Children Sold for Sex in America: A Painful Discovery

Compiled by Ken Simmons:

*According to an article by the website Share Together entitled “Trafficking by the Numbers.”

Columnist’s Note: I knew about child trafficking but wasn’t aware of these astonishing numbers and level of wickedness.

Everyone who receives this should share it, or do something, especially sharing this article with those in high positions of authority and influence who can actually do something about it.

It was deeply painful for me to read this. It aroused great compassion for these children and righteous anger against their perpetrators. This is so horrific.

God help us!

Although this primarily affects young girls, children of both sexes are being sold for sex in the U.S. at an alarming rate. Estimates of America’s children who have been taken as sex slaves range from 300,000 to 1.5 million.* The reason for the wide range in the statistical numbers is that only about 1% of such crimes are ever reported. The average young girl taken is between the ages of 11 and 14, but if you believe it couldn’t get any worse, some are sold into sex slavery as young as 4 years old.

If America had 300,000 cases of measles in a year, this would be a national emergency. The government would call on the CDC to pull out all the stops to end this threat, but child sex trafficking is largely ignored. Rather than placing this tragedy high on the list of national priorities, it barely registers a blip on our radar screen.

Jaco Booyens, a guest on Life, Liberty & Levin, which aired Aug. 11 on the Fox News Channel, indicated that 77,000 times a day in the state of Texas alone, a child is forced to engage in sex for profit. He did point out, however, that President Trump and Texas governor Greg Abbott are two of the few in government who are addressing this problem to head off this horrific practice that seems to be sweeping America, but rather than addressing the problem, it is being swept under the rug.

Money is the driving force in this shameful business, to the tune of $32 billion a year. For a perspective, compare that to the annual revenue for motion pictures in the U.S., at $11.1 billion (2017). It is expected that money derived from sex trafficking in America will surpass drug trafficking revenues in the next two to three years unless this plague on America’s children is stopped.

The sex traffickers have become shrewd businessmen, studying ways to reach young victims much in the same way that retail marketers study their potential customers. One favorite tool is to use social media, looking for children who frequent chat rooms and who use such phrases as “My parents don’t understand me” and “I feel so lonely.” They then cultivate their young victims in those chat rooms, telling them “I know how you feel, but I understand you,” or “I think you’re so pretty,” and they sometimes lavish gifts on their prey in much the way a fisherman baits his hook. … except these human fishermen don’t use catch and release but snag their victims into a life that frequently leads to an early grave. These children become the bait dangled before their future customers.

A drug trafficker, once he has peddled his goods, must go out and purchase more drugs to sell, but to the trafficker, a child can be used over and over and over again, earning him $100,000 – $200,000 a year. Such is the value traffickers place on a child. Their ultimate reward will be a place where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth without end.

Who is to blame — the drug traffickers certainly—but are not the customers whose value of these children is limited their sexual gratification even more so to blame? Without those who pay for such services this industry would dry up overnight.

How can this happen in the “land of the free”? America is supposed to be a beacon of hope, but for so many of our children, it has become a prison, trapping them into a life of degradation and slavery. As a nation, we share in this blame and this shame because we have allowed our moral foundation to slip away to such a degree that we seem to tolerate this problem by ignoring it.

In some narrow segments of our country, pedophilia is considered normal. There is even an organization that goes by the acronym NAMBLA, which stands for North American Man/Boy Love Association.

Another example is while U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an attorney for the ACLU, she openly advocated lowering the age of consent for sexual relations to 12 years, meaning that adults engaging in sex with a 12-year-old could not be arrested for committing an act of pedophilia.

Today America clamors for “gun control” … to do anything to stop the “gun violence,” but seems to be unwilling to face what is happening to our greatest treasure, our children. (Incidentally, when the guest on Life, Liberty & Levin reached out to CNN and MSNBC to air this story, he was turned down.)

Children who are finally rescued and returned home to their parents end up being scarred for life. In some jurisdictions, once they turn 18 they are no longer considered victims, but are prosecuted as prostitutes. This is a compounded tragedy.

America must regain its moral clarity and demand that those who traffic in children be brought to justice. Many consider life sentences to be too lenient, and they advocate for the death penalty for both the traffickers and their customers.