For almost two decades, Helmut Sax has straddled the boundary between research and practice around anti-trafficking. He has long sat ‘on the inside’ of official international anti-trafficking bodies and yet is widely and publicly critical of the ways in which anti-trafficking efforts often fail. BTS caught up with him in the context of this twentieth anniversary debate.

Neil Howard (BTS): Helmut, you have nearly two decades of experience as both an anti-trafficker and a scholar of anti-trafficking. In this series, we’re looking at the concept of ‘exploitation’ and taking stock of where the field has gotten to in its fight against it. What’s your take on where the field is at?

Helmut Sax: The ultimate goal of anti-trafficking is not the prevention of trafficking, but the prevention of exploitation. Conceptually, trafficking should be regarded as no more than a preparatory act, something that creates or maintains situations of dependency which make people vulnerable to being exploited. The added value of making trafficking a criminal offence is precisely that it enables us to address these situations – what I call the ‘logistics’ of dependency. But doing so means working much more closely with wider efforts to end exploitation. For example, when it comes to supply chains, we shouldn’t just be focussing on monitoring but instead need to address poor working conditions, weak labour rights, and all the underlying cause factors that lead to a need for monitoring in the first place.

Neil: So why is that not happening?

Helmut: Ironically, it’s partly attributable to the fact that, as a criminal offence, trafficking is typically addressed through the criminal justice system. This leads to a heavy emphasis on investigation, arrest, and prosecution, with the obvious consequence that individual criminals are targeted instead of the exploitative circumstances in which they operate. In practice, this sees states work hard to increase their numbers of trafficking investigations and convictions, but their actual focus really should be on addressing exploitation.

Nagpur, Dec 16 (PTI) Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh and his wife will perform the ''kanyadaan'', ritual of offering daughter''s hand to groom in marriage, of an orphan and speech and hearing impaired bride in Nagpur on Sunday.

Nagpur Collector Ravindra Thakre and his wife will will perform the father''s duty for the groom, who is also an orphan and suffers from the same disabilities, according to a release issued by the district information office.

The woman, aged 23, was found abandoned at a railway station in Nagpur 23 years back, and was adopted and raised by social worker Shankarbaba Papalkar at his orphanage in the state''s Amravati district, the release said.

The 27-year-old man was found abandoned in Dombivali town of Thane district when he was two years'' old. He was also adopted and brought up by Papalkar at his orphanage.

Their wedding will be held on December 20.

A forum of mostly Catholic nuns has demanded equal treatment for priests and nuns, citing the case of a priest continuing in ministry after fathering a child with a nun who has been dismissed from her congregation.

In a letter to the top Catholic hierarchy, Sisters in Solidarity said the Church has been following a "double standard" by dismissing the nun after she became pregnant.

When priests violate the vow of celibacy, "they are merely relocated to another diocese" but when nuns face a similar situation, "they are compelled to leave their congregations," said the Dec. 16 letter titled "A wake-up call to greater integrity."

The letter was sent to Cardinal Oswald Gracias, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India, Cardinal George Alencherry, major archbishop and head of the Syro-Malabar Church based in the southern state of Kerala, and other top officials.

The letter referred to Syro-Malabar Thamarassery Diocese transferring Father Jomon Kandathinkara to Shamshabad Diocese in Telangana state five years ago after diocesan officials came to know that he had fathered a baby girl with a Franciscan Clarist nun.

NBC News reported at the age of 28-years-old, Culberson began her search when she learned her biological mother died when she was only 11. After a phone call from an uncle, she learned she was related to African royalty. According to the news outlet, she is from the Mende tribe in Bumpe, Sierra Leone, and is considered a mahaloi, the child of a paramount chief. This makes Culberson the princess of the Bumpe village.

Sarah Culberson Sierra Leone www.theGrio.com

(Image via sarahculberson.com / Brandon Flint Photography)

Hundreds of people came out to celebrate her return during a special ceremony in 2006 where her biological father gifted her a dress that matched his own suit. Culberson shared with the news outlet that although a royal title sounds glamorous, learning her identity came with responsibility.

“My only guidance of what a princess was was what I saw in movies,” Culberson said to NBC News. “[But] it’s really about responsibility. It’s about walking in my great-grandfather and grandfather’s footsteps and what they’ve done for the country. I realized that’s my role as a princess, to keep moving things forward in the country.”

FOR 40 YEARS, his name was Michael Libberton.

The Florida man defined himself by his Midwestern upbringing and the values instilled by his adoptive parents. Libberton, who was adopted shortly before his second birthday, said he thought little of the fact that he’d been born in Colombia.

Then, in 2016, Libberton applied to Lake Technical College to strengthen his welding skills. There was a problem with his paperwork. Over the next two years, Libberton followed a trail of records — from his adoptive family to the city in Illinois where he grew up to the immigration office — and learned that he was not, as he’d always believed, a U.S. citizen.

Libberton said he feels like he’s losing his country, his identity, even his name.

“You love this country, and it’s taken from you,” Libberton told USA TODAY. “Every right you thought you had, you don’t have.”

The Orban government is preparing to take a surprising decision during the government meeting on Monday. The draft Decision is already on the agenda of the Government meeting to be held on 31 August 2020.

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When the health emergency was declared, the Secretariat for International Adoption of Quebec (SAI) suspended all its activities, delaying to an indefinite date the meeting of the adoptive parents with their child. "There are those who thought they would leave in March to pick him up, and now it is December and they have no promise of being able to find this child," testifies Dr Jean-François Chicoine, pediatrician at CHU Sainte-Justine , specialist in international adoption.

“When we have already lost a little time with a child who is proposed to us for adoption, with whom we have not been able to share the first months, even the first years of his life, when a year is added to that, it is extremely trying for the parents ”, shares Dr. Chicoine, who was able to speak with these parents within the framework of virtual meetings organized with the collaboration of the personnel of the clinic of adoption and international health of the CHU Sainte -Justine and the SAI.

Gathered in groups of around twenty people, the parents were able to share their concerns and experiences during virtual sessions lasting 2h30 supervised by Doctor Chicoine and his team.

“When we have already lost a little time with a child who is proposed to us for adoption, with whom we have not been able to share the first months, even the first years of his life, when a year is added to that, it is extremely trying for the parents ”, shares Dr. Chicoine.

“When we have already lost a little time with a child who is proposed to us for adoption, with whom we have not been able to share the first months, even the first years of his life, when a year is added to that, it is extremely trying for the parents ”, shares Dr. Chicoine.

Prayagraj: In an important judgment, the Allahabad high court has held that even if a married Hindu man has estranged wife, i.e., living apart but not divorced, even then he needs prior consent of his alienated wife for adoption of a child under Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act.

Dismissing a writ petition filed by one Bhanu Pratap Singh of Mau district, Justice JJ Munir observed, “The proviso makes it imperative for a Hindu male to secure his wife’s consent to an adoption that he makes, unless she has completely and finally renounced the world, or has ceased to be a Hindu, or has been declared by a court of competent jurisdiction to be of unsound mind.”

The petitioner, Bhanu Pratap Singh, had requested for appointment on compassionate grounds in the forest department of the state after the death of his uncle Rajendra Singh.

According to the petitioner, in the year 2001 he was adopted by his uncle, Rajendra Singh, who had alienated his wife Phulmati and had no child from the marriage. Therefore, he was entitled for job as per the provisions of ‘The Uttar Pradesh Recruitment of Dependants of Government Servants Dying-in-Harness Rules, 1974’ because he was sole heir and dependant of his adopter, who was an employee of the forest department at the time of his death.

Subsequently, on December 17, 2016, the forest department rejected the plea of the petitioner for appointment on compassionate grounds. Hence, this rejection was challenged in the present petition before the high court.

Last month, BBC Africa Eye exposed a thriving black-market trade in babies in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Police arrested seven people on trafficking charges in response to the story, but what about the women on the other side of these illegal deals? What drives a mother to sell her child?

BBC

Adama's life was easy when she had her parents, she said. Money was tight, and her options were already narrow, but there was an order to things that made sense. She attended school and cherished it. She had few worries. Then her father died when she was 12, and her mother died a few years later.

"Life became so hard then," she said, in a conversation from her village in rural western Kenya. "I had to drop out of school and fend for myself."

At 22, Adama met a man and got pregnant, but he died three days after their baby daughter was born. Her loneliness deepened. She nursed her baby through an infant sickness until the girl improved, at about 18 months, then a steady income was needed to keep them both alive. So Adama left the baby with her elderly grandmother and headed to Nairobi to find work.

The stolen climate crisis babies: US politician jailed for selling children of mothers desperate to escape environmental catastrophe

A former politician has been sentenced to six years for running an illegal adoption racket which took advantage of impoverished women from the Marshall Islands, a low-lying nation in the Pacific Ocean, where more and more citizens are being forced to flee because of the climate crisis.

Paul Petersen, a onetime Republican county assessor who was also an adoption attorney, illegally paid women to come to the US to give up their babies to Americans. Petersen had at least 70 adoptions cases in Arizona, Utah and Arkansas over three years.

Petersen “manipulated birth mothers into consenting to adoptions they did not fully understand,” said First Assistant United States Attorney Fowlkes of the Western District of Arkansas.

Judge Timothy Brooks, who imposed the sentence from Fayetteville, Arkansas on Tuesday, said that Petersen abused his position as an attorney by misleading or instructing others to lie to courts in adoptions that wouldn’t have been approved had the truth been told to them.