Whitehouse.gov petitions: What the people really want


Earlier this month Whitehouse.gov (the official site of the White House) launched “We the People”:

“Welcome to We the People on WhiteHouse.gov. This tool provides you with a new way to petition the Obama Administration to take action on a range of important issues facing our country. If a petition gets enough support, White House staff will review it, ensure it’s sent to the appropriate policy experts, and issue an official response.”

Any petition created within the first 30 days, that reaches at least 5,000 signatures, will receive an “official response”. This has incredible potential. It gives the Internet hivemind a way to bring what they actually care about to discussion. Guess what the people want?

  1. 34,223+ “Legalize and Regulate Marijuana in a Manner Similar to Alcohol.”
  2. 20,375+ “Abolish the TSA, and use its monstrous budget to fund more sophisticated, less intrusive counter-terrorism intelligence.”
  3. 16,930+ “Call an Investigation into Allegations of Prosecutorial & Judicial Misconduct in the Case of Sholom Rubashkin”
  4. 12,763+ “Edit the Pledge of Allegiance to remove the phrase “Under God”.”
  5. 10,594+ “Allow Industrial Hemp to be Grown in the U.S. Once Again”
  6. 10,381+ “Direct the Patent Office to Cease Issuing Software Patents”
  7. 10,178+ “Legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana.”
  8. 9,586+ “Stop Interfering With State Marijuana Legalization Efforts”
  9. 8,689+ “End the destructive, wasteful and counterproductive “War on Drugs”
  10. 8,537 + “Remove “In God We Trust” from currency.“
  11. 8,400+ “Restore democracy by ending corporate personhood.“
  12. 7,998+ “Repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.“

I don’t see any hate petitions, or faith petitions, nothing commercially motivated. These are generally issues that I care about and ones that don’t always receive the most coverage. Even if the corporate media shies away from an issue, tools like this bring them back up. If these petitions get the attention they genuinely deserve, then it could be a huge step forward for our country. In reality, our government isn’t ignorant to these things; someone has an agenda that involves marijuana being illegal and the TSA making travel inconvenient and degrading.

We don’t know what the “official response” will look like, but right now these petitions are educating people and creating a valuable sense of urgency.

Sign up, contribute, and spread the word.

in Campaigns / Grassroots / News of Note  by 26 Sep 2011 1 comments

The Sexual Freedom Project: Criticizing Moves Like That

(También en Español)

BREAKING NEWS? Abstinence-only education is a failure and causes huge problems. Every society suffers without health and sex education, including the safety of contraceptives.

We also have to cope with our “politicians” often counter-productive actions.

When do you think sex education should begin for children? what age? at home or from friends or at school? (Only after marriage??)

How can sex education and age of consent vary so widely state to state? where the trail of abstinence only sex ed leaves a trail of higher unwanted pregnancies at earlier and earlier ages?

What’s your experience holding elected and appointed accountable? Should we have a national bill of rights that provides for the mandatory health and sex education of all minors?

Send us your thoughts, comment, make your own video or write a short essay, or send us your visual ideas that express the ideals of sexual freedom, and we’ll thank you with a free VenusPlusX t-shirt .

Video by Tiye Massey.

TRANSCRIPT by David Kreps

So you take abstinence-only education in the United States. That is a huge problem for sexual freedom in this country. I feel that we can’t really be free sexually if we’re not informed, and abstinence-only education has been demonstrated not to be effective. All the research indicates that it’s not going to prevent people from having sex and… So they’re going to be just as likely to have sex and when they are, they’re not going to be as apt or as knowledgeable about contraception and all the relevant information. So, for example, Hillary Clinton came out a couple years ago, I want to say  2008? She said, “Abstinence-only education doesn’t work, we know that it doesn’t,” and then she pours a few more million dollars into these programs and you’re just like “What??” (laughs) So yeah, we should be criticizing moves like that, and then we’ll get to where we want to be with sexual freedom.


in The Sexual Freedom Project / Videos  by 25 Sep 2011 0 comments

This week’s hot stuff (9-22-11)

The Take Back the American Dream conference, organized by the Campaign for America’s Future with support from Rebuild the Dream, will be happening on October 3 – 5 in Washington, DC. Find out more and register online. The American Dream Movement is growing stronger by the day, and it’s not going away until everyone can find jobs, afford to go to college, retire with dignity, and secure a future for our children and our communities.

Rainbow Response Coalition in DC is a grassroots organization addressing the needs of LGBTQ people with regard to domestic violence. This deeply sensitive work joins LGBTQ leaders domestic with violence service providers and government agencies to increase the awareness about Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) amid the relationships of LGBTQ individuals, and educating within the LGBTQ communities and beyond. We encourage you to get involved and support Rainbow Response Coalition.

We hoping to make it to the The Singularity Summit 2011, a TED-style two-day event at the historic 92nd Street Y in New York City, October 15-16. This is all about the development of new technologies ramping up more and more rapidly, an exponential expansion of technology wherein technology feeds on itself making unpredictable progress, otherwise known as “the singularity,” a term coined and popularized by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. Joining Kurzweil as a speaker are visionary scientist Stephen Wolfram, IBM manager Dan Cerutti, longevity expert Sonia Arrison, author David Brin, neuroscientist Christof Koch, PayPal founder Peter Thiel, MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark, AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, MIT polymath Alexander Wissner-Gross, DARPA challenge winner Riley Crane, Skype founder Jaan Tallinn, economist Tyler Cowen, television personalities Jason Silva and Casey Pieretti, and robotics professors James McLurnkin and Robin Murphy. The Singularity Summit was founded as an academic forum for discussing the “big picture” questions in industry, economics, and ethics raised by the prospect of such a profound event.

Fantasia Fair is a week-long celebration of gender diversity and according to its website it is also the longest-running annual event in the transgender world. Every October it is held in Provincetown, Massachusetts, this year October 16-23. We have only heard rave reviews of this gathering which attracts hundreds of gender-queer and transfolk from across the country. There is a whole circuit of similarly themed conferences, one called Be All every year in Chicago. Many people we have spoken to here with us attending Atlanta’s Southern Comfort Conference are heading north for Fantasia Fair because there is nothing like person-to-person contact to help forward our common cause.

Out & Equal‘s 2011 Workplace Summit in Dallas is coming, October 25-28. “Individuals, human resources professionals, diversity managers, employee resource group (ERG) leaders, and allies have the perfect platform from which to make powerful connections, share best practices, and formulate a strategy that allows for a powerful demonstration of their commitment to equality in the workplace.” Find out more about this and the many other thing this organization is accomplishing.

We marvel over The American Equality Bill which calls for equal non-discrimination protections for sexuality and gender, and would apply nationally to every state by adding “sexual orientation and gender identity” to all existing federal civil rights legislation.  As endorsements add up for this idea, Representative Jared Polis (CO-2) is also working on an LGBT Omnibus Equality Bill to be introduced sometime in October. If you want to get involved in working towards such a bill and help free our society from sexuality and gender oppression, go to Equality Giving or Facebook.

It’s Vicky’s birthday again, Victoria Woodhull that is (September 23, 1838 – June 9, 1927), the radical suffragette that founded the sexual freedom movement. Each year, Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance produces a report, the State of the Sexual Freedom in the US, and presides over Sexual Freedom Day filled with informative presentations, the “Vicky” Awards to outstanding sexual freedom pioneers, and a sumptuous gala in the evening. Alison and Dan are members of the Alliance’s Advisory Board, and VenusPlusX returns as a Sexual Freedom Day sponsor. Some tickets are still available, but make a note for next September 23 to attend this must-go event.

And. we can’t pass any opportunity to draw your attention to People For The American Way and its crucial work fighting right-wing extremism in this country. Please check out “Right Wing Watch” on their website, one of many features that will spur you into action.

Last but not least, a shout out and message of love and deep admiration for all the dedicated and impassioned individuals who comprise Servicemembers Legal Defense Network and played such a vital role in seeing through the September 20 repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” It’s a brand new day. Thank you.

If you your site or blog isn’t yet on our general Stuff We Like, or would like to be featured here on our weekly top ten, please let us hear from you.

in Events / Public Information  by 22 Sep 2011 0 comments

Becoming and Being an Avatar—Uploading Salvation

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español And so we come, at last, to the true meaning of salvation. It is common to think of this word as meaning escape from mortality, resurrection into an afterlife. Yet this also contains the idea of a personal change to observe a higher set of ideals, so that one overcomes bad attitudes and behavior towards others. I think the most basic concept of salvation is, however, salvation from uncertainty—the avatar’s choice. If the avatar makes the single choice to engage the resident’s will, or the output of a higher level cognitive process embodied in AI, then ey knows whatever mess ey gets into subsequently will be something the higher level resident’s mind understands, no matter how it looks to the avatar. If the avatar can’t accept this, then ey will expend his energies in a futile attempt to continue to exist without taking advantage of the higher mind functions of eir resident.

Salvation is freedom from fear, and from the uncertainty of acting correctly (doing good). Salvation is provided by commitment of the will to act in the spirit of truth. And so we strive to live the truth, not just to tell the truth. And by so doing our actions will produce goodness for the benefit of our fellows and make beautiful the harmony of kindred spirits. If our human lives are indeed similar to the consciousnesses we can imagine for an advanced SL avatar, we may face a common experience of existence and mortality.

In discussing the experience of an avatar finding identity escape from SL to RL, we ignored the problem of providing the higher cognitive processes that will support integration of avatar behavior between SL and RL. Were the avatar already controlled from RL, eir identification with eir resident (from whom eir lower cognitive functions were uploaded) would be complete as long as the linkage of will overcontrol is maintained. Avatars without this capability will have to be adopted by some RL service, but we have not identified who or what would do this.

Imagine then a highly advanced self-acting avatar, through learning, recombination of memes, and experimentation with its higher mind functions, at last being able to reach beyond the confines of its original design requirements, learning to perform alone at a new and higher level of cognition. This idea is certainly no more challenging than believing that computers will become so powerful someday they will be able to take over policy functions, rather than simply automating a process. Such an avatar would have proven its value to the community. By progressively qualifying to operate effectively at higher cognitive levels, the avatar would demonstrate its ability, given sufficient computational resources, to function in RL if an RL representation or interface could be provided.

We can imagine providing some sort of physical body in RL for the physical control by the SL mind of the evolved avatar. In effect, the self-evolved SL avatar takes control of a physical “avatar” in RL and, through integrated action of will, becomes a fully functioning physical presence in RL. In effect, an RL personality could be partially embodied in an SL avatar, and a sufficiently evolved SL being could be partially embodied in an RL artificial body. The fact that this transfer can occur in either direction gives hope to the idea that someday a way will be found to achieve full personality within the avatar. On the other hand, it is at least equally possible that the mind of the avatar cannot achieve full personhood without direct engagement in RL.

Why is salvation freedom from error? Because in that way a subordinate consciousness is able to function effectively in its own environment, while self-evolving to be able to embrace higher cognitive functions, yielding still more effective functioning. Such a simulated mind, as in a thinking SL avatar, has the implicit ability to shift its seat of conscious identity from SL to RL or to synchronize with a free RL identity. In either case, the conscious being is no longer dependent on the SL computational substrate to support its continued existence, having moved into RL and begun utilization of RL energy processes. Would the avatar mind think it had been immortalized by the transition, even as we assume humans making a mind transition to an artificial substrate would think themselves immortalized? Perhaps the grass is always greener on the other side.

In either case, imagine what it would be like if the reach for higher consciousness the SL avatars make were similarly performed by human minds operating in RL. The human mind seeks the same kind of salvation as the SL avatar—namely, the certainty of right action. And the human finds this salvation by exploring higher levels of cognition of which ey are initially unaware. As these levels are explored, they become familiar to the person and are incorporated into rational patterns of behavior. And this process leads the individual to progressively improve eir actions in increased harmony with universal ideals until eir seat of consciousness comes to occupy a level of reality that transcends the limitations of a physical brain.

I certainly cannot prove that this higher level of Transcendent Life (Trans Live) exists beyond RL as RL exists beyond SL. If it exists, then there is surely a path of transition from RL to Trans ifeL that is similar to the SL to RL transition, and our destiny is to transcend RL and occupy this new level by following the path of living truth. On the other hand, we also know that, should there be no Trans Life to receive our developed personalities, our lives will not have been in vain, for we will have chosen as well as we could, lived as well as the world provided, and passed on our ideals for the help and uplift of those who come after us. If our destiny is only to be pastfathers, then we shall have been being the best pastfathers we could be. And if a way exists to extend our life experience, whether in Trans Life, RL, or SL, we will grasp it with our customary enthusiasm.

 

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 22 Sep 2011 0 comments

Online gamers crack AIDS enzyme puzzle

“Gamers solve molecular puzzle that baffled scientists”

There is this website, Fold.it. People go there to play a video game about Protein Folding. Players can contribute to science by solving these puzzles.

Wikipedia sums up the news nicely:
“. . . online gamers used Foldit to decipher the crystal structure of M-PMV retroviral protease, which is linked to an AIDS-like virus. Players produced an accurate 3D model of the enzyme in just three weeks. The problem had thwarted scientists for a decade.”  

This is significant: We haven’t hit the singularity yet, but the emergence of tools like Foldit that enable the masses to cooperate, will greatly accelerate technological progress.

  • Captchas are often part of a transcription project, and you’re actually helping transcribe words from old texts.

The beautiful cooperation that we have enabled with the Internet is throwing us forward. As more people participate, and new forms of participation are created, the benefits to and advancement of humankind will be exponential.

in News of Note  by 20 Sep 2011 0 comments

This week’s hot stuff (9-15-11)

Voto Latino along with the National Council of La Raza are playing an increasing central role in advocating for progressive causes across a spectrum of stakeholders, not just for immigration, but all struggles for economic and social justice including labor rights and equality rights. These are the leaders of America’s new majority and so much the target of the old white men who would have it otherwise. We will soon be hearing from Gloria Nieto who will be writing on the intersection of race, gender, and sexual politics.

In doing research for a story Zain Rivzi is preparing this week, about what it is like to be gay in Iran today, we came across the now resurfaced Iran Human Rights Blog. Zain is asking if you know that the only way two men can be coupled in Iran is if one of them undergoes sexual reassignment surgery? The penalties for homosexuality is imprisonment, torture, and death, which are worse, but the result is an entire class of transexuals who easily fall into poverty and prostitution. Prostitution in Iran is technically legal under government issued “temporary marriage” documents, but in any calculation it’s a mess, and a mess that we need to care about.

The Organization for Refuge Asylum & Migration (Oram) is a fierce and heroic advocate for refugees fleeing sexual and gender violence and provides free legal advice and representation. They are looking for interns and volunteers and you can “adopt a refugee” to see someone through the passage of safety and resettlement.

Doing work on America’s streets to prevent the spread of HIV and protect the lives of prostitutes living at society’s edge, Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS) works tirelessly to break the chain of poverty, prostitution, and HIV. We salute them, support them, and urge you to get involved in this life-saving work.

Returning again this year, we’re off to Southern Comfort Conference next week. This most excellent and exuberant gathering draws nearly a thousand gender non-conforming and trans folks and their allies spending a 4-day weekend sharing wisdom and seeking common ground. Check out the days of programming that are punctuated with all sorts of social events; this year, the conference joins the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) International Symposium on September 26. You’ll want to come, or at least put it on your calendar for next year. Scholarships are available. We will be hosting several events there including several scheduled Live Twitter Chats on the subject of Transunity and Transleadership. If there ever was a time to join hands to end transphobia, it certainly has to be now.

The last week in September we are headed to Arse Elektronika (AE) for a something, as they say, completely different. Nonetheless it is related to sexual freedom. AE is an international conference founded in Austria and held each year in Europe and in San Francisco. It is an exposition of the future of sexuality, gender, and technology. As transhumanists we are interested in the individuals and companies on the forefront of this industry’s great potential. because they have a built in interest in the struggle for sexual freedom and may want to become involved in in VenusPlusX’s grant-making programs. Consider that future sex is safe sex and future sex technology will find more of a market as sexual repression ebbs away and disappears.

We are again highlighting DC Trans Coalition, and its recently released preliminary findings in a Needs Assessment that was undertaken last year. Must reading for all those who advocate for the rights of trans people, and other sexual minorities. Around here, we say, “If you advocate for the T (as in Transgender, Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual people, TLGB) you are advocating for everyone. We hope you will take an interest and support the DCTC’s exemplary work.

Planning for January’s Creating Change Conference (January 25-29, 2012, in Baltimore) is underway and looking for volunteers and presenters. The next planning meeting is September 15 at 7:oo PM at the MCC Church conference room (401 W. Monument Street, Baltimore, MD 21201).

Few dig as deep as Michelle Meow at Swirl Radio out of San Francisco, “a fast-paced show . . . from the epicenter of the gay universe.” Check it out.

And, last but not least, a shout out to our favorite news aggregator  for giving the Huffington Post a run for their money, The Raw Story.

If you your site or blog isn’t yet on our general Stuff We Like, or would like to be featured here on our weekly top ten, please let us hear from you.

in Events / Public Information  by 15 Sep 2011 0 comments

Becoming and Being an Avatar—Attaining Self-Consciousness

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español In our last post we explained how one can explore the Virtual Reality (VR) of Second Life (SL) as an avatar equipped with a wide range of physical characteristics and surface appearances. We suggested that endowing SL avatars with some form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) would support rational exploration of the different levels of human cognition and interactions across the hierarchy. Today, we consider what it would be like to personally experience the life of an SL avatar. Carlton Mellick explored this idea in the D&D game The Kobold Wizard’s Dildo of Enlightenment +2  in which a group of characters, after experiencing the dildo, are awakened to the fact that they are just pre-rolled characters living inside of a classic RPG, subject to the whims of a dungeon master who is only interested in making them have sex in various combinations.

Someday, possibly sooner than later, it will become possible through personality profiling technology akin to today’s mindfiles to simulate a significant fraction of the cognitive activity of the human mind. Stated this way, the prediction seems vague enough to be obviously true; however, many Transhumanists believe that this is a destiny that will someday be completely true. They believe that it will be possible to simulate the entirety of a human personality—body, mind, and spirit—in a technological construct. SL avatars thus endowed would surely have to be considered entirely equivalent to human beings, with legal rights of their own.

What then should become of the resident associated with the SL avatar that has become a fully self-conscious human personality? It would seem natural for the resident to abandon support of personality functions that have been successfully offloaded to the avatar and its supporting substrate. This part of the resident has come to live a simulated life in a simulated form in a simulated world. Could the resident transfer all his personality into the simulation and be free from the meat forever? We do not know because we do not have a useful understanding of what constitutes personal identity, much less whether it could be replicated and indefinitely maintained in an artificial substrate. I have argued that the erotic, the sense of sexual pleasure and the joy of orgasm would be a necessary foundational capability for any simulation able to replicate personal identity.

Although the resident who voluntarily (and non-destructively) transfers the bulk of his personal qualities into the simulation will remember where he has come from and how to leave the simulation, this is not true of a simulated consciousness of comparable power that is constructed, introduced, and allowed to evolve within SL, copying fragments from operated avatars to support its own development through genetic recombination and selection. Such simulated beings would have no understanding of the existence of RL, except through the explanations and visualizations provided by RL residents through their SL avatars. Clearly, SL beings that have struggled up from the random digital muck to reasonable self-awareness deserve to understand where they stand and how they can find their way to RL. You can’t keep the knowledge from them and, once they know it is real, you can’t ethically deny them a path to explore it and more.

Human beings, thinking sympathetically of the needs they would want fulfilled were they first born as SL avatars (to know of RL and a path there) will feel compelled to provide such knowledge to the community of self-evolved free-acting avatars. If humans would show this much mercy to their creations, is it not necessarily true that the cosmic infrastructure of RL would provide comparable facilities for the care and uplift of those like us, who are first born into RL? Someday, once SL avatars have begun to attain independent self-consciousness, it will be possible to show them how our minds enter our avatars and, thus, how their higher mind functions may finally escape SL to find a new and independent existence in RL with our help.

Let’s start out by thinking how our higher mind functions would interact with less complex mind functions of an avatar endowed with free will. You may wonder why the exercise of will would ever be turned over to an avatar, but if the avatar truly embodies and follows the will of the owner, then the two remain effectively one person. When I enter SL as my avatar, there are no questions about integrated identity, since I know any uploaded will function will be faithfully applied as if I did it myself.

On the other hand, if the avatar truly does have free will, then it possesses the singular ability to make my will its will and to act accordingly, or to do anything different. In terms of forming an integrated personal presence, the avatar must voluntarily adopt the will of the resident and always act in the directions and within the boundaries of that will, which need not be confining. If I think from the avatar’s viewpoint, I will be trying to follow directions from the resident, whose mind in RL embraces levels of capability of which I am not directly aware, in order that my actions in SL will satisfy our shared purpose—which, in the final analysis, is to experience fulfilling joy in both SL and RL. My resident has a bird’s eye view of SL and can help me be fabulous if I pay attention. And once I fully experience a union of will, of purpose with my resident, then I know I can move my personal presence from SL into RL, even as my mentor, who came from RL to SL, showed me.

 

in Cosmic Citizenship / Library / Transhuman Erotic Freedom  by 14 Sep 2011 2 comments

Newly expanded VenusPlusX rolls out

We are expanding with our retooled website to fulfill VenusPlusX’s mission to help usher in “The New Age of Sexual Freedom” – a world free from the global culture of racial, sexual, and gender oppression and violence driven by governments, religions, corporations, and social custom.

We aim to do that with the site’s new utilities and capabilities, bringing the voices of our diverse allies via our campaigns, initiatives, educational and advocacy programs, and grassroots organizing.

Some highlights . . .

  • New videos daily as part of our Sexual Freedom Project. LilMike will bring us videos, poems, essays, artwork, and other original submissions from readers on the topic of sexual freedom, or anything else that is covered by VenusPlusX. And, there is a free VenusPlusX t-shirt for participating.
  • Join a national conversation on Transunity and Transleadership, addressing lots of challenging and urgent questions, with our Guest Feature Editor, Jos Truitt. Jos, Alison, and Dan will be hosting several live twitter chats next week at Atlanta’s Southern Comfort Conference.
  • Zain Rizvi, Adrianna Midamba, and other international activists join Kushaba “Moses” Mworeko’s Global Sexual Freedom Watch, widening our response to the imprisonment, sexual mutilation, and murders of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, the severe curtailment of women’s rights, human trafficking, and the steady eradication of anyone who is HIV+ — in 100s of countries. Use the annotated bibliography as a resource and to get involved. Fundraising to support LGBT US asylum seekers is also on deck.
  • Jack Diehl will be giving us his wry take on his favorite news stories everyday.
  • And, Dan Massey will continue to write on the broad topic of Transhuman Erotic Freedom, adding to his large archive from the past year. Includes an annotated Table of Contents. Prepare for The New Age of Sexual Freedom.

I will be reporting on America’s general problem with sex and gender, and how this is connected to violent oppression across the globe through flawed government laws and policies, often exploited by American businessmen and politicians. I’ll also be charting the grassroots to help focus “boots on the ground” when/where needed.

Please let us know what you think of the new site and ways we can improve it. To help expand our reach, add us to your blog roll, tell your friends, and “Like” us on Facebook, “Like-Favorite-Comment-Subscribe” to our YouTube videos, “Follow” us on Twitter, and post or email your uncensored comments.

We are here for you, take off to the new age of sexual freedom.

in Events  by 13 Sep 2011 0 comments

Human trafficking

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together. — Margaret Atwood

Back in 2009 while in Uganda, I found myself involved in a scam that fell neatly in the stereotype that Nigeria is the NO.1 source of scammers. I am not sure about that but I was conned by a South African-Nigerian. His name was Nick Oppenheimer, a supposed COO of a family business in South Africa.

He promised to offer me a job. He told me that it would be easier to start with owning shares in the company and because I was poor, he offered to buy shares for me, which he “did” through this address:  Barnard Jacobs & Mellet Holdings Ltd,  24 Fricker Rd, Illovo, Johannesburg  2196 .

Apparently, huge amounts were paid for stock in my name and I started receiving trade alerts of this nature Mr. MOSES MWOREKO KUSHABA,  Petrosa shares of 4400 units have been credited to your A/C registered with us.  Barn Mell Ltd.

I was then asked to send some money to my  account through an Inter-Bank transfer in Lagos, Nigeria, after which, my employment letter would be sent to me by Mr. John Cray.

I was so excited and borrowed $100 to send to Lagos, and subsequently I received the employment letter. Then I was asked to send more money.

Nicky, my supposed boss to be, was on a tour of the company’s business in Nigeria. He told me he would pass through Uganda to take me to South Africa.

While in Nigeria, I talked to “him” on phone and he started telling me to send more money. At this point, I began to investigate the company.

I sent an inquiry to the actual organization about my accounts status, and quickly learned this was a scam. During that same time, there were many employment agencies that were recruiting people for jobs in UAE, and in talking to my friends, we remembered this. This ended my search for employment in those companies.

Human trafficking is real. Desperate situations put people in compromised situations leading to suffering, like Masud’s story. Many end up as domestic slaves or indentured sex workers.

Masud was 12. His parents were persuaded, tricked, to let him be taken from his home in Bangladesh to a new life in England. He was sold, “Trafficked.”

He left his home with an unknown man who travelled with him to London then onto the southwest where he was abandoned in an Indian restaurant. To survive he worked in the restaurant, lived in one of its small store rooms, sleeping next to jars of chutney and bags of onions. Sometimes when there was no work he was forced to sleep on the streets. He was not able to go to school and his life was controlled by the restaurant owners.

When he was 28, with the help of STOP THE TRAFFIK, he contacted the local police and immigration team who helped him to obtain a passport and identity documents, resulting in him being able to return to Bangladesh.

Stories like Masud’s are happening all the time, making people trafficking the world’s fastest growing illegal trade.

Let’s take a moment and look at the statistics from UN Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking.

1.4 million – 56% – are in Asia and the Pacific

250,000 – 10% – are in Latin America and the Caribbean

230,000 – 9.2% – are in the Middle East and North Africa

130,000 – 5.2% – are in sub-Saharan countries. An estimated 2.5 million people are in forced labor (including sexual exploitation) at any given time as a result of trafficking.

270,000 – 10.8% – are in industrialised countries

200,000 – 8%- are in countries in transition

Sexual Trafficking – The Facts – VIDEO

These helpless people need a voice. There are many operators just like “Nicky” out there who need to be exposed and dealt with to avoid more stories like Masud’s.

The State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report 2011 provides a detailed account on this issue.

What do you think of when you hear the term “human trafficking?” Do you know someone who is in your country as a result of it? Tell us your ideas for solving this most horrid aspect the the global culture of sexual violence?

 

Image by Steve Weaver, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
Image Description; An exhibition set up in Trafalgar square from September 22nd to the 30th 2007 by the Helen Bamber organization to highlight and lobby the government to the shocking trade of sex trafficking and enslavement happening on our doorsteps. To find out more and to sign a petition go here.

in Global Sexual Freedom Watch  by 13 Sep 2011 0 comments

The Sexual Freedom Project: Gender Doesn’t Exist

(También en Español)

You might be surprised by Mariana when she talks about her Catholic father’s approach to her sexuality and sex education, and how the result has been that she is generally more responsible than her peers. You will agree how cool it has been for her to receive her Dad’s trust and guidance in place of absolutes or prohibitions. She also recalls being 8 years old and thinking she wanted to be a boy, just because life seemed so much easier, but as an adult those gender differences have practically faded?

Parent or child, what do you think are the best ways young people can be guided. Does gender still exist for you? Can you imaging a gender-free future?

Send us your thoughts — and we’ll give you a t-shirt for sharing them with us! A short video, an essay or a poem, or even an image or original artwork you think sends the right message.

Video by Tiye Massey.

TRANSCRIPT by David Kreps

We’re Catholic, but my dad, he’s really open-minded. Since I [was] like sixteen, he told me, “You know Mariana? You have to… If you have sex, please wear a condom. You can do whatever you want, but use it.” So, (laughs) that’s why I’m so ‘responsible’ in some ways, and I didn’t get pregnant like a lot of my friends did. It’s cool, it’s cool to have this type of education. They don’t prohibit…

I have to say, since I [was] like eight years old,  I wanted to be a guy, to be honest. Because for me it was so much easier, you know, like to be a guy than a girl. But then, you know, nowadays, you can be, you can do a lot of things as guys do, and also, guys do a lot of things that girls do. So for me, I don’t know, gender doesn’t exist that much anymore.

in The Sexual Freedom Project / Videos  by 09 Sep 2011 0 comments