Reminder to keep your mouth shut
[url]http://www.npr.org/2012/04/21/151103048/prostitutions-real-casualties-arent-secret-service[/url]
Seeing prostitution close up can shake any idea you may have that it can be some kind of Julia Roberts romantic comedy.
The customers and hustlers are certainly eager participants. But the women — and the few men — I've interviewed usually seem to be drawn into that world by poverty, desperation or drugs. They often tell you it's a brutal, sad and dangerous life, in which the women are often attacked, robbed and abused.
If you walk down Amsterdam's famous red-light district, you don't see many apple-cheeked young Dutch girls in the windows. A Netherlands' government report says most of the young women who become prostitutes there are poor immigrants from Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. The relief organization World Vision estimates that up to a quarter of the women who become prostitutes have been literally dragged into that life by sex traffickers.
To put the question in blunt, personal terms: Whether walking the street or working as an escort, would you want someone you love to live that way?
But I wonder if the people who planned this year's Summit of the Americas thought throughthe implications of bringing 34 heads of state to meet a place in which an enterprise many people consider an exploitation of women is practiced so openly.
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AND this is the left-wing NPR reporting!!
It's important for mongers to remember how much the outside world reviles us