The Federal Bureau of Investigation said that a nationwide operation had led to the arrests over the last few days of 159 men charged with forcing about 105 teenage girls to work as prostitutes. Some of the girls were as young as thirteen. The agency said that 105 girls were rescued but not charged.Rico says that some people are lifeforms lower than the slime molds (and that's pretty low), but these guys might not've made it that far up the evolutionary scale...
The operation was part of a decade-long Justice Department program— the Innocence Lost National Initiative— that is intended to break up child prostitution rings. The program has led to the convictions of 1,350 people for pimping-related offenses, ten of whom received life sentences, according to the FBI.
Over the last decade, roughly 2,700 children were rescued from working as prostitutes through such operations, the agency said. The FBI arranged for victim assistance counselors working with local child services organizations to place the teenagers in foster or group homes, said Ron Hosko, the assistant director of the FBI’s criminal investigations division. No charges would be filed against the girls, he said. “We are not going to charge child victims of prostitution with prostitution,” he said. “We regard them as victims, as they were not able to make a choice for themselves. The goal is to break the cycle so they can rebuild their lives.”
The most arrests were in Detroit, where eighteen pimps were taken into custody and ten girls were rescued, the FBI. said. In San Francisco, seventeen pimps were held and twelve girls rescued. There were seventeen arrests in Atlanta, and two girls were rescued. There were arrests in more than seventy cities.
The authorities focused on finding prostitutes who were seeking customers on the Web or at places like truck stops and casinos. After tracking down the young women, officers used information from the teenagers to locate their pimps. Many of the operations were conducted by both Federal and local law enforcement officers, along with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a Congressionally authorized program.
John Ryan, the head of the Center, said the problem of child prostitution was getting worse. The recent effort, he said, demonstrated “just how many of America’s children are being sold for sex every day, many on the Internet.”
30 July 2013
Bad men (or is that redundant?) for the day
Michael Schmidt has an article in The New York Times about child prostitution:
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