"As part of the "National Day of Johns" sex trafficking sting, spearheaded by the Cook County, Ill., Sheriff's Office, police said that they captured hundreds of men and women attempting to hire prostitutes through websites such as Backpage.com and Craigslist. Police also said they rescued dozens of women who said they had been forced into prostitution…" READ MORE
Is this still a man’s world or what?
Why are they still talking about underinflated balls? Why?
Because they’re not really talking about underinflated balls, they’re talking
about money. About men making money. About men losing money.
I don’t want to
talk about or hear any more about underinflated balls.
I want to talk
about the under-aged sex workers men will be bringing in to Glendale, Arizona
for the 2015 Super Bowl.
It’s hard to be
ahead of the times on this one. The trouble with statistics is that you have to
wait until after the fact to gather them. I have no stats on how many child
prostitutes will be unwillingly brought into Glendale next weekend. I do have
stats on previous Super Bowls, however: an estimated 10,000 women and minors
were brought into Tampa, FL for sex at the 2009 Super Bowl. The numbers for
actual arrests are almost comical by comparison – “One human trafficker was
arrested and jailed for advertising a 14 and 18-year-old for $300 on Craigslist
as a ‘Super Bowl Special’.”
The
Super Bowl may be the Las Vegas of sports events, sex, drugs, alcohol, whatever
happens here, stays here, but for the young women who are forced into sex
trafficking, it’s no picnic. Most of the men who pay for sex are married with
the children, have good jobs and are obviously earning enough money to buy a
Super Bowl ticket, travel and pay Super high hotel rates. They will return with
no regrets to their wholesome lives after engaging in vacation sex with a child.
The child, however, will regret each moment she is forced to have sex with
anywhere from 25-50 men every day she (or he) is at the year’s most prestigious
event. Makes one wonder about other events – say the political Conventions, I
don’t want to single out a political party here – or any other such event you
can imagine.
Good people, I
have found, do not like hearing about this situation. Good people like to
concentrate on the game itself, on the wholesomeness of this family sports event,
on having enough snacks and booze for their friends and colleagues at their
Super Bowl party. They didn’t even want to see Janet Jackson’s pink nipple - that was too shocking! So, it follows, that
during the game no one wants to think about a little girl chained to a bed, shot
up with heroin to keep her docile, trained to not gag by an older girl, trained
by an older girl to act sultry or scared – most of the men want scared – if I
go on about this, you’ll blame me for telling you. How can you say such things?
How
can you ignore them? How can you eat your snacks and enjoy the game knowing
that women and children are going to be hurt afterward – for fun?
You
need to know about the damage group. The damage group is made up of the girls to
whom men are allowed to do anything they want, usually involving horrible
beatings and torture while performing sexual acts. In the documentary Playground by filmmaker, Libby Spears
(now streaming on Netflix) about sex trafficking in the United States, one
official commented that some of the acts they were seeing he couldn’t describe,
against children so young, that no normal person could look at them without
being disturbed. Officials blame easy access of child pornography on the internet
for the increase in more extreme sexual acts. Users have become dulled by the nightmares they've witnessed there and are
looking for more and more perversions.
Most people think
sex trafficking is a problem found only in other countries. That’s simply not
true. The United States has 100,000 to 150,000 under-aged sex workers; most of
them are runaways or captives who were forced into a life of prostitution. Take
the example of Debbie, an A student from a good family in Phoenix, AZ who was
abducted from her driveway at age 15, held at gunpoint in a dog kennel, given
dog biscuits to eat, forced to have sex with multiple men, raped by her captors
for sport, stuffed into a drawer under a bed where she was found by police 40
days after her abduction. She was lucky. Most abducted children are never
found.
Here is a quote
from Gregg Abbot, Texas Attorney General: "The Super Bowl is one of the
largest human trafficking events in the United States."
If you click on
the NBC News link, the page says, “We're
sorry. The text content of this page is no longer available.”
But I found it: in a
great article by USA Today’s Rick Jervis about efforts by Texas law enforcement
to meet the challenges of what was expected to be going on underneath the
surface glamour of the 2011 Dallas Super Bowl: "The Super Bowl is the
greatest show on Earth, but it also has an ugly underbelly," Abbott said.
"It's commonly known as the single largest human trafficking incident in
the United States.” Ernie Allen, President
of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said, “Each year,
100,000 to 300,000 American kids, some as young as 12 years old, are exploited
in the sex trade. The traffickers use the Super Bowl and other large events
such as the World Cup to ply their trade. The traffickers try to seize that
opportunity to do business.” Traffickers are making money by exploiting
children and their co-conspirators are men, most often family men, who are
literally lining up to purchase sex with a child.
Back to underinflated
balls. How appropriate. Because that is exactly the kind of balls men have who need to abuse
children, who need to scare little girls, who need to force children, who need
the perversion of having sex with a toddler or younger - oh, yes, it’s too
awful, and too true. Maybe
strong women have scared them. Maybe the media has shown them too many sexual
images of girls and boys at younger at younger ages. Maybe the easy access of
the internet is to blame for the increase in cruelty and perversion. Probably.
The sheer number of these easily available, horrifying acts have dulled the
senses of perverts who now want more and more aberrant acts performed. But,
that’s no excuse. Child prostitution is as old as time. Children are easy prey
for monsters. Who knows what horrors existed in ancient Rome or medieval China.
It’s always, always, always the same – it’s bullying. Men who need to hurt a
very small, very helpless person in order to feel large.
Men with underinflated
balls.
©PatriciaGoodwin, 2015
What you can do:
If you suspect trafficking, CALL the National Human Trafficking Resource
Center: a toll-free 24-hour hotline at 888-373-7888.
Give as much as you can:
Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater.
No comments:
Post a Comment