Human Trafficking Watch

It’s no surprise that Juvies are used to recruit prostitutes: Police: Teen pimp lures girls into illegal sex. Underage proxies have been used for decades for everything else from armed robbery to drive-by shootings. Why not prostitution? Juvies are arrested and prosecuted while their mentors continue to escape any justice. When the Juvies turn 18, instant clean record.

“It’s a really horrendous affair,” said Dallas police Lt. Chess Williams.

Police estimate there are hundreds of teenage prostitutes on the streets of Dallas because there is a big demand. Recently, they found a 12-year-old girl dancing naked at a nightclub.

“I can’t believe that a 13-, 14-, 15-year-old child knowlingly injects herself into a world of prostitution,” Lt. Williams said.

But it did happen, and the 13-year-old in this case may have talked another school friend into prostitution.

Police won’t say what school the girl attended, but they’re not surprised. “One of the remarkable things we learned through all of this is there’s a tremendous amount of money in all this, so a huge demand for young girls in prostitution world,” Lt. Williams said.

Police said the young girls aren’t acting alone. They say some of the same people who are pimping out the adult prostitutes are the same ones exploiting young girls.

It appears that many children have been rescued from a large, worldwide child porn ring. What was interesting about this story was the admission by law enforcement that this ring was sophisticated technically and socially.

In all, more than 400,000 pictures, video files and other images showing children engaged in sexual behavior were produced, advertised, traded and distributed globally in the online pornography ring, according to U.S. and international authorities. The sting, which started in Australia, also netted accused pornographers in England, Canada and Germany.

Some victims were as young as 5 years old. Others were preyed upon for innocent characteristics such as wearing their hair in pigtails.

Authorities won’t say how they eventually broke through several layers of encryption, background checks and other security measures the pornographers used to protect their online user group from being accessed.

The highly sophisticated porn ring was run like a business, FBI Executive Assistant Director J. Stephen Tidwell said Tuesday, with the lewd images used as currency instead of cash.

“This is beyond a quantum exponential leap for us to see folks that have gone to this much trouble to produce this kind of volume of horrific exploitation of children,” Tidwell said in an interview. “But with 400,000 [images] we’re going to be at this for years, trying to find the victims.

I believe the future of child porn is even more layers of security to protect the perpetrators. Australia’s Courier Mail has an excellent and detailed article about the police operation, including some details about the victims. These children were raped and abused by people closest to them, further proof that trafficking is not just for sleazy underworld figures. It could be happening in anyone’s neighborhood.

Two years later, the Queensland-driven global police sting rescued more than 20 children from a life of sexual abuse and netted 22 members of The Group.

“These men were leading bizarre double lives, and being part of this network was more important than their real-life existence,” Det-Insp Rouse said.

The men were arrested last month in simultaneous raids in Australia, the US, Germany, Britain and Canada. Two Australians were arrested, including a federal public servant in Townsville, who is an alleged ringleader.

More than 100 online users who bought child pornography were arrested worldwide, and four commercial sites, including one that showed more than 40 children being sexually abused, were shut down.