Sickening, and Heartbreaking

How is it that the Catholic Church is vilified for being backwards and hostile to the rights of women when in reality, it is the sex-crazed culture that's doing that? I'm reading an article from Vanity Fair entitled "Sex Trafficking of Americans: The Girls Next Door," and this thought just keeps coming to my mind that feminists, instead of fighting a real enemy and being an advocate for young girls, they fight a 'supposed' enemy in the Catholic Church. For examples of how the Church views women, sexuality, and family, please view: On the Regulation of Birth; On Christian Marriage; On the Dignity and Vocation of Women; The Great Sacrament of Matrimony; On the Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World;  Theology of the Body; just to name a few and not to mention various writings from local bishops and cardinals around the world.

Fair warning, the article is not for the faint of heart to read, it is graphic and horrific and heartbreaking. My comments will be in [bolded brackets]. Here are some choice quotes:

There are more young American girls entering the commercial sex industry—an estimated 300,000 at this moment—and their ages have been dropping drastically. “The average starting age for prostitution is now 13,” says Rachel Lloyd, executive director of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (gems), a Harlem-based organization that rescues young women from “the life.” [I believe part of the lowering of ages of prostitutes is the unhealthy obsession that our society has with youth and their absolute abhorrence of anything to do with getting older/dying.]
....
The explanations offered for these downwardly expanding demographics are various, and not at all mutually exclusive. Dr. Sharon Cooper believes that the anti-intellectual, consumerist, hyper-violent, and super-eroticized content of movies (Hustle & Flow), reality TV (Cathouse), video games (Grand Theft Auto: Vice City), gangsta rap (Nelly’s “Tip Drill”), and cyber sites (Second Life: Jail Bait) has normalized sexual harm. [Gee, there's a surprise! We were sold a lie when it came to the sexual revolution - "Be free to explore your sexuality" has become a free-for-all descent into madness and licentiousness.] “History is repeating itself, and we’re back to treating women and children as chattel,” she says. “It’s a sexually toxic era of ‘pimpfantwear’ for your newborn son and thongs for your five-year-old daughter.” [So we see the effects of marketing.] Additionally, Cooper cites the breakdown of the family unit (statistically, absent or abusive parents compounds risk) ["As goes the family, so goes the world."] and the emergence of vast cyber-communities of like-minded deviant individuals, who no longer have disincentives to act on their most destructive predatory fantasies. [I don't argue necessarily for a regulation of teh interwebz, again, we go back to a mindset of 'anonymity'. I can be as crude, rude, and lewd as I want because I'm 'anonymous'.] Krishna Patel, assistant U.S. attorney in Bridgeport, Connecticut, invokes the easy money. Criminals have learned, often in prison—where “macking” memoirs such as Iceberg Slim’s Pimp are best-sellers—that 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. [How sad is it that we have stricter laws for dealing dope than we do in dealing girls. And look how the 'war on drugs' has been turning out.]
....
Says Krishna Patel, “I’d always dismissed the idea of human trafficking in the United States. I’m Indian, and when I went to Mumbai and saw children sold openly, I wondered, Why isn’t anything being done about it? But now I know—it’s no different here. I never would have believed it, but I’ve seen it. 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.” [I think part of the reason why is simply because so many refuse to see prostitution and human trafficking as a serious problem. Most people believe - or want to believe - that girls who are prostitutes are doing it of their own free will.]

....
Pimps refer to this trust-building courtship phase as “seasoning,” and they can be extremely patient. Forensic pediatrician Dr. Sharon Cooper, a specialist in treating juvenile victims of sex trafficking, terms the process “grooming.” Girls acquainted with “the life” call it “spitting game.” Forbes, Scates notes, was a master at singling out, on the high-school campus or at the shopping center, the vulnerable girl with abysmal self-esteem. “And,” she says, “he sensed what lines would be most effective on which girl.” [Again, we see the role that fathers play - or don't - in a girl's life. The better the father figure, the better for young girls and boys.]
...
Intra-familial recruiting of sex slaves is a common practice. Eva, a Norwich, Connecticut, girl, was forced by her mother-in-law—via starvation, drugs, and threats to her baby boys—into prostituting herself at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, the Connecticut casinos. Caroline, the former 4-H member, was taken to a brothel by her best friend’s mom and a pastor, the Reverend Henry L. Price. Gwen was especially easy prey for her aunt and Forbes because, before she had even left Vermont, she was hooked on heroin—a virtual epidemic nowadays in the New England and New York suburbs because of its current purity, potency, and cheapness. [This just sickens me. A pastor took a young girl to a brothel? Disgusting. And her own family sold her into this?]
...
Then, one day in December 2003, at a sleazy motor inn on the Berlin Turnpike—an 11.2-mile time-warp stretch of asphalt, lined on either side with at least 37 other no-tell motels—Paris remitted Forbes $1,200, and the girls, court documents show, were his. Buying girls like livestock is not unusual. Cheryl, a gems girl, at about 14 was sold by one pimp, “Love,” to another pimp, “Junior,” for $600. The New York City Police detective Wayne Taylor—convicted in July 2008 for the attempted kidnapping of a 13-year-old—purchased his thrall for $500 from a Brooklyn “pimp partner.” In fact, the price for an adolescent female slave is far lower than it was in the mid–19th century, when, adjusted to today’s dollar, the going rate was roughly $40,000, the price of a car. [This goes back to the beginning of the article when the author spoke of going back to a time where women and children are treated like chattel.]
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At one point another pimp showed up, pretending to be a client, and kidnapped the two girls. He hauled them up to Boston, where they were cooped up in a shack. Though there is a system for acquiring girls from one another, known as “serving,” pimps often break their own rules and steal “bitches” outright. Gwen and Alicia were especially coveted because of their skin color. In a rigid hierarchy that clinical psychologist Melissa Farley—founder of Prostitution Research & Education, a San Francisco–based think tank—calls “eroticized racism,” the “snow bunnies” (white girls) outclass the “ducks” (black girls). “Maybe one out of 50 callers would request a black or Latina,” says Caroline. “Most asked for ‘the girl next door’—a blonde, thin teenager with big breasts. That’s candy to ants.”
...
Alicia wound up in the York Correctional Institution, in Niantic, Connecticut, where she, like Gwen, dried out, and where Detective Scates first interviewed her, on Gwen’s suggestion. “Both Alicia and Gwen got off heroin on their own,” Scates reflects, “which makes me really believe that Paris and Forbes kept them on drugs for their own purposes.” And, of course, their habits had turned into an insidious vicious cycle, too, because they self-medicated in order to numb out the nightmare their lives had become. [I would too.]
...
Scates knew she had a federal case on her hands, involving money-laundering, interstate commerce, conspiracy, and the Mann Act—the 1910 federal white-slave statute prohibiting the transporting of individuals across state lines for the purposes of prostitution. “First thing,” Scates says, “I went to [I.R.S. special agent] Douglas Werth,” her cohort on the Alpha bust, who, with his six-foot-five-inch frame and Glock 40, does not fit the stereotypical image of an I.R.S. number cruncher. “Criminals usually fear the I.R.S. more than the F.B.I. Going to jail is the cost of doing business,” Werth explains. “But nobody wants their stuff taken from them.” Adds Werth, who has spent more than 20 years with the I.R.S., “Pretty quickly, we realized that this was bigger than Alpha—there were more people, younger girls, and a real bad guy.” [Two things I didn't know about: the Mann Act and fearing the I.R.S. more than the F.B.I. It makes sense though. Going to jail, sure, it's no cakewalk. But going to jail and being stripped of all property and money - that's more suck-tastic.]
...
There is also a one-year statute of limitations on patronizing a prostitute [One year? You've got to be joking me.], in the state of Connecticut a Class A misdemeanor. Says Sergeant McKee, who conducted interviews with johns, “No one at first wanted to acknowledge patronizing a prostitute.” (The average john is married, employed, and in his late 30s; their numbers, according to studies, are escalating.) Says Scates, “They came from every walk of life you could think of.” Remarks Caroline, the 4-H girl, “You name it, every guy is into it. I had a politician, a prosecutor, a police officer, a lawyer, doctors right in Saint Francis Hospital. There’s more of them than of us—and I don’t respect them.” [Of course no one wanted to own up to it. Why would you, if you're supposed to be a 'respectable' 'family' man? It makes me feel ill and suspicious of motives and behaviors.]

Most of the johns were startled to learn that the girls were not acting of their own free will—75 to 80 percent of prostitutes don’t. The men believed the ads, and the legend of the Happy Hooker. Each of them also assumed they were the one exception to the rule of the repulsive customer. Says Karen Stauss, the former staff attorney for Polaris Project, a D.C.-based not-for-profit anti-slavery-and-human-trafficking organization, “Johns don’t understand what they’re contributing to. It never occurs to them that the woman who is smiling is being abused. They really don’t know what’s going on—and they don’t care.” [When we are blinded to our own sin, we will convince ourselves of almost anything if only we can continue in our sin and not be shown how it affects others.]
...
Observes Scates, though the economic circumstances of the girls varied and they covered the full racial spectrum, “a common theme with every victim is that they came from a dysfunctional home with no positive male role model.” If there was poverty of any kind, it was of the emotional variety. [This is so indicative of our culture, and the breakdown of families. Yet we are told that divorce is okay, it doesn't hurt kids; pre-marital sex is okay; adults hooking up is okay.]
...
Introduced and signed into law under the Clinton administration, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, 18 U.S.C. 1591, covers labor trafficking as well as sex trafficking, but only when a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or when the person induced to perform such an act is a minor, under 18. Trafficked foreign nationals, who were the original focus of the statute, are granted an automatic refugee-type status, which allows them access to health, education, and housing services, as well as to special “T” visas, a stepping-stone to a green card. The T.V.P.A. also created a large infrastructure to address trafficking overseas, and a State Department rating system—Saudi Arabia, for example, is a Tier III, pariah country—to penalize governments that fail to meet stringent U.S. anti-slavery standards.

One positive blowback of the T.V.P.A. was that it brought attention to domestic sex trafficking—pimping—which follows the same models and patterns as its international counterparts. “The logic was: if you get weepy-eyed about a young girl in Cambodia, why not feel the same way about the girl trafficked from Iowa?” explains Isobel Coleman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Re-authorized in 2003 and 2006, the T.V.P.A. was updated again in 2008 with a bill introduced by then senator Joe Biden and signed into law by President Bush in December 2008. Ideally, the latest re-authorization will help to redress the fact that special restitution has not been readily available to victims who are U.S. citizens; help to remove from pimps the defense that they did not know a child’s age; and, advocates hope, help to transfer the burden of proof away from the victims—76 percent of whom suffer from post-traumatic-stress disorder and many of whom still have Stockholm-syndrome-like “trauma bonds” with their pimps. Says Karen Stauss, now program director of Free the Slaves, “Victims are terrified to testify. It makes it harder to bring a case.” [One can only hope that this is helping prosecutors put these people away; and helping victims as well.]
...
The unlikely trafficking-abolitionist coalition—consisting of secular social-justice advocates, faith-based groups, black activists, second- and fourth-wave feminists, liberals, conservatives, Democrats, and Republicans—shares a peculiar adversary in the form of trafficking skeptics, coming largely from the left. The Nation, for example, ridiculed the “‘sex slave’ panic,” and both Slate and City Pages questioned the alarming statistics published by the Department of Justice, the State Department, and non–government organizations such as ecpat and the Salvation Army. “All the numbers we have on trafficking are inaccurate,” avows Deirdre Bialo-Padin, chief of the domestic-violence bureau of the Brooklyn D.A.’s office. “They’re too low. It’s an underreported crime. Who is going to raise her hand and say, ‘Hi, I’m a trafficking victim!’ when her family has been threatened? With the right laws in place, we will get harder numbers.” For victim advocates, saying that trafficking in America isn’t a problem is akin to J. Edgar Hoover saying the Mafia doesn’t exist. Melissa Farley believes “we’re still in the Dark Ages with trafficking because, unlike incest, rape, and domestic battering, trafficking generates massive revenues—$32 billion a year worldwide.” [I think, too, the reason no one wants to believe it, is because it's America! That couldn't happen here! Also, if the stats on the johns are true, then probably a lot of men involved in different organizations don't want it to come out that they've probably used an underage prostitute.]
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It emerged, during the now nearly two-year-long investigation, that a number of the girls Paris and Forbes had “turned out” had been minors as young as 14. But until the task force had Andrew Kline’s input, Scates and McKee had not recognized all of them as such. “In Connecticut,” Scates explains, “the age of consent is 16. But according to the federal trafficking laws, a minor is anyone under 18.” [As young as 14? My heart breaks. Yet the hook-up, MTV culture is passed off as normal!]
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“These guys,” McKee says, “truly are monsters. Most people committing crimes aren’t bad people—they act out of necessity, for financial gain. But these guys were bad people taking advantage of vulnerable, weak, troubled girls. This was the most significant case I ever worked on. What made it even more significant to me is that I have two daughters. Though they look like me, both my daughters were adopted from substance-abusing parents in low-income situations. So it’s real personal. It made me look at prostitution—everything—in a totally different light. Instead of ‘She’s committing a crime,’ I now think, Why is she there? Who put her there? But for the grace of God these victims could be my little girls.” [If only more police, prosecutors, and judges were able to think more like this.]
...
That, in fact, is exactly the theory behind the Sex Purchase Law in Sweden. As of 1999, johns are punished by up to six months’ imprisonment, traffickers are locked up for 2-to-10-year hits, and prostitutes are offered medical care, education, and housing. As a result, prostitution has been reduced by 50 percent in Sweden, and the purchase of sex, which is understood to be a human-rights abuse, has decreased by 75 percent. In contrast, Europol studies show, nations such as Holland and Australia, where prostitution has been legalized, have become lucrative, low-risk magnets for international sex-slave drivers and organized crime. On the subject of Sweden’s demand-side laws—which Finland and Norway have now adopted, and Denmark is currently considering—Sweden’s minister for justice, Beatrice Ask, notes, “If we could get rid of slavery, then I think this type of buying human beings is something that we have to fight too.” [This is where I think too many states go wrong. We punish the prostitute instead of also punishing the johns. And whodathunk - if you de-criminalize sin, you will have people taken advantage of - which usually ends up being women and children.]

In the meantime, here in the U.S., hot-pink patent-leather stiletto crib shoes for baby girls, aged zero to six months, and Abercrombie & Fitch push-up padded bikinis for eight-year-olds have been all the rage in downward-deviant fashion, prostitution is a mainstay of Las Vegas’s economy, and Ice-T has produced a documentary on the life of Iceberg Slim, who, in his dotage, expressed remorse in Pimp for his wasted youth and his squandered fortune, but never for any of the girls he thrashed into red jelly with his homemade wire whip. Slim did speculate, however, that his cruelty toward women arose from his “unconscious hatred” for his mother. “It’s disgusting,” Natalie says. “The pimp is winning out.” [And we, as consumers, are buying into all this crap! You would not believe how hard it is to find a modest bathing suit for my 4 year old little girl. All I want is a swim t-shirt and swim-trunks and I don't think it exists.]

[My comments following.]


As I kept reading this article, my heart was in knots, thinking of all these beautiful children out there who are modern day slaves - to our society's insatiable appetite for sex. All in all, this whole article made me feel just sick to my stomach - and my soul. If only we were truly living as Christians - instead of objectifying each other, using one another, and treating each others' bodies as carcasses for our souls. If you haven't read Humanae Vitae (On the Regulation of Birth), you need to do so now (linked at the top of this post).