Teenager standing trial for murdering her step father who she states sexually abused her

A horrible story - In Australia a 19 year old girl on trial for murdering her step father she states sexually abused her from aged 14. The night she killed him she reports that he had demanded oral sex of her. Whilst he was abusing her he was also recording the abuse and capturing his abuse, his torture and rape of her.

The prosecution are saying that because she dismembered his body and then went out with a man that her step father banned her from seeing, that the murder was pre mediatated. She probably should of reported the killing and maybe dismembering was not a good idea, however look at what she is facing - being tried for murdering her abuser, when she was acting in self defence.

Andrea Dworkin said ".......they stand there in jail for us; for all women who survived, for all women who got away without ever having to pull the trigger; without ever having the trigger pulled on us..."

Read the article here http://www.news.%20com.au/adelaiden%20ow/story/%200,22606,24909535%20-5005962,%2000.html

Teen to stand trial over stepdad's murder
Article from: AAP
By Kim Stephens
January 13, 2009 08:11pm
A VICTORIAN teenager has been ordered to stand trial for the murder of her stepfather who allegedly took nearly 10,000 pornographic pictures of her in four years.The Shepparton Magistrates' Court was told that on March 13 last year, the stepdaughter shot the 34-year-old in the back of the head to put an end to daily sexual abuse that began when she was 14. The man's dismembered torso was unearthed in a shallow grave in the backyard of their Mooroopna home on April 9 and further remains were discovered two days later at a campsite nearby at Old Toolamba, in Victoria's north.

The teenager, now 19, has pleaded not guilty to murder. Her defence barrister Peter Chadwick told the court on the night of his death, the woman's stepfather ordered the accused to go to a shed at the back of their home where he demanded she perform oral sex on him. Mr Chadwick told the court when the teenager declined, citing a sore throat, the stepfather removed a shotgun from his gun cabinet, loaded it and asked her to rethink her answer. After she performed the act, she moved behind him and seeing the loaded shotgun lying on the ground, picked it up and fired it at the back of his head.

Mr Chadwick said the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told police her motive for her actions was so "she wouldn't have to do it again". Under cross-examination, Victoria Police homicide squad Detective Senior Constable Barry Gray said soon after the teenager was charged, police seized a series of still and video pornographic images the deceased had taken of her, which he had stored in the shed. He agreed while there were many pictures of the pair engaged in sexual activity, "by far the large majority were of just the accused". He agreed that among the images was one of the accused tied to a chair with cable ties and towels. Det Sen Const Gray said the images dated from January 2004 until February 2008 and constituted child pornography.

Mr Chadwick told Magistrate Ian von Einem the images cast no doubt on the girl's claims of sustained sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather. "It has been videoed, photographed and is clear for all to see," he said. "He had used the images to blackmail her into submission. Asked by police what she thought would have happened if she hadn't killed him, she said she probably would have killed herself because she could not keep living the way she was." But Crown prosecutor Mark Gamble said the teenager's dismembering of the body and attempts to cover up the murder, along with forming a relationship with a man her stepfather had banned her from seeing three days after his death, could be construed as something other than self-defence. "She shot him so she didn't have to do it again ... a jury could form the view, albeit against a background of abuse, it was not committed in self-defence, " he said. The accused was ordered to appear at a directions hearing in the Victorian Supreme Court on January 27.

Torture of children on sale in Cambodia

From the New York Times link is here

And more here

January 1, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist
The Evil Behind the Smiles
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia
Western men who visit red-light districts in poor countries often find themselves surrounded by coquettish teenage girls laughingly tugging them toward the brothels. The men assume that the girls are there voluntarily, and in some cases they are right.
But anyone inclined to take the girls' smiles at face value should talk to Sina Vann, who was once one of those smiling girls.
Sina is Vietnamese but was kidnapped at the age of 13 and taken to Cambodia, where she was drugged. She said she woke up naked and bloody on a bed with a white man — she doesn't know his nationality — who had purchased her virginity.
After that, she was locked on the upper floors of a nice hotel and offered to Western men and wealthy Cambodians. She said she was beaten ferociously to force her to smile and act seductive.
"My first phrase in Khmer," the Cambodian language, "was, 'I want to sleep with you,' " she said. "My first phrase in English was" — well, it's unprintable.
Sina mostly followed instructions and smiled alluringly at men because she would have been beaten if men didn't choose her. But sometimes she was in such pain that she resisted, and then she said she would be dragged down to a torture chamber in the basement.
"Many of the brothels have these torture chambers," she said. "They are underground because then the girls' screams are muffled."
As in many brothels, the torture of choice was electric shocks. Sina would be tied down, doused in water and then prodded with wires running from the 220-volt wall outlet. The jolt causes intense pain, sometimes evacuation of the bladder and bowel — and even unconsciousness.
Shocks fit well into the brothel business model because they cause agonizing pain and terrify the girls without damaging their looks or undermining their market value.
After the beatings and shocks, Sina said she would be locked naked in a wooden coffin full of biting ants. The coffin was dark, suffocating and so tight that she could not move her hands up to her face to brush off the ants. Her tears washed the ants out of her eyes.
She was locked in the coffin for a day or two at a time, and she said this happened many, many times.
Finally, Sina was freed in a police raid, and found herself blinded by the first daylight she had seen in years. The raid was organized by Somaly Mam, a Cambodian woman who herself had been sold into the brothels but managed to escape, educate herself and now heads a foundation fighting forced prostitution.
After being freed, Sina began studying and eventually became one of Somaly's trusted lieutenants. They now work together, in defiance of death threats from brothel owners, to free other girls. To get at Somaly, the brothel owners kidnapped and brutalized her 14-year-old daughter. And six months ago, the daughter of another anti-trafficking activist (my interpreter when I interviewed Sina) went missing.
I had heard about torture chambers under the brothels but had never seen one, so a few days ago Sina took me to the red-light district here where she once was imprisoned. A brothel had been torn down, revealing a warren of dungeons underneath.
"I was in a room just like those," she said, pointing. "There must be many girls who died in those rooms." She grew distressed and added: "I'm cold and afraid. Tonight I won't sleep."
"Photograph quickly," she added, and pointed to brothels lining the street. "It's not safe to stay here long."
Sina and Somaly sustain themselves with a wicked sense of humor. They tease each other mercilessly, with Sina, who is single, mock-scolding Somaly: "At least I had plenty of men until you had to come along and rescue me!"
Sex trafficking is truly the 21st century's version of slavery. One of the differences from 19th-century slavery is that many of these modern slaves will die of AIDS by their late 20s.
Whenever I report on sex trafficking, I come away less depressed by the atrocities than inspired by the courage of modern abolitionists like Somaly and Sina. They are risking their lives to help others still locked up in the brothels, and they have the credibility and experience to lead this fight. In my next column, I'll introduce a girl that Sina is now helping to recover from mind-boggling torture in a brothel — and Sina's own story gives hope to the girl in a way that an army of psychologists couldn't.
I hope that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will recognize slavery as unfinished business on the foreign policy agenda. The abolitionist cause simply hasn't been completed as long as 14-year-old girls are being jolted with electric shocks — right now, as you read this — to make them smile before oblivious tourists.