INSIDE VEGAS by Steve Miller
AmericanMafia.com
May 31, 2010
LAS VEGAS - It's been two and a half years since Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman told reporters, "I'll take a baseball bat and break his head if he ever comes here."
The mayor was referring to New York Times columnist Bob Herbert who dared to place a telephone call to Goodman describing his visit to Oriental Angels massage parlor located only one block from my home.
"More than 100 thousand American girls are sexually trafficked in the United States. Their first sexual encounter is between the ages of 11 and 14." This video by the Rebecca Project describes how young girls are lured into prostitution, and how Craigslist has become the primary marketplace for trafficking.
An advertisement placed in a California newspaper said Craiglist's adult services section is "the choice of traffickers" in sex with underage girls. The half-page ad, addressed to Craigslist founder Craig Newmark in Wednesday's San Francisco Chronicle, calls for Craigslist to discontinue its adult services section, which generated $36 million in revenues this year, and included the experiences of two teenage girls who said they were forced into prostitution via Craigslist, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday.
Recently a book titled, Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys was published by Soft Skull Press. This book is being promoted as a “bestseller” in Borders, on the New York Times, Amazon, and on “sex worker” websites as a book supported by SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation, www.sagesf.org).
On August 23rd, the New York Times published a review of the book which states that the editors, David Henry Sterry and R. J. Martin Jr., are currently affiliated with the SAGE Project. We want to share with you a letter that we have sent to the New York Times to address the fact that these two individuals are no longer affiliated with the organization.
We are outraged by the way this publication has been marketed and the method through which its content was secured; the book does not honor client confidentiality, naming clients currently and formerly engaged in our programs. One individual happened to stumble upon the book in a writing group and was surprised to find stories she had written in the publication. She, like many of our SAGE clients continues to be connected with the organization and her resilience and strength do not appear in the book. No effort was made to contact her prior to publication.
We are writing to you, our allies and colleagues, to let you know that SAGE’s mission and work have not changed. We stand committed to our goal to bring an end to the trauma, pain, and degradation inflicted by commercial sexual exploitation and human trafficking.
We will update you as we move forward in addressing this issue.
UM Honors Mexican Who Reported on Child Sex Ring
Associated Press - October 8, 2009 4:14 AM ET
ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) - A Mexican journalist who was arrested and threatened with rape after exposing a child prostitution ring in Cancun involving prominent business figures is speaking at the University of Michigan.
Lydia Cacho is to receive the Wallenberg Medal at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Rackham Auditorium, then deliver the annual Wallenberg Lecture.
The event honors Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who helped rescue tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis in World War II.
Cacho was arrested and threatened after publishing a book about the child prostitution ring in 2005. The International Women's Media Foundation awarded her the Courage in Journalism Award in 2007.
Norma Hotaling, founder and Executive Director of the SAGE Project in San Francisco died on December 16, 2008 following a short illness.
Norma Hotaling transformed her own experiences in prostitution into a mission of social justice for her sisters and brothers who had also been trafficked and exploited in prostitution. As a direct result of Ms. Hotaling’s life work, many now have a profound understanding of the harm of prostitution and the responsibility of buyers for that harm.
Xaviera Hollander, who wrote the Happy Hooker in the 1970's, glamorized prostitution as empowerment for women. Few know that Hollander was a Holocaust survivor. Playwright and author Carolyn Gage analyzes Hollander's advocacy of prostitution and her pimping in the context of her earlier traumatic life. Gage notes that the sexualized behavior of Hollander, Marilyn Monroe, and many women can be understood as not only "post-traumatic, generalized Stockholm Syndrome" but also as idealized female behavior and as behavior of enslaved children.
Gage's article, Trivial Lives: the Happy Hooker Revisited is in Trivia, Voices of Feminism, an online journal.
