During the weekend of Oct. 23, 2009, 50 American children were rescued from sexual slavery thanks to the FBI in partnership with the Innocence Lost National Initiative. The rescues occurred in 36 U.S. cities and netted the arrest of 60 pimps and 631 other adults.
With these arrests, child sexual exploitation and human trafficking are openly shown to be a big problem in the nation that is supposed to be the world leader in human rights. According to Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, “There are now 34 task forces around the country… going after this problem. What we’re trying to do is wake up the country to what’s happening to our children and save lives.”
In May 2009, Shared Hope International released The National Report on Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking: America’s Prostituted Children. In this study, it was discovered that there are seven areas of concern when it comes to minors being exploited through child sex slavery, child sex trafficking, child prostitution, commercial sexual exploitation of children, and the rape of children in the U.S. These seven concerns are as follows:
- Misidentification: The inability of law enforcement, the courts, government social agencies, and community organizations to identify minors properly hampers the authorities from correctly determining a child’s problem as sexual exploitation as opposed to the problems they have that are obvious like drugs, prostitution, or being runaways.
- Criminalization of the victim through misidentification: Since the minors cannot be properly identified, they are often assumed to be juvenile delinquents or adult prostitutes by the authorities since their pimps supply them with false IDs and teach them to lie if they are ever questioned or arrested.
- Criminalization as a response to no options for placement: Minors who are trafficked fail to get the social services and education they need because there is a lack of places to keep them safe, so the authorities see no other choice than charging them with a crime and locking them up to ensure their safety. This, in turn, hinders them from receiving services for being crime victims in some communities since they have a record.
- Inappropriate or inaccessible services for domestic minor sex trafficking trauma: Minors who are trafficked are traumatized not only by the adults who have sexually exploited them but also by the law enforcement system that threatens them with being locked up or denied services they need if they refuse to give details of the crime to the authorities.
- Burden on the victim to build the case against their exploiter: Instead of developing other investigative techniques to build a case against traffickers, law enforcement relies heavily on the child victim to build their case. This often proves to be too much of an emotional and psychological burden on the victimized child who may find it extremely difficult to open up to someone they don’t know about the terrible things they have experienced.
- Lack of protective, therapeutic shelters for the trafficked victims: There are only a handful of shelters throughout the U.S. that house such victims, so the vast majority of sexually exploited children have nowhere to flee to for help.
- Insufficient priority on combating demand: Not enough is being done to stamp out the demand that drives the sexual exploitation of children. Most of those who are caught trying to have sex with children are caught in stings that use decoys. This means a vast majority of these criminals who use other methods of acquiring sex with children are not caught.
Let’s hope and pray these concerns will be addressed sufficiently in the future and that we as a nation will uphold the importance of human rights, especially for our children. God forgive us for dropping the ball on this important issue.
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