September 10, 2009

A story in last week's news focused on the mysterious reappearance of Jaycee Lee Dugard, a 29-year-old woman who had been kidnapped 18 years earlier—snatched into a car while walking home from school. As the details of her imprisonment emerge, the horror is inescapable. Hidden in a filthy backyard complex, she was forced to serve as a sex slave for her jailer—even bearing him two children during her captivity. Can she ever live a normal life? What does the future hold for her children—young teenage girls who rarely left the backyard in which they were born? Will her captor receive the punishment he so soundly deserves?

We've heard and been repulsed by such stories before. Three years ago a young German woman, Natascha Kampusch, escaped from an Austrian cellar after being held captive for eight years. Nearly a year after her 2002 abduction from her bedroom and forced "marriage" to her kidnapper, Elizabeth Smart was rescued when an elderly couple recognized her after seeing her story on television. When confronted with the gruesome details of these crimes, we wonder how something like this could happen. What kind of person could treat a child so callously and brutally? At least, we often comfort ourselves, such abductions are rare.

Unfortunately that's not the case. Every day girls all over the world lose their innocence to heartless "owners" who are profiting from the sale of their young bodies in the sex trade. They "work" in brothels in Eastern Asia, India, Europe, and yes, in the United States. Just last week five people in Houston were arrested and charged with trafficking children—children they had forced into sexual servitude.

The U.S. State Department estimates that about half of the two million people trafficked across international borders each year are minors, the majority of whom are forced into commercial sexual exploitation. These children, occasionally as young as seven or eight, are sexually and emotionally brutalized until they are sufficiently broken to serve as many as 20 customers a day. Vulnerable to the lure of traffickers because they are poor, uneducated, and often orphaned, these girls succumb to tempting offers for seemingly lucrative jobs in other countries. When they arrive, however, in their new homes, they are stripped of their passports, their dignity, and their freedom. Their captors control them by physically and emotionally abusing them and by denying them access to money or other means of escape. Rarely can they speak the language of the country where they are being exploited; many are warned that their families will be murdered if they flee.

In the United States, where studies reveal that the average age at which a girl enters prostitution is 12 or 13, vulnerable populations include runaways, foster children, and illegal immigrants. Most have been sexually abused at home or on the streets. Trafficking recruiters lurk near Southern California high schools and target immigrant girls, threatening to turn their families over to Immigration Services if they don't begin to turn tricks. Pimps often gain control of runaway girls with kindness—before raping, beating, and drugging them into submission and forcing them to walk the streets. Sadly, if they are picked up by the police, they are often treated as criminals instead of as the victims they are.