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What is fueling the demand for child sex trafficking?
For most people it’s hard to imagine that grown men are having sexual contact with, paying for, and raping children. Yet this is happening with such frequency that this crime, human trafficking, is the now the fastest growing crime in the world. (Harris, K. 2012). What is causing grown men to abuse children in this […]
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An open letter to John Grisham: Child pornography consumers are “real pedophiles”
John, I grew up reading your books. Your characters had an influence on my young mind and their stories gave me impressions of the legal world that I will never forget. In fact, I still have nearly a whole shelf in my library dedicated to your works. Eventually, I decided to become a lawyer, went […]
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A Survivor’s Voice: Strategies to End Demand
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 […]
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A Call To Men: What Will Your Story Be?
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) […]
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Ending Demand Starts with Building Strong Children
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 […]
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Neglecting Demand Fuels Human Trafficking
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 […]
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Hazards of Demand-Side Research: A Perspective from the Front Lines
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 […]
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What The Johns Don’t Want To Hear
In this, the 21st 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 […]
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Demanding Justice in Congress
While we often talk about human trafficking, there’s one important aspect that we often ignore: the man who solicits sex on the street or on the internet. These individuals are also criminals, and they live among us every day, preying on young women and girls. They are the demand that drives this business, because that […]
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South Dakota: An Aggressive Prosecutorial Response
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 […]