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Tag Archives: Child Sex Trafficking
What can YOU do about the child sex trafficking problem?
Yesterday I posted a disturbing news article about the horrific problem of child sex trafficking in the U.S. (and around the world). So far no comments have come in to this blog on disturbing story. Either it’s because people don’t care (which I doubt), or people don’t know what to say (I get that), or because people feel helpless to do anything about it (I get that too).
Well, there are some things that YOU can do. Here are my thoughts on this issue. (If you have any more suggestions, please post them in the comments section of this article, and I’ll add them to the list below.)
So what can YOU do about the rampant epidemic for child sex trafficking? Perhaps you don’t think you can do much. But really you can by tending to your own garden. You can begin by sharing the info on this blog (including the previously posted article on child sex trafficking) with those around you.
Chez vous (French for “at your own place”), there’s a lot you can do. As the saying goes, when the world is a mess and you can do much about it, you can sweep your own front porch or tend our own garden. This means strengthen your own family. Keep your marriages strong. Train your children, grandchildren and the other young people in your life in the ways of YHVH. (This is why I wrote and published Torah Explorers—https://www.hoshanarabbah.org/parshiot.html, so that parents would have a free tool to raise up their children in the ways of YHVH).
Here are some more things that YOU can do:
- Love your children unconditionally—even the prodigals. Be there for them. Stay close to them.
- Those of you who are retired, don’t selfishly move far away from your children and grandchildren, so that you can have your “fun in the sun” our whatever. Stay near them, so that you can exercise a godly influence on them and help to raise them.
- Parents, limit and monitor your kids’ internet time.
- Throw the television out the window!
- Don’t give your kids smart phones until they’re older and can handle it.
- On the settings mode of your children’s computers, set the controls so that porn can’t be viewed.
- Help your kids to choose righteous friend and know who their friends are.
- Homeschool your children. This means that one parent may have to stay home and forgo outside employment. You may have to reduce your income and lifestyle a bit by learning to live on one income. This investment in your family will pay off, though! (Try starting a home-based business with your kids and teach them some entrepreneurial skills.)
- Spend time as a family doing activities together, especially in the out-of-doors.
- Have regular prayer and Bible reading times with our children or grandchildren.
- “Adopt” a young person into your family who is troubled or comes from a broken family.
- The National Human Trafficking Hotline (NHTH) is a 24/7 phone number for victims and survivors of human trafficking. One can call this number with questions or tips, or for help in connecting with law enforcement or with people trained in helping victims. The phone number is 1-888-3737-888. The NHTH website is https://humantraffickinghotline.org.This hotline works in conjunction with and is supported by the US government’s Dept. of Health and Human Services (DHHS). For more info including victim assistance, training, and other resources go to https://www.acf.hhs.gov/otip/victim-assistance/national-human-trafficking-hotline.
Here are some additional ways you can help stop human sex trafficking: https://www.acf.hhs.gov/otip/about/ways-endtrafficking
Horrifically Disturbing—Child Sex Trafficking in the U.S.
Please send the link to this article out to as many people as you can. The light of truth is the best way to combat darkness.
The Essence of Evil: Sex with Children Has Become Big Business in America
“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”—John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
Children, young girls—some as young as 9 years old—are being bought and sold for sex in America. The average age for a young woman being sold for sex is now 13 years old.
This is America’s dirty little secret.
Sex trafficking—especially when it comes to the buying and selling of young girls—has become big business in America, the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.
As investigative journalist Amy Fine Collins notes, “It’s become more lucrative and much safer to sell malleable teens than drugs or guns. A pound of heroin or an AK-47 can be retailed once, but a young girl can be sold 10 to 15 times a day—and a ‘righteous’ pimp confiscates 100 percent of her earnings.”
Consider this: every two minutes, a child is exploited in the sex industry.
According to USA Today, adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.
Who buys a child for sex? Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life.
“They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.
In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.
On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period of servitude.
It is estimated that at least 100,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.
“Human trafficking—the commercial sexual exploitation of American children and women, via the Internet, strip clubs, escort services, or street prostitution—is on its way to becoming one of the worst crimes in the U.S.,” said prosecutor Krishna Patel.
This is an industry that revolves around cheap sex on the fly, with young girls and women who are sold to 50 men each day for $25 apiece, while their handlers make $150,000 to $200,000 per child each year.
This is not a problem found only in big cities.
It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.
As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out, “The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”
Don’t fool yourselves into believing that this is merely a concern for lower income communities or immigrants.
It is estimated that there are 100,000 to 150,000 under-aged child sex workers in the U.S. These girls aren’t volunteering to be sex slaves. They’re being lured—forced—trafficked into it. In most cases, they have no choice.
In order to avoid detection (in some cases aided and abetted by the police) and cater to male buyers’ demand for sex with different women, pimps and the gangs and crime syndicates they work for have turned sex trafficking into a highly mobile enterprise, with trafficked girls, boys and women constantly being moved from city to city, state to state, and country to country.
For instance, the Baltimore-Washington area, referred to as The Circuit, with its I-95 corridor dotted with rest stops, bus stations and truck stops, is a hub for the sex trade.
No doubt about it: this is a highly profitable, highly organized and highly sophisticated sex trafficking business that operates in towns large and small, raking in upwards of $9.5 billion a year in the U.S. alone by abducting and selling young girls for sex.
Every year, the girls being bought and sold gets younger and younger.
The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out, “Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.“
“For every 10 women rescued, there are 50 to 100 more women who are brought in by the traffickers. Unfortunately, they’re not 18- or 20-year-olds anymore,” noted a 25-year-old victim of trafficking. “They’re minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked. They’re little girls.”
Where did this appetite for young girls come from?
Look around you.
Young girls have been sexualized for years now in music videos, on billboards, in television ads, and in clothing stores. Marketers have created a demand for young flesh and a ready supply of over-sexualized children.
“All it takes is one look at MySpace photos of teens to see examples—if they aren’t imitating porn they’ve actually seen, they’re imitating the porn-inspired images and poses they’ve absorbed elsewhere,” writes Jessica Bennett for Newsweek. “Latex, corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn stars, have made their way into middle and high school.”
This is what Bennett refers to as the “pornification of a generation.”
“In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn’t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives,” concludes Bennett. “Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14 have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.”
In other words, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators. And then we wonder why our young women are being preyed on, trafficked and abused?
Social media makes it all too easy. As one news center reported, “Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.” Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers.
Rarely do these girls enter into prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.
Debbie, a straight-A student who belonged to a close-knit Air Force family living in Phoenix, Ariz., is an example of this trading of flesh. Debbie was 15 when she was snatched from her driveway by an acquaintance-friend. Forced into a car, Debbie was bound and taken to an unknown location, held at gunpoint and raped by multiple men. She was then crammed into a small dog kennel and forced to eat dog biscuits. Debbie’s captors advertised her services on Craigslist. Those who responded were often married with children, and the money that Debbie “earned” for sex was given to her kidnappers. The gang raping continued. After searching the apartment where Debbie was held captive, police finally found Debbie stuffed in a drawer under a bed. Her harrowing ordeal lasted for 40 days.
While Debbie was fortunate enough to be rescued, others are not so lucky. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, nearly 800,000 children go missing every year (roughly 2,185 children a day).
With a growing demand for sexual slavery and an endless supply of girls and women who can be targeted for abduction, this is not a problem that’s going away anytime soon.
For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.
Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.
Peter Landesman paints the full horrors of life for those victims of the sex trade in his New York Times article “The Girls Next Door”:
Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners–toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens–as well as what she called a “damage group.” “In the damage group, they can hit you or do anything they want to,” she explained. “Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it’s always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.”
What Andrea described next shows just how depraved some portions of American society have become. “They’d get you hungry then to train you” to have oral sex. “They put honey on a man. For the littlest kids, you had to learn not to gag. And they would push things in you so you would open up better. We learned responses. Like if they wanted us to be sultry or sexy or scared. Most of them wanted you scared. When I got older, I’d teach the younger kids how to float away so things didn’t hurt.”
Immigration and customs enforcement agents at the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., report that when it comes to sex, the appetites of many Americans have now changed. What was once considered abnormal is now the norm. These agents are tracking a clear spike in the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet. As one agent noted, “We’ve become desensitized by the soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit.”
This trend is reflected by the treatment many of the girls receive at the hands of the drug traffickers and the men who purchase them. Peter Landesman interviewed Rosario, a Mexican woman who had been trafficked to New York and held captive for a number of years. She said: “In America, we had ‘special jobs.’ Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.”
A common thread woven through most survivors’ experiences is being forced to go without sleep or food until they have met their sex quota of at least 40 men. One woman recounts how her trafficker made her lie face down on the floor when she was pregnant and then literally jumped on her back, forcing her to miscarry.
Holly Austin Smith was abducted when she was 14 years old, raped, and then forced to prostitute herself. Her pimp, when brought to trial, was only made to serve a year in prison.
Barbara Amaya was repeatedly sold between traffickers, abused, shot, stabbed, raped, kidnapped, trafficked, beaten, and jailed all before she was 18 years old. “I had a quota that I was supposed to fill every night. And if I didn’t have that amount of money, I would get beat, thrown down the stairs. He beat me once with wire coat hangers, the kind you hang up clothes, he straightened it out and my whole back was bleeding.”
As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune: “In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”
One particular sex trafficking ring catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout the southeastern states, especially the Carolinas and Georgia, although it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up outside shacks, as many as 30 at a time, to have sex with them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would begin all over again.
This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.
Trafficked women and children are advertised on the internet, transported on the interstate, and bought and sold in swanky hotels.
Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government’s war on sex trafficking—much like the government’s war on terrorism, drugs and crime—has become a perfect excuse for inflicting more police state tactics (police check points, searches, surveillance, and heightened security) on a vulnerable public, while doing little to make our communities safer.
So what can you do?
Educate yourselves and your children about this growing menace in our communities.
Stop feeding the monster: Sex trafficking is part of a larger continuum in America that runs the gamut from homelessness, poverty, and self-esteem issues to sexualized television, the glorification of a pimp/ho culture—what is often referred to as the pornification of America—and a billion dollar sex industry built on the back of pornography, music, entertainment, etc.
This epidemic is largely one of our own making, especially in a corporate age where the value placed on human life takes a backseat to profit. It is estimated that the porn industry brings in more money than Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.
Call on your city councils, elected officials and police departments to make the battle against sex trafficking a top priority, more so even than the so-called war on terror and drugs and the militarization of law enforcement.
Stop prosecuting adults for victimless “crimes” such as growing lettuce in their front yard and focus on putting away the pimps and buyers who victimize these young women.
Finally, the police need to do a better job of training, identifying and responding to these issues; communities and social services need to do a better job of protecting runaways, who are the primary targets of traffickers; legislators need to pass legislation aimed at prosecuting traffickers and “johns,” the buyers who drive the demand for sex slaves; and hotels need to stop enabling these traffickers, by providing them with rooms and cover for their dirty deeds.
That so many women and children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.
But the truth is that we are all guilty of contributing to this human suffering. The traffickers are guilty. The consumers are guilty. The corrupt law enforcement officials are guilty. The women’s groups who do nothing are guilty. The foreign peacekeepers and aid workers who contribute to the demand for sex slaves are guilty. Most of all, every individual who does not raise a hue and cry over the atrocities being committed against women and children in almost every nation around the globe—including the United States—is guilty.
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
Natan—
So what can you do about this problem? Perhaps there’s not much you can do “out there” about this problem except share this info with others and bring light to the issue.
But chez vous (French for “at your own place”), there’s a lot you can do. As the saying goes, when the world is a mess and you can do much about it, you can sweep your own front porch or tend our own garden. This means strengthen your own family. Keep your marriages strong. Train your children, grandchildren and the other young people in your life in the ways of YHVH. (This is why I wrote and published Torah Explorers—https://www.hoshanarabbah.org/parshiot.html, so that parents would have a free tool to raise up their children in the ways of YHVH).
Here are some more things you can do:
- Love your children unconditionally—even the prodigals. Be there for them. Stay close to them.
- Those of you who are retired, don’t selfishly move far away from your children and grandchildren, so that you can have your “fun in the sun” our whatever. Stay near them, so that you can exercise a godly influence on them and help to raise them.
- Parents, limit and monitor your kids’ internet time.
- Throw the television out the window!
- Don’t give your kids smart phones until they’re older and can handle it.
- Help your kids to choose righteous friend and know who their friends are.
- Homeschool your children. This means that one parent may have to stay home and forgo outside employment. You may have to reduce your income and lifestyle a bit by learning to live on one income. This investment in your family will pay off, though! (Try starting a home-based business with your kids and teach them some entrepreneurial skills.)
- Spend time as a family doing activities together, especially in the out of doors.
- Have regular prayer and Bible reading times with our children or grandchildren.
- Adopt a young person into your family who is troubled or comes from a broken family.
More Info and Resources on Child Sex Trafficking and What YOU Can Do
Here is some more information on child sex trafficking and resources on what YOU can do about it
- Men Who Buy Sex with Adolescent Girls: A Scientific Research Study (https://multco.us/file/24357/download). This study shows that Craig’s List is a major link up means between adults and children seeking sex.
- Volunteers ramp up efforts to rescue underage sex slaves during Super Bowl (http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2010-02-05/news/fl-superbowl-sex-trafficking-20100205_1_human-trafficking-prostitution-super-bowl/2)
- The Stolen Ones (http://thestolenones.heraldtribune.com)
- Sex Trafficking—the Girls Next Door (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/05/sex-trafficking-201105)
- Child prostitution survivor aims to change lives (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-02-26-carissa-child-prostitution_N.htm)
- Rescued from a Pimp (https://www.countynewscenter.com/rescued-pimp/)
- The Hidden Economics of Porn (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/pornography-industry-economics-tarrant/476580/)
- Sex Trafficking in Maryland: Police, Social Agencies Say Human Trafficking Growing Faster Than Authorities Can Control: Five Recommendations to Address the Problem (http://www.abell.org/sites/default/files/publications/arn1.12013.pdf)
What YOU Can Do
| From the US Government’s Department of Human Services (https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/blue-campaign/Blue%20Campaign%20-%20Human%20Trafficking%20101%20for%20School%20Administrators%20and%20Staff.pdf |
|
If you suspect that a person may be a victim of human trafficking, please call the Homeland Security Investigations Tip Line at 1-866-347-2423 (24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in over 300 languages and dialects) or submit a tip online at www.ice.gov/tips. You may also call the National Human Trafficking Resource Center at 1-888-373-7888 to get help or connect with a service provider in your area. The Center is not a law enforcement or immigration authority and is operated by a non-governmental organization. Non-law enforcement personnel should never attempt to directly confront a suspected trafficker or rescue a suspected victim. Doing so could put both your and the victim’s safety at risk. By immediately informing law enforcement of your suspicions, you can safely assist in the recovery of the victim and the dismantling of the trafficking operation. School administrators and staff who suspect a trafficking incident should follow their school district’s established protocol for such matters. Schools that do not have such procedures in place should consider adopting a formal protocol on how to identify the indicators and report suspected cases to law enforcement. Your protocol should be developed in collaboration with school district leadership; federal and/or local law enforcement; mental health, child welfare, or victim services providers; and other appropriate community partners. |
Who buys a trafficked child for sex? Otherwise ordinary men.
From USA Today at https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/nation-now/2018/01/30/sex-trafficking-column/1073459001/
IndyStar columnist Tim Swarens spent more than a year investigating a lucrative business where abused children are bought and sold. USA TODAY
More than 1 million children, according to the International Labour Organization, are exploited each year in the commercial sex trade. IndyStar columnist Tim Swarens, through the support of a Society of Professional Journalists fellowship, spent more than a year investigating a lucrative business where children are abused with low risk to buyers or traffickers, despite tougher laws and heightened international awareness of the scourge. Google, Eli Lilly and Co., and Indiana Wesleyan University provided additional support for this project.
This is the first of 10 columns in the EXPLOITED series, which explores the cultural and economic forces that contribute to commercial sexual exploitation.
On the day she met Marcus Thompson, the girl later told the FBI, she had been ready to leap from a bridge to end her life.
She was only 15, pregnant and alone on the streets.
And in this wounded child, Thompson saw a means to make money. He promised that if she left her small Illinois town with him, he would make her a model. Grasping for hope, she climbed into his truck.
But the promise was a lie.
Instead, in the summer of 2015, Thompson and his wife, Robin, forced the girl on a nightmarish six-week trek across the southern United States. Photographed in suggestive poses and marketed online, she was sold out of hotel rooms and truck stops to any man with the money and the desire to buy sex.
The justice system eventually would work well in this case in several respects. The victim was rescued and provided with treatment. The traffickers who exploited her were caught, pleaded guilty and were sent to prison.
But what of the men who paid to rape this child? What consequences did they suffer?
Not a single one was ever charged.
That same breach of justice is the norm in thousands of trafficking cases. About 10,000 children a year suffer the horrors of commercial sexual exploitation in the United States. Each victim on average is forced to have sex more than five times a day.
Yet the buyers who fuel the child sex trade are seldom held accountable. Most just blend back into their families, jobs and neighborhoods. Until the next time.
►How to report human trafficking
In the Thompson case, the victim, too young for a driver’s license, told the FBI she was beaten once for attempting to escape and was threatened with being “thrown to the alligators” if she tried to run again. Marcus Thompson, according to federal authorities, raped the girl five times.
Still, the child retained enough independence to say no when a buyer demanded anal sex. But her refusal came at a brutal price. The man who bought her complained to the man who sold her. And she was beaten again.
At a hospital in St. Louis, the abuse finally ended when the girl was identified as a sex-trafficking victim. The Thompsons, based on her descriptions, were arrested.
Marcus Thompson is now serving a life sentence. Robin Thompson, who helped place the online ads and book the hotel rooms, was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
At Robin Thompson’s sentencing, Chief U.S. District Judge Michael Reagan described the couple’s crimes as among the worst he had seen in 16 years on the federal bench.
In her victim impact letter, read by Reagan at the sentencing, the girl wrote, “It’s hard to wake up every day and remember the people I had sex with.”
In the past 16 months, I’ve witnessed the worst of human behavior while reporting for this project, one that’s taken me across eight countries on five continents. I’ve talked to 6-year-old trafficking victims, visited a shelter where the oldest survivors were only 11, met a 5-year-old boy living with his parents in a squalid brothel in India and interviewed survivors who were raped by hundreds of men.
Yet the ordeal of that one child from Illinois — beaten for saying no — has haunted me in particular.
It’s stuck in my mind because it exposes a harsh truth: In the sex trade, buyers and sellers view the children they torment as property.
And property cannot say no.
“Despite 20 years of efforts, the sexual exploitation of children in travel and tourism has expanded across the globe and outpaced every attempt to respond at the international and national level… As a result, the risks of child sexual exploitation are increasing.”
— The Global Study on Sexual Exploitation of Children in Travel and Tourism, 2016.
This project began with a question: Who buys a 15-year-old child for sex?
The answer: Many otherwise ordinary men. They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse.
“They’re in all walks of life,” a 17-year-old survivor from the Midwest, trafficked when she was 15, said about the more than 150 men who purchased her in a month. “Some could be upstanding people in the community. It was mostly people in their 40s, living in the suburbs, who were coming to get the stuff they were missing.”
►Human trafficking by the numbers
The scale of the trade indicates that it’s not a small number of men who pay to have sex with kids. A 2016 study by the Center for Court Innovation found that between 8,900 and 10,500 children, ages 13 to 17, are commercially exploited each year in this country. Several hundred children 12 and younger, a group not included in the study, also suffer commercial sexual abuse.
The researchers found that the average age of victims is 15 and that each child is purchased on average 5.4 times a day. I’ve interviewed victims who were forced to have sex with more than 30 men in a week; more than 100 in a month.
To determine a conservative estimate of the demand, I multiplied the lower number of victims (8,900) identified in the Center for Court Innovation study by the rate of daily exploitation per child (5.4), and then by an average of only one “work” day per week (52). The result: Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.
The number of identified victims in the U.S. is on the rise. The National Human Trafficking Hotline recorded a 35 percent increase in reports in 2016. Most of the cases involved sex trafficking and many of the victims were children.
Brad Myles, CEO of the Polaris Project, which operates the hotline, said the increase largely can be attributed to better identification of trafficking victims and heightened public awareness that the hotline exists. Yet, Myles said, “The vast majority of victims are still not being found.”
International numbers are even more staggering. Sex trafficking, according to the United Nations’ International Labour Organization, is a $99 billion-a-year global industry. The exploitation of more than 1 million children accounts for more than 20 percent of those profits.
And there’s evidence that the child sex trade is growing. ECPAT International, a research and advocacy organization, concluded in 2016 in a first of its kind global study that more children than ever are at risk of abuse.
Mark Capaldi, ECPAT’s lead researcher, said in an interview at the organization’s Bangkok headquarters that rising global incomes, cheaper air travel and better internet access have fueled the increase in demand. In short, it’s cheaper and easier than ever for adults to exploit children.
Another reason for the growing exploitation: Buyers face little risk. “You’re unlucky if you get caught,” Bjorn Sellstrom, the head of INTERPOL’s Crimes Against Children unit, said in Lyon, France. “It’s fairly free of risk to travel to another country and abuse children.”
It’s a low-risk crime for domestic abusers as well. In 2015, Congress strengthened federal anti-trafficking laws to provide prosecutors with more tools to go after sex buyers. Prosecutions have only modestly increased as a result.
A U.S. Department of Justice spokeswoman, in a written response to questions, said the primary objective is to focus “our limited resources on apprehending the traffickers, who pose the most imminent threat to the victims.”
She provided examples of about 30 buyers, including former Subway pitchman Jared Fogle, convicted on federal charges in 2015 and 2016. But she said state and local prosecutors are in a better position than the federal government to hold accountable those who pay to exploit children.
Like the federal government, state and local jurisdictions tend to use sting operations in which undercover officers pose as exploited children to stop buyers. Although such operations net thousands of would-be sex buyers each year, most of the men arrested plead down to lesser crimes.
And it’s rare for police and prosecutors to pursue buyers after they’ve paid to abuse children. That’s true even in the most nauseating of crimes.
In 2016, police rescued a 12-year-old Texas girl who was held captive in a hotel room in a wealthy suburb of Nashville, Tenn. Authorities said the child, found with bruises and scratches on her face, had been advertised on Backpage.com and sold to sex buyers for a month in the Knoxville, Memphis and Nashville areas.
A 36-year-old Nashville man, Tavarie Williams, was charged with multiple counts of trafficking, kidnapping and rape. He is awaiting trial. But, as in the case of the 15-year-old from Illinois, none of the men who paid to sexually abuse a middle school-age child were ever charged. (A spokeswoman for the Davidson County (Tenn.) District Attorney’s Office said authorities were unable to identify any of the buyers, who could have faced felony charges).
“That child will have to fight the stigma of what happened to her for the rest of her life,” said Alex Trouteaud, director of policy and research with Demand Abolition, a Massachusetts-based organization that works to reduce demand for commercial sex. “Meanwhile, the buyers will never be held accountable. It’s what we call the culture of impunity.”
Prosecutors note that they face several obstacles in pursuing charges, including the need to show that a buyer knew or should have known that the person he paid to exploit was underage. Victims — traumatized, frightened, frequently dependent on drugs and alcohol — often don’t make strong witnesses. Prosecutors also must weigh whether putting a child on the stand, where defense cross examinations can be rough, will further wound the victim.
It’s tempting to put buyers who exploit children in a box — to say that all of them are pedophiles, a small percentage of the population driven by a deep sickness. But researchers and survivors say that’s not the case.
ECPAT International researchers found that the great majority of men who pay to exploit children are opportunists. They don’t set out specifically to buy sex with a child, but neither do they walk away when faced with the temptation.
Survivors I interviewed reported similar experiences. One of them, exploited when she was 15, said only two men turned and left the motel room when they saw how young she was. Even those two didn’t notify police about the ongoing abuse of a child.
More than 100 other men who paid to have sex with her stayed. “They just didn’t care” about her age, she said.
In a room full of sex buyers, enrolled in a court-ordered program in Seattle, I asked: “Do you ever think about the life stories of the girls and women you purchased?”
The men appeared uncertain about how to answer. Then a former once-a-week buyer, arrested for attempting to purchase sex from a police officer posing as a 15-year-old girl, said, “I don’t want to know how the sausage is made.”
A piece of meat. A commodity to be consumed.
Not a child. Not a life.
Later in this series, we’ll further explore the factors that drive men to buy sex with children. But let’s take time now for a dose of inspiration.
We’ll find it in a sewing room in Mumbai, India, where a group of remarkable women are waiting to greet us.
Priya, her body ravaged by HIV, was barely alive the day Seena Simon, director of Care and Development for the Cincinnati-based Aruna Project, found her on the street in Mumbai’s Grant Road red light district.
Trafficked at age 13, Priya had worked in the brothels for 15 years before she was kicked out because of her illness.
“She shared with me that in one night 15 to 20 men used her. That was her life,” Simon, who’s worked with trafficking victims in Mumbai for the past 15 years, said. “She didn’t have the strength or energy to do that work. So she was not earning any money for the brothel keeper and they didn’t want her.”
Told by doctors that Priya wouldn’t survive, Simon found the still-young woman a bed in a hospice, where she went to die.
Except Priya didn’t die.
►7 ways to help fight human trafficking
Her white blood count began to improve. She began to eat, to regain weight and energy. After three months, Priya left the hospice for an after-care home.
At around that time, Simon had been talking to Ryan Berg, an American from Cincinnati who worked for an NGO with operations in India, about the need to provide jobs in a sheltered work environment for trafficking survivors.
“Employment was the gap,” Simon said. “Once they were trained in some kind of skill, we sent them for work, but they couldn’t cope with the pressure. Finish the deadline, finish the targets — they couldn’t do it. There was an internal conflict and many of them failed. And some I know went back to the red light district.”
From that need, and from Berg and Simon’s shared passion to help trafficking victims, a business plan was born. In the U.S., Berg founded The Aruna Project, a Cincinnati-based nonprofit that stages 5K runs in multiple states. Registration fees and other proceeds from the races are used to pay salaries for trafficking survivors in Mumbai.
In Mumbai, Simon manages production and counsels survivors, who are employed to make athletic bags and headbands distributed to participants in Aruna Project races in the U.S. More upscale bags also are sold online.
In 2015, Aruna hired its first survivor, Priya. Simon said the company pays better than market rate salaries and benefits. It also provides group homes for those survivors who are not yet ready to live on their own.
The fight against human trafficking inspires incredible passion among many people, but that passion is sometimes misdirected. More than a few nonprofits working to combat trafficking are less than effective. And when I first heard about The Aruna Project’s approach, I was skeptical. Can 5K runs in America really make a difference for women living in India?
But then I stepped onto the production floor in Mumbai, and I saw the women’s smiles. It’s always humbling for me as a man to meet a survivor. In the sewing room, IndyStar visuals editor Mykal McEldowney and I were surrounded by 22 survivors, women like Priya who had suffered unspeakable horror.
The women answered our questions through a translator and asked their own questions of us. They laughed and giggled and showed off, with clear pride, the bags and other products they had made. They also told us about their dreams for the future — one wants to become a fashion designer, another a tailor.
And a young woman named Ruby, no more than five feet tall, hopes to become a singer. When we asked if she would sing for us, she smiled and chose a worship song, a hymn of thanksgiving.
As her clear, strong voice filled the room, she sang not about the pain of the past but of hope for the future.
Human Trafficking 101 from the U.S. Government
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| Human Trafficking 101 for School Administrators and Staff
From the US Government’s Department of Human Services (https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/blue-campaign/Blue%20Campaign%20-%20Human%20Trafficking%20101%20for%20School%20Administrators%20and%20Staff.pdf) |
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What is Human Trafficking? Human trafficking is modern-day slavery and involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to exploit a person for labor or commercial sex.
Human smuggling involves bringing (or attempting to bring) a person into a country in violation of immigration or other laws. Human trafficking is the exploitation of a person for sex or labor. Human trafficking does not require movement or transport across borders – the exploitation is what makes the person a victim. |
Who are the Victims? Who is at Risk? Victims of trafficking can be any age, race, gender, or nationality, including U.S. citizens.
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Did You Know?
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How Do I Identify Human Trafficking?
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Human trafficking can often go unnoticed, even by individuals interacting with a victim on a regular basis. Recognizing the “red flags,” or indicators, can help alert school administrators and staff to a human trafficking situation. Recognizing the signs is the first step in identifying potential victims. No single indicator is necessarily proof of human trafficking. Behavior or Physical State:
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What Should I Do? If you suspect that a person may be a victim of human trafficking, please call the Homeland Security Investigations Tip Line at 1-866-347-2423 (24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in over 300 languages and dialects) or submit a tip online at www.ice.gov/tips. You may also call the National Human Trafficking Resource Center at 1-888-373-7888 to get help or connect with a service provider in your area. The Center is not a law enforcement or immigration authority and is operated by a non-governmental organization. Non-law enforcement personnel should never attempt to directly confront a suspected trafficker or rescue a suspected victim. Doing so could put both your and the victim’s safety at risk. By immediately informing law enforcement of your suspicions, you can safely assist in the recovery of the victim and the dismantling of the trafficking operation. School administrators and staff who suspect a trafficking incident should follow their school district’s established protocol for such matters. Schools that do not have such procedures in place should consider adopting a formal protocol on how to identify the indicators and report suspected cases to law enforcement. Your protocol should be developed in collaboration with school district leadership; federal and/or local law enforcement; mental health, child welfare, or victim services providers; and other appropriate community partners. |
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For more information, training, and resources, please visit www.dhs.gov/BlueCampaign. |
Child Sex Trafficking Epidemic : Protect Your Children!
Are you a parent or grandparent? Do you have minor children under your care? Then read this article; it speaks for itself.
Child sex trafficking is an unimaginable and unspeakable evil!
Yeshua talked about children in the most positive terms as it relates to the kingdom of heaven; our Lord even equated himself with a little child (Matt 18:3–5; Mark 9:36) and blessed the children (Matt 19:13–15). On the other hand, he spoke in the most disparaging and condemning ways of those who hurt and abuse children (Matt 18:6).
The internet is now the main way that evil individuals make contact with innocent children and lure them into criminality. Parents and guardians of children: Protect your little ones by assiduously controlling their access to the internet through their electronic devices. At the same time, surround them with loving guidance, for their life depends upon it. Build a strong spiritual foundation under your children by training them in the ways of YHVH through biblical training resources like Torah Explorers (https://www.hoshanarabbah.org/parshiot.html). Their physical and spiritual life depends on it!
Little Barbies: Sex Trafficking Of Young Girls Is America’s Dirty Little Secret
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
They’re called the Little Barbies.
Children, young girls—some as young as 9 years old—are being bought and sold for sex in America. The average age for a young woman being sold for sex is now 13 years old.
This is America’s dirty little secret.
According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, “Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”
Sex trafficking—especially when it comes to the buying and selling of young girls—has become big business in America, the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity tradedillegally after drugs and guns.
As investigative journalist Amy Fine Collins notes, “It’s become more lucrative and much safer to sell malleable teens than drugs or guns. A pound of heroin or an AK-47 can be retailed once, but a young girl can be sold 10 to 15 times a day.”
Consider this: every two minutes, a child is exploited in the sex industry.
According to USA Today, adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.
Who buys a child for sex? Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life.
“They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.
In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.
On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period of servitude.
It is estimated that at least 100,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.
“Human trafficking—the commercial sexual exploitation of American children and women, via the Internet, strip clubs, escort services, or street prostitution—is on its way to becoming one of the worst crimes in the U.S.,” said prosecutor Krishna Patel.
This is not a problem found only in big cities.
It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.
As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out, “The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”
It is estimated that there are 100,000 to 150,000 under-aged child sex workers in the U.S.
Every year, the girls being bought and sold gets younger and younger.
Social media makes it all too easy for young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators.
As one news center reported, “Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.” Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers.
With a growing demand for sexual slavery and an endless supply of girls and women who can be targeted for abduction, this is not a problem that’s going away anytime soon.
In fact, this growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open: trafficked women and children are advertised on the internet, transported on the interstate, and bought and sold in swanky hotels.
Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government’s war on sex trafficking—much like the government’s war on terrorism, drugs and crime—has become a perfect excuse for inflicting more police state tactics (police check points, searches, surveillance, and heightened security) on a vulnerable public, while doing little to make our communities safer.
So what can you do?
Educate yourselves and your children about this growing menace in our communities.
Stop feeding the monster: Sex trafficking is part of a larger continuum in America that runs the gamut from homelessness, poverty, and self-esteem issues to sexualized television, the glorification of a pimp/ho culture—what is often referred to as the pornification of America—and a billion dollar sex industry built on the back of pornography, music, entertainment, etc.
This epidemic is largely one of our own making, especially in a corporate age where the value placed on human life takes a backseat to profit. It is estimated that the porn industry brings in more money than Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.
Call on your city councils, elected officials and police departments to make the battle against sex trafficking a top priority, more so even than the so-called war on terror and drugs and the militarization of law enforcement.
Stop prosecuting adults for victimless “crimes” such as growing lettuce in their front yard and focus on putting away the pimps and buyers who victimize these young women.
Finally, the police need to do a better job of training, identifying and responding to these issues; communities and social services need to do a better job of protecting runaways, who are the primary targets of traffickers; legislators need to pass legislation aimed at prosecuting traffickers and “johns,” the buyers who drive the demand for sex slaves; and hotels need to stop enabling these traffickers, by providing them with rooms and cover for their dirty deeds.
That so many women and children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.
But the truth is that we are all guilty of contributing to this human suffering. The traffickers are guilty. The consumers are guilty. The corrupt law enforcement officials are guilty. The women’s groups who do nothing are guilty. The foreign peacekeepers and aid workers who contribute to the demand for sex slaves are guilty. Most of all, every individual who does not raise a hue and cry over the atrocities being committed against women and children in almost every nation around the globe—including the United States—is guilty.