by Brian Shilhavy
Health Impact News Editor
The trafficking of children and sexual slavery world-wide is a global epidemic. Most of the public’s image of such horrific examples of modern-day slavery evoke images of poorer countries where this problem is well-documented.
However, a new government investigation confirms that the problem of trafficking children and modern-day child slavery is a very real problem right here within our own borders.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) recently published a six-month investigation looking at 125,000 unaccompanied minors who have crossed the U.S. borders into the United States since 2011, reportedly fleeing violence and unrest in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
This U.S. Senate report concluded that the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has failed to protect these children from human trafficking, leaving them vulnerable to abuses at the hands of government-approved caretakers. U.S. law requires HHS to ensure that unaccompanied alien children (UAC) are protected from human trafficking and other forms of abuse. However, this is not happening.
The fact that the United States is a popular destination for child trafficking has been well documented:
The causes of the surge of UACs are disputed, but all stakeholders, including HHS, agree that one reason UACs come to this country is that they are ‘brought into the United States by human trafficking rings.’ According to the State Department’s 2015 Trafficking in Persons Report, ‘[t]he United States is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, transgender individuals, and children—both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals—subjected to sex trafficking and forced labor.’ Human trafficking involves transporting or harboring human beings, often for financial gain, through the use of fraud, force, or coercion. (Report)
The Senate report notes several “Systemic Deficiencies” in the government’s failure to protect these vulnerable children from organized criminal trafficking:
- HHS’s Process for Verifying a Category 3 Sponsor’s Identity and Relationship with a UAC Is Unreliable and Subject to Abuse
- HHS Is Unable to Safeguard Children from Sponsors Attempting to Accumulate Multiple Children
- HHS Failed to Require Background Checks on Non-Sponsor Adult Household Members or on Backup Sponsors
- HHS Policy Allowed Non-Relatives with Criminal Histories to Sponsor Children
- HHS Does Not Ensure a Sponsor Has Adequate Income to Support a UAC
- HHS Approves Placements with Sponsors Who May Not Remain in the Country
- Sponsors Often Inflict Legal Harm on UACs by Not Ensuring Their Appearance At Immigration Proceedings
Child Trafficking in the U.S. Goes Beyond Alien Children – Is Happening with ALL Children in America
While it is good that the issue of unaccompanied alien children being brought into the United States by organized trafficking rings is getting some public exposure in the mainstream media and Congress, the broader issue of child trafficking and sexual slavery of all children in the United States is one that does not get much press or attention from politicians.
Every day in the United Sates, children are being ripped away from their parents and trafficked through organizations that are for the most part legal.
One of the main reasons this issue is not yet front and center with the public is because the main perpetrators of these heinous crimes are corrupt government social programs and those who allow them to operate.
Health Impact News started MedicalKidnap.com in the last quarter of 2014 to begin giving more exposure to this problem of legal child trafficking in the United States. The foster care and adoption system in the United States is a multi-billion dollar business, and the vast majority of children who are being removed from their homes and placed into the system are not being removed because of child abuse.
A much broader and vague reason is used far more often today to take children away from parents: neglect. “Neglect” is being defined today by government social agencies, whose primary premise is that the government can do a better job of taking care of children than most parents. “Neglect” can be defined today as “medical neglect” for simply disagreeing with one’s doctor and desiring to seek a second opinion on a medical procedure, for example.
Legal Child Trafficking for Drug Research
War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg. Adolf Hitler’s personal physician, 43-year old Karl Brandt. Brandt was also Reich Commissar for Health and Sanitation, and was indicted by the U.S. prosecution with 22 other Nazi doctors. Brandt was found guilty of participating in and consenting to using concentration camp inmates as guinea pigs in horrible medical experiments, supposedly for the benefit of the armed forces. He was sentenced to death by hanging. Image Source.
The U.S. federal government has mandated drug research with children. The need for children to participate in drug company research is high, and the temptation to overstep parental rights to force children to participate is great. Researchers publicly admit using money and other rewards to obtain participation of children in their drug trials.
Organizations that advocate for the rights of parents to make decisions regarding their children’s healthcare are finding that foster children in CPS custody are being enrolled in drug experiments without parental approval. State Child Protective Services are enrolling children in drug experiments without parental approval or court orders. However, those who conduct these drug experiments for pharmaceutical companies, and those who are charged with monitoring such research, do not see a problem with their recruitment methods.
To learn more about this legal form of child trafficking occurring in the United States, see:
Medical Kidnapping in the U.S. – Kidnapping Children for Drug Trials
Legal Child Trafficking for Adoption
As noted above, the U.S. foster care and adoption industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. With infertility rates at all-time highs, and increasing legislation sanctioning same-sex marriages which cannot produce offspring, the demand for babies for adoption is higher than ever before.
In one of the most shocking stories we published in 2015, Health Impact News resurrected some investigative reports conducted by John Boel in Kentucky in 2006 through 2007. In these series of reports aired in the local media in Kentucky, Mr. Boel interviewed whistle-blowers who were former managers in child social services who admitted that the agency “took orders” for babies to be adopted, and then used bogus charges against poor families to take away their children and fulfill these orders. Watch the shocking reports yourself:
Whistleblowers Reveal CPS Child Kidnappings in Kentucky Adoption Business
Legal Child Sex Trafficking is Rampant in the United States
Filmmaker Sean Stone interviews Tammi Stefano. Image from YouTube.
In 2015 filmmaker Sean Stone interviewed Tammi Stefano, the Executive Director of The National Safe Child Coalition (NSCC), and exposed much of the corruption happening within Child Protection Services and Family Courts. This might be one of the few interviews currently available on the Internet that exposes so much information on the child sex trafficking business that exists in LA County, and across the nation.
Ms. Stefano reveals that she discovered, and that the Los Angeles Times was kind enough to publish, how 1000 “convicted sex offenders” had been given a “green light” by CPS to become “approved foster parents” just in Los Angeles County. She also reported that CPS in Orange County, California in 2014, of 105 sexually abused victims that were found in one particular case, 65% of those victims were in the foster care system under CPS control, and they were allegedly never reported missing.
Stefano states:
“The child trafficking industry, or human trafficking industry right now, makes more money than the illegal drug trade, and illegal arms trade, combined.”
Read the full article and watch the interview at:
Child Sex Trafficking through Child “Protection” Services Exposed – Kidnapping Children for Sex
Conclusion: Child Trafficking is a Huge Business in the U.S. – Both Legal and Illegal
Unfortunately, every child in America today is at risk of being seized by social services agencies in each state, and being put into the foster care system where abuse is the norm, not the exception. Research has shown that children in the foster care system today are worse off than if they had been left in troubled homes.
Americans need to wake up and understand just how terrible the problem has become. See:
Foster Care Children are Worse Off than Children in Troubled Homes – The Child Trafficking Business
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