Used, enSlaved, Abused

Christina Dohr - Features Editor
March 9, 2010
Filed under Features

Eleven-year old Kristen hated being at home. Her dad was always drunk and she hated watching him take out his irrational anger on her little brother.
“One day I was out avoiding the house when an older man approached me on the street. He drove a beautiful car, had business cards, and said he had so much money he could give me anything I wanted. I’d never had nice things – or had an adult treat me that well – so after we talked for a while, I got in his car and drove off with him,” she stated.
She was taken to a motel room where she was to live with six other underage sex workers, allowed to smoke all the marijuana and cocaine they could want. Thus began Kristen’s five years as a child prostitute.
2.5 million children (the majority of them girls) are sexually exploited in the commercial sex industry worldwide each year, according to stopchildtraffickingnow.org. Often when Americans hear about children being bought and sold for sexual exploitation, they consider it nothing more than a sad reality that occurs in poverty-stricken countries. But the issue is actually a lot closer to home than most Americans realize.
“For far too long in America, the attitude toward child trafficking has been that it’s terrible, but happens somewhere else,” says Ernie Allen, president of the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children in Alexandria, Virginia. “But this problem exists right here on Main Street, USA.”
300,000 children in the U.S. are at risk every year for commercial sexual exploitation, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Minga, an organization of teens fighting the global sex trade of children, says that one in five children who regularly use the Internet are approached by strangers for sex, and 25% of sex tourists outside the U.S. are American.
Victims of this undercover industry go perilously unnoticed; many can remain trapped in sexual slavery for years, enduring unimaginable amounts of physical and emotional suffering.
“The psychological torture that they put you under is nothing that an adult can even imagine. From a kid’s perspective, it’s fear and psychological torture and shame all together,” said Theresa Flores, a former sex slave who appeared on the NBC news show TODAY in February.
A $12 billion dollar global industry, illegal trafficking of children is not an issue that will eventually fade out because demand is high and constant. Innocent children are hardest hit because of their vulnerability and susceptibility to manipulation. A shocking amount of kids in America are being lured under false pretenses into situations that are nearly inescapable.
Forced to “work” until they bring home a minimum of $500 each night, many children can have between 10 and 20 “clients” a day. They hand over their earnings in exchange for food, housing, clothes, and often drugs, but even at the end of a day of “work,” these victims undergo even worse experiences with their pimps, who use emotional manipulation and physical abuse to maintain control.
“After the abuse, my pimp would tell me to sit on his lap and ask me what was wrong,” says Tina Frundt, a former child prostitute who now works for the Polaris Project, an anti-trafficking agency in Washington, DC. “When I said, ‘You broke my arm,’ he hit me and asked me again. I had to say, ‘I fell down.’ … Instead of being angry at him, I grew angry at myself for not listening to him in the first place.”
There are plenty of organizations out there whose goal is to raise awareness of such horrible undercover realities as these. But awareness is only the first step.
Stop Child Trafficking Now is an organization that has created a multi-phase plan involving hundreds of special operative teams going out into their respective locations to uncover sex traders and ensure justice is served. The teams are made up of military, federal and state intelligence and investigative organizations. Since human trafficking is the second-largest criminal industry in the world, SCTNow places most emphasis on cutting off the demand in order to solve the problem, rather than simply rescuing victims. Their approach to this task involves investigating and targeting child predators for prosecution and conviction.
Part of their efforts include providing everyday people with the opportunity to help end child slavery in America by hosting an annual nation-wide walk campaign. Last year over 8,000 individuals, student groups, corporations, religious organizations, communities and students from over 80 college campuses participated in the Flagship Walk in New York City. For those unable to attend in New York, they also host awareness fund-raising walks in 39 other communities around the country. Last year they raised a total of $600,000, and hope to surpass that number at the walk this year, set for the weekend of October 2. SCTNow encompasses the motto “Rescue a child with your sole” to move from awareness to action in order to end the sexual exploitation of innocent children in America.
“We have allowed this to happen,” said Flores, “We don’t like to think that it happens here, but slavery is alive and well in the U.S.”