The Polaris Project began just a few years ago and has grown rapidly ever since. They purport to fight human and sex trafficking in the US and around the world, and they routinely conflate international marriages with sex trafficking. They think that I am a sex trafficker because I met my wife online and she is from another country.
What does it take for such an NGO to succeed? Here are the ingredients. First, it takes someone with ambition. Founder Derek Ellerman is such a person, along with Katherine Chon, both Asian-American, Ivy League grads who know better, i.e. they know the essential premise of their organization is fraudulent.
Second, it takes the right cause at the right time. Fighting human trafficking is surely a noble cause. Anyone who kidnaps another person should be severely punished. And during the last decade the US government, followed by state governments, has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to stamping this out in the US. Much of this money is given out to NGOs who can show they are fighting human trafficking.
It matters not if they are successful, and indeed they cannot be successful because there is virtually no such trafficking to the US. http://www.online-dating-rights.com/forum/index.php?topic=1105.0
The Washington Post, the same newspaper that wrote glowingly about Polaris below and which helped them perpetrate the fraud that woman are sex trafficked to the site of the World Cup, also wrote an expose of the corrupt human trafficking industry in the US, which necessarily includes organizations like Polaris.
Polaris has long been behind Tahirih Justice Center in fundraising, clout and connections. Indeed, Derek Ellerman is just a kid, probably in his early 30s, so he hardly has the connections that Layli Miller-Muro has. You can read his bio and navel contemplations at:
http://www.ellerman.info/joomla/index.php which includes a list of books he likes and thinks everyone should read. (But I have read some of these same books and haven't made it my mission in life to denigrate foreign women, American men and raise money to get laws passed that would put men in jail for sending emails to those foreign women, so maybe the books are meaningless and when we get down all about...character and personal integrity. Derek clearly learned the wrong lesson from Thoreau's words in Walden that he wanted to learn what life had to teach.)
Here is part of his blog that he wants the world to know about:
Saturday, 07 June 2008
I'm not doing such a good job of keeping my website up to date. I returned to Polaris Project fulltime in January as Interim Executive Director, and have been really enjoying the last several months. It's an amazing team that I get to work with everyday doing work that is making a real difference. I've been spending my spare time piddling around with Lynx, practicing Andy McKee on guitar, and spending time with Sandra. I can't believe it's already June. Nevertheless, he correctly read our culture and the propensity of our politicians, foundations and corporations to hand out gobs of cash to anyone fighting human trafficking, no questions asked. And he helped found an organization to milk those tits of money and to milk them good. But along with his youth comes hubris. And Derek thinks he knows what he really doesn't know, as evidenced from his statement to the reporter below that he knows sex trafficking spikes during major sporting events. (Studies done by neutral researchers disproves this lie.)
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/09/AR2006060901477_pf.htmlSoccer With a Side of Slavery
By Katherine Chon and Derek Ellerman
Saturday, June 10, 2006
"It is truly scandalous. People are talking about women, importing them to satisfy the base instincts of people associated with football. It is humiliating enough for me that football is linked with alcohol and violence. But this is worse. It is slaves that will come and be put into houses. Human beings are being talked about like cattle, and football is linked with that."
-- Raymond Domenech, coach of the French World Cup soccer team
As the 2006 World Cup games get underway in Germany, tourists and soccer fans are being joined at the various competition venues by denizens of an international world of crime where human beings are bought and sold for profit.
Human trafficking is the third-largest criminal industry in the world, after arms and drugs. While soccer fans anticipate the excitement of the games, many of us in the anti-trafficking movement are deeply troubled by the expected surge of sex trafficking in Germany to meet the demand for commercial sex associated with the World Cup. It is estimated that more than 40,000 women and children will be imported to Germany during the month-long competition to provide commercial sex in the "mega-brothels," "quickie shacks," other legalized venues and vast underground networks that exist in Germany.
The traffickers and those who benefit from sex trafficking promote an image of women freely choosing to be involved in prostitution, making huge amounts of money at it and in general having a great time. It is the "Pretty Woman" myth, which many apparently like to believe in order to justify their inaction or ignorance on the issue.
But as our organization, Polaris Project, and many others like it that work every day with people in the sex industry know, this image does not reflect the reality on the streets and in the brothels for a majority of women and children.
In fact this is a world where violence and psychological abuse by the pimps, traffickers and customers are nearly ubiquitous. Research has shown that those who are prostituted face a 62 percent chance of being raped or gang-raped, a 73 percent chance of being physically assaulted, and a chance of dying that is 40 times greater than that of the average person in their age group. There is nothing "pretty" about the sex industry for the majority of people it victimizes.
From our experience as service providers for victims of trafficking, we know that large sporting events, conventions and other such gatherings are closely tied to a spike in demand for commercial sex and, in turn, for sex trafficking. Behind the trophies and cheers is the hidden suffering of women and children who bear the brunt of violence and abuse resulting from the rise in demand. Because of the link between demand and sex trafficking, we are troubled to see that the State Department gave Germany a Tier 1 compliance ranking in its annual Trafficking in Persons report released earlier this week, despite the German government's failure to address this problem.
Exacerbating all of the factors described above are the legalization of pimping and of the buying of commercial sex. The traffickers support legalization because they know that "regulation" has, in practice, meant a thin layer of regulated commercial sex businesses that have opted into the system, resting on top of a far larger group of illegal operations. The underground dealers have correctly calculated that greater profits can be generated through not paying taxes, ignoring basic safety standards for women and engaging in trafficking of children. Without a commensurately large, and politically unrealistic, apparatus to meaningfully monitor and police the thousands of underground operations, the increase in demand under a legalized system dramatically drives the expansion of this sector of sex trafficking. Unlike the success seen in countries such as Sweden, with its policies that decriminalize prostituted women and children but criminalize the buyers and controllers, failure has been the hallmark of the social experiment of full legalization.
The modern-day slave trade is the fastest-growing criminal industry in the world. There should be no country that is uncertain in its opposition to all the things that facilitate this egregious crime. Those who fail to act will surely face international condemnation now, and the judgment of history in the future. A time will come when they will be asked, "Where did you stand? What did you do?" We hope that the German government, soccer fans and governments and people everywhere, will be able to answer in sound conscience: We stood with the oppressed, and did everything in our power to stop these abuses.
The writers are co-executive directors and co-founders of Polaris Project, a Washington-based agency combating human trafficking and modern-day slavery.
