THE
ESSENCE OF EVIL: SEX WITH CHILDREN HAS BECOME BIG BUSINESS IN AMERICA
Sat, 04/27/2019 - 00:05
“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.
