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Have you thought about how much your daughter is worth?
Most girls are recruited into sex trafficking at the age of 12. Have you considered how much money they can make a trafficker? A sex trafficker can make $150,000-200,000 a year per girl he is pimping out. No one is doing anything regarding prevention of sex trafficking of minors, so maybe starting by thinking of the dollar amount attached may get people’s attention. Human trafficking is a $150 billion a year industry, that’s more than Delta Airlines makes in a year.
Though there are new movies coming out and advertisements hung in airports, hotels, clubs, lounges, bathrooms, etc., no one is working to prevent it.
Girls and women make up 83 percent of victims of trafficking and 90 percent of those trafficked engage in sex trafficking even if they were recruited into a different form of trafficking first. How are they recruited? Seventy three percent are coerced on social media.
CNN called out Facebook recently for knowing that traffickers use the platform to recruit and yet they are unable to stop them. Other articles shared the main 21 apps that traffickers use to recruit girls. Have you checked and compared the list with the apps on your daughters’ phone or tablet?
So many have this out-of-sight out-of-mind thinking with this global issue which strongly adds to the problem. As a sex trafficking survivor of South Florida starting at age 12, I grew up in Cutler Bay to parents who worked for the federal government and thought it doesn’t happen to girls like me.
No one talked to me about it. Like many girls, we only hear what media says, what is depicted in movies and shows. Since I wasn’t traveling abroad alone, I assumed this wouldn’t happen to me. I wasn’t told that I could be recruited by an intimate partner, another teenager, family member, trusted adult, or pen pal I spoke to online.
I wasn’t warned about the red flags or how love doesn’t include doing sexual favors for my boyfriend’s “friends.” I wasn’t told how they would start off as charming and then turn into my biggest fear with threats that may or may not hold true value.
The idea of this “Romeo Pimp” is such a hard concept for people to understand and that confuses me. A Romeo Pimp is a girls’ boyfriend who they may describe as the “love of their life” their “ride or die” who has fully manipulated them into doing these sexual favors, demands, and even engaging in illegal activity for them. That is the most common route that girls are recruited into sex trafficking.
I fell for the “Romeo Pimp,” telling my friends I was living in a romantic comedy. Well, it wasn’t very funny or romantic after a while. When I was trafficked, we had AOL chats, online chat rooms, and Myspace, we didn’t have all the platforms girls have now.
I grew up in the era that if the police saw you out past 11 p.m. as a minor, you were brought home in a cop car. I can’t imagine how badly it would have been for me if my trafficker had access to social media or how easily I would have been recruited through online platforms as opposed to him hanging out on the sidewalk of my middle school every day.
Many programs related to sex trafficking are focused on assisting survivors, bringing awareness by discussing trafficking, and designing new ads for people to see when walking or driving around. Have you heard anyone talk about how to work with youth to prevent them from falling victim to this? No?
The fact that we are allowing our daughters and other girls to be “educated” on trafficking by media is sad and part of the problem. Do you care enough about the young girls in your life to talk about prevention? Hopefully yes. So let me give you a head start. Most girls who fall victim are uneducated about healthy relationships (with peers, family, adults, and intimate partners), lack self-esteem, lack independent living skills, lack financial knowledge, at risk of homelessness, low-income, and/or facing current abuse (emotional, physical, sexual). These factors, however, don’t account for everyone, as I didn’t fall into the majority of those when I was younger.
Traffickers want girls who are vulnerable, gullible, caring, and loyal. But honestly, there is no discrimination in trafficking, all races, ages, genders, etc., are at-risk of being trafficked.
It definitely can happen to anyone, anywhere, regardless of the thoughts of “it doesn’t happen here” or “it doesn’t happen to girls like me or like mine”.
I implore you to start having these conversations with young girls in your life, and if and when you see an agency working towards prevention of sex trafficking, back them, share their information, get involved, volunteer, do whatever you can to help stop this multi-billion-dollar industry from continuing to grow.
Gloria C. Martinez is a sex trafficking survivor, currently in her doctorate program at USC.
Martinez lives in Miami-Dade County and runs a nonprofit for teen girls called Taking Back The Girls (www.takingbackthegirls.org). She is focusing on sex trafficking of minors in her doctorate and wrote this op-ed on the subject.
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