The Nahmias Cipher Report

Ayanna Nahmias, Editor-in-Chief Last Modified: 15:46 PM EDT, 17 May 2012 Al Jazeera reported on the release of a film about the explosive increase in the Netherlands of forced prostitution of girls as young as 12 by their Dutch-Moroccan ‘boyfriends.’ The film by Julia Rooke and Caroline Pare features Ibrahim, a Dutch-Moroccan social worker who [...]

Reblogged from Just Saskia: To the ones who we lost, to the ones yet to be found In light of a few recent charity scandals, we have been encouraged to increase our reporting on work done internationally, and keep accurate track of cases and trafficked persons assisted. Which is great, and so needed. I mean we [...]

Reblogged from ethiopiantimes: SHAGARAB REFUGEE CAMP, SUDAN — Moving at night through the cold, flat desert, armed people smugglers are exploiting, abducting and sometimes killing Eritreans fleeing their authoritarian homeland, the UN and refugees say. “People catch us, sell us like a goat,” one Eritrean asylum-seeker said of the human traffickers. Like others who have [...]

Ayanna Nahmias, Editor-in-Chief Last Modified: 22:10 PM EDT, 26 December 2011 PYONGYANG, North Korea — Kim Jong-il, “supreme leader” of North Korea died on Saturday, 17 December 2010, purportedly from a heart attack at the age of 69. Although the North Korean people suffered abject deprivation and human rights abuses under his reign; news broadcasts [...]

Ayanna Nahmias, Editor-in-Chief Last Modified: 01:52 AM EDT, 31 October 2011 There are many voices within the global and American landscape that continually challenge us to peek behind the veil, to question authority, and practice free thought. In past decades,  authors, philosophers and even filmmakers provided the impetus for us to dig deeper beneath the [...]

When a woman attempts to leave an unhappy marriage, depending upon where she resides it could result in her death, loss of her parental rights, disfigurement, impoverishment, ostracization or other dire consequences. When my father began to physically abuse my mother she was caught in an untenable situation because he had vowed that he would kill her rather than let her go and if she somehow managed to escape she would do so without her children.

A mother’s love enables many women to endure unimaginable degradation and hardship to protect their children and to remain in situations often to their own detriment. In America we are familiar with these stories but they are easily tuned into and out of in favor of the latest gossip story or ‘reality’ TV series. A story currently playing out in public is the scandalous case of Tamar Epstein and Aharon Friedman.

Today Amnesty International based out of London, England released a report claiming the North Korean camps for political prisoners are expanding in size. A political prisoner in an interview recounted a horrific tale of his three-year internment in the sprawling camp. There is a global pandemic of human rights abuses from post conflict rape of women in Africa to collateral death of innocent people at the hands of homicide bombers of all persuasions. However, the systematic and organized machinery of suppression practiced in these North Korean internment camps recall the forced labor camp system of the former USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) known as The Gulag.

The Gulag camp system was officially created on April 25, 1930 and claims have been made that it was dismantled on January 13, 1960. Wherever there is political oppression, lack of freedom of speech, and dissidence is viewed as sedition, the conditions exist for internment camps to operate with relative impunity.

This morning Americans were greeted with recaps of CNN’s sobering and scathing report about child sex trafficking on Craigslist. This is not the first time that this allegation has made headlines, however, last night’s exposé signaled the beginning of a frontal assault on a long smoldering problem of Craigslist facilitating the trafficking and sale of children for sex.

Last month, two young girls sold for sex on Craigslist wrote letters to CEO Jim Buckmaster and Craig Newmark. One of them, M.C. who was first forced into prostitution at 11, told them she was forced to post her own ads to Craigslist during the day, and then answer them at night. Her pimp drove her around the country for years, using Craigslist as the primary means to advertise her. If she didn’t post on Craigslist, M.C.’s pimp would beat her and dunk her in ice water baths. The website was a central figure in the years of slavery and abuse she suffered.

In the “World’s Untold Stories: Innocence for Sale,” Aaron Cohen and CNN go undercover in Cambodia. The program vividly depicts the abject cruelty, heartless abuse and dehumanizing condition of children sold into sexual slavery, often by their parents. Once imprisoned, pedophiles who travel to the country from all parts of the world can pay roughly the same cost as a round of drinks for sex with a child. The documentary will enlighten and inspire new conversation about the challenges currently preventing aid workers and authorities from winning the battle in the struggle to free children from this most despicable form of modern-day slavery.