an incredibly insightful look at why some men buy sex.
From The Times
March 13, 2008
My desire for sex was so overwhelming that I had difficulty breathing
As a US Governor becomes embroiled in an escort scandal, a call-girl addict reveals the lure of illicit sex
John X
This is what gets me about the debate about prostitution, this speculation of motive as if it were some profound secret that only a team of crack shrinks can unlock. "Why did he do it?" "What did he feel?" "How could he? Why would he? But he had a girlfriend!" "Is his penis microscopically small?" "He must have harboured subconscious murderous thoughts towards his mother."
For six years I was addicted to prostitutes. All the symptoms were there: the racing pulse; the hyperventilation; the inability, when the red mist of lust descended, to walk away; the exhilarating high before and the crushing low after; the cack-handed attempts to blot out shame, if only for a few minutes - usually by buying more sex. Why did I crave prostitutes like a
crackhead craves drugs? Because I wanted to feel nothing; oblivion feels good when you've had a bad day at work, or are hung-over.
First, let me explode some myths about Johns. Things that I have never been: ugly, unemployed, smelly, intellectually subnormal, illiterate, uneducated or proud of what I've done. Like most people, I can be decent company and I can be an idiot. I've always had a good, if distant, relationship with my family (hand on heart, I can tell you that I like my mother) and I've had girlfriends most of my adult life. I'm young (35) and married, thank God, to a woman who knows about my past and whom I'd never betray. It's true I used to drink too much and, like the urge for cigarettes, the urge for paid sex evaporated only when I dried out. All
addicts crave that headspace where nothing else matters. I'd get there with alcohol, and when the next day the hangover began, I'd get there again with sex. The hedonist's dilemma, I call it.
As a teenager I was packed off to an all-boys boarding school, where I was lonely and hated the group mentality. I lost my virginity at 15 but, like many boys of my background, my primary sexual relations were with the women in porn magazines. I emerged from school a man of average height and of average temperament, if a little intense sometimes, with a below-average
ability to relate to the opposite sex. My problem wasn't that I couldn't shag women; I just couldn't talk to them. My first time was in Amsterdam on my 18th birthday. I was drunk and high and with six friends from school who had decided that a brothel was on the agenda. Did it feel like crossing a line? Not really. I couldn't get it up and, afterwards, when the collective bragging began - the word "stallion" was bandied about - I lied. I remember thinking: "That was worse than popping my cherry!" The experience didn't leave me craving paid sex. What did remain were the lessons I'd already learnt from pornography: that women were there for one thing.
I don't know where the statistic that one man in ten has used prostitutes comes from. I'd say that 50 or 60 per cent of men have been to one at least once. I don't think most men like to talk about it even among themselves, but every now and again somebody lets something slip, usually when drunk. She was a "nice Swedish girl" or "good" or "professional". "Good" means that she acted it all out and hid the fact that she found you abhorrent. As for "professional" ... A friend told me about a place he went to in Chelsea: there were two women there, watching Friends. "Choose one," he was told. He had found it unprofessional that the girl he hadn't chosen was obviously so delighted to have wriggled out of sex with him. "She just skipped off," he told me.
You have to be deluded to think that a prostitute likes having sex with you. But you appreciate any woman who lets you suspend your disbelief. A "good" prostitute doesn't look at her watch in the middle of proceedings, or let you know that in paying for sex you have become everything that women hate about men.
Why do men go to prostitutes? To shag, is the short answer. It's a mistake to associate paid sex with feelings. Better to associate it with a lack of feelings, a big frightening void, an inability to communicate sexually and emotionally with a partner. Shagging a prostitute won't sort out emotional problems. You don't lie there pouring your heart out or wanting to save her from her miserable life. Why does a man need a prostitute if he's got a lovely girlfriend at home? No matter how beautiful the woman he's sleeping with, he just wants someone different, and then wants someone different again. Someone to take him out of his current reality, of which self-hatred is a decisive aspect. I never have sex with the same prostitute more than
once.
By the time I had sex with a second prostitute four years had passed. I was in Central London, hung-over, and saw a card in a phone booth. A thought passed through my brain: "If I ring that number, I could be having sex in five minutes." Suddenly the desire to have sex became so physically overwhelming that I was having difficulty breathing. Ten minutes later I was on a thin mattress with an older English woman. It was an unmemorable experience but, given the alcoholic mess that my life was becoming, the physical act was comforting. For maybe eight minutes life became a bubble, a bosom and a womb, a room full of cotton wool. And then I'd come to and there was a woman I didn't know leaving the room and always, without fail, the smell of bleach.
By the time I stopped using prostitutes, I was teetering on the brink of triple figures. At my worst I was seeing three women a week, usually in Soho where, at the time, you could buy full sex for £20. The urge to have sex was always worst when I was hung over. And anxiety is a great aphrodisiac.
I've walked out only twice - once when the prostitute turned out to be 50-odd, once when I found the girl chained to the bed (I didn't know if it was real or part of the act). And that's another myth about this business, that a punter will have a Richard Gere moment and rescue this woman from her misery. What are you going to do, give her £5,000? Some women I met I
couldn't believe were working as prostitutes. One German girl was very educated - something bad must have happened to her. I did try to find her again to give her the number of a friend who could get her work, but the place had been shut down.
Some men claim that they go for the conversation but, come on, you don't go to a brothel to talk. "Hello," she says. "Hello," you say. "Where are you from?" "Naples", she replies. Like a prat, you say: "Oh, I've been to Italy!" "Where are you from?" she asks, with zero interest.
"Er, England." That's about it.
The longest conversation I've had was spent talking about what she did at the gym. But mostly you don't speak. To get you in the spirit of things there might be a hardcore video blaring from a TV set. In the back of your mind self-disgust mingles with the conviction that you're not that bad, she's had to sleep with worse. Prostitution is a degrading experience for both parties. As a punter, it's not good for your self-esteem, and costs quite a lot. More likely than not, you've got problems. And more likely than not, so does she. A prostitute on Berwick Street once told a friend that he reminded her of her ex-boyfriend and as "a treat" she didn't make him use a condom. He was drunk, of course, and wildly frightened afterwards. Was this her revenge? Was she messed up? Did she have HIV? Did he now?
There are few totally happy addicts; we tend to feel like outsiders, which makes us do what we do. But when I went to AA I saw a room full of people just like me. I was all alienated, and suddenly here were these people telling me that they felt exactly as I did. They described the five, ten, 15 minutes before the drink or drugs or poker game or woman when you go mad, when you think, I can't not do this. They described the state of mind, the "I shouldn't do this", the breathlessness when it's happening and the pathetic shameful emptiness afterwards. They described mulling over the potential consequences - and doing it anyway. They described feeling unique and isolated. After a while I realised the most shameful truth of all: I
wasn't different at all.
Read more!
Monday, April 7, 2008
USB POLE DANCER
Another page from the unbelievable -- Fry's Electronics is now selling a "pole dancer" that you plug into your computer! Yes, it's true. So now men can have an electronic stripper right at their desk?! More normalization, more dehumanization of women, more objectification . . . when and where will it all end?
Cables Unlimited:
FRYS.com #: 5203157
Dim the lights, crank up the music and she does her thing! This pole dancer is power directly by the USB port on your computer! Fresh off the Vegas strip and straight to your desk with motorized action and disco lighting, she'll dance to her own music when you press select the demo mode, or plug in your own audio player and dance the night away! Some call her a little plastic, but ask Charles and he'll call her Candi. Save your singles let her dance into your dreams today!
No batteries or software required
$24.99 Read more!
Cables Unlimited:
FRYS.com #: 5203157
Dim the lights, crank up the music and she does her thing! This pole dancer is power directly by the USB port on your computer! Fresh off the Vegas strip and straight to your desk with motorized action and disco lighting, she'll dance to her own music when you press select the demo mode, or plug in your own audio player and dance the night away! Some call her a little plastic, but ask Charles and he'll call her Candi. Save your singles let her dance into your dreams today!No batteries or software required
$24.99 Read more!
Child prostitution survivor aims to change lives
By Janet Kornblum, USA TODAY
FRESNO — On a chilly winter evening in the Central Valley, the agricultural heart of California, Carissa Phelps is driving down a street known as Motel Drive, tucked between a park and railroad tracks in the shadow of Highway 99.
A few women — some looking more like teens — stand on street corners, eyeing potential customers, preparing for the night ahead. Not much has changed since Phelps stood on these very same corners 19 years ago, a girl with nowhere to go but the streets.
Phelps looks at the run-down, faded buildings and points to a tall turquoise sign with white and yellow lettering. The Villa Motel.
She was 12, hungry and alone when a man three times her age picked her up, bought her a hot dog and Pepsi, then brought her here.
It was the beginning of a life she never thought she'd survive.
But now she is 31, a law and business school graduate of the University of California-Los Angeles, a star in an upcoming documentary about her life and a spokeswoman for teenagers forced to turn to prostitution when they have no other way to survive.
ON THE WEB: View the trailer for Carissa and learn more
She is a fundraiser who rubs elbows with California's business and political elite, and she is a neighborhood organizer who is just as comfortable with people living on the margins.
She's a "meteor," who has a passion not just to change this neighborhood but to create a blueprint to transform dangerous, marginal neighborhoods into places of light, culture and safety, sayslocal investor Lee Ayers.
"People get on and off the freeway and get what they want," Phelps says. "Nobody understands about the lives of people here. They don't realize there are kids out there."
Children being forced into prostitution is "America's dirty little secret," says Lois Lee, founder of Children of the Night, a Los Angeles non-profit that houses and counsels children who want to get off the streets.
Phelps wants to put the spotlight on prostituted children (calling them "child prostitutes" puts the blame on the wrong person, she says) by sharing her story, which is decidedly unglamorous and all too common: a story of a girl from a broken home with no place to go.
How it all began
For Phelps, life in the streets began when her mother dropped her off at Fresno County Juvenile Hall 70 miles from their Coalinga home.
Sharol Macleod, Phelps' mother, says she doesn't remember much from that time; the incident is a "blur." But she does remember feeling helpless. Her daughter was repeatedly running away from home and seemed out of control.
"I was just desperate for her to be somewhere safe and not to run away anymore," Macleod says in a quiet voice over the phone.
Phelps remembers her childhood rebelliousness, a product, she says, of a dysfunctional family. But "I'm 12 years old. I can't be that bad at 12 years old. I had no criminal record — a common girl."
The county couldn't take her; she had broken no law. It couldn't turn her away, either. Phelps slept in the lobby for three days until she was taken to a group home. She disliked it instantly and ran away.
This was a pattern she repeated over the next few years, running from group homes, hanging out, sometimes babysitting, eventually turning to the streets.
For Phelps and many others, prostitution "wasn't Heidi Fleiss," Lee says. "She wasn't some attractive, sexy call girl. She wasn't having sex with movie stars."
When she ran away, she fell into the same trap as many young girls: "men who befriended her, forced her to have sex with other adult men and took money from her," Lee says. "She is the face and the voice of kids who have been forced into prostitution."
No one has accurate statistics on how many children turn to prostitution for survival, largely because street kids remain hidden. Some estimates range from 100,000 to 300,000 in the USA. But even those numbers are unreliable, says David Finkelhor of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.
The numbers are higher than most people realize, says Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
"The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it," Allen says. "This is not a problem that only happens in New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco. This happens in smaller communities."
What makes Phelps' story worthy of a documentary, now in its final stages, was not just that she survived but that she thrived, says filmmaker David Sauvage, who met Phelps in business school.
When he began making Carissa, he just wanted to make a great debut as a filmmaker.
"I wasn't thinking that much about the social implications of it," he says. "But over the course of making it, I saw that there really is a pretty powerful need for a story about a girl who made it out of that situation into a much better one."
In addition to her new life as a community organizer, Phelps also is a newlywed. On Feb. 21, she married her best friend from 15 years ago, Cole Clement, and has an 8-year-old stepdaughter.
The way back
Phelps' journey off the streets began when she stole a car at 13. She had been through short stints in county juvenile facilities, but this time she was sentenced to six months and placed in an experimental program that included group therapy.
There she met counselor Ron Jenkins, who now is a youth correctional officer and recruiter. He recognized her intelligence and gift for academics.
Phelps says it was the first time she felt adults really cared about her, and it made a difference.
Jenkins could see "a lot of hurt and pain" in Phelps, and he encouraged her to go back to school.
"Here's a young woman who pretty much had her childhood stolen away from her," he says. "But yet she had a desire to continue her education, to continue caring enough about herself to not only turn her life around, but to spend the rest of her life turning other people's lives around."
Phelps realized things needed to change even as a child of 12.
"I was walking down McKinley Avenue really late at night feeling totally invisible, scared out of my wits. There were bushes on the side of the street, and I didn't know if someone was going to jump out from them, or if there were monsters. I was freaked out. And I got mad. I was like, why isn't there any place for me to go? Why? I wanted to change it."
'Enlightenment' and action
It wasn't until much later, until business school, that she realized she wanted to come back and change that very neighborhood. She took a course on women and leadership taught by Jamie McCourt, president of the Los Angeles Dodgers. (The Dodgers Dream Foundation is helping pay for the documentary.)
Phelps says McCourt convinced her "that earning a degree meant that certain economic, social and civic callings awaited all of us as members of an elite class of business school grads."
After graduating in June, Phelps took a lucrative job working as a private equity analyst in Los Angeles. She had planned to save money for a while and learn more about community investment to pay off her $150,000 in student loans and then return in a few years armed with knowledge and money.
But a desk job wasn't for her. And there was something more. "Me coming back to Fresno is about my own enlightenment," she says. "There's no other way I would want to live my life. I wanted to help. I want this junk, this crap that happened to me to be useful somehow. And this is how it could be useful."
And it was after she returned that she reunited with Clement.
Working on the dream
Phelps can almost taste how the neighborhood could change. "I see a beautiful area with open space, organic farming — grocery stores."
But those are only dreams. Her plan is to organize neighborhood leaders who will help develop the specifics.
Phelps already has begun. She started a fund to buy abandoned buildings, like the old Kmart on Olive Avenue. She spends her days fundraising, talking to community officials and organizing neighbors. She recently received attention for her fight against a proposal to put a halfway house in the neighborhood for returning female convicts.
"I try to think about where I can do the most," she says. Even if she doesn't raise the money herself but can inspire others, "I shine a light on the problem. If that's all that I do, it's worth it."
But is she ever too haunted by the past to move forward?
"Only when I'm not working on and trying to fix it," she says. "I want to somehow change the situation that I came from so that if there was another Carissa following 30 years behind me, something different would happen for them." Read more!
FRESNO — On a chilly winter evening in the Central Valley, the agricultural heart of California, Carissa Phelps is driving down a street known as Motel Drive, tucked between a park and railroad tracks in the shadow of Highway 99.
A few women — some looking more like teens — stand on street corners, eyeing potential customers, preparing for the night ahead. Not much has changed since Phelps stood on these very same corners 19 years ago, a girl with nowhere to go but the streets.
Phelps looks at the run-down, faded buildings and points to a tall turquoise sign with white and yellow lettering. The Villa Motel.
She was 12, hungry and alone when a man three times her age picked her up, bought her a hot dog and Pepsi, then brought her here.
It was the beginning of a life she never thought she'd survive.
But now she is 31, a law and business school graduate of the University of California-Los Angeles, a star in an upcoming documentary about her life and a spokeswoman for teenagers forced to turn to prostitution when they have no other way to survive.
ON THE WEB: View the trailer for Carissa and learn more
She is a fundraiser who rubs elbows with California's business and political elite, and she is a neighborhood organizer who is just as comfortable with people living on the margins.
She's a "meteor," who has a passion not just to change this neighborhood but to create a blueprint to transform dangerous, marginal neighborhoods into places of light, culture and safety, sayslocal investor Lee Ayers.
"People get on and off the freeway and get what they want," Phelps says. "Nobody understands about the lives of people here. They don't realize there are kids out there."
Children being forced into prostitution is "America's dirty little secret," says Lois Lee, founder of Children of the Night, a Los Angeles non-profit that houses and counsels children who want to get off the streets.
Phelps wants to put the spotlight on prostituted children (calling them "child prostitutes" puts the blame on the wrong person, she says) by sharing her story, which is decidedly unglamorous and all too common: a story of a girl from a broken home with no place to go.
How it all began
For Phelps, life in the streets began when her mother dropped her off at Fresno County Juvenile Hall 70 miles from their Coalinga home.
Sharol Macleod, Phelps' mother, says she doesn't remember much from that time; the incident is a "blur." But she does remember feeling helpless. Her daughter was repeatedly running away from home and seemed out of control.
"I was just desperate for her to be somewhere safe and not to run away anymore," Macleod says in a quiet voice over the phone.
Phelps remembers her childhood rebelliousness, a product, she says, of a dysfunctional family. But "I'm 12 years old. I can't be that bad at 12 years old. I had no criminal record — a common girl."
The county couldn't take her; she had broken no law. It couldn't turn her away, either. Phelps slept in the lobby for three days until she was taken to a group home. She disliked it instantly and ran away.
This was a pattern she repeated over the next few years, running from group homes, hanging out, sometimes babysitting, eventually turning to the streets.
For Phelps and many others, prostitution "wasn't Heidi Fleiss," Lee says. "She wasn't some attractive, sexy call girl. She wasn't having sex with movie stars."
When she ran away, she fell into the same trap as many young girls: "men who befriended her, forced her to have sex with other adult men and took money from her," Lee says. "She is the face and the voice of kids who have been forced into prostitution."
No one has accurate statistics on how many children turn to prostitution for survival, largely because street kids remain hidden. Some estimates range from 100,000 to 300,000 in the USA. But even those numbers are unreliable, says David Finkelhor of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.
The numbers are higher than most people realize, says Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
"The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it," Allen says. "This is not a problem that only happens in New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco. This happens in smaller communities."
What makes Phelps' story worthy of a documentary, now in its final stages, was not just that she survived but that she thrived, says filmmaker David Sauvage, who met Phelps in business school.
When he began making Carissa, he just wanted to make a great debut as a filmmaker.
"I wasn't thinking that much about the social implications of it," he says. "But over the course of making it, I saw that there really is a pretty powerful need for a story about a girl who made it out of that situation into a much better one."
In addition to her new life as a community organizer, Phelps also is a newlywed. On Feb. 21, she married her best friend from 15 years ago, Cole Clement, and has an 8-year-old stepdaughter.
The way back
Phelps' journey off the streets began when she stole a car at 13. She had been through short stints in county juvenile facilities, but this time she was sentenced to six months and placed in an experimental program that included group therapy.
There she met counselor Ron Jenkins, who now is a youth correctional officer and recruiter. He recognized her intelligence and gift for academics.
Phelps says it was the first time she felt adults really cared about her, and it made a difference.
Jenkins could see "a lot of hurt and pain" in Phelps, and he encouraged her to go back to school.
"Here's a young woman who pretty much had her childhood stolen away from her," he says. "But yet she had a desire to continue her education, to continue caring enough about herself to not only turn her life around, but to spend the rest of her life turning other people's lives around."
Phelps realized things needed to change even as a child of 12.
"I was walking down McKinley Avenue really late at night feeling totally invisible, scared out of my wits. There were bushes on the side of the street, and I didn't know if someone was going to jump out from them, or if there were monsters. I was freaked out. And I got mad. I was like, why isn't there any place for me to go? Why? I wanted to change it."
'Enlightenment' and action
It wasn't until much later, until business school, that she realized she wanted to come back and change that very neighborhood. She took a course on women and leadership taught by Jamie McCourt, president of the Los Angeles Dodgers. (The Dodgers Dream Foundation is helping pay for the documentary.)
Phelps says McCourt convinced her "that earning a degree meant that certain economic, social and civic callings awaited all of us as members of an elite class of business school grads."
After graduating in June, Phelps took a lucrative job working as a private equity analyst in Los Angeles. She had planned to save money for a while and learn more about community investment to pay off her $150,000 in student loans and then return in a few years armed with knowledge and money.
But a desk job wasn't for her. And there was something more. "Me coming back to Fresno is about my own enlightenment," she says. "There's no other way I would want to live my life. I wanted to help. I want this junk, this crap that happened to me to be useful somehow. And this is how it could be useful."
And it was after she returned that she reunited with Clement.
Working on the dream
Phelps can almost taste how the neighborhood could change. "I see a beautiful area with open space, organic farming — grocery stores."
But those are only dreams. Her plan is to organize neighborhood leaders who will help develop the specifics.
Phelps already has begun. She started a fund to buy abandoned buildings, like the old Kmart on Olive Avenue. She spends her days fundraising, talking to community officials and organizing neighbors. She recently received attention for her fight against a proposal to put a halfway house in the neighborhood for returning female convicts.
"I try to think about where I can do the most," she says. Even if she doesn't raise the money herself but can inspire others, "I shine a light on the problem. If that's all that I do, it's worth it."
But is she ever too haunted by the past to move forward?
"Only when I'm not working on and trying to fix it," she says. "I want to somehow change the situation that I came from so that if there was another Carissa following 30 years behind me, something different would happen for them." Read more!
The Wrong Target
By BOB HERBERT
A New York City police detective and his girlfriend have been accused of kidnapping and forcing a 13-year-old girl into prostitution.
According to the Queens district attorney’s office, the detective, Wayne Taylor, and the girlfriend, Zalika Brown, would parade the girl at parties and other places where adult men had gathered and force her to have sex with them for money – $40 for oral sex, $80 for intercourse.
The child was an investment. The couple allegedly told her that she had been purchased for $500 – purchased, like the slaves of old, only this time for use as a prostitute.
Other than the fact that one of the accused in this case is a police detective, there was nothing unusual about this tale of trafficking in young female flesh.
Our perspective is twisted. It was a big story when a television newsman was crude and thoughtless enough to use the term “pimped out” in a reference to Chelsea Clinton. The comment generated outrage – as it should have – and the newsman was suspended. But if someone actually pimps out a 13-year-old child, and even if that someone is alleged to be a police detective, it generates a collective yawn.
Across the country, young girls by the many thousands – children – are being drawn into the hellishly dangerous world of prostitution. They are raped, beaten and exploited in every way imaginable.
As part of the staggeringly lucrative commercial sex trade, the role of these children is to satisfy the sexual demands of johns who in most cases do not fit the stereotype of a pedophile.
“Many of the guys who buy sex with children would never consider themselves pedophiles,” said Rachel Lloyd, founder of an organization in New York called GEMS that offers help to under-age girls in the sex trade. “They’re not necessarily out there looking for 12-year-olds or teenagers. They just kind of don’t care.
“They feel like they have the right to buy sex from someone, and they prefer it to be someone who looks younger and cleaner and less drug-addicted.”
In the case of the accused New York City detective, the authorities acted promptly and effectively. The girl managed to escape and notified the police, who investigated immediately. Detective Taylor and Ms. Brown were arrested and the case has been turned over to the office of Queens District Attorney Richard Brown. Both are in custody.
But law enforcement does not always respond in a positive or constructive way. It is common across the country for under-age girls engaged in prostitution to be arrested, which is bizarre when you consider that it is a serious crime – statutory rape – for an adult to have sex with a minor.
If no money is involved, the youngster is considered a victim. But if the man pays for the sex – even if the money is going to the pimp, which is so often the case – the child is considered a prostitute and thus subject in many venues to arrest and incarceration.
“We often see the girls arrested and the pimps and the johns go free,” said Carol Smolenski, the head of Ecpat-USA, a group that fights the sexual exploitation of children. “One of the big problems is that there is this whole set of child sex exploiters who are not targeted as exceptionally bad guys.”
What’s needed is a paradigm shift. Society (and thus law enforcement) needs to view any adult who sexually exploits a child as a villain, and the exploited child as a victim of that villainy. If a 35-year-old pimp puts a 16-year-old girl on the street and a 30-year-old john pays to have sex with her, how is it reasonable that the girl is most often the point in that triangle that is targeted by law enforcement?
A measure of how far we still have to go is the fact that some enlightened officials in the state of New York tried to shift that paradigm last year and failed. The proposed Safe Harbor Act would have ended the practice of criminalizing kids too young to legally consent to sex. Under the law, authorities would have no longer been able to charge children with prostitution, but would have had to offer such youngsters emotional counseling, medical care and shelter, if necessary.
Legislative passage was thwarted in large part because prosecutors made the case that it was necessary to hold the threat of jail over the heads of these children as a way of coercing them to testify against pimps. In other words: If you don’t tell us who hurt you, little girl, we’re going to put you in jail.
It was an utterly specious case, filled to the bursting point with tragic implications and unworthy of a civilized society. Read more!
A New York City police detective and his girlfriend have been accused of kidnapping and forcing a 13-year-old girl into prostitution.
According to the Queens district attorney’s office, the detective, Wayne Taylor, and the girlfriend, Zalika Brown, would parade the girl at parties and other places where adult men had gathered and force her to have sex with them for money – $40 for oral sex, $80 for intercourse.
The child was an investment. The couple allegedly told her that she had been purchased for $500 – purchased, like the slaves of old, only this time for use as a prostitute.
Other than the fact that one of the accused in this case is a police detective, there was nothing unusual about this tale of trafficking in young female flesh.
Our perspective is twisted. It was a big story when a television newsman was crude and thoughtless enough to use the term “pimped out” in a reference to Chelsea Clinton. The comment generated outrage – as it should have – and the newsman was suspended. But if someone actually pimps out a 13-year-old child, and even if that someone is alleged to be a police detective, it generates a collective yawn.
Across the country, young girls by the many thousands – children – are being drawn into the hellishly dangerous world of prostitution. They are raped, beaten and exploited in every way imaginable.
As part of the staggeringly lucrative commercial sex trade, the role of these children is to satisfy the sexual demands of johns who in most cases do not fit the stereotype of a pedophile.
“Many of the guys who buy sex with children would never consider themselves pedophiles,” said Rachel Lloyd, founder of an organization in New York called GEMS that offers help to under-age girls in the sex trade. “They’re not necessarily out there looking for 12-year-olds or teenagers. They just kind of don’t care.
“They feel like they have the right to buy sex from someone, and they prefer it to be someone who looks younger and cleaner and less drug-addicted.”
In the case of the accused New York City detective, the authorities acted promptly and effectively. The girl managed to escape and notified the police, who investigated immediately. Detective Taylor and Ms. Brown were arrested and the case has been turned over to the office of Queens District Attorney Richard Brown. Both are in custody.
But law enforcement does not always respond in a positive or constructive way. It is common across the country for under-age girls engaged in prostitution to be arrested, which is bizarre when you consider that it is a serious crime – statutory rape – for an adult to have sex with a minor.
If no money is involved, the youngster is considered a victim. But if the man pays for the sex – even if the money is going to the pimp, which is so often the case – the child is considered a prostitute and thus subject in many venues to arrest and incarceration.
“We often see the girls arrested and the pimps and the johns go free,” said Carol Smolenski, the head of Ecpat-USA, a group that fights the sexual exploitation of children. “One of the big problems is that there is this whole set of child sex exploiters who are not targeted as exceptionally bad guys.”
What’s needed is a paradigm shift. Society (and thus law enforcement) needs to view any adult who sexually exploits a child as a villain, and the exploited child as a victim of that villainy. If a 35-year-old pimp puts a 16-year-old girl on the street and a 30-year-old john pays to have sex with her, how is it reasonable that the girl is most often the point in that triangle that is targeted by law enforcement?
A measure of how far we still have to go is the fact that some enlightened officials in the state of New York tried to shift that paradigm last year and failed. The proposed Safe Harbor Act would have ended the practice of criminalizing kids too young to legally consent to sex. Under the law, authorities would have no longer been able to charge children with prostitution, but would have had to offer such youngsters emotional counseling, medical care and shelter, if necessary.
Legislative passage was thwarted in large part because prosecutors made the case that it was necessary to hold the threat of jail over the heads of these children as a way of coercing them to testify against pimps. In other words: If you don’t tell us who hurt you, little girl, we’re going to put you in jail.
It was an utterly specious case, filled to the bursting point with tragic implications and unworthy of a civilized society. Read more!
Trafficking tough to tame in rich Gulf states
Trafficking tough to tame in rich Gulf states
Sat Feb 23, 2008 7:41pm EST
By Lin Noueihed
DUBAI (Reuters) - Aysha sold her wedding gold to pay traffickers $200 to find her and a cousin jobs in Dubai. A world away from her village in Uzbekistan, she was forced to work in a disco and expected to offer sex.
Beaten by her Uzbek boss when she shooed prospective clients away, she and her cousin fled and hid in airport toilets for two days, surviving on tap water.
Aysha's story reveals the dark underbelly of glitzy, fast-paced Dubai, the Gulf Arab trade and tourism hub. It also highlights a problem that bedevils many states in the region and is a bone of contention with their close ally the United States.
The 26-year-old, who only identified herself as Aysha for fear the traffickers would hurt her family, supports her son and sick mother back home.
"Some girls like going to discos but I am Muslim, I cannot go to places where people dance and drink let alone work there," she said at the shelter in Dubai where she now lives.
Tens of thousands of people arrive in Dubai and neighboring states each year, seeking a better life in a region booming on record oil revenues. But the wealth on show in Dubai's sprawling shopping malls, skyscrapers and smart restaurants attracts traffickers too.
Foreign workers and expatriates with different lifestyles and cultures make up over 80 percent of the more than 4 million population in the United Arab Emirates, a Muslim country.
Prostitution, even adultery, are illegal yet bars abound where women are available for sex.
In a 2007 report, the U.S. State Department accused its Gulf Arab allies of being among the worst offenders in failing to prevent people from being sold into sex and servitude.
It put the UAE on "Tier 2 Watch List" for not doing enough but Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar joined Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan on a list of 16 states subject to possible sanctions.
In 2006, the UAE -- a wealthy seven-member federation including Abu Dhabi and Dubai -- passed the Arab world's first law aimed specifically at combating the trade in humans, with penalties ranging from five years to life in jail.
Last month, the nearby Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, which has a free trade pact with the United States, issued its own law.
"It is not a stigma on the UAE that human trafficking takes place because many prosperous, attractive places to live have this problem," said Anwar Gargash, a minister who heads a committee set up to coordinate efforts to implement the law.
"The stigma is if we do nothing about it," he said. "We have done a lot ... but we have a long way to go."
BROKEN PROMISES
Trafficking is hard to measure but the United Nations says a revolution in affordable transport and instant communication has vastly increased it over the past decade.
It estimates annual profits from human trafficking at more than $30 billion, with 2.5 million people trapped in forced labor, including sexual exploitation, in forced marriages, or pushed to provide body parts for black market trade in organs.
A relatively small proportion of forced labor -- 260,000 people -- takes place in the Middle East and North Africa but most of it -- 230,000 people -- is a result of trafficking, the International labor Organization said in a 2005 report.
Aysha's case puts a face on the figures.
She was sitting outside her home in Uzbekistan when she was approached by a woman who showed her pictures of Dubai and promised her a job as a waitress.
When she and her cousin arrived in Dubai, their hair was cut, their eyebrows plucked and they were given skimpy clothes to wear. They were locked up in an apartment with four other girls who were made to work as prostitutes.
On day two, Aysha and her cousin escaped from the disco when their boss had to go out on an urgent errand. They flagged down a taxi, but the only English word they knew was airport.
They lived in the airport toilets for two days before being found and sent to the Uzbek consulate, which sent them to the shelter.
"The other girls wanted to run away too but they were too afraid. I think they tried before but were caught," Aysha said.
VICTIMS OR CRIMINALS
The UAE took part in the UN's global conference on human trafficking in Vienna this month, and donated $15 million last year to support efforts to fight human trafficking.
But it has faced logistical and cultural problems common to many countries in trying to stop trafficking.
One difficulty is training police officers from traditional societies to see prostitutes as victims or to deal sensitively with rape or abuse. Victims of trafficking are often caught and punished while traffickers escape.
Gargash said police were being trained to investigate for the involvement of human trafficking webs in prostitution cases.
"Women and children are often the victims in these cases and we want the police to have victim sensitivity," he said.
Another issue is reaching out to source nations.
"This is a transnational crime. It is impossible to combat it only on a national basis. We need partnerships with source countries ... We are just delving into this area," Gargash said.
Sharla Musabih runs Dubai's City of Hope shelter, the first of its kind in the Gulf and now home to the two young women from Uzbekistan. She will inaugurate a shelter in Ethiopia this month to help stop the trafficking at source.
An American who married an Emirati and moved to Dubai in 1984, Musabih says there has been some progress in cracking down on trafficking for sex but more needs to be done.
"I have dealt with over 400 cases in the past six months, cases of everything from trafficking to maid abuse, domestic violence or labor abuse," she said. "That situation (trafficking for sex) has improved immensely. I used to see many. Now I have two girls here and the attempt did not work."
Aysha and her cousin seemed at ease in Musabih's shelter. They giggled and called Musabih "mama", communicating through signals or through a fellow Uzbek woman who spoke English.
"They want to come back," the woman said. "In my country, pay is bad, $50 a month when a kilo of meat costs $5 ... They say 'I want to go home, arrange a real job and come back'." Read more!
Sat Feb 23, 2008 7:41pm EST
By Lin Noueihed
DUBAI (Reuters) - Aysha sold her wedding gold to pay traffickers $200 to find her and a cousin jobs in Dubai. A world away from her village in Uzbekistan, she was forced to work in a disco and expected to offer sex.
Beaten by her Uzbek boss when she shooed prospective clients away, she and her cousin fled and hid in airport toilets for two days, surviving on tap water.
Aysha's story reveals the dark underbelly of glitzy, fast-paced Dubai, the Gulf Arab trade and tourism hub. It also highlights a problem that bedevils many states in the region and is a bone of contention with their close ally the United States.
The 26-year-old, who only identified herself as Aysha for fear the traffickers would hurt her family, supports her son and sick mother back home.
"Some girls like going to discos but I am Muslim, I cannot go to places where people dance and drink let alone work there," she said at the shelter in Dubai where she now lives.
Tens of thousands of people arrive in Dubai and neighboring states each year, seeking a better life in a region booming on record oil revenues. But the wealth on show in Dubai's sprawling shopping malls, skyscrapers and smart restaurants attracts traffickers too.
Foreign workers and expatriates with different lifestyles and cultures make up over 80 percent of the more than 4 million population in the United Arab Emirates, a Muslim country.
Prostitution, even adultery, are illegal yet bars abound where women are available for sex.
In a 2007 report, the U.S. State Department accused its Gulf Arab allies of being among the worst offenders in failing to prevent people from being sold into sex and servitude.
It put the UAE on "Tier 2 Watch List" for not doing enough but Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar joined Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan on a list of 16 states subject to possible sanctions.
In 2006, the UAE -- a wealthy seven-member federation including Abu Dhabi and Dubai -- passed the Arab world's first law aimed specifically at combating the trade in humans, with penalties ranging from five years to life in jail.
Last month, the nearby Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, which has a free trade pact with the United States, issued its own law.
"It is not a stigma on the UAE that human trafficking takes place because many prosperous, attractive places to live have this problem," said Anwar Gargash, a minister who heads a committee set up to coordinate efforts to implement the law.
"The stigma is if we do nothing about it," he said. "We have done a lot ... but we have a long way to go."
BROKEN PROMISES
Trafficking is hard to measure but the United Nations says a revolution in affordable transport and instant communication has vastly increased it over the past decade.
It estimates annual profits from human trafficking at more than $30 billion, with 2.5 million people trapped in forced labor, including sexual exploitation, in forced marriages, or pushed to provide body parts for black market trade in organs.
A relatively small proportion of forced labor -- 260,000 people -- takes place in the Middle East and North Africa but most of it -- 230,000 people -- is a result of trafficking, the International labor Organization said in a 2005 report.
Aysha's case puts a face on the figures.
She was sitting outside her home in Uzbekistan when she was approached by a woman who showed her pictures of Dubai and promised her a job as a waitress.
When she and her cousin arrived in Dubai, their hair was cut, their eyebrows plucked and they were given skimpy clothes to wear. They were locked up in an apartment with four other girls who were made to work as prostitutes.
On day two, Aysha and her cousin escaped from the disco when their boss had to go out on an urgent errand. They flagged down a taxi, but the only English word they knew was airport.
They lived in the airport toilets for two days before being found and sent to the Uzbek consulate, which sent them to the shelter.
"The other girls wanted to run away too but they were too afraid. I think they tried before but were caught," Aysha said.
VICTIMS OR CRIMINALS
The UAE took part in the UN's global conference on human trafficking in Vienna this month, and donated $15 million last year to support efforts to fight human trafficking.
But it has faced logistical and cultural problems common to many countries in trying to stop trafficking.
One difficulty is training police officers from traditional societies to see prostitutes as victims or to deal sensitively with rape or abuse. Victims of trafficking are often caught and punished while traffickers escape.
Gargash said police were being trained to investigate for the involvement of human trafficking webs in prostitution cases.
"Women and children are often the victims in these cases and we want the police to have victim sensitivity," he said.
Another issue is reaching out to source nations.
"This is a transnational crime. It is impossible to combat it only on a national basis. We need partnerships with source countries ... We are just delving into this area," Gargash said.
Sharla Musabih runs Dubai's City of Hope shelter, the first of its kind in the Gulf and now home to the two young women from Uzbekistan. She will inaugurate a shelter in Ethiopia this month to help stop the trafficking at source.
An American who married an Emirati and moved to Dubai in 1984, Musabih says there has been some progress in cracking down on trafficking for sex but more needs to be done.
"I have dealt with over 400 cases in the past six months, cases of everything from trafficking to maid abuse, domestic violence or labor abuse," she said. "That situation (trafficking for sex) has improved immensely. I used to see many. Now I have two girls here and the attempt did not work."
Aysha and her cousin seemed at ease in Musabih's shelter. They giggled and called Musabih "mama", communicating through signals or through a fellow Uzbek woman who spoke English.
"They want to come back," the woman said. "In my country, pay is bad, $50 a month when a kilo of meat costs $5 ... They say 'I want to go home, arrange a real job and come back'." Read more!
Monday, February 4, 2008
Commoditizing Humans
What does child porn have to do with Victoria’s Secret?
What do aborted female fetuses in China and North Korea have to do with classified ads in major U.S. newspapers inviting women to sell their eggs for a small fortune?
What do British adults nurturing life-like baby dolls have to do with women in India renting their wombs for Western women’s babies?
What all these modern developments have in common is the commoditization of human beings. In a world where babies are seen as customizable products, where children are seen as both merchandise and marketing target, and where women’s bodies are treated as manufacturing sites and consumables, truly anything can happen.
Here’s more recent evidence that human life—in particular the most vulnerable among us—children, women, the poor—is being devalued as the human race increasingly looks for fulfillment in all the wrong places. Fortunately, even the mainstream media are beginning to ask where this trend is heading. See any connections in the following articles? Let’s talk about it.
Living Dolls from AOL.com
Explore the extraordinary lives of women who buy hand-crafted lifelike dolls called ‘Re-Borns’. Treated as real infants and costing hundreds of dollars, these ‘human’ babies cry, squirm, and are the objects of intense affection by their ‘mothers.’ Loved like real babies, they’re taken for walks, bathed, and even have their diapers changed.
"Outsourced Wombs" by Judith Warner for the New York Times (1.3.08)
What’s going on in India—where surrogacy is estimated now to be a $445-million-a-year business—feels like a step toward the kind of insane dehumanization that filled the dystopic fantasies of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.
Naughty - and Definitely Not Nice by Karen Heller for the Philadelphia Inquirer (10.31.07)
A quick perusal through the 188-page Victoria’s Secret holiday catalogue reveals marketing directed at teen girls, if not ’tweens, contributing to what can be called the continuing “slutification of America.”
Adult-Porn Industry Drives Child Porn Views from Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink (12.04.07)
Communities across America are struggling with news of doctors, businessmen, educators and the average family man being caught downloading graphic, illegal images of child porn.
Confessions of a Child Porn Addict by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck for the Buffalo News (10.16.07)
"It was a drive, something like a fix. I needed more, and if I didn’t get it, I felt empty.” - Clarence Johnson, convicted child pornography addict
Politics and Misogyny by Bob Herbert for the New York Times (1.15.08)
If there was ever a story that deserved more coverage by the news media, it’s the dark persistence of misogyny in America. Sexism in its myriad destructive forms permeates nearly every aspect of American life. For many men, it’s the true national pastime, much bigger than baseball or football.
China to act on gender imbalance from BBC (8.25.07)
The Chinese government says it is drafting new laws to tackle the growing gender imbalance caused by the widespread abortion of female fetuses.
As Demand for Donor Eggs Soars, High Prices Stir Ethical Concerns by Roni Caryn Rabin (5.15.07)
Samantha Carolan was 23 and fresh out of graduate school when she decided to donate eggs to an infertile couple. Ms. Carolan concedes that she would never have done it if not for the money, $7,000 that she used to pay off some student loans.
'Love+Sex with Robots': Our Future? by Don Oldenburg for USA TODAY (12.18.07)
This review of David Levy's new book, Love + Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships (Harper, 2007), looks at humanoids designed and programmed to satisfy our every psychological and sexual need, want, and desire. According to artificial-intelligence expert David Levy, within the next 50 years, falling in love with and making love to artificial but remarkably human-like robots will become a socially accepted alternative.
Read more!
What do aborted female fetuses in China and North Korea have to do with classified ads in major U.S. newspapers inviting women to sell their eggs for a small fortune?
What do British adults nurturing life-like baby dolls have to do with women in India renting their wombs for Western women’s babies?
What all these modern developments have in common is the commoditization of human beings. In a world where babies are seen as customizable products, where children are seen as both merchandise and marketing target, and where women’s bodies are treated as manufacturing sites and consumables, truly anything can happen.
Here’s more recent evidence that human life—in particular the most vulnerable among us—children, women, the poor—is being devalued as the human race increasingly looks for fulfillment in all the wrong places. Fortunately, even the mainstream media are beginning to ask where this trend is heading. See any connections in the following articles? Let’s talk about it.
Living Dolls from AOL.com
Explore the extraordinary lives of women who buy hand-crafted lifelike dolls called ‘Re-Borns’. Treated as real infants and costing hundreds of dollars, these ‘human’ babies cry, squirm, and are the objects of intense affection by their ‘mothers.’ Loved like real babies, they’re taken for walks, bathed, and even have their diapers changed.
"Outsourced Wombs" by Judith Warner for the New York Times (1.3.08)
What’s going on in India—where surrogacy is estimated now to be a $445-million-a-year business—feels like a step toward the kind of insane dehumanization that filled the dystopic fantasies of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.
Naughty - and Definitely Not Nice by Karen Heller for the Philadelphia Inquirer (10.31.07)
A quick perusal through the 188-page Victoria’s Secret holiday catalogue reveals marketing directed at teen girls, if not ’tweens, contributing to what can be called the continuing “slutification of America.”
Adult-Porn Industry Drives Child Porn Views from Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink (12.04.07)
Communities across America are struggling with news of doctors, businessmen, educators and the average family man being caught downloading graphic, illegal images of child porn.
Confessions of a Child Porn Addict by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck for the Buffalo News (10.16.07)
"It was a drive, something like a fix. I needed more, and if I didn’t get it, I felt empty.” - Clarence Johnson, convicted child pornography addict
Politics and Misogyny by Bob Herbert for the New York Times (1.15.08)
If there was ever a story that deserved more coverage by the news media, it’s the dark persistence of misogyny in America. Sexism in its myriad destructive forms permeates nearly every aspect of American life. For many men, it’s the true national pastime, much bigger than baseball or football.
China to act on gender imbalance from BBC (8.25.07)
The Chinese government says it is drafting new laws to tackle the growing gender imbalance caused by the widespread abortion of female fetuses.
As Demand for Donor Eggs Soars, High Prices Stir Ethical Concerns by Roni Caryn Rabin (5.15.07)
Samantha Carolan was 23 and fresh out of graduate school when she decided to donate eggs to an infertile couple. Ms. Carolan concedes that she would never have done it if not for the money, $7,000 that she used to pay off some student loans.
'Love+Sex with Robots': Our Future? by Don Oldenburg for USA TODAY (12.18.07)
This review of David Levy's new book, Love + Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships (Harper, 2007), looks at humanoids designed and programmed to satisfy our every psychological and sexual need, want, and desire. According to artificial-intelligence expert David Levy, within the next 50 years, falling in love with and making love to artificial but remarkably human-like robots will become a socially accepted alternative.
Read more!
Hands That Heal: International Curriculum to Train Caregivers of Trafficking Survivors
Human Trafficking: How to Care for SurvivorsAt a recent briefing in Washington D.C., The Faith Alliance Against Slavery and Trafficking (FAAST) announced the forthcoming of Hands that Heal: International Curriculum to Train Caregivers of Trafficking Survivors. The FAAST curriculum is a comprehensive, Christian curriculum to train global caregivers who are frontline providers of aftercare for women, children, and men that have been trafficked into the commercial sex industry. FAAST also developed Hands that Heal as a tool to inform and inspire churches, communities, organizations, and individuals around the world to engage in the battle against the injustice of human trafficking and to help equip them to provide transformational care to survivors. There are two editions of Hands that Heal. The Academic Edition is designed as an undergraduate or graduate course to introduce future caregivers to the wide-ranging needs of survivors of sex trafficking, as well as to enhance the skills of current caregivers. The Community-Based Edition utilizes a participatory training approach that can be used at the local level by churches, organizations and local community groups around the world. Limited hard copies of both editions will be available, while a CD which contains all the materials and additional resources will be widely available.The Salvation Army is a founding member of FAAST, and continues to be an active participant in the alliance through efforts by both USA National Headquarters and The Salvation Army World Service Office (SAWSO). Other FAAST partners include Project Rescue, World Hope International, and World Relief.What you can do: Request and Host a TOT!The Curriculum will be made available on October 1, 2007. FAAST is rolling out the curriculum around the world by conducting Training of Trainers (TOTs). TOTs will consist of 4-day training sessions to equip potential trainers with basic knowledge about human trafficking, knowledge of curriculum contents, overview of key Units, and how to use the manual to train others in caring for survivors of trafficking.
If you are interested in hosting a TOT or have additional questions about the curriculum, please contact:
Katie BurgmayerAnti-Trafficking Project
Assistant Salvation Army World Service Office (SAWSO)Katie_Burgmayer@usn.salvationarmy.org
703.519.5883 Read more!
If you are interested in hosting a TOT or have additional questions about the curriculum, please contact:
Katie BurgmayerAnti-Trafficking Project
Assistant Salvation Army World Service Office (SAWSO)Katie_Burgmayer@usn.salvationarmy.org
703.519.5883 Read more!
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