“I met my first boyfriend when I was 15… He introduced me to sex trafficking. I was getting in and out of cars with people I didn't know. It was definitely nerve wracking. I had never even walked in heels before."1 This is the face of sex trafficking in Atlanta: teenage girls, like Alexa, who are forced into prostitution by much older “boyfriend” pimps. The city has become a hub...
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After 15 years in prison Cyntoia Brown’s promise of freedom has finally come. “Cyntoia Denise Brown, a woman serving a life sentence for killing a man who bought her for sex when she was 16-years-old, has been granted clemency, the Tennessee governor's office said Monday.”1 Brown was 16 when she was convicted of the murder of Johnny Mitchell Allen, a sex buyer. Today, in 2018, the courts would have seen...
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On December 31, as 2018 was coming to a close and the dawn of 2019 was on the horizon, the members of the Israeli Knesset joined together, in Jerusalem, to make a united, historic declaration about the values of their society. With no dissenters, the government of Israel approved legislation that sent a clear message: humans are not property to be bought and sold. In a momentous stand for human...
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"Truly He taught us to love one another; His law is love and His gospel is peace. Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother; And in His name all oppression shall cease. Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we, Let all within us praise His holy name." —"O Holy Night" Two thousand year ago a baby was born in a lowly manger—a holy, passionate God...
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“Amsterdam,” the Netherlands capital that attracts over 18 million tourists every year, has become synonymous with prostitution. It's difficult to think of this city without it conjuring up images of its world-infamous red light district—a place where men line up at scores of brothel doors to purchase and sexually exploit women who are advertised in windows like merchandise. But there may be change on horizon because for the first time...
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This article was originally published in Dignity: A Journal of Sexual Exploitation and Violence. Vol. 3, Issue 1, Article 9. "What matters here is to try to learn what the prostituted woman knows, because it is of immense value. It is true, and it has been hidden. It has been hidden for a political reason: to know it is to come closer to knowing how to undo the system of...
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In a staggering and disturbing expose, the Miami Herald recently detailed how hedge fund mogul, and multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, (whose friends include some of the wealthiest and influential people in the world such as Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and Prince Andrew) was let off the hook in an extraordinarily unusual secret plea deal after being accused of “assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls... to coerce into sex acts...
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This article was originally published November 14, 2018 on Survivor’s View, a blog written by survivors of prostitution at Prostitution Research & Education. I was Dennis Hof’s personal assistant and publicist for 3 years and I was also prostituted in his brothels. In the beginning, I believed the myths about how the women in Hof's brothels were there by choice, how the women but not the pimps or johns were...
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As a survivor of sexual exploitation in prostitution and porn I can definitively say that it is not a job like any other. Let me take you into that world and explain why. The sex industry—prostitution, porn, and stripping—is an industry run primarily by men. Men are the exploiters and sex buyers. Women/girls are the exploited and the purchased commodities. The gender inequality is not hard to see once you...
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