And I thought this was a thing of the past!
America’s dirty little secret: Sex trafficking is big business
Sex trafficking in the United States (file photo)
Wed Nov 26, 2014 1:32AM GMT
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The
mysterious disappearance of 18-year-old Hannah Graham on September 13,
2014, has become easy fodder for the media at a time when the news cycle
is lagging. After all, how does a young woman just vanish without a
trace, in the middle of the night, in a town that is routinely lauded
for being the happiest place in America, not to mention one of the most
beautiful?
Yet Graham is not the first girl to vanish in America without a
trace—my hometown of Charlottesville, Va., has had five women go missing
over the span of five years—and it is doubtful she will be the last. I
say doubtful because America is in the grip of 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.
It is estimated that there are 100,000 to 150,000 under-aged sex
workers in the U.S. The average age of girls who enter into street
prostitution is between 12 and 14 years old, with some as young as 9
years old. This doesn’t include those who entered the “trade” as minors
and have since come of age. Rarely do these girls enter into
prostitution voluntarily. As one rescue organization estimated, an
underaged prostitute might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year
period of servitude.
This is America’s dirty little secret.
You don’t hear much about domestic sex trafficking from the media or
government officials, and yet it infects suburbs, cities and towns
across the nation. According to the FBI, sex trafficking is the fastest
growing business in organized crime, the second most-lucrative commodity
traded illegally after drugs and guns. It’s 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.
In order to avoid detection by 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.
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.
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. Young girls are particularly
vulnerable, with 13 being the average age of those being trafficked. 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.”
Consider this: every two minutes, a child is exploited in the sex
industry. 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. 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.
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 such numbers, why don’t we hear more about this? Especially if,
as Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
insists, “this is not a problem that only happens in New York and Los
Angeles and San Francisco. This happens in smaller communities. The only
way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for
it.”
Unfortunately, Americans have become good at turning away from things
that make us uncomfortable or stray too far from our picture-perfect
images of ourselves. In this regard, we’re all complicit in contributing
to this growing evil which, for all intents and purposes, is out in the
open: advertising on the internet, commuting on the interstate,
operating in swanky hotels, taking advantage of a system in which the
police, the courts and the legislatures are more interested with
fattening their coffers by targeting Americans for petty violations than
actually breaking up crime syndicates.
Writing for the Herald-Tribune, reporter J. David McSwane
has put together one of the most chilling and insightful investigative
reports into sex trafficking in America. “The Stolen Ones” should be
mandatory reading for every American, especially those who still believe
it can’t happen in their communities or to their children because it’s
mainly a concern for lower income communities or immigrants.
As McSwane makes clear, no community is safe from this danger, and
yet very little is being done to combat it. Indeed, although police
agencies across the country receive billions of dollars’ worth of
military equipment, weapons and training that keeps them busy fighting a
losing battle against marijuana, among other less pressing concerns,
very little time and money is being invested in the fight against sex
trafficking except for the FBI’s annual sex trafficking sting, which
inevitably makes national headlines for the numbers of missing girls
recovered.
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. 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 McSwane recounts: “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 that was busted earlier in 2014
caters 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.
What can you do?
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.
Insist that law enforcement agencies in the country at all levels,
local, state and federal, funnel their resources into fighting the crime
of sex trafficking. 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.
Educate yourselves and your children about this growing menace in our
communities. The future of America is at stake. As YouthSpark, a group
that advocates for young people points out, 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.
Stop feeding the monster. 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. The U.S. is a huge consumer of
trafficked “goods,” with national sporting events such as the Super Bowl
serving as backdrops for the sex industry’s most lucrative seasons.
Each year, for instance, the Super Bowl serves as a “windfall” for sex
traffickers selling minors as young as 13 years old. As one sex
trafficking survivor explained, “They're coming to the Super Bowl not
even to watch football. They’re coming to the Super Bowl to have sex
with women and/or men or children.”
Finally, as the Abell Foundation’s report on trafficking advises: the
police need to do a better job of training on, 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;
hotels need to stop enabling these traffickers, by providing them with
rooms and cover for their dirty deeds; and “we the people” need to stop
hiding our heads in the sand and acting as if there are other matters
more pressing.
Those concerned about the police state in America, which I document in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,
should be equally concerned about the sex trafficking trade in America.
It is only made possible by the police state’s complicity in turning
average Americans into suspects for minor violations while letting the
real criminals wreak havoc on our communities. No doubt about it, these
are two sides of the same coin.
NT/NT
