Special Report: Human Trafficking

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Part 1: Hiding in Plain Sight
On a warm October night, the small, affluent town of Wellesley has better things to think about than human trafficking. But on this night, Wellesley went from a town renowned for its colleges and highly educated residents to a place where cops busted an alleged prostitution ring that operated out of a massage parlor.
Extra: Boston Public Radio - Sex Trafficking Reverberations

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Part 2: The Route Through Queens
Without ever knowing it, you’ve driven the same routes, passed the same landmarks and used the same rest stops as today’s human trafficking networks that operate from New York to New England.

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Part 3: The Business of Trafficking
Why would someone fly 8,500 miles and spend $4,000 dollars to pony up to a bar in Pattaya, Thailand?
“If they go into Pattaya, it’s not because Pattaya has nice beaches. It’s because it has sex tourism.”

Web Extra: The Origins of Sex Tourism & Trafficking in Southeast Asia

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Part 4: One Town in Thailand
Pattaya, Thailand's famed nightlife is already in full swing. Pattaya is a “Wild West” of bars, massage parlors, brothels and strip clubs. I watch as inebriated men wander up and down the red-light district with its neon-sketched bars to  the left and right.

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Part 5: Taken into China
Vietnam is losing its children.
For years, girls and young women have been taken — kidnapped and trafficked across the border into Cambodia and southern China. Many disappear into big cities.

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Part 6: Trading in Shame
Phillip Martin travels Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, to the home of a man whose 19-year old daughter was just rescued from a brothel in China. The neighbors don’t know it.  

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Part 7: Modern Day Slavery in America

If you think slavery ended in 1865, think again. Human traffickers have picked up where Jim Crow left off.

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Part 8: What Now?

Individuals can take heroic steps to stop human trafficking, like the cab driver in Saigon who rescued 11- and 12-year-olds enslaved in garment factories.

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Web Extra: The New Abolitionists
Profiles of the people in the U.S. and Asia who are working to end human trafficking where they live.

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For More Information:

• Resources on Counter Trafficking [The Schuster Institute]
• Presidential Proclamation -- National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, 2013 [Whitehouse.gov]
• American Experience: The Abolitionists

Matt Friedman on Human Trafficking

Irony: Mitt Romney Profited From the Auto Bailout That He Opposed

BUSINESS AND POLITICS: WGBH RADIO NEWS on The HUFFINGTON POST

Just weeks after Sen. John McCain lost the 2008 presidential race to Barack Obama, Mitt Romney wrote an op-ed in The New York Times opposing an auto bailout and calling instead for a "managed bankruptcy" — in fact, his opposition was a theme at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. But by saving auto-related industries,  that bailout had an unexpected beneficiary: Mitt Romney. One of those companies was Sensata, an organization bought by Bain Capital in 2006. Even though Romney was several years gone from the private equity firm that he founded, he was still making money from his Bain investments. Listen to my report

TAKING ON THE HIV PANDEMIC in HO CHI MINH CITY

WGBH RADIO SPECIAL REPORT

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — This summer, two Boston College professors are leading a group of students to volunteer at a clinic for HIV patients who are at the end of their lives in a society where the illness carries significant stigma.  They’re not here to tell Vietnamese clinicians, caregivers and patients what to do and how to do it, but instead they listen and learn.
Here's my audio and written report from Vietnam. 


ALSO LISTEN TO MY REPORT ON THE STRUGGLE AGAINST HIV IN ONE BLACK COMMUNITY IN BOSTON.

funding for my reporting trip to Vietnam was provided by the International Center for Journalists in Washington through the generosity of the Ford Foundation.  Phillip Martin, Ford Foundation Fellow and Senior Fellow with the Schuster Center for Investigative Reporting at Brandeis University.

SPRUCING UP OCCUPY WALL STREET'S IMAGE: What Would Don Draper Do?

WGBH BOSTON PUBLIC RADIO SPECIAL:

When your image is sullied, your fundraising is sinking fast and a poll shows even a majority of “Millennials” have a low opinion of your movement… you might consider turning to that paragon of cultural excess and Madison Avenue self-absorption: Don Draper.  What can advertising experts do to spruce up Occupy Wall Street's image that has been sullied by conservative ideologues, as well as self-afflicted mis-steps?  Read or listen to the public radio special report here:

'Occupy Boston' Demonstrators Bring Wall Street Protests North

After more than 2000 demonstrators took to Boston’s streets over the weekend, dozens remain camped out in tents in a park facing the city’s Federal Reserve Building. Occupy Boston organizers say they watched while many demonstrators protesting financial policies on Wall Street were arrested, and decided to act here.

Blue Hill Avenue: If A Street Could Speak

The murders in late September 2010 of a toddler, his mother and two adult men were described by police as the worst shooting rampage in Boston since 2005.  These homicides, as well as other murders in recent months, have largely taken place in urban neighborhoods abutting Blue Hill Avenue, the street that connects Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan and suburban Milton. Violence has given this street a tragic notoriety, but it's also a place with a deep history, and a present filled with complexity and alive with growth.  You can listen to my four-part series here:

  

Rough Waters: SPECIAL SERIES ON THE NEW ENGLAND FISHING CRISIS

The Ongoing Fight Over Regulating New England Fisheries

BOSTON -- Environmentalists and marine scientists have long argued that the stock of common food fish such as cod and flounder are in danger of being harvested to the point of extinction. In the 1970s, the federal government began a regulatory system to restrict commercial fishing off the nation’s coasts in an attempt to save and replenish these endangered fish stocks. This regulatory scheme evolved into an oversight program known as Days at Sea. Anglers who were used to catching fish 300 days out of the calendar year were suddenly reduced to half or less of that number, and the effects on fishing communities were disastrous.  Phillip Martin begins our series: