Capturing one pedophile at at time!

There was world-wide media exposure this weekend about a Vancouver, BC pedophile nabbed in Thailand! Keep the momentum going, take action to create awareness about child trafficking around the world!!


By Nopporn Wong-Anan
BANGKOK (Reuters) - Canadian pedophile suspect Christopher Neil, focus of a global hunt that ended in rural Thailand on Friday, will be charged with molesting underage children after being tracked down through his boyfriend's phone.

Thai police appealed for more victims to come forward after nabbing Neil at a rented house. Neil is also accused of raping young boys in Vietnam and Cambodia after being unmasked by nifty police computer work and hunted in a unique Internet appeal.

"From pictures on the Internet, there were five to seven children under age 10 who have been abused by him, including one girl," Deputy National Police Chief Wongkot Maneerin told a packed news conference in Bangkok.

Neil, 32, caught in the northeast Thai province of Nakhon Ratchasima, 250 km (150 miles) from Bangkok and well off the normal tourist trail, refused to answer reporters' questions.
Police said Neil, who arrived in handcuffs at national police headquarters, his head covered by a blue T-shirt, had confirmed his identity to investigators but said nothing else.
Neil was no stranger to Thailand, having once taught in a Bangkok language school, but his hiding place was revealed by a trace on the mobile phone of his 25-year-old Thai boyfriend, identified by transvestites in the seedy beach town of Pattaya.

"They went together to different provinces, probably on the run, and the last call made was from Nakhon Ratchasima. So I sent my men there," tourist police chief Chuchart Suwannakom told Reuters.

Thai police issued a warrant for Neil's arrest on Thursday, a week after he fled South Korea, after two Thai teenagers accused him of paying for oral sex when they were nine and 14, grounds for prosecution under Thai law.

Neil could face up to 20 years in jail if convicted in Thailand. Wongkot said he would be prosecuted in Bangkok, but left open the possibility he could be extradited once he had served his sentence.

"He has to be prosecuted in Thailand first," he said.
"SWIRLY FACE"
Canada -- which can prosecute its citizens for child sex crimes committed abroad, but has rarely done so -- has not said if it plans to seek Neil's extradition.

"We are aware an arrest has been made and we will offer consular services as necessary," a spokesman for the Canadian embassy in Bangkok said.

Cambodia said it also wanted to question Neil and would charge him if police there could put a case together. "We want to know did he really commit sexual abuses on Cambodia's children and women," Police Major General Keo Vannthan said. "If so it will lead us to locate the victims and we will file suit against him." Vietnam might also want to question Neil.
Detectives in various countries had been trying to track Neil down since German police discovered photographs on the Internet three years ago of a man sexually abusing 12 boys in Vietnam and Cambodia.

His face had been scrambled with a digital swirling pattern, but German police computer experts managed to unravel the "Swirly Face" disguise and Interpol issued an unprecedented worldwide appeal through the Internet for information on who the man was.
More than 350 people came forward and Neil was identified by five sources from three different continents, Interpol said.

Neil abruptly left South Korea, where he was teaching, after Interpol broadcast his cleaned-up photograph and flew to Thailand, where he was photographed with shaved head and glasses by airport security cameras.

Thailand and its neighbors immediately alerted border posts in case he tried to sneak across a land frontier as Thai police launched a manhunt to rival their search a year ago for JonBenet Ramsey murder suspect John Mark Karr.

Karr was arrested in a run-down Bangkok hostel and sent back to the United States, where he was eventually cleared of any involvement in Ramsey's murder, one of America's most infamous unsolved crimes.
Source: Reuters

Composing a Life...

This month my book club is reading Composing a Life, by Mary Catherine Bateson a book that was published seventeen years ago. Bateson focuses on life as a work in progress—the improvisations of five extraordinary women. It was a perfect choice for this month. There are five total in the club, very extraordinary beautiful women with families and all of us on a similar journey, to live authentically. I won’t go into details, but the path that lead me to these women is its own interesting journey.

Over the last three years, I’ve been passionately working on creating awareness about the epidemic of child trafficking. During this time, I have often wondered how and why I got involved in this issue. I think back, there sitting comfortable in my suburbia house watching that expose about child trafficking on Dateline NBC. My soul/essences started screaming at me to get my butt out my chair and really live…compose my life. It didn't let up for a year. Finally, I kicked myself into gear and started to tackle this enormous issue of child trafficking, which included I trip over to Cambodia in January of 2006 to check things out first hand.

After returning from Cambodia, there was this chain reaction that followed in every area of my life. Six months after returning from my trip, I quit my corporate job, stripped me from all the money and prestige that a management position offers. From there, I spent the next six months struggling to find myself, launching a consulting business, frustrated with my marriage, over-exposed to life as a stay-at-home mom and basically throwing my religious faith out the door and starting from scratch.

This cause has been the catyalyst for creating a new destiny for my life. In the book, Bateson describes one of the women, Ellen as “determined to be different.” She goes on to say,” At the same time, you cannot put together a life willy-nilly from odds and ends. Even in a crazy quilt, the various pieces, wherever they come from, have to be trimmed and shaped and arranged so they fit together, then firmly sewn to last through time and keep out the cold. Most quilts are more ambitious: they involve the imposition of a new pattern. But even crazy quilts are sewn against a backing: the basic sense of continuity allows improvisation. Composing a life involves an openness to possibilities and the capacity to put them together in a way that is structurally sound.”

I don’t think I would consider myself one of those crazy quilts, some of my villagers may disagree, but I am an ambitious type of quilt. I have this urgency to be the maestro of my life and make it count. I guess my key take-away about this passage, is as I create this new ambitious quilt pattern called my life, is not to loose sight that life involves a continual reimagining of the future and reinterpretation of the past to give meaning to the present.

Human Rights Film Festival - NY June 2008

Just found this festival in NY in June 2008. Human Rights Film Festival - Mark your calendar!

As I prepare for my trip to Cambodia in November 2007, I was just thinking how to best capture the images and stories about child trafficking issues and promote awareness of this worldwide epidemic. I video taped a bit on my trip to Cambodia in 2006, but haven't done anything with it. This festival might just give me the inspiration I need to actually take my filming seriously. Overall, the festival sounds like a great platform for sharing ideas and learning about human rights issues around the world.


About the Human Rights Film Festival

In recognition of the power of film to educate and galvanize a broad constituency of concerned citizens, Human Rights Watch decided to create the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. Human Rights Watch's International Film Festival has become a leading venue for distinguished fiction, documentary and animated films and videos with a distinctive human rights theme. Through the eyes of committed and courageous filmmakers, we showcase the heroic stories of activists and survivors from all over the world. The works we feature help to put a human face on threats to individual freedom and dignity, and celebrate the power of the human spirit and intellect to prevail. We seek to empower everyone with the knowledge that personal commitment can make a very real difference.