Nasty Little Man

Yet another issue on which to raise our voices loudly: Child sex slaves

Those of us who enjoyed and appreciated Bowling for Columbine (back in the days before anyone knew who Michael Moore was, before he became the lead comrade of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy) tend to be a little cynical about the MSM's (over)reporting of violent crime. "If it bleeds, it leads," and while crime rates have gone down, reporting of crimes has gone up.

It's hard to get a handle on whether or not the media blows the issue of sexual abuse of children in America out of proportion. As we know, the abuser usually knows the victim, but it is the stranger who randomly kidnaps a child that gets the most media attention, a crime that is significantly less likely to happen than acquaintance abuse.

I know victims of child sex abuse and don't want to downplay it or act like it's not a problem. It alters lives.

I've said that to set this up: There is another child sex abuse issue that does not get nearly the attention from the MSM that it should- children around the world in slavery for sex. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times delivers a devastating (and much too short) piece in Sunday's Times on the issue.

Historians will look back in puzzlement at the way our 21st century world tolerates the slavery of more than a million children in brothels around the world.

That's the lead, but later Kristoff delivers this.

The Lancet, the British medical journal, has estimated: "The number of prostituted children is thought to be increasing and could be as high as 10 million."

Kristoff reports from Calcutta and delivers the story of Geeta Ghosh, who was sold into sex slavery when she was 12, before she had even had her first period.

This issue came right in my face a month or two ago in a graduate class at Penn State. One of my classmates is a police officer in a major northeast city. She has done work on this issue in her city. She told us that she watched a home where children from Latin America were brought in to work as sex slaves and that the kids are rotated from city to city. She spent hours watching men go in and out of the house and eventually got on her radio and said, "You better send someone over here because I'm going in there."

She talked with one of the little girls who told her that she had 25 johns in a day.

Maybe Greta Van Susteren could afford to take five minutes off from the Natalee Holloway story to report on this.

Amazingly, it is very difficult to find information on this issue on the websites of some of our most significant human rights organizations. I dug through the sites of Amnesty International (both AI and USA), Human Rights First, and Human Rights Watch and could find nothing on the topic. The only time I got even in the ballpark of the topic was in a report from Human Rights First on child slavery in India but without mention of sex slavery.

Whether they are sweating in the heat of stone quarries, working in the fields sixteen hours a day, picking rags in city streets, or hidden away as domestic servants, these children endure miserable and difficult lives.

This is devastating. What can we do about it? Kristoff says that he will address that question in his next column.

posted by Kinder Gentler Little Man @ 11:10 PM