By Mike Masten
President, Project Exodus
It sounds like something out of a Hollywood movie. A young girl is at the mall with her friends when she is approached by a suave older guy who starts putting the moves on her. The young girl, naïve and wanting of attention, eats it up. Over the next few weeks, her “relationship” with this guy soon blossoms into a fairy tale romance: sweet words, tons of attention, and lots of beautiful gifts. The young girl, unaware of what love really is, falls in head first.
[Enter the dramatic music]. One day Mr. Suave shows up stressed. He explains to the girl that he is in financial trouble and that if he doesn’t take care of his “problem” then the fantasy life the two are planning together will never happen. The girl, hesitant but blinded by her love, is willing to do anything to help her man out. After all, it is just this one time. Before she knows it she is in the car headed to a hotel. Awaiting her in the hotel is a much older man with a malicious grin. In minutes her fantasy falls apart. One favor turns to two, then three, then four. By the weeks end her reality is abundantly clear. She is not a princess living a fantasy life; she is a victim of human trafficking in California.
Everyday across California and the United States, young children are being tricked and coerced into a life of sexual exploitation at the hands of heartless traffickers. According to Shared Hope International, at least 100,000 American children are being sexual exploited across the United States today. Contrary to commonly held beliefs, these children are not the sexually promiscuous and rebellious individuals that society has labeled them. Instead, these victims of child sex trafficking are everyday children who are put into extraordinarily evil situations with little voice and little hope to escape.
Their traffickers, aka “pimps”, are masters of deception and coercion. Understanding their vulnerabilities, traffickers focus their recruitment efforts on young children. It is for this reason that, according to the US Department of Justice, the average age an individual enters into prostitution in the US is between 12 and 14 years old. Skilled in the worst ways, traffickers are able to identify children who come from broken homes, have a history of sexual abuse, or have low self-esteems. Their recruitment grounds match their victim’s demographic: malls, schools, parks, churches…even Facebook and MySpace. One look at Craigslist will show the success traffickers are having. The crime is out of control.
Today the parents of America are faced with an unbelievable situation: the enslavement of our children. However, despite the magnitude and nature of the crime, there is hope. By becoming aware of the techniques pimps use to recruit children and by becoming more involved in their child’s life, a parent can be a first line of defense against traffickers and for their children. Our children have learned that slavery ended in the United States in 1865. Let’s make sure this remains true.
This article was originally written for the California Parent Teacher Association and will be published in the CA PTA's newsletter. Project Exodus recently acted as a consultant on a Child Human Trafficking Resolution that was just recently passed by the CA PTA and is working on getting an Anti-Human Trafficking Educational Curriculum established in California schools.
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