International Child Sex Trafficking — Ravaged Innocence
Matthew Robb, MSW, LCSW-C
Social Work Today
http://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/ ... 6p22.shtml
According to Norma Hotaling, executive director of San Francisco-based SAGE Project, brothels are routinely staffed with children aged 12 to 16, but customers can procure them as young as the age of 5.
Improved air and road travel in developed countries eases the Western sex tourist passage into the most remote “brothel villages” of southeast Asia and Central America. There, aid workers have noted increasing demand for younger and younger girls. Staff reports are replete with instances of Japanese businessmen soliciting oral sex from girls as young as age 5 and engaging in intercourse with 10-year-olds.
“Remember,” Hotaling says, “this is a $52 billion worldwide annual industry run by organized crime.
As demand increases for children, so too does the need for supply. It feeds on itself like a wildfire.
Hotaling cites a recent Frontline (National Public Radio) broadcast that identified the world’s four major receiving countries of trafficked women. “All have legalized prostitution,” she says. Noting that
child sex workers are especially prized by customers, she contends that prostitution and pornography are quintessentially antichild, antiwoman, and antisociety.
Smith agrees. She says
studies demonstrate a clear link between prostitution and pornography, and the demand for younger children. Her organization’s own investigation shows that children are featured in at least one in five online pornographic images.