About this Crisis - Montgomery County, Maryland

Latina Women & Children at Risk

Sexual Exploitation of Women and Children of African Ancestry in the Americas

This Section last Updated on December 15, 2005

A Focus on Africa - and on African Descended communities in the Caribbean, Latin America, the United States and Canada

This section of LibertadLatina.org contains information regarding the crisis in human rights facing Afro-Latina and Afro-Caribbean women and children across the Americas.

Chuck Goolsby,

December 10, 2005

- LibertadLatina

Participants in the CIM/OAS and IOM Caribbean

Regional Meeting on Counter-Trafficking Strategies
Date: March 14-16, 2005 - Washington, DC

African Descended Women in the Americas

Afro-Latina and Afro-Caribbean women and girls are also subjected to conditions of gender and race based impunity in the Americas. Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the English speaking West Indies (Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago and other islands), as well as French speaking Haiti and Dominique all have large populations of African-descended women facing severe sexual exploitation. Sex traffickers actively target these women and girls.

See Also:

Crisis - Brazil

Crisis-Columbia

Darfur Genocide

Doctor Maricel Mena López An Afro-Colombian Theologian Living in Brazil

La mujer blanca, de clase media, solo sufre sexismo. Las pobres sufren clasismo y sexismo. Para la mujer negra enfrenta, además, otro elemento, que es el racismo.

Middle class white women only suffer sexism. Poor women suffer class-ism and sexism. Black women face, in addition, another element, which is racism.

From: I Am Black and Beautiful (In Spanish).

Child sex abuse and prostitution are rising in Latin America and children are most threatened in Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Cuba, United nations officials said Wednesday... "Poverty and race ... are decisive. It is mainly poor, black women who suffer the worst abuse'.'

Reuters, 1997: Abuse In Latin America Growing.

Resources

www.AfroLatino.com

Join Afrolatino.com's bilingual forums

NEWS

Added Dec. 09, 2005

Missouri, USA

Sheila Jackson spends her 44th birthday in bed.

Photo: Gabriel B. Tait/Post-Dispatch

Living with AIDS - African American women

An estimated 1.6 million Americans have become infected with the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS. About 500,000 [U.S.] Americans have died.

The disease now strikes people of every age, race, ethnic group and sexual orientation. But some more than others.
In many ways, Sheila Jackson represents the changing face of the disease, now in its third decade.

Jackson, 44, is African-American, a mother who probably was infected in her 20s. Today, the greatest rise in new HIV infections is occurring among African-American women.

- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Nov. 30, 2005

See also:

LibertadLatina

HIV-AIDS Issues

Added Dec. 07, 2005

The World

African National Congress (ANC) Youth League march in Durban, South Africa on Dec. 12, 2001 protesting the ongoing rape of women and children. Many cases involve adult men who have been told by traditional healers that having sex with a child cures HIV/AIDS.

Photo: Final Call

United Nations - Human trafficking has now tied with the illegal arms industry as the largest and fastest-growing criminal enterprise in the world, after the illicit drug trade.

There are 27 million people serving as literal slaves around the world. Every year, 600,000 to 800,000 victims are trafficked across international borders, half of them children.

The trafficking in human slaves is now a $9.5-billion-a-year 'industry.'

- IPS/GIN

Dec. 06, 2005

See also:

LibertadLatina

The Global Crisis

Added Dec. 02, 2005

Jamaica

HIV Rights Activist Steve Harvey

On the eve of World AIDS Day, Steve Harvey, an AIDS activist from Jamaica AIDS Support for Life (JASL), was murdered. Harvey ran a program providing support to gay men and sex workers.

Last year, the founder of Jamaica’s gay rights movement, Brian Williamson, was also murdered. Many believe the killing was a hate crime.

Homosexuality is illegal in Jamaica: men convicted of homosexual activity can face ten years’ imprisonment.

Recently, Steve Harvey led JASL’s annual candle-lit vigil in memory of those killed by HIV. JASL is now mourning the death of one of their strongest defendants of people living with HIV/AIDS.

- Christian Aid

Alertnet.org

Dec. 02, 2005

Added Dec. 01, 2005

Brazil bucks AIDS trend, but Afro-Brazilians have been hard-hit.

Added Dec. 01, 2005

Africa: Niños con Sida en peligro

Added Nov. 27, 2005

Dominican Republic

Entre 23.000 y 38.000 mujeres dominicanas son víctimas de tráfico humano.

Santo Domingo - The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has declared that it is urgent that the Dominican government seek greater judicial cooperation between source & destination countries for sex trafficked women. According to Fanny Polanía, IOM programs officer for the Republic Dominican, the lack of coordination is allowing traffickers to escape justice and to intimidate victims.

Between 23.000 and 38.000 Dominican women have been sex trafficked, mainly in Europe, South America and North America.

IOM’s efforts have rescued 181 women this year [2005]. The average victim is a single mother of three, between age 20 and 25. Most victims had been trafficked to Argentina.

The Republic Dominican is also a destination country for sex trafficked women from Haiti, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Asia and Eastern Europe.

- ElNuevoDiario.com.do

Dominican Republic

Nov. 24, 2005

IOM's Fanny Polonia, quoted above, is also the author of::

"Japan, the Mecca for Trafficking in Colombian Women."

(PDF File)

Added Nov. 23, 2005

U.S. ICE Action

Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic

Dominican Migrant Rescued.

Photo: U.S. ICE

Cinco hombres dominicanos fueron sentenciados en Puerto Rico a más de 10 años de cárcel por tráfico de humanos desde República Dominicana.

- Nuevo Heraldo

Miami Herald

Nov. 21, 2005

San Juan, Puerto Rico - U.S. Immig-ration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has announced that five Dominicans have been convicted of human smuggling and were sentenced by a federal judge to prisons terms of 10 to 17 years each.

The five men were responsible for smuggling 93 Dominican migrants to Puerto Rico on a boat that capsized during the voyage killing 7 Dominicans.

- U.S. ICE

Nov. 22, 2005

Added Nov. 4, 2005

Brazil

Marcelo Campos, chief of Brazil's anti-slavery task force, is stepping up armed raids on ranches, farms and work camps he says force people to work against their will.

Last month, the task force helped free workers from illegal camps in five Brazilian states.

About 25,000 people in Brazil work under slave-like conditions according to the Catholic Church. In the last 15 years, 17,000 captive workers have been freed by police.

-Bloomberg.com

Nov. 4, 2005

LibertadLatina Note:

This article's statistics do not include the estimated 500,000 to 2 million children and youth who are estimated to be forced into prostitution each year in Brazil.