Sex Trafficking --- Still With Us

I am just back from a symposium on Sex Trafficking sponsored by the National Council of Jewish Women and the Jewish Women’s Foundation. Over 400 attendees heard first-hand the grim details of how children 18 years of age and under are sexually exploited in the U.S. Experts from law enforcement, social services, the Attorney General’s office and more presented over five hours of depressingly graphic material. Many kudos to these women for taking on such an enormous and important task.

Sadly, sex trafficking awareness activities are now nothing new. Those of us interested in ridding the nation of this heinous crime have been meeting, discussing, planning, and advocating for over six years. The end result – while state and federal laws have vastly improved and the public and private sectors are far more educated on this subject than ever before, statistics have not changed. Children continue to be lured, pimped, abused and dumped and/or killed on a daily basis. Pimps continue to pull in millions of dollars each year – sex trafficking in the U.S. is $32 billion dollar industry. Men, and women, seeking sexual gratification of all sorts continue to buy children for pleasure from a variety of resources. The media continues to glorify pimping and encourage the sexualization of all aspects of our culture.

What is wrong with this picture? What is frighteningly wrong is that we have failed to understand the root causes of this crime against children. Root causes that have resulted in a stunning violation of human rights and the institution of modern day slavery. What is wrong is that we are not holding accountable those who could truly address and, yes, even in the long run, prevent pimps and their buddies from having a hold on our society. What is wrong is that we are asking schools, law enforcement, the courts, social service organizations, and churches to “clean up” the mess, rather than asking parents and the media to prevent these children from exposure to extreme violence, abuse, neglect, indifference, and messages that blast through eyes and ears of fragile young hearts and minds puncturing the fragile veil of innocent childhood and encouraging behaviors that deny self-worth and well-being.

The good news is, of course, that so many people are trying to turn the tide of child sexual exploitation in America. The bad news – or, at least the ­­challenging news – is that we need to dig deeper, be braver, speak louder to those who have the power and the money to send a very different message to our children and their parents. A message that conveys the importance of being a family, caring for each other and ourselves, a message that condemns activities that lead to violence and loss of self and self-esteem, a message that leads us back to a place where that fragile veil of childhood innocence in honored, nurtured and protected.

The Rev. Clelia P. Garrity