As a survivor of child sex trafficking, I often travel across the country to share my story as part of a larger effort to spread awareness about human trafficking and child exploitation.  After sharing my testimony, I’m often asked for thoughts on ending the demand for commercial sex, as a way to deter sex trafficking and the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC).

Several strategies have been posed to help end the demand for illegal commercial sex, including financial penalties, shame tactics, and diversion programs (e.g. “john schools”).  For any person seeking commercial sex specifically with a child, that person is a pedophile; his or her behavior will not be corrected with a fine or john school.  For those buyers who are intending to purchase illegal commercial sex from a “willing” adult, then a john school could certainly educate them about the existence of sex trafficking within illegal (and sometimes legal) commercial sex work, including incidences involving children.

It is not necessarily my mission to end the demand for legal commercial sex work; however, it is my personal and professional mission to end the widespread tolerance for sexual objectification of women and girls, especially in the media.  I believe this will, in turn, help to reduce the prevalence of sexual exploitation, including sex trafficking and CSEC.

Every day we are surrounded by images of women sexualized and objectified in the media.  Consistent exposure to such images can cause impressionable and misled girls to self-sexualize and self-objectify, and can cause both boys and girls to grow up viewing women as objects to critique and consume.  Such a culture creates a tendency toward violence against women, which can manifest in ways ranging from degrading jokes about women in positions of power to excuses made for college students who gang rape an intoxicated and unconscious girl.

In my recently-published book, Walking Prey,I stress the need for media literacy education as a way to prevent sexual exploitation.  Such education would help children and youth to deconstruct media (e.g. advertisements, magazines, movies, and music) and discuss messages within those media, including messages about different genders, races, and cultures.

An ideal media literacy program would include various perspectives on these topics from diverse populations. For example, many media messages attempt to portray an empowered woman, whether it’s for an advertisement, music video, or other media vehicle.  But what does an empowered woman look like?  One person may envision an empowered woman as one who is sexually open and aggressive, while another may view her as one who is academically and professionally successful.  Another person may see an empowered woman as one who is chasing her dreams, regardless of the academic level, financial payoff, or sexual appeal; and yet another may see her as one who embraces her age and the wisdom gained from experience.

The goal of media literacy is to encourage children and youth to question (1) whose view or perspective they are actually seeing in a media image or message, (2) whether or not they agree with that message, and (3) the potential effects that message may have on individuals and societies.

How might such education prevent sexual exploitation, including sex trafficking and CSEC?

Youth and young adults who are forced or lured into commercial sex work have often already experienced sexual abuse and/or exploitation within their homes or communities.  Before I met the man who trafficked me for commercial sex at age 14, I had been sexually exploited by older boys and young men in my community.  As a preteen, I studied fashion magazines, movies, and music videos for clues about how to be pretty and popular.  As a result, I was overwhelmingly exposed to images of sexually objectified women.

What I learned from these messages was that young women who were valued in society were sexy, desired by men, and eager to please men and that sex always felt good to these women.  As I adopted these principles, I quickly learned that I did notenjoy sex, which made me think that something was physically wrong with me.  What I did notlearn from these media messages was that empowered women not only had the choice to say no to sex but also practiced that choice whenever they felt uncomfortable.

In turn, I believe the older boys and men from my youth who sexually exploited intermediate and middle school-aged girls had also been exposed to these same media messages.  I believe they simply didn’t see anything wrong with treating girls as sexual objects without feelings, concerns, or desires of their own.  Had I been exposed to media literacy in elementary and middle school, I might have recognized that I was seeing only one perspective on female sexuality and value; and that this message, without the balance of other perspectives, was potentially destructive.  The same goes for the boys and young men in my community – had they been exposed to media literacy, perhaps they would have recognized, and even rejected, messages that encouraged objectification and exploitation of women.

I ultimately cooperated with the man who forced me into prostitution because I didn’t understand my personal rights or value as a young woman.  In fact, I began to feel empowered by prostitution because I was then getting paid to do something that I hated but thought was a requisite of young women.  Many youth and young adults in illegal (or legal) commercial sex work may harbor these same notions.

So, what are my thoughts on ending the demand for commercial sex?  My thoughts are to instead focus on media literacy as a tool to teach youth to think critically.  Such education can follow youth into adulthood and help them to identify negative messages and situations, especially those that perpetuate violence against others.  Media literacy is one of many vital components to a well-rounded prevention program to educate youth against sexual exploitation.  Change will begin with education, and a movement will flourish with inspired young leaders.

I should say up front that this post is aimed at men.  When it comes to fighting human trafficking, those of us on the front-lines of this battle tend to look beside us and see mostly women.  When you add the fact that many, but not all perpetrators, especially of domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST) are males, it becomes painfully clear that we need strong and compassionate men to join the efforts to end this atrocity.

With that said, I promise that this will not be a “male bashing”post.  As an African-American male, I don’t want to add to the guilt that many feel.  To the contrary, my intention is simply this: to move you to action.  And perhaps the best way to do that is to share why I got involved.

I have been married to my beautiful and loving wife for 16 years.  In that time, I have been blessed to be Daddy to two amazing daughters.  Yes, three women govern my personal life!  I have learned to enjoy mall hopping, learning the newest pop sensations, and I have enough rainbow loom bracelets to stretch across all the Peachtree Streets in Atlanta.

Perhaps one of the biggest adaptations I’ve made as a father was understanding inequalities that still exist for women.  The looks my oldest would receive as one of a few girls at basketball camp.  The bullying my youngest dealt with as the smartest in her class.  Many times the thought would enter my mind – “Would they go through this if they were boys?”  As a dad, my job was to protect and that’s what I planned to do until they were grown and married.

And so as a protector, when I began to learn that modern-day slavery still existed around the world, I was shocked.  I was even more shocked to learn that it happened in many forms, one of which was DMST and my own home of Atlanta had developed a reputation across the world of being a hub for the sex trafficking of minors.  In fact, in 2005, the FBI named Atlanta as one of 14 cities in the nation with the highest incidence of children used in prostitution.  As men, many times our natural reaction to this is to get angry, and then once football or some other distraction comes into our world, that anger subsides.  For me, the anger just stewed.  And I knew I had to do something.

My first course of action was to learn more.  And as I learned more, I realized that this was no light issue.  In my home state of Georgia, the average age of girls exploited sexually is 12-14.  In 2009, each month, 7,200 men were paying for 8,700 sex acts with children in Georgia.  After learning this information, there was no way that I could ignore what was happening in my own community.  As Edmund Burke said “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”  How could I consider myself a good man and a good father if I were to turn my head away from what was happening in my community?

And as a father, this meant that, at the appropriate time, I needed to begin educating my family.  Starting with my wife and then my daughters.  Something as simple having a conversation about “what are girls and boys like at your school,” can be an eye-opening dialogue to have with your children.

Once I became educated, I needed to find a place to fit in.  How could I get engaged with this issue?  I did not have extra time to just add hours to my already packed schedule, nor did I want to do the community service equivalent of bucket plunking in church.  I wanted to add value to this cause.  As learning professional that meant applying my experience and skills to the training that was being done by Street Grace, the organization that introduced me to this issue.  For others that have partnered with us, their contribution has also related to their expertise.  There is so much to be done, that there’s a place and role for everyone.  What will yours be?

As I began to serve, seeing the lights go on in the eyes of others was encouraging.  I knew that the way I was serving was making a difference and I began freely giving more and more of my time to Street Grace.  The empowerment that was happening around me was exciting and it lead me to believe that within my lifetime, I could see this horror ended.

Fast-forward four years to 2014.  I had the privilege of serving on the Street Grace Board of Directors for three years.  I now continue to serve as a member of the CEO’s Advisory Board.  I have traveled around the country speaking about the ills of DMST and human trafficking.  All of this because I decided not to let a Falcons game quench the discomfort that was growing within me around this issue.

So what will your story be?  As the 19th Century English abolitionist William Wilberforce said, “You may choose to look the other way, but you can never again say that you did not know.”  So now that YOU know, what will YOU do?

Action Steps:

1. Get educated.  Participate in a Chosen small group study or find training about DMST
2. Talk to the children in your life. Simply learning about what these children are experiencing, challenged with or doing can be valuable information in this fight.
3. Give.  Your time and your finances, make a contribution to a local community-based organization that is fighting this issue.
4. Mentor. If you don’t mentor the children in our communities, the pimps, dealers and other negative members of society will.
5. Spread the word.  Tell others about this atrocity, encouraging them to get involved in this fight.

Learn more about Aaronde’s work at Street Grace and the Fathers Against Child Exploitation (FACE).

While enslaved on a plantation on the eastern shore of Maryland, my great-great-great grandfather, Frederick Douglass, was denied an education. Slaves were prohibited by U.S. law to learn to read and write. Slave owners understood that education was incompatible with slavery. They believed that an ignorant slave was a content slave…and the federal government ensured that those held in physical bondage would also be held in mental bondage.

There is a paradigm that, even after the legal demise of slavery brought on by the Emancipation Proclamation and Thirteenth Amendment, has remained unchanged. Douglass identified the key to ending this human scourge when he realized at the tender age of nine that, “Education makes a man unfit to be a slave.” My great ancestor understood that knowledge was power and it would one day be his key to freedom.

I’ve long considered my connection to Douglass as well as that to my great-great grandfather, Booker T. Washington, to be a rare blessing. It wasn’t, however, until I discovered the extent to which slavery still affects people in the world today, including here in the U.S., that I realized these great legacies were also part of a calling for me – a calling to leverage history in order to help change the future for those captured in modern-day slavery. Unless we’re able to educate young people about slavery’s past and present; about the methods traffickers use to entrap and exploit, it will continue unabated. This is the mission of the organization I lead, Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives (FDFI).

Human trafficking is slavery.  It occurs when one or more individuals are controlled and used by others. Trafficking victims often include children who have been coerced or deceived into the commercial sex trade. Sex trafficking is a profitable crime: where guns and drugs are sold only once, a child can be sold many times (even in one day) and can be sold day after day, week after week and year after year. Unlike the legalized slavery my ancestors endured, the slavery that exists today is illegal. The criminals are not just those who sell children for sex but also those who buy them.

Demand has been recognized as a critical component of the sex trafficking crime. Most of us recognize “supply and demand” as basic elements of an economic formula. In the same way that the demand for cheap and free labor in the Southern United States drove the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, sex trafficking today is driven by demand. Sex traffickers meet this demand by supplying mostly women and girls to buyers wishing to purchase them for sex.

Our culture is, in many ways, complicit in creating demand for commercial sex. One way is by normalizing prostitution. Media representations of prostituted individuals, various forms of sexual exploitation and Pimp Culture are reaching boys on computer screens and cellphones at younger and younger ages. While some of their female counterparts are being lured into commercial sex, huge numbers of boys are systematically being groomed by pornographers to become future buyers of sex in person and on video. As pornography proliferates on the Internet, the financial stakes and the risk to children increase exponentially. Right now, pornographers have the upper hand.

“It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

 Frederick Douglass

Current efforts to address demand have focused almost exclusively on adult males who purchase sex.  Federal and local legislation has been introduced and bills have been passed to strengthen anti-demand enforcement. Community awareness campaigns have been promoted to help men understand that Real Men Don’t Buy Sex.

These are all important and necessary steps to take. If, however, the strategy for stopping demand is to repair broken men, it will ultimately fail. A concerted effort must be made to build strong children. Prevention education needs to become a priority in the fight against sex trafficking and demand. We often use the image of the 2010 gulf oil spill as an analogy for the unchecked destruction being caused by sex trafficking in our communities. Proactively educating children is the logical solution to capping the broken well of this particular disaster.

“Young people play critical roles on both sides of the Contemporary Slavery spectrum: at one end, they are the most vulnerable to becoming its victims and, at the other, the most qualified to lead its demise.”

Robert Benz,

Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives

Educating young people about the crime of sex trafficking is an important first step if we want to eradicate sex trafficking from communities. Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington understood first-hand that the application of knowledge and the empowerment of an individual provided the best opportunity for one to remain free from bondage. With this philosophy as our foundation, FDFI created a human trafficking prevention curriculum for secondary schools called, History, Human Rights and the Power of One. It is designed to help keep children from becoming victims of various forms of slavery and to empower them to act against human trafficking in their communities.

Prevention education provides girls and young women with tools to understand how sexual exploitation happens, how to avoid it and what to do when it happens to them.  It also helps them identify the elements within language, media and popular culture that conspire to obscure or even glamorize behavior that may be detrimental or dangerous. Prevention education provides boys and young men with tools to understand how sexual exploitation happens and what to do if they see it happening around them. And, most importantly, education teaches them how to avoid playing a role in driving demand. It helps them recognize and interpret elements within cultural traditions, the Internet, media trends and pornography that may place their health, integrity and women and girls at risk.

In April 2013, I visited a youth detention facility outside of Washington, D.C. It is a secure, lockdown facility for about 150 boys who have been adjudicated as delinquent and committed to the district’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. While chatting with the young men, I noticed a kid in the front row who looked to be about 16 years old.  He had a teardrop tattoo under his right eye which drew my attention to his steely glare and hardened demeanor. I could see in his eyes all of the suffering he had endured as a child and all of the suffering he had likely inflicted on himself and others.

My conversation with the boys covered many subjects that day including violence against women and girls. A few of them emotionally recounted the violence they had witnessed against women in their own lives. Some of the boys confided in me that they were there because they had abused girls.  I asked them to stop and think about how they would feel or react if someone were to mistreat or abuse their sister, mother or daughter. The young man with the tattoo didn’t say a word and continued to stare.

I proceeded to share stories about the courageous men and women in history who gave their lives for the freedom these young men had thrown away. We talked about Frederick Douglass and the importance of freeing one’s mind from mental bondage. We talked about Booker T. Washington and how he started a school to educate formerly enslaved Americans. As our time together came to a close, I concluded by telling them that they descend from greatness and each of them has the blood of heroes and sheroes flowing through their veins, just like I do.

The young man in the front row with the steely glare had been silent until this moment.  He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Mr. Morris, I have a baby boy. When I get out of here one day, I’m not going to raise him how I was raised. I’m going to teach him to always treat women with respect and dignity.” The teardrop tattoo on his cheek was now obscured by real tears.

I couldn’t help but think how this young man’s life may have taken a different turn had he been educated and empowered when it mattered most.

There are many forms of human trafficking and for the past two years, Human Trafficking Search has been writing a weekly blog on the topics of sex trafficking, child trafficking, organ trafficking and forced labor yet sex trafficking remains the most common form of human trafficking in the world. The HTS blog has covered both international and domestic trafficking on all continents, but whether local or abroad, the underlying cause of all types of human trafficking stems from demand. Much like any other product or service in the free market, human trafficking follows the standard economic principal of supply and demand. When buyers demand young women and girls for sexual services, the market eagerly complies and traffickers sell their “supply” for a large profit. The men and women responsible for the perpetuation of commercial sexual exploitation must face consequences for their actions in this not so free market. This is why Human Trafficking Search encourages and supports the creation of the Shared Hope Demanding Justice website. Only when the men and women who perpetuate the commercial sexual exploitation of human beings are held accountable and feel consequences for their actions will the demand for sex trafficking stop.

Accountability

For demand to decrease, the buyers of sex must be held accountable. Many buyers lead doubles lives as respectable family and businessmen and women—some are even considered pillars of their community. With the Shared Hope Demanding Justice website, these buyers will be exposed and held accountable for their actions. The shame and embarrassment the victims of commercial sexual exploitation feel needs to be transferred to the real problem—the buyer. As current legislations stands today there are very few legal repercussions for buyers of sex, but that doesn’t mean the buyer should escape all consequences. The Shared Hope website will hold buyers accountable for their actions and use social repercussions as a form of deterrence.

Social Consequences

The Demanding Justice website will expose buyers to the pain, social disconnect and humiliation that victims of commercial sexual exploitation feel each time they are sold. By showing the convicted buyer’s mug shots on the Internet, the buyers will be forced to face their peers both professionally and personally and accept what they have done. The buyers face will be on the Internet just like the faces of the women and girls who are sold online everyday. If the anti-trafficking community is serious about ending demand and the legal community won’t step up and evoke stricter laws against buyers then the best way to end demand is through social consequences to the buyers. Negatively affecting the buyers lives through public exposure will help end demand, as potential new buyers will be deterred by the threat of their mug shot posted online.

Even though sex trafficking is fueled by demand, it is one of the least researched, funded or publicized topics in the anti-trafficking community. There will always be a demand for sex trafficking unless there is public dialogue and agreement that purchasing another human being for sex is wrong and never consensual. The Shared Hope Demanding Justice website is just the catalyst the anti-trafficking community needs to change conversation from the supply side of sex trafficking to the demand side.

Researchers tend to be both curious and risk-averse. Curious because we’re always looking for unanswered questions, and risk-averse because we don’t want to make mistakes as we try to answer those questions. These are generalizations, of course…but we researchers tend to be fond of generalizations, too. I believe it is the push and pull of curiosity and risk-aversion that gives many researchers heartburn about digging into the subject of sex trafficking.

On the one hand, there are many unanswered questions about sex trafficking in the United States and beyond. On the other hand, empirical studies on sex trafficking are difficult to design and carry out at the level of rigor with which most researchers are comfortable. As an applied sociologist (that means I conduct social research to help clients answer real-world questions), this kind of heartburn is par for the course. The way I think of it is this: is it better to sit back as a researcher and point out why a study cannot be done perfectly, or is it better to work around limitations and try to answer the question? When lives are at stake, I believe there is greater net risk in avoiding research just because the methodological limitations might preclude you from publishing the results in an academic journal.

I’ve been involved in quite a few studies over the years to better understand child sex trafficking, but things changed for me the first time I studied demand. Back when online classifieds sites were mostly unknown to the public, traffickers were some of the first to figure out that you could post an ad for pretty much anything you wanted to sell — including a person. You still can today, by the way. Once every couple of months I would review and sort thousands of crudely pornographic images collected from online sites. The images were far more grotesque back then compared to what they are today. It was nauseating to see four or five naked young females, each in different ads but obviously photographed in the same person’s garage. I went through this routine for several years and watched as more and more females were being offered for sale online.

Then one day a client asked how many people were buying these females. It seemed an important question because “supply” was clearly increasing online, so demand obviously was to blame in one way or another. But measuring demand was even more challenging than measuring supply, because as a U.S. society we seem to be more tolerant of seeing females sold for sex than males buying them. Instead of reviewing thousands of images of exploited females at a time, I was now listening to men as they were calling in and attempting to buy a female advertised online.

Suddenly I struggled to get to sleep at night. I was cold and distant with my wife. I was yelling at my kids. I got fed up with little things at the office that normally wouldn’t bother me. This lasted for weeks before I even noticed it was happening, at which point I blamed it on stress and vowed to be less of a jerk. That didn’t work, though.

It wasn’t until several weeks after we finished our first demand study that these symptoms started to go away and I realized what was really going on: I was experiencing secondary trauma as a result of having studied the direct traumatization of so many other people. Today I understand that trauma affects everyone differently, and that it can be insidious. While I could somehow withstand viewing thousands of dehumanizing photos of abuse victims, I responded quite viscerally to the sound of a man ordering up a child, like she was a box of pizza.

Today there seems to be much wider interest from the social research community in studying all forms of human trafficking than there was several years ago. Yet studies on demand are still few and far between—particularly empirical studies. I believe there are a few reasons why this is still the case.

First, it is important to realize that most research on social issues comes from either academic or governmental institutions. I suspect one day our federal government will invest in large-scale ongoing data collection on sex trafficking, just as it does today with gun trafficking, drug trafficking, and many other criminal activities. Today it does not, though we seem to be headed in the right direction.

If an academic researcher gets funding to research demand for sex trafficking, he or she then must face the realities of human subjects review boards. These boards are well-intentioned, but they can also stifle research innovation. I have seen boards require jargon-filled informed consent passages longer than this very article to be placed at the beginning of completely innocuous surveys. Now imagine what a board would want to see from a researcher who seeks to ask questions of a male engaged in trafficking. More often than not, my academic friends and colleagues say that their review boards would not allow such research to happen.

The other reason why I believe we don’t see more empirical studies on demand is that we aren’t yet comfortable as a society with who the perpetrators are. We often talk about child sex trafficking perpetrators as if torches and pitchforks are in our hands, right up until the perpetrator is Lawrence Taylor. The day she turns 18, and often earlier, we openly ponder whether or not she chose to prostitute herself. We essentially ignore the situation where a homeless adolescent male or female “stays with” a newfound acquaintance because the streets are just too damn cold to sleep on that night.

Here’s the thing: in order for there to be thousands of victims on the “supply” side, there must be many, many more perpetrators on the “demand” side. That means we know these perpetrators because they live in our neighborhood, go to our church, are friends with us on social media, and work in the same office as us. We’ve gone to dinner with them, celebrated holidays with them, and helped them when they needed it.  We give them identities outside of their actions as perpetrators, yet we often fail to extend the same courtesy to those on the supply side whom we know by their labels as “prostitutes,” “whores,” and worse. The truth is, “we” as a society give perpetrators of sex trafficking the protection of anonymity, and that is the very reason why demand-side research is both challenging to conduct and terribly needed.