Sex-Trafficking in the World

All These Missing Little Girls
No longer Does Media Blame Aliens From Outer Space

We are finally getting it. We’re finally accepting that Martians, among other aliens, and the man in the moon can no longer be held solely responsible anymore for all the missing little girls and young teenagers being kidnapped in the world. And now that the truth is revealed, it’s long overdue that we come to some healthy state of consciousness and civility, as to address and reproach this marginalization of women in our civilization. With the exposition of these women as sexually exploited objects, our culture has helped assist women remaining victims in one of the last venues of modern slavery: sex-trafficking in the marketplace of organized crime. Added to this is the fact that the abduction of younger girls in the private sectors also has shown of late that the pornography industry is, indeed, cultivating a new vehicle of harm that has jeopardized the exploitation of children in our society. The paradigms marginalizing and imprisoning women are at last all too visible for either the media or public to avoid.
Of these past few weeks, as I’ve randomly watched the news recurring on behalf of detectives searching for samples of bone debris in the back of Phillip Garrido’s backyard, I cannot help but go back to the incessant days when I spent hours in the basement of the British Studies Institute at the Free University Berlin, reading The Daily Mirror, The Times, The Sun and other British papers that had suddenly returned to the subject of Frederick West following his prison suicide in 1995. (In many ways, I couldn’t believe that such enormous “satanic murders” could surface again, and I kept asking myself, was this but merely a media scheme of sorts on CNN’s part, as to keep us all glued to their TV station for a few extra weeks: were they using Fred West as a PR motive. Or were we as men prone to such violence, dominance, and abuse over members of the opposite sex if our own sense of power (or lack of it) caused us to fuel some mundane illusion in our psyche as to propel us to feel superior? In an attempt to bring some closure over such analysis I did not feel empowered, but shame for the sake of knowing how helpless these men must have actually been. Looking back on Frederick West’s saga, I found it most intriguing how unaware England was during the interim of those twelve murders—I had been stationed in Alconbury RAF in the mid-70s and no one had ever had a clue that such a crime of this magnitude would even incur in England.)
Within the past decade, just around the time Tony Blair was campaigning for England to support American in Iraq, the BBC broadcasted that sex-trafficking and -slavery was about to become even more of a serious challenge in the globalization community. As I listened to the radio-documentary revealing and denouncing sex-trafficking that evening—I asked myself, Why was it so hard for the world to believe that there was no such thing as spaceships out there beaming little girls up into outer space? Why couldn’t society get that there were circumstances far too complex and marred for this dynamics of child exploitation to be recurring as often as it had been?
However, roughly five years ago, suddenly the media started unfolding one story of sexual abuse after another. It seemed the images were beginning to come in loud and clear: from Florida to Minnesota: from Utah to Portugal: and from Colorado to Cambodia: even from Aruba to Peru. Slowly, the media had begun to understand that many of these cases did not limit themselves to mere runaways.
On August 25, 2006 my own breakthrough of conscientiousness on the subject of child exploitation seemed plausibly ignited. On that day, I watched the news from my Berlin apartment and learned about a young teenager named Natascha Kampusch who, only a day or so before, had successfully escaped from over eight years of imprisonment in the cellar of a man named Wolfgang Priklopil in Austria. She had found her way to the safe havens of a police office. He had just placed himself in front of a train, knowing the police were out there hunting him down. The story shocked Europe. Natascha received mega exposure though her face had yet been unveiled. It was to be the first of several women I watched, at the expense of the media, who would find their way back to some state of normality in the world.
I was extremely happy for Jaycee Dugard’s escape. One can only praise her for her bravery.
Yet, even if the whereabouts of the bodies of Madeleine McCann and Natalee Holloway remain a mystery, finally with the success of females such as Elizabeth Smart, Natascha Kampush, Jaycee, and most recently Elizabeth Fritzl, we in western society are finally beginning to place potent analysis on the issues of male dominance and abuse in our culture, as we have at least finally come to accept that the kidnapping of children around the world has got very little to do with Martians, and above all else, at least not on behalf of aliens arriving from outer space.