Shared Hope International
Women and minor girls, usually victims of commercial sexual exploitation and under pimp control, are increasingly becoming facilitators. Pimps will often use these women and girls to recruit new victims in schools and other places. In this way, pimps avoid detection and punishment from law enforcement. This process also may elevate the recruiter to a higher status in the pimp’s “stable.”245 Institutional facilitators, such as local officials and businesses, are complicit in sex trafficking and sex tourism in the U.S. as in other countries examined. Officials recognize the value of the commercial sex markets to the local economy. Las Vegas relies heavily on tourism using a suggestive promotion campaign and promoting a permissive atmosphere. Hotels make some efforts at regulating access to the rooms above the casinos to prevent prostitution but late night observations in the casinos indicate young-looking girls hanging on the gamblers’ arms.246 Since former mob lawyer Oscar Goodman was elected Mayor of Las Vegas in 1999, a troubling new enterprise has emerged within the city limits: the sexual exploitation of teenage girls...247 Taxi drivers are among the facilitators of the commercial sex markets in the U.S., as in every other location examined. At the turn of the century, taxi drivers were earning extra cash by transporting prostituted women and their buyers across town while they engage in sex in the back of the cab.248 Today taxicabs continue to assist in the recruitment and delivery of women to their buyers. Hotels and clubs are notorious for having “knowledgeable” drivers who can serve the needs of their guests by taking them to any destination they wish or bringing to them what they desire. Ethnic brothels use designated taxi operators to deliver buyers to the secret locations; passwords and specially designated telephone numbers are used.
The United States of America
DEMAND.
Culture of Tolerance A prominent scholar, Dr. Melissa Farley, analyzes empirical data on the harms of prostitution, pornography and trafficking in her article “Prostitution, Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia: What We Must Not Know in Order To Keep the Business of Sexual Exploitation Running Smoothly.” She explains, “This information has to be culturally, psychologically, and legally denied because to know it would interfere with the business of sexual exploitation.”249 It is this general denial that permits the culture of tolerance and the marketplaces of exploitation to thrive. While the cultures of tolerance that permit commercial sex markets to persist in each city are unique, America suffers nation-wide from the detrimental effects of the “pimp culture.” Pimps and pimping have become so ingrained in American culture, the concept has almost become commonplace. In 2006, the song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” won the Oscar for Best Original Song for the film Hustle and Flow.250 The hit MTV series Pimp My Ride, about improving cars with cool new Lee, Lois, “Sixteen Psychosocial Strategies of Pimps,” Presentation at ILEA (International Law Enforcement Academy) Conference in Las Vegas, September 18-20, 2006. 246 SHI Research Report, September 22, 2005. On file with authors. 247 Miller, Steve, “Sex-Slave Trade Flourishes under Sin City Mayor Oscar Goodman,” AmericanMafia.com, October 20, 2003 <http://www.americanmafia.com/Inside_Vegas/10-20-03_Inside_Vegas.html>. Accessed on January 15, 2007. 248 “The Repression of Prostitution in the District of Columbia,” Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, subcommittee on Public Health, Hospitals, and Charity, October 13, 1921. 249 Farley, Melissa, PhD, “Prostitution, Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia: What We Must Not Know in Order To Keep the Business of Sexual Exploitation Running Smoothly,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, v. 18:N, p. 104, May 2006. 250 Milloy, Courtland, “Pimp Pop Culture Brushes Aside Girls’ Fate,” Washington Post, March 8, 2006. 245
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