There's a Way to Change

Justine Koffi

Ms.Giknis

English 9

18 March 2018

There’s a Way To Change

For this portion of my You and The World Project, I was meant to do a survey, interview, or  a field observation. I planned to have an interview with the communications director at the G.E.M.S program. I mentioned them in my last post, click here for it. I planned to have my interview Monday afternoon, during advisory, but it had to be rescheduled for the next day. The same thing kept happening until thursday which was the last day I had the time to conduct the interview. I forgot about the interview which was my fault. Overall, there was fault on both sides which resulting in me not having the interview I needed for this part of the project. Instead, I decided to further my research.

For my first post, I looked into the statistics. I found some horrible facts about the children we are losing to this industry and how much they are suffering on a daily. Can you believe that some kids are sold 5-6 times a day? Vulnerable children are targeted, ages 11-17 all the time and they are put into this horrendous life. Since I found very interesting information about the general industry of child sex trafficking, for the second post, I decided to look into some specific stories of women who were sold into the sex industry as children. I found some more surprising information.

First, I found the site Human Trafficking Survivor. The girl in the account said she was raped about 43,200 times, which I found hard to believe until I really read and thought about it. Karla, the woman bravely speaking out about her past, said she was abused since she was five by a close relative. She felt rejected by her mother, and the overall dynamic of her family was dysfunctional. When she was twelve, she was pursued by a man who spoke nice and had a fast car that she liked. They spoke, and exchanged numbers. He started talking to her as a friend and Karla was excited. They met up again and he brought a different red car that she liked a lot. From there, she recalls seeing red flags everywhere. She was convinced to go stay with him since her mom locked her out one night. The next couple months, he shows her kindness and gave her everything she wasn’t getting at home. He then started telling her about the pimping business and how she must act and speak for her to get money for him. He explained the positions to her and how much money she must earn. "I started at 10 a.m. and finished at midnight. We were in Guadalajara for a week. Do the math. Twenty per day for a week. Some men would laugh at me because I was crying. I had to close my eyes so that that I wouldn't see what they were doing to me, so that I wouldn't feel anything," Karla says. They moved to other cities where she was still expected to see about 20 men a day, seven days a week. There was even a day she thought she would escape her unfortunate circumstances when a police officer came in to one hotel known for prostitution. Instead, the officer forced them to do things too. Karla got pregnant at 15 years old and gave birth to a girl. The baby girl was now threatened if Karla didn’t fulfill her duties as a prostitute. She was rescued in 2008 during an anti-trafficking operation. She was 16 at the time. She is now 23 and a speaker and advocate against sex trafficking. She says,  "These minors are being abducted, lured, and yanked away from their families. Don't just listen to me. You need to learn about what happened to me and take the blindfold off your eyes." I think it’s very important to letr Karla’s story sink in and reflect on it. Just as I said in my first post, vulnerable children are being pursued by predators and being taken away from their homes. It’s important to take into account that this could happen to anyone and that we should be doing more as a community to speak out and try to prevent it.

In addition, Karla’s story was fascinating to me, especially the part about the corrupt police officers, so I started to look into the police involvement in child sex trafficking. I looked into this article about police help with the issue at hand. From this post, I found that a lot of the time, police arrest sex trafficking  victims on a prostitution charge in which they are threatened to be prosecuted, which obviously isn’t working very well. The girls, who are victims, are held accountable for their circumstances instead of the people who are actually the problem which doesn’t seem fair to me. They don’t seem to take into account that the girls need help. They just see a crime that someone has to pay for.

In conclusion, although I wasn’t able to conduct the interview, I found some more shocking facts about the sex trafficking industry.