Sex Trafficking in America By Marilyn Penn
http://politicalmavens.com/
Stimulated by the reports of federal prosecutors probing the nefarious activities of Jeffrey Epstein, I googled “online sites with nude girls” and was surprised to see that 874 million such sites are available to us. When I added “teenage” to the request, the number jumped to 1, 470,000,000 – it’s hard to say that number and much worse to believe. “Sexy pictures of children” fetches a mere 185 million sites, all of which are perfectly legal to look at. The only thing that’s against the law in our state is printing, downloading or stashing them. One would hope that faced with the enormity of underage sex trafficking online, our legislators would be hounding NY State for new legislation that would stop this public epidemic at its source. Yet the legislation currently being considered in Albany has to do with decriminalizing prostitution so that sex workers get more respectability as well as better compensation for their work.
But the internet is not the only purveyor of sexual activity – it’s all over the cable tv. channels, even those without warnings concerning appropriateness for certain viewers. We seem to be swimming through a flood of interest and concern with all types of sex – LGBTQ, gender fluidity, drag queens, women who join cults such as Nexium where other women turn them into sex slaves and they are forcibly tied to a table nude to be branded by their owner’s initials in their pubic areas. All of this is reported in great detail in our newspaper of record – not in some salacious magazine for aficionados of perversion.
According to a study funded by the Justice Department in 2016, 21,000 underage children are part of the national sex trade, over 21 % of all people trafficked for sex. An astounding fact is that human trafficking is the fastest growing organized crime activity in the U.S. earning circa 32 billion dollars a year. 70 % of these transactions take place online and most of them involve women. When was the last time you read an article in the New York Times about attempts by #MeToo to call attention to this growing tragedy. When did you last read about efforts by the FBI, the Justice Department, Congress or the Media to give this their full attention instead of pursuing solitary billionaire targets who represent less than 1% of this scourge.
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