Little People, Big Business: Private Foundation Launches New DataBank for Sexually Exploited & Trafficked Children

How the sexual exploitation of children has become one of the most lucrative industries in the world, and what one privately-funded organization is doing about it.

Laguna Beach, CA April 22, 2006 -- The Children Under Fire Foundation, a California non-profit corporation, has launched a unique organization in the fight against child sexual exploitation called PROGENY.

PROGENY is a privately funded international organization dedicated to the rescue, safety, and rehabilitation of sexually exploited and trafficked children, and the dissemination of information for the interdiction of child predators and traffickers worldwide. PROGENY has three predominant functions:

1. The operation and maintenance of its highly Secure DataBank of children who are victims of sexual exploitation and/or trafficking, and specifically those who require urgent medical attention. The DataBank allows pre-screened and authorized physicians in highly developed countries to share the most up-to-date medical knowledge and information with orphanages, safe-houses, and hospices and their attending doctors, or other health care professionals worldwide about the sick children in their care, and to thereby facilitate all possible methods for their successful treatment.

2. The task of obtaining financial assistance through private philanthropists, corporate sponsorship, charitable institutions, or governmental grants and aid, to obtain such medicines, treatments, or medical expertise as may be required for the survival and welfare of those children under PROGENY's jurisdiction or care.

3. The dissemination to international law enforcement agencies worldwide of invaluable evidentiary material gathered by PROGENY's operatives, or from anecodotal testimony from victims, to assist in the pursuit of child traffickers, pornographers, and predators.

Currently, millions of children worldwide are involved in illegal prostitution, child pornography, and child trafficking, and the numbers are increasing by an estimated 1 million each year. The tragic practice of child trafficking and sex tourism was previously thought to be focused in countries such as Thailand, Cambodia, Nepal, and India, but is now a widespread, global pandemic.

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