child abuse

The "Breakdown of Tradition" is Responsible for the Pedophile Priest Scandals, but Not the Way the Church Wants to Spin It.

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2011-05-19 15:06

Mitchell Landsberg has what I'm pretty sure is a significant tidbit in his article on the Catholic Church's decision to blame the hippies for pedophile priests.

[The report] also found no evidence that homosexuality was to blame. While more boys than girls have been abused, the report said, that is probably because priests had greater access to boys. In fact, it said, the incidence of sexual abuse in the priesthood began declining not long after a noticeable rise in the number of gay men entering Catholic seminaries in the 1970s.

Source: Los Angeles Times

While I can think of a number of possible reasons why an influx of gay men into the Catholic clergy might have made a difference I'm going to take a pass -- others are probably far better qualified, far better informed, and far better experienced with the situation.

Instead I'd like to step back and suggest that contrary to the evident, er, thrust of the Church's decision to blame the "liberal" climate that fostered the sexual revolution (rather than their own shitty management) that same liberal climate may have been an even bigger part of the solution.

At least in the U.S. around the time of Pope John XXIII's revolutionarily liberal Vatican II convention, Catholic families stopped feeling as obliged to pressure a son, daughter to enter the church to become a priest or nun.  With the paradoxical result that while total numbers of celibate priests and nuns declined the proportion of novices, straight or gay, who were willing to intentionally commit to faith and celibacy, as opposed to merely conform to convention (or at least pretend to) went up.

Also, as to the Church's claim that pedophile (ok, ok, and ephebophile) priests became a problem only in the late 20th Century the big determining factor appears to be the "problem" of victims' willingness to come forward. And keep coming forward. Until finally authorities outside the church could no longer ignore it. Church documents going back to the 11th Century suggest the same pattern of internal priests and bishops stepping forward with meticulous documentation, considerable sympathy for victims, and recommendations to expel offending clergy date back at least as far as St. Peter Damian's Liber Gomorrhianus, published in A.D. 1051. So bullshit on that.

The latter regard, and I suspect only in that regard has the "liberalization" of modern society played a role in clerical sex abuse scandals. In which case, yeah, I can see why they continue to fight against it tooth and nail.

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A Really Bad Example of Not Forcing Customers of Trafficked or Minor Sex Workers to Register as Sex Offenders

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2011-03-21 23:17

Audacia Ray calls out a genuinely egregious form of discrimination against a former prostitute based on a Louisiana state law from... the year 1806!

The words “sex offender” now appear on her driver’s license. “I have tried desperately to change my life,” she says, but her status as a sex offender stands in the way of housing and other programs. “When I present my ID for anything,” she says, “the assumption is that you’re a child molester or a rapist. The discrimination is just ongoing and ongoing.” Eve was penalized under Louisiana’s 205-year-old Crime Against Nature statute, a blatantly discriminatory law that legislators have maneuvered to keep on the state’s books for the purpose of turning sex workers into felons. As enforced, the law specifically singles out oral and anal sex for greater punishment for those arrested for prostitution

Source: Waking Vixen

This is a form of reflex prosecutorial piling on that's just inexcusable. In what conceivable universe is a prostitute who performs fellatio a registerable sex offender in a way that a prostitute who "merely" performs intercourse isn't?  Or that a prostitute's customer isn't.  My personal and 100% correct opinion is of course that a prostitute is never a registerable sex offender and, for that matter, shouldn't be considered a criminal at all.   And while there's a bit more division in the ranks over this, with one interesting exception it's also my opinion that simply being a prostitute's customer should never be considered either a sex offender or a criminal either.

The exception, of course, is when the customer engages in behavior that would normally get them charged as a criminal or sex offender.  But, in today's... morally conflicted environment is considered boys-will-be-boys, hearty-fellow-well-done when a customer does it.

In other words, when customer has paid for sexual activity with someone who through age or coercion couldn't or wouldn't ordinarily be considered a freely consenting adult.  So paying for sex with a trafficked person?  If you weren't paying it would be rape, and thus a registrable sexual offense -- therefore if you get caught paying for it you should go on a sex-offender registry as well.  Same with sex with minors.

I happen to think it's appalling that prosecutors or judges in Louisiana, or any other state, would use such a heavy tool to penalize a voluntary adult prostituted or his or her customer.  But I also think it's appalling that they leave the same tool on the table when it comes to customers who have sex with children or slaves.

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Colorado Rep. Kent Lambert Differs Mightily on the Meaning and Consequences of the Words "Suffer the Children" in Matthew 19:14

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2011-01-25 22:50

Calvin and Hobbes. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Calvin and Hobbes comic via SBC prof Tim W. Loboschefski.

Jamelle Brouie quotes a Republican Colorado state legislator who a) imagines he's a good father and grandfather, b) imagines he's a good Presbyterian and c) seems to imagine he'll go to Heaven when he dies despite d) taking active steps to hurt small children in order to punish their parents.

"As a family guy myself with children and grandchildren, I take a very strong responsibility to earn money to feed my own family," said Sen. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, who voted against the request.

Shorter Lambert: If those poor kids didn't have such irresponsible parents, then they'd be able to afford breakfast!

Source: TAPPED

This is the the most intensely corrosive piece of patriarchy whether it be the personal, cultural, economic, or (nominally) Biblical type: in patriarchy small children aren't full-fledged individuals human beings. Nor, despite his professed "Christian" interest in the "sanctity of life" does it appear to occur to him that they have their own souls. Instead they're merely assets or liabilities... instruments to reflect the virtues of the well to do, and to "force-multiplied" punishment for those who aren't.

In the real, non-patriarchal world, however, children don't somehow magically disappear the moment they turn 18... to be replaced with what? Toast? It doesn't work that way. Instead they grow to take up the reins of the world when their generation comes of age. Or, if ill fed, mistreated because somebody wanted to "teach their parents a lesson," and otherwise left behind they become instead burdens, no longer on their parents but on their fellow citizens.

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Because the America is Just So Much Safer When TSA Gropes the Groins of Weeping 3-Year-Old Children

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2010-11-15 21:37

TSA's new book for kids:
TSA’s new book for kids: “My First Cavity Search” Source: BoingBoing

Ok, so I don’t usually object all that much to airport security theater. I’ve even been through the TSA’s stupid high-radiation “backscatter” peeping-tom body-scanner. But as it gets slowly more, and more, and more, and more intrusive… and theatrical… and most importantly delay-imposing it is getting a little old. But on average I figure for the couple of times a year I fly, what the fuck, let ‘em look at my pee-pee through their dime-store X-RAY SPECS.

But this one got me. Via Jennifer Welsh of Discover Blogs some group called National Opt-Out Day (about which I know nothing and therefore can’t possibly endorse) is suggesting that everyone protest against the body scanners by opting en mass for the alternative hands-on-your-genitals pat downs.

Here’s their pitch. I’ve emphasized the line that finally got me.

It’s the day ordinary citizens stand up for their rights, stand up for liberty, and protest the federal government’s desire to virtually strip us naked or submit to an “enhanced pat down” that touches people’s breasts and genitals in an aggressive manner. You should never have to explain to your children, “Remember that no stranger can touch or see your private area, unless it’s a government employee, then it’s OK.”

Source: Discover Blogs

The “unless it’s a government employee” part sounds a little right-wing, but the underlying principle is sound: don’t complicate the message we give children not to let others touch their private parts.

I might not have been so… well… touchy about it if political blogger Kevin Drum hadn’t mentioned a cell-phone video of a TSA agent trying to pat down a 3-year-old. And if Sungold at Kittywampus hadn’t been all over it too. And so on.

But yeah, I think past a certain point the returns in national humiliation, let alone sexual assault of children, offsets the genuinely incremental increases in personal security bullshit theatrics like this pose. Especially since they don’t really produce all that much extra security in the first place. (For instance would backscanner technology have stopped the Yemen-based printer-cartridge bomb attempts? No, the printer cartridges were shipped as cargo and aside from making shippers pinky-swear they’re not shipping bombs air cargo remains subject to basically no inspection at all. At all! But I digress…)

Anyway, no, adults probably should be, and children definitively shouldn’t be subjected either virtual nude photography or way-too-real genital manipulation at airports or… pretty much anywhere else.

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By "Other Means" to Avoid Pregancy We Hope He Means Something Besides Putting His Penis in Children Too Young to Get Pregnant

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2010-11-08 15:05

So here’s yet more fallout from Catholicism’s culture of sex abuse: Why, exactly, would the church hierarchy be so intransigent about producing unlimited numbers of children?

According to the Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the Associated Press,

U.S. Catholic bishops say pregnancy is a healthy condition, not an illness. In comments filed with the Department of Health and Human Services, the bishops say they oppose any requirement to cover contraceptives or sterilization as preventive care.

“We don’t consider it to be health care, but a lifestyle choice,” said John Haas, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, a Philadelphia think tank whose work reflects church teachings. “We think there are other ways to avoid having children than by ingesting chemicals paid for by health insurance.”

Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Forget about their well-documented anger and fear of women. Forget their even better known anxiety about sexuality. And let’s not even worry about their deep-seated ties to capital-P patriarchal concerns about paternity, property, and propriety.

Instead ask yourself if an institution that at times seems so dedicated first to abusing children and then covering it up can ever be truly disinterested when it comes to limiting further production of more victims children.

I don’t know why this subject always sets my teeth so far on edge. But wow does the institution behind Haas’s think tank have zero moral standing on this issue!

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Speaking of "Accommodation:" The Brutal Consequences of Neoconservative Obession With "Sex-Trafficking"

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2010-05-27 05:39

Levi Pulkkinen of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Seattle 911 Police Blog brings home to points that are really, really critical in debates about human trafficking, as opposed to “sex-trafficking.”

The first point is that non-sex-trafficking human trafficking is perfectly real.

The second, even more important point, is that while not all human trafficking is “sex trafficking,” i.e. not all trafficked people are trafficked into conscripted sex work, all trafficked people face the prospect of coerced sex. Some face the reality of it.

For instance…

A Pacific couple previously convicted on human smuggling charges was sentenced Tuesday to federal prison.

Maria Bartola Santos-Gonzalez, 63, was sentenced to three years in prison Tuesday, while her husband, Juan Gonzalez Guerra, 55, was sentenced to one year and a day, according to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement statement. Both pleaded guilty to in January.

Investigators with the Pacific Police Department and ICE launched the investigation in May 2009 after a 7-year-old girl told her school counselor that an older man had been molesting her, according to the ICE statement. The Pacific Police Department followed up on the claim and it led them to Gonzalez Guerra.

Read the quote in context here.

So. As often happens in these kinds of situations, the Gonzalez couple hired runners in Mexico to locate people who wanted to be smuggled into the U.S. so they could find work. So the people willingly entered into agreements to be brought here.

So. Their intention was to be in migration. Their agreement was to be smuggled in exchange for a fee to be paid after they arrived. Their reality was that when they arrived they were blackmailed, defrauded, threatened with violence, and were victims of violence at the hands of people they’d believed to be smugglers but who instead had instead trafficked them into forced, largely uncompensated labor.

And while they at it their children were tied up, beaten, sexually assaulted, and, it sounds like, raped by their traffickers.

But I guess since they were only being sexually assaulted and raped by their captors instead of “prostituted” it’s not really very important. Because to their mind only sex-trafficking matters. (In fact some of them, mostly, no surprise neoconservatives and/or their very-conservative feminist allies, claim that concern about “human trafficking” is a deliberate dodge invented by the sex industry to distract resources away from them.)

Point being this case illustrates that yeah, really, there really, really is human trafficking, often of would-be ordinary migrants, and that people who say otherwise are liars. And yeah, some of the people trafficked into the U.S. — a little less than half according to credible, non-partisan estimates — are trafficked into sex work but the rest aren’t, and people who say otherwise are liars about that too. But finally, yeah, this case illustrates that the assholes who claim that only the sex-trafficking matters because ZOMG!!!TEH!!!WHITE!!!SLAVERY!!! are assholes who don’t get that regardless of age, gender, orientation, or forced profession once you’re coerced you don’t really have a lot of recourse if your trafficker wants to use your body as well as your paycheck.

Pulkinnen’s article adds

At the hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman said, “[Ms. Santos-Gonzalez] took their money, put them in circumstances that were dire … children went to bed hungry … [she] took advantage of these people … in many ways it was a form of modern-day slavery… it is at the fundamental core that you cannot take people and grind people down… this is not the way to treat other people… you need to treat them with respect, you need to treat them with dignity.”

Just a little reminder that accusations of “accommodation” can go both ways. To obsess about the sex part of trafficking, instead of the trafficking part of trafficking, is to enable not only slavery, debt peonage, coercion and labor conscription but also sexual assault and rape.

For why this issue is so nettlesome to me see, also, for instance

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Why I Believe MRAs Should Address Sexual Abuse of Boys As a Separate Issue

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2010-03-31 11:22

Summary: Comments to my earlier post, Time for MRAs and other Men’s Movement Activists to Speak Out on Catholic and Other Institutional Sexual Abuses of Boys, have been cool enough, and thought-provoking enough to warrant a separate post about why sexual abuse of boys should be a specific MRA/Men’s-Movement issue.

I’m not at all suggesting in that post or anywhere else that there is or was no abuse of girls. And goodness knows there’s not just covert abuse of minor girls in other denominations but active encouragement to enter marriage (or its, um, equivalents) early. Sometimes (FLDS, Branch Davidians) egregiously early!

There are instead three other reasons I’m focusing on the currently-visible issue of sexual assault on boys.

1) Possibly because of avoidance due to bogus Rule of Desire #2, or perhaps just because boys don’t have hymens and/or hymen-related “resale” value in marriage, or maybe just from the sheer inertia of tradition the emphasis of the impact has been on anger and sense of betrayal at the perpetrators rather than consideration of the impact of sexual assault on boys. In other words the emphasis is that it’s been priests, who really shouldn’t have been committing these crimes, not on the minors who shouldn’t have been victims regardless of who the perpetrators are or were.

2) When rape of children has been addressed at all it’s tended to be addressed in a sort of dog-leg version of traditional gender divisions: children are women’s work, plus children are lumped in with women as traditional dependents of men, and so dealing with sexual assault on children has fallen to women in general, and feminists in particular. That’s actually fine in a way — women, children, and men have received blanket protection thanks to the heartfelt, sometimes aggressive, and often unwelcome-by-antifeminist efforts of feminism. The end result, however, has been to leave men off the hook — not only for taking action against predation on children but also, and very importantly in my estimation, off the hook for being out about their own current and prior roles as victims.

3) And finally the MRA issue: Over the years a number of so-called “hard core” feminists ranging from Mary Daly to Twisty Faster have expressed, um, dissatisfaction with men’s efforts to include rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment of men in feminist anti-rape discourse. (I can’t find the quote at the moment but I remember Twisty saying approximately that if men wanted to so something about male victims they should, but the issue was otherwise of no interest to her.) Beyond the asshole-ishness of the sentiment it’s a legitimate point: When one is serious about challenging gender stereotypes and destygmatizing one’s own sex you’re not really going to make it very far by focusing only on whatever wrongs, even legitimate ones, perpetrated by one’s opposite sex. The issue of (by definition, convention, and as of 1995 Papally-approved infallability) all-male Priests abusing male children, matched with the issue of male children being identified as systematic victims over decades and perhaps centuries, is just about as tailor-made an issue for anything even remotely identifiable as a men’s movement to involve itself in.

For those three reasons, even though I’m pretty sure comparable institutional abuse of girls will eventually come to light, I think it’s a good idea to draw attention to the issue as an issue by and about, men because it is therefore for men to affirmatively rather than passively address.

And, incidentally, I also happen to strongly suspect that just as boys and men have gained protection from feminist activism against rape, girls and women will similarly benefit from from men’s activism to prevent abuse of men and boys.

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Time for MRAs and other Men's Movement Activists to Speak Out on Catholic and Other Institutional Sexual Abuses of Boys

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2010-03-30 05:48

You know how pretty within minutes a feminist mentioning rape culture online a Men’s Rights Activist or other anti-feminist is going to chime in with either “but women commit rape too” or “but men get raped too?” Many of them get awesomely passionate about their real or potential or at least hypothetical experiences on the receiving end.

So… quick question: when it comes to the now-overflowing allegations of sexual assault and exploitation of boys in the Catholic Church hierarchy what is the MRA position and what, if anything, are MRAs doing about it?

I ask because I genuinely don’t know: I don’t ordinarily follow MRAs enough to be able to track the credible ones so MRAs could be all over this and I just haven’t heard. If so, though, Google is being unusually nonforthcoming about it. So I had to ask.

This is another one of those areas where society in general, and men in particular, have been freeloading off of feminist women for nearly 40 years. Who’s done the heavy lifting on issues like, oh, say, rape? Who’s done the heavy lifting on issues like, oh, say, authority-based sexual coercion and harassment and the abuse of power differentials for sex? Women have. Mostly feminist women.

And yeah, sure, inside our social narratives that makes 100% sense. And even in reality, since the vast majority of those raped, coerced, harassed, bought, sold, and otherwise leveraged are women it still makes 75-85% sense that women would have been most motivated to pull that weight.

But look at the stuff going on in the Church. I’m confident there’s another shoe out there waiting to drop on sexual abuse of girls by priests. I mean, we haven’t been hearing about it but it’s bound to turn up. But you know what? In the meantime it’s about priests sexually abusing boy, after boy, after boy, after boy after boy, after boy, after…

If ever, on the planet, there was a legitimate issue for men to get involved in you’d think it would be the issue of shocking numbers of boys and young men being molested, raped, abused and generally sexually preyed upon by, largely, other men. It ought to be a major issue particularly for men who claim simply to be attempting to organize themselves politically and socially the way women have already been doing for several generations.

Because, it’s turning out, men really do get raped too! In very large numbers. And whereas one particularly ill-organized church is in the spotlight I’m… pretty sure once people really start asking questions they’re going to start discovering lots, and lots, and lots of other denominational vectors for abuse of men and boys. Lots of secular ones too. (Not even including the nervous heh-heh-don’t-drop-the-soap prevalence of prison rape.)

And it’s not like sexual assault of boys doesn’t have profound influence on them! It’s not like trauma, ambiguity, neuroses, and sexualization doesn’t happen to boys either. (Secondary question: how different would men’s sexual behavior be if some fraction of former boys weren’t trying to regain control after loss of their own sexual autonomy? Food for thought.)

So you’d think this issue would just be tailor made for MRAs. And yet I’m really hearing nothing. (Remember, there could be lots of MRAs saying it, but if I’m not hearing it…)

At any rate, this appears to be yet another area where men are seriously getting free rides on the backs of feminist pioneers. And it seems like if the men’s movements and men’s rights movements are serious about their stated intentions this would be a very, very good time for them to begin stepping up to the plate.

Denial based on Rule of Desire #2 is no longer a valid excuse.

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Harriet Jacobs at Fugitivus Writes Awesomely About Coping With Abuse in All It's Permutations

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2010-02-05 13:17

Harriet Jacobs of Fugitivus writes very powerfully about extracting herself from a very deeply-ingrained local culture of abuse. Parental abuse. Sexual abuse. Partner abuse. Often intertwined with drug abuse and alcohol abuse. She now works in or around the field of social services related to family and child courts. (I’m trying to be even more vague about what she does than she tries to be.)

Wow. She’s some writer. With some past. And some really great insights about it. And she’s got what sounds like an awesomely insider job in an area of law and society that very much needs to be better understood. And she writes very well about that too.

While there’s an excellent chance I’m the only one who wasn’t already reading her a quick Google search doesn’t turn up that many references to her. Which is a shame. As I said she has sometimes chillingly important things to say. For those likely to be triggered by any manner of abuse at all her topics are all pretty much triggering.

An example of something triggering would be the following quote about the (internal) logic of abusive relationships in the context of perilous/subsistence social situations… made even more trigger-y by the circumstances her abusive relationship made it possible to avoid! (Emphasis hers.)

I’ve said this before, but I never really applied it to my own life. Sometimes, the reason women stay with abusive men is because they assume they will always be abused, and they’re choosing their abuser. I am certain, had I been single, Nero would’ve made a move on me. And without the omnipresent threat of stealing another man’s girl, he might’ve felt perfectly safe about raping me. I don’t have any doubt that the other boys would’ve told me it wasn’t rape, which would’ve been part of Nero’s sense of safety. Granted, the only reason I was in a social group like that was because of my association with Flint, but being surrounded by people of his choosing did exactly what he wanted it to: It made me choose him as the best alternative. For a few years, I was surrounded by completely amoral drug addicts and rapists/rape-apologists. And I assumed everybody was like that, once you got to know them enough; after all, I’d seen the boys act decent and human in front of new women. That’s a dangerous place to be, and since I wasn’t yet together enough to realize “I don’t have to hang out with these fuckwits,” the second best solution was to find some way to protect myself from all of them by choosing one of them. Letting Flint rape me was insurance against anybody else doing it.

She said it here.

That resonates very seriously for me, though obviously from a slightly different perspective. The kinds of people she describes hanging around with, and for that matter being, sound so similar to the people I hung around with during my transition from homelessness into mere desperately marginality. A life where “good guys” only sold or used pot, coke, alcohol and maybe occasionally non-meth speed while “bad guys” sold coke, pot, tranquilizers, and more-directly addictive “hard stuff.” A life where “up and out” meant “working my way up” into a “Clerks” like assistant manager position in an exurban fast-food joint with only the most peripheral contact with my former friends. And “friends.” And before moving away completely to the Northwest where I discovered college, real friends (including many of my old, true friends), work, life, health, and eventually love and family.

In other words, while my situation was nowhere near as dire as Jacobs I completely recognize the logic that comes from the realization that “I don’t have to hang out with these fuckwits.” Instead inside that culture being a “good guy” means hanging out with the good drug dealers and good crooked cops who don’t beat up their girlfriends and who think it’s “bad form” to have sex with women who’ve passed out. The way “those losers” do.

Sigh. There’s a lot more at her blog. Not just about the downsides but about how to deal with the downsides. But from within and, once out, from without.

Jacobs has just taken a new job, an important one, that requires a great deal more circumspection in her blogging, and which takes up more of her time and energy. So who knows if she’ll continue writing the way she has been. That said she’s got a couple of very powerful new pieces. For instance one about how society, personality, and personal circumstance conspires with the law to constrain reproductive choice for the very young and very vulnerable even more than you think it does. And another about how one very anonymous department of a very-deliberately not-identified administrative entity helps getting judicial waivers of parent-notification requirements merely difficult in a system that’s otherwise not really well-designed to give them at all.

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A Good Time to Think About Haiti's Coerced Domestic Child Servants

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2010-01-15 15:23


Photo by Flickr user United Nations Development Programme. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Lurid tales of sex-trafficking around the world, and… problematic conflation of any sort of adult sex work with trafficking notwithstanding, the situation of child trafficking in Haiti is well-documented and endemic.

A very quick bit of Googling will turn up the same stories over and over. Here’s a representative sample from a reliable source, the U.S. Department of Labor:

A 1997 UNICEF study estimated that there were some 250,000 to 300,000 child domestic workers in Haiti, 80 percent of whom were girls under the age of 14. In Haiti, child domestic workers are commonly referred to as restaveks , a Creole word meaning “to stay with.” They are among the most vulnerable and exploited of all children in Haiti. Isolated from family and peers, restavek children are largely unprotected from abuse.

According to UNICEF, most restaveks reach the age of 15 without ever having been to school. Most restaveks work 10 to 14 hours per day and do not receive any compensation for their work. They are often psychologically and physically punished by the master or mistress of the house and sometimes even by their children. Girl restaveks are sometimes sexually abused by the males in the employing families. If a girl becomes pregnant, she will generally be released into the streets. Many such girls become street children or prostitutes.

They said it here.

Also by tradition even in the best of times these children, who’s parents send them from their impoverished countryside to the only scarcely less impoverished city on the usually-empty promise that they will receive an education, are worked the hardest and fed last by their owners “employers.”

This is not the best of times.

If it’s left up to the (often lower-to-middle-class) Haitan families who use them these children will receive disaster-related food, water, shelter, and medical care last. With nowhere else to go (many are brought in too young even to remember where their real homes are) these children may have no where else to turn but the families that used them before.

If you’ve ever spent a minute of your time worrying in the abstract about trafficking it might be a good time, right now, to start thinking about the very concrete problem of what to do about up to a quarter million trafficked children who are now doubly screwed.

My partner and I have already donated to Doctors Without Borders because they’re good people and not just spending all their fundraising dollars on… more fundraising. Which is more than I can say about some of the more sanctimonious “anti-trafficking” organizations. So I’m on the lookout for reputable groups able to directly address the specific needs of displaced coerced children in Haiti. If I find one I’ll post about it here.

According to the charity rating service CharityNavigator the following groups are reputable and fit the approximate criteria. Again I’ll update if I find something more specific.

Save the Children

Note: I’m advocating for donations, not admonishing. Right now there are more than enough priorities in Haiti to go around, and as long as you’re giving through a reputable organization it’s needed and will make a difference.

See CharityNavigator’s list of established organizations on the ground in Haiti now.. Note: The same page has a good list recommendations for how to make sure any donations you go where you want them to go, and how to avoid being scammed instead.

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