In this, the 21^st Century, tens of millions of women and children are slaves in their homelands throughout the globe to be used solely for sex.

And every year hundreds of thousands of women and children are trafficked to foreign lands and throughout the United States as fodder for the sex trade.

As I investigated the causes behind this global sex slave calamity, I quickly discovered the main reason for this – MEN – men who feel that because they have cash, they have the right to rent and invade a woman’s body.

Through all my research, I witnessed the very worst of men who rent the bodies of women and children.  I witnessed their complete indifference toward another human being; their profound disregard and disrespect for the prostituted ; and their grand sense of entitlement and the kingdom of delusion in which they hold court.

And I quickly learned that the Johns don’t want to hear a peep about the incredible human suffering they are causing worldwide.

What I found was they only want, and need, to believe in the myths; the lies and the propaganda that help them get through the night.

Today men who step out into the night seeking purchased sex defiantly cling to the myth that all prostituted persons are in the sex trade by CHOICE and are making money the easy way – on their backs.

Johns don’t want to hear the tragic stories of how the vast majority of women and children were forced into the world of prostitution.

They don’t want to hear about five- and six-year-old girls and boys being sold by their desperately poor parents to brothel owners in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam to be used and abused by men on international sex tours.

They don’t want to hear that most prostituted women and children are recruited into the flesh trade throughout the Western World at ages as young as 12, 13 and 14 – teenage girls who have been made vulnerable by the violence of their surroundings; teenage girls who are victims of shattered and abusive families where they had been sexually abused and raped by their fathers, grandfathers, uncles and trusted family friends and where their innocence and self esteem has been destroyed.

Johns don’t want to hear that the vast majority of prostituted women and children are controlled by violent pimps and crime gangs; that most are addicted to drugs, oftentimes forcibly addicted by their drug-dealing pimps as a form of control, and that most prostituted women and children suffer from serious mental health issues.

Johns don’t want to hear how traffickers are hunting down and ensnaring more and more unsuspecting young women and girls for the seemingly insatiable global sex market.

They don’t want to hear how these young women and girls are taken to “breaking grounds” where they are “seasoned” for the flesh trade.  Places – out of sight – in cities like Moscow, Belgrade, Milan, Berlin, Miami and New York – where they are beaten, gang raped and forced to comply with every demand made by their new owners, where they are depersonalized until they are no longer capable of acting or thinking for themselves.

The only avenue of survival for these destitute women and girls is prostitution.  In essence, what they are forced into is an act of desperation and there is never a choice in desperation.

This is the cold, hard reality for the vast majority of women and girls in prostitution, and the Johns don’t want to hear any of this.

What Johns want to believe is the lie that somehow, magically, a woman is suddenly struck with the idea that prostitution would be a rewarding and wonderful career path!

That these young women and girls enjoy servicing a half dozen or more strange, doughy, smelly, sweaty, middle-aged, bozos on Viagra because it’s a good paying job!

And it’s because of all the lies, the propaganda and absurd myths perpetuated by the prostitution legalization lobby that the situation for tens of millions of impoverished and vulnerable women and children worldwide is getting worse.

The fact is that over the past decade, the demand by men for purchased sex has gone off the charts.

There is no complicated or complex explanation for what is going on. It’s very simple.

In economic parlance, women and girls are the commodity; the supply side of the coin. And imbedded on the supply side are the push factors—extreme poverty, lack of education, and the eternal yearning of desperate human beings to improve their lot in life.

Flip the coin and you get the demand side of the equation with the emphasis on three key letters: “m…a…n.”

Without the demand, there would be no supply.

It would not be profitable for the criminals and pimps to stay in this business if endless platoons of men weren’t prowling the side streets for purchased sex.

The clandestine activities of men on the prowl for sex with prostituted women and girls are forever dismissed with glib comments like: “Boys will be boys … they’re just sowing their wild oats.” It is precisely this bizarre entrenched attitude that has led to the global explosion of men buying sex.

All these crazy and widely-accepted myths about men “needing sex to release tension” “the natural drive of men for sex” “prostitution protecting nice women and girls from rape” and “the rite of passage by initiating boys into manhood.”

No matter which way you examine the issue of buying sex, you cannot escape this one conclusion: this entire global human rights debacle is totally man-made!

The cold, hard reality is little will be done to stop this worldwide sexual carnage until men start taking responsibility for their behavior.

Men hold the key to putting the breaks on this sexual insanity because unlike the tens of millions of women and girls ensnared in the flesh trade, men have a choice.

Men can make different choices and those with a moral compass do.

 

South Dakota is not the place one expects to find fourteen-year-old girls being sold for sex on the internet. The grim reality, however, is that sex trafficking is a growth industry and it has taken root even here in rural America. I became the United States Attorney for South Dakota in 2009, and at that time there had never been a case of sex trafficking prosecuted in the history of our state. Over the past four years in South Dakota, three men have received life sentences for sex trafficking in federal court, two more were sentenced to thirty years or more in prison, and more than a dozen men were prosecuted federally for attempting to purchase sex from a trafficking victim.

The economics of sex trafficking provide a clear illustration of the law of supply and demand. The traffickers profit from selling their victims to an eager market. Law enforcement has aggressively prosecuted the supply side of this equation, the traffickers, and in some areas this effort has produced significant results. But it is also important to address the demand side of the sex trafficking equation. In my experience, those who seek to purchase sex from trafficking victims often have a great deal to lose if they are caught by law enforcement, and thus we can significantly reduce the demand for trafficking victims in a community by also aggressively prosecuting these individuals. This article is a brief overview of our efforts to prosecute those seeking to purchase sex from trafficking victims in South Dakota.

The First Sting:

In 2011, South Dakota law enforcement set up an internet sting operation targeting men purchasing sex from children on the internet. Fictitious twin fourteen-year-old girls and an eleven-year-old girl were advertised on the internet as being available to perform sex acts for money. Three men responded to the advertisements and exchanged numerous emails and phone calls with an undercover agent, describing in great detail the sex acts they wanted to perform on the young girls. When they arrived at a local house with money in hand expecting to meet the trafficked children, the men were instead greeted by law enforcement.

Two of the defendants went to trial and were convicted by separate juries. The defendants subsequently filed motions with the trial court, asking that the convictions be dismissed. They argued that the federal sex trafficking statute they were charged with violating, 18 U.S.C. Section 1591, did not apply to “customers”. The district court was persuaded by the defendants’ arguments that the federal statute did not apply because the legislative history showed that Congress had failed to discuss the importance of prosecuting the demand side of a human trafficking enterprise. In fact, the legislative history revealed that Congress paid little attention not only to the demand side of human trafficking, but even to domestic sex trafficking generally when they passed the law in 2000. My office appealed the judgments of acquittal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. We argued that the plain language of the statute included those who seek to obtain sex from a trafficking victim, and that criminal trafficking enterprises cannot exist without both supply and demand. In a landmark decision released in January 2013, the appellate court reversed the district court and reinstated the convictions. This decision was a victory for law enforcement, as it is now clear under federal law that if you attempt to purchase sex with a trafficking victim that you are also a human trafficker.

Prosecuting Demand at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally:

The South Dakota decision from the Eighth Circuit provided my office with an additional weapon to attack sex trafficking. Armed with this new tool, South Dakota law enforcement turned their focus to the 2013 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota. A coordinated team of state and federal authorities once again set up a sting operation targeting individuals interested in purchasing sex with children. Many men responded to the ads, nine men of whom we charged in federal court for responding to internet advertisements offering sex with girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen. One of the men even asked for a ten-year-old girl but settled for a twelve-year-old on the condition that he could take photos and did not have to use a condom. When this individual arrived at a gas station parking lot on his 2012 Harley Davidson expecting to pick up a child for sex, he was instead met by agents from the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation and arrested. He now faces a federal mandatory minimum sentence of fifteen years.

We conducted a similar law enforcement operation last month during the 2014 Sturgis Rally. The number of individuals who responded to the ads were down significantly, a good result, but we are still prosecuting five individuals in federal court who responded to the advertisements. It should also be noted that South Dakota law enforcement conducts these operations not only during the Rally, but throughout the year. Our federal prosecutions have included prominent members of the community, such as a physician and an air traffic controller. Our citizens are now well aware of the dramatic ramifications for trying to purchase sex from a trafficked child.

Conclusion:

There are good people deeply committed to ending sex trafficking who disagree with our approach in South Dakota. I want to be clear that we do not seek 10-year mandatory minimum sentences in all of our cases. In every case, we look at the criminal history of the defendant and the nature of his conduct during the commission of the crime to determine whether a mandatory minimum sentence is appropriate. I also recognize that other prosecutors, in areas much larger than mine, are devoting all of their resources to rescuing children from actual sex trafficking operations. I appreciate their budget constraints and commend the important work they are doing with limited resources.

I do not, however, accept the criticism that I often hear about South Dakota federal prosecutors acting like “vice cops”. Let me be clear, we prosecute individuals who are on the internet looking to pay money to a stranger in order to have sex with a young child in their care. I offer no apology for prosecuting that type of trafficker to the fullest extent of the law. This strategy works in South Dakota and it can work elsewhere.

The issue of law enforcement and sex trafficking is complex and bears much consideration. Outwardly, the relationship seems simple: Police enforce the laws. Invariably, the victim comes under scrutiny in a sex crime and in some cases is blamed.

For many it seems troubling. After all, do we blame the store clerk for the armed robbery? He or she is never deemed complicit in the crime. Do we blame the home owner who forgot to lock a window and gave a burglar easy entry into his house? Was this really an invitation to all would-be-thieves to come into his house and help themselves to his valuables? Of course not.

Why, then do we assign blame to sex crime victims? Child sex trafficking differs from the “average” sex crime because it’s a sex crime that is demand-driven.

These complexities bring us to two fundamental questions: What perceptions does society have that influence enforcing laws that combat demand and how can society influence law enforcement’s prosecutorial priorities?

Let’s take the first question and examine the perceptions that society currently holds that influence the enforcement against demand. Let’s consider “demand” the desire and willingness of men and women to purchase human beings for sexual experiences. The commonly used false adage that prostitution is “the oldest profession in the world” lends credibility to sexual transactions and makes prostitution seem like a valid career choice. Many argue that a woman has the right to sell her body despite illegality in all but one state. Media influence suggests that we are all sexual beings, “sex sells”, and “nothing is wrong with a little porn.”

All of these societal perceptions place road blocks in the way of law enforcement when we try to enforce the laws that criminalize deviant and abusive sexual experiences. No gender, race, socioeconomic status, zip code, or profession is immune from this desire to purchase another person for sex. Sexual deviance knows no boundaries.

Historically, law enforcement focus was on the arrest of prostitutes, to a lesser extent pimps, and to an even lesser extent, the purchasers. It begs the question: Would there be a supply if there wasn’t a demand?

The concept of supply and demand is at the core of all economic principles. In any free market society, demand always drives supply and the price associated with any goods or services relates to the amount of supply in the marketplace. In other words, as demand increases, so too does supply. The supply of children is a reusable, resalable commodity and people are not illegal in and of themselves to possess. For a person with criminal intent, buying sex with a child is a low risk, high reward proposition. It doesn’t take a degree in economics to understand that.

It is undeniable that there is demand for sex with children. A quick glance at any state’s sex offender registry reveals that there is a great demand for children; the number of offenders that are registered as sex offenders for sex offenses against children is astonishing. The number of images of children forced into the commercial sexual industry is equally staggering. Has this always been the case or is something driving that increase in demand? The internet has certainly contributed to the anonymous distribution of pornographic images of children. Experts assert that child pornography increases the desire for children by individuals who are sexually attracted to kids. Permissive societal attitudes toward deviant sexuality allows demand to thrive.

Finally, how can society influence law enforcement’s prosecutorial priorities? More than twenty years ago, society changed its perceptions of what constituted domestic violence. Society is now undergoing a paradigm shift on the issue of human trafficking as well, yet because prostitution and child sex trafficking are increasingly electronic crimes, they have disappeared from the public reality. The crime is no longer visible to the eye as you drive up and down the street in the seedier parts of town. The “track” in any given city can now be found in the new 21st century geography–the internet. There is no longer a call from the community to “clean up” that bad part of town. That part of your community may still appear run down and dirty, but there are no longer scores of women and men trolling for a “date” where everybody can see them. And everybody could see the men who drive that track looking for a “date.” So, if there is no call to law enforcement to take action, no action is taken. Certainly, if members of the community saw children walking up and down the “track” police departments would be flooded with calls for action.

Bottom line: In order for criminalization of the purchasing of sex with children to become a priority for law enforcement, there must be a call to action, an outrage, a community swell, an overwhelming public opinion that the sale of human beings is a bad thing for everybody involved. Whether the good members of a community can see it or not, it’s happening right beneath their noses. And no one is immune.