By John & Nisha Whitehead
It takes a special kind of evil to both promote prostitution and traffick a child for sex, and yet this evil walks among us every minute every day.
Consider: Every two minutes, a child is bought and sold for sex.
Hundreds of young girls and boys, some as young as nine years old, are being bought and sold for sex, as many as 20 times per day.
Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.
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.
Child rape has become big business in the U.S..
The problem is not found only in big cities.
The problem happens everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities, and towns, across the Nation.
Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out, “The only way not to find this (situation) in any American city is simply not to look for it.”
Similar to many of the evils in our midst, sex trafficking (and the sexualization of young people) is a cultural disease that is rooted in the American police state’s heart of darkness. 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 estimation is that the number of children who are at risk of being trafficked, or, already sold into the sex trade would fill 1,300 school buses.
The internet has become the primary means of sexual predators targeting and selling young children for sex. “One in five kids online is sexually propositioned through gaming platforms and other social media and those, non-contact-oriented forums of sexual exploitation are increasing,” said researcher Brian Ulicny.
The facts are not just young girls who are vulnerable, either. According to a USA Today investigative report, “boys make up approximately 36% of children caught up in the U.S. sex industry, approximately 60% are female, and less than 5% are transgender males and females.”
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.
“They’re minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked,” said a 25-year-old victim of trafficking. “They’re little girls.”
The fact 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 the United States.
According to criminal investigator, Marc Chadderdon, these “buyers, the so-called ‘ordinary’ men who drive the demand for sex with children, represent a cross-section of American society: Every age, every race, every socio-economic background, cops, teachers, corrections workers, pastors, and many more trusted sections of society.
The U.S. police forces, riddled with corruption, brutality, sexual misconduct, and drug abuse, represent another facet of the problem: Police have become both predators and pimps. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports, “Hundreds of police officers across the country have turned from protectors to predators, by using the power of their badge to extort sex.”
Then at the big national sporting events such as the Super Bowl, sex traffickers have been caught selling minors, some as young as nine years old.
Finally, as 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. Rarely do these children enter into prostitution voluntarily.
For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end. Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those they love, hurt or killed.
This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.
Unfortunately, as documented in my book, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart, “The Erik Blair Diaries, the government’s war on sex trafficking, much like the government’s war on terrorism, drugs, and crime, has become a perfect excuse for inflicting more police state tactics such as police check points, searches, surveillance, and heightened security, on a vulnerable public while doing little to actually protect our children from sex predators.
That so many children continue to be victimized, brutalized, and treated as 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.
—The Rutherford Institute