Tag: crime

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 Once released, the women are told they must work as prostitutes or have their bond rescinded and be sent back to jail.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

‘We believe you harmed your child’: the war over shaken baby convictions | News | The Guardian

At first, Craig Stillwell and Carla Andrews only vaguely registered the change at the hospital; how the expressions of warm, calm concern in the doctors and nurses who had been helping them look after their sick baby had iced over. It was 15 August 2016, in the early hours of the morning, and their three-month-old daughter, Effie, was fighting for life.

Two hours earlier, Effie had woken up screaming. Her parents, both 23, had no permanent home and were staying at Craig’s father’s place in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. They had all been asleep on the floor in the lounge: Effie in the travel cot that detached from her pram, Craig still in the uniform he wore as a grass cutter. Carla thought the problem was acid reflux. She passed the baby to Craig and went to prepare a bottle of formula in the kitchen. As she worked, Effie screamed and screamed in the other room. Suddenly she fell silent. Carla heard Craig panic: “Effie! Effie!” She rushed in. Craig, terrified, was holding the child. Effie was white-faced, limbs floppy, eyes fixed, gasping weakly for air.

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Paramedics arrived at 3.19am, by which time Effie appeared dead. They reached Stoke Mandeville hospital at 3.50am. She roused a little and was taken for a brain scan. Afterwards, in the resuscitation unit, a doctor told them what they had found. Effie had suffered a bleed on the brain, and it didn’t look like it had been the first. Carla and Craig both started crying.

“But how could this happen?” asked Craig.

“We’re going to look into it,” the doctor replied.

At that moment, Craig realised everyone had started treating them with a cold, professional distance. Apart from one nurse, who remained kindly, all the reassuring faces were now hard.

Later that morning, Effie was moved to the high-dependency unit. As the hours passed, the young parents noticed lots of nurses and doctors peering in through the window, staring at them, before hurrying along. At about 3pm, two officers from Thames Valley Police appeared. Craig and Carla were taken to a small room that was empty but for two sofas.

“We believe you’ve harmed your child,” said a detective sergeant.

‘We believe you harmed your child’: the war over shaken baby convictions | News | The Guardian

The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist | WIRED

At 2:28 pm on August 28, 2003, a middle-aged pizza deliveryman named Brian Wells walked into a PNC Bank in Erie, Pennsylvania. He had a short cane in his right hand and a strange bulge under the collar of his T-shirt. Wells, 46 and balding, passed the teller a note. “Gather employees with access codes to vault and work fast to fill bag with $250,000,” it said. “You have only 15 minutes.” Then he lifted his shirt to reveal a heavy, boxlike device dangling from his neck. According to the note, it was a bomb. The teller, who told Wells there was no way to get into the vault at that time, filled a bag with cash—$8,702—and handed it over. Wells walked out, sucking on a Dum Dum lollipop he grabbed from the counter, hopped into his car, and drove off. He didn’t get far. Some 15 minutes later, state troopers spotted Wells standing outside his Geo Metro in a nearby parking lot, surrounded him, and tossed him to the pavement, cuffing his hands behind his back.

Wells told the troopers that while out on a delivery he had been accosted by a group of black men who chained the bomb around his neck at gunpoint and forced him to rob the bank. “It’s gonna go off!” he told them in desperation. “I’m not lying.” The officers called the bomb squad and took positions behind their cars, guns drawn. TV camera crews arrived and began filming. For 25 minutes Wells remained seated on the pavement, his legs curled beneath him.

“Did you call my boss?” Wells asked a trooper at one point, apparently concerned that his employer would think he was shirking his duties. Suddenly, the device started to emit an accelerating beeping noise. Wells fidgeted. It looked like he was trying to scoot backward, to somehow escape the bomb strapped to his neck. Beep… Beep… Beep. Boom! The device detonated, blasting him violently onto his back and ripping a 5-inch gash in his chest. The pizza deliveryman took a few last gasps and died on the pavement. It was 3:18 pm. The bomb squad arrived three minutes later.

The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist | WIRED

My family was traumatised first by a murder, then by the TV serialisation

After discovering in 2009 that my beautiful mum, who died in 1991, was in fact murdered by my father and the woman he had formerly had an affair with, I was propelled into a new world of trauma.

Loss of any form is distressing. But the intentional and often violent killing of another brings about a complex grieving process that is interrupted, sidelined and trivialised in favour of a criminal investigation. In a 2011 report of 400 families bereaved through homicide, more than 80% were found to suffer from trauma-related symptoms. When dealing with (or often not dealing with) the impact of murder and the sequence of events it brings about, it can result in multiple processes of re-trauma.

We all love a good crime drama. Yet the reality of murder on the families involved is much more sobering, traumatic and, well, messier than is often projected on our screens. Behind the high viewing figures, whether for fiction or the coverage of real crimes, there are people living with murder bereavement on a daily basis. And an intrusive media experience can often compound this original trauma. If deemed “a good enough story”, private grief becomes public property.

News is important, and when handled factually it serves the public interest. But there is a clear distinction between public interest and what is of interest to the public – the latter is problematic.

The Guardian

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

Bad girls and gone girls: Why the media tired of ‘missing white women’

You remember their names, because the media wouldn’t let you forget them: Laci Peterson, Natalee Holloway, Elizabeth Smart, Chandra Levy, Lori Hacking — young women who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Gone girls.

Then there were the bad girls. Young women accused of murder — Amanda Knox, Casey Anthony,Jodi Arias. The long-running investigations into their alleged crimes were the stuff of equally obsessive coverage.

But as 2015 creeps toward a close, the gone girls and bad girls have all but disappeared from the media map. The era in which the national news media regularly manufactured folk heroines and anti-heroines from the crime blotter seems to have passed.

WashingtonPost

‘I woke up. He was in the room. I didn’t know who he was.’

After The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a poll of more than 1,000 current and recent college students from around the country, a team of Post reporters interviewed more than 50 people who responded that they had, at some point during their time in college, experienced unwanted sexual contact.

The Washington Post