How a Child Becomes a Prostitute
The Human Trafficking of American Youth
On October 27, 2008 the FBI announced the result of its latest operation under the Innocence Lost National Initiative, a joint Department of Justice and FBI program to dismantle the child sex trade in the U.S. The 3-day operation, conducted in cooperation with local police departments in 29 cities, dismantled over a dozen large-scale prostitution rings that ranged from Boston to Honolulu. It yielded 642 arrests, and rescued 47 exploited children.
The operation was the latest in a series of large-scale raids targeting an illicit industry that reaps enormous profits from forcing children to become prostitutes. In June, the FBI launched Operation Cross Country, which swept across 16 cities, and arrested over 300 individuals connected with child prostitution rings. However, officials admit that recent law enforcement efforts are small in comparison to the magnitude of the problem, which is an unrecognized crisis in many U.S. communities.
Media coverage of the sex trade has primarily focused on the forced prostitution of women and girls in the developing world. The media, and law enforcement have been slow to recognize that American youth are also targeted, and forced into prostitution. In the MSNBC special investigation, “Sex Slaves in the Suburbs”, which aired Oct. 12, a window is provided into an industry that preys on the naivety of children, and the denial of a nation.
The dramatic story of Shauna Newell, a teenager from FL, illustrates the lengths to which perpetrators will go to abduct children, and how ill equipped law enforcement officials are to handle the problem. On April 29th 2006, 16 year old Shauna Newell was kidnapped by a new friend she met at school. She was invited to spend the weekend with her friend, under the supervision of a man posing as her friend’s father. Shauna was instead taken to a house where she was drugged, and repeatedly gang rapped.
It was later revealed that her friend had previously served time for prostitution, and that Shauna had been sold on the Internet to a man in TX for $300,000. In a homegrown search and rescue operation mounted by Shauna’s family, because the police refused to take action, she was found before she was transported out of state, barely alive.
Shauna Newell has since recovered to emerge as a leading voice in awareness education about the human trafficking of American youth. Remarkably, no one has ever been charged in connection with her case. Local law enforcement claim they were not able to pursue an investigation, because Shauna was uncooperative. Shauna’s family claim that two male officers demanded to speak with her alone in the hospital, immediately after she was rescued. Shauna was too traumatized to allow her father in her hospital room, let alone male strangers.
Law enforcement’s treatment of Newell’s case is no surprise to Marc Klaas, founder of KlaasKids, an advocacy group devoted to the prevention of violence against children. According to Klaas, local law enforcement are too eager to cast off missing children as runaways, or to blame exploited children, and adolescents for their situation. Klaas predicts that if a thorough investigation into open missing children cases were conducted, a large portion of those cases would involve kidnapping, and human trafficking.
The sluggishness of law enforcement to address the problem, the difficulty of prosecuting human trafficking in court, and the enormous profits involved, has made the child sex trade one of the fastest growing criminal industries in the world. According to Ernie Allen, President of the Coalition of Missing and Exploited Children, slavery is alive and well in the 21st century, and American youth are among its victims.
Chained Flowers Forgotten
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