Sex Trafficking: The Girls Next Door

Vanity Fair has a great story about child sex trafficking and prostitution in All-American Hartford, Connecticut. Here’s an edited excerpt of this excellent piece:

There are more young American girls entering the commercial sex industry—an estimated 300,000 at this moment—and their ages have been dropping drastically. “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.”

The explanations offered for these downwardly expanding demographics are various, and not at all mutually exclusive. Dr. Sharon Cooper believes that “history is repeating itself, and we’re back to treating women and children as chattel,” she says. “It’s a sexually toxic era of ‘pimpfantwear’ for your newborn son and thongs for your five-year-old daughter.” Additionally, Cooper cites the breakdown of the family unit (statistically, absent or abusive parents compounds risk) and the emergence of vast cyber-communities of like-minded deviant individuals, who no longer have disincentives to act on their most destructive predatory fantasies.

Criminals have learned, often in prison—where “macking” memoirs such as Iceberg Slim’s Pimp are best-sellers—that it’s become more lucrative and much safer to sell malleable teens than drugs or guns. A pound of heroin or an AK-47 can be retailed once, but a young girl can be sold 10 to 15 times a day—and a “righteous” pimp confiscates 100 percent of her earnings.

“There are basically two business models: manipulating girls through violence—that’s called ‘gorilla’ pimping—and controlling them with drugs,” says Krishna Patel, assistant U.S. attorney in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who prosecuted the case of New York-based trafficker Corey Davis, a.k.a. “Magnificent.” A high-living, highly educated pimp who kept the slave master’s manifesto The Willie Lynch Letter and the Making of a Slave in his Mercedes, Davis, Patel says, made sex slaves out of, among others, a 12-year-old runaway and a university coed on a track scholarship.

Says Krishna Patel, “I’d always dismissed the idea of human trafficking in the United States. I’m Indian, and when I went to Mumbai and saw children sold openly, I wondered, Why isn’t anything being done about it? But now I know—it’s no different here. I never would have believed it, but I’ve seen it. Human trafficking—the commercial sexual exploitation of American children and women, via the Internet, strip clubs, escort services, or street prostitution—is on its way to becoming one of the worst crimes in the U.S.”

Read the story here in Vanity Fair.

Listen to an interview of the story’s author here.


1 Reply to "Sex Trafficking: The Girls Next Door"

  • George
    September 12, 2011 (5:25 am)

    Romania is a mafia state with not working administration governed by organized crime.

    Human trafficking in Romania is a state policy and a modern retail which feed corruption and organized crime. Organized crime is constantly looking for legitimate business that could be used as a cover.Behind such companies, actually hiding network specializing in recruitment of girls who end up prostitute.

    These companies are used as a mask, to support illegal activities, to wash the money, but also because leaders mobs to be seen as successful entrepreneurs.

    Besides these companies, strongly related with them, in the town of Curtea de Arges (Romania) exist more mafia groups(indestructible mafia groups) which with the complicity of local taxi drivers, recruit, transport, and place girls to practice prostitution, girls which later are trafficked external.

    According to data held by the Italian authorities in Roma: 85% of prostitutes in Rome are romanian woman. In Milano: eight of ten prostitutes which practice “job” in Milano are romanian woman including Ioana Visan, Berlusconi’s hooker from Curtea de Arges (Curtea de Arges, pimps factory from Romania, manager: local corrupt police ) arrived in Italy by prostitution networks from Curtea de Arges.

    Cars of the pimps from Curtea de Arges who recruit girls from prostitution and customers for them: B-14-WXH (prostitute-pimp who was married with Caroli Pici, said Loti, a member of a criminal gang George Nan by world involved in human trafficking, kidnappings, usury and murders, thefts from apartments, and car thefts, and that on the June 20, 2004 abducted and kidnapped Anna Maria Valdata, the italian wife of a tycoon for which demanded a ransom of 1 million euros http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/nightmare-of-kidnapping-returns-to-italy-as-millionaires-wife-is-held-733071.html http://ziare.zaraf.ro/articol8544/RAPITORUL-MILIARDAREI-INFRACTOR-INTERNATIONAL.htm http://archivio.panorama.it/home/articolo/idA020001025842 ) and B-34-TND (pimp – one of the mob leaders from Curtea de Arges)

    About the pimp Caroli Pici, nick Loti and local corrupt police:

    http://www.ziarulprofit.ro/archives/6159
    http://www.ziarulprofit.ro/archives/10990

    …in Denmark, Romania is the country with the most prostitutes and according to Europol, Eurojust, The Times, CNN, the first exporter of prostitution in Europe is Romania.

    Police mafia-underworld

    Mafia groups in Romania are “monitored” for nearly 20 years. Police chiefs the long investigations, sent in prison some between pawns of sacrifice indicate by the underworld, in this way mafia groups unfolding-and in continuation criminal activity.

    Everything, seasoned with a few masked which, below the cameras, will break the door, will seize the swords and guns ball, clubs and other trifles from those established as victims.

    German Bundestag: “Corruption in Romania is a worrying problem. It’s not a sporadic apparition is a systematic phenomenon.”.

    El Pais about Romania: corrupt and without money.
    La Croix: Romania, the most corrupt country in Europe.
    Tel Aviv: Corruption in Romania is a national disease.
    The Times: Romania is the first exporter of prostitution.
    Transparency International: In Romania, the atmosphere is filled with corruption
    Jan Marinus Wiersma: Romania still needs another 25 years to eradicate corruption
    Geert Wilders: Romania and Bulgaria should be excluded from the EU due to high corruption and irregularities which make them unsuitable as members of the EU.
    —–