FIGHTING TO THE END
DOWN TO AN ART Artist interviews, attendee reactions from March’s First Friday art show PAGE 5
NU-Purdue Big Ten championship game hits double overtime; Nebraska falls, 74-70 PAGE 10 monday, march 5, 2012
volume 111, issue 115
DAILY NEBRASKAN dailynebraskan.com
City Campus finishes bedbug sweep
humans for sale: day 1 of a 2-day in-depth report
is human trafficking here? Sure, it goes on in exotic locales like Thailand, Nepal. It’s even in action flicks like 2008’s “Taken.” But is it in Lincoln? According to interviews with city and federal law enforcement, state officials, health care professionals and local officials, the answer is
After 188 rooms treated, bedbug dogs head to East Campus
yes.
staff report daily nebraskan
A
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Housing finished the sweep of all City Campus residence halls Thursday afternoon. Bedbug dogs, provided by Plunkett’s Pest Control, searched 3,256 rooms in 13 residence halls. The total number of rooms detected by the dogs and treated was 188. Selleck Quadrangle had the most rooms treated with 50, and Abel Hall had the next highest with 39 treated rooms. But the sweep is not finished. Starting Wednesday, the bedbug dogs will sweep through residence halls on UNL’s East Campus: Burr Hall, Fedde Hall and Love Memorial Cooperative Residence Hall. Husker Hall, located off Vine Street, will be inspected by the dogs as well. The sweep cannot start earlier than Wednesday because the contractor’s heattreatment staff will be in training Monday and Tuesday, according to Housing’s website. A schedule for the remaining halls has not been set, but the hall staffs will be meeting residents before inspection. In a telephone interview Friday afternoon, Housing Director Sue Gildersleeve said students in City Campus residence halls were very cooperative
Story and photo illustration by Dan Holtmeyer
police officer casually dressed, but for the shining silver badge hanging from her neck, walked into the nearly empty Lincoln Police Department on a November evening. She will remain unnamed because of her work undercover, first in prostitution, now in narcotics. One evening about five years ago, she said, a man walked up to her on a sidewalk near downtown. “Hey, what’s up?” he asked, striking apparently normal conversation. But a few minutes later, the officer said, the man turned to her and made his intentions chillingly clear. “You work for me now,” she remembered him saying. “You don’t go anywhere without me.” Within two minutes, the man found her a customer and a price: $20. “It’s a job,” the officer said with a laugh, deflecting any idea of personal bravery by pointing to her fellow officers nearby. “I just rely on everyone else.” Nonetheless, just like that, she’d found herself taking the first footsteps of a human trafficking victim. And it doesn’t appear to be all that unusual in Lincoln. “It’s crazy. It’s a lot of money and a lot of victims,” the officer said, recalling her interviews with women arrested for selling sex.
Escort services, online ads, massages for one hour, oral sex for a few bucks. They’re all ready and waiting, some on the street, more on the Internet. She had to laugh mirthlessly when asked why — when just a Google search away — these “services” haven’t been shut down. “There’s so many of them,” she said simply. * * * Recruiting, transporting or harboring a person for exploitation by force, coercion or other means is human trafficking — a crime — as defined by the United Nations. It can include sex trafficking, the celebrity of this underground world, but also agriculture, domestic labor and construction trafficking. Worldwide, most nonprofit organizations estimate this system has spirited 27 million people, if not more, across countries and their borders. Experts, federal agents and law enforcement officials differ on some matters of response and priority, but all agreed on two things: First, human trafficking — and its twin, modern-day slavery — is a growing, multibillion, international industry, one that extends into nearly every town on the globe, including the capital city of Nebraska. “It is one of the fastest growing criminal enterprises in the world,”
Weysan Dun, a special agent in the FBI’s Innocence Lost program branch in Omaha, which focuses on child sexual exploitation, told the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s third annual Human Trafficking Conference late last September. “Clearly it’s big business.” Second, most citizens are unaware of the problem or its local reach. Even the people working with potential and past victims of trafficking are unsure of how big of a problem trafficking is overall, much less here. The term “human trafficking” is about a decade old, and the research to go with it is just beginning to accumulate. On top of that, the market for people doesn’t want to be found. “Who’s willing to tell you?” asked the female officer. “How are you going to dig into that unless someone comes forward?” The only thing certain, officials have said, is that human trafficking is here. According to Free the Slaves, an international nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., the U.S. is mainly a receiver of human traffic, with tens of thousands of fresh victims each year about evenly split between labor and sex work, though the line between the two is easily crossed. “There’s no one that’s immune to this,” said Anna Brewer, head of the FBI’s Lost Innocence Task
Force in Omaha, which focuses on child sex trafficking. She spoke to a nearly full auditorium in the Nebraska Union after a screening of a documentary on stateside trafficking. “People want to turn a blind eye to it in the Midwest,” Brewer said with frustration, mentioning several local towns as hot spots. “Stop putting your head in the sand.” Labor, Agriculture and Trafficking Immigrants coming for agricultural work in states like Nebraska are highly vulnerable to traffickers, especially if they’re undocumented, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Polaris Project, which focuses on national policy and law applicable to trafficking. The victims can be forced to work in exchange for passage, for example, and the debt can take years for immigrants to pay off, if they ever do. Tom Casady, Lincoln’s public safety director and former chief of police, referred to this arrangement as “indentured servitude.” Throw in a common distrust of law enforcement and unfamiliarity with English, and immigrants and refugees — documented and undocumented alike — can become
trafficking: see page 3
bedbugs: see page 2
Campus Rec hosts Regents approve budget climbing competition for new East Stadium lab 70 contenders of many ages turn out to navigate climbing wall jacy marmaduke daily nebraskan
Ellen Kinsey stood out in more ways than one at Outdoor Adventures’ Flatland Climbing Competition. With seven years of experience, Kinsey was one of the competition’s most experienced climbers. The 12-year-old competitor was its youngest, too. And with a score more than
croghan page 4
1,000 points greater than her competitors, Kinsey took the first-place title in the women’s beginner category: Not bad for a 4-foot-11-inch sixth grader. Seventy climbers from across the Midwestern region of collegiate climbing scrambled to the top of the Campus Recreation Center’s 36-foot climbing wall Saturday morning, navigating a vertical maze of rocks and taped routes. The event took place in two sessions and was many climbers’ first competition. “It’s a different way to challenge yourself,” Outdoor Adventures coordinator Kyle
Hansen said. “It’s nice to stretch yourself a little bit.” Competitors could scale the wall as many times as possible within the three-hour limit, taking turns with five climbing ropes. Blue-shirted judges granted them points based on the difficulty of their routes, and, at the end of the competition, each climber’s five top scores were compiled for a total score. Colored tape marked different routes on the walls, but one wrong move could leave a climber stranded at a dead
climbing: see page 2
Writers page 7
Frannie Sprouls Daily Nebraskan
The University of Nebraska Board of Regents approved the budget for the East Stadium Athletic Performance Lab Fit-out at its Friday meeting. The performance lab will link the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Athletics program, UNL’s academic departments and private partners. It will also complement the Center for Brain, Biology and Behavior, which is another section of the East Stadium addition. The project will cost $5
million. “I think it shows tremendous vision for an area that is much needed,” said Vice Chairman Tim Clare of Lincoln. “When you combine athletics and academics, I think it’s a great partnership.” Construction of the performance lab will begin as early as November 2012 and will be completed as early as June 2013. “I think this is something Nebraska is going to be a true leader in,” said Regent Bob Whitehouse of Omaha. The board also approved the recommendation for
wrestling page 10
renovation and additions to the East Campus Recreation Center. The previous plan for the East Campus Recreation Center was to demolish the old building and replace it. “I read the report, I thought they did a careful job with this,” said NU President James B.
regents: see page 2
Weather | windy
The rainbow connection
Masters of the craft
In the thick of things
gay men can learn much from straight male counterparts
UNL English department to host visiting writers
NU qualifies six wrestlers for NCAAs at Big Tens
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