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Inner City Sex Trafficking

By 3L at Seton Hall University School of Law and Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review.

Much of the debate surrounding Eliot Spitzer's fall from grace emphasized that the high-priced prostitutes that he used were consenting adults, and thus, his was a victimless crime. (For a response to the victimless crime argument, see this NY Times op-ed.)

Lost in this argument, however, is the daily travails of women, and more frequently, young girls, caught in inner city prostitution rings. This oft-ignored system of human sex trafficking is fueled not by $1,000/hr. rates, but by violence, fear, intimidation, and emotional and psychological instability. (There are, however, some groups committed to addressing this cause; for example, GEMS in New York City, and the Polaris Project, out of Washington, D.C.)

As articulated by Nicholas Kristof in an insightful NY Times op-ed: "The big problem out there is the teenage girls who are battered by their pimps, who will have to meet their quotas tonight and every night, who are locked in car trunks or in basements, who have guns shoved in their mouths if they hint of quitting. If the Spitzer affair causes us to lose sight of that, then the biggest loser will be those innumerable girls, far more typical than ?Kristen,? for whom selling sex isn?t a choice but a nightmare."

Full post as published by Urban Law Journal on March 16, 2008 (boomark / email).