June 2018 - Mental Wealth

America’s outcasts: the women trapped in a cruel cycle of exploitation | Global development | The Guardian

Kate had spent three years behind bars at Lowell Correctional Institution, Florida’s largest women’s prison, when the letters from Richard Rawls started to arrive.

Men had written to Kate in prison before, but this time was different. Although she had never met him, Rawls made her feel special. He wrote that he’d seen her mugshot online and couldn’t stop thinking about her. Somehow aware that she was getting out soon, he offered her money, a home and unconditional love when she was released.

The letters promised Kate a future she never imagined possible – a way out of the cycle of prostitution and incarceration that had defined her life after a childhood of chaos and abuse. Soon, Rawls stopped signing his letters “Rick”; instead, he urged her: “Come on home to your daddy.”

“When you’re in prison, all you think about is getting out,” Kate says. “The hours go by and it really hurts to know that nobody thinks about you in there.

“So when you get a letter it’s like a gift from God. He told me everything that I wanted to hear. He said I wasn’t going to be a prostitute any more, that I could go home with him and live at his house, and that he would be the love that I was searching for.”

When Kate walked out of prison, Rawls, a career criminal and convicted felon with more than 47 charges for sexual battery, child abuse, drug possession and assault, was there to pick her up. Just as he had promised.

America’s outcasts: the women trapped in a cruel cycle of exploitation | Global development | The Guardian

Revealed: how US sex traffickers recruit jailed women for prostitution | Global development | The Guardian

Women in prisons across the US are being recruited by sex traffickers who force them into prostitution on their release.

A Guardian investigation has found that traffickers are using government websites to obtain personal information including mugshots, release dates and charge sheets to identify potential victims while they are still behind bars.

Pimps also use inmates in prisons and jails countrywide to befriend incarcerated women who, on their release, are trafficked into the $9.5bn (£7.2bn) US commercial sex industry.

The investigation also found cases of the bail bond system being used in sex trafficking operations in at least five different states. Pimps and sex buyers are locating incarcerated women awaiting a court date by using personal data such as mugshots and bail bonds posted online, or through corrupt bondsmen.

Traffickers are then bailing women out of detention. Once released, the women are told they must work as prostitutes or have their bond rescinded and be sent back to jail.

Over the course of the investigation, The Guardian found cases of the bail bond system being used by pimps and sex buyers in Florida, Texas, Ohio, North Carolina and Mississippi.

“The pimps would use bail as a way to control us and keep us in debt bondage,” said one trafficking survivor from Tampa, Florida. She claimed she was forced to work as a prostitute to pay off her bail debt and locked inside a house and beaten if she didn’t bring home enough money.

Revealed: how US sex traffickers recruit jailed women for prostitution | Global development | The Guardian

How Fortnite Captured Teens’ Hearts and Minds | The New Yorker

Fortnite, for anyone not a teen-ager or a parent or educator of teens, is the third-person shooter game that has taken over the hearts and minds—and the time, both discretionary and otherwise—of adolescent and collegiate America. Released last September, it is right now by many measures the most popular video game in the world. At times, there have been more than three million people playing it at once. It has been downloaded an estimated sixty million times. (The game, available on PC, Mac, Xbox, PS4, and mobile devices, is—crucially—free, but many players pay for additional, cosmetic features, including costumes known as “skins.”) In terms of fervor, compulsive behavior, and parental noncomprehension, the Fortnite craze has elements of Beatlemania, the opioid crisis, and the ingestion of Tide Pods. Parents speak of it as an addiction and swap tales of plunging grades and brazen screen-time abuse: under the desk at school, at a memorial service, in the bathroom at 4 A.M. They beg one another for solutions. A friend sent me a video he’d taken one afternoon while trying to stop his son from playing; there was a time when repeatedly calling one’s father a fucking asshole would have led to big trouble in Tomato Town. In our household, the big threat is gamer rehab in South Korea.

Game fads come and go: Rubik’s Cube, Dungeons & Dragons, Angry Birds, Minecraft, Clash of Clans, Pokémon Go. What people seem to agree on, whether they’re seasoned gamers or dorky dads, is that there’s something new emerging around Fortnite, a kind of mass social gathering, open to a much wider array of people than the games that came before.

How Fortnite Captured Teens’ Hearts and Minds | The New Yorker

How alleged Toronto serial killer Bruce McArthur went unnoticed | World news | The Guardian

When the biggest forensic investigation in Toronto history began, it was still possible to be blind to the full extent of the horror.

On 18 January 2018, in the mid-morning, Bruce McArthur, a 66-year-old freelance landscaper, entered his Thorncliffe Park apartment building in Toronto, accompanied by a young man.

McArthur had been placed under 24-hour police watch the previous day. The surveillance officers had instructions to arrest him if they saw him alone with someone else.

They ascended to McArthur’s 19th-floor apartment and broke down the door. Inside, they found his companion already tied to the bed.

McArthur was charged with the murder of Andrew Kinsman, 49, who had gone missing shortly after Pride Day on 26 June 2017, and Selim Esen, 44, who was reported missing about two months earlier.

As a particularly cold winter dragged on into February, the city was horrified as police began to unearth the remains of corpses buried inside more than a dozen decorative planters. The planters were located outside a modest home, on Mallory Crescent in the Leaside area of the city, where McArthur had been employed as a gardener.

Police issued a plea to anyone who might have used McArthur’s services, and deployed cadaver dogs to multiple locations across Toronto. They erected tents and used heaters to thaw the frozen ground. Forensic investigators combed over McArthur’s two-bedroom apartment for months, removing 1,800 pieces of evidence and photographing every square inch.

How alleged Toronto serial killer Bruce McArthur went unnoticed | World news | The Guardian

How to form healthy habits in your 20s – The New York Times

When you woke up this morning, what did you do first?

Did you hop in the shower, check your email or grab a doughnut? What did you say to your roommates on the way out the door? Salad or hamburger for lunch? When you got home, did you put on your sneakers and go for a run, or eat dinner in front of the television?

Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits. And though each habit means relatively little on its own, over time, the meals we eat, how we spend our evenings, and how often we exercise have enormous impacts.

This is particularly true in our 20s, when so many of our habits are still up for grabs. The patterns you establish right now will impact your health, productivity, financial security and happiness for decades. How much money you make, how much time you spend with your friends and family, how well your body functions years from now — all of these, in many ways, are products of the habits you are building today.

How to form healthy habits in your 20s – The New York Times

Pakistan’s shame: the open secret of child sex abuse in the workplace | Kiran Nazish | Global development | The Guardian

About 3.8 million children work in Pakistan. The majority are employed in the agriculture sector, but many work in leather and shoe factories, in mechanics’ workshops and restaurants.

They are vulnerable to “street sexual abuse”, says Jawwad Bukhari, chief executive of the Alpha Foundation, a local organisation focused on getting children off the street and into schools. “Sexual exploitation of children is an absolute kind of occurrence in this town, and it is immediately connected with work. You can say it is a product of how labour makes children vulnerable,” says Bukhari, who has spent years trying to help children avoid abuse.

Interviews with children, families, organisations and officials in Kasur reveal that many working children, particularly boys, are expected to indulge in sexual activity with employers, peers and acquaintances, often in return for work or accommodation. Victims are often threatened to keep silent, and the mechanism of fear almost always works.

Bukhari estimates at least 90% of all working children in Kasur under the age of 14 experience sexually harassment or other forms of exploitation, and says he has come across hundreds of cases.

Pakistan’s shame: the open secret of child sex abuse in the workplace | Kiran Nazish | Global development | The Guardian

‘It wasn’t supposed to be a rape scene’: Why are pornographers getting away with on-camera assault?

Nikki Benz alleges she was violently assaulted in the workplace in 2016. Her primary assailant’s employer investigated and found her account credible enough to terminate his contract. But because her workplace is an adult film set, and because she is a sex worker, she won’t be getting justice. In fact, she was more vulnerable to being sued for defamation than likely to succeed in pressing charges against two men whose actions were caught on tape. She’s the most recent high-profile example of a sex worker denied the protection of the law because of what she does and who she is, despite its legality.

Benz’s credits for work in the porn industry go back to 2002. When she agreed to do a “boy/girl” scene involving anal sex, she was consenting only to be touched by her scene partner, Ramón Nomar. But after the director, “Tony T,” asked everyone else to leave—purportedly to clear the space to make using a handheld camera easier—it quickly became apparent that the two men left in the room weren’t sticking to any industry standard.

Nomar, Benz alleges, gagged her with her own underwear and covered her face, heightening her fear. Tony T began participating in the scene, Benz said, meaning he was touching her without her consent. He choked her. He’d go on to stomp on her head. She called “cut,” and the men ignored her. Benz’s police report said that Nomar penetrated her so violently “blood splattered on the white walls.” To be paid, she had to say she was okay. But she wasn’t.

Sex workers, onscreen and otherwise, have a much higher risk of sexual assault than the general population but have a much lower chance of getting justice. In New York, 46 percent of indoor sex workers reported they’d been forced into an act by a client; more than 80 percent of street-based sex workers have been violated. Benz’s experience was all too believable to others at risk and just as unbelievable to law enforcement, who discriminate against sex workers.

Benz spoke up soon after the assault on Twitter.

‘It wasn’t supposed to be a rape scene’: Why are pornographers getting away with on-camera assault?

The person who knows and understands Trump the best isn’t a psychologist: + 300 excellent comments

The person who knows and understands Trump the best isn’t a psychologist. It is Tony Schwartz who wrote “The Art of the Deal” and spent many hours with Trump over a year and a half. He was on “AM Joy” today and said that if Trump had the power of a true dictator he would be as murderous as Kim.

He said Trump is a mix of paranoia, grandiosity, and cruelty.

He said, “his cruelty is a way of punishing people who he thinks are his enemies.” He went on to say that the things Trump said about Kim demonstrate that Trump has no conscience.

Schwartz emphasized that Trump has no empathy, no heart, and no soul. He said that he grew up with a deep inner emptiness.

“Trump isn’t in the business of empathy, he’s in the business of Trump.”

Schwartz is not a trained mental health professional. However, as a layperson, he has an excellent understanding of psychopathology. He doesn’t make a precise psychiatric diagnosis beyond saying Trump is acting out a severe personality disorder marked by dangerous & pathological narcissism, grandiosity, and paranoia.

The person who knows and understands Trump the best isn’t a psychologist: + 300 excellent comments