- CHILLAX

Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery
In the early years of the 21st Century

*** ARCHIVES ***

Trafficking victim tells her story

Patrick Mayoyo, Daily Nation (

Kenya

), 20 February 2007l

[accessed 16 February 2011]

Lucy Kabanya, 39, was in high spirits at the Moi International Airport in Mombasa on July 8, last year. And she had every reason to be, for she had just boarded a Condor Airline plane on her way toGermany, courtesy of her German “boyfriend”. Various thoughts flashed through her mind as the plane cut through the clouds on its way to Frankfurt, where she was to spend a three-month holiday. But all hopes of an exciting and wonderful stay in a foreign land were shattered on arrival inGermany, when her host confiscated her travel documents and denied her food for several days before informing her that she would work as a sex slave.

Child Trafficking in the U.K.

Ambrose Musiyiwa (amusiyiwa), OhmyNews, 2006-07-25

Click [here] to connect. The URL is not shown because of its length

[accessed 23 April 2012]

She was a teenage orphan living on the streets of Nairobi when a man approached her and promised her work in the

United Kingdom

. He told her she would be working as a house girl.

True to his word, her "savior" brought her into the U.K. -- but instead of placing her with a family the man took her to a brothel, where she was systematically raped, beaten, and forced to work as a prostitute.

Three months later, when the 16-year-old Kenyan girl became pregnant, she was forced to continue sleeping with a succession of men until she was almost due to give birth. The heavily pregnant teenager was then removed from the brothel, driven out of the town where she had been held, and dumped many miles away on the streets of Sheffield.

The sequence of events that has emerged during those interviews is both shocking and tragic. It involves imprisonment, beatings, and systematic rape over a lengthy period.

An African cleansing rite that now can kill

Sharon LaFraniere, The New York Times, May 12, 2005

www.nytimes.com/2005/05/11/health/11iht-malawi.html?pagewanted=all

[accessed 23 April 2012]

In Malawi and in a number of nearby nations including Zambia and

Kenya

, a husband's funeral has long concluded with a final ritual: sex between the widow and one of her husband's relatives, to break the bond with his spirit and, it is said, save her and the rest of the village from insanity or disease. Widows have long tolerated it, and traditional leaders have endorsed it, as an unchallenged tradition of rural African life.

US names Kenya in slavery report

Kevin J Kelley, Daily Nation, New York, 06/16/2004

At one time this article had been archived and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 7 September 2011]

"Some trafficking offences could be prosecuted under laws addressing child labour, forced detention for prostitution and the commercial exploitation of children, but no trafficking-related offences have been prosecuted", the report says in its assessment of

Kenya

. "Kenyan police officials continue to deny that trafficking is a problem."

But in seeming contradiction to these criticisms, the State Department says elsewhere in the same assessment that Kenyan officials are increasingly engaged with the United States to develop anti-trafficking programmes. The report notes that a human trafficking unit was created in the police force last year with US assistance.