By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.” —John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
Even in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic, there’s no stopping this year’s Super Bowl LV showdown between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Although the winner of Sunday’s Vince Lombardi Trophy was up for grabs, we already know the biggest losers: The hundreds of young girls and boys, some as young as nine years old, who will be bought and sold for sex, as many as 20 times per day, during the course of the big game.
“The Super Bowl is kind of deemed as the weekend to have sex with minors,” said Cammy Bowker, founder of Global Education Philanthropist.
It’s common to refer to this evil practice, which has become the fastest-growing business in organized crime and the second-most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns as child sex trafficking, but what we’re really talking about is rape.
Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 Million times a year in the United States.
It is estimated that the number of children who are at risk of being bought and sold for sex would fill 1,300 school buses.
Yet, as shocking as those numbers may be, this COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in even greater numbers of children being preyed upon by child sex traffickers.
According to a recent study on human trafficking during the pandemic by Thomson-Reuters and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, school closures due to the pandemic, which have forced children out-of-school and subjected them to more online exposure, have made them especially vulnerable to sexual predators.
The internet, with its web cams and chat rooms, a necessity for virtual classrooms, has become the primary means of pimps targeting young children. “One in five kids online are sexually propositioned through gaming platforms and other social media. And those, non-contact oriented forums of sexual exploitation are increasing,” said researcher Brian Ulicny, who co-wrote the Thomson-Reuters study.
It’s not just young girls who are vulnerable to these predators, either.
According to a USA Today investigative report, “boys make up about 36% of children caught up in the U.S. sex industry (about 60% are female and less than five percent are transgender males and females).”
Consider this: Every two minutes, a child is bought and sold for sex.
On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period.
It is estimated that at least 100,000 to 500,000 children, girls and boys, are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.
It is not a problem found only in big cities.
It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.
Every year, the ages of the girls and boys being bought and sold get younger and younger.
The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out, “Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means eight-, nine-, 10-year-olds.”
It is America’s dirty little secret.
But what or who is driving this evil appetite for young flesh? Who buys a child for sex?
Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life. “They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor, or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.
Then there are the extra-ordinary men such as Jeffrey Epstein and his cronies who belong to a powerful, wealthy, elite segment of society that operates according to their own sordid rules.
Still, where did this appetite for young girls come from? Look around you.
Young girls have been sexualized for years now in music videos, on billboards, in television ads, and in clothing stores. Marketers have created a demand for young flesh and a ready supply of over-sexualized children.
Indeed as I documented in an earlier column, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators.
Social media makes it all too easy. One news center reported, “Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on … social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools, and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.” Foster homes and youth shelters have become prime targets for traffickers.
That so many children continue to be victimized, brutalized, and treated like human cargo is due to three things: One, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved, except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.
Unfortunately, while the government’s war on sex trafficking, much like the government’s war on terrorism, drugs and crime, which I describe in greater detail in my book, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People” has become a perfect excuse for inflicting more police state tactics (police check points, searches, surveillance, and heightened security) on a vulnerable public, it has done little to protect our children from sex predators.
It speaks to a sordid, far-reaching corruption that stretches from the highest seats of power (governmental and corporate) down to the most hidden corners and relies on our silence and our complicity to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing.
—The Rutherford Institute