STOP LOOKING THE OTHER WAY
Today, we are seeing many terrifying trends in porn and the mass media, which mirror what the main character of Memoirs of a Sex Industry Survivor, Juliet West, endured. Children are being exploited at a younger age, and are also entering the sex industry younger and younger. We look the other way, pretend it “isn’t that bad,” or that, my child, cousin, neighbor is “just making things up.”
The need for a cultural standards “renovation” was thoroughly documented within a report/study entitled, “The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico,” by Richard Estes and Neil Alan Weiner, who are both PhDs. The study, which was conducted at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Social Work, and the Center for the Study of Youth Policy, took three years to complete.
The US government commissioned this investigation, and it calls for urgent measures to be taken. According to Estes, “As many as 400,000 children in the United States are victims of the sex trade each year, from juvenile pornography and street prostitution, to selling sex at school. At least one in every 100 American child is involved in sexually exploitive activities. This is an epidemic.”
Memoirs of a Sex Industry Survivor is a splash of cold water on readers’ faces, a wake-up call to all who casually deny the connection between sexual abuse, pornography and prostitution.
Additional Statistics (Demographics of Prostitution) were from an essay called “Prostitution=Slavery,” Vednita Carter, published in 2003. (One of her sources was Prostitution Research and Education, www.prostitutionresearch.com)