From the Trenches in the Battle Against Sex Trafficking -A $30 Billion industry
The reworked legislation makes it possible to convict offenders without proof of deprivation of liberty in cases in which the victim is a minor. The idea is much like that behind statutory rape laws, which presumes coercion because persons under 18 years of age are legally incapable of giving consent. Prop 35 classifies all forms of pimping a minor as sex trafficking, which before wouldn’t have necessarily been considered as such. It’s a shift that has unearthed what activists are calling an epidemic of child sex slavery.
After the drug trade and counterfeiting, human trafficking is the world’s most profitable criminal activity, raking in $31.6 billion annually. According to estimates by the International Labor Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations that promotes workplace rights, 26 percent of victims are children, and most trafficked girls are forced into child prostitution and pornography.
Back when Prop 35 was just an idea, Daphne Phung, the executive director of California Against Slavery and one of the bill’s first proponents, marched the Bay Area streets seeking signatures in support of the bill. She’d relay people the statistics. She’d tell them that pimps lurk outside foster homes and schools to recruit girls for their ranks. She’d impress upon them that it’s all happening here in our communities, right under our noses.
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Phung would have to start at the beginning, explaining that child sex exploitation is far from a phenomenon contained to distant, third-world corners of the globe.
Fifty-five percent of child pornography worldwide is produced in the US, and the FBI estimates that 100,000 to 300,000 minors are sold for sex each year nationally (that’s 10-30 percent of the global market). The average age that a minor starts working in the US skin trade is between 12 and 14, according to a 2005 University of Pennsylvania study titled “The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the US, Canada, and Mexico.”
More: From the Trenches in the Battle Against Sex Trafficking