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Corporate Sponsored Pimping by Rachel Lloyd
Today is Human Trafficking Awareness Day and President Obama recently proclaimed January as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. Yet when we think about trafficking, we think about it happening to children from Asia, women from the Ukraine, domestic servants brought in from Africa and Central America. All of these examples are real.
But rarely we do associate trafficking and slavery with the girls and young women that we see on HBO specials like 'Hookers on the Point', girls sold for sex on the streets, on Craigslist ads, girls on the pole in strip-clubs. The primary face of trafficking in this country looks like an adolescent girl of color trafficked for sex, sold by adult men to adult men.
Language matters. Calling that girl a 'child prostitute', or 'teen hooker' places all the culpability and blame on her. In fact, in most states, even if she's not old enough to consent to sex, she will frequently be charged with an act of prostitution and sent to juvenile detention or jail.
While firm statistics on this issue are hard to find, Department of Justice's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section estimates that the median age of entry into the commercial sex industry in the US is between 12 and 14 years old. How is it that our American girls are bought and sold every day, right under our noses, yet we don't see it, acknowledge it? Perhaps it's because the girls who are bought and sold don't fit into our neat, little box of who's a 'real' victim; perhaps, because those girls are frequently low income girls, girls of color, girls who've been in the child welfare system, girls in the juvenile justice system - girls who aren't high on anyone's priority list anyway.
Language matters too when we're talking about the adult men who seduce, kidnap, torture, brainwash and then sell girls for sex - we call them pimps, and we think they're alternately benign, smooth, glamorous, or 'businessmen'.
(more here)
corporate-sponsored-pimping-plays-role-in-us-human-trafficking.php
But rarely we do associate trafficking and slavery with the girls and young women that we see on HBO specials like 'Hookers on the Point', girls sold for sex on the streets, on Craigslist ads, girls on the pole in strip-clubs. The primary face of trafficking in this country looks like an adolescent girl of color trafficked for sex, sold by adult men to adult men.
Language matters. Calling that girl a 'child prostitute', or 'teen hooker' places all the culpability and blame on her. In fact, in most states, even if she's not old enough to consent to sex, she will frequently be charged with an act of prostitution and sent to juvenile detention or jail.
While firm statistics on this issue are hard to find, Department of Justice's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section estimates that the median age of entry into the commercial sex industry in the US is between 12 and 14 years old. How is it that our American girls are bought and sold every day, right under our noses, yet we don't see it, acknowledge it? Perhaps it's because the girls who are bought and sold don't fit into our neat, little box of who's a 'real' victim; perhaps, because those girls are frequently low income girls, girls of color, girls who've been in the child welfare system, girls in the juvenile justice system - girls who aren't high on anyone's priority list anyway.
Language matters too when we're talking about the adult men who seduce, kidnap, torture, brainwash and then sell girls for sex - we call them pimps, and we think they're alternately benign, smooth, glamorous, or 'businessmen'.
(more here)
corporate-sponsored-pimping-plays-role-in-us-human-trafficking.php
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