What Puts Young Women at Risk of Prostitution?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/17/opinion/what-puts-young-women-at-risk-of-prostitution.html?emc=edit_tnt_20131016&tntemail0=y&_r=0

To the Editor:

Connect With Us on Twitter

For Op-Ed, follow@nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow@andyrNYT.

In “From the Streets to the ‘World’s Best Mom’ ” (column, Oct. 13), Nicholas D. Kristof profiles a survivor of domestic sex trafficking, saying “there are also women (and men) who sell sex voluntarily.” In my years of working to end prostitution and sex trafficking, I have never met any of them. Not one.

What I have seen is that the so-called voluntarily prostituted entered the sex industry as children and then find it nearly impossible to leave. Not at all surprising, as these (mostly) women endure years, decades even, of paid sexual abuse and need assistance to rebuild their lives, assistance that is hard to come by.

Today’s prostituted children are tomorrow’s prostituted adults. They are the same people. We need to bring the same measure of empathy to them both as we work to end the world’s oldest oppression.

NORMA RAMOS
Dublin, Oct. 14, 2013

The writer is executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.

To the Editor:

The story of Shelia Faye Simpkins, featured in Nicholas D. Kristof’s column, is both heartening and discouraging — heartening in her success and the assistance of Magdalene House, discouraging in that it demonstrates that sex trafficking and the exploitation of minors occurs every day across this country.

I had the privilege and difficult task of co-leading a comprehensive study by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council on sex trafficking and exploitation of minors in the United States. The recently released report revealed that multiple factors put minors at risk of becoming victims.

It also calls for law enforcement, the justice system, social services, teachers, health care providers and the commercial sector to work together to prevent these harms, identify victimized youth and help them regain their lives.

No one should ever have to suffer the abuse that Ms. Simpkins endured. We all have a role to play in ensuring that no one else does.

ELLEN WRIGHT CLAYTON
Nashville, Oct. 16, 2013

The writer is a professor of pediatrics and law at Vanderbilt University.