They are looking for ideas for a billboard for stopping child sex trafficking. Any ideas?
“Please, think of the children. Don’t rape them.”
Picture of a sad kid?
Urging them to move on to adult sex trafficking?
Trafficking in foreign-born child prostitutes means lower wages for American child prostitutes. Buy American!
Actually maybe that should be “Please, DON’T think of the children.” Or “Don’t think of the children that way.”
A map showing arrows of places where children are trafficked from and to, with the caption “Children should be seen, not herd” and “Call 1 800 555 5555 to report suspected trafficking”
That having been said, I’m not sure what a billboard could do. It’s not like this is a highly visible crime that concerned citizens can do much about. Much of it, at least within the US, is very much internal trafficking and takes advantage of runaways or other at-risk groups. Doing things like treating the abusers as criminals instead of the victims as criminals would help a lot. Dragging a young girl before a court in handcuffs and charging her with prostitution when she’s been raped and abused, often forcibly drug addicted, by someone who told her they love her and she thinks of as her “boyfriend” is a terrible way to make inroads on a case. You need to rescue the child and get her to tell you who was involved, not lock her in a cell and reinforce the stereotypes of police as brutal and uncaring. Many abused children have been raised in the cycle of abuse and neglect and they honestly don’t know anything different and the rules of criminal proceedings require these twelve year old abuse victims to be handcuffed as if they were thirty old cop killers at an arraignment. Is it any wonder they have trouble getting them to turn on their “boyfriends”?
Treat the victims of trafficking as victims and go after the abusers. The incredible resources available to individuals in modern society(private homes, private cars, secure communication, etc.) make it possible to hide these crimes. The well-meaning but overbearing criminal justice system isn’t well suited to the humane task of rescuing these children and rehabilitating them. Heck, it’s even terrible at identifying them. These children often have a list of missed opportunities for society to have stopped their trajectory, from multiple CPS calls reporting neglect/abuse in childhood to juvenile offenses, drug offenses, etc. There is a special branch of the Dallas Police which deals with High Risk and Trafficked Victims and they put together a presentation(PDF) which, on page 8, has a heartbreaking, but all too common list of these kinds of missed opportunities, charting reports to CPS from as early as age 1, through sexual abuse allegations at 9 coupled with a suicide attempt, then multiple runaway reports when she was 9-12, and finally ending up with multiple prostitution charges when she was 13. The system is clearly not working and more people reporting doesn’t seem to be the problem. Taking the right action on the reports seems to be the weak link.
Check out the work of investigative journalist Julian Sher for more info on how the criminal justice system is letting abusers walk out of courtrooms while locking up victims. There are audio podcast links on the page and links to his books which are considered some of the best on the topic.
Steven
“we spent the money for this billboard on something more likely to have an impact.”
Seriously, the people who don’t intuitively know that sex trafficking of children is bad, won’t learn it from a billboard.
That is so wrong that I just laughed my ass off at it. Damn you!
I saw a billboard once that said “Thinking of touching a child? DON’T.” with a number for a child molester help line.
Really?
What billboard would stop somebody that does it. None.
…
A pictograph of a child impaled by a penis, in the middle of one of those red circles with a diagonal slash.
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An ad for a toll free number “Order a Child Sex Slave”
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Arrest the callers.
I think the best wording would be, “Think of the Children. And NOT THAT WAY!”
Or if you want to go the revenge-fantasy-route,
“Sup, dawg, I herd u liek raping little girls so I put a dick in your ass so you can have sex in prison while you’re in prison for having sex.”
/thread
Edit:
And this is a fail. If you really wanted to use “I put a dick in your ass” as the gifted item it’d be “Yo dawg I herd you like dicks in your ass so we put a dick in your ass in that dick in your ass so you can get raped while you get raped.” Exactly.
Formulate future Yo Dawgs after the best one I’ve read: “Yo dawg I herd you like drinks so we put a drink in your drink so you can drink while you drink.”
I think the idea of a billboard is that many of these evil people go to Cambodia and think that they are anonymous and the laws of Australia do not apply. If they see a billboard maybe some will realise they are not anonymous and the laws of Australia still apply.
Spend the money on a billboard to stop forced human labor trafficking instead. Because that’s real, and affects tens of thousands more people than the maybe couple hundred actual case of child sex trafficking in this country.
Or they should just be honest and have the billboard say: “Embrace the hysteria!!! Don’t think, send $ now!!! (We’ll spend it on shit you don’t want us to, but you’ll think you did a good thing.)”
There are multiple threads on this board about this topic. Any one of them can give you the straight dope.
There is a form but is non binding. Subversion, like in limericks, is a valid humor form, despite your opinion on any specific one.
For instance, my favorite yo dawg is “I herd u like fishing so we put your car in the ocean. Good luck with that.”