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.

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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.

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MONTGOMERY, Ala. — In a plain brown building sits an office run by the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, a place for people who have been held accountable for their crimes and duly expressed remorse. 

Just a few yards up the street lies a different kind of rehabilitation center, for a country that has not been held to nearly the same standard. 

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opens Thursday on a six-acre site overlooking the Alabama State Capitol, is dedicated to the victims of American white supremacy. And it demands a reckoning with one of the nation’s least recognized atrocities: the lynching of thousands of black people in a decades-long campaign of racist terror. 

At the center is a grim cloister, a walkway with 800 weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. Etched on each column is the name of an American county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.” The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given. But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings.

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