BUILDING AWARENESS: SEX TRAFFICKING OF AMERICAN GIRLS AND BOYS
By Teri Kramer, Arlington Heights resident
Remember when shelters for battered women were being built in the 1980s? Remember how many people thought it was an overreaction, how many didn’t want to talk about it, thinking, “It really doesn’t happen….and if it does, those women must be difficult and probably deserve it.”? How that paradigm has changed! The same paradigm shift is occurring around the “child prostitution”/sex trafficking issue as more and more people begin to understand the deceptive ways children are lured into forming attachments with those who later turn out to be pimps or “recruiters” and are held captive by such means as brutal beatings, threats against family members, shame, drugs, and so on. It IS happening to an estimated 300,000 American children and they DON’T want or deserve it. They’re trapped emotionally… and sometimes physically.
Demand spikes around major sporting events and you may have read that efforts are being made in our area to prevent the additional trafficking the Super Bowl is expected to bring, and to rescue children out of it.
Deena Graves, executive director of Traffick911 spoke this past September at the League of Neighborhoods meeting. The www.traffick911.com website is full of information about domestic trafficking with links to over 80 anti-trafficking organizations and listings of Studies, books, videos, and events. Listed there is a screening of George Cluny’s The Playground Documentary at 7 p.m., Friday, Jan. 14 at the Palace Theater in Grapevine. The screening is sponsored by Irving Bible Church. Please open your eyes and hearts to the plight of these brutalized and traumatized victims.