You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.
William Wilberforce, Abolitionist, 1759-1833
I cannot get this terrible thing off my mind. Neither could Susan Norris, so she wrote a book about it, Rescuing Hope, to help her find some peace. Norris wanted to raise awareness that girls as young as 11 years old -- and even younger -- are being stolen from their lives and turned into slaves, forced to have sex 20 or more times a night, held prisoner in decrepit apartments or hotels, starved, beaten, threatened with their lives.
I'm not talking about girls enslaved by ISIS. I'm talking about your daughter in your neighborhood, today. Yes, your daughter, your neighborhood, today. White, black, Asian, Hispanic, rich, middle class, poor, urban, suburban, rural. No demographic is safe. Norris' book is a fictionalized account, based on dozens of interviews she conducted with victims, survivors, detectives, even a former pimp, of what happened to a 14-year-old girl in Atlanta, Georgia.
Sex slavery is happening on a very large scale in this great city of Atlanta -- exponentially when major sporting events are taking place. Young girls are served up to "customers" like selections on a menu, "Send me a young, white girl, blonde, petite..."
Did you know that the customers in Atlanta typically are married men with children, "regular guys" who may be your neighbor, nearly half living in metro Atlanta's northern suburbs?
"More than 40 percent live north of the perimeter because that's where the money is," Norris told me when we met for an iced chai tea one recent afternoon. This statistic was one of many surprising statistics and horrifying stories she shared with me.
Did you know that pimps in Atlanta make more than $33,000 a week? They're getting richer, and doing so faster, than drug dealers because they are using "renewable resources" -- pre-teens and young teens who are raped repeatedly night after night after night. Pimps traffic on average four to six girls.
But this isn't happening just in Atlanta. Did you know sex trafficking takes place all across America, in large cities and suburbs, in small towns, and on college campuses? It's estimated that in the United States, 100,000 children are victims of sex trafficking and 300,000 more are at risk. The human trafficking trade has become a $9.5 billion industry in America and $32 billion globally.
Since Norris self-published 5,000 copies of her book in 2012, she's been getting calls from victims, survivors, families. "You understand," they tell her. "Please help." A former teacher, Norris has become "mama" to many young women, a mentor and a trusted person to walk with them through the struggle of recovery. She connects anyway she can -- talks to them on the phone, meets them for coffee, takes them shopping for traditional work clothes and covers the cost herself, escorts them to rehabilitation, visits them in prison.
Yes, the girls are in prison -- not the pimps, the customers, the property owners where these heinous crimes occur. It's a flaw of our legal system that many states are grappling to address because prostitution is illegal (except in Nevada), which means the girls are considered criminals, not their torturers. Recently in Georgia, the General Assembly passed two bills designed to strengthen penalties for traffickers and expand protections for victims so that the true criminals are more likely to be punished.
To seek justice, Norris is connecting the girls to a newly formed Atlanta-based non-profit organization called Civil Lawyers Against World Sex Slavery (CLAWS). CLAWS uses the civil side of the court system to punish the perpetrators.
"Our goal is to hold customers responsible for their participation and economic fueling of the problem, traffickers responsible for their organizational activities, and venues responsible for permitting, and profiting from, unlawful conduct upon their premises," says David William Boone, a well-known Atlanta civil litigator who founded CLAWS in 2014.
With the emergence of CLAWS and an increasingly unified plan of attack among the city's various non-profit organizations and governmental bodies engaged in this battle, Norris is hopeful on two fronts: first, that the demand side of this equation - the customers -- will decrease out of fear of prosecution and the shame associated with it; and second, that the girls will get more of the support they need to leave "the life" once and for all.
"We have to change our culture to show that all people have value, all people have destiny," Norris says. "Demand drives supply. If we can reach young men at an age when they're outraged by injustice, then maybe we can change a generation, and if we can change a generation, then we can change the issue."
Child Sex Slavery Facts
- More than 100,000 children are currently trafficked for sex in the United States.
- 300,000 children in the United States are at risk of being prostituted.
- The average age of entry into prostitution for a child victim in the United States is 12-14 years old.
- Girls are forced to have sex more than 20 times per night.
- The average life expectancy of a child after getting into prostitution is seven years, with homicide or HIV/AIDS as the main causes of death.
- 92 percent want to exit prostitution but cannot due to a lack of healthcare, legal services, money, education, and other basic resources.
- Underage girls are the bulk of victims in the commercial sex markets, which include pornography, stripping, escort services, and prostitution.
- Sex trafficking is the world's third largest criminal enterprise, after drugs and weapons, and it is the fastest growing.
- A pimp can make 33,000 per week--or 1.7 million annually.
- A pimp can earn 150,000-200,000 per child each year, and the average pimp has four to six girls.
- 7,200 men account for 8,700 paid sex acts with female adolescents each month in Georgia (about 300 a day).
- Between 2003 and 2007, the underground sex industry in Atlanta grew by 22 percent.
- The top two most common scouting venues used by pimps are the victims' social circles and home neighborhoods.
- The rise of the Internet and increased use of technology have led to more children being exploited in the commercial sex trade.
To learn more and support the organizations fighting sex slavery in Atlanta, go to www.usclaws.org.