Chicago Adult Entertainment: ‘Sex trafficking’ not just a problem abroad

… We’ve got to punish men who are buying sex from children’ Mary Schmich February 28, 2010 E-mail Print Text Size One of the first things Jody Raphael will tell you about child prostitution is this: These children are not prostitutes. They’re victims of abuse. They’re girls mostly, as young as 12, thousands of them, pimped out in hotels and apartments, often via the Internet, from the suburbs to the outskirts of Midway Airport and on down to Springfield, especially when all sorts gather for a legislative session. The practice is officially known as sex trafficking, though the word “trafficking” often gets paired with “international” and conjures images of girls from foreign places. The abuse of those girls – from Eastern Europe, Cambodia, Thailand – is what most often makes news and the plots of prime-time crime shows. “International trafficking has excited a whole lot of interest,” says Raphael, a research fellow at the DePaul University College of Law. “We’ve been trying to sa …

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