Sex tourism targeting US minors

At Lois' Lodge we have served many girls over the past several years, who have surprised and shocked their families. These girls are intelligent and well-liked – raised in a strong Christian family. Oftentimes they are heading towards graduating high school with excellent grades. They run away with their boyfriends. Not just any guy, mind you, but a grown man, who may even already be wanted on charges relating to prostitution and physical assault on a child. These girls leave by their own choice. They are gone for days or even weeks fleeing their parents, their church and the police before finally turning themselves in. Ultimately they are brought to our setting, pregnant, because their families are not able to control them and to keep them away from negative environments and influences. All of us need to stay alert in order to protect our children from predators.

I have worked with teenagers and their parents for many years and have raised my own two teenagers, with my own share of challenges. There is very little I haven’t seen in the way of teenage rebellion. Substance abuse. School expulsions. Runaways. Disrespect. Car accidents. Peer pressure sexually transmitted disease, pregnancy.... The list goes on. Please know that I and the staff at Lois' Lodge are available to you. Contact us if you need some support and/or advice. I encourage you to seek counseling for yourself and your family if your teen's rebellion seems to rise to a level that is dangerous. Your pastor can refer you to a Christian counselor that can help you to navigate through these challenging years.

The story below is information of which we should all be aware.

Baptist Press 9/26/07

Sex tourism' targeting U.S. minors.

By Erica Simons WASHINGTON (BP)--

Demands for commercial sex have created a growing market of sex tourism and human trafficking in the United States, with an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 American children at risk of becoming victims of sexual exploitation, according to a new report. "DEMAND" is both a video documentary and comprehensive report on a 12-month investigation conducted by Shared Hope International. Based in Vancouver, Wash., SHI is a non-profit organization that compiled the information in an effort to understand and bring an end to human trafficking.

"U.S. citizens and permanent residents under the age of 18 are increasingly being recruited into the commercial sex markets," the report says. Runaway children and underage American women are among the most common victims of human trafficking."People talk about how awful it is that in a place like Nepal, or in Thailand, you can have a people or a country who can allow their children to be sold, but the reality is it's no different in Washington, D.C.," says Derek Ellerman, co-executive director of the Polaris Project, in the documentary.

The report also focuses on the market aspects of the "multi-billion dollar industry," specifically our society that generates such high volumes of buyers of commercial sex. "As the culture continues to normalize sexual images and activities, the markets grow," the study says. "The sexualized popular culture ... reduces moral barriers to accessing commercial sex." Advertisements, television and music, along with video games that "glamorize pimping and prostitution," seem to be the culprits, quickly expanding an already large industry, the study says.

The United States, the report says, presents a unique challenge to those combating the sex slave industry: Most Americans are wired. "With nearly 70 percent of Americans accessing the Internet, the accessibility to commercial sex markets on the Internet is staggering," according to the report. The web facilitates arrangements for prostitution and allows child pornography to be made easily and inexpensively.

SHI's commitment to reducing the number of victims who are pulled into human trafficking focuses on one area: demand. "Too often, police enforcement has focused on the prostitute, with practically no attention given at all to prosecuting the traffickers and so-called customers," said Duke, the ERLC's vice president for public policy. "As long as demand exists, there will be unscrupulous people who will be willing to traffic human beings to meet it."Awareness is one way SHI hopes to decrease the demand, by revealing the tragedy behind the sex market. "If there were no buyers, there would be no sellers, and there would be no victims," the documentary says. To watch "DEMAND," visit SHI's website at: http://www.sharedhope.org/what/enddemand3.asp

It's a Boy- Baracha

It's a Boy! Baracha (means blessing in Swahili) was born on September 26 at 8:27 pm - 7lb., 3oz. and 20". Both mom and baby are doing well. They will be moving into our aftercare setting. Mother is from Kenya. She has been taking computer classes online and is looking for an office job. Please let us know if you are aware of opportunities for this young mom. She is very sweet and eager to work to be able to support her son.

College

This world is going crazy! I have two children in college currently and this message below so supports what I am learning about college campuses. What are we going to do to turn this around????? Debbie

Dorm Brothels
By Mark Earley 8/10/2006

Is Promiscuity Obligatory?

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley.

At Maryland's Loyola College, ethics professor Vigen Guroian was lecturing on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Students were comparing the novel--in which sexual promiscuity is required by law -- with life in their own freewheeling dorms. Guroian pointed out the difference: Promiscuity on campus is voluntary, whereas in Brave New World, it's mandatory.
After class, a young woman came up to Guroian and told him he was wrong. Peer pressure and living arrangements on campus make promiscuity "practically obligatory," she said. "When it seems like everyone else is 'doing it,' it is hard to say no," she added. "It is more like Brave New World here than you think."

Guroian was not altogether surprised. He attended college himself in the late 1960s, when colleges gave up the responsibilities of in loco parentis. Up until then, separate dorms for men and women, along with stringent rules regarding visitors of the opposite sex, "made it possible for a female student to say 'no' and make it stick," he writes. While the rules were not always followed, they established the boundaries and norms of acceptable behavior.

Today, these boundaries no longer exist. In his new book, titled Rallying the Really Human Things, Guroian writes that the abdication of in loco parentis "opened the floodgates to the so-called sexual revolution, inviting much of what goes on today in college dormitories." Men and women share dorms and even bathrooms at some schools. It's not unusual, he says, for dorms to have a designated room set aside for casual hook-ups.

In effect, he says, colleges have "gone into the . . . brothel business." Meanwhile, college administrators ignore the truth: Coed dorms work to the advantage of male sexual aggression. And the results are tragic.

"I know that young people are getting hurt, some permanently scarred for life," Guroian says. "I hold colleges like my own morally accountable, if not complicit in this harm. The colleges know what is going on, and they [simply] shovel out self-serving rhetoric about respecting college students as adults. And," Guroian says, "when those 'adults' get hurt, they order up more psychologists . . . to bandage the casualties, my children and yours."

Guroian is right: These appalling conditions are both terrible and tragic. Students today need a great deal of wisdom to navigate a course of integrity in dormitory life. But the journey should not be made more difficult by college administrators who seem unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge the truth about human nature: Putting healthy young men and women together in close quarters only promotes promiscuous behavior. In the short term, these living conditions interfere with the students' ability to learn. In the long term, they damage their ability to form successful marriages.

Before sending their kids off to colleges, parents ought to investigate the living arrangements. Alumni can also put pressure on their schools, demanding that they offer at least one non-coed dorm for women. And students themselves should ask administrators why they are being forced to live in surroundings that degrade them -- a setting that turns college dormitories, according to Guroian, into virtual brothels.

This commentary first aired on January 10, 2006.

For Further Reading and Information
Today's BreakPoint offer: Rallying the Really Human Things: The Moral Imagination in Politics by Vigen Guroian.
Vigen Guroian, "The Virgin and the Ivy," BreakPoint Online.
Vigen Guroian, "Dorm Brothel," Christianity Today, February 2005.
See the Chicago Sun-Times special feature on "Sex on Campus: Hanging Out and Hooking Up."
Roberto Rivera, "Imaginary Day: The Slavery of Promiscuity," BreakPoint Online, 30 September 2004.
What every college student must have: BreakPoint's Worldview Survival Kit for Students -- which includes Ask Me Anything and How to Stay Christian in College, both by J. Budziszewski, The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel, and more!
BreakPoint Commentary No. 041213, "The Worst Kind of Folly: I Am Charlotte Simmons."
BreakPoint Commentary No. 040814, "The Way It Isn't: Fighting Temptation."
BreakPoint Commentary No. 040401, "Checking Boxes: Transgender Chic."
Lauren F. Winner, "Sex and the Single Evangelical," Beliefnet, 2000. See also Winner's book Real Sex, along with this interview and this article from Christianity Today.
Anne Morse, "The Dangers of Cash-Based Courtship," Boundless, 2000.
Read parts one, two, and three of "The End of Courtship" by Leon Kass from Boundless. Along with his wife, Kass is the author of Wing to Wing and Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying.
Learn about national campus ministries available at your university or college by visiting College Walk's website.

From a special teen volunteer

My mom and I both are about to begin volunteering at Lois' Lodge specifically in the after care program and the special events area! My church is also getting involved with a frozen food drive! I'm so excited that God has allowed me to become involved in this ministry! It is such a great testimony of hope for so many women, I encourage everyone to learn more about it and to become involved. Even just reading these women's testimonies is so powerful, and it's so encouraging to see their drive for God and using EVERY part of their life to influence others for Him! I'm praying for this ministry and those involved and I hope you will too!

In His Name, Jordan