Ever since he published GING and went on the rolling thunder God-bashing debate tour, Christopher has been more assiduous than before in his efforts to point out the connection between religion and child abuse. Whether it's rape or sexual abuse of minors by members of the Catholic clergy and covered up by their superiors, "male genital mutilation" (his term for circumcision) carried out in the name of Judaism, female genital mutilation in the name of Islam (although not when it's done by the "secular" Kurds), or most recently, the marriage of child brides to adult men in Yemen, Hitch is never happier than when making the connection between what our friend Angrysoba persists in describing as "childfucking" and his own universal poison of "religion".
However, Child sexual abuse is far wider than Hitchens acknowledges. There is no firm evidence that it is more common in general among the religious than the secular or among theists than atheists, and, with the possible exception of circumcision (which only a small minority people in a special Greywolf poll accepted as constituting child sexual abuse), there is no firm evidence that when religious people rape or sexually abuse children that they do it for religious reasons. And yet Hitchens seems blissfully unaware that much if not most "childfucking" has no religious basis whatsoever, and — with the singular exception of his recent lukewarm criticism of Roman Polanski's crime, which he attempted to tie in with goings on in Yemen and Iran — his rule appears to be to remain resolutely silent on the issue apart from when it suits his anti-religious agenda to speak out. It's almost as if, as long as the abuser is a secular son of a bitch, the Hitch really doesn't give a shit and that the tiny victims of these heinous crimes are merely the meat in Hitch's rhetorical sandwiches, which he unfailingly serves with relish. If he could get the same mileage out of Catholic priests beating dogs or Shi'ite mullahs swinging cats by their tails, that would do him just as well.
If, as a regular Hitchens reader, you thought that the worst place on earth to be a child was the Middle East, then you'd be wrong. Because broadly speaking, just like Sting's Russians, the Muslims love their children too. Actually, I have it on good authority that the worst place on earth to be a child these days is not the Mid-East but the Mid-West. Just last week, specialists from the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Federal Marshals from Texas and the Department of Justice Prosecutors from Washington D.C. all got together in Tulsa, Oklahoma for the state's first Human Trafficking Awareness and Training Conference. Because, in the words of Jamie Reeves, the News Editor of the University of Tulsa's student newspaper The Collegian, "America is now the number one destination in the world for child sex trafficking, according to the State Department Bureau of Justice Statistics. Sex trafficking of modern-day slaves is at an all-time high and larger U.S. cities are major markets for this illegal sex trade industry."
At the website of Oklahomans Against Trafficking Humans (O.A.T.H.), we find the following stats:
Think Human Trafficking Doesn't Happen Here? Think Again! Did you know millions each day face forced labor and sexual exploitation -Over 2 million children are trafficked annually -Human trafficking is a $34 billion industry & the 2nd largest criminal activity in the world -An estimated 45,000 men, women & children are brought here by traffickers from around the world annually. -300,000 of our own children are at risk each year. - America is the #1 destination for Child Sex Trafficking in the world. - A child is reported missing every 40 seconds in the US.
It's Happening Here in Oklahoma -In 2003, the Dept of Justice reported the largest concentrations of trafficking survivors who received federal assistance resided in California, Texas, New York and Oklahoma. -In 2004 the FBI’s program "Stormy Nights" rescued 13 Oklahoma children ages 12 and up from a prostitution ring operating at Oklahoma City truck stops and traveled to other U.S truck stops. -In September 2006, an Oklahoma City federal court handed down a judgment against men running a human trafficking scheme where workers from India were lured to Oklahoma for forced labor at a manufacturing facility in Tulsa. -February 2009, our FBI Task Force working with Innocence Loss rescued several girls from forced prostitution through a Craig's List sting operation. -Oklahoma cities are on major human trafficking routes throughout the Midwest
Types of Human Trafficking in Oklahoma: - Debt Bondage in domestic service for private homes and labor sectors including the restaurant, hotel, massage, nail salons, agricultural, construction, and landscaping industries. - Commercial Sex Industry including prostitution, stripping, escort and massage where women must give the money they make to their pimp, not allowed to quit, plus basic human rights and freedom violations occurring. - Child Trafficking involving all minors caught up in prostitution, pornography, stripping, escort, massage and sex chatting while trafficker or pimp is marketing them for commercial profit.
More information on child sex trafficking in America is available at End Human Trafficking.
Shared Hope International has conducted field research on child sex trafficking across the U.S. This research found underage girls are the bulk of victims in commercial sex markets - this includes pornography, stripping, escort services, and prostitution. There are three main manifestations of child sex trafficking in America: pimp-controlled prostitution, familial prostitution, and "survival" sex. Melissa Snow, Director of Programs for Shared Hope International, will be bringing you periodic updates from the field: the reality of child sex trafficking in America.
It's happening across the U.S.- from Maryland to Minnesota, Iowa to Utah, American children as young as 12 years old are being sold by pimps in prostitution. By law, any child in prostitution is a victim of human trafficking. And how can such rampant sexual exploitation of America's youth exist? Pimp control. We use "pimp control" to refer to the targeting, recruiting, and maintaining of a person for commercial sexual exploitation- in many cases, a child.
Here in America, the average age a child is targeted and recruited into sex trafficking is 13 years old. Pimps prey on the innocence of youth because it provides them with a target that can be romanced, tricked and then brutally forced into the sex trafficking market. Pimps use a variety of techniques to target and recruit a child into prostitution, from immediate force and violence as demonstrated in the case of two underage girls from Toledo, to the more common "loverboy" or boyfriend approach.
Hitchens is exceptionally enthusiastic about attacking certain religious groups and organizations for tolerating child rape and sex abuse, but I've been reading him for years and I cannot recall a word about the much larger problem of socially widespread child rape and abuse where no religious angle is apparent. Perhaps he has occasionally pontificated on the matter, but not often enough for his words to be easily accessible among in the many thousands of google hits that lump "Hitchens" and "child abuse" together with religion. This is an omission that amounts to a distortion and, given the sheer scale of Hitchen's outpourings on "religiously sanctified" child abuse and the breadth of his bully pulpit, it could easily be construed as adding up to an implicit endorsement of adult men having sex with minors, just as long as the abusers aren't Catholic priests or Muslims. Also, as a vocal proponent of sexual freedom who also has also demonstrated a salacious interest in the seedier side of sex on numerous occasions, Hitch might do well to reflect on his own personal contribution to the pornogrification of mainstream Western culture that has undoubtedly helped to sustain a social environment in which all kinds of things that a traditionalist would term "perversion" can and do flourish. He is, for example, gushing with praise for Nabokov and lamented that he never got a Nobel, and yet Lolita was just twelve years old. Just because the novel didn't prompt Hitch or Martin Amis into touching up a tot, it is incontestable that it brought the idea that such a thing is possible to the attention of many minds that the thought might never otherwise have crossed. It made the thought "fashionable" and helped deepen the pornographic swamp, so to speak. But then again, on such matters Hitch is about as reflective as a coat of pitch.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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