It's In Our High Schools.

I recently met with my friend Katy, who works with Youth For Christ in the high schools & middle schools in a neighboring city. I wanted to get together with Katy because I heard about a really disturbing new fad amongst high schoolers here - "Get-Down Girls." These are girls who are the "property" of boys in gangs, & any of the gang members are allowed to do any sexual act with "their girls." Katy was unsure of any payment offered or received for these "services," but it seems that the boys are the ones calling the shots for the who, the where, & the when. The most disturbing thing of all is that other high school students actually know who these girls are, & it almost sounds like it's a status symbol of sorts; it certainly isn't seen as anything out of the ordinary.

There was a study done recently at Boston University's School of Public Health, which found that one in thirteen teenage girls have had a "multi-person sex experience" - often initiated by boyfriends who had been watching pornography. More than half of these girls were pressured or coerced into threesomes, or victims of gang rape. (Source)

THIS IS A FORM OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING, & IT IS HAPPENING IN OUR HIGH SCHOOLS ACROSS AMERICA. If this isn't enough to prove the severity of this problem, I don't know what is. The sad thing is that most of these girls have no idea that they are victims of trafficking. For those of you who have kids in high school - especially public high school - it is SO important to talk to them about sexual abuse in its various forms, & make sure that they understand what sex trafficking is & how it can affect them. I can't stand to see such young girls in our own country being sexually exploited by young men their own age. We so often think of traffickers as being creepy, scummy old men, but that isn't always the case.

I read a statistic awhile back that 1 in 3 women has been coerced into sex or sexually abused in some way. (Source) The thing that has stuck with me since I first read that is that if 80-90% of trafficking victims has been sexually abused prior to being forced into prostitution (Source), that means that 1 in 3 women are susceptible to sexual exploitation & the potential of becoming victims of human trafficking.

Think about that the next time you're sitting in an airport, or a busy restaurant...or even when you're sitting in church on sunday morning. Take a look around you. 1 in 3.

Don't forget that this Wednesday, January 11, is National Human Trafficking Awareness Day. What are YOU going to do to shed some light on the problem?