At the International Tour Management Institute's (ITMI) 26th Annual Symposium, ITMI became the first travel and tourism institute to sign the Tourism Child-Protection Code of Conduct. Last year, ITMI incorporated human trafficking training into their curriculum. All graduates of the program are educated on the issue, the signs of trafficking, and empowered to report suspected incidences to the proper authorities.
UN Conference on the Rights of the Child gives concluding remarks on the Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children
The United Nations gave their concluding observations on the second periodic report of the United States of America to the Committee on the Rights of the Child on the Optional Protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, adopted by the Committee at its sixty-second session (14 January-1 February 2013), how the U.S can improve its protection of children covered under this protocol. The recommendations state how the U.S. government can do a better job in protecting children from sexual exploitation and come from a review of the government’s report and additional conversation and between the US and the UN Committee on the Rights of the child in January.
150 years after U.S. emancipation, slavery isn’t over
This January marked not only the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, but also the third annual National Slavery & Human Trafficking Prevention Month. The presidential proclamation began in 2011 as a way for the administration and human rights groups to raise awareness of what President Obama has called “a crime that amounts to modern-day slavery.“ There are more people living in bondage today than at any other time in human history. The market value of a trafficked human life has decreased from the equivalent of $40,000 in today’s dollars in the mid-nineteenth century American South, to about $90 today. The number of human trafficking cases in the U.S. has more than doubled since 2007, according to the FBI.
Apple's Child-Labor Problem Runs Deep
Apple has released its 2012 Supplier Responsibility Report, which claims to have found no underage workers in "any of our final assembly suppliers." But Apple's supply chain goes much deeper than that, and what the company found in the supply chain of its suppliers — the places that send Foxconn parts — came out less clean. "In many of the cases of underage labor we’ve discovered, the culprit behind the violation was a third-party labor agent that willfully and illegally recruited young workers," explains the report. In one plant that makes circuit-board components, Apple's auditors found 74 cases of workers 16-years-old and younger. Another huge labor agency, Quanshun Human Resources, forced parents of young children to forge papers in order to cover for its underage workers. While 95 percent of the factories Apple audited had no signs of child labor, the other 5 percent include more sordid stories.
King County of Seattle Displays Awareness of Human Trafficking on Its Billboards
In early February, King County of Seattle unveiled billboards that increase awareness of Human Trafficking along the Interstate-5 corridor, in Kent and Tukwila as well as Tacoma, Mill Creek and Bellingham. The ad space, donated by Clear Channel Outdoors, advertises a national hotline and message to reach out to victims, potential victims and the public about where to turn for help on its 15 electronic and traditionally displayed billboards. The ads, in eight languages, encourage people to call the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline at 1-888-3737-888 if they suspect someone may be a victim of human trafficking or if they are victims. Similar ads are being displayed on Metro Transit buses and on county websites and other resources. Clear Channel Media & Entertainment also airs public service announcements on their radio stations throughout the region as part of their $88,000 contribution to the awareness campaign.
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