Daily | American Girls for Sale | Keiko Fujimori Seeks Peruvian Presidency

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America’s Girls for Sale

Sex Trafficking of Americans: The Girls Next Door  Vanity Fair

A photographer’s representation of a typical scene at one of the motels in Central Connecticut used for sex trafficking. Photographer Larry Fink.Vanity Fair’s writer Amy Fine Collins digs deep into sex trafficking in America, writing that 300,000 young American girls are entering the commercial sex industry and their ages are dropping drastically. Collins takes the high number in an estimated 100-300,000 that is widely-reported but also challenged as an estimate.

(Update July 2, 2011 Authors Richard J Estes and Neil Alan Weiner of ‘The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the US, Canada and Mexico are responsible for this number. Anne is reading their report now.)

“The average starting age for prostitution is now 13,” says Rachel Lloyd, executive director of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (gems), a Harlem-based organization that rescues young women from “the life.” Says Judge Cofield, who formerly presided over Hartford’s Prostitution Protocol, a court-ordered rehabilitation program, “I call them the Little Barbies.”

Criminals have learned, often in prison,  that it’s become more lucrative and much safer to sell defenseless teen girls — preferably white, very thin with big breasts — than drugs or guns. A pound of heroin or an AK-47 can be retailed only once, but a young girl can be sold 10 to 15 times a day. She is the annuity gift that keeps on giving.

Yes, America’s morality police believes ‘just say no’. Good American girls don’t behave this way. The rest deserve what they get.

‘Sex Trafficking of Americans: The Girls Next Door’ is riveting in shining the light on a problem Americans like to place in India or Cambodia. We don’t talk about sex trafficking as a home-grown, American problem.

The spectacular writing in this piece is crisp and compelling, profesional but in your face.

The unlikely trafficking-abolitionist coalition—consisting of secular social-justice advocates, faith-based groups, black activists, second- and fourth-wave feminists, liberals, conservatives, Democrats, and Republicans—shares a peculiar adversary in the form of trafficking skeptics, coming largely from the left. The Nation, for example, ridiculed the “‘sex slave’ panic,” and both Slate and City Pages questioned the alarming statistics published by the Department of Justice, the State Department, and non–government organizations such as ecpat and the Salvation Army. “All the numbers we have on trafficking are inaccurate,” avows Deirdre Bialo-Padin, chief of the domestic-violence bureau of the Brooklyn D.A.’s office. “They’re too low. It’s an underreported crime. Who is going to raise her hand and say, ‘Hi, I’m a trafficking victim!’ when her family has been threatened? With the right laws in place, we will get harder numbers.” For victim advocates, saying that trafficking in America isn’t a problem is akin to J. Edgar Hoover saying the Mafia doesn’t exist. Melissa Farley believes “we’re still in the Dark Ages with trafficking because, unlike incest, rape, and domestic battering, trafficking generates massive revenues—$32 billion a year worldwide.”

What else, Dr. Sharon Cooper wonders, are we to conclude when Lee Iacocca tees off on a golf course with Snoop Dogg, a self-described ex-pimp who composes odes to beating women, “breaking bitches,” and (to use the vernacular) “turning them out” on the “track”—or, for that matter, when a country girl such as Caroline ends up with a pimp’s gun in her mouth so that she’ll go out and service a politician?

We want to read these articles in the Nation and Slate and other media. This Vanity Fair article should stir up a hornet’s nest. Being the maverick thinkers that we are at AOC, there’s an unsettling thought running through our skeptical minds at this moment.

“History is repeating itself, and we’re back to treating women and children as chattel,” says forensic pediatrician Dr Sharon Cooper.

We’ve made the identical argument about the Republican War on Women. This horrific reality of sex trafficking is a reminder that from every front, women’s bodies are under assault in America. This is just one more angle of the big story about the erosion of women’s rights in America and worldwide.

To be continued … Anne

At the Vatican

Vatican convenes AIDS experts amid condom flap Business Week

These comments reflect the Anne of Carversvile position:

Monsignor Kevin Dowling, bishop of Rustenburg, South Africa, knows Africa too though he is not speaking at the conference. Since 1997 he has run a community-based HIV program that provides home-care nurses, anti-retroviral clinics, a hospice and program for orphans to cope with the hundreds of thousands of HIV-positive people of the region. And he counsels condom use.

The snapshot that he paints is chilling: The area is home to large platinum mines that attract men from around the region to work for months at a time away from their families, and women who come looking for work. Desperately poor, the women are forced to engage in what Dowling calls “survival sex” — to pay for food and shelter since there are no other jobs.

“What am I to say to her? That the only 100 percent sure way of ensuring that you will not become infected is to abstain from sex before marriage, and remain faithful to a single partner in a stable marriage for the rest of your life?” Dowling said in an email. “Such ‘choices’ are totally, but totally irrelevant to such people.”

Laura Dekker Update

Dutch sailor Laura Dekker has arrived in French Polynesia, crossing the Pacific Ocean, as if she had wings. Read the details of Laura Dekker’s saga in Articles About Women.

The distance is 800 miles further, she writes in her blog.

Everyone is wondering how I could make the crossing within 17 days and 22 hours. Except for a big 66-feet yacht, I could not yet find another boat that did the crossing faster than Guppy. And during conversations the question is often raised about how I managed to be that fast. Mostly they conclude that I must have been towed by a whale - or that I am the “Flying DutchGIRL”.. Unfortunately being so fast did not prevent Guppy from collecting underwater growth on her hull on the way over here. And so I spent half of my day today under Guppy once again, armed with diving goggles and a scraper.

Madame President?

Keiko Fujimori Contends for Peru’s Presidency NYTimes

Imagine Tricia Nixon, daughter of former President Richard Nixon who resigned over Watergate, running for president, wrote former ambassador to Peru Dennis Jett.

Keiko Fujimori is the daughter of former Peruvian president Keiko Fujimori, who has been jailed for human rights abuses since 2009.

Consider also that Keiko Fujimori, maintains a narrow lead over nationalist Ollanta Humala, a former military officer who led a rebellion against her father in 2000, in Pervu’s presidential election scheduled for June 5.

Educated first at Boston University for her undergraduate degree, Keiko Fujimori went to Columbia University Business school, where she met Mark Vollanella, a self-described ‘Jersey guy’ from Berkeley Heights, NJ. They have two daughters.

With three moderates in Peru’s presidential elections out of the running now, could Keiko Fujimori actually win? And will her father be back to running the country?

Also: Why Peru’s political suicide should matter to Americans Miami Herald