Aaron Wakling

Have you read ‘Street Girls?’ It sounds like that place, except it’s in Brazil.

i’m glad you were able to preserve these thoughts while they were still fresh… it’s like i was there.

in Delhi, a father offered his daughter to me when i started talking to her. i wanted to throw up.

that’s a powerful and difficult thought – that one girl’s reality is the message she receives from the men who prey on her, and hardly anything more than that.

let’s take this down, brick by brick.

The first thing to do is to understand trafficking and sort through the terminology that has been purposefully generated, misused and conflated. Such terms include sex slaves, child sex slaves, modern day slavery, trafficking, sex trafficking etc. All these terms are run together and used very loosely by govt and media alike with little or no accountability as to whether or not they really apply on a case-by-case basis. The media has gone bananas conflating terminology and sensationalizing because sex sells and gets ratings up. Most media outlets get thier data from another media source (likely without verifying it) so its become a self perpetuating exaggeration.

Some prefer to interpret prostitution and trafficking as synonomous….like the Bush administration. Secretary Rice has come out in condemnation of prostitution in countries where it is legal and then had to retract her comments. Confusing prostitution with trafficking is not accurate and was not the intent when Congress passed the law in 2000 because the federal govt has no Constitutional basis for regulating prostitution which has always been a state law matter.

If you follow most of the trafficking cases in the US, you will find that people are charged with trafficking but rarely charged or convicted with slavery. This distinction means means that force or restraint was not used. The definitions in the law do not require force or restraint to qualify for trafficking. Most poeple do not know that because the public has been decieved by the govt…..again. Recruitment for commerical sex is enough to qualify for trafficking. A federal defense attorney friend of mine says the state licensed brothels in technically illegal under the federal trafficking laws, but the DOJ has not chosen (yet) to pursue it….because it would bring to light the misuses of the program and the overly broad of the definitions in the law. It would likely result in a judge stricking the law down as too broad and unconstitutional.

In late November 2007, the State dept finally admitted that they have had a great deal of trouble finding real victims. They estimated 50,000 victims each year into the US back in 2000. In 8 years now, they have found only 1100 total which is less than 0.25% of what they should have found. The Washington Post was one of the few media outlets that covered it. Most big media companies have made TV specials about it where they take the worst examples. The media cannot admit the problem is overexaggerated now because they have a return on their investment to obtain. The govt does not want to admit it either because there are too many bureacrats making 6 figure salaries off of this bubble. I find it odd that the media never mentions anything about the over estimated numbers in their specials. It is factual. The govt has included the estimated number of ALL prostitutes in its trafficking numbers….that is why the numbers are so large.

This sort of trick is not new. THe History Channel ran a special about the history of prostitution….which was legal in the US up until the early 1900s. At that time, a bunch of religious nuts cooked up a problem where they said white women were being enslaved in brothels in big cities. You have to remember that segregation was legal then too. They went to Congress and got everyone upset and enacted Congress to inlist the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Yes the FBI got its first big purpose chasing prostitutes in New York. The FBI shutdown the brothels and interviewed the women. And low and behold, they could not find any enslaved women (or very very few), but they got the law on the books anyway…which was thier goal. Recently, govt bureacrats realized that it worked before….lets do it again.

This not to say that there are no vicitms. Surely there are, but in most cases, what we have here is a govt (with media and special interest group help) using a lot of smoke and mirrors as an excuse to regulate consenual adult prostitution because there are some who think “I think its wrong therefore it should be illegal”.