Running Away Into Slavery

Two hundred years ago in this country, the only way for slaves to escape was to run away from the men who would seek to exploit them. Today, most of the girls who are enslaved as prostitutes in the United States are not shipped here from overseas by international sex merchants, but are “home-grown runaway kids” according to Nicholas Kristof in a July 14th article of The New York Times. He claims that of the 100-600 thousand children engaged in prostitution in the United States, many are girls in their early teens who are attempting to escape from a particularly stressful or volatile family situation, such as a mother’s boyfriend making unwanted advances. These rebellious girls, often as young as 13, do not trust police and as they aimlessly wander the streets without any direction other than away from home, are approached by the only type of people on the look-out for such a girl, pimps. These pimps buy the girls dinner, give them shelter in the form of a motel room, tell them they love them, often being their first of many unwanted sexual partners. Then they force the girls at the point of a knife or gun to have sex with multiple men a night, for free because the “boyfriend”, as these pimps refer to themselves, collects all the proceeds. Customers are met either on the street or, increasingly, on the internet and are often unaware that it is against the girls’ wills, but then again would a grown man having sex with a 13 year old prostitute care? Probably not, perhaps along with the Federal Government because as Kristof agrees, sex slavery and human trafficking does receive nearly the amount of attention it should compared with other major crimes due to the fact that the victims, prostitutes, don’t make good “poster children” and are even considered criminals in the eyes of the state. This is wrong because of the three involved parties in these transactions, being the broker (pimp), the product (prostitute) and the consumer ("john"), only two should be punished, the first and the last. The person caught in the middle should be rehabilitated and receive benefits for going through such a terrible experience as Sweden has made efforts to do. We should follow Sweden’s model, adopted in 1999 as well as policies that benefit our system specifically such as improving the domestic situations in the homes that lead to these girls running away,  but especially providing resources for runaway girls to turn use instead of pimps.