NEW YORK, May 3 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Children removed from unfit families and put in foster care are terrifyingly vulnerable to being trafficked, a fact that Amy Andrews knows all too well. 

She spun in and out of her abusive family home into the child welfare system, starting when she was 10 years old. By 14, she was selling sex on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard, working for traffickers who exploited her naivete and need for attention. 

"I'm loved, I'm wanted, I'm cared for, I'm given everything I want and no one blames me," Andrews said of being trafficked. "And I'm being sexually abused, but I can overlook that. 

"Nobody wanted me. This set me up to be vulnerable and needy," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. 

Hundreds of thousands of U.S. children live in foster care, prey to predator sex traffickers who may find their young victims at bus stops, shopping malls or street corners as well as on social media and online chat rooms.

Read More

MUMBAI, May 1(Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Girls are being trafficked into domestic servitude or sex slavery after their parents illegally marry them off, said officials in the Indian state of Maharashtra on Tuesday. 

Researchers are conducting the state's first survey into links between child marriage and slavery, according to Vijaya Rahatkar, chairperson of Maharashtra's women's commission. 

The legal age of marriage in India is 18 for women and 21 for men. Parents face a fine of 100,000 rupees ($1,535) and two years in prison if they are caught trying to marry off their underage children. 

But discrimination against girls remains widespread, particularly in rural and poor communities where parents often view daughters as financial burdens and continue to marry them off early.

Read More

DAKAR, May 2 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Democratic Republic of Congo's jailing of a warlord for sexual slavery shows it is cracking down on a longstanding culture of impunity, rights groups and lawyers said on Wednesday. 

A military court in the central African country sentenced Lieutenant-Colonel Maro Ntumwa, nicknamed "Marocain", to 20 years in prison on Saturday for crimes he committed as head of a local militia from 2005 to 2007. 

The prosecution was one of several that suggest the state is making a greater effort to hold people accountable for sex crimes after being pegged the "rape capital of the world", said Geneva-based legal group Trial International. 

"I feel that concretely there has been a change of heart or at least more determination on the part of the government," said Daniele Perissi, head of the Congo programme at Trial International, which helped Ntumwa's victims build their case.

Read More

The U.S. Senate passed legislation on Wednesday aimed at penalizing website operators that facilitate online sex trafficking, chipping away at a bedrock legal shield for the technology industry. 

The bill passed the House of Representatives last month and was expected to be signed into law as soon as this week by President Donald Trump. 

The legislation, which passed the Senate on a 97-2 vote, would make it easier for state prosecutors and sex-trafficking victims to sue social media networks, advertisers and others that failed to keep exploitative material off their platforms. 

Law enforcement has lobbied for years for such a law, an effort which resulted in part from a crackdown on backpage.com, the second largest U.S. classified ad service and which is used for sex advertising. 

Passage of the bill represented a rare defeat for the internet industry, which despite coming under renewed scrutiny for how companies protect user data or guard against Russian meddling has for years avoided meaningful regulation in Washington.

Read More