Children in chains: Part I

Child Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation as a Global Crisis

By Meg Burd
October 20, 2004

A man named James abducts a child from an orphanage in London. Trafficking the child around the globe, he first ships the young victim to Romania, where a life of prostitution and horrific pornography ensues for the helpless child.

Selling the child to a brothel in Thailand, James was found attempting to repeat this grotesque abuse cycle on yet another child in a back alley of Romania. Confronted with deadly force by David Race Bannon, an international operative for Interpol, James did not live to abuse or traffic another child.

Disturbingly, the stories of predators such as James are not rare in today's world. Indeed, the global trafficking of children ranging from barely toddlers to mid-teens is a sickening and booming international business, estimated by Europol and the United Nations to be worth several billion dollars a year.

Called "the worst kind of exploitation imaginable" by Colin Powell in an interview with Dateline NBC, the global tragedy of child sexual slavery is often overlooked as a global crisis or indeed imagined as some horrific fiction. Bannon, however, can attest to the horrific reality of this international and growing crime epidemic.

"It's a testament to our decency that it's so hard to comprehend," Bannon said of this terrible crime. However, he added: "This is not a fantasy. Unfortunately, it is horrifically real. A modern holocaust that deserves world attention."

Starting out as young missionary working in Korea, Bannon recruited by Interpol thanks to his knowledge of martial arts and fluent Korean, a story he relates in his book "Race Against Evil" and in his numerous interviews with news outlets such as National Public Radio and, most recently, the Boulder Weekly.

An agent working for Interpol (the second largest international organization after the United Nations; founded to work against international crime) Bannon was part of the Archangel project, an arm of Interpol designed to track and mete out justice to child traffickers and pornographers. As he relates it, the time he spent working for this organization led him to realize the startling reality of this global crime.

"Trafficking exists in every nation on the globe. Every nation has individuals who will pay to have sex with children," Bannon sadly noted at an event this past weekend for the Colorado-based organization Free A Child. Indeed, with globalization on the rise, the number of child sexual slaves and children trafficked for sexual exploitation seems to be growing at a troubling rate.

Statistics on this crime, Bannon points out, are notoriously difficult to obtain and often disputed. Bannon points to U.N. reports of 4 million children trafficked annually (trafficking being defined in the U.S. State Department's Trafficking in Persons report as a form of modern-day slavery in which victims are forced, defrauded or coerced into sexual or labor exploitation). The State Department gives a considerably more conservative number, placing the number of women and children trafficked across international borders worldwide at 600,000 to 800,000 annually. The National Center For Missing and Exploited Children looks at individual places, noting that places such as Sri Lanka have a reported 100,000 children between the ages of 6 and 14 working in brothels and an additional 5,000 between 10 and 18 years old working in tourist areas. In Taiwan, the agency suggests that there are around 100,000 children in the sex industry.

Regardless of the numbers, Bannon emphasized in his speech Sunday that this crime deserves our attention. "One child is more than enough, don't you think? Just one."

Indeed, as will be discussed in Part II and III of this series in following weeks, even one child having to suffer through the horrific crime of child sexual slavery and trafficking is one too many.

*Please look next week for Part II of "Children in Chains: Child Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation as a Global Crisis."

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Children in chains: Part II
10-21-2004

Children in chains: Part III
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