Posted on 04/27/2019 10:29:22 AM PDT by Perseverando
“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’s not.
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.
WC: 2620
They have the power and the leisure to indulge their worst impulses.
The more frequent motivation in that was to promote fidelity by making women mot desire sex.
You are not alone.
Yes, wives are to obey their husbands (in the Lord). But that is part of obeying God.
When we keep God’s law we are obeying God.
Children are to obey their parents, citizens their government, servants their masters... ( in the Lord ) - because God has told us to.
This does not mean we are candy dishes being bought and sold. We are all protected by God’s law. The fact is sometimes people break it. But not with God’s approval, far from it.
I know that. I'm just saying that the male sex drive is a mindless and powerful force, and rather a dark one, and if they don't control it, this is what happens.
Thank you. Good night.
Thank you.
They have or acquire those impulses because there is nothing to give any meaning to their lives.They may invoke the Church to support something or to attack someone but they don’t believe any of it.They try to substitute sensation for meaning.
What is that even supposed to mean? It cannot ALL be true so none of it is?
There is a growing problem with sex exploitation, and a lot of it is out in the open. We have little boys and girls being paraded in sexualized outfits by the LGBT crowd in public shows, TV shows, parades, etc.
The left is out there screaming how these things are their rights.
And then we have people on a conservative forum who want to defend pornography and prostitution.
These are not “Constitutional rights” BTW, whatever you have been taught. Hopefully, these are not what you are referring to as being in danger.
Do you believe this issue should be important enough to suspend constitutional rights? And, you know what those rights are.
Be wary of Reichstag fires, etc.
“Would you please quit trying to put words into my mouth.”
Would you please be specific about what you mean?
You said “it all cannot be true” but provide nothing specific which is supposedly false or any basis for how we can know that it is false.
You said news of sex trafficking “can be highly hyped and exaggerated”. Can’t anything be? Couldn’t there be an even worse problem in which it is hidden and swept under the rug while innocent children suffer in silence?
You said this information / news can be “used to remove constitutional protections”.
Really? How? Be specific.
“And, you know what those rights are. Be wary of Reichstag fires, etc.”
This is from The Rutherford Institute. There motto is: “Our job is to make the government play by the rules of the Constitution.”
They in no way have advocated anything unconstitutional. Your whole premise is ridiculous and uninformed.
Read the article on which you are commenting. Here are the things they advocate:
“Educate yourselves and your children”
“Stop feeding the monster.” That is, don’t give the industry money.
And straight from the article also: “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.”
There are literally, right now, children in cages crying in pain, IN AMERICA, who have been enslaved by pimps, pornographers, pedophiles, and Satanists,and the last thing we need is dissenters saying this is not a real problem or it is being overblown or let’s not rush into doing something foolish. If you or someone you cared about were in such a situation you would be begging God for someone—anyone—to come rescue you or your loved one.
A lot of people can’t bear that what is going on is real. It is a sick horror show. For many it is hell on earth. Those who cannot face this reality should find other matters to occupy themselves with. But what they should not do is say to themselves that they can’t take this reality so it must not be true. That’s psychosis. And further, they must not spread this psychosis to others by claiming that these things are not happening, because they are.
Some of the things being carried out routinely in this “business” which goes hand in hand with the abortion business, are horrific, catastrophic, heart-rending, diabolical, and pure evil. And the average person cannot even stand to read description about some of these things that are being done to small children (and people of all ages actually). The evidence that this is real is immense, verifiable, and inescapable.
Yes, child sexual abuse is a real problem. These children come from backgrounds that would simply horrify us. They are abused just as badly in their home countries, in Mexico, on the road to America, and everywhere in between. It did not start in America, and we are not to blame for all the ills of the world.
Frankly, I cannot understand why an adult male would have any interest in children. Arrested development? I don’t know.
On the other hand, trafficking has, in Florida, been recently used as a reason to secretly video tape consenting adults naked, none of whom were trafficked. Their lives have been destroyed, and none were convicted. The videos are going to be released to the public for the public’s entertainment and for shaming purposes. A crime was committed by the police faking a bomb threat, to install the cameras secretly. The massage parlor was co-operated by police and owners for months so that more males could be caught in the honey trap.
Now all of this was done to save women from trafficking, supposedly. However, none of the women were trafficked. And, it would have been relatively easy to interview the workers in safe places to determine whether the are free to leave, what conditions the live under, and how they were brought here.
Now we have American police secretly recording naked people, just like the East Germany Stasi, before the fall of the iron curtain.
So, in order to save the immigrant children, you are just fine with this? Can you not see that emotional buttons are pushed to facilitate mission creep?
Where will this end? Will the data gathered by FBI, CIA apparatus be used to spy and extort and silence Americans? The IRS has been used politically, and everyone files income tax. The laws are so complicated that no one can file without committing income tax crimes. If you were interviewed by investigators for 40 hours, could your memory protect you from perjury traps? I would bet that, no matter how good a person you are, and I have little doubt you are a good person, you could be convicted of something.
All I am saying, is that in this environment beware of emotional posturing to “save the ———”. It has been, and is often used to justify nefarious means.
Do you support a police state in order to “protect the children”?
Your post #50 is right on and is very important, especially in today’s environment.
Pretty neat trick if you can import your own tribe of voters and use the media to blame their criminal activities on the other side’s voters.
It’s like a gory mangled wreck on the freeway. Once you start looking at it, you can’t turn away.
The costumes are magnificent. The towns are beautifully recreated (but way too tidy, neat and clean). The scenery is wonderful.
The Indian tribes are all very woke because they are led by highly intelligent, feeling, caring, strong women. There are a couple of blacks, one a runaway slave and another a black free woman who is indigent at being called a “slave.” They are the wisest, most couth, and well spoken people in all of Eastern Canada. Most of the whites are unimaginably evil, degraded and violent.
You’re missing a lot.
The Indian tribes are all very woke because they are led by highly intelligent, feeling, caring, strong women. There are a couple of blacks, one a runaway slave and another a black free woman who is indigent at being called a “slave.” They are the wisest, most couth, and well spoken people in all of Eastern Canada. Most of the whites are unimaginably evil, degraded and violent.
You’re missing a lot.
“Do you support a police state in order to ‘protect the children’?”
No.
“All I am saying, is that in this environment beware of emotional posturing to ‘save the ———’. It has been, and is often used to justify nefarious means.”
True. And as a means to obtain never-ending tax increases. “It is for the pubic safety... police officers who risk their lives... firefighters... better schools... etc. we just need more money to do these great things.”
“So, in order to save the immigrant children, you are just fine with this? Can you not see that emotional buttons are pushed to facilitate mission creep?”
It is not just immigrant children. Children themselves are fairly defenseless. Any could become targets of kidnappers / traffickers, including any American children. But those in especially vulnerable situations tend to get exploited more—ones where the parents are drug addicts, broken homes, homes where one or both parents are incarcerated, orphans, etc.
We also have an international criminal organization comprised of Satan / Lucifer worshippers who use Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRN) to enslave children using mind control techniques invented or revived by NAZI occultists. This was imported into our country through Operation Paperclip. It probably existed in some forms here going back to the late 1800s / early 1900s when modern Satanism was incubated through the demonically-inspired Aleister Crowley’s writings and organizations. (This era saw the country divided on the issue of slavery and ideas like Darwinian evolution, while Nietzsche’s anti-God philosophies gained traction as well. John Dewey’s progressive education formed the foundation of the modern public school system.)
“On the other hand, trafficking has, in Florida, been recently used as a reason to secretly video tape consenting adults naked, none of whom were trafficked. Their lives have been destroyed, and none were convicted. The videos are going to be released to the public for the public’s entertainment and for shaming purposes. A crime was committed by the police faking a bomb threat, to install the cameras secretly. The massage parlor was co-operated by police and owners for months so that more males could be caught in the honey trap.”
This appears to be where we part ways in our worldviews and philosophies. I reject “consenting adults” as any sort of basis for sexual morality or legality. It is fundamentally the same philosophy that treats prostitution, pornography, abortion, and all types of drug trafficking and abuse under the guise of “my body, my choice.”
This goes back to the worldwide feminist movement that started around the same time as Satanism—the late 1800s / early 1900s. The consequence of these philosophies takes multiple generations to manifest. But the outcome has been repeated in historical rising and falling of civilizations which, from a Christian perspective, can be seen outlined in Romans 1 of the Bible. The sex & drugs revolution of the 1960s is the direct result. So is the “abortion rights” movement that followed. So is the modern LGBT movement.
Too many conservatives and libertarians desire and seek the benefits of earlier eras of our society without the Christian moral restraints. That can’t happen. They go hand in hand.
“Yes, child sexual abuse is a real problem. These children come from backgrounds that would simply horrify us. They are abused just as badly in their home countries, in Mexico, on the road to America, and everywhere in between. It did not start in America, and we are not to blame for all the ills of the world.”
America is rich. This makes America a prime target for enterprising criminal organizations that sell anything illegal. Law enforcement can attempt to cut off supply, but it is at least equally important to address the demand.
America has a lot more people with disposable income and more time on their hands than most of the world. Most of the world is comprised of people who subsist from day to day. Our money flows into these countries to provide us goods and services. This money can benefit poor people around the world who have the opportunity to work for increasing wages. However, when what America buys is people then the money flows to criminal organizations and corrupt government officials. America is culpable for worldwide human trafficking.
A civil, moral, just, and free society cannot exist very long where sex and recreational drugs are commodities. Societies apply their collective values to representative government and the laws created by this government. So, when societies tolerate extramarital sex and drug abuse, civilization begins its long, slow collapse. But when they codify values that support family, marriage, personal responsibility and industry, civilization thrives.
The personal proclivities of individuals, when it comes to sex and drugs, feed into the societal moral standards that determine these outcomes. A person who uses marijuana recreationally will be distorted in his or her thinking so that it seems to be a harmless activity—a victimless crime. Same thing goes with those who pay for pornography or prostitution. They will blame the system that “criminalizes innocent behavior.”
But these things need, indeed MUST, remain criminal in order for civilization to be sustained.
Sting operations of prostitution fronts like the massage parlor are necessary as long as there is prostitution. The solution to drugs, porn, prostitution and similar societal problems is not to wave a white flag or pretend that these things are not destructive to society. Arguing that no one was convicted of a crime is like arguing that the courts keep ruling that Planned Parenthood has the right to tax dollars and can’t be held accountable for any crimes it commits. These things just reflect on how corrupt our society and government have become.
Laws prohibiting prostitution are necessary. Enforcing these laws is necessary. When people break these laws there must be consequences.
“However, none of the women were trafficked. And, it would have been relatively easy to interview the workers in safe places to determine whether the are free to leave, what conditions the live under, and how they were brought here.”
You have no way of knowing this unless you are personally involved. The job of law enforcement should not be trying to determine who is a real criminal versus victim based on the presumption that prostitution is a victimless crime. Those engaged in it are either victims or perpetrators, period. If a woman is taking money for sex, she should also be charged with a crime unless there is credible evidence that she was coerced. If she does this due to drug addiction or similar reasons, there should be a path to rehabilitation. Same is true of the men who patronize them. Perhaps there should be a first-time-offender program that treats sex addiction and educates about human trafficking and the harm that prostitution does to society.
I could give you first-hand examples of how prostitution and “adult entertainment” destroys lives and society, but I’ve already written too much. So I will leave it at this.
Of course, I agree, humblegunner.
You, unfortunately, were still incorrect.
The analogy was spot on. You simply cannot see the forest for the trees.
Because you cannot see the forest for the trees, that does not cause the analogy to be incorrect.
It is also pretty shocking what the Russian soldiers did to under-aged girls in Germany right after WWII. But before that there are youtube videos about Berlin in the 20's being the new Babylon where 5 American dollars bought you ANYTHING.
You have no way of knowing this unless you are personally involved.
I must admit I kind of like your idea of enforced morality in order to save society. We need more cameras, everywhere, in all private places so that people are not tempted to do anything wrong. We should create another agency with law enforcement powers, named "Ministry for the Preservation of Public Morals" to enforce public morality.
Don't you think this would improve our society? /S
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