As you read these words a young man is waiting to pick up his next sex slave outside a group foster home near you. He is a pimp. He knows his job. He learned it when he was in jail for dealing drugs. “What you do,” he was told, “is find a group home for girls in a city a couple of hours away from where you live. Hang around there. Get to know one of those girls (ages 9 through 16) and treat her right for six to eight months. Take her to a movie. Buy her a steak dinner. Nobody’s ever treated her nice in her whole life. She’ll love you. Give her presents, whatever she wants. She’ll be eager to sleep with you. So do it often. Then, tell her you’ve had a bad month. Can’t pay the rent. Because you both would do anything for each other, ask her to sleep with a man who’ll pay your rent. Then take her back to your city and put her to work. Beat her up. Starve her a couple of days. She doesn’t know anybody to complain to. Cops don’t bother you. The competition won’t kill you like when you were dealing. She’ll do $500 worth of tricks a day. She gets busted and you bail her out. You get some more girls. You’re a rich man.”

I heard this from two speakers at Theological Opportunity Program meeting at the Harvard Divinity School on October 19, 2006. Lisa Goldblatt-Grace spoke about her work at the Home for Little Wanderers in Boston. Mei-Mei Ellerman spoke to us abut the Polaris Project.

Goldblatt-Grace speaks to girls at schools and in group homes, telling them the story in my first paragraph. Warning them. Ellerman is an academic whose children drew her into a new career of activism against the sex trade – here in America as well as world-wide.

Ellerman described a district in Washington, D.C., with 200 brothels, guarded by the police to keep things “orderly.” Leading male citizens are the regular Johns. Only the slaves get arrested on the occasional police “raids.” The Johns go back to their leadership roles in our democracy and the pimps post bail for their victims.

Check out:
http://www.polarisproject.org/polarisproject/
for information on the Polaris Project.

Stories from some of the victims are at:
http://www.slaverystillexists.org/

The Home for Little Wanderers is at:
http://www.thehome.org/site/content/index.asp

Katrina was right when she recited the Pledge of Allegiance, “With Liberty and Justice for Some.”