by Charles Powell

I am very grateful that New Hope Publishers provided my coauthor Dillon Burroughs and me with a very good publicity team to help us promote our book, Not in My Town.
If you want attention, get a professional. Lately I haven’t had a spare minute to myself. I have been doing interviews with newspapers, magazines and blogs. I have also done more than my share of interviews on radio, television, and online.

One thing I have observed throughout these many interviews is that nearly every journalist focuses the main thrust of the interview around the underage, pimp-forced prostitution of American children. I would like to state clearly now that this is indeed a problem in the US and more must be done to combat this vicious crime against innocent children.

But, after my 2-year undercover investigation across the United States, I believe there are exponentially more women between the ages of 18 and 45 caught in this web than there are children being forced to prostitute themselves. These adult women are being forced into horrific exploitation against their will and against what God wants for their lives. And I don’t feel nonprofits are as actively fighting against this growing humanitarian disaster as they should be.

Why? I think the answer is simple. My perception is that it is easier to raise funds to rescue children than to raise funds to rescue women, especially if these women are from Asia, Central America and Mexico, Eastern Europe, or Africa.

My many interviews and encounters with the press have been just as frustrating. Every time a reporter steers the conversation toward the inevitable conversation about child prostitution I answer a question or two on the matter before I seek to turn the conversation toward the epidemic of Asian women forced to work as prostitutes in spas and massage parlors across the US.

I think to myself: “Surely the only reason the reporter isn’t asking about these victims is because they are unaware of the problem. Right?”

Wrong!

To my memory, not a single reporter I have encountered since May really wanted to do a story about the women. They just wanted to talk about prostituted children. What’s more, some of them actually told me that they thought that anyone over 18 years old who was a prostitute should blame themselves. To me, this is much akin to the old view which blamed women for having been raped.

Wake up, America. There is a humanitarian disaster taking place and your daughters, sisters, and mothers of every background are the victims.

Shame on any nonprofit that would exploit the plight of child prostitutes to raise funds while women languish without help right in their own communities.

Last but not least, shame on the news media for seeking to report on child prostitution as a sensational feature while knowingly ignoring the growing plight of prostituted women.

Pray that God will move on the hearts of men and women to come to the aid and rescue of adult women who are, even as you read this, praying for God to deliver them from their circumstances. Pray also that the news media will tell the whole truth about the problem of prostitution in their towns.

Charles J. Powell is an author, adventurer, abolitionist, and civil rights activist whose real life reads like a best-selling thriller novel, from encounters with Soviet spies at the end of the cold war to his work as a bodyguard for royalty to living undercover in the War on Drugs. Powell appears on television, speaks at conferences, and writes for numerous publications on a variety of topics from human trafficking to postmodernism to terrorism. For contact information for Mercy Movement, go to http://www.mercymovement.com/connect/.