By Dennis Oda, Star-Bulletin
Cops nab a suspect for soliciting.
By Jaymes K. SongPolice are cracking down on prostitution. With 12 new officers in Waikiki, arrests are up. Officer 'Emily' may appear to be turning tricks, but the trick's on potential customers
Star-Bulletin
"Emily" looks out to the brightly lit, buzzing street, awaiting her next customer.
Cars, buses and trolleys roar down Kalakaua Avenue as hundreds of people pass her by.
Some give her a stare. A dirty look. A rude comment.
Others avoid making any contact with her.
But a "date" with Emily is one of costliest around -- $500 and a trip to jail.
Emily, whose name has been changed to shield her identity, is a policewoman who poses as a Waikiki prostitute in "reverse-sting" operations.
Conducted by the Honolulu Police Department, the operations target "johns" who proposition sex acts for money.
"People judge me, thinking they can have me for $100," she said. "And they treat you like crap. Little do they know, they have to bail out for $500. That's kind of fun."
9:07 p.m., Thursday, Waikiki Police Substation Sgt. James McGhee receives notice that his "reverse-sting" crew just arrested a 54-year-old tourist from Israel for apparently soliciting Emily. The man, coincidentally, is the same person that a tour group reported missing earlier.
9:45 p.m., in a parking lot off the 2000 block of Kalakaua. McGhee, who has 24 years with the department, meets up with his team: Emily, and plain-clothes officers Rick Orton, Chris Park and Keith Perry.
The officers tell him a second arrest has been made, a 17-year-old Kalihi boy. Found in his pockets was medication for his venereal disease.
10 p.m., 2000 block of Kalakaua Avenue. Emily, dressed in a fitted animal-print mini-dress, high heels and a shiny hand bag, walks to the mauka side of Kalakaua Avenue and waits for a john.
The male officers set up across the street where they have a good view of Emily and could quickly get to the scene.
McGhee said it takes a special officer to endure the humiliation of being a prostitute.
"It's kind of degrading to them to hear the comments from the other ladies," he said. "You can't explain what you are doing. You can't get upset by that."
Emily, 27, who recently graduated from the police academy, was picked for her appearance and her professionalism. Her tall, thin build helps her "blend in" with the prostitutes, McGhee said.
The current rate for sex in Waikiki is about $200 to $300, he said. Japanese tourists usually use credit cards and are willing to pay more. On a busy night, one prostitute can make more than 10 "dates."
10:15 p.m. A group of four men from Japan start talking with Emily. Three of them walk away but the fourth, in a green shirt, lags behind.
The three call for their friend to join them. He then leaves her.
The ground rules for Emily: never approach men, never discuss sex or money, never lead them on.
McGhee said she can make an arrest only when the man solicits a sexual act for any amount of money. Money does not have to exchange hands for an arrest.
Several prostitutes walk up to Emily and start conversing.
By Dennis Oda, Star-Bulletin
A Japanese tourist is handcuffed after soliciting
an undercover officer for sex in Waikiki.
Emily said the prostitutes usually inform her what's happening on the streets and who is harming them.
10:27 p.m. Two men from the group of four that visited Emily earlier, come back.
The man in the green shirt converses with Emily again, then walks away.
"A nibble, no bite," said Park.
Orton, a seven-year veteran of the force, said he enjoys his job.
"I like making a small difference," he said. "The tourism industry is so important. I just want to make Waikiki a nicer place for tourists to visit."
11:03 p.m. The foot traffic and the flame from the torches that line the streets, start dying.
Store lights start shutting off; the entire area gets dimmer.
Two male tourists from Australia start talking to Emily.
Seven minutes later, one leaves, but the other stays to harass Emily.
He starts trying to touch her and asks for a kiss. She denies him.
He asks Emily to go back to his hotel room, but does not say what for and does not offer money. Not a violation of laws.
McGhee immediately calls Emily on her cellular phone, but it's off.
"He's too close," he said, adding that he wanted her to walk away from him. "Most importantly, is officer safety. I don't want to let them get in a position to get hurt."
The man then leaves disappointedly with no kiss.
11:20 p.m. A 27-year-old man from Japan starts talking to Emily in Japanese.
On her cellular phone, she calls Orton, who is fluent in Japanese, for translations of what the man is saying. The man tells her that he "is safe."
He continues to converse with her in Japanese. But the only English word he can say is "sex." Orton listens in.
The man finally proposes $70 to her for "manual sex" or masturbation.
Emily gives the officers a signal that the crime has been committed and they rush over.
They escort the man to an alley, not cuffing him on the main street to avoid drawing attention to the arrest.
Orton and Park hold the victim by the back of his pants and escort him to an awaiting police car.
Midnight
McGhee declares the operation over.
Emily will now return to the station for at least two hours to type up the three arrest reports.
"People think prostitutes aren't hurting anyone, but they do," Emily said. "They steal from the guys, assault and rob them."
One of the most memorable arrests for Emily was a man who was on his honeymoon. His wife of 12 days was sleeping in their hotel room when he propositioned Emily.
"I felt so bad for the wife," she said. "I just thought, 'what a jerk.' "
Replies
photo credit: quinn.anya
University of Hawaii Denounces Legalizing Child Pornography
After receiving 250 letters from Change.org members, the University of Hawaii has denounced the legalization of child pornography. Members began voicing their concerns after a retired University of Hawaii professor released a study that seemed to advocate for legalizing child pornography in order to reduce child abuse. Now, however, university officials have stated they don't support that policy recommendation.
Dr. Milton Diamond, a University of Hawaii professor who retired in 2009, used his university credentials when he published his recent study Pornography and Sex Crimes in the Czech Republic. In it, he studies the legalization of adult pornography in the Czech Republic and concludes that when adult pornography was legalized, sex crimes against adults did not increase. It also claims that when child pornography was made legal, sex crimes against children decreased.
However, the study failed to consider that child pornography is child sexual abuse. Child pornography is nothing more than pictorial or video evidence of a child being sexually exploited and harmed. So not only does child pornography not reduce child sexual abuse, it includes child sexual abuse in its production. Furthermore, child pornography is used to groom children for trafficking, and traffickers' threats to send dirty images to kids' families have kept them there.
In an email to Change.org, a university representative stated that Dr. Diamond felt his work had been misinterpreted, and that he never intended to campaign for the legalization of child pornography. The comment from Dr. Diamond's paper, "we do not approve of the use of real children in the production or distribution of child pornography but artificially produced materials might serve" may imply an approval of child pornography produced using age-regression software, but Dr. Diamond maintains his advocacy has not been for the legalization of any child pornography, real or synthetic.
The University of Hawaii, for their part, thanked Change.org members for bringing the issue to their attention, and was more than happy to support their efforts to ensure the rights of children to be safe from all forms of abuse, including child pornography, remain protected.
Thanks to everyone who wrote to the University of Hawaii asking them to denounce the legalization of child pornography.
photo credit: quinn.anya
Child Sex Trafficking Victims Get Second Chance from Congress
by Amanda Kloer · March 18, 2011
Topics:
Last year, the Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking Deterrence and Victims Support Act of 2011 -- which would help alleviate the shelter crisis for sex trafficked kids in the U.S. -- was days away from becoming law. Unfortunately, the legislation was blocked at the last minute by Alabama Senator Jeffrey Sessions, after Concerned Women for America wrote a letter to Congress saying kids who have been raped and forced into prostitution should be arrested. Now, the Victims Support Act and the thousands of children it will help have another chance ... until March 30.
The Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking Deterrence and Victims Support Act would provide critical resources for the over 100,000 children sex trafficked in the U.S. every year. Child sex trafficking victims experience violent trauma, manipulation, and are often arrested and detained in juvenile detention. They need safe places like shelters to recover from that abuse. But there are only a handful of shelter beds in the whole country for child sex trafficking victims. Right now, there aren't enough aftercare facilities to serve even 1% of the estimated victims of child sex trafficking in the U.S. The lack of shelter for child trafficking victims is truly a national crisis.
Last year, the legislation unanimously passed the Senate, but when it arrived in the House, it languished in the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime until two days before the end of the session. Before it was returned, however, the House removed two Senate amendments added by Senator Sessions. As the bill no longer contained his amendments, Sessions refused to let the bill go to a final vote, which almost surely would have resulted in its passage. For awhile, anti-trafficking advocates wondered if the bill could be revived.
Fortunately, it has been, and now is being presented to Congress again. This time, anti-trafficking organization Polaris Project and thousands of other activists are refusing to let the Victims Support Act die for good. They're organizing grassroots supporters to get in touch with key members of Congress and advocate for the Victims Support Act to become law.
You can join them by signing this petition and making sure Congress knows there is broad support for providing shelter to child sex trafficking victims. Or, find out more at Polaris Project's Action Center.
Will Hawaii Finally Make Human Trafficking a Crime?
- Child Prostitution ·
- Child Trafficking ·
- Prostitution ·
show moreCurrently in Hawaii, victims of sex trafficking are often criminalized and arrested, as there are no state laws which identify them as victims of a crime. For example, in most states a woman tricked into the commercial sex industry with the promise of a modeling job or other deception would be considered a victims of human trafficking and given support services. But since the definition of sex trafficking in Hawaii doesn't include "fraud," that same woman might be arrested instead of assisted. That's a big gap, considering that Hawaii has a significant sex trafficking problem, and was recently the site of the largest human trafficking case in the country.
HB 576 would amend the current prostitution statutes in Hawaii to include a definition of sex trafficking crimes involving forced or child prostitution and ensure children under 18 involved in commercial sex are treated as trafficking victims, not criminals. Currently, Hawaii doesn't even have a criminal statutory definition of human trafficking, making almost all other laws and regulations related to the act almost impossible. The new law would also increase penalties for human traffickers, allow for forfeiture of assets from convicted traffickers, and allow for more investigative tools for law enforcement investigating human trafficking cases.
Previously, this bill was committed by lawmakers to be included in the bi-partisan Women's Legislative Caucus package, but at the last minute was pulled from the package at the request of Rep. Marilyn Lee. The bill's proponents claim it was removed for political reasons and at the behest of Keith Kaneshiro, a Honolulu prosecutor who has said that Hawaii doesn't need a human trafficking law. But now, the bill has a second chance, and with it, all the Hawaiian human trafficking victims who right now are being treated as criminals.
Support making human trafficking a crime in Hawaii by singing this petition started by local activists. Because human trafficking victims should never be treated as criminals.
Photo credit: Ken Lund
Editorial Observer
In an Ugly Human-Trafficking Case, Hawaii Forgets Itself
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Published: September 20, 2010
This is a story of two farmers, Laotian immigrant brothers who grow vegetables in Hawaii. People love their onions, melons, Asian cabbage, herbs and sweet corn, and their Halloween pumpkin patch is a popular field trip for schoolchildren all over Oahu. They count local politicians and community leaders among their many friends, and run a charitable foundation.
Though they are relative newcomers, their adopted home is a state that honors its agricultural history, where most longtime locals are descendants of immigrant plantation workers. The brothers fit right in.
But they had an ugly secret. A captive work force: forty-four men, laborers from Thailand who were lured to Hawaii in 2004 with promises of good wages, housing and food. The workers sacrificed dearly to make the trip, mortgaging family land and homes to pay recruiters steep fees of up to $20,000 each.
According to a federal indictment, the workers’ passports were taken away. They were set up in cramped, substandard housing — some lived in a shipping container. Many saw their paychecks chiseled with deductions for food and expenses; some toiled in the fields for no net pay. Workers were told not to complain or be sent home, with no way to repay their unbearable debts.
The news broke last August. The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice filed charges of forced labor and visa fraud. The farm owners agreed to plead guilty in December in Federal District Court to conspiring to commit forced labor. They admitted violating the rules of the H-2A guest worker program, telling the workers that their labor contracts were “just a piece of paper” used to deceive the federal government.
I wish I could say that at this point the case so shocked the Hawaiian public that people rushed to aid the immigrants, who reminded them so much of their parents and grandparents. That funds were raised and justice sought.
But that didn’t happen.
In an astounding display of amnesia and misplaced sympathy, Hawaii rallied around the defendants. After entering their plea deal, the farmers, Michael and Alec Sou of Aloun Farms, orchestrated an outpouring of letters begging the judge for leniency at sentencing. Business leaders, community activists, politicians — even two former governors, Benjamin Cayetano and John Waihee, and top executives at First Hawaiian Bank — joined a parade attesting to the brothers’ goodness.
The men were paragons of diversified agriculture and wise land use, the letter writers said. They had special vegetable knowledge that nobody else had, and were holding the line against genetically modified crops. If they went to prison, evil developers would pave their farmland. Think of the “trickle down impact,” one woman implored the judge. Besides, their produce was delicious.
The friends pleaded for probation, fines, anything but prison. The workers, now scattered to uncertain fates and still in debt, have seen no such empathy.
The Sous were supposed to have been sentenced months ago, but at a hearing in July they made statements that muddled and seemed to contradict their plea agreement. The vexed judge, Susan Oki Mollway, postponed sentencing to Sept. 9, so they could get their story straight. Back in court this month, the men recanted some of their sworn testimony, so the judge threw the plea deal out. Now there will be a trial in November.
Another shocking story emerged in Honolulu this month: a federal grand jury indicted six people on charges of enslaving 400 Thai farm workers on Maui and elsewhere — the largest trafficking case in American history. In Hawaii, no uproar ensued. The pumpkin-patch field trips are still booked.
Hawaii has a state motto: Ua mau ke ea o ka aina i ka pono, or the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness. Hawaiians use “pono” to mean what is just or right, in harmony with nature and with other people. The words hang on huge bronze seals at the State Capitol, and I feel sure that most longtime residents of Hawaii can easily recall and recite them, in Hawaiian and English.
Whether some of them ever think about what the motto means, or care, is another question.
A version of this editorial appeared in print on September 21, 2010, on page A30 of the New York edition.
I have been monitoring this article: An article appeared on3/10/11 Hono Star-Adver.
Self-defense claimed in attack with machete
by Nelson Darancian ndaranciang@staradvertiser.com
A 67-year-old decorated Amrican military veteran who lost his home in the 2009 Samoa earthquake was defending himself when he injured an NOAA employee with a machete during a dispute in Amercan Samoa over where he could rebuild his home, the man's lawyer said Tuesday in federal court.
Simeti Lualemaga is on trail in U.S. District Court for the March 29, 2010, attack on Mark Cunningham, station chief for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration observatory on Tutuila island in American Samoa.
The government says Cunningham had previously told Lualemaga he could not build his home on land that NOAA leases from the area chief for its observatory.
In opening statements to the jury, federal prosecutor Larry Butrick said the men got into an argument when Cunningham was out taking pictures of the property for his annual report. Butrick said Cunningham was threatened to call police and that as he held his cellular telephone up to his ear, Lualemaga hit him with a machete.
Cunningham lost the lower part of his left ear and suffered a laceration to his neck in the attack.
Lualemaga's lawyer, Salina Althof, said Lualemaga doesn't dispute causing Cunningham's injuries. But she said Cunningham started the fight, then lied about what happened.
Althof said the animosity between the two dates to 2006, when Cunningham became the station chief. She said Lualemaga didn't like what Cunningham was doing to the land, asked NOAA to replace him and threatened to end the lease if he became chief. She said Cunningham doesn't like Lualemaga and supported Lualemaga's opponent, who became chief in 2008.
After the 2009 earthquake that destroyed his home, Lualemaga lived with his wife in a tent given to them by the Federal emergency Management Agency on land bordering the NOAA-leased property, and built a cooking shack across the border. Althof said Lualemaga believed the land was under the control of a different chief, and got that chief's permission and government permit to build his home there.
HR1627, SB 1 SB 1520 are restetting the legalization of pot, prostitution, and military on DHHL. DHHL needs the bloodquantum to stave off the legalization of gambling on our 200,000 acres. The military and their Native Hawaiian Veterans, LLC are the biggest pimps in the Pacific. They prey on innocent children with the help of 'Hookipa check out the realities in Hawaii. Stealing our childrens social security numbers are their game everyday! Get plenty 'sisters' that are data minning for their back pocket careers.
These are some of the realities that will happen on our DHHL, we will not be able to survive this next wave of tradegies. We know that now and can hardly stand the flow of North America at this time for they have reached the shores of our limu beds where children frolic in the sun.
The women on any streets in the world are victums, which is why we are saying no more. Human Trafficking exist in Hawaii.
For the sleepers on Maoliworld, Na Kanaka children were sent to the mainland they were sold on the streets in Hawaii. To help bring our children home check out the issue on Human Trafficking in Hawaii. Its a group of young people trying to stop this atrocity.
Hello,
"Hotel Street was the center of Honolulu’s eponymous vice district, through which some 30,000 or more soldiers, sailors, and war workers passed on any given day during most of World War II… On Hotel Street, some of the most complex issues in America’s history came together. Systems of race and of gender (complicated by both sex and war) structured individual, experience and public policy. At the same time the story of Hawaii’s vice district revolves around the changing role of the State, as it asserted its interests in counterpoint to local elites. For most of the war Hawaii was under martial law, ruled by a military governor. Even if not fully by intention, agents of the federal government—ironically in the form of the military and martial law—emerged as limited guarantors of equality and created openings for social struggle… A critical part of this struggle for power centered on prostitution and its control.
Hotel Street was more than just brothels,...
Hotel Street: “Prostitution and the Politics of War” by beth bailey and David Farber, in Radical History Review 52 (Winter 1992): 54-77.
This article in part gives an understanding as to where the conditions of such cruelty are birthed!
part 2
This is a 10 page article that I am reading at:http://shs.westport.k12.ct.us/jwb/HonorsUS/Labor/WWII%20Hotel%20Str...
“ Some of the reasons for the brothels’ survival are found in Hawaii’s multriracial and multicultural society. To many of the people who made up the islands’ varied population, prostitution was not a “social evil.” And many of the islands’ white elite, the “respectable” people who would have provided the necessary pressure to have the brothels closed down, approved of a regulated system of prostitution. The brothels, many believed, kept the predominately lower-class white soldiers an sailors and especially the overwhelmingly male and dark-skinned population o plantation workers who lived in communities with few women away from the islands’ respectable women, who were, by their definition, white.3 The head of the Honolulu Police Commission (which was comprised solely of leading white businessmen) said it directly: too many men in and around Honolulu were “just like animals.”4 An editorial in Hawaii, a magazine published and supported by the haole elit, explained further: “If the secual desires of men in this predominately masculine community are going to be satisfied, certainly not one of us but would rather see them satisfied in regulated brothels than by our young girls and women—whether by rape, seduction or the encouraging of natural tendencies5…” The brothers, they thought helped keep the peace.” Bailey and Farber