“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to one another.”
Mother Teresa of Calcutta
I just finished reading Corban Addison’s compelling story of two young sisters, Ahalya and Sita, who survive the Indonesian tsunami only to be taken captive by another storm—the storm of sexual predators. A Walk Across the Sun (2012, Quercus Books) is fiction based on fact—the best kind.
Slavery and trafficing in human flesh is now bigger business than any former slave trade ever was. How can that be? Today? It’s a business bringing sex entrepreneurs over $30 billion a year in profits, that's how. And they’re not about to let all that money go.
Pimps can earn $300,000 a year from each girl in their clutches. Why sell drugs, one at a time, when you can force a young girl to have sex six or seven times a night and reap the benefits over and over until she overdoses from her depression and the drugs used to keep her in captivity, or they kill her because she tries to escape. Like any profitable business, they throw away any used up “product” that no longer brings in cash.
Even though there are data bases of kidnapped children, tracing these lost souls across the planet is extremely difficult. Their slave-owners are rich, smart, and know how to cover their tracks. They market and transport their sex products to where the buyers are. Thousands and thousands of underaged prostitutes get trucked and flown around every day.They're taken to any place men seek pleasure in young flesh. This wholesaling of flesh takes place openly in cultures where young boys think that love is sex and sex is rape. You'll find this trafficing outside military bases. At truck stops. “Escort” services in any city. Sex tourism. A man is willing to buy them at higher prices if he doesn’t have to use a condom. You'll find them on Internet sites featuring younger and younger “exotic product.” It all takes place within a vicious network of corrupt police, incompetent judicial systems, and people willing to look the other way.
In India, whole towns are brothels. One person in Addison's book described the girls who live there as “Bedia girls. Women from their caste have been prostitutes for centuries…all of them gorgeous...Their parents groom them to become bar girls.” And poor street children go where they might be fed.
There are many young women traveling to other countries to be workers or nannies—or so they are told—and then their passports are confiscated and they are subsequently ordered to forget their old identiies and are forced into sex slavery. In Russia,they are simply lumped together and called Natashas.
Or young girls go to New York to become models and actresses and find themselves crammed into back rooms or basements until their next “evening dates.” Many of them have run away from abusive households hoping against all hope to find something better. They rarely do.
And of course, the young women forced into prostitution make no money for themselves from these perverse transactions. Furthermore, most are kept in the poorest of slave conditions—no heat, little food, minimal health care, and they sleep on the floor or in a few beds all packed together. Many are forced into vans and driven around to parking lots where truckers hang out. These young women, their slave owners call “lot lizards.”
I find myself wondering where today’s underground railroad is for these poor young things. There are abolitionist groups, but they are not growing nearly as fast as the trafficking trade itself. So I went to a government site to learn more about forced labor and sex trafficing. Then I checked out the Polaris Project and Shared Hope. I learned more from Janice Redmond and Donna Hughes' scholarly work on the sex industry. But rather than an industry, I prefer to call it slavery.
How will it end? When men stop needing their flesh. It's a market economy, after all.
The first step in ending slavery as Harriet Tubman taught us in the 19th century is to escape yourself, then make others aware of the escape routes. “I grew up like a neglected weed,” she said, “ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it.”
Or as Sojourner Truth put it, we women had better ban together to do something about this. “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.” And “Religion without humanity is poor human stuff.” Poor, indeed.








Recent Comments