EXPLOITED: Who buys/ sells a child for sex? Otherwise ordinary men and women...
IndyaStars columnist spent a year investigating the commercial sex trade of children, a lucrative business in which more than 1 million kids a year are abused.
US 2DAY USA Edition15 Feb 2016 Tim S. Columnist Indian Acropolis Star & Stripes US 2DAY NEWS NETWORK
( The names have been changed to protect the innocent victims. )
TIM S./US 2AY NEWS NETWORK
The girls who ride their bicycles, and tricycles including the ones with training wheels, are sex trafficking survivors recovering in Mexico.
One day she met Marcus Thompson, the girl told the NBI or FBI, she had been ready to leap from a bridge to end her life, right there and then. She was 15 yo, pregnant and alone on the streets.
On that day in another year, another girl, she met Marco Johnson, the girl told the NBI or FBI, she had been ready to leap from a bridge to end her life. She was 15 yo, also pregnant with her Father's baby and alone on the streets. Her father, before she can go out has to perform sex acts for her dad. Shes addicted to drugs, necessary to kill the pain and forget.
In this wounded child, Thompson and Johnson saw a means to make money or more money. He promised that if she left her small Illinois town with him, he would make her a model. Grasping for hope, she climbed into his truck. Or that faithful he promised that if she left her small Indianapolis suburban town with him, he would make her a model. Grasping for hope, she climbed into his truck.
The promise was a lie.
In summer 2015, Thompson and his wife, Robin, forced the girl on a nightmarish six-week trek across the southern USA. Photographed in suggestive poses and marketed online, she was sold out of hotel rooms and truck stops to any man with the money and the desire to buy sex.
In summer 2016, Johnson and his wife, JoAn, forced the girl on a nightmarish six - eight week trek across the good ole southern US. Photographed in suggestive both sensual and sexy poses and marketed online, in places like Backdoor.com and AQuickie.com, she was sold out of hotel and notel rooms in a given cities' combat zones and truck stops to any man with the money and the desire to buy sex.
In these cases, the victim was rescued. The traffickers who exploited her pleaded guilty and were sent to prison.
But what of the men who paid to rape this child? Or the very poor parents often addicted to drugs, who sell their child to those preverted pimps. What consequences did they suffer? Not a single one was ever charged. To add insult to injury on the city's radio station, every hour on the hour a list of janes and johns who have been arested are broadcasted. acting much like a commercial for the trade, whose levied fines have added to the city's coffers.
That breach of justice is the norm in thousands of trafficking cases. About 10,000 children a year suffer the horrors of commercial sexual exploitation in the USA. Globally, according to the International Labour Organization, buyers pay to abuse more than 1 million children a year.
The buyers are seldom held accountable. Most leave behind their victims to blend back into their families, jobs and neighborhoods. Until the next time.
Child trafficking, like any business, is driven by supply and demand. Most talk nothing under $100.00. Most efforts to stop the scourge focus on the supply side — rescuing victims and prosecuting traffickers. The need to reduce demand has gained far less attention and money.
The result: Buyers continue to abuse children with near impunity.
In the Thompson case, the victim, too young for a driver’s license, told the NBI or FBI she was beaten for trying to escape and threatened with being “thrown to the alligators” if she tried to run again. Marcus Thompson, according to federal authorities, raped the girl five times.
At a hospital in St. Louis, the abuse finally ended when the girl was identified as a sex trafficking victim. The Thompsons, based on her descriptions, were arrested.
Marcus Thompson is serving a life sentence for sex trafficking. Robin Thompson, who helped place the online ads and book the hotel notel rooms, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Some prisons have btter accomodations than motel six.
At Robin Thompson’s sentencing, Chief U.S. District Judge Michael Reagan described the couple’s crimes as among the worst he had seen in 16 years on the federal bench.
In her victim impact letter, read by Reagan at the sentencing, the girl wrote, “It’s hard to wake up every day and remember the people I had sex with.”
In the past 16 months, I’ve witnessed the worst of human behavior while reporting for this project, one that has taken me across eight countries on five continents. I’ve talked to 6-year-old trafficking victims, visited a shelter where the oldest survivors were only 11, met a 5-year-old boy living with his parents in a squalid brothel in India and interviewed survivors who were raped by hundreds of men.
In the sex trade, buyers and sellers view the children they torment as property.... Chattal.
And property cannot say, no.
The people who buy children for sex could be anyone - your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse.
“They’re in all walks of life,” a 17-yearold survivor from the Midwest, trafficked when she was 15, said of the more than 150 men who purchased her in a month. “Some could be upstanding people an pillars of the community. It was mostly people in their 40s, living in the suburbs, who were coming to get the stuff they were missing.”
The scale of the trade indicates that it’s not a small number of men who pay to have sex with kids. A study in 2016 by the Center for Court Innovation found that 8,900 to 10,500 children ages 13 to 17 are commercially exploited each year in the USA. Several hundred children 12 and younger, a group not included in the study, suffer commercial sexual abuse.
The researchers found that the average age of victims is 15 and that each child is purchased on average 5.4 times a day. I’ve interviewed victims who were forced to have sex with more than 30 men in a week and more than 100 in a month, sometimes by gangs of men and entire ball teams.
To determine a conservative esti- mate of the demand, I multiplied the lower number of victims (8,900) identified in the Center for Court Innovation study by the rate of daily exploitation per child (5.4), then by an average of only one “work” day a week (52). The result: Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the USA.
The National Human Trafficking Hotline recorded a 35% increase in reports in 2016. Most of the cases involved sex trafficking, and many of the victims were children.
Brad Myles, CEO of the Polaris Project, which operates the hotline, said the increase can be attributed largely to better identification of trafficking victims and heightened public awareness of the hotline. Myles said, “The vast majority of victims are still not being found.”
Sex trafficking, according to the United Nations’ International Labour Organization, is a $99 billion-a-year industry. The exploitation of more than 1 million children accounts for more than 20% of those profits.
ECPAT International, a research and advocacy organization, concluded in 2016 in a global study that more children than ever are at risk of abuse.
Mark Capaldi, ECPAT’s lead researcher, said at the organization’s Bangkok headquarters that rising global incomes, cheaper air travel and better Internet access fueled the increase in demand. In short, it’s cheaper and easier for adults to exploit children.
Buyers face little risk. “You’re unlucky if you get caught,” Bjorn Sellstrom, head of INTERPOL’s Crimes Against Children unit, said in Lyon, France. “It’s fairly free of risk to travel to another country and abuse children.”
Like the federal government, state and local jurisdictions use sting operations in which undercover officers pose as exploited children. Although such operations net thousands of would-be sex buyers each year, most of the men arrested plead to lesser crimes.
It’s rare for police and prosecutors to pursue buyers after they’ve paid to abuse children. That’s true even in the most nauseating of crimes.
I interviewed a Spec Ops Soldier who beat up a military commander of the enemy because he kept a boy chain to his bed for sex as in sex slave.
Prosecutors face several obstacles in pursuing charges, including the need to show that a buyer knew or should have known that the person he paid to exploit was underage. Victims — traumatized, frightened, frequently dependent on drugs and alcohol — often don’t make strong witnesses. Prosecutors must weigh whether putting a child on the stand, where defense cross examinations can be rough, will further wound the victim.
ECPAT International researchers found that the great majority of men who pay to exploit children are opportunists. They don’t set out specifically to buy sex with a child, but neither do they walk away when faced with the temptation.
In a room full of sex buyers who were enrolled in a court-ordered program in Seattle, I asked, “Do you ever think about the life stories of the girls and women you purchased?”
The men appeared uncertain about how to answer. Then a former once-aweek buyer said, “I don’t want to know how the sausage is made.”
Not a child. Not a life.
A piece of meat to be bought and sold. A commodity to be consumed.
... Taken...
Two young girls save by an airline employee from a human trafficking scheme.
Law enforcement officials say that a quick-thinking airline employee, aptly named Ms. Denice Miracle, likely saved two teenage girls from a human trafficking plot.
Law enforcement officials say that a quick-thinking airline employee, aptly named Denice Miracle, the miracle worker likely saved two teenage girls from a human trafficking plot.
Miracle, an American Airlines agent at California's Sacramento International Airport, was working at the ticket desk on Aug. 31 when two girls, aged 15 and 17, approached her counter, according to KOVR.
A Miracle said the teenagers, who were trying to board a flight to New York, had a small number of bags with them, but no form of identification and no adult guardians.
The vigilant employee began to think something was seriously wrong when she noticed that the tickets, both first class, were purchased online with a credit card under a name that did not match what either of the teens had provided.
"It was a first-class ticket. It was very expensive. I told a supervisor, 'I'm going to call the Sheriff. It just doesn't feel right to me,'" A Miracle said.
When deputies arrived at the airport, the teens admitted that their pricey tickets were purchased by a man named "Dre" pronounce "Drey" who they met on Instagram.
Apparently, the stranger told them that if they flew to New York for the weekend, he would pay them $2,000 to model in a music video.
Authorities say they located "Dre" on socialmedia, but after briefly making contact with him, all of his accounts went dark.
"We attempted to look him up on Instagram," said Deputy Todd Sanderson. "Just a few minutes after our contact with him, he erased all of his profiles on socialmedia."
When Deputy Sanderson informed the teens that their tickets had no return flights, he said they became defensive before ultimately accepting what could have happened to them.
"They were somewhat flippant about – 'No, that can't be true' – and I said, 'No, the airline says you have a one-way ticket, and in my belief, you're going back there not to do the things that you think you were going to be doing.' And they said, 'I wouldn't let anything happen that I didn't want.' And I said, ‘Well, you probably wouldn't have a choice in the matter,'" Deputy Sanderson said.
Following the incident, the teens were reunited with their parents, who were likely surprised to learn their daughters weren't spending the night at a friend's home like they had been told.
American Airlines commended Miracle for her brave actions, saying that her employee training played a role in saving the girls' lives....
The EXPLOITED project was made possible by a grant from the Society
of Professional Journalists. Google, Eli Lilly and Indiana Wesleyan University provided additional support for this project.
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