Category: abuse

40 million slaves in the world, finds new report – CNN

London (CNN)More than 40 million people were estimated to be victims of modern slavery in 2016 — and one in four of those were children.

Those are the findings of a new report produced by the International Labor Organization (ILO), a U.N. agency focusing on labor rights, and the Walk Free Foundation, an international NGO working to end modern slavery.

The report estimates that last year, 25 million people were in forced labor — made to work under threat or coercion — and 15 million people were in forced marriage.

It’s impossible to know exactly how many people are living in modern slavery, and different studies have produced different estimates. One reason is that modern slavery is a hidden crime that’s difficult to identify. Another is that different studies use different definitions of slavery, with some including forced marriage, for example, and others not.

40 million slaves in the world, finds new report – CNN

These haunting animal photos aim to make you reconsider a visit to the zoo – The Washington Post

Jo-Anne McArthur, a Canadian photographer and animal rights activist, does not deny that her new book could be called “one-sided.” That is sort of the point.

The images in “Captive” were taken at zoos across five continents, but they don’t include depictions of handlers bottle-feeding baby hippos, giving pandas ultrasounds or even cleaning cages. They’re taken from the perspective of the public, and, McArthur said, aim to show the animals as “individuals,” as opposed to representatives of their species. The photos are unusual and at times arresting, featuring solitary animals juxtaposed against gawking crowds, suburbia and the barriers that keep them enclosed.

The book comes off as quite anti-zoo, but McArthur says she hopes it will count as a contribution to an escalating public conversation about animals in captivity — one that has been highlighted by uproar over Sea World orcas and the killing of Harambe the gorilla, but that is also churning quietly among zoo managers.

What follows is a selection of photos from McArthur’s book, paired with her captions, and a Q and A about the book. All images were taken in 2016, when McArthur was on assignment in Europe for the Born Free Foundation, a wildlife advocacy organization.

These haunting animal photos aim to make you reconsider a visit to the zoo – The Washington Post

Outdated Laws, Unpunished Child Abusers – The New York Times

Beginning in 1997, and then for the next 13 years, Ama Dwimoh ran the Crimes Against Children Bureau in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, observing a theater of atrocities. Early in her tenure, Ms. Dwimoh told me recently, she handled a case involving a young man who had been sexually molested by his family’s landlord for a decade, starting when he was 5.

The abuse had come to her attention through a photo developer, who had contacted the police when he noticed unseemly images in a roll of film brought in for processing. With a picture of someone who appeared to be the victim of various predations in hand, law enforcers went in search of the boy. When they found him and knocked on his door, Ms. Dwimoh recalled, he appeared to feel he was being outed; he got sick and vomited. He knew that what had happened to him was wrong, but he had also experienced his abuser in less monstrous moments. How was the child, or even the young adult he would become, to make sense of all this, of such horrors entwined with the semblance of affection?

A search of the perpetrator’s home revealed a trove of old photographs of many other children, indicating he had been a pedophile for years. Ms. Dwimoh, who is running to become the Brooklyn district attorney, realized that if the police had never knocked, it was unclear whether the boy would have come forward soon, or ever, and if he hadn’t, how many more children would have been imperiled?

Outdated Laws, Unpunished Child Abusers – The New York Times

My Life Inside ‘The Family’ Cult

“Do you remember me?” she asks, as a hopeful smile spreads on her face, like she’s trying to tease the right answer out of me. We’re not children anymore. We’ve left. Some of us left with our families, some with our friends, and some alone. Now we’re living in this other world where we keep having to explain—why we lived in so many countries, why our accents change when we talk to strangers, why we didn’t go to school, why we can’t sleep. But to one another, to those of us who grew up like me in the Family, we don’t have to explain.

Yet on message boards, on Facebook, and now, outside a coffee shop on South Congress in Austin, this same question—“Do you remember me?”—comes up over and over. It’s usually followed by the volley of questions we’ve tested to figure out who we were then. “What was your name? Who were your parents? Were you in Osaka? Switzerland?”

Part of the problem with growing up in something so secluded as a cult is that our pasts are so unbelievable we need a witness for our own memory. And so we seek out those who remember.

Daily Beast

Report on physician sexual abuse stirs alarm

(CNN)A yearlong investigation conducted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, published last week, uncovered thousands of cases of physician sexual abuse spread across every state in America. Emotions ran deep, especially among patient advocates and sexual violence centers.

“The results are very concerning,” said Laura Palumbo, a spokeswoman for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. “It is astounding that, at the systemic level, there seem to be conditions where sexual abuse is allowed to happen and physicians aren’t held accountable.”
Violations during physician-patient encounters can cause deep harm to patients since trust is “the absolute cornerstone of the whole relationship,” said Julia A. Hallisy, founder and president of the Empowered Patient Coalition. Hallisy is a dentist and has experienced the loss of her daughter to cancer; she understands firsthand that doctors bear witness to some of the happiest and most tragic moments in people’s lives.
CNN

Murder by Poison

In early-nineteenth-century England, a good way to get rid of your husband was arsenic. A medical examiner usually couldn’t tell whether the poison was involved, because the symptoms—diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain—are much like those of other disorders. Nor could he necessarily place you at the murder scene. The dying typically took hours. Also, you could administer the poison gradually, a little bit every day. In the mid-century, arsenic poisoning was commonly the resort of women. (In 1851, the House of Lords tried to pass a law forbidding women to buy arsenic.) But unpleasant husbands were not the only people you might want to eliminate. During this period of feverish social mobility, a young person might be waiting impatiently for an inheritance, and there was Uncle Ted, sitting on all that money and meanwhile bossing you around, toying with your hopes. In such cases, male poisoners presumably outnumbered females.

The New Yorker

This is how the government is catching people who use child porn sites

As criminals become more savvy about using technology such as Tor to hide their tracks, investigators are turning to hacking tools to thwart them. In some cases, members of law enforcement agencies are placing malware on sites that might have thousands of users. Some privacy advocates and analysts worry that in doing so, investigators may also wind up hacking and identifying the computers of law-abiding people who are seeking to remain anonymous, people who can also include political dissidents and journalists.

“As the hacking techniques become more ambitious, failure in execution can lead to large-scale privacy and civil liberties abuses at home and abroad,” said Ahmed Ghappour, a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. “It’s imperative that Congress step in to regulate exactly who and how law enforcement may hack.”

But Justice Department officials said that the government investigates crimes based on evidence of illegal activities. “When we obtain a warrant, it’s because we have convinced a judge that there is probable cause that we’ll be able to find evidence in a particular location,” said a senior department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the department.

Washington Post

The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic

Walter Pitts was used to being bullied. He’d been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker, had no trouble raising his fists to get his way. The neighborhood boys weren’t much better. One afternoon in 1935, they chased him through the streets until he ducked into the local library to hide. The library was familiar ground, where he had taught himself Greek, Latin, logic, and mathematics—better than home, where his father insisted he drop out of school and go to work. Outside, the world was messy. Inside, it all made sense.

Nautil.us

One Simple Idea That Could Reduce Domestic Violence

A report released Tuesday is proposing a simple way to reduce domestic violence: Give victims free lawyers.

Lawyers are expensive, and women who need them often can’t afford them. Without legal counsel, it can be harder for women to get protective orders, leave their abusive partners and escape the cycle of violence. And women stuck in violent relationships tend to miss work because of injury or rack up hospital bills they can never pay off, according to the report by The Institute for Policy Integrity, a nonpartisan think tank.

With one in four women in the U.S. estimated to become victims of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime, this dynamic has major economic repercussions. As the report notes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that domestic violence costs the U.S. at least $9.05 billion each year.

Providing free or subsidized legal representation to victims, the report concludes, may reduce domestic violence and would be cost-effective as it would likely result in lower associated health care and legal costs.

HuffPost