Posted on 07/21/2020 4:31:13 AM PDT by Kaslin
Last January, while the U.S. economy was humming and fear of a global pandemic was non-existent, St. Petersburg, Florida Police investigators found a 16-year-old boy in a local feces ridden house trailer where he was being tortured and used as a sex slave by adult men.
The young boy had been missing from his home in Louisiana for nearly a year and living with four adult males at Silver Lake Mobile Home Park. According to police reports, Mark Dennis, Andrew Clements, Curtis Gruwell, and Michael Schwartz, all charged with conspiracy to commit human trafficking, lived in the trailer with the boy surrounded by "whips, leather masks, and bondage tools." Dennis called himself the "Grand Master" and referred to the other men and the boy as his "pups" during bondage rituals.
The boy was lured by his traffickers through online video games and delivered to his traffickers from Louisiana to Florida by a family acquaintance. He was continually raped inside the trailer as neighbors and friends were unaware of the horrors until seeing the arrests in the news. As the boy was regularly molested, he received no medical care, education, or any contact with the world outside the trailer park.
Fast forward over one year later. The U.S. economy has ground to a near-total halt, and a global health crisis grips the nation. Schools across the nation were shut down in March for the remainder of the Spring, and now states across the country are struggling with the decision whether or not to close public schools for the Fall.
The prospect of millions of Americans once again confined to their homes, and parents tasked with educating their children at home through online learning programs will put millions of American kids at a higher risk of sexual abuse and exploitation. As parents and kids shelter in place, parents and children will increasingly turn to radio, television, and the internet to provide an education and to pass the time until in-classroom instruction is reinstituted.
According to Forbes, total internet usage in the United States has surged by 50-70 percent during the pandemic shutdown. March data collected by SuperAwesome, a children's technology company, shows web traffic to kid-focused apps and digital services have increased by nearly 70 percent in the U.S.
As more American kids are isolated at home and spending more time on their digital devices, it is creating new opportunities for sex traffickers to endanger our kids. Sexual predators are using the COVID-19 pandemic and the increased online exposure to their advantage in order to recruit new victims and hide those already being victimized by sex trafficking.
On March 16, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a public warning to parents about the dangers of human traffickers using popular online platforms to recruit young people into human trafficking. Human traffickers utilize online platforms, including dating apps, Facebook, Instagram, and as was the case of the boy rescued in Florida as well as hundreds of other cases around the country, online gaming consoles are used to find and recruit potential victims.
The pandemic gripping our nation has interrupted our daily lives, but the operations of sex traffickers have not been interrupted. Online sex predators and human traffickers are actively pursuing paid sex with young people, and with more kids online and not in the classroom, traffickers and buyers have a more captive audience to lure victims.
Law enforcement continues to combat traffickers both in the streets and online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, it is up to parents and other caretakers of our nation's children to pay close attention to the online activities of young people as we remain sheltered at home, and pay even closer attention to their kids activities as schools implement online learning.
The lives of thousands of kids are at stake, and it is up to every American to remain vigilant in fighting the systematic buying and selling of our youth.
BS.
I’ll bet more kids have died under the watchful *care* of social services allowing them to stay in dangerous situations than at the hands of their homeschooling parents.
There’s lots of abuse going on in homes that the public school system knows about and does nothing about either because they won’t, or can’t. Or if they do, they KNOW nothing will be done.
Anecdotal evidence for sure but I’ve talked to more than enough public school teachers over the years and heard this far too often. Not to mention the welfare town we lived in where we saw the abuse and gaming the system.
Having kids in public school is absolutely NO Guarantee in the least that abuse like this is not going to happen.
I think teachers are predators since we have so many stories of them raping children.
Kids are far safer at home.
I already saw this on South Park.
Sometimes I lose count of the number of stupid things said on this board.
and I am sorry I have to call them stupid but that’s what they are. Either too many of you have grown up in an imaginary Norman Rockwell painting or you are just idiots
There is a staggering amount of sexual abuse in households.
And anyone who thinks one teacher with maybe two hundred kids during the day is doing more sexual abuse than 200 separate kids at home really knows nothing and shouldn’t comment on anything regarding the subject.
this is another reason we lose. Way too many conservatives have grown up in a bubble. Almost none have grown up in the real world or the streets
too many of them talk tough about the 50 guns they have but they’ve never been even in a street fight. Where were they when the statues were coming down? When the flags are coming down?
I’ve known guys with guns and I knew which ones would use them and which ones wouldn’t. The ones who talked about them too damn much wouldn’t.
We need a lot more Trump conservatives. Guys who know what it’s like to get down and dirty and fist fight And throw dirty punches to win. In the streets and in business.
And it’s not just sexual abuse that gets the kids
If I couldnt escape my home to go out until the night time I would have lost my mind hearing about debt Add sickness and problems keeping up with the bills and how long pop may live and a million other things. The outside and the street was my refuge.
That’s the real world. It’s hard and it’s mean and it’s cruel and you have to fight back or it will knock you down and keep you there.
I fear too many conservatives know nothing but the real world and that leaves us at a severe disadvantage
Gotta learn to moderate your insane theories, first we have to send kids home because school will kill them with covid. Now we have to send them to school because they will be abused.
Which is it?
+.
The teachers unions are trying to keep schools shut. I say if you don’t fully open, then dock the pay of teachers and rebate school taxes back to property taxpayers.
Since teachers unions are always clamoring for smaller classroom sizes, let them try their half-week classroom/half-week virtual teaching.
One catch...on the virtual days, let them have a thousand students instead of their normal 24 to 36.
Or they double the number of classes they teach and have half the students in each class.
Thank God for Donald Trump, the 'Brawler'.
Decertify the unions and cancel their friggin' pensions.
“And anyone who thinks one teacher with maybe two hundred kids during the day is doing more sexual abuse than 200 separate kids at home really knows nothing and shouldn’t comment on anything regarding the subject.”
Wow are you dumb. School routinely sexually abuse children just with their predatory curriculum; teaching homosexuality and sodomy, masturbation techniques to elementary school kids, Heather has Two Mommies, etc, etc, etc.
totally, don’t full for this anti-home schooling BS!
Disagree 100%. The opposite is true. As the old saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who's been robbed.
Liberals believe more government will solve society's problems. Yes, many liberals are marxists who want complete control over everyone. But, some liberals truly believe that big government programs will help people. They are the ones who live in a bubble.
Conservatives are not so naïve. We don't trust big government. We've seen for ourselves how "absolute power corrupts absolutely." We see that leftists only want power and control, not freedom.
And anyone who thinks one teacher with maybe two hundred kids during the day is doing more sexual abuse
Schools are staffed with many good people, but a single sicko employed there (not necessarily a teacher) has access to many children. It happened in my school, and when I raised my family in a different town, it happened in that school, too.
And that is exactly what it is.
It’s the liberal argument, while they let child abusers like Clinton go scott free.
I’m actually shocked that Townhall would publish something this left leaning.
That horrific crime occurred when the schools were open.
Wish the evil SOBs were put to death. What those animals did to that teenage boy was sickening. They are not human and should be put down like dogs.
Pray that justice is served and that somehow this boy is able to find peace.
Exactly. And it didn't occur in his home with his family. He made a decision to leave home to live with a stranger, which proved to be disastrous.
It has nothing to do with schools' being open or closed.
That is the best story they’ve got about the risk of school closings? Sad.
They didn’t even make a real effort. Even the author should have realized that a story from more than a year ago, when schools were open, is making the opposite point from the one he intends.
(The point is, Teenagers do stupid stuff, and sometimes the outcomes are absolutely catastrophic for them.)
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