#anti-Prohibition

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Future Mayor Fiorello La Guardia really said, "I dare you to arrest me." A fervent opponent of Prohibition, La Guardia, then a congressman, staged a beer-making demonstration for reporters in 1926 in order to defy the law. He, along with Governor Al Smith, emphasized how Prohibition unfairly targeted working-class New Yorkers and distracted officials from other pressing issues.

Photo: MCNY Instagram

#vintage New York #1920s #Fiorello LaGuardia #Prohibition #anti-Prohibition #making beer #Al Smith #vintage NYC #dare

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

Detroit ‘Beer Parade,’ May 14, 1932.

1)  Thousands of demonstrators demand an end to Prohibition as they march through the streets of downtown Detroit during the city's "Beer Parade." An estimated crowd of 40,000 attended the festive, day-long event, including Mayor Frank Murphy.

2) Women dressed in sailor suits march through the streets of downtown Detroit in support of the repeal of Prohibition during the city's "Beer Parade."

Their banner reads: "Bring Back Beer and we will give the Depression the ---."

3) Men and women ride in car decorated with crepe paper and the slogan "We Want Beer - Hamtramck" through the streets of downtown Detroit in support of the repeal of Prohibition during the city's "Beer Parade."

4) Men ride on a float through the streets of downtown Detroit in support of the repeal of Prohibition during the city's "Beer Parade." These photos are from the Detroit News and put online by the Walter P. Reuther library at Wayne State University. All captions provided by the library archivists.

#detroit #beer parade #prohibition #anti-prohibition #alcohol prohibition #the great depression #political march #parade #united states history

[unproduciblesmackdown]

reread the rest thus far of lackadaisy and there's the both v easy & difficult task of gathering a shit ton but only a shit ton of excerpts (like every single page is a highlight i'm not exaggerating)

and every single element is superlative and the way it all only becomes More So....already mentioned the way the like smooth gradient shading made the successful evocation of 3D Shapes more noticeable, along w/the consistent geometries of character design & details in fabric folds; the way Lighting & Coloring only goes on to become more prominent elements only enhances that further. the compositions, backgrounds, pacing, angles....everything is so dynamic & expressive, such as including the expressions which you know i also Love / absorbed

going "hell yes for people to discover this superlative comic" then having to occasionally refresh past site traffic overloaded server errors like "nooo" but actually yes

whilest clapping & cheering for the fun of everyone who's been here a minute. My God the invigorating reward when again i started reading in '07 & the concept of rocky & freckle on a "proper" run had only manifested via fun official bonus art, then a literal decade later as it was actually happening in the comic like screeeeaammm i can feel it coming in the air tonight oh lord etc....i've loved following it, again, if i see another new comic page. i am going to be Enriched

i also really was right on the ball myself this time around like okay okay yep i have picked up on Everything, at least to the degree i can lmao. i love the mysteries. i love how Character Focused it is too ofc and there's no characters i'm uniterested in / dislike. you gotta point to one of them, truly, and i have been a [pointing at freckle] enjoyer these fifteen years but fr i am a connoisseur of everyone, i love that so many characters are a weird mysterious chaos element story driver in their own right. i considered mordecai more intently than ever, love his like ultra mystery (and that we leave off on him doing some detectiving even) and truly fun that like, the source of the more Immediate problems he keeps having in every damn interaction isn't the like [wow mordecai with the just diving into the hatchet murdering] factor so much as it's that he's generally like "i am just standing here" and is not nt in any way that matters and people insist on fucking with him on that front. the peak tragedy of him in a bonus comic getting bullied into having to dance with someone to Be Polite like i'm so sorry i wish you could be that ficus too. anyways intrigued with the marigold &/or mordecai mysteries including that it's like, how coincidental is it that he talks about marigold having a thorn in its side & the savoys' nickname for him is peekon = thorn. there is so much to consider, love that for us truly. and i'm rooting for mordecai & nicodeme's dynamic out here, is another conclusion....very enriched by comparing & contrasting that serafine nicodeme mordecai triumvirate with the rocky ivy freckle one, to be sure. im enriched

i'm also enriched by every footnote that's got like historical facts / research notes / [this is inaccurate for xyz prioritization but here's the disclaimer] explanations. i Love information. and everything else like i loooove this comic it's Soooo Fucking putting my hands to my temples and inhaling at length through my teeth

#first time i've really taken tumblr up on that new thirty image limit expansion; bit of a surprise maybe lol #put your back into autism acceptance month &/or press j; scroll fast; read through it actually; filter the following: #long post // #learning abt the overwhelming popularity of baby ruth candy bars from lackadaisy footnotes? relevant to gtm:pota aficionadoship at one pt #remember discussing what i learned from another footnote abt some christian denominations / other religions being very Anti Prohibition #every time i use the word cagey i think of lackadaisy. cagey thing... we've all been there #fantastic time revisiting and i love to be considering all these characters all the further / with reckless juxtaposition #especially the two triumvirates as mentioned. rooting for them all #rooting for mordecai to be relieved of that v realistic [ppl sensing a Mess With His he is not nt in any way that mattersness Free For All] #either let him be or start shooting at him lmfao. but i Love that the gang had that pleasant nonbrunch together & no shots exchanged yet #more brunches! and i think nicodeme could be mordecai's bestie or w/e he wants. turn out to be Supportive in any way that matters #they are more so the ivy and freckle of their group after all lol. slightly would-be Unlikely coupling there as well anyways; and yet! #i am as enriched and intrigued and appreciative and etc as ever #and reminded that in my rereading i haven't yet gone over all the bonus material lol.... #also stumbled across that sungwon cho had fandubs of lackadaisy comics posted like 9 yrs back?? #which means i probably saw one or two; think i remember one being shared and checking that out #like hey didn't know i'd encountered you before like; vines & oh the lamps are fucking & etc. and now there he goes voicing mordecai yaay #lackadaisy

[chaoswillcalmusdown]

beyoncé by beyoncé; we're all in this together by dave; nimrod by green day; channel orange by frank ocean; gioventú bruciata by mahmood; amir by tamino; no thank you by little simz; sherihan by cherrie; infinity on high by fall out boy; skin by joy crookes

this really exposes my weakness for a man with a good falsetto, lmao

tagged by @sensazioneultra and top 10 albums is like picking favourite children but i do think i can stand behind these choices

and bc i'm nosy and love this shit, i tag: @naslostcontrol @icedsodapop @moodyeucalyptus @fishbarconcept @polarcell @kutputli

#the ones that didn't quite make it are 1) college dropout 2) mind of mine 3) aha shake heartbreak and 4) anti #college dropout should probably have gone in here in stead of smth newer but the bitter taste prohibits me from listening to it #bc it just makes me sad #to think of kanye back then vs kanye now #it's tragic #anyways

[profic-orbot]

🔴    For those uncertain as to why censorship is such a bad thing and aren't convinced by the many good arguments against it, might I suggest looking into the Prohibition Act in the United States from 1920 to 1933?

🔴    You can read all about it on Wikipedia, but the short of it was that alcoholic beverages were banned, made illegal. This isn't mean that they disappeared, however... they were just driven underground, making it much more difficult to track them and made it easier for people to decide their own prices. Of course, getting caught was quite dangerous too, especially more so for minorities. This was also something driven by "morals", which meant to hell with anyone who disagreed. Religious wine was still permitted, however, which is very funny to us, in a dark sort of way.

🔴    It should be known that no one really knows if Prohibition actually helped in any meaningful way, which is probably not the result you want to hear.

🔴    If you think censorship is something that would eliminate the things you claim to be as dangerous, it wouldn't. It would make them harder to track, and it would also make it easier for actually dangerous people to slip under the radar.

🔴    Instead, it is better to educate others how to block, mute, blacklist tags. When you advocate for a position of mass authority to do it for you, then you will lose things you didn't want to as well. Laws are blunt objects that do not concern themselves with finer details. Teach people how to curate their own experiences without trying to control everyone else.

#profic #Prohibition #censorship #anti censorship #profic!orbot

[greenmeanqueen]

rhaenyra should absolutely be allowed to explore her sexuality without the worry of her being punished but it should be done in a healthy way for both her and the other partner. neither which apply to her scenes with ser criston and daemon

#thank you for your ask #part of the tragedy is societal roles prohibit many characters from exploring anything #and consent isn’t ever really highlighted #or considered as crucial #which creates horrible situations for so many #anti rhaenyra x criston #anti daemyra #rhaenyra targaryen #criston cole #anti daemon targaryen #house of the dragon spoilers #hotd #house of the dragon #asoiaf #fire and blood #dance of the dragons #ask a gal #tw noncon

[bohne-bohne]

Rest easy, little one

Article pictured above

Article 2

#aj’s art #art #artists on tumblr #gray wolf #wolf #wolf pup #pup #puppy #wolf hunting #anti wolf hunting #prohibit wolf hunting #predator zones #anti predator zones

[pepprs]

likeeee i know i do this literally every month but it fills me with such despair. making this bullet points (cringe) bc it’s so long lol

first of all why do i live in a household where… like i get it i know it’s not good to over-rely on medication and pharmaceuticals but when we don’t use them or seek them out AT ALL except for emergencies and an emergency is only when you’re so sick or in pain that you cant function… except i have BEEN in so much pain i have been unable to function (e.g. bad cramps… and wisdom t**th pain…. and ear infections!!!) and my parents still hedged and stalled and delayed me from seeing a doctor and getting meds which made my nightmare oct 2021 ear infection worse and created complications i have to suffer the consequences of every day!!!!!! like when i don’t get to decide the goalposts and every month with my period im in pain that isn’t like… too SEVERE to function but certainly makes it hard. idk how to articulate it but like… when i don’t get to decide the goalposts. when i am made to doubt whether the goalposts are actually goalposts and whether im actually in “enough” pain to warrant taking “extreme” actions. that is very dangerous and a problem. it is not good to regularly suffer pain and to not have what i need to get through it. and be the only person i know who is dealing with that kind of thing like nobody else’s parents are like this 💀

SECOND of all… and this is something i have said before… if a huge portion of ppl on earth regularly experience this pain to various degrees of debilitation then why… like i know why. but why isn’t society set up to make it easier to experience it. to let you take what you need to experience it. like you can’t walk around and go to school / work with a heating pad. you can’t lie down with it or plug it in. there are strict attendance policies a lot of the time so if you come in late or miss a day you’re fucked (thankfully that’s not the case for me at work but it was when i was in school). it just sucks and is so fucking stupid. why isn’t it understood that some ppl need to take a break once a month to ride out the pain and discomfort and whatever and then return and be fine. why have to work through it. ugh

#purrs #related to point 1: i got a h*ngnail at the beginning of the week and didn’t get it out right and so it started to hurt and possibly get inf #infected on wed and i told my parents and asked if we had neosporin and they were like 🤨 neosporin is an antibiotic. use turmeric paste #instead bc it’s an anti-inflammatory! so i put fucking turmeric on it and you know what? all it fucking did was stain my finger yellow 😍😍😍😍😍 #and i had to ask my colleague bestie to sneak in some neosporin into the office and i used it and you know whst? it made the infection go #away 😻😻😻😻😻😻 and i didn’t have any adverse side effects 😻😻😻😻😻😻😻 the joys of modern medicine 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰 #delete later #menstruation tw #medical tw #ask to tag #also when i asked for the neosporin i felt like i was doing something illegal. like using dangerous prohibited substances or whatever. i #don’t think that is a normal thought that normal people have about using neosporin. lol

[coochiequeens]

The UAE…. Where rape victims can jailed for having sex outside of marriage but the authorities look the way when African women are forced into prostitution. But it’s ok with authorities because as long as the foreign male population has a foreign female population to exploit the local women won’t be harassed.

African women trafficked into the UAE are forced into debt and subjected to threats and violence, as they are kept in sexual slavery. The case of Christy Gold, who has been charged with sex trafficking in Nigeria, highlights the torment endured by these women in the UAE.

By MAGGIE MICHAEL 

Filed June 12, 2023, 11 a.m. GMT

On a pleasure boat cruising Gulf waters near Dubai’s glittering skyline, a Nigerian woman in a white dress and gold jewelry nodded and swayed as a gathering sang “Happy Birthday” to her.

Videos of Christy Gold’s 45th birthday party were posted in May last year on an Instagram account that showcases her glamorous lifestyle, months after Gold fled Nigeria, where she was facing sex trafficking charges.

Gold – whose name appears in court records as Christiana Jacob Uadiale – was a ringleader in a criminal network that lured African women to Dubai and forced them into prostitution in brothels, backstreets, bars, hotels and dance clubs, according to six Nigerian government anti-trafficking officials, a British human rights activist who has tracked her operation and five women who say they were trafficked and exploited by her.

Three of the women said in interviews that Gold told them that if they didn’t do as they were told, they’d be killed and dumped in the desert. Those who didn’t make enough money for her were taken to a room in an apartment in Dubai, where Gold’s brother starved them, flogged them and shoved hot chili paste into their vaginas, according to three anti-trafficking officials and five women who provided detailed accounts in interviews and court statements.

“They beat the hell out of me,” one of the women said. “The suffering was too much.”

In a statement to the court after she was charged, Gold denied that she and her brother were sex traffickers. “I am not involved in human trafficking and I do not have any girls in Dubai working for me as a prostitute,” she said.

Gold remains a fugitive from justice – part of what anti-trafficking activists and officials say is a thriving underground of suspected Nigerian sex traffickers who have taken refuge in the United Arab Emirates, a Gulf nation known for its wealth, futuristic skyscrapers and what rights groups say is a poor record on protecting foreign workers and basic freedoms.

The UAE is a major destination for sex trafficking, where African women are forced into prostitution by illicit networks operating within the country, an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and Reuters has found.

Emirati authorities do little to protect these women, according to anti-trafficking activists, Nigerian authorities and interviews with trafficked women.

This story is based on interviews with 25 African women, mostly from Nigeria, who described being lured to the UAE by Gold or other alleged traffickers, as well as dozens of interviews with humanitarian workers, investigators, Nigerian government officials and others with knowledge of sex trafficking in the Emirates. Their accounts are corroborated by court records and case files from Nigeria’s anti-human trafficking agency.

Human traffickers keep African women in sexual slavery by playing on their financial desperation and creating webs of manipulation and coercion, the reporting shows. They subject them to threats and violence. They ensnare them in crushing debts, often totaling $10,000 to $15,000 – huge sums for women from poor families. And, in many cases, they exploit traditional African spiritual beliefs to make victims believe that they have no choice but to do what the traffickers tell them.

This article is part of a reporting collaboration led by ICIJ, Trafficking Inc., which is examining sex trafficking and labor trafficking in many parts of the globe. ICIJ’s media partners on the project include Reuters, NBC News, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism and other news outlets in multiple countries.

Gold did not respond to questions for this story. In her statement to the court in Nigeria, Gold said she had helped Nigerian women and men move to the UAE by subletting space to them in an apartment she owned in Dubai.

“I even go as far as advising them like a mother so they too can make it in Dubai,” she said. But she told the court, “I cannot tell what these people did for a living in Dubai.”

In a written reply supplied by the Dubai government’s media affairs office, the emirate’s police agency said claims that Gold had engaged in the sex trafficking of African women in Dubai are “false and have absolutely no basis in fact.” The statement said Gold had “entered and exited Dubai legally and was not implicated in any illegal activities.”

The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs said any suggestion the UAE “tolerates human trafficking or that it has little regard to the victims of this heinous crime is utterly false.” Such allegations, the ministry said in response to questions, were “baseless and without foundation.”

The ministry said the UAE’s laws on sex trafficking carry heavy fines and prison sentences. A report the ministry shared said the UAE had referred 20 “human trafficking cases” to the courts in 2021, most for “sexual exploitation.”

The UAE has been involved in international police operations against trafficking networks, the ministry said.

Human rights activists and Nigerian authorities say the UAE doesn’t live up to its anti-trafficking commitments.

Fatima Waziri-Azi, director general of Nigeria’s National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, said there has been “no cooperation” when NAPTIP has reached out to Emirati authorities for help hunting down traffickers working out of the UAE.

Angus Thomas, a British activist who founded an anti-trafficking education organization based in Ghana, said UAE authorities, including the police, were uncooperative when he urged them to help African women get away from Gold and her associates.

“I wrote, I phoned, I emailed, asking them to help me get the girls, sending addresses of apartments,” he said. “And I heard nothing.”

In plain sight

Sex trafficking is one form of human trafficking, which is generally defined as using force, fraud or coercion to induce someone to provide a service.

Most of the 25 women interviewed for this story said they were promised other types of work but were driven into prostitution. Others said they chose to do sex work but were trapped in situations in which they were abused, their earnings were stolen and they were unable to get away.

The UAE made sex trafficking a crime in 2006 and has established an interagency anti-trafficking panel and opened shelters for survivors. The U.S. State Department said in 2022 that the UAE has made “significant efforts” to combat human trafficking but still falls short in key areas – including failing to “consistently screen vulnerable populations for trafficking indicators, which may have penalized some victims for unlawful acts traffickers compelled them to commit, such as immigration or ‘prostitution’ violations.”

The UAE follows Islamic law, yet prostitution and sex trafficking are open secrets. Business cards with photos and WhatsApp numbers for brothels disguised as massage parlors litter many areas of Dubai. Spas, dance clubs and bars are filled with sex workers.

A hierarchy based on skin tone plays an important role in the UAE’s sex industry, according to interviews with trafficked women and visits to spots where prostitutes congregate in the UAE. Lighter-skinned women from Europe are generally trafficked into higher-end venues serving wealthier customers. Darker-skinned women are often steered to alleys and street corners, providing sex to low-income migrant workers from South Asia and Africa.

One Nigerian woman described being taken by a trafficker to an open-air brothel in the desert between Dubai and another emirate, Abu Dhabi. She said she and other women would take off their clothes and spread them on the ground, and men would come to have sex with them from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m.

A Nigerian mother in her 20s said a trafficker led her and two other women to a parking lot in Ajman, one of the emirates that make up the UAE, and forced them to have sex with male clients amid vehicles that were being painted and repaired. At the end of the night, she said, the traffickers took all the money, leaving them with nothing to buy food.

After she broke free of the trafficker, the woman said, she slept in the streets and begged for food. She nearly lost her mind, she said, before a nurse from Nigeria rescued her and helped her get home.

The UAE's sex industry is shaped by the country's distinctive demography and economy.

Nearly 90% of its population comes from somewhere else – mostly foreign workers employed in construction, hospitality and other industries. Most of them are men and they arrive alone. As a result, 69% of the UAE’s population is male. The government deals with these demographic realities by deploying extensive surveillance in the UAE – and by allowing a bustling sex trade as a way of pacifying male workers, according to two former diplomats who were based in the UAE and monitored sex trafficking.

Gold and Mercy

On New Year’s Eve 2019, Thomas, a photographer and anti-trafficking activist, had a one-day layover in the UAE before heading home to London. He was going into a supermarket in Dubai when a 19-year-old Nigerian woman approached him and offered him sex.

He declined, but asked her if she wanted to return to her home country.

She told him, Thomas said, that she and 22 other women were under the control of a trafficker named Christy Gold. Back in London, he sent her money to rent a safe place to stay and then arranged a flight home to Nigeria.

Thomas said he began trying to rescue other women trapped in Dubai. He started a campaign called Send Them Home, raising money to cover victims’ escape and travel costs. Over several months, Thomas said, he helped rescue eight other women who said they’d been held against their will by Gold or other traffickers operating in the UAE. Thomas’ account was confirmed by Nigerian anti-trafficking officials and women who Thomas helped escape from traffickers.

He also shared information that he had gathered about Gold with Nigeria’s anti-trafficking agency NAPTIP, which can arrest and prosecute alleged traffickers. His efforts included tracking Gold’s Instagram account, where she displays hundreds of online posts featuring lion-shaped gold pendants and other jewelry she sells through a gold trading business she runs from Dubai.

In a May 2022 email to Waziri-Azi, the Nigerian anti-trafficking agency’s director, Thomas wrote that Gold was “flaunting her wealth built on the backs” of young women “she trafficks to Dubai.”

Little is known about Gold’s background. In her written statement to the Nigerian court, Gold said that she traveled to Dubai in 2009 and after that began shuttling back and forth, buying gold, shoes and handbags in the UAE and selling them in Nigeria.

According to victim statements to the court and interviews, Gold and her associates targeted Nigerian women who were desperate for work and new lives, promising them jobs in hair salons, restaurants and other retail businesses in Dubai. Gold’s associates helped them obtain Nigerian passports and tourist visas to travel to the UAE.

Descriptions of her operations come from five women who said they’d been trafficked by Gold. Three gave detailed interviews. Two of the three women interviewed for this story, along with two other women, have submitted witness statements in Gold’s criminal case.

Each of the three women interviewed for this article said she was trafficked after being approached by a recruiter, Mercy Ewere Owuzo, who worked with Gold.

One said she was working in a shop in Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, in July 2019 when Owuzo told her that she could make much more money as a salesperson in a store in Dubai.

“I didn’t ask any questions because she told me she is trying to help young women and I thought, ‘She is a kind person,’” the woman, 25, recalled.

She said Owuzo paid for her passport, plane ticket and UAE tourist visa.

After arriving in Dubai, she said, she talked by phone to Owuzo, who told her there was no job for her in a store. Instead, she would be going to clubs, restaurants and hotels to sell her body. It was the only way, she said she was told, to pay down the $12,000 debt that she owed Gold for bringing her to the UAE.

The three women said Gold also controlled them by confiscating their passports. Then, they said, she created fake passports that appeared authentic enough to get them through routine police stops or past front desks at hotels – but not enough to get them out of the country.

It’s not clear from witness accounts and court documents whether Gold was the topmost leader of the alleged trafficking network. The three women interviewed for this story said she exercised a substantial level of authority and was deeply engaged in the network’s operations – personally threatening, for example, to leave their corpses in the Arabian Desert if they didn’t comply with her demands.

“Every time we don’t bring money, they would beat us, put pepper in our vagina, pepper in our eyes,” said one of the three women, who said she was working as a hairstylist in Nigeria before Owuzo promised her a better-paying job in Dubai. “Many of us had wounds, but we weren’t taken to hospitals because they don’t want people to know what they were doing to us.”

All three of these women spent time in a two-bedroom apartment in Dubai controlled by Gold. At one point, they said, Gold occupied one bedroom, while as many as 18 women were crammed into the other, with most sleeping on blankets on the floor.

It was here, according to interviews and court statements, that women marked for punishment were sent and where Gold’s enforcer – her brother Solomon – sexually assaulted them and beat their malnourished bodies with a hookah hose, broomstick or other implements.

NAPTIP officials said Solomon has not been charged with a crime. Gold said in her court statement that she never ordered Solomon to hurt anyone who stayed in her apartment in Dubai.

“I have never at any time instructed him to beat any of the girls as I have never had cause to beat any of them,” she said.

ICIJ and Reuters were unable to contact Solomon.

Victoria Oburoh, one of NAPTIP’s top prosecutors, confirmed that Gold and Owuzo worked together. In May last year, NAPTIP was able to win a conviction of Owuzo on sex trafficking charges in federal court in the Nigerian state of Delta. Oburoh said that case and the one pending against Gold are “sister cases.”

A lawyer who represented Owuzo during her trial declined to comment.

NAPTIP began an investigation of Gold after one of her alleged victims reported her to the police in Nigeria. Authorities charged Gold with six counts of violating Nigeria’s sex trafficking law.

After a judge released her on bail, she failed to show up for a scheduled court appearance on Nov. 3, 2021. Her lawyer told the judge that Gold had been “found half dead on the bed” and taken to a hospital.

The judge ordered that Gold be taken back into custody. But authorities had no luck tracking her down, NAPTIP officials say.

Christy Gold had disappeared.

Put me in prison’

Loudspeakers announced evening prayers at a mosque in Al Baraha, a working-class neighborhood in Dubai’s populous Deira district, when a reporter visited last August.

Steps away, young women in colorful wigs and low-cut evening dresses lined up in front of shabby buildings for their day’s work: providing sex to men. On the fourth and fifth floors of one building, South Asian men sat in the stairway, scrolling on their phones, sipping beer and waiting for their turns with the sex workers.

All the while police vehicles slowly navigated the district’s narrow alleys – part of the policing and surveillance apparatus that keeps UAE authorities deeply informed about what’s going on in Dubai and other emirates.

One of the sex workers was a young woman who arrived from Ghana in June 2022. She said she was promised a job as a housemaid but found herself doing an entirely different kind of work.

She rolled up her dress to show the bruises that came with the job.

“A few days ago, my eyes were swollen after being hit in the face and slapped when I failed to meet the target,” she said. “It’s my boss who did this to me.”

He told her, she said, that if she wanted to gain her freedom, she had to pay a debt of nearly $10,000.

“Where do I go? What do I do?” she asked, breaking into tears. She said her trafficker, whom she didn’t name, had taken away her phone and passport. Another way traffickers and their subordinates control African women is by using the power of juju, a traditional African spiritual belief system.

Women targeted for sex trafficking are required to take “juju oaths,” solemn vows to do the bidding of the recruiters who have promised to help them find work abroad. As part of the oath-taking ceremonies, they are told to strip naked, kneel for hours and swallow noxious drinks that can make them dizzy. They’re warned that breaking their vows of obedience could put a curse on them that could cause injury, death, even generational misfortune for their families.

Most of the women interviewed for this story said they had been required to take a juju oath, with some of the ceremonies conducted in Nigeria and others after they arrived in the UAE.

Three women said in witness statements in Gold’s criminal case that Gold’s associates required them to do oath-taking ceremonies in Nigeria before they traveled to Dubai.

“She makes us believe she has juju,” one woman who claims she’d been trafficked by Gold said in an interview. “That is, if we run away, we can become mad or die.”

In her statement to the court, Gold denied organizing such ceremonies.

When women brave the threats of real violence and otherworldly consequences to try to escape their traffickers, they say they often get little help from Emirati authorities.

A 25-year-old Ugandan said that after she fled a brothel in the Deira district of Dubai where she was forced to work, she headed to the nearest police station. She said a police officer took her back to the brothel and negotiated with the trafficker to return the passport to her. The officer left without doing anything else, and the trafficker took the passport back again, she said.

She got away for good only after she reached out to Nyondo Rozet, a Ugandan YouTube broadcaster based in the UAE. Rozet posted a video about her plight, which raised the money for a plane ticket home.

Rozet, whose videos primarily appeal to the Ugandan community in the UAE, said in an interview that a woman who called her, saying she was the trafficker, offered her money to take the video down. When she refused, Rozet said, other people contacted her to threaten harm if she didn’t delete the video, telling her: “You are not going to survive.”

The Dubai police did not respond to questions about the incident.

A 23-year-old woman from Nigeria’s northeastern farm belt said she thought UAE police would help her after she fled a brothel in Abu Dhabi where she and six other women had been locked in a room filled with steel beds separated by curtains. Every night, she had to have sex with half a dozen men.

She had slipped away when her boss got drunk and left the key in the door. But when she walked into a police station in the Khalidiya area of Abu Dhabi, she said, an officer told her, “Go to where you came from.”

She said she pleaded: “Put me in prison!” But “they turned their back to me. I was crying, but they paid no attention. They said: ‘To Hell with Africa.’”

The police station in Khalidiya did not respond to a request for comment.

Extradition request

For years, large numbers of migrants from Nigeria and other African countries have sought jobs and new lives in Europe. Migration routes have changed as European Union members have pushed migrants back to Libya, the main transit point across the Mediterranean Sea. With the way to Europe increasingly blocked, African migrants have turned, in growing numbers, to the UAE and other rich Arab nations.

Oburoh, the NAPTIP prosecutor, said that when trafficking cases have links to Europe, governments there provide information and cooperation that help the agency apprehend and prosecute traffickers. But when it comes to the UAE, official cooperation is nonexistent, Nigerian anti-trafficking investigators said.

At home, NAPTIP operates in an environment where some government officials also have been accused of engaging in human trafficking – and where, NAPTIP officials say, convicted traffickers often avoid jail terms.

The Nigerian government did not respond to a request for comment.

#united arab emirates #UAE #anti sex industry #anti exploiting women #Sex trafficking #Nigeria’s National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons #If sex work is empowering then how are the women left with no money after the pimps take everything? #Societal issues when 69% of a countries population is male #Send Them Home #Using spiritual beliefs to trap in abusive situations women #Women around the World Wednesday

[salticid]

Only including people who were actually running and curated for the ones I could fit. Please choose carefully. We can fix America. People from other countries are encouraged to vote.

#yes that is prohibition party in the anti alcohol sense #they still exist and they want to ban all marriage via constitutional amendment and replace it with civil union

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Five members of the anti-Prohibition Prohibition Research Committee depart on the bus Diogenes, named after the man who sought in vain for an honest man, June 1, 1932. They are seeking a single drunk who has been reformed by the 18th amendment.

From left are, Stephen Duggan Jr., assistant investigator; Russell Salmon, chief investigator; Ernest Boorland, Jr., member of the executive committee; Robert Nicholson, assistant director; and Paul Morris, director.

Photo: Associated Press via the Denver Post

#vintage New York #1930s #Prohibition #June 1 #1 June #18th Amendment #anti-Prohibition #Volstead Act #Diogenes

[lordofdestructionm]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Lackadaisy (Webcomic) Rating: Not Rated Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Mordecai Heller & Viktor Vasko Characters: Mordecai Heller, Viktor Vasko Additional Tags: vik and mordecai are besties, Overstimmulation, everyone that's not them is drunk, mordecai is tired of people, lackatypical environment, viktor is a good fren, how do you tag, mordecai gets my headcannons Summary:

Neither Mordecai nor Viktor like people. People are exhausting, and Mordecai hit his limit for socializing one evening, and got overstimulated by it all. Viktor helps ground his friend.

#lackadaisy #lackadaisycats #fanfiction #vikdecai #mordecai heller #viktor vasko #overstimulation #comfort #they both hate noise and people #lets be alone together #anti-social #cats #gangsters #1920s #prohibition

[winterdusktales]

iKON FREEDOM

i never doubted their hate for yg. i know my man junhoe holds a very deep grudge I KNOW IT. my only concern was if he was stupid enough to still stay in a company he hates just to be in the group cuz some members were showing obvious signs of wanting to renew. TURNS OUT THEY ARENT NOT #THAT STUPID!

they all left and are continuing as a group and even considering starting their own agency. this is literally the best choice they could come up w as a group. THEY HAVE FUNCTIONING BRAINS U GUYS. THE ANTI YG MEMBERS WERE LOUDER!!

but i get a feeling they'll prioritize their solo activities so LETSGAUR JUNSOLO LETSGAUR ACTOR KOO JUNHOE LETSGAUR POET KOO LETSGAUR IT BOY JUNHOE LETSGAUUUUUR!!!!!

#my body rlly woke up at the right time #worst fear of missing out didnt happen!! #also rlly happy their name isnt associated w that evil of a company anymore #can junhoe drop an unreleased solo song out of spite #since yg prohibited him from posting his songs #this is why i never agreed w those stans saying its time to accept cuz they obviously renewed #I TRUST MY MAN AND HIS RAGE #hes the biggest yg anti #i know he played a big part in this #junhoe #ikon #jana rambles

[999-roses]

United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries

the courts ruled against the US btw. & then ruled against the US AGAIN on appeal

#im revisiting a social movement that ran roughly parallel to the eugenics movement in the US - the anti-vice/obscenity movement #tho im not sure if it's like officially known as a movement? in the way that eugenics or 1st wave feminism or temperance/prohibition were #it's mostly comstock laws (banned gambling & drinking & porn/any material related to sex including contraceptives&info) #which legally defined 'obscenity'. first comstock laws were 1870s roughly the same start as eugenics mvt #comstock was more puffed up about 'obscenity' like absolutely anything related to sex & less about specifically drinking #that's a different group of people. the temperance movement (prohibition of alcohol) was active in similar timeframe (late1800-early1900) #it's funny b/c the anti-vice & birth control folks (affiliated w both feminists & eugenicists) butted heads over contraceptives & sex ed #anyway this one stuck out to me as pretty funny both in context and out of context #history #yeah this rotten hell country has barely changed socially huh. #usa pol

[pyjamac]

it’s so weird i feel like most of my experience on the internet is ppl being rlly pro-pirating but then sometimes i stumble into communities that, for no specific reason i can tell, think pirating is a mortal sin and it’s such a weird shock.

#like for some reason vocaloid ppl are rlly anti pirating even though the software is prohibitively expensive for any normal person #shah mac

[staff]

A message from a few of the trans staff at Tumblr & Automattic:

We want trans people, and LGBTQ+ people broadly, to feel welcome on Tumblr, in part because we as trans people at Tumblr and Automattic want it to be a space where we ourselves feel included. We want to feel like this is a platform that supports us and fights for our safety. Tumblr is made brighter and more vibrant by your presence, and the LGBTQ+ folks who help run it are fighting all the time for this, for you, internally. 

A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg (the CEO of Automattic, Tumblr’s parent company) responded to a user’s ask about an account suspension in a way that negatively affected Tumblr’s LGBTQ+ community. We believe that Matt's response to this ask and his continued commentary has been unwarranted and harmful. Tumblr staff do not comment on moderation decisions as a matter of policy for a variety of reasons—including the privacy of those involved, and the practicalities of moderating thousands of reports a day. The downside of this policy is that it is very easy for rumors and incorrect information about actions taken by our Trust & Safety team to spread unchecked. Given this, we want to clarify a few different pieces of this situation:

The reality of predstrogen's suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.

Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension. Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic, and we were not consulted in the construction of a response to these events.

Last year, the "mature" and "sexual themes" community labels were erroneously applied to some users' posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr. 

Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.

When it comes to the experience of trans folks on Tumblr encountering transphobic content, and interacting with bigoted users, we understand and share your frustrations. Tumblr’s policies, and Automattic’s policies, are written to ensure freedom of speech and expression. We prohibit harassment as defined in our Community Guidelines, but we know that this policy falls short of protecting users from the wider scope of harmful speech often used against LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.

Going forward, Tumblr is taking the following actions:

Prioritizing anti-harassment features that will empower users to more effectively protect themselves from harassment.

Building more internal tooling for us as Staff to proactively identify and mitigate instances of harassment.

Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.

We’re sorry for how this all transpired, and we’re actively fighting to make our voices heard more and prevent something like this from happening again in the future. We know firsthand that having to deal with situations like this as a Tumblr user is difficult, particularly as a member of an already frequently targeted and harassed community. We know it will take time to regain your trust, and we’re going to put in the work to rebuild it.

We appreciate the space we have been given to express our concerns and dissent, and we are thankful that Matt’s (and Automattic’s) strong commitment to freedom of expression has facilitated it.

We will continue to fight to make Tumblr safe for us all.

— This statement was authored by multiple trans employees of Tumblr and Automattic.

#announcements #transgender #trans rights #trans