While we are on the sex trafficking saga, let's have a look at that problem from a different perspective and one that is either totally ignored or deliberately swept under the "no funding available/Women first" carpet..
If it is one issue that really gets under my skin, it's this type of abuse that is completely ignored by the Agencies who are well aware of it and should be helping but do not, including the feminised United Nations as well as UNHCR, have a look at that site and notice it is solely interested in women only. So what else is new..
I would recommend that you only donate to that sexist, biased organisation when it begins to deal with people and not just women only..
Here is the link for this study
THE INVISIBLE MAN: THE CONSCIOUS NEGLECT OF MEN
AND BOYS IN THE WAR ON HUMAN TRAFFICKING
Samuel Vincent Jones
© 2010 Samuel Vincent Jones, Associate Professor of Law, The John Marshall LawSchool, Chicago, Illinois. The author is a former U.S. Army military police officer andjudge advocate (Major, USAR (Ret.)). The author sincerely thanks Professor R. KentGreenawalt of Columbia University Law School; and Professors Kevin Hopkins, LindaCrane, and Justin Schwartz of The John Marshall School of Law in Chicago, for theirhelpful remarks on earlier drafts of this Article. The author greatly appreciates the researchassistance of Erin McKibben, Amanda Morgenstern and Carson Griffis
I.INTRODUCTION
On April 4, 2010, CNN’s Larry King Live aired a special segment, titled
“Worldwide Crisis: Human Trafficking,” to highlight the crime’s brutal and global
nature. 2
Joined by Ashley Judd and Lucy Liu, host Larry King described human
trafficking as “women and children, kidnapped, bought, [and] sold into bondage.”3
Throughout the program, the commentators made at least twenty-five references to
“women” or “girls” to describe, in graphic detail, occasions on which men
enslaved and sexually abused females4
It portrayed the crime as a contemporary tale of good versus evil about misogyny and the sexual exploitation of women.
The show’s intended theme reveals as much by what was not stated as it does
by what was stated. The Larry King commentators, in powerfully reporting facts
regarding global human trafficking, did not convey that boy sex trafficking rings
represent a major criminal enterprise in the United States5 and around the world,
with boys constituting up to 90% of the child prostitutes in some countries.
6
Theplight of hundreds of thousands of male farm laborers, who are confined and
forced to work on U.S. farms without pay, and routinely beaten, burned, and
raped,7
was also omitted from the program’s discussion. In fact, the Larry King
commentators did not refer to boys or male victims throughout the entire special
segment, despite the fact that boys account for at least half of all certified child
victims of forced labor.
8
The Larry King Live show’s glaring omission is consistent with, and sustains,
the powerful traditional narrative used by media personalities and commentators to
describe human trafficking through sensationalized accounts of heinous male
predators molesting female captives, while ignoring the significant number of male
victims of forced labor and sex trafficking.
9
For example, although Dr. Janice Shaw Crouse implicitly claimed to describe the full spectrum of human trafficking
in her article, entitled “No Tolerance for Human Trafficking,”10
she did not make any mention of male victims.11
In response to Dr. Crouse’s use of the traditional narrative, one astute commentator wrote:
Mrs. Crouse makes no mention of the laborers with calloused hands and
broken hearts whose passports are removed by their employers and told
to work even harder. No comment about the men ordered never to report
the abuses perpetrated against them. Nothing of the millions of [young
boys] around the world forced into lives of destitution and involuntary
servitude.
12
Although it is true that, historically, females have suffered enormous levels of
harm, particularly at the hands of males, this truism does not preclude the
empirical reality that males have also suffered enormous harm at the hands of both
males and females. However, while female vulnerability is often highlighted in
contemporary media discourse, male vulnerability is consistently obscured by
modern-day media expressions of male dominance and invulnerability perpetuated
under the guise of masculinity. To some extent, men and boys have become the
victims of this media-driven, socially constructed conception of maleness. Indeed,
the notion that males can be oppressed or systematically victimized strikes some as
ludicrous. Nevertheless, as this Article will show, this conception of maleness,
especially juxtaposed against the backdrop of the human trafficking phenomenon
in the United States, is conceptually flawed.
This Article explores the intersection between an attribute of the commercial
media and American criminal jurisprudence that existing legal scholarship has
largely disregarded: the systematic neglect of male victims in the publicity of
human trafficking.
13
Indeed, male vulnerability to human trafficking has been
neglected even in academic discourse. The traditional narrative posits that women
and girls are more vulnerable to human trafficking and thus are in greater need of
legal protection, whereas males, conversely, are resistant to human trafficking and
thus less in need of legal protection. This Article will demonstrate, however, that
men and boys are both more likely than women and girls to become victims of
human trafficking and far less likely to receive legal protection.
Additionally, this Article will establish that, although the text of the
Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) is gender-neutral, its implementation
is unlikely to protect male victims of human trafficking because the TVPA is
largely interpreted and enforced as a law primarily designed to protect women and
girls from sexual exploitation. It argues that the traditional notion that human
trafficking is primarily a sex crime against females harms the collective good by
facilitating the neglect of hundreds of thousands of male victims who suffer from
sex crimes or forced labor. This social condition leaves the full extent of the
resulting harm unabated and significantly increases the incidence of human
trafficking, particularly of male victims.
14
This Article links this injustice to mediadriven perspectives and presentations that propagate falsities regarding male
vulnerability. It highlights the glaring, but normative, institutional lack of concern
for male victims of human trafficking; discusses the reasons for and catalysts of
this neglect; identifies the misconceptions that perpetuate it; and argues for the
advancement of gender-neutral reporting, research, and funding schemes that
delegitimize misconceptions regarding male victims of human trafficking
