That all but one of those children were female again raises the question: why are females such a palatable commodity? And how is our own society contributing to how we view women and girls?

Jean Kilbourne and other noted feminists contributed to an article I wrote that explores that question and provides at least a partial answer.

article can be found here:

http://www.journalinquirer.com/articles/2008/10/02/airtime/doc48dbb5dae8457240505031.txt

What is with people now a days? What makes so many people into sex trafficing especially with young children. It is crazy to think that about 300,000 children in the United States are at risk. What prevents children from becoming one of these numbers?

"What is with people now a days?"

My question is, is this a "nowadays" thing? Or is this a crime that's always been in existence, only modern technology facilitates the spread of it? Does anyone know the history of child exploitation? Sexual exploitation, not the exploitation linked to the Industrial Revolution.

Slavery alive and well in the US of A.

My time is limited today, but child prostitution has been around for as long as there has been adult prostitution. However, Victorian England was a particularly notable time for child prostitution, with an estimated 300 child brothels in the city of London alone, many frequented by prominent citizens (as they were significantly more expensive than adult brothels). There was a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it was nearly extinct in the US, but the social environment has changed drastically since then.

Certainly with ease of movement nowadays and with an increased demand fuelled by internet porn, it is an ever increasing problem. And for anyone who is doubtful, I can assure you that mainstream adult porn and adult prostutition have a significant link to child prostitution.

If anyone is interested, I may be able to write more on the weekend, perhaps in the community forum.

All but one of the children were female. But homophobes still claim that all gays are pedophiles (and imply that all pedophiles are gay). Of course, to be fair, they didn't say how many of the adults were male and how many were female. But I think we all know those statistics.

If you dig a little deeper into the story (most versions seem to be just three-paragraph summaries) we find that 500+ of those arrested were... adult prostitutes.

None of the 500+ arrests appear to have been customers. Whatever one may think of prostitution by adults that number therefore is padded.

Not to put too fine a point on it, whether they'd netted 5,000 or 50,000 adult prostitutes in their child-rescue operation it still wouldn't have had nearly the impact of a headline that said "50 customers will spend the rest of their lives on sex-offender registries after paying for sex with children."

figleaf

i also find it really upsetting that 500+ of those arrested were prostitutes. how you can turn 18 and suddenly cease to be a victim of this prostitution ring is beyond me.

Not that this story isn't sad enough, what with there being that many trafficked children and adults in the first place, and what with the trafficked adults being lumped in with their traffickers as criminals ... but also isn't it kind of sad that of the 47 children, only 10 of them were reported missing? Where are the parents, guardians, friends and relatives of the other 37? I hope that's just a number taken out of context that has a better explanation than "Nobody cares about them." Perhaps the other 37 were reported missing to a different agency, or reported in another country. If it's a true number, and nobody cared enough about them to notice they were missing, that's a story worthy of uncovering and reporting in itself.

Can anyone believe that there was a time in world when child prostitution was legal? Does anyone else think that the reason there seems to be more child molestation going on is because there is no more easy access to child prostitutes. It's just something I'm pondering. However I'm sure most of the child prostitutes were children of the adult prostitutes so it was just a way of life for them because its all they knew, so maybe they were not in danger of physical and emotional abuse, unlike a girl who was kidnapped and forced to work. Maybe I've just seen Pretty Baby too many times.

I believe the increase in child molestation is due to a combination of factors including the mainstream sexualization of children, the unprecedented easy access to child pornography (as well as to adult pornography), a lack of significant punishment for offenders (especially for first time offenders), and an increased awareness of the need to report child molestation to authorities.

By the way, in my own city in Canada, access to child prostitutes (some as young as 8) is actually quite easy.

As far as I'm concerned this is a worldwide issue for which this and the many other new stories that have come out, barely scratch the surface. This issue seems to be pervasive across education levels, economies and cultures.

Again, I think we need be asking better questions about where the demand for this is coming from.

And you would think that more people would be willing to address this societal problem, since absent is the conflict surrounding choice and consent, which almost always derails the conversation regarding sexual exploitation in adults.

is there any information regarding the 300,000 children at risk. I mean what is their social economic situation, and family life. i can imagine is shitty, but it dosnt hurt to ask.

justinc

"children at risk" immediately makes me think of runaways.

Questions such as "why are there so many at risk" and "what kind of people are they" "what kind of lives do they have" may be answered by sources such as

http://www.1800runaway.org/

try a search on "runaway children" to read more.

Way back when, the number of runaway children was IIRC, 500,000. It shocks me to think the number today is more like "Between 1.6 and 2.8 million youth run away in a year."

Some figures from National Runaway Switchboard:

NRS Call Statistics

NRS handles more than 100,000 calls annually. In 2007, NRS handled 176,609 calls.
Family dynamics is the most frequently identified problem identified by crisis callers
77% of crisis callers are female
Friends and relatives are the most frequently identified means of survival for crisis callers (51%)
56% of crisis callers have been on the street for one week or less

Also, November is National Runaway Prevention Month

http://www.1800runaway.org/rpm/whatis.html

What is National Runaway Prevention Month

November is National Runaway Prevention Month. It is a public education campaign spearheaded by the National Runaway Switchboard (NRS) and the National Network for Youth (NNY) to:

Increase the awareness of the issues facing runaways, and
Educate the public about the solutions and the role they can play in preventing youth from running away