Posted on 01/29/2013 3:26:12 PM PST by CHRISTIAN DIARIST
January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month. I didn’t want to let the month pass without telling the story of young Brianna Myers, who got herself caught up in sex trafficking before being rescued.
Brianna was a 17-year-old honor roll student at her small town high school in Washington State. When she wasn’t in class, when she wasn’t cheerleading, she was waitressing at a local diner.
The teen caught the attention of a middle-aged man, Richard, who would become a regular customer. He seemed friendly enough to the unsuspecting waitress. He plied her for personal information, about her life, her dreams, the kind of guys she liked and, importantly, when she would turn 18.
Eventually Richard made a move on the high schooler, asking if she wanted to “party” with him. She told him no. And that was that.
So she thought.
A few weeks after rejecting Richard’s proposition, Nick showed up at Brianna’s diner. “I noticed him right away,” she remembers. “He flirted with me and made me feel so special and beautiful. I’ve never been talked to like that.”
Nick invited the teen to visit him in Seattle. When her family objected, Nick persuaded Brianna to move to the bright lights and big city, where he would allow her to stay in his spare room. He suggested that she could attend college while working on the side.
But Nick didn’t have in mind an innocent little diner, like the one in which he met Brianna. He steered her to a strip club, where she spent seven hours a night as a nude dancer, where, lo and behold!, she happened to run into Richard.
“They worked on me for a year before (they) even pursued me,” Brianna recounts. Nick, it turned out, was “pimping me out,” she says, showing me here at the strip club.” Taking the money she earned
Having beguiled Brianna into the sex trade, Nick suggested that he and the teen take an out-of-town trip to Arizona and Nevada. It is quite likely she would have been completely cut off from family and friends and forced into a life of prostitution.
That’s when the Holy Spirit intervened, I am convinced.
Brianna very well would have gone with Nick, but wanted to first return her family’s car, which she had driven to Seattle. With Nick’s assent, she arranged to have a high school friend come to Seattle and share the drive with her. The friend sensed something was amiss and, unbeknownst to Brianna, alerted her parents.
When the teen arrived her parents’ home, they were there awaiting her with former Congresswoman Linda Smith, founder and president of Shared Hope, a national anti-trafficking organization.
Smith spoke the truth in love to Brianna, who eventually realized that Richard and Nick were sex traffickers, and that she had been ensnared by them like God knows how many other young girls like her.
Today, Brianna has joined the crusade against sex trafficking, sharing her story with lawmakers from Washington State to Washington, D.C.
Her message is one with which many, if not most of us, would agree: That sex trafficking is among the most repugnant of crimes. And that no punishment, short of the death penalty, is too severe for those, like Richard, like Nick, that prey upon the young, the impressionable and the vulnerable.
Now that they have decided to normalize pedophilia, this kind of thing is just another lifestyle choice
A young woman from my city, about ten years ago, was romanced by a sex trafficker. The guy invited her to visit his mansion and when she got there, he demanded that she pay for every dinner, hot air balloon ride, everything that he used to romance her.
The last she was heard from, about 6 years ago was a phone call to her parents saying she was all right. It’s currently assumed that she’s dead now.
“Young people, like Brianna, make mistakes. But that does not forgive those that take advantage of them.”
No, that is truly a stretch for anyone (forgiving these monsters). So glad she was helped in time to avert a real tragedy. Strong families, good and courageous friends, prayer, and the power of the Holy Spirit can help us to encircle our children with protection and heavenly guidance.
Pray ceaselessly—that is what Paul advised! As for these monsters, God will judge them and deal with them accordingly!
Ummmm ya, sure I believe this ... NOT. Just doesn’t pass the smell test to me. Some guy works on her for a year? If he owns a strip club in Seattle how on earth does he have time to motor out to the sticks to case some waitress? And then sends some sweet talker out there to close the deal? come on ... really?
More than likely the dumb broad did like dumb broads everywhere have done and fell for some bad boy and ran off with him, being a bad boy he didn’t have a steady source of income so she’s pressured into first stripping to support them and then whoring. Next thing you know the bad boy finds someone else and dumps her for the new prospect and she’s left to go home and try to explain just how it is that daddy’s little girl became a street walker. Happened to my brother with his first wife by the way, and this was in the 1980’s so nothing new here just some dumb rebellious woman reaping what she’s sown.
I, too, have my doubts about this story.
Unfortunately, sex trafficking is a very real issue. The girl I told you about stayed because the guy, who trapped her, told her credibly enough that he would kill her family.
There is very real evil in the world, trapped. That’s how these POS work. They wine and dine, give the impression of a dream world and, the young woman who is foolishness to fall for it, will often find herself trapped with no way out, without risking her life.
It never said he owned the club. It said he showed up there. This particular article may or may not be true but this scenario happens a lot.
Ever raise a calf from birth to slaughter?
The girl was just one, how many others were in the stable being groomed?
Also, he knows where she works. It’s not costing him anything to give her sweet words and whatever he does spend on her, he’ll get it back when she starts working for him. A prostitute can easily earn a couple hundred grand per year, most of which she won’t see a cent.
If it's not lust for sexually immature children, it's not pedophilia, even if the object of desire happens to be younger than whatever arbitrary age cutoff your state legislators have conjured out of thin air as the "age of consent" by defining sex with persons below that age as "rape" regardless of how freely consent was given. If you've been living in a cloistered monastery, I'll clue you in: desire for young, but sexually mature, women is normal (in this fallen world) even though acting on it is sinful if you haven't married the young woman and illegal if she happens to be below the age fixed by the whim of your state legislators. Desire for sexually immature children of either sex is a sick, abnormal and morbid temptation, and acting on it is deserving of severe punishment by the state.
(Of course, this is all a side matter to the real topic of the thread, which is another grave evil that even those with a libertarian or libertine attitude toward prostitution -- sex trafficking -- will, I hope, condemn as a form of slavery and utterly immoral.)
“Unfortunately, sex trafficking is a very real issue. The girl I told you about stayed because the guy, who trapped her, told her credibly enough that he would kill her family.”
The statistics don’t support this, the vast majority of women in the sex industry are there by choice. Trust me there are enough messed up desperate women out there that the need to risk serious jail time for white slavery just isn’t there for most. The real guys doing the white slavery thing are typically those trafficking in young (as in under 10 years old) children and a few of the illegal immigrants who have to “pay-off” their smuggling fee. This by the way is a very small part of the sex trade as those caught get very heavy sentences and may not live long once they hit the general population.
This gal was of legal age and this story just smells of her making it up and now she gets to play the victim and trot all over the country giving her “tearful” story to all who will listen. Trust me, she was a willing participant in this and there was no threat other than the threat that her bad boy partner would leave her if she didn’t do this.
“Normal” whatever
Society should just say no to adults having sex with minors. Pure and simple as that.
If these kids are old enough for sex, even with each other, then they are old enough to get jobs and move out.
I consider prostitution and sex trafficking as immoral and abhorrent under all circumstances.
“The girl was just one, how many others were in the stable being groomed?”
Groomed? By some creepy middle-aged guy that drooled over her while she’s waitressing? Get serious, women do this all the time and then when things go wrong they make up some “poor little me” story to cover up the fact that they were whoring it up. I’m amazed in this day and age that people are still this gullible but I guess most men (and women) will believe anything out of the mouth of some pretty young woman, no matter how incredible.
Women do not do this all the time. I find your posts disturbing.
“Women do not do this all the time. I find your posts disturbing.”
Unfortunately they do, otherwise there would be no strippers and no hookers walking the streets. And the fact that women lie about it is common knowledge (there’s an old saw about every hooker has a “hard luck story” people used to know that with women that did these type of things “stories” were part of the package, I guess not so much any more).
“Women do not do this all the time. I find your posts disturbing.”
Oh yes they do. Three girls I knew in High School hit the stripper pole just after they turned eighteen. According to them, why not, all the guys were staring at them anyway.
One bragged to me that she had made $5000 dollars off some guy the night before. I commented that was good she could pay for our meal (Burger King) as I only had $10 left to get two days to my next paycheck. After that I broke off the friendship and we only became acquainted again years later. She still says it was fun.
One went all in stripping, drugs, and whoring. My last night living in my hometown I actually asked her to leave with me before it killed her. She refused. Years later she was arrested and recognized by a mutual friend in the jail. He arranged for her to get drug addiction treatment. She is slowly coming back.
One, and this one broke my heart in high school, had a kid with a guy in the Navy when she was sixteen (pregnant at fifteen) who promptly left her, and then was evicted by her mother. She started for the easy money, then fell into the drugs and lost her kid. I met her one night while visiting home. She looked used up. She asked me for help, to my shame I demurred and left her where she stood.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.