Have you heard about sex trafficking?
Sex trafficking is the new sex offender industry buzzword. The media propaganda machine, fueled by the political opportunists, is up and going, and the numbers being thrown around stagger the imagination. If the number of innocent children–some snatched off the street never to be seen again–forced into sex trafficking were factual, almost every one of us would know of at least one child who just disappeared. Not surprisingly, the old, tired “100,000” rears its head again, this time as the minimum number of youth in the U.S. who are “trafficked” each year. *
Run-away teens, sadly, do often get involved in prostitution. This is a tragic situation, but it is no new problem. Adult prostitution has always and will always exist. The definition of sex trafficking has been rewritten to include these situations as well as the many and varied methods of sting and entrapment situations** that law enforcement can manage to pull off.
A new focus was needed to enthrall the media and the public and to justify the massive amount of money and federal grants poured into the sex offender industry. This fills the bill just fine. Do not be surprised to hear, in the upcoming months, of even more new task forces being formed dedicated to fighting sexual trafficking. Websites and Facebook pages will be created dedicated to finding and bringing home the hundreds of thousands of children who have fallen prey to sex trafficking.
And in a few years, when the evil sex traffickers have run their course…what then will be the new bogeyman?
** http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/palm-beach/fl-coach-sex-entrapment-20140313,0,1998377.story
It’s 2014 and lets just say over the past ten years 100,000 children were really trafficked every year. That’s one million children since 2004. According to the most recent census data the population of the United States is somewhere around 317,297,938. One million children (we are counting everyone under 18 as a child) might seem like a small number against 300 plus million for the total population and it kind of is. However, saying that they were all trafficked creates a slightly different picture. Imagine if each year 100,000 was a verified minimum number of children trafficked, we are not talking children reported missing, rather some verification came to light that each one of them was really trafficked.
I find it difficult to believe that we as country would stand by after a single official verified announcement came through stating for sure 100,000 children were trafficked in a given year. I believe it would only take one announcement and the country at large would demand action to prevent something of this scale from occurring in the coming years. The point being if the united states was truly serious about stopping all the things we citizens claim to care about; the government, private companies, and the public would be exhausting all possible efforts to resolve our issues in a fairly speedy fashion.
The keys to true crime prevention are just that, prevention. To prevent something is to act before it can occur. Catching people after crimes are committed does not really stop new crimes from being committed by another individual or group of individuals. Those who have ill intent won’t be deterred by new laws or additions to existing laws making them stricter. If any entity has a serious interest in stopping terrible things from happening, they will seek ways to lead people away from illegal activity before those individuals ever consider such activity in the first place. For example if every possible future gang member in a community is occupied elsewhere, recruitment will suffer. If the efforts to keep potential gang members out of reach from gangs are good enough, gang presence in a community will eventually dwindle. Additionally other efforts would target current gang members to help them improve their lives and move away from gang involvement. This double approach of targeting both sides of a problem by reaching out to potential new sources and targeting current sources could be applied to many different types of illegal activity.
I live in North Georgia, and one of the more recent “human trafficking” cases here in Atlanta was fascinating. A successful man puts an advertisement up on atlanta.backpag.com in the men seeking women section of the website (which requires a user to say they are 18+) that says nothing about human trafficking or minors. ICE agent responds to his ad, and asks him if he’ll help find a husband for his “girlfriend’s niece”. The guy in the transcripts (I didn’t find the audio recordings) asks the agent if this 16 year old is “being sold or something like that”. Agent responds verbatim “No man, its nothing like that, she’s family. She’s just moving between family to family”. The mark then goes on to STATE HE WANTS NOTHING TO DO with human trafficking, and the agent assures him that the girl (legal in Georgia) is not being trafficked and it’s “nothing like that”. The mark moves forward by helping to pay to move the agents family member into the United States… Dumb right, but as far as he knew it was legal (age of consent is 16 in Georgia)
The man was arrested for human trafficking, and when the man plead guilty to “enticement of a minor”, DHS/ICE puts out a press release stating this case proves that human trafficking is a problem in Atlanta… This is pure ingenuity. No victim, no minor, told by agent it was “nothing like” human trafficking, and the DHS comea back and states this proves human trafficking is an issue…. The guy is serving 10 years for it.
Don’t they know people can look at cases on PACER?