Congratulations to the citizens and elected officials of Rhode Island for closing a loophole in state law that allowed “indoor” prostitution to flourish. In a special legislative session, lawmakers passed three bills that will:
• Ban minors from working in any “adult entertainment” business
• Criminalize forced labor as a form of human trafficking
• Enable the prosecution of sex trafficking of minors without proving that coercion was used
• Criminalize the soliciting of commercial sex by prostitutes and “johns”
• Prohibit victims of sex trafficking from being convicted of prostitution offenses
Coincidentally, the same day the legislature voted to ban indoor prostitution, they also approved a measure to allow voters the chance to remove the word “plantations” from the official state name. Both appropriate. There is no room for slavery of any kind in decent society.
Many fine people worked hard to get these bills passed—from homemakers to federal policy experts—but special thanks and honor must go to Donna M. Hughes and Melanie Shapiro, co-founders of Citizens Against Trafficking and Agitators-in-Chief. Your dedication and tireless efforts are a model to us all. Thank you!
An amazing story broke this week highlighting the rescue of 50 children trapped in sex trafficking rings. The three-day sting involved the FBI and local law enforcement officials working under the Innocence Lost Initiative. Check out these numbers:
- 36 cities targeted
- 50 children rescued
- 60 traffickers arrested
- 631 other people arrested
Two points to consider:
1) Some experts who fight human trafficking estimate that the AVERAGE age of entry into prostitution is 12 to 14–years old. Do you get this? The “Pretty Woman” is a mirage. The adult women in prostitution who are supposedly making an “employment choice” very likely are where they are today because someone preyed upon them as children.
2) Not all children will be saved, but some will be lost through political muddleheadedness. Professor Donna Hughes of the U. of Rhode Island makes a startling point about this nationwide sting: “No cities in Rhode Island were included in the investigation and crackdown. Rhode Island has been left out of this national FBI initiative—Innocence Lost–because we don’t have a prostitution law.”
Donna and others have been fighting to close the loophole in Rhode Island law allowing for indoor prostitution. Local police are unable to enter known brothels without probable cause of illegal activity. Without going inside, they can’t save children. It is a perfect cover for human trafficking. State lawmakers are duking it out in hearings as I write. Until such a law is passed, children being molested for money in Rhode Island have little hope of escape.
It may surprise no one that a Girls Gone Wild event in Yulee, FL. led to 16 arrests on charges of indecent exposure, obscenity and operating a sexually-oriented business. For years, this multi-million dollar porn franchise has encouraged young women to take off their clothes and/or engage in sexual activity on camera.
Hidden behind the films’ popularity is a great deal of unsavoriness—and I mean apart from the actual pornography. Trouble seems to follow the GGW tour bus like a bad groupie. Here are just three of the many, many news stories revealing these problems:
“Girls Gone Wild” founder charged with sexual battery
“Girls Gone Wild” founder fined $500,000
Spitzer Call Girl in ‘Girls Gone Wild’ Archives Was 17 (Did that act encourage her further into a world of pornography and prostitution?)
For the definitive behind the scenes story, read this one from the LA Times in 2006. But, be prepared. I have rarely been as angry as I was when I finished reading this article. Not for the faint of heart.
The man behind the “Girls Gone Wild” soft-porn empire lets Claire Hoffman into his world, for better or worse
George Bernard Shaw once said, “It is impossible to explain decency without being indecent.” The challenge is familiar for those who work to expose the dehumanizing, destructive and commercialized exploitation of the sex industry.
Credit Mark Scandrette for his willingness to peer into the darkness and tell us what he saw. As part of the anti-human trafficking effort, The ABOLITION PROJECT, Scandrette investigated some of the seedy sex clubs of San Francisco.
Mark and a friend visited a “massage parlor” where he was invited to participate in commercial sexual exploitation before he said a word and spoke with a bouncer at a topless strip club who seemed to indicate the dancers were underage. All around him were women devastated by the lust, greed and violence of men who didn’t consider them human. He ends his account with these powerful words:
My heart is breaking because I live in a city where fifty dollars can fetch you thirty minutes of pleasure by the hands of a scared undocumented woman. My heart is breaking because I live in a town where, for less than the price of a movie rental, you can watch a live eighteen year old girl strip away her dignity… My heart is breaking because I realize that the root of human slavery is the human heart, wanting to possess what it has not earned by love, trust and fidelity.
Agape International Ministries has just released a report, Stolen Lives, which paints the picture of human trafficking in India. One disturbing way young girls enter into sexual exploitation is known as the devadasi tradition.
Daughters are dedicated to the Lord Shiva when they are very young for temple service.… People believe that by doing so, they will bring prosperity and good luck in their lives. Once a girl is dedicated to the temple, the parents consider their daughter to be dead. These girls live inside the temple and become the slave of the lord. In the physical sense, the lord is the priest. Sexual abuse takes place by the priest, family members, and those who visit the temple. This sexual abuse takes place as early as eight years of age. After a couple of years of service to the temple, trafficking brokers take the girls to brothels and sell them. The brokers offer good money and opportunity in big cities. These young people are brainwashed by their parents and society to believe that this is their lot in life and there is no other way they can live.
Redemption from this brutal and depressing life is long and arduous. Learn more about Agape International Ministries here.
Last month a U.S. District Court judge issued a permanent injunction against a South Carolina law prohibiting sexually-oriented advertising within one mile of public highways. Similar advertising bans have failed in Kansas and Missouri. These cases hinge on the idea that the government cannot prohibit lawful advertising for a lawfully run business.
The real question is whether or not sexually-oriented businesses operate legally. The presumption under the law is that they do. It takes a specific citizen complaint or police investigation to start the process to determine otherwise and even then, no one or no business is guilty until so found by a jury in a court trial.
However, many who have investigated, worked in, or frequented such business know they sometimes violate local laws ranging from obscenity violations to drug crimes, prostitution offenses and building and health code violations. If General McMaster wants to curtail the influence of sexually-oriented businesses, he should worry less about their signs and investigate the businesses themselves. He might be surprised at what he finds.
Learn more about what some have discovered at strip clubs and porn shops.
The Associated Press reports on an much-needed police sting in Florida. Police have charged three employees of the Orlando Weekly with aiding and abetting prostitution and profiting from it. Undercover officers say they sought to buy ad space claiming to sell sex, otherwise known as prostitution, also fairly well known to be illegal in the United States (outside of a few Nevada counties and anywhere indoors in Rhode Island).
Attorney Pat Trueman told Family News in Focus that many papers may be at risk for similar investigations. “There is no First Amendment protection to be involved in a crime. And, when a newspaper is taking advertisements for prostitution they are aiding and abetting that crime.”
Some things to note here:
1) Newspapers across the country routinely feature sexually explicit ads for massages and other creative euphemisms for prostitution. They also advertise sex chat lines, which are also prohibited by federal law.
2) Trueman says the paper could have been aiding and abetting a crime. That’s just an opinion until the defendants are found guilty, but the point is worth pondering.
How many other entities may be abetting criminal activity surrounding porn and prostitution? Some possibilities:
- Hotels that profit from the sale of obscene pornography via pay-per-view systems
- Cable and satellite providers that sell the same material
Then there are those TV shows, so-called news organizations, and teen idols whose actions make them little more than shills for the commercial sex industry. This, too, is aiding and abetting through deceitful marketing.
Let’s revisit points 8 and 10 of the Code of Conduct for Men in the 21st Century. Say it with me:
8. I WILL NOT BUY products that advertise by exploiting women’s bodies when it has nothing at all to do with the product.
10. I WILL NOT BUY newspapers and magazines that advertise sexual services.
A fight is brewing in Rhode Island over a bill intending to close the state’s loophole allowing legalized prostitution so long as it’s conducted indoors. Currently, police cannot raid “full-service spas” (wink, wink) to find trafficked women because prostituting the women isn’t illegal. It’s the perfect cover for organized crime, but some want to keep it that way. This battle will get more heated until the General Assembly reconvenes in early September to address the issue.
Not ancillary to this policy fight is a practice among pimps of branding and tattooing women under their control. View this disturbing article with photos. Yes, in modern-day America, not just the antebellum South and Nazi Germany, women are being given an owner’s mark designating whose property they are. There is no such thing as “choice” in prostitution.
It’s long past the time that our society connects the dots between pornography, stripping, and prostitution—and understands their connections to organized crime and sex trafficking. All of these so-called businesses have in common the idea that women are commodities to be bought and sold. Is this social justice in the 21st century, that women are once again treated as chattel as they were in the ancient and not-so-ancient world?
The Associated Press reports on a sickening incident in New Hampshire:
A veteran sports reporter for New Hampshire’s largest newspaper was accused Wednesday of running a prostitution ring in two states and Canada featuring women who had auditioned for him.
Kevin Provencher advertised his prostitution ring’s services on Craigslist and other Web sites and rented hotel rooms in Andover, Mass., and in New Hampshire where the women would have sex for money, prosecutors said.
Cook County, IL Sheriff Thomas Dart has called Craigslist “the single largest source of prostitution in the nation” and this story would support that claim. What convinces a four-time New Hampshire sports writer of the year to start a side business trafficking in women? Ease. I’ve said before that Craigslist’s erotic service adult service ads normalize and legitimize prostitution in a way previously unthinkable.
