trafficking trial testified on Wednesday that Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to Donald Trump when she was 14. This accuser also claimed that she was on a flight with Prince Andrew.

She did not accuse Trump or the Duke of York of any misconduct. The accuser, who used the pseudonym “Jane” in court, said this as she was undergoing cross-examination from one of Maxwell’s attorneys.

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Brexit and UK immigration policy ‘increasing risks to trafficking victims’

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Damning report highlights greater risk of EU worker exploitation and vulnerability of undocumented migrants

A damning new report on trafficking in the UK has warned that Brexit and the Home Office’s new plan for immigration are increasing the risks to trafficking victims.

The report has also found links between terrorism and trafficking in cases involving families from the UK ending up with Islamic State in Syria and an increase in the recruitment of trafficking victims via social media.

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