The United Nations has estimated that about 2.5 million people at any given time are trafficked into forced labour and sexual exploitation, roughly half of whom are children.
WASHINGTON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – When gunmen broke into an orphanage outside Nairobi in 2009, beat the house mistress nearly to death and gang raped a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old girl, the violence hit home 8,700 miles away.
Rolando Lopez, a former Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) agent, was celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. city of Dallas when he received an email from a nurse he knew describing the attack and asking for help.
"It just broke my heart," Lopez told Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The email prompted him to set up Orphan Secure, a global volunteer organisation of 110 people on three continents with experience in policing, intelligence and special operations security experience.
Volunteers have installed security equipment and provided special training to orphanages and helped help governments in combating violence against children, including sex trafficking.
In Guatemala, Lopez said his group tracked down an extortionist threatening to kidnap an orphanage director or the children unless he paid thousands of dollars into a named bank account, and found it was a racket run out of a prison hundreds of miles away – one of about four extortion cases it has handled each year.
In Mexico, Orphan Secure is raising funds to buy security cameras, motion detectors and powerful lighting around an NPH International orphanage and has provided free security training to its five children's homes housing 800 children.
"We are focusing on the children's education and health and we haven't known how to focus on the security," said Rafael Bermudez, Mexican national director for NPH, adding that orphanages were a soft target in increasingly violent Mexico because their gates are open to the public and visitors.
TRAFFICKING APP
Lopez said Orphan Secure would launch a mobile app this week allowing users to report whether they have information about trafficking or whether they are victims.
The app, which will be available in 10 languages, will be rolled out in countries known to be trafficking centres, including the United States, Cambodia and Thailand, he said.
Lopez's is the latest initiative. UK-based organisations such as the Salvation Army and educational charity Just Enough UK have also launched similar tools to try to track and stop trafficking which affects about 2.5 million people at any given time, according to the United Nations.
The U.N. estimates that 43 percent of victims are trafficked for commercial sex, 98 percent of them are women and girls.
Lopez is distributing the app to local NGOs that help trafficking victims, proposing that they enter information about the patterns of trafficking they gather during interviews and in providing after-care to survivors in a database.
Incoming reports will be monitored by students in the intelligence studies department of Mercyhurst University, in Erie, Pennsylvania, most of whom are military intelligence veterans returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lopez said.
They will verify the credibility of the reports and contact a local NGO or aid agency if immediate help is required. But the main purpose is to collect sufficient clusters of information so they can pass strong leads to local law enforcement, he added.
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