Innocence Lost National Initiative
The Innocence Lost National Initiative (dt. National Initiative Lost Innocence ) is a program of the US Federal Police FBI against child prostitution . The campaign has been running since 2003.
Manhunt
The FBI often came across the children and teenagers during the operation through advertisements on the Backpage.com website. The operators of the contact page had worked with the FBI. Those in charge of the website told the Washington Post that they deliberately did not delete the illegal personals because the pimps would have simply switched to other websites that did not cooperate with the authorities.
Action Cross Country 2013
In a three-day raid on casinos, motels and motorway service stations in 76 US cities at the end of July 2013, the FBI freed over 100 sexually abused young people and arrested around 150 suspected pimps. Most of the minors rescued were between 13 and 16 years old.
The FBI federal police officers first sought contact with the underage prostitutes and used their information to locate the alleged pimps.
Twelve teenagers working as prostitutes were rescued in San Francisco and another ten in Detroit . Pimps have also been arrested and children freed in Las Vegas , New Orleans, and Oklahoma City .
During the action, the FBI explained about the children's backgrounds that most of the cases are children who have left their families after an argument or conflict. This is also the reason why no adult reported the missing persons to the police.
The use of local, regional and national level was carried out in collaboration with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) (dt. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children ). Its then President John Ryan said it had become clear once again "how many American children are sold for sex every day, often on the Internet".
background
After the 2013 raid, the FBI said the freed youth had experienced a "culture of abuse, both physical and emotional ." The FBI would be dealing with victims who consider drugs and exploitation to be perfectly normal. In the unstable environment in which these children lived, they would not expect that “someone would look after them for more than half an hour or an hour,” said the FBI's vice-chief at the time, Ronald Hosko.
The young prostitutes are usually not charged, as in most cases they were dependent on their pimps.
Results
From the start of the initiative in 2003 to 2013, more than 2,700 sexually exploited children were rescued and 1,350 perpetrators were convicted; ten of them to life imprisonment.
Web links
- Innocence Lost on the FBI website.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Operation Cross Country VII on www.fbi.gov.
- ↑ 105 Juveniles Recovered in Nationwide Operation Targeting Underage Prostitution . FBI press release, July 29, 2013.
- ↑ http://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/fbi-prostitution100.html ( Memento from August 1, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ http://www.20min.ch/ausland/news/story/-Kein-Mensch-hat-diese-Kinder-vermisst--10142315