Salvadorian trans woman secures US asylum

Source: Washington Post

By Teresa Tomassoni

After a gang member held him at gunpoint inside his home, the 24-year-old gay man knew he had to flee El Salvador to survive. He had been beaten and harassed repeatedly on the streets by gang members. Eventually, they warned, they would kill him.

It took two attempts to get across the U.S.-Mexican border, but in 2006, he was smuggled into Arizona and made his way to Washington, where his brother lived.

“Finally, I can have my real life, exactly how I am,” he thought.

Valerie Villalta, now 30, found that new life as a transgender woman and, in the process, won a kind of protection she didn’t even know was possible for someone like her: asylum.

Asylum, which allows an immigrant to live and work in the country legally, is more commonly associated with immigrants who have been persecuted in their home countries — or who might be in the future — because of their politics, race, religion or ethnicity. But Villalta learned that it also can apply to gay and transgender immigrants who have been tortured because of their sexuality.

Since winning her asylum case in 2009 with the help of the Whitman-Walker Health clinic in the District, Villalta has dedicated much of her life to providing guidance to gay and transgender Latino immigrants who find themselves in a foreign land with little or no knowledge of the language, the culture or the services that can help them find peace with who they really are.

She volunteers with a health education program for gay and transgender youths called Empoderate, or “Empower yourself” — the same program that helped her find her way. The youth center is just a few blocks from its umbrella organization, La Clinica del Pueblo, a bilingual community health center in Columbia Heights.

“When you try to help other people, you feel good,” Villalta said recently, sitting in the center’s coral pink Girls Meeting Room. A drawing of a butterfly emerging from its cocoon hangs above her head. “Soy mujer trans (I’m a transgender woman),” it says.

Read more »

Anti- trafficking laws are anti-immigration laws

Source: The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants

By Xanthe Whittaker

Anti- trafficking laws are anti-immigration laws, according to research by sex worker rights network, x:talk project. Their report, Human Rights, Sex Work and the Challenge of Trafficking, was recently released and is an appraisal of anti-trafficking measures from some of the people who have been most affected by them: sex workers.

While no one would want to underplay the gross human rights violation that trafficking amounts to, the x:talk report argues that laws and measures introduced to address trafficking have been more effective at rounding up migrant sex workers and charging them with prostitution and immigration crimes than supporting and assisting genuine victims of trafficking.

‘Rescuing’ victims of trafficking?

Take, for example, Pentameter 2, a joint policing and UKBA operation aimed at ‘rescuing’ victims of trafficking. This series of raids on 822 indoor sex venues across the UK resulted in the conviction of just 15 people on trafficking charges, in contrast to the 122 people who were arrested for immigration offences during the operation.

Human trafficking has been framed in the UK in terms of a sexual offence whose victims are women, and with little distinction made between trafficking and prostitution per se. The x:talk report expresses concern that this policy focus has the effect of creating a moral panic around women working in the sex industry. And that is particularly the case for migrant women, who have become the target of immigration round-ups and, as a result, have been pushed into more underground, less safe pockets of the industry. Irregular immigration status has also been a major mechanism of blackmail and control by people who do seek to exploit or control these women.

Not just women

The report also argues that anti-trafficking efforts are failing to recognise or address the needs of men and transgender people who are trafficked, as well as people trafficked into non-sexual work. Between 2003 and December 2008, a total of 92 people were convicted of sex trafficking, compared with four convictions for labour trafficking.

In terms of protecting the human rights of trafficked people, the UK offers no national coordinated framework for providing services to victims of trafficking. As recently as August this year, the SOCA [Serious Organised Crime Agency] website defined trafficking as: “the movement of illegal immigrants for exploitation within the UK,” which it isn’t—trafficking does not always involve cross-border migration or breaches of migration law, yet it would appear it has been adopted by the UK authorities as yet another front in the protection of UK border integrity.

The report calls upon the Government to rethink its trafficking policy. It recommends that to protect the human rights of migrants against exploitation in the UK (sexual or otherwise), the UK must sign and ratify the Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families and that, in general, a migrant’s immigration status cannot be invoked to undermine their human rights.

Xanthe Whittaker is the co-ordinator of the X: talk project publication Human Rights Sex Work and the Challenge of Trafficking. X: talk project is a grassroots sex workers network made up of people directly working in the sex industry.

Human rights, sex work and the challenge of trafficking

First cases of men being trafficked into Scotland as sex slaves

Image by venana via Flickr

Source: Daily Record

By Annie Brown

Men have been trafficked into Scotland to be used as gay sex slaves.

In the first known cases of male sex trafficking to hit Scotland, two men were smuggled in from Africa and imprisoned in flats.

The men were victims of separate incidents. One was forced to take part in pornography, while the other was sold for sex.

Experts fear that more victims could follow.

Julian Heng, who manages a support project for male prostitutes, said his organisation were called in to help the men.

He said: "We have had a couple of requests for telephone support for professionals who were supporting two separate cases of men who had been trafficked into the country.

"They weren't asylum seekers or refugees, they had actually been trafficked into Scotland from Africa."

There are around 700 trafficked women in the UK but when men are trafficked here, it tends to be for manual labour - not sex.

Mr Heng, who is service manager of NHS Open Road, said the male sex trade often mirrored what happened to women.

He said: "Whatever happens with women involved in prostitution, we will usually see happening with men. It tends to take a couple of years, that's all.

Read more »