anti-trafficking image is from here

Wherever men with money carry a belief that women are for men for what pimping and procuring men call "sex", there is sexual trafficking. Whether in Nepal, India, or across Europe and North America. Where men gather with the will to rape and purchase women, trafficking is there. But states and nations can oppose it, and work to end it, if women are human to the leaders.

What follows is from *here*.

Dont let the sex industry turn the Commonwealth Games into a pimping opportunity

• Target: Pratibha Patil, President of India
• Sponsored by: Apne Aap Women Worldwide,

Apne Aap Women Worldwide appeals to the President of India, Srimati Pratibha Patil to ensure that the Government of India puts into place sufficient mechanisms to stop the proliferation of sex trafficking in the run up to the Commonwealth Games. As brothels and escort services along GB Road fix up their rooms and double their rates in anticipation of a boom in sex tourism, their brokers are hunting rural and tribal areas across the country in order to find new victims to bring into prostitution.

We appeal to the President to order the CWG authorities to:

1. Establish information and surveillance booths, manned by NGOs, to support girls and women who need protections from traffickers, especially in sex sites like GB Road and pick-up sites like railway stations, bus stands, metro stations and airports;

2. Set in measures to protect the more marginalized women, who have been brought into Delhi as labour for the construction of roads, stadiums and houses, to go back home safely, provide tickets and bookings as well as protection from property snatching or rape during this period, or provide safe accommodation once their contract is over;

3. Hold sensitization workshops for police officials, tour operators, transporters, labour contractors, on treatment of women migrant workers as well as new women who are being trafficked to the city;

Organize surveillance of sex sites to check the sex industry from turning the CWG into a pimping opportunity.

We are basing our recommendations on site visits to brothels, reports in the media, and revelations made by NGOs:

%uFFFD Hundreds of girls are being kidnapped from all over India and are being prepared for the CWG in villages in Alwar, Rajasthan, with oxytocin injections to make them more voluptuous for prostitution. (May 27th, India Today; Girls drugged into puberty, sold as prostitutes)

%uFFFD According to Mr. Rishikant, Founder of Shakti Vahini, an anti trafficking organisation working in GB Road, the organisation has rescued between 40-45 girls since March of this year indicating an increase in the number of women and girls trafficked to meet the demand during the Commonwealth Games. The rescued girls originating from Orissa, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Assam and Bihar range in ages from 13yrs to 17yrs.

%uFFFD According to Action against Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation of Children (ATSEC), girls are being trafficked from tribal areas in West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, to serve the huge number of foreigners coming during the games (June 7th; The Telegraph; Giving the game away - Commonwealth Games raises trafficking fears)

%uFFFD Trafficked girls and women on GB road are being given one- hour sessions every morning to learn English and are being taught words like %u201Chello, thankyou%u201D %u201Chow are you?%u201D and %u201Cplease use a condom%u201D (May 30th; Deccan Herald, Brothels get a facelift ahead of Commonwealth Games)

%uFFFD GB Road, the biggest red light district in Delhi, is getting a %u201Cface-lift%u201D to make it more appealing for the foreign clients. AC%u2019S, LCD TV%u2019S, fridges, etc. are being installed by the brothel owners ( Hindustan Times, 30 May).

%uFFFD Tina Jaiswal, owner of Delhi%u2019s NO 1 escort agency said, %u201CWe hope to make good money during the games. We will simply follow the demand and supply principles of economics. We will double our rates a month before the games begin and increase our work force%u201D (Youth Ki Awaaz).

In the meantime, the government has set up hundreds of condom vending machines. These machines can only be a poor substitute for rights of women and girls. The code of conduct prepared by the Tourism Ministry is for hotels and tour operators and will only apply to women and girls being brought to hotels and not to the brothels. Apne Aap had applied for a place in GB Road to the authorities at the Central and Delhi to set up a support centre for such women and girls. Nothing has been heard of this application though the CWG is only six weeks away..

We appeal to the President to act promptly on behalf of girls and women at risk in India.

Ruchira Gupta,

Founder President,

Apne Aap Women Worldwide

12 August, 2010

Please watch this utterly condescending, patronising video made by some white guy named "freedom0f5peech". He's super annoying. But please try and get through his little lesson for all us numb-heads on the realities of all forms of genital cutting and surgery, to infants and children, primarily:



At issue, as is so often the case, is the way "educated" "literate" men misuse a highly cultural and political concept called "logic" to argue "rationally" how some phenomena are injurious to both females and males in some kind of "equal" or "mutually harmful" fashion, as if it were true because information without knowledge is used to present "logical arguments". This is a CLASSIC Western euro-white male supremacist example.

We want to focus our logical attention on this guy: freedom0f5peech who posted on this forum--http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=28460.10;wap2
about the logic problems in how so many people discuss the matter of what he terms FGM vs. MGM, terms which, for reasons stated below, I refuse to use on this blog, other than to note it here, above.

He's not satisfied to have his rational logical argumentation presented in text. He made all of us stupid idiots that video above, so we can "get it" because, you know, if only we'd just listen to these "logical" white men, the world's suffering would all become understandable as JUST AS DANGEROUS to white males as it is for males of color and females--of all colors. (Because these white guys just never want to own publicly that they have it EASY compared to other groups of people--groups of people that white men systematically and globally oppress and mass murder.) And, as you'll note here, the white guys always kind of want to subtly--or not--suggest that the WORST of what happens is: surprise! really to THEM!

After watching the video, please see my reply to him below, published here only, thus far.

Hello Mr. Logician, aka freedom0f5peech,

What you fail to take into account in your conveniently manipulative video are a few things that humane beings who care about human cruelty might argue are important and relevant to the discussion. Things such as:

1. Just so you know, many women of color do not support the term "female genital mutilation" as they prefer not to consider their genitals "mutilated" for the rest of their lives--and out of compassion for their feelings, I don't use that term. And the term "male genital mutilation" is overtly dishonest, as the genitals aren't "mutilated" at all. The word isn't helpful in any case.

2. Compare to the number of males who experience the worst form of male genital surgery or cutting to the number of females. Personally, I've never even heard of this "top/worst" category of "MGM" you have listed wherein all the skin is removed, including the scrotum. So you're saying somewhere in the world male babies have the whole of their genitals removed? Their penises cut off at the base and their testicles cut off and their scrotal skin removed? Where does that occur and to how many male babies worldwide annually? I'd argue that since you place that form of "MGM"--which you argue shouldn't be understood as happening to males at all, isn't socially real as a human rights problem but I welcome you educating me on this as an endemic cross-cultural problem impacting millions of male babies that, thus far, seems to be going under everyone's social justice radar. (I know of NO males to whom this has happened. Not one.)

3. You very conveniently neglect to frame the discussion in the social context in which these phenomena happen. Do they happen in societies in which male are dominant over women and female sexuality and in which females are not only genitally cut but are controlled in other ways, sexually and physically, oppressively, as a group, by men? Are these cuttings and surgeries occurring in societies which also promote marital rape of girls and women and other physical and psychic traumatic violations of female bodies as natural, God-ordained and ordered, or evolutionarily inevitable?

Or, do they happen in societies in which females are dominant over men and male sexuality and in which males are not only genitally cut but are controlled in other ways sexually and physically, oppressively, as a group, by women? Are these cuttings and surgeries occurring in societies which also promote marital rape of boys and men and other physical and psychic traumatic violations of male bodies as natural, God-ordained and ordered, or evolutionarily inevitable?

Such as through dominate religious and secular institutions promoting woman-hating or man-hating as normal and natural? Do they happen in patriarchal societies or matriarchal ones? Whose interests are served by the procedures? What is the presumed gender of the god who is prayed to? Which gendered beings write the laws, predominantly? What gendered beings, primarily, enforce the laws? Which gendered beings, usually and most forcefully, punish those who break the laws?

This is relevant because no girl, woman, intersex person, or intergender person is served by having their genitals cut or destroyed when a child when there's absolutely no health-related reason to do so. But boys who are circumcised either due to religious custom (as in Judaism) or secular custom (as in the U.S.) DON'T have their penises removed or their scrotums either. And males and boys still end up with fully sexually functional genitals with plenty of sensation sufficient to enjoy happy sexual lives, including having orgasms easily. The most common forms of female genital cutting and surgery, globally, often leave females without most of the nerve endings necessary to experience sexual arousal. Why don't you organise your helpful chart according to which procedures prevent full sexual functioning as adults? Why not make that list in order of trauma to the person, over a lifetime? You show no stats on occurrence of each type. Why?

And, in case you've forgotten: What is this phenomenon you conveniently invent to make it seem like overall, some of what happens to males is worse than what happens to females, while some of what happens to females is worse, as if, overall, it's all kind of awful, but really--pssst: the worst thing that happens is to MALES?

And stop arguing it both ways: you can't keep identifying things in terms of gender and then ask us to ignore gender. And, you're going to have to back up your truth claims, such as this notion that there even is such a thing as all male genitalia, including scrotums, being cut off of male babies. Again, where does that happen and to how many males globally?

Your videos arguments may be "logical" but that doesn't make them knowledgeable or helpful, necessarily. "Logic" alone means nothing, sir. The question is this: in what social reality does the logic exist? Math problems can be logical. So what? What does that have to do with social justice? With ending atrocities? You won't even use math in ways that it could illuminate the practices of atrocity, such as by noting THE NUMBER OF FEMALES negatively impacted by the worst forms of female genital cutting and surgery compared THE NUMBER OF MALES who experience and survive the worst forms done to males. Produce those statistics if you want your video to be taken at all seriously.

Let me draw you a parallel to your "logical" but inaccurate video.

Let's say you were making the "logical" case that all heterosexual spousal murder is wrong. Using your socially well-restricted logic methodology, you, sir, might produce a video showing all the ways humans who are murdered by "the other" sex are accomplished, among heterosexuals who are lawfully wed. And you'd note: some women kill men in their sleep, which gives them no opportunity to fight back. And men beat up women, but those women at least have the chance to fight back, so let's put women killing men in their sleep as "worse" than men beating and killing female spouses.

And you'd display all the ways heterosexual spousal murder occurs. But what you'd fail to note is WHY those women kill those men and that the greatest reason for that happening is that the husbands are terrorists, threatening those women's lives daily, beating and torturing them, or "just" psychologically terrifying them and dominated them, controlling and manipulating them in oppressive and degrading ways designed to crush their wills for freedom. Because that little detail might muddy your "logic system". And men kill women because the women didn't have dinner on the table, didn't get the laundry done, and told a man he was wrong for the way he treats their children. Or she said not to sex. Or she complained that he's spending too much time away from home. So he pounds the shit out of her, and sometimes he breaks her bones, and sometimes he kills her. But, more often, if she leaves him because he beats her, he is then far more likely to kill her. The statistics are that death from battery--from men beating women routinely and regularly in escalating patterns of increasing danger, are more likely to be murdered if they leave than if they stay with the controlling, sadistic bully. So, some women know this and they stay. And for you, them staying wouldn't factor into your argument because she wasn't killed yet.

So you see, your "logic" doesn't equal "knowledge" and it certainly doesn't demonstrate the exercise of compassion or wisdom in the service of gender justice or human rights.

Julian Real

We better be listening to those among us who are the youth and our elders, or we're doomed: There are themes in lectures and one of them is how dominant systems of learning and values about who is most intelligent, rule out listening to the people we most need to support speaking out. Because the story of the White Man is a very limited, dishonest, and self-serving story, and while some white

 [photo of girl wearing lipstick is from here] Victims and survivors of trafficking want us to not accept their slavery as inevitable by simply trying to mitigate its circumstances through the offer of beds in shelters or condoms in brothels. They want us to dismantle the very system of trafficking by bringing traffickers and end users to book. They want a world in which it is unacceptable

Caster Semenya, an 18-year-old from South Africa, after the women’s 800 meters at the world track and field championships in Berlin.[photo is from here]Caster Semenya was over-exposed in the media last year due to having her gender and sex interrogated in invasive ways. It was a despicable example of how dehumanising the media can be. Not that there's any shortage of stories of that proclivity in

[image is from here, and the information from the page where I found this follows the main post] As you read what follows, please ask yourself this: "What question and issue ISN'T asked?" And the follow up question is: "What does it mean that we don't ask this question?" My answers follow the news article. What follows is a cross post from AlterNet.org, *here*. Posted by jrbizzy at 10:53 am

Bronski Beat, "Why" lyricsContempt in your eyes As I turn to kiss his lips Broken I lie All my feelings denied Blood on your fist Can you tell me why? You in your false securities Tear up my life Condemning me Name me an illness Call me a sin Never feel guilty Never give in Tell me why? You and me together Fighting for our love Can you tell me why? Click on the title below to link back to where

All that follows is from True/Slant here. The Case for Arresting the Pope By ALLISON KILKENNY Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife(Updated) Richard Dawkins, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”. Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to

[image is from here]Source AlterNet *here*, and the LA Times / By Tom Hayden Our Government Is Planning to Stay at War for the Next 80 Years -- Anyone Got a Problem with That?March 31, 2010  |   Without public

 [photograph of Sinead O'Connor is from here] Above: Anderson Cooper, reporting on CNN, takes us through a brief timeline of the current pope's involvement with child sex abuse cases. Note: Anderson is cute. Immediately following his report, he interviews Sinead O'Connor on this matter. Since reading in Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 ECD feminist classic decades ago, I have firmly and unwaveringly