Mickayla+M.+-+SL+-+SP12

Congress Must Enact Protections for Sex Trafficking Victims 3.27.12 ** Couldn’t find an article on the websites we had to choose from, but since this is a part of a newspaper, it is still reliable**

The article talks about how we should be helping out those who have fallen victim to what is known as “Sex Trafficking”, which is when you’re put into prostitution against your own free will. It mentions how we should be giving them choices when it comes to contraception and abortion, and allowing them to have such services without discrimination. Most of the democrats are all for it, but the Republicans want to make changes to it that generalizes it. What that means, is that instead of giving the funding to specific people that need it, the Republicans want to give it to health facilities that help people in general. Therefore, not all of the people that need it get it, and anyone has access to the funding. It isn’t going directly for a good cause. To most people, Sex Trafficking isn’t a form of slavery, because what our classrooms have taught us is that slavery was when the whites owned the blacks, and the blacks were pretty much property. But if you look at this case, it can be said that women are treated as property as well, being used for different purposes, but still being used altogether. The most common places that this is happening in nowadays are Japan and Thailand, as well as the Micronesian Islands. How this can be relevant to the course is simple: WWII. In this course, we take a pretty in-depth look at WWII and its impacts, but we never really hear about this kind of thing, after all, war is the more important thing, not the small little issues coming from it. It was mainly our enemies that were going about this, places like France and Britain didn’t think that sex trafficking would even be appropriate. In Japan, this issue was terrible. There were about 200,000 women who worked in the Japanese bases, and they were called “comfort women”. A book [Japanese War Crimes: The Search for Justice] describes their situation as this: “Many women were raped to the point of death or killed by torture, such as having their breasts sliced off or having their abdomens slit open.” (Li). They also had geishas, who were pretty much sold into a slavery, but they didn’t have to have sex with their customers. But of course, since they were our enemies, we didn’t much focus on problems like this that were happening. In Germany, there were brothels in the concentration camps, that way the workers could still have some sort of a sexual life, even though it wasn’t voluntary. The main people that were put in the brothel were women from the concentration camps, and they were left in an entirely different building that was heavily guarded. They also used the brothels as a “cure” for homosexuality, making the men that claimed they were gay go to the brothel at least once a week to have sex with a women. The women were used as objects for pleasure and we completely ignored it.  We have essentially tried to get rid of all forms of unwanted sexual contact in America. We have various laws against Sex Trafficking, and prostitution is illegal as well. It mainly started with the Progressive Era, when all of the women’s rights activists started their protests. They tried to get rid of pornography, prostitution (which was rather popular at the time), and sex trafficking. Age of consent was also raised in most states, that way that women could be able to mature more before before deciding to have sexual contact. Birth control was made during this time as well, so that women could be sexually active and not get pregnant; or if they got raped, chances were that they wouldn’t conceive a child due to it. The rise of women’s rights in the Progressive Era was likely stemmed from the information that they had gotten on other countries rights. More recently, we had the civil rights movement in the 60’s, giving women even more rights, and allowing all women to have the chance to get birth control. Since then, we have been working to make women as men’s equals, giving them the choices to do with their body whatever they please. We have made it a mostly safe place for women, and there isn’t really a threat of having women abducted in America for sexual prostitution. If other countries made more laws like we have, there wouldn’t be much of a problem anymore, and women can sleep easy knowing that they can decide who they can have sex with, and that they won’t be forced into slavery just because they were born with working female body parts. Child pornography is also entirely illegal, and anyone to use a child for sexual purposes gets a lot of jail time. If we pushed other countries to promote women’s rights (to do whatever they want with their body), Sex Trafficking would be a thing of the past.  Sex Trafficking completely ties into the theme of Slavery because the act itself includes forcing women to have sex against their will for money that doesn’t even benefit them. This kind of slavery has been around for a really long time, and chances are, it’ll always be happening. Something that victims of Sex Trafficking and the victims of slavery among Blacks have in common is that they both have low self perception. Sex Trafficking victims don’t feel too great about themselves because they’re being taken advantage of, as well as being treated poorly by their owners. The same can go for the Blacks because when they were made to work, they weren’t given many breaks, and they weren’t allowed to have many of the rights that other people around them can have. They’re also the same when it comes to the age group more times than not. When slaves (both blacks and sex trafficking) are chosen, the owners try to find the youngest and most fit, because after all, what is the use to either one of those groups having a 50 year old woman as a part of their property? Most only consider slavery as something that happened a long time ago, and something that we don’t have to worry about, but in all reality, they don’t see all of the things that are happening right before their eyes. Ignorance is bliss, after all... Right?  1. Can a problem naturally stop without other people’s knowledge of the situation?  2. What would the similarities and differences between sex victims and black victims be?  3. Do you think that slavery targets one specific group of people?  4. Based on the progress that America has made with slavery, do you think that slavery could be abolished worldwide, if they follow the steps that we have?
 * Summary **
 * Relevance **
 * Evaluation **
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Questions **

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Works Cited <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">"Bradenton Herald." Congress Must Enact Protections for Sex-trafficking Victims. Web. 05 Apr. 2012. <http://www.bradenton.com/2012/03/28/3966529/congress-must-enact-protections.html>. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">"German Camp Brothels in World War II." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 04 Jan. 2012. Web. 05 Apr. 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_camp_brothels_in_World_War_II>. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">"How Can You Compare Contemporary Slavery (human Trafficking; I.e. Sexual Exploitation) to Slavery of the 1800s?" Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Web. 05 Apr. 2012. <http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090926122457AAzAvMo>. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">"Human and Sex Trafficking Facts." Sex Trafficking: Information About Sex Trafficking. Web. 05 Apr. 2012. <http://www.istoptraffic.com/html/human_trafficking_info.html>. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Li, Peter. Japanese War Crimes: The Search for Justice. New Brunswick: Transaction, 2003. Print. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">"Sexual Slavery." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 04 Apr. 2012. Web. 05 Apr. 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_slavery>. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">"Women and Global Human Rights." Webster University. Web. 05 Apr. 2012. <http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/trafficking.html>.