Note the bolding (mine). And some people refuse to admit that there’s such a thing as child sex slavery here in the US!
This is a subject that’s close to my soul and I ache for those kids, just like I do whenever I hear of child sexual exploitation anywhere in the world. “…led to the recovery of 575 children…” breaks my heart. I hope they all get the counseling they need but I fear many if not most of them won’t. How many will turn to drugs and alcohol to to try and forget, and/or go right back into prostitution and/or other crime? My heart is so heavy that I can’t even work up a round of expletives to pour on the pimps and johns. May they all die horrible, painful deaths, every last one of them.
So the big headline is “FBI ARRESTS 600 FOR CHILD PROSTITUTION,” but the catch is that 5/6ths of the arrestees were adult prostitutes? Is that all they’re being charged with? I wonder how many adult prostitutes would have been child victims if the arrest had happened a year or two ago.
I used to live in a neighborhood with a fair number of street hookers, and most of the obviously-older-than-18-looking ones looked just as strung out as the ones who could have possibly been underage.
I’d be willing to bet that a large majority of the rescued teenagers in this case are drug-taking runaways who happened to fall in with a really bad crowd.
Not that it makes what the pimps did any better, but I doubt they were kidnapped off the street or anything.
And not to take anything away from the FBI, but 47 children ranging from 13 to 17 could easily be 1 thirteen-year old and 46 seventeen-year old children. Still wrong, but not so inflammatory as the headline would have it.
As a guess, the FBI was investigating the sex industry and arrested 689 people. Then they divided them up into categories. If you were getting paid for sex and were 18 or older, you were an adult prostitute and a criminal. If you were under 18, you were an innocent victim. And if they couldn’t prove you were having sex, you must have been a pimp.
Jesus Christ, but “FBI arrests 600+ in child prostitution ring sting!” is a misleading title.
The FBI didn’t arrest 600 child molesters. They didn’t arrest 600 white slavers. They arrested 500 prostitutes and a couple of other people. How can you count the adult prostitutes in with the child molesters and pimps? And it ain’t like there’s something magical that happens on a prostitute’s 18th birthday that turns her customer from a child molester into a john.
It isn’t absolutely unheard of for them to be kidnapped off the street. I know it’s sensationalist, but I saw one of those Dateline specials or something on children who were indeed forced by violence into prostitution or sex slavery - not drugged-out runaways, teenagers who were coerced, tricked, drugged, or violently forced.
600+ is a MASSIVE number when dealing with a paraphillia as uncommon as paedophilia or ephebephilia. Given that only a very small number of people have such urges, and an even smaller number are willing to commit criminal acts to satisfy them, I’m thinking this was either the most effective sting ever organized and it got a significant fraction of the active paedophiles in the US, or some non-paedophiles have been lumped in. The DA’s are going to have a nightmare of a time dealing with this many prosecutions. Odds are some people are going to get child sex offender records who don’t deserve them. Hopefully the actual law enforcement will be more even-handed than the article headline writing for this situation.
This was an ordinary prostitution sting which happened to nab some teenagers. Most of us would probably not be able to tell a 16 year old from an 18 year old on sight. Pedophilia has little if anything to do with this case, and ephebephilia is uncommon? Seriously? Sixteen is legal in some countries.
Exactly what I came in to say. Perhaps I’m somewhat jaded, but I wouldn’t see anything remarkable about prostitutes between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. I would describe them as underaged prostitutes, and legally they’re minors, but at that age they aren’t really physically children.
It’s sad, yes, but pretty common and it has nothing whatsoever to do with pedophilia. It has to do with teenagers in bad situations trying to make money and people preying on them. It has to do with the normal and near universal appeal of youth. If the youngest in this group was thirteen then that means that unless an unusual hormonal situation was going on not a single one of those kids was prepubescent. And what is a pedophile? An adult who experiences a sexual preference for prepubescent children.
It doesn’t seem very likely that they were trying to appeal to pedophiles.
What a misleading title. There’s no children involved in this story, a better title would be FBI arrests over 600 prostitutes and pimps. These ‘children’ aren’t part of a child sexual slavery ring, they’re runaway teens who turned to prostitution. While it’s sad that teens resort to the world’s oldest profession, this isn’t a child prostitution ring.
I wonder how many of the 518 adult prostitutes that were busted were 18 and missed thier get out of jail free card by a year.
What seems strange to me is that if one of these under-18s was caught stealing a car, or driving drunk in one, they’d be charged with a crime. If they were selling or possessing drugs, again, a crime. But if they got so incredibly strung out on drugs that they had to sell themselves for a fix, they are crime victims?
I don’t entirely understand this, but then I completely don’t understand the need for drug and adult prostitution laws in the first place, so…
Taking ephebephilia to the point of a paraphilia is uncommon. Sexual attraction to 15-19 year old individuals is normal(not considered a disorder in DSM IV), but exclusive attraction to this narrow age range would be turning ephebephilia into a paraphilia, and thus, uncommon/abnormal.