Asian-American Forum combats human trafficking massage parlors with lesson plan
A few month ago, Asian American Forum (AAF) offered a challenge. Which Asian American journalist will come up with the next article about human trafficking and Asian massage parlors? January is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Awareness month and AAF has published a Unit Plan on Human Trafficking with Asian Massage Parlors: The Skinny LP in its Winter 2016 issue.
Naturally such a challenge is ongoing. Press TV aired a piece about how criminal gangs in Europe may take advantage of Syrian refugees. Women and children are especially vulnerable to pedophiles and labor traffickers. Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center (APALRC) has worked extensively with victims of labor trafficking in the DC area. Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund has a webpage devoted to its Anti-Trafficking Initiative. Legal rights brochures are available in 12 languages, and manuals with regard to T- and U-visas. Doubtless more articles are in the offing.
Human trafficking is now the second most profitable international criminal commodity, alongside weapons and drug-trafficking. The three can be interlinked as syndicates use the same underground network of transportation methods and routes, entry points, go-betweens, handlers, and scouts.
Decent, idyllic rural America is becoming Pottersville, filled with ill-disguised brothels numbering more than coffee shops or Chinese fast-food. Quaint past-times such as quilting classes, watercolor painting, or reading of poems praising the countryside, have become an anachronism. Instead, lyrics celebrating violence, drugs, pagan symbolism, sexual revelry, and sports cater to the male libido.
Are men becoming increasingly infantile and craven in their pursuit of instant happiness?
According to multiple sources, the Super Bowl attracts not only hundreds of millions of viewers, but tens of thousands of prostitutes, often under-aged.
Fox News: “Every year the Super Bowl attracts the largest human sex-trafficking problems in the world—a lot of trafficking in kids.”
Online sex ads at Craigslist, Backpage, and other sites increase their business productivity up to 300%, with the pimps or traffickers collecting most of the money.
CNN’s Special Report, Children for Sale: The Fight to End Human Trafficking, investigated how human traffickers exploit under-aged girls and entrap them as sex-slaves for the rest of their shortened lives.
In filming Nefarious: Merchant of Souls, Benjamin Nolot and crew describe (white) johns who travel to cities such as Phnom Penh, Cambodia for child sex tourism. Interviews indicate that most deviant johns addicted to pornography are sucked into the perversion and violence. In America, young boys can be particularly prone to the distorting influences of violence on T.V. with girls in accessory roles.
It is easy to convince oneself over time that rape, kidnapping, and slave labor are all necessary evils for the advancement of democracy. As rural farmers and villages are squeezed out or shut down by transnationals or terrorists, financial hardship transforms millions of families into migratory refugees. Parents are forced to sell their children. Cheryl O’Brien in “An Analysis of Global Sex Trafficking”:
Within a market-driven, masculinist economy, sex trafficking thrives by treating women and girls as cold-cash commodities, which unlike drugs, can be sold for many years at a high profit to criminal networks. Yet, due to a large supply of poor women, trafficking victims are disposable products. If a woman complains too much, she is killed or sold to another brothel, and some women, particularly women of color, are raped and killed in ‘snuff’ videos’.
The industry is a growing thriving monster because unlike drugs or weapons, the children can be resold and their services used over and over again after they are bought and paid for. This is why the human trafficking is now a $32 billion industry and pornography is a $100 billion industry.
With a child being exploited in the sex industry every two minutes in the United States; with up to 40% of Asian massage parlors harboring trafficking victims; it’s all hidden in plain sight. Why won’t more Americans take notice? According to Rutherford Institute:
Americans have become good at turning away from things that make us uncomfortable or stray too far from our picture-perfect images of ourselves. In this regard, we’re all complicit in contributing to this growing evil which, for all intents and purposes, is out in the open: advertising on the internet, commuting on the interstate, operating in swanky hotels, taking advantage of a system in which the police, the courts and the legislatures are more interested with fattening their coffers by targeting Americans for petty violations than actually breaking up crime syndicates.
Legalizing prostitution won’t help matters either, according to the Family Research Council:
We already know that developed countries with legalized prostitution, like Germany and Australia, have seen an increase in human trafficking, as the demand for prostitutes and sex slaves—including children—has increased.
The efforts to combat human trafficking are minuscule in comparison with the latest figures: 21 million victims worldwide; approximately 500,000 trafficked here in the United States. In California, only 711 confirmed cases were reported to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center in 2015.
Meanwhile, in the Fresno area there are over 200 massage businesses. The Fresno Police Department estimates that at least 10% are operating illegally. That percentage is likely to be higher by several factors since Fresno is a major agricultural and trucking destination.
This is why the Unit Plan: Human Trafficking: Asian Massage Parlors: The Skinny LP is a good start. The presentation proves that there are indignant Yellow Women, just as there are offended White Women who are worried about America’s future. Developed from the perspective of middle-class cultivated Asian-American educators, it serves as a contemporary social science exposé—and wake-up call.
Senator Amy Klobuchar (D, Minn, 2016 Democratic Presidential Candidate) and Cindy McCain in bipartisan effort (Fox News, The Real Story, 01/17/2014)