Rape-rape?
Whoopi Goldberg said of producer Roman Polanski and his rape conviction of the 13-year-old girl he drugged and sodomized, “It wasn’t rape-rape. It was something else but I don’t believe it was rape-rape.”
Have our values so deteriorated that we no longer recognize rape? Polanski is a free man, living in Europe where the cultures are more enlightened, progressive, understanding and tolerant than ours, the very words used by our progressives when they demand we accept each new debased definition of right and wrong.
Where does this attitude of “it wasn’t rape-rape” lead us? What happens to our ability to see wrongs when the line of right and wrong is just a blur? If we cannot recognize rape, what other degradations of fellow human beings go unnoticed?
Sindiswa had AIDS, tuberculosis and was three-months pregnant, left to die on a street, no longer of value. Less than a year earlier, a woman offered her a job in a neighboring town, only to sell her to a human-trafficking syndicate. She would die in the next few days while listening to the roars of the soccer fans at a World Cup match in South Africa where billions of dollars were spent preparing for the event.
Human trafficking ranks second only to drug trafficking as the most profitable crime, generating billions of dollars each year. It spans the spectrum from ten-year-old girls sold into sex slavery to men and women sold as indentured servants, never able to pay their claimed debt. More than 30 million human beings are slaves in the world today, more than at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade with the early American colonies.
Children are favorite targets of sex traffickers because of their demand and because they can be more easily indoctrinated. Traffickers target them, recruit them, extract them from their home community and control them with extreme violence, often including repeated gang rapes. Every day the traffickers threaten to kill their families if they do not willingly comply. And when they are finally broken, finally compliant, they are sold.
We like to think human trafficking only happens in places like Thailand, where travel agencies advertise “erotic sexual adventures.” In 2003 the country had 11 million foreign visitors, about two-thirds unaccompanied men. Do you really think that millions of men were in Thailand just for business ventures?
We convince ourselves this is just an Asian, European, Central American or African problem. That’s where the human trafficking occurs. Really? The CIA estimates that more than 50,000 people are trafficked into or through the United States each year.
Nena Ruiz, a retired Filipino schoolteacher was enticed to come to Hollywood to work for a wealthy couple as a domestic servant. She had her passport taken, spent years sleeping on a dog bed, worked 18 hour days and cooked gourmet food for the couple’s dogs while she ate several-day old leftovers. The motion picture vice president’s wife was sentenced to three years in prison.
In the United States, human trafficking is more in the form of forced labor masquerading as domestic servants, agricultural migrant workers, hotel workers, construction workers and even strip club dancers.
Just how difficult is it to “buy” workers in America? A business owner in any American city can make a phone call specifying age, race and number of women needed for a strip club and the women arrive within a few weeks. No problem.
In 2009, a group of Missouri employers were indicted for human trafficking. They imported workers from Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and the Philippines, charged them exorbitant fees for their travel, gave them substandard housing and leased them to big name hotels. The workers were indentured servants; they were slaves.
This can’t be true. Not in America. The domestic servant came here willingly and she could have escaped if she wanted. The strippers had to know what they were getting into and could have left if they wanted. The hotel workers were just taking the jobs Americans will not and they could have walked away if they wanted.
After all, “It wasn’t rape-rape.”
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One Response to “Rape-rape?”
Dawn L. Morrell says:
August 3, 2010 at 12:14 AM
Spot on Dr. Bosley.