|
The Super Bowl’s Biggest
Losers: The Boys and Girls Being Sold for Sex 20 Times a Day
By John W. Whitehead
January 28, 2020
There can only be one winner emerging from this year’s
Super Bowl LIV showdown between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas
City Chiefs, but the biggest losers will be the hundreds of young girls
and boys—some as young as 9 years old—who
will be bought and sold for sex during the course of the big game.
It’s common to refer to this evil practice, which has become the fastest growing business in
organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded
illegally after drugs and guns as child sex trafficking, but what we’re
really talking about is rape.
Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5
million times a year in the United States.
It’s not just young girls who are vulnerable to these predators,
either.
According to a USA Today investigative report, “boys make up about 36% of children caught up in
the U.S. sex industry (about 60% are female and less
than 5% are transgender males and females).”
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.
On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period.
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.
|
|
|
Child rape has become Big Business in America.
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. Every transaction is rape.
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.”
This is America’s dirty little secret.
But what or who is driving this evil appetite for young flesh? 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.
Catholic and Protestant churches have been particularly singled out in
recent years for harboring these sexual predators. Twenty years after
the clergy sex abuse scandal rocked the Catholic Church, hundreds of
sexual predators—priests, deacons, monks and lay people—continue to be
given work assignments in proximity to children. In many cases, the abuse continues unabated.
Although much less publicized, the sex crimes within the Protestant
Church have been no less egregious. For instance, a recent expose into
the Southern Baptist Church leaders by the Houston Chronicle documents
over 700 child sex victims “who were molested, sent explicit photos or texts, exposed
to pornography, photographed nude, or repeatedly raped by youth pastors.
Some victims as young as 3 were molested or raped inside pastors'
studies and Sunday school classrooms.”
And then you have national sporting events such as the Super Bowl,
where sex traffickers have been caught selling minors, some as young as 9 years old. Yet
even if the Super Bowl is not exactly a “windfall” for sex traffickers
as some claim, it remains a lucrative source of income for the child
sex trafficking industry and a draw for those who are willing to pay to
rape young children.
According to criminal investigator Marc Chadderdon, these “buyers”—the
so-called “ordinary” men who drive the demand for sex with
children—represent a cross-section of American society: every age, every race, every socio-economic
background, cops, teachers, corrections workers, pastors, etc.
And then there are the extra-ordinary men, such as Jeffrey
Epstein, the hedge fund billionaire / convicted serial pedophile who was arrested on charges of molesting, raping
and sex trafficking dozens of young girls, only to die
under highly unusual circumstances.
It is believed that Epstein operated his own personal sex trafficking
ring not only for his personal pleasure but also for the pleasure of his friends and business
associates. According to The Washington Post,
“several of the young women…say they were offered to the rich and famous as sex partners
at Epstein’s parties.” At various times, Epstein ferried his friends
about on his private plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”
Men like Epstein and his cronies, who belong to a powerful, wealthy, elite segment of society
that operates according to their own rules, skate free of
accountability by taking advantage of a criminal justice system that panders to the
powerful, the wealthy and the elite.
Still, 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.
“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,”
writes Jessica Bennett for Newsweek.
“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.”
This is what Bennett refers to as the “pornification of a generation.”
In other words, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed
upon by sexual predators.
Social media makes it all too easy. As one news center reported,
“Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on … 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 children are advertised on the internet, transported on the
interstate, and bought and sold in swanky hotels.
Unfortunately, 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
protect our children from sex predators.
WC: 2514
Source: https://bit.ly/2U75wVd
|
|
|
|