Something to think about...

When I was staying with Andria, I don't know how it came up, but we started talking about the human sex slave trade. Coincidently, Saturday Lifetime aired a movie about it, "Human Trafficking." The movie ended nicely, but the reality is beyond sad because as the movie stated:
"There are over 14,000-17,000 women and children brought to THIS country to be modern day sex slaves... But in 1999 the CIA estimated 45,000 annually," this is in addition to the thousands who are already here. No one actually knows the number of people enslaved in America. The sale of women and girls is becoming as common as that of illegal drugs and weapons.

Why there is a market:

There is an increased demand for human trafficking and sex slavery because of the internet. Unfortunately, things that were not intended to cause harm are often used that way. There are many societal factors that impact it as well. But one is that people have become desensitized to pornographic and violent images through the prevalence of it in our society. Some that are consumers of it begin to have an increased appetite for more and more "hard-core" images. We can be anti-censorship because of our "Freedom of Speech," but the the truth of the matter is that it is a slippery slope from "Playboy" to "Hustler" to "Barely Legal" to internet porn to an explicitly violent sexual appetite. Some may think that "Playboy" is innocent enough, but the underlying problem is that it causes us to think of women as objects, not as people. They are "just" images for pleasure. When a society begins to think of people as objects, it falls into the trap of people being treated as objects or treated as if they are not deserving of human treatment.

So next time you are wondering why this horrific practice has patronage--especially in America where we are "superior" in human rights--stop and think about America's EVERYDAY "innocent and normal" appetite for pornography, because that is where it starts and considering that, it is no wonder that there is a human trafficking and sexual slavery industry.

What is human trafficking?

Trafficking in persons, also known as human trafficking, is the modern practice of slavery. It is the third largest criminal industry in the world today, after arms and drug dealing, and is the fastest growing. Traffickers generate billions of dollars in profits every year while victimizing millions of people around the globe.

Trafficked persons are forced or coerced into labor or sexual exploitation. -Polaris Project
This includes women, children and even infants.

I first learned about human trafficking from an NPR radio program. It was the worst thing I had ever heard. Then I looked up the article by the reporter that was interviewed for the NPR program. Here is the beginning of the article:

"The Girl Next Door"
By PETER LANDESMANPublished: January 25, 2004The house at 1212 1/2 West Front Street in Plainfield, N.J., is a conventional midcentury home with slate-gray siding, white trim and Victorian lines. When I stood in front of it on a breezy day in October, I could hear the cries of children from the playground of an elementary school around the corner. American flags fluttered from porches and windows. The neighborhood is a leafy, middle-class Anytown. The house is set back off the street, near two convenience stores and a gift shop. On the door of Superior Supermarket was pasted a sign issued by the Plainfield police: ''Safe neighborhoods save lives.'' The store's manager, who refused to tell me his name, said he never noticed anything unusual about the house, and never heard anything. But David Miranda, the young man behind the counter of Westside Convenience, told me he saw girls from the house roughly once a week. ''They came in to buy candy and soda, then went back to the house,'' he said. The same girls rarely came twice, and they were all very young, Miranda said. They never asked for anything beyond what they were purchasing; they certainly never asked for help. Cars drove up to the house all day; nice cars, all kinds of cars. Dozens of men came and went. ''But no one here knew what was really going on,'' Miranda said. And no one ever asked.
On a tip, the Plainfield police raided the house in February 2002, expecting to find illegal aliens working an underground brothel. What the police found were four girls between the ages of 14 and 17. They were all Mexican nationals without documentation. But they weren't prostitutes; they were sex slaves. The distinction is important: these girls weren't working for profit or a paycheck. They were captives to the traffickers and keepers who controlled their every move. ''I consider myself hardened,'' Mark J. Kelly, now a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security), told me recently. ''I spent time in the Marine Corps. But seeing some of the stuff I saw, then heard about, from those girls was a difficult, eye-opening experience.''
The police found a squalid, land-based equivalent of a 19th-century slave ship, with rancid, doorless bathrooms; bare, putrid mattresses; and a stash of penicillin, ''morning after'' pills and misoprostol, an antiulcer medication that can induce abortion. The girls were pale, exhausted and malnourished.
It turned out that 1212 1/2 West Front Street was one of what law-enforcement officials say are dozens of active stash houses and apartments in the New York metropolitan area -- mirroring hundreds more in other major cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago -- where under-age girls and young women from dozens of countries are trafficked and held captive. Most of them -- whether they started out in Eastern Europe or Latin America -- are taken to the United States through Mexico. Some of them have been baited by promises of legitimate jobs and a better life in America; many have been abducted; others have been bought from or abandoned by their impoverished families.
Because of the porousness of the U.S.-Mexico border and the criminal networks that traverse it, the towns and cities along that border have become the main staging area in an illicit and barbaric industry, whose ''products'' are women and girls. On both sides of the border, they are rented out for sex for as little as 15 minutes at a time, dozens of times a day. Sometimes they are sold outright to other traffickers and sex rings, victims and experts say. These sex slaves earn no money, there is nothing voluntary about what they do and if they try to escape they are often beaten and sometimes killed.
Last September, in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly, President Bush named sex trafficking as ''a special evil,'' a multibillion-dollar ''underground of brutality and lonely fear,'' a global scourge alongside the AIDS epidemic. Influenced by a coalition of religious organizations, the Bush administration has pushed international action on the global sex trade. The president declared at the U.N. that ''those who create these victims and profit from their suffering must be severely punished'' and that ''those who patronize this industry debase themselves and deepen the misery of others. And governments that tolerate this trade are tolerating a form of slavery.''

for the rest of the article see this website: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25SEXTRAFFIC.html?ei=5007&en=43dbe6ef76e45af8&ex=1390366800&partner=USERLAND&pagewanted=print&position=

Also, check out these websites, including the Government's "Trafficking in Person's Report":

Fifth "Trafficking in Persons Report": http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/47255.pdf

Lifetime movie, "Human Trafficking" website: http://www.lifetimetv.com/movies/originals/humantrafficking.html

The Polaris Project: http://www.polarisproject.org

The International Justice Mission: http://ijm.org

The Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking: http://www.castla.org/facts.html