Reality Check: How Prevalent is the Global Child Sex Trade in the U.S.? (VIDEO)

[image: Ira Gelb]

By Ben Swann, Truth in Media | 

It’s a horrific issue that doesn’t get nearly enough coverage in U.S. mainstream media. Child sex trafficking is a booming black market business.

Most parents can’t imagine it happening in their own backyard.

While we know it’s a global issue, child sex trafficking is finally starting to become a mainstream topic in the U.S.

A film called “I Am Jane Doe,” released in February, highlights young girls between the ages of 13 and 15 years old who were picked up off the street and sold for sex online.

The film takes aim at Backpage.com. But in reality, the issue of child sex trafficking is so much bigger than one website. And the appetite for child sex abuse goes all the way to the top.

This is Reality Check you won’t get anywhere else.

It’s a disheartening statistic: the child sex trafficking market is resulting in more than 1 million children abused around the world each year. So how has this market proliferated?

Tim Swarens, a columnist and editor for The Indianapolis Star, recently began publishing a series of articles about the child sex trade, a subject he’s reportedly investigated for more than a year. He explains that the child sex trade is like any other business trade, driven by supply and demand.

According to a study by the Center for Court Innovation from 2016, between 8,900 and 10,500 children ages 13 to 17 are being sold in the U.S. each year. Swarens writes, “The researchers found that the average age of victims is 15 and that each child is purchased on average 5.4 times a day.”

To determine a conservative estimate of the demand, Swarens “multiplied the lower number of victims (8,900) identified in the Center for Court Innovation study by the rate of daily exploitation per child (5.4), and then by an average of only one ‘work’ day per week (52). The result: Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.”

And while the supply side is what garners most media attention, the issue of demand doesn’t get nearly as much coverage.

Take the recent documentary “I Am Jane Doe,” a film about parents seeking justice for their young teenage girls being picked up and trafficked for sex right in their own communities.

Those parents took aim at the website Backpage.com for profiting off of its adult section, allegedly riddled with young girls being sold for sex. But even if Backpage.com is a platform for advertising and selling, a channel through which these transactions can take place, it’s just one of many online channels being used by pedophiles to buy children to abuse.

But is the problem the channels, or is it something deeper?

What’s missing from the discussion is the high demand perpetuating the child sex trade.

Swarens explains, “The critical need to reduce demand has gained far less attention and money. The result: Buyers continue to abuse children with near impunity.”

Now, in the film “I Am Jane Doe,” the people buying children to abuse are described to be white, married men with families who live in suburbia. A former pimp interviewed for the film, Homer King, says on camera that he sold girls to priests, lawyers and even politicians.

Swarens came to the same conclusion in his investigation. He writes: “This project began with a question: Who buys a 15-year-old child for sex? The answer: Many otherwise ordinary men. They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse.”

Who are some of these men buying children to abuse?

Remember Jared Fogle from the Subway sandwich commercials? He “admitted to charges of having child pornography and repeatedly having sex with minors,” according to NPR. Court documents show that one of the text messages Fogle sent to a 17-year-old he paid for sex, stated his preferences as quote: “The younger the girl, the better.”

And back in June 2008, billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was prosecuted and sentenced to 18 months in prison for paying for sex with girls as young as 14. He served only 13 of those months.

The appetite for underage sex goes all the way to the top—some most powerful people in the world.

The longest serving Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who was second in line to the presidency from 1999 to 2007, admitted to sexually abusing boys while he was a high school wrestling coach. After making the admission in 2016, the judge who sentenced him 15 months in prison and two years of supervised release, called Hastert a “serial child molester.” He served only 13 months.

Now, let’s be clear: there’s no evidence that Hastert actually paid for sex. But the desire to abuse children is what fuels the global child sex trade, and demand is high.

Back in 2015, a special report aired on 60 Minutes Australia revealing that elected officials and elites in the UK were accused of buying and abusing children.

From powerful elites down to “otherwise ordinary men,” children are easily being bought and abused… around in the world.

Posing as a buyer, former special agent for the Department of Homeland Security Timothy Ballard has been setting up undercover sting operations through his nonprofit Operation Underground Railroad since 2013.

Working in conjunction with governments all around the world, Operation Underground Railroad has so far busted 443 child sex traffickers and saved more than 1,000 victims. Here are just some of their 2017 operations.

• Operation Sainte Jou: Port-au-Prince, Haiti – 32 rescued, 9 arrested


• Operation Grand Via: Mexico – 25 rescued, 5 arrested


• Operation NN9: Washington State, USA – 17 rescued, 21 arrested


• Operation Jetsar: Cambodia – 11 rescued, 9 arrested

So what you need to know is that the battle to dismantle the global child sex trade is a massive and almost overwhelming undertaking.

Yet mainstream media does not treat it that way. Networks like CNN will give at least 40 days of daily coverage to stories like the missing Flight 370 in 2014. But in those 40 days, using Swarens’s math, about 250,000 children were bought and abused.

Even if that made the news, we make a mistake when the focus of the efforts to end this trafficking is only focused on how children are sold, instead of also focusing on to whom they are sold.

That discussion is one we need to have because until mainstream media and law enforcement is willing to go down that road… we will likely not see any real changes.

That’s Reality Check. Let’s talk about that, right now, on Twitter and Facebook.

The post Reality Check: How Prevalent is the Global Child Sex Trade in the U.S.? (VIDEO) appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.

Kevin Spacey Flew on ‘Lolita Express’ with Bill Clinton

[image: prisonplanet.com]

By Paul Joseph Watson | 

Records show that alleged child molester Kevin Spacey flew on the infamous ‘Lolita Express’ – the private jet owned by pedophile Jeffrey Epstein – along with former President Bill Clinton.

The revelation has resurfaced in the aftermath of claims by actor Anthony Rapp that Spacey sexually assaulted him when he was a 14-year-old boy after a party at Spacey’s apartment in 1986 when Spacey, then 24, picked up Rapp, placed him on his bed and climbed on top of him.

Spacey subsequently apologized for the incident, but deflected by making the story about how he was now living as a gay man.

The media dutifully obliged and the gravity of the sexual assault claim has been obfuscated to some extent by the pressfocusing on the House of Cards actor’s sexuality.

In 2008, financier Jeffrey Epstein, whose friends included some of the most powerful people on the planet, was convicted of soliciting an under-age girl for prostitution.

Spacey was on board Epstein’s private jet with Bill Clinton when it flew from JFK Airport into the Azores before the former President and the actor enjoyed a tour of Africa.

According to Fox News, Epstein, “Allegedly had a team of traffickers who procured girls as young as 12 to service his friends on “Orgy Island,” an estate on Epstein’s 72-acre island, called Little St. James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.”

Bill Clinton took at least 26 trips on the Lolita Express, a luxury jet fitted out with beds where prominent elitists allegedly had sex with young girls, ditching his Secret Service detail for 5 of those trips.

Clinton chose to continue his association with Epstein even after, according to the Alliance to Rescue Victims of Trafficking, “everyone within his inner circles knew was a pedophile.”

Epstein also reportedly had 21 different phone numbers for Bill Clinton.

While there is no evidence to suggest Spacey engaged in criminal activity while on board Epstein’s jet, his admission that he sexually assaulted a 14-year-old boy is sure to provoke further questions.

As we reported last week, actor Corey Feldman has announced a plan to expose top Hollywood pedophiles who he says are being protected by the industry.

The post Kevin Spacey Flew on ‘Lolita Express’ with Bill Clinton appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.

Catholic Church and UK Government Claim Child Sex Abuse Victims Can “Consent” to their Attacks

By: Kalee Brown, Collective Evolution | 

Catholic churches all around the world have been accused of sex scandals, including the Vatican, which has allegedly paid an astonishing $4 billion since 1950 to settle sexual abuse claims. Far too often these stories involve priests taking advantage of their positions of authority in order to sexually abuse people, often children.

More recently, the UK government and the Catholic church have come under public scrutiny for claiming that victims of child sexual abuse “consented” to their rapes in order to avoid compensating the victims. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) establishes which victims get compensated, and they do so by determining whether or not the victim gave consent, even if the victim is a child well under the legal age limit.

The Telegraph reported last month that, according to CICA, “A victim can consent in fact even though in law they may be deemed not to have consented.” That’s right, this government loophole can be used to claim that even though a child may be under the legal age limit, they can still provide consent.

Legal Loophole Preventing Child Sex Victims From Being Compensated

To give you a better picture of how this works, one case that was explained by the charity Victim Support involved a 12-year-old girl who was led into the woods and sexually assaulted by a 21-year-old man while she was intoxicated.

Interestingly enough, despite the fact that the man pled guilty to having sex with a minor, she still wasn’t compensated because she allegedly “gave consent” by “voluntarily” going into the woods with him.

“No child ever gives their ‘consent’ to being abused, and the increased use of this line of defence, although still quite rare, is worrying,” said Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner for England. “I have contacted the Ministry of Justice previously and again recently about this issue and the Government should look urgently at what can be done to tackle it.”

They also argued that she was able to give consent because she had recently had sex with someone her own age. That’s like saying, “If you consent to someone your own age, you consent to everyone. If you’ve consented in the past, you consent to everyone.” That is not an ethical argument, and we should not be teaching children that this irrational logic is okay.

A Freedom of Information Act request introduced by Victim Support indicated that since this loophole came into fruition in 2012, a total of 693 cases in which child sexual abuse victims came forward were denied compensation by the CICA. Though many of these cases involved children who were 16, some of the victims were much younger.

So, Where Does the Catholic Church Fit Into This?

As it turns out, this loophole most often benefits private schools, religious groups, and the local authorities. For example, lawyers for the Catholic Archdiocese of Southwark explained to one of the sexual abuse victims that his rape “actually occurred in the context of a consensual relationship (albeit one the Claimant in retrospect now appears to regret).”

Although this particular case was actually settled to the tune of £80,000, the victim stated that the defence was both insulting and highlighted the fact that he was below the legal age of consent. There’s a legal age limit for a reason, and it’s strange that this law is being bent through the use of another law.

Dino Nocivelli, a specialist child abuse solicitor at Bolt Burdon, explained on Kent Live: “It is time for the church to practise what they preach and to admit their failings, to take account of the damage this has caused to the lives of far too many children and lastly to apologise for the abuse.”

An important question we need to start asking ourselves and the government is: Why are people in authority positions let off the hook for violent crimes? Sexual abuse and rape are not crimes that should go ignored, yet time and time again, higher-ups and government officials are excused from the law.

To name a few examples, we have the Jeffrey Epstein case, in which he was accused of recruiting and forcing dozens of children into an underground network of sex slaves, who served many of the elite members of society, including former American President Bill Clinton.

Epstein owned a private jet, referred to as the “Lolita Express” by mainstream media (MSM), which was used to transport Epstein and his elitist friends to Little St. James, Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands — dubbed “Orgy Island” by the tabloids. Despite all of these allegations and proven facts, he only served approximately one year in jail time.

Former U.S. representative Cynthia McKinney also knew about the government’s relationship to human trafficking, and she actually addressed it in 2005. She grilled Donald Rumsfeld on military contractor DynCorp’s child trafficking business of selling women and children.

Ted Gunderson, former FBI special agent and head of their L.A. office, worked to uncover years’ worth of information on high-level pedophilia, sexual abuse, and satanic rituals performed by the government and the elite (or the cabal). In my opinion, Ted Gunderson is a wonderful place to start your research on this subject. You can read more about that in our CE article here.

Although these examples are outside of the UK, they still speak to how the government provides special treatment when it comes to crimes committed by those in higher social classes.

Final Thoughts

Time and time again, the government allows perpetrators of sexual violence to go unpunished. If we’re not willing to face these issues, regardless of who the perpetrator is, then how will we fix this clear issue within society? Sexual violence is never okay, and we should not be blaming the victims for crimes they were not responsible for.

We need to start treating everyone as equal and extend more compassion to others; only then will we be able to not only improve our judiciary system, but hopefully prevent these crimes from occurring in the first place.

Bill Clinton Was A Frequent Flyer On Jeff Epstein’s Pedo Plane

(image: Jim Cooke / Gawker)

It’s amazing what you can get away with when you have friends in high places.

Here’s an example.

But wait – there’s more…

However, on a five-leg Asia trip between May 22 and May 25, 2002, not a single Secret Service agent is listed. The U.S. Secret Service has declined to answer multiple Freedom of Information Act requests filed by FoxNews.com seeking information on these trips. Clinton would have been required to file a form to dismiss the agent detail, a former Secret Service agent told FoxNews.com.

In response to a separate FOIA request from FoxNews.com, the U.S. Secret Service said it has no records showing agents were ever on the island with Clinton.

A Clinton spokesperson did not return emails requesting comment about the former president’s relationship and travels with Epstein. The Clinton Library said it had no relevant information and does not keep track of Clinton’s travel records.

From The National Review:

…bogus sex scandals follow just about everyone who makes it to the national level in politics. Offhand, I believe Mitt Romney may have been the only major party nominee the past 25 years who never had anybody in the press try to shop a sex scandal story (real or bogus) about him. Voters mostly gave the benefit of the doubt to Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio when flimsy sex stories were run against them in the primaries. Trump’s great wealth and messy public personal life make him a big target for this sort of thing. Sometimes, we have to just look at the facts we have and use our judgment.

Trump’s statement at the time about the original lawsuit was a blanket denial, which extended as far as questioning whether the plaintiff even existed: “The allegations are not only categorically false, but disgusting at the highest level and clearly framed to solicit media attention or, perhaps, are simply politically motivated. There is absolutely no merit to these allegations. Period.”

In the absence of credible evidence to the contrary, we should believe him. The passage of a long period of time, the emergence of the suit only when Trump is engaged in a high-profile political campaign, and the apparent lack of corroboration beyond the accuser’s word, all cut against believing the charge.

The moral of this story?

If your last name is Clinton, you can get away with anything.

Never has a presidential election gotten so dirty. As more Wikileaks emerge about suspicions of a pedophilia ring, a disturbing occult practice called “spirit cooking” that relates to the Podesta brothers, and the Clintons’ ties to a Haitian orphanage from which the children appear to have been trafficked into sex slavery, it promises to get even worse.

Article first posted at DaisyLuther.com