Child Slavery, Just How Bad is it?
By Dean Honeycutt
Mitchell County
I would like to call your attention to Child sex trafficking because I fear we pay far too little attention to this huge problem. I was first made aware of the magnitude of “human slavery” at a “For King And Country” concert in Charlotte. I believe at times we are so shocked at children being sold for sex we want to put the issue away in a closet and shut the door and not open it because it is so horrifying. The only way we are going to stop this horrible sin is to bring it into the light by making it known and punish severely those who sell children and young women.
I would like to share part of an article written by John Whitehead, January 28, 2020, entitled The Super Bowl’s Biggest Losers: The Boys and Girls Being Sold for Sex 20 Times a Day.
The following is a portion of Whitehead’s article.
“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”—(John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children) There can only be one winner emerging from this year’s Super Bowl LIV showdown between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs, but the biggest losers will be the hundreds of young girls and boys—some as young as 9 years old—who will be bought and sold for sex during the course of the big game.
It’s common to refer to this evil practice, which has become the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns as child sex trafficking, but what we’re really talking about is rape. Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.
It’s not just young girls who are vulnerable to these predators, either.
According to a USA Today investigative report, “boys make up about 36% of children caught up in the U.S. sex industry (about 60% are female and less than 5% are transgender males and females).”
Consider this: every two minutes, a child is exploited in the sex industry. In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day. On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period.
It is estimated that at least 100,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still, others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.
Child rape has become Big Business in America. This is an industry that revolves around cheap sex on the fly, with young girls and women who are sold to 50 men each day for $25 apiece, while their handlers make $150,000 to $200,000 per child each year.
This is not a problem found only in big cities.
It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities, and towns across the nation. Debbie, a straight-A student who belonged to a close-knit Air Force family living in Phoenix, Ariz., is an example of this trading of flesh. Debbie was 15 when she was snatched from her driveway by an acquaintance-friend. Forced into a car, Debbie was bound and taken to an unknown location, held at gunpoint and raped by multiple men. She was then crammed into a small dog kennel and forced to eat dog biscuits. Debbie’s captors advertised her services on Craigslist. Those who responded were often married with children, and the money that Debbie “earned” for sex was given to her kidnappers. The gang raping continued. After searching the apartment where Debbie was held captive, police finally found Debbie stuffed in a drawer under a bed. Her harrowing ordeal lasted for 40 days.
While Debbie was fortunate enough to be rescued, others are not so lucky. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, nearly 800,000 children go missing every year (roughly 2,185 children a day). With a growing demand for sexual slavery and an endless supply of girls and women who can be targeted for abduction, this is not a problem that’s going away anytime soon. For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end. Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.
Peter Landesman paints the full horrors of life for those victims of the sex trade in his New York Times article “The Girls Next Door”: “Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist-patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners–toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens–as well as what she called a “damage group.” “In the damage group, they can hit you or do anything they want to,” she explained. “Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it’s always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.”
Again, this is just a portion of the article. I wanted to share it with you because it is powerful and informative. Be vigilant. If you see something suspicious say something. Keep your eyes on your children and keep up with who they relate to on social media.
You may read the entire commentary at The Rutherford Institute Facebook post-January 28, 2020. You can also read the original article in the John White commentary section located at https://www.rutherford.org/
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Pastor Dean Honeycutt shepherds Snow Hill Baptist Church in Bakersville, NC. He may be reached at 828-385-0213, snowhillbaptist@gmail.com, or visit their website at www.snowhillbaptist.com.
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