ursulav

Similar horrors exist in Tiawan, China, Italy and Russia. Documented cases of Asian women smuggled intot he country and put into forced sex slave conditions have occured in California too.

The world can be a brutal, ugly place. You know it's bad when GW includes sex slaves and outright slavery (re: Sudan) in his speeches (which he has).

Regretfully,
Mako

Not Russia. Ukraine.

Talk about sex slaves - a step above that is the dowry system in India that leads to so many bride burnings. FGM in multiple African countries - where the men have a knife to help them penetrate their wives because the scar tissue is so thick. Same societies, women are not allowed to express that they enjoy sex, lest they be killed with one word from the husband. 12 year old girls that are abducted in Ethiopia for early marriages and forced to have children that their young bodies can't handle (think labor for 5 days, when the baby dies, shrinks, and is finally able to pass through the pelvis).

The world is a very awful place sometimes.

I took a cross cultural sexuality class a couple of years ago. It was very informative, if not very depressing.

There was recently an episode of Dateline that dealt with child sex slaves in Cambodia. They set up an undercover sting to liberate some of those girls and to shut down one of the brothels, and they had all kinds of hidden cameras. At one point, one woman tried to sell them two virgin 10-ish-year-olds for $600 (which they obviously declined), and a couple of weeks later the same woman approached them with the same girls, but they weren't virgins anymore. :-(

They had hidden video inside these brothels where girls as young as *five* were being listed as available prostitutes (there was a price list that included ages), and during the last part of the sting, one of the undercover men with a hidden camera had payed for three girls (around five or six years old) and had them in a room, where he was supposed to be having sex with them, though obviously he wasn't--he was singing songs with them and telling them stories to keep them calm and occupied while non-undercover officers raided the rest of the brothel and arrested the owners.

There was also undercover footage of a man that was trying to sell two of the undercover guys on a "sex party" involving about half a dozen toddler girls and several men (something the man seemed to indicate was a common customer request). It was painful to watch that episode of Dateline...I just can't even imagine the kind of people who think selling children for sex is okay, and I don't *want* to imagine what those poor children have to go through. I'm with you on mastering flame thrower skills, Ursula.

--Jennifer