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Words illustrate; statistics devastate. In the United States alone:
• Human trafficking has been estimated to generate $9.5 billion annually.
• Approximately 300,000 children are at risk of being prostituted.
• The average age of entry into prostitution for a child victim is 13 to 14.
• A pimp can make up to $200,000 per child each year, and the average pimp has four to six girls.
• The average victim may be forced to have sex up to 20 to 48 times a day.
• One in three teens on the street will be lured into prostitution within 48 hours of leaving home.
These numbers were compiled by The Covering House, a St. Louis, Missouri, nonprofit offering help to victims of sex trafficking. The sources range from the U.S. Department of Justice to the United Nations.
Here’s more:
In 2013, the FBI announced the results of “Operation Cross Country,” with 105 girls ages 13 to 17 rescued from forced prostitution in 76 U.S. cities. Since 2003, the FBI had rescued 2,700 children, netted 1,350 convictions and seized more than $3.1 million in assets of sex traffickers.
Times Leader archives shows this barbaric snake lurks in our backyards of alleged civility:
• Jan. 6, 2015: A Pittston man is sentenced for operating a prostitution ring with three other men out of a Pittston house. The victims: two girls, ages 16 and 18.
• Nov. 7, 2014: A Wilkes-Barre man is sentenced for recruiting and transporting a girl, then 16, from New Jersey to engage in prostitution in Pennsylvania.
• Sept. 10, 2014: A Bear Creek woman is sentenced in the same case for renting and driving a vehicle to transport the female to motels to engage in prostitution.
Despite this overwhelming evidence that sex trafficking flourishes in our country’s seediest underbelly, a 2014 report by the Justice Policy Center of the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., contended law-enforcement agencies nationwide still had not honed their ability to ferret out and prosecute perpetrators.
Only 16 percent of cases studied ended up in sex-trafficking charges, and another 2 percent in labor trafficking. That data came courtesy of Meyers High School graduate Colleen Owens, a researcher in the case who spoke at Misericordia University last year
On March 17, Misericordia will revisit the issue, hosting a noon public appearance in Insalaco Hall by Shandra Woworuntu, an Indonesian native who, through trickery and then captivity with the threat of death, went from working in international finance in her homeland to forced prostitution in a Brooklyn tenement.
Now an activist for legislative change and public awareness, Woworuntu speaks to the many facets of a crime that preys on the weak and vulnerable to sate the sick and demented.
We need to listen; we need to act.
Otherwise, shame on us.