Social Work Today article on child prostitution

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Social Work Today article on child prostitution

Postby sam » Mon Nov 20, 2006 12:29 pm

http://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/ ... 6p22.shtml

(snippets)

The problem is alarming, and the numbers are sobering:

• The United Nations (UN) estimates that 10 million children and women worldwide “are ensnared within the system of commercial sexual exploitation.”

• Each year, more than 1 million children enter the global sex trade, translating into some 30 million children over 30 years “who have lost their childhood” through rape and exploitation.

• In India alone, more than 2.3 million females are forced sex workers—one half of them young girls. Of these, only 2,000 (fewer than one tenth of 1%) are rescued each year.

• An annual pilgrimage of 300,000 Japanese male “sex tourists” has elevated prostitution into the Philippines’ fourth largest income producer. Demand is particularly high for young girls and boys.

• An estimated 16,000 children and women are annually trafficked into the United States for sexual services—and the trend is accelerating.

• Likening it to the tip of a shadowy iceberg, Immigration and Naturalization Service officials recently counted 250 brothels in 26 U.S. cities staffed with trafficking victims. Currently, an estimated 200,000 American children work in the U.S. sex industry.

**

Supply and Demand
Although experts say there is no reliable profile of predators, 20% of the world’s child “sex tourists” are U.S. citizens—virtually all male. The nations with the highest demand for trafficked females are the United States, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Israel, Japan, and Thailand.

Customers run the gamut, from the Fortune 500 senior executive searching for “a little extracurricular activity” in Shanghai to a group of frat brothers seeking steamy adventure in remote Jamaica.

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. Hotaling says this despicable practice has given rise to a whole new “rape for profit” industry.

“These trips are packaged as fun-filled getaway tours,” she says, “but these men aren’t going down to Thailand or Mexico or Haiti as tourists on vacation. They’re going down there to rape and sexually abuse children.”

Pedophilia drives demand, but so does greed and ignorance. In many cultures, men have sex with children as a way of avoiding infection with HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Law enforcement, court officials, and politicians turn a blind eye, often with the help of bribes or political favors.

“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. Behind every organized-crime person is a so-called ‘normal mind’ paying $1 at a time to gain access to women and children. These men don’t care if a girl is trafficked or if she’s a child at all.”

Hotaling adds, “We need to draw a line in the sand. We need to say, ‘No more!’ We need to look at the underlying issues of poverty, vulnerability, and homelessness—and start getting to work in a really serious way.”

Colliding Waves

Hotaling should know. Sexually abused as a child, she later became a traffic victim, served time in jail for prostitution, and thereafter struggled with a 21-year heroin dependency, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Today, she runs the world’s “first and largest” treatment program for solicitors of prostitution, which has since been replicated on four continents.

“We’ve been pushing against this [trafficking] wall for years....” she says. “Trafficking has been ignored for so long that it has gotten completely out of control.”

Hotaling sees a clear link between trafficking and the western world’s normalization of prostitution and pornography. “When you normalize or legalize prostitution,” she comments, “you’re normalizing the sexual abuse and rape of children and the trafficking of human beings. It’s really that clear.

“Trafficking isn’t an issue of free choice,” Hotaling adds. “Ultimately, the normalization of prostitution and pornography entails the powerful preying on the vulnerable. There are so many issues below the surface that traffickers and their customers are taking advantage of—emotional and economic vulnerability, gender bias, blatant discrimination, and more.”

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.
sam
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