Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will see occasional showers with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 15h 11m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the nine hundred thirty-eighth day.
Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1989, Chinese oppression against protestors leads to the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
From 6.5.1989:
Recommended for reading in full:
Diana Dombrowski reports Human trafficking is all over Wisconsin, but subtle. You might have seen victims and never known:
Women are bound, hands tied with chains or ropes. They look dirty, as if they’ve been kept in a basement. Some are wide-eyed with fear. Others are stamped with a bar code.
If you type “human trafficking” into an image search on your computer, these are the pictures you will see. The message is clear: Women and children are being sold. They’re trapped. These are the makings of a horror film.
But that bar code was edited into the photo. And these are images from a marketing campaign.
Human trafficking in Wisconsin doesn’t look quite like this. It looks like the promise of a new career as a model. It looks like an expensive gift to your child from an acquaintance. It looks like a drug addiction and the hope of something more, as it did for Stratton.
Not all trafficking involves sex. A recent example of labor trafficking surfaced in the Milwaukee area where federal prosecutors charged five people in what they called a conspiracy to force Mexican nationals to work on farms in Wisconsin.
It’s not the easiest crime to recognize, but human trafficking cases have been documented in each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties.
The National Human Trafficking Hotline says it was contacted 122 times about 64 cases in the first six months of 2018 in Wisconsin. Since 2007, the hotline has received 1,523 calls about 362 cases in the state.
Yet no one knows exactly how often people are bought and sold in Wisconsin. Not only do victims sometimes fail to recognize they’re being trafficked and the crimes go unreported, but until this year, the state had no mechanism to collect statewide information on trafficking cases, said Derek Veitenheimer from the Department of Justice.
A new data collection process will include more detailed information about each reported incident.
Meanwhile, Sheboygan Detective Tamara Remington speaks to packed rooms of concerned residents when she shares what she’s learned working trafficking cases.
The average age for kids is 13 or younger
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If you need help or know someone who does
Contact the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888 or text them at 233733. A live chat option is also available on their website: humantraffickinghotline.org.If you need immediate assistance, you can also call 9-1-1.
The 23-Year-Old Woman Who Pioneered Investigative Journalism: