My apartment building has a lot of college students so there is a stack of Daily Texan newspapers in the lobby. When I came back with my customary breakfast danish and coffee about Noon today I noticed the following story touted above the masthead.
‘Sex-trafficking survivor sheds light on suffering”
So, to set the cat among the pigeons, here it is for your discomfort. I cut and pasted to leave out the picture of the author/victim so as delay the knee-jerk reaction based on her appearance from the “gentlemen” who have trouble (or disdain to try) concealing their hooves and snouts.
Campaign goes nationwide to raise student awareness, urge victims to break silence
By Jennifer Ifebi, Daily Texan Staff
Published: Monday, August 30, 2010
"When Theresa Flores relocated with her family to Detroit, Mich. at the age of 15, it was just another move to follow her father’s business career. She could not have predicted she would become trapped in a child sex-trafficking ring six months after the move.
After being date raped by a boy she was interested in, Flores was forced into a sex-trafficking ring, facing daily sexual abuse and torture at the hands of him and his family. Raised a Catholic with strong family values, Flores was ashamed to tell her parents and three brothers, suffering in silence for seven years after the first rape and fearing that the secret would bring shame on the family.
“He spent a lot of time grooming me, complimenting me,” she said of her rapist, telling herself, “Theresa, you’re being stupid. You know him, it’ll be fine.”
Flores told her story Saturday morning at an event hosted by Stop Child Trafficking Now, a nationwide campaign targeting child-sex predators.
Flores, who was promoting her new book “The Slave Across The Street,” told the crowd about one night when she was raped by two dozen men, adding “terrified was not even a word I could describe of how I felt.”
“Here, gentleman, is your reward for your hard work,” the head of the sex ring told his associates, as Flores succumbed with her hands tied.
She was eventually rescued by a waitress working at restaurant where the men in sex ring often took their rape victims. They used inconspicuous places such as eateries, hotels and massage parlors as cover-ups to thwart police.
“People saw that they could make money out of me and enhance their business,” she said.
Deek Moore, a detective with the Austin Police Department, said law enforcement usually arrests the women involved, who are forced into prostitution, instead of the men who head the slave sex rings. Some police departments are increasingly allowing the women to confess if they are involved in prostitution on their own, or victims of a sex ring.
“[The women] trust that our hearts are in the right place and that we’re not just trying to throw them in jail,” he said.
Students are shocked to find out about this modern-day slavery, said Noël Busch-Armendariz, director of the Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault at the UT School of Social Work.
“Most [students] are concerned about the issue and are amazed to believe that modern day slavery still exists,” she said.
Government junior, Leyla Olano said seeing a person firsthand who was a victim of human trafficking put the problem into perspective.
“An actual survivor brings so much to a person and awareness to their reality,” she said. “It opens people’s eyes to a reality they don’t want to see because it’s ugly.”
Olano, who has been involved in the organization since last year, said she’s tweaked some minor things in her daily routine, like not running late at night.
Laurie Heffron, program coordinator at the Center for Social Work Research, said the women involved in sex trafficking might not show any outward signs of abuse or torture if they are rescued.
“Victims of human trafficking are among us, working in fields and restaurants, in people’s home, in brothels and on the streets,” she said. “They may be too afraid to speak out or too emotionally coerced to recognize themselves as being victims and having rights or being eligible for assistance.”
http://www.dailytexanonline.com/cont...ight-suffering
A few thoughts: There is no doubt that there are vulnerable people out there and numerous people, nearly all of them men, eager to exploit them and this has been the case for a very long time. Between the turn of the Twentieth Century and the the First World War there were lots of books, still to be found in antique shops, decrying “white slavery” which was what human trafficking was called then, of women displaced by the technological and economic changes that forced millions off the farm and into the cities unprepared for what awaited the poor and uneducated.
Is this relevant to The Hobby? I had an absolutely wonderful three hour session Saturday with a well-known local lady whom I would consider an educated and sophisticated self-employed business woman using her beauty and skills to simultaneously satisfy the need to make a living and an, unusual for a woman, ability to enjoy sex outside of a relationship. I just booked a meeting with another such lady. I’m intensely grateful for women like them. Yet there are is no doubt that many ladies in the business are here stickily for the money and because they cannot earn a “decent” living elsewhere. These are the ones struggling not to grit their teeth while they “let” disagreeable things be done to them. That’s not a comfortable consumer experience even if there is no criminal conspiracy involved. Unless, of course, you have managed to turn your empathy off entirely.
There is a moderately funny youtube video of a young Swede saying, “Welcome to Sweden where it is not illegal to sell sex but it is against the law to buy it”. That is the coming thing - laws directed against customer guys and not sex workers. Sweden is usually about a half a century ahead of the US so I expect to be long past caring by the time that idea catches on here. Perhaps the police will have to start paying a bonus for female officers with good looks for sting duty, as they do now for other than English language abilities.
As reported by local media
she loves to tease......
