From an article in the New York Times on sex trafficking in Spain

The whole article is really disturbing, but this in particular made me have to stop reading and take a deep breath. I don’t want to judge the family without knowing the situation–who knows whether the traffickers gave them little or no choice, for example–but that the world is a place where it is possible just to imagine treating anyone’s daughter like this doesn’t simply turn my stomach. It fills me, as I sit here waiting for my wife to get her new eyeglasses adjusted, with a helpless rage that makes me want to cry:

Some of the women are sold into the business by their families, Mr. Cortés said. The police came across one case in which Colombian traffickers were paying one family $650 a month for their daughter. She managed to escape, he said. But when she contacted her family, they told her to go back or they would send her sister as a replacement.

Note also where the article mentions a woman whose traffickers tattooed a bar code on her and the amount of money she owed them. Read the whole thing here.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

This entry posted in Rape, intimate violence, & related issues, Sex work, porn, etc. Bookmark the permalink. 

6 Responses to From an article in the New York Times on sex trafficking in Spain

  1. 1
    W.B. Reeves says:

    I share your repulsion. My own rage is of the murderous kind. This is my normative reaction to the abuse and exploitation of the vunerable. Yet, we must recognize that in the tangled skein of folly, crime and atrocity that is our history as a species, such horrors are far more normative than the innovative belief in human rights and the sanctity of the individual human being. We have a long row to hoe before our pretensions of having risen above the brute savagery of our origins are anything more than hollow, self-serving blather. To paraphrase Peter Weis: The conditions of our lives must be changed absolutely and without these changes, everything we do must fail.

  2. 2
    Eva says:

    Holy hell. Thanks for sharing your pain, sorry this was the source. Not just for you, of course, but the victims and perpetrators. What a world we live in.

  3. 3
    Susan says:

    I cannot bend my mind around enough to get into the minds of people who would sell their daughter for such a purpose, or for any purpose at all. It must speak to desperate poverty, plus lack of character. Better we should all starve together, is my impulse.

  4. Susan:

    It must speak to desperate poverty, plus lack of character. Better we should all starve together, is my impulse.

    Without the “lack of character” judgement, this is also how I feel, sitting comfortably here in front of my computer, while I take a break from grading papers. I am also aware, however, that I can feel this way because I am privileged not to be in a position–that I most likely will never be in a position–where I and my family are living in such abject poverty that I had to look in the eyes of my hungry children and actually live the decision that they should all starve–and let’s take this to its logical conclusion: and die–for the sake of a principle. If I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I don’t know what I would do if I and my family were in such desperate straits–in part because I cannot imagine such desperate straits–that selling one daughter, or son, would make it possible for me to feed everyone else. I like to think that I would not do it; I truly hope I would not do it; but there is no way to know that I would not do it; and I find that kind of scary. (And I am not even going to get into the question of the degree to which the family in the article may have been, overtly or covertly, coerced by the traffickers–that’s a whole other side to this kind of story.)

  5. 5
    Donna Dickerson says:

    Human trafficking is the illegal trade of human beings for the purposes of reproductive slavery, commercial sexual exploitation, forced labor, or a modern-day form of slavery. This activity is NEVER a choice in my opinion. Somewhere in the process the woman was forced to sell herself by parents, a partner, or was kidnapped. Human Trafficking is a way out for some women and it is never an option or choice. Human Trafficking is illegal and it needs to always remain that way so young girls are not forced into the business. Human Trafficking is an exploitation of women.

  6. 6
    LaQwana says:

    I am so glad that this was a topic of a blog. Human Trafficking is starting to become a major issue in our world today and it needs to be put in the public eye. Many of the women who are involved in the ring of human trafficking do not choose to be there by choice; this women are usually tricked and sold a dream to reel them in. I think that most of these women have a hard time getting help once they are helped because they are afraid of the stigmas that might be attached to them are how they were caught up. Also I still think victim-blaming occurs and these women do not want to feel worse than they already do.