by Allen Williams

Today's insurance market is simply the pits especially where automobile coverage is concerned. Consumer complaints are on the rise and even though one can get a feel for how he or she may fair under insurer policies from these complaints, there is little relief from industry abuses. One such example is Farm Bureau Financial Services of West Des Moines. Iowa, a holding company that has acquired a number of state farm bureaus through the years including Kansas in 2001.

Farm Bureau is a financial conglomerate that provides Home and Auto coverage through its subsidiaries as well as questionable innovative technologies like driveology'. View the FBFS Driver real time monitoring brochure here: (https://www.fbfs.com/insurance/auto-insurance/driveology) Whats that you may ask? Note that the company's safe driving software will be rating YOUR contribution to global warming as a qualifier for premium auto discounts.

We now live in a technological age where government and its affiliated partners can render total information control over every individual. Under real time driver management surveillance, most people will never qualify for any significant discounts. It will be nothing more than an intrusive incursion into ones privacy.

As you might imagine in new technologies, the Farm Bureau website does not give any system details on its driver monitoring package. Their safety brochure mailed to potential insurance renewals is all the information that is available. They want you to talk to their agent where nothing promised is in writing to establish that the insurer wasn't acting in good faith in the event of future litigation. I'll define what that means a bit later.

Now before one can actually qualify for the kind of savings they hint at with their driver monitor (up to 30%) you need to own the right car. What might that be you respond? Well the advertisement I received with last years 13.5% rate increase infers that I may only expect to receive the maximum discounted savings IF my car qualifies. Now given the fact that Farm Bureau raised my auto rates 18% last year with no claims for the last 15 to 20 years that Ive been insured, I have to conclude that one must have the latest vehicle technology in addition to their software if any real savings are possible. So, what must a person do?

Well for starters I must accept their electronic surveillance package in my car (it could be as simple as a flash drive plugged into my cars USB port, if I had one) that would query and store my vehicles health, environmental and operating data.

Expect this to be a points based rating system not unlike trading carbon credits. For example, you just had a new CO exhaust monitor installed in the vehicle, that's +5 points but you also have a substandard performing catalytic converter and that's (-)50 points. Get the drift or am I going too fast?

In addition, the FB insurance system records how often the brake pedal is actuated, your distance traveled, the speed of the vehicle and if the driver is wearing a seat belt. I bet it will also test driver alertness on long trips as most new cars have a camera screen which is perfect for receiving visual messages and alarms from your driving safely monitor. It will send various messages that need to be responded to in a certain amount of time along the lines of a drunk detector on start-up which requires you to type in a random series of numbers in sequence in 10 or so seconds or you can't start the car. Remember, older drivers with arthritis and other physical impairments will be challenged to satisfy such tests. And, it would most likely result in a serious penalty (-)1000 points, etc in the driveology system if you fail it.

The Farm Bureau software surveillance system is capable of virtually infinite expansion as any new WIFI device can communicate with your vehicle WIFI. So say, there is a new device marker for a school zone, the marker will notify the FBFS system in your car enabling it to determine if you're speeding in that region, and if so (-) 100 points. And lets not forget that weather is available across the WIFI network which allows insurers to determine that you're driving too fast on wet slippery roads and then more point penalties. Also, they will know what you' re listening to on the radio and if you are texting because these are all WIFI access devices. And because most fast food restaurants also have WIFI, the company will be aware of what you're eating and drinking. This information will be sold to their business partners per their privacy notification policy.

The Farm Bureau driver monitor will also know the last time your car was serviced and if the environment is being harmed by using the AC too often. [UPDATE] These intrusive measures are being offered as a 'social responsibility' effort but also a 'profit enhancer' for companies. Telogis offers real time driver monitoring.  See (https://www.telogis.com/benefits/social-responsibility)
Here's an example of what's already underway in commercial fleet operation: "Using Telogis Fleet (https://www.telogis.com/solutions/fleet) you can measure progress on green metrics. Using baseline data, ongoing collection and record-keeping of GHG outputs, you can report on your current carbon footprint and track green fleet initiatives. ..It all adds up to shrinking your carbon footprint and minimizing carbon emissions. Calculate your potential CO2 reductions using our GPS ROI calculator."
(https://www.telogis.com/benefits/your-roi/gps-roi)

Driver monitors can also interface with the police license scanner system ALPR - (http://www.theiacp.org/ALPR) alerting an expired license (-)1500 points (plus a ticket). Or perhaps, you did not schedule that emissions test when told to by the system within the time window allotted (-) 500 points. The FB driveology data is viewable externally as their brochure claims but you cant correct it. It will testify against you in any legal proceeding resulting from a citation or an accident.

Now after your car has spied on you for a period of time, I mean monitored your driving habits for a year or so, you become eligible for advanced premium discounts. But I'd be surprised if anyone could qualify for a dime of rebate under such a program, more than likely the FB system will document scores of reasons why one can't earn a premium break and will then be justification for endless rate increases just as one experiences each year for those over retirement age.

Statistics is the lifeblood of the insurance industry; these people are always looking for ways to minimize their risks and boost profits at the drivers expense so your personal freedom and privacy under the 4th amendment is of little concern. So, do not be surprised if the insurance industry is already lobbying government to require this invasive technology under penalty of law. Forcing individuals to upgrade equipment and purchase services they do not need or want is a time honored globalist tradition right along with getting the government to do their dirty work. (If you have forgotten that just revisit Obamacare.)

Companies like Farm Bureau also force you to subscribe to their quarterly Kansas Living magazine as a condition of purchasing their auto insurance. Kansas Living is no longer the voice of agriculture but a paid platform of partner advertising subsidized by the policy holder. You can't cancel it because your FB auto insurance is contingent upon remaining a Kansas Living subscriber.

So, how effective is Farm Bureaus claim management you may think? Well, in short, they almost never return your phone calls. Particularly, if you have a question about their rates do not expect to get an answer in your lifetime. For a supposedly rural company they come off like the snobbish global company they truly are. One recent user named Rachel from Kansas (https://www.consumeraffairs.com/insurance/farm-bureau-homeowners.htm) laments: 

"Extremely dissatisfied with Farm Bureau. We have paid additional to get residential home equipment breakdown coverage. Our heat and air unit outside needs replacement. It has been eleven days since we have filed our claim. We have tried to contact the insurance agent several times. He does not pick up his phone and neither does he answer back."

I certainly have to agree with her assessment based on my personal experiences with Farm Bureau.

Then there is Debra (https://www.consumeraffairs.com/insurance/farm-bureau-homeowners.htm) from the Indiana branch of Farm Bureau:

"I've had Indiana Farm Bureau Insurance for 6 SIX years, paying approx $200/month which equals over $14k and had NO ZERO claims, not even 1 speeding ticket, yet my insurance rates keep increasing - on my 11 yo vehicle! I am even over 50. Called my agent and he said "Well, I can't explain it. Sorry. I'll even shop around for you!"

" Here are more FBFS complaints from the consumer protection website (https://www.consumeraffairs.com/insurance/farm_bureau_auto.html).

Folks there is a reason behind Farm Bureaus rude and callous behavior, they simply don't have to perform because if there is any misdoings you're the one (or your attorney) who has to prove that the insurer was not acting in good faith and its just about impossible to prove given the legal boundary conditions that have to be satisfied simultaneously. Now you know the value of insurance lobbying. Yes, state governments have provided some cushy legal protection for the insurance cartel's deep pockets. Here is an excellent example from Findlaw as to how the claim game is played.

On October 9, 1999, Roger Bellville (Bellville) and his wife, Sue Ellen, were involved in a motor vehicle accident with Guy Schueler. Ellen died at the scene Bellville was unharmed. (http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ia-supreme-court/1256710.html)

Now here's the explanation of 'good faith' in legal terms as I mentioned earlier: 

So bad faith actions ARE NOT proof of bad faith itself and precisely what insurance adjuster actions could ever be deemed unreasonable in a court of law? And how could you prove that the insurer knew or should have known that his basis for denying the claim was unreasonable? Anything the adjuster does will be deemed reasonable; the appellate court has already affirmed that assumption in this particular case.

Farm Bureaus real time driver monitoring system is a privacy threat and a consumer rip off.

by Benjamin Arie

A terrible double standard has been uncovered within the media, and it centers on one of the left’s favorite talking points this month: Underage illegal immigration.

For weeks, the topic has dominated headlines and sparked what seems like coordinated outrage among liberals.

Apparently oblivious to the fact that the Obama administration detained minors at the border for years, the left has pointed fingers instead at President Donald Trump for enforcing regulations that were enacted before he was even president.

Pundits including MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough even compared U.S. law enforcement officials to Nazis, all because they separate children who are brought along during the commission of federal crimes from adults who are being placed into criminal custody.

This is akin to being outraged because police don’t throw the children of suspects in jail with their parents during arrests, but instead take them into protective environments.

The left-leaning media stayed strangely silent when the detention of migrant children went on for years before Trump took office… and now it looks like they also kept quiet when Barack Obama’s administration literally placed immigrant children in the hands of human traffickers just a few years ago.

“The United States government placed an unknown number of Central American migrant children into the custody of human traffickers after neglecting to run the most basic checks on these so-called ‘caregivers,'” New York magazine reported in 2016, based on a Senate report.

Blame Trump! The problem, for the left, however, is that this horrific mistreatment of immigrant children happened in 2013 — right in the middle of the Obama presidency, and two years before Trump even announced he was a candidate.

“In the fall of 2013, tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors traveled to the U.S. southern border,” continued New York magazine.

“At least six of those children were eventually resettled on an egg farm in Marion, Ohio, where their sponsors forced them to work 12 hours a day under threats of death,” the report continued. That’s right: Around the same time that now-infamous pictures of the Obama administration putting migrant children in caged detention areas were being snapped, the same administration was directly responsible for essentially handing foreign kids into child slavery.

“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, told The New York Times at the time.

Politics

Report: Obama’s HHS Placed Children With Human Traffickers, Media Dead Silent

By Benjamin Arie
June 17, 2018 at 3:08pm

“At least six of those children were eventually resettled on an egg farm in Marion, Ohio, where their sponsors forced them to work 12 hours a day under threats of death,” the report continued.

That’s right: Around the same time that now-infamous pictures of the Obama administration putting migrant children in caged detention areas were being snapped, the same administration was directly responsible for essentially handing foreign kids into child slavery.

“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, told The New York Times at the time.

“But what makes the Marion cases even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of their abusers,” the senator continued.

The Obama administration was appallingly lax at conducting even basic checks about the adults who showed up to “claim” migrant children.

“As detention centers became incapable of housing the massive influx of migrants, the [Obama-run] Department of Health and Human Services started placing children into the care of sponsors who would oversee the minors until their bids for refugee status could be reviewed,” explained New York magazine, again confirming that the detention of child migrants took place long before Trump.

The current administration at least provides comfortable and safe housing for the children who are separated from their parents. Obama’s team did something very different.“ But in many cases, officials failed to confirm whether the adults volunteering for this task were actually relatives or good Samaritans — and not unscrupulous egg farmers or child molesters,” the magazine reported about the Obama-era scandal.

“The department performed check-in visits at caretakers’ homes in only 5 percent of cases between 2013 and 2015,” it continued. “The Senate’s investigation built on an Associated Press report that found more than two dozen unaccompanied children were placed in homes where they were sexually abused, starved, or forced into slave labor.”

Shockingly, nobody knows for certain how many immigrant children ended up in horrific slavery-like circumstances under Obama’s watch. Over 90,000 immigrant children were placed into so-called “sponsor care” during the time-frame of 2013 to 2015.

“Exactly how many of those fell prey to traffickers is unknown, because the agency does not keep track,” New York magazine concluded.

Even after the scandal was uncovered and locations such as the slave-like egg farm in Marion, Ohio, were raided by police, the media remained oddly quiet.

A Google search of this incident reveals only a handful of media outlets covering the story between 2013 and 2014, despite the clearly huge implications of this Obama scandal.

It seems that when immigration enforcement policies made President Obama look bad, they were swept under the rug. Now that the same border problems that have existed for decades can be used against Donald Trump, however, liberal journalists have miraculously found the backbone to cover the story.

The reality is that border and immigration issues are tough, and children are unfortunately caught in the middle.

Just as it’s heartbreaking but necessary for police to make an arrest when children are witnesses, or for Child Protective Services to step in when a family situation turns ugly, the presence of minors doesn’t mean that we stop enforcing national laws. This would only encourage law-breakers to use children as “legal shields” as they commit more crimes.

Reality isn’t always pretty. There are no easy or magic answers on how to enforce U.S. border laws while being humane and compassionate to innocent kids dragged into the chaos by adults. It’s a difficult situation from any angle.

Trump’s administration is doing its best to deal with a problem it inherited from past presidents — but the fact that the mainstream media barely said a word about much worse treatment of migrants should be a giant red flag about the real agenda being pushed by liberal journalists now.

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byJohn W. Whitehead

“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”—John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

They’re called the Little Barbies.
 
Children, young girls—some as young as 9 years old—are being bought and sold for sex in America. The average age for a young woman being sold for sex is now 13 years old.
 
This is America’s dirty little secret.
 
Sex trafficking—especially when it comes to the buying and selling of young girls—has become big business in America, the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.
 
As investigative journalist Amy Fine Collins notes, “It’s become more lucrative and much safer to sell malleable teens than drugs or guns. A pound of heroin or an AK-47 can be retailed once, but a young girl can be sold 10 to 15 times a day—and a ‘righteous’ pimp confiscates 100 percent of her earnings.”
 
Consider this: every two minutes, a child is exploited in the sex industry.
 
According to USA Today, adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.

“They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.
 
In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.
 
On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period of servitude.   It is estimated that at least 100,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.
 
“Human trafficking—the commercial sexual exploitation of American children and women, via the Internet, strip clubs, escort services, or street prostitution—is on its way to becoming one of the worst crimes in the U.S.,” said prosecutor Krishna Patel.
 
This is an industry that revolves around cheap sex on the fly, with young girls and women who are sold to 50 men each day for $25 apiece, while their handlers make $150,000 to $200,000 per child each year.   Who buys a child for sex? Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life.

This is not a problem found only in big cities.   It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.
 
As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out, “The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”
 
Don’t fool yourselves into believing that this is merely a concern for lower income communities or immigrants.
 
It’s not.
 
It is estimated that there are 100,000 to 150,000 under-aged child sex workers in the U.S. These girls aren’t volunteering to be sex slaves. They’re being lured—forced—trafficked into it. In most cases, they have no choice.
 
In order to avoid detection (in some cases aided and abetted by the police) and cater to male buyers’ demand for sex with different women, pimps and the gangs and crime syndicates they work for have turned sex trafficking into a highly mobile enterprise, with trafficked girls, boys and women constantly being moved from city to city, state to state, and country to country.

For instance, the Baltimore-Washington area, referred to as The Circuit, with its I-95 corridor dotted with rest stops, bus stations and truck stops, is a hub for the sex trade.   No doubt about it: this is a highly profitable, highly organized and highly sophisticated sex trafficking business that operates in towns large and small, raking in upwards of $9.5 billion a year in the U.S. alone by abducting and selling young girls for sex.
 
Every year, the girls being bought and sold gets younger and younger.
 
The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out, “Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.“
 
“For every 10 women rescued, there are 50 to 100 more women who are brought in by the traffickers. Unfortunately, they’re not 18- or 20-year-olds anymore,” noted a 25-year-old victim of trafficking. “They’re minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked. They’re little girls.”
 
Where did this appetite for young girls come from?
 
Look around you. 

Young girls have been sexualized for years now in music videos, on billboards, in television ads, and in clothing stores. Marketers have created a demand for young flesh and a ready supply of over-sexualized children.
 
“All it takes is one look at [certain social media] photos of teens to see examples—if they aren’t imitating porn they’ve actually seen, they’re imitating the porn-inspired images and poses they’ve absorbed elsewhere,” writes Jessica Bennett for Newsweek. “Latex, corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn stars, have made their way into middle and high school.”
 
This is what Bennett refers to as the “pornification of a generation.”
 
“In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn’t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives,” concludes Bennett. “Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14 have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.”
 
In other words, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators. And then we wonder why our young women are being preyed on, trafficked and abused?

Social media makes it all too easy. As one news center reported, “Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.” Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers.
 
Rarely do these girls enter into prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.

Debbie, a straight-A student who belonged to a close-knit Air Force family living in Phoenix, Ariz., is an example of this trading of flesh. Debbie was 15 when she was snatched from her driveway by an acquaintance-friend. Forced into a car, Debbie was bound and taken to an unknown location, held at gunpoint and raped by multiple men. She was then crammed into a small dog kennel and forced to eat dog biscuits. Debbie’s captors advertised her services on Craigslist. Those who responded were often married with children, and the money that Debbie “earned” for sex was given to her kidnappers. The gang raping continued. After searching the apartment where Debbie was held captive, police finally found Debbie stuffed in a drawer under a bed. Her harrowing ordeal lasted for 40 days.

While Debbie was fortunate enough to be rescued, others are not so lucky. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, nearly 800,000 children go missing every year (roughly 2,185 children a day).
 
With a growing demand for sexual slavery and an endless supply of girls and women who can be targeted for abduction, this is not a problem that’s going away anytime soon.  For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.  Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.
 
Peter Landesman paints the full horrors of life for those victims of the sex trade in his New York Times article “The Girls Next Door”:

Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners--toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens--as well as what she called a “damage group.” “In the damage group, they can hit you or do anything they want to,” she explained. “Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it’s always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.”

What Andrea described next shows just how depraved some portions of American society have become. “They’d get you hungry then to train you” to have oral sex. “They put honey on a man. For the littlest kids, you had to learn not to gag. And they would push things in you so you would open up better. We learned responses. Like if they wanted us to be sultry or sexy or scared. Most of them wanted you scared. When I got older, I’d teach the younger kids how to float away so things didn’t hurt.”

Immigration and customs enforcement agents at the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., report that when it comes to sex, the appetites of many Americans have now changed. What was once considered abnormal is now the norm. These agents are tracking a clear spike in the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet. As one agent noted, “We’ve become desensitized by the soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit.”

This trend is reflected by the treatment many of the girls receive at the hands of the drug traffickers and the men who purchase them. Peter Landesman interviewed Rosario, a Mexican woman who had been trafficked to New York and held captive for a number of years. She said: “In America, we had ‘special jobs.’ Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.”
 
A common thread woven through most survivors’ experiences is being forced to go without sleep or food until they have met their sex quota of at least 40 men. One woman recounts how her trafficker made her lie face down on the floor when she was pregnant and then literally jumped on her back, forcing her to miscarry.
 
Holly Austin Smith was abducted when she was 14 years old, raped, and then forced to prostitute herself. Her pimp, when brought to trial, was only made to serve a year in prison.
 
Barbara Amaya was repeatedly sold between traffickers, abused, shot, stabbed, raped, kidnapped, trafficked, beaten, and jailed all before she was 18 years old. “I had a quota that I was supposed to fill every night. And if I didn’t have that amount of money, I would get beat, thrown down the stairs. He beat me once with wire coat hangers, the kind you hang up clothes, he straightened it out and my whole back was bleeding.”
 
As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune: “In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”
 
One particular sex trafficking ring catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout the southeastern states, especially the Carolinas and Georgia, although it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up outside shacks, as many as 30 at a time, to have sex with them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would begin all over again.
 
This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.
 
Trafficked women and children are advertised on the internet, transported on the interstate, and bought and sold in swanky hotels.  Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government’s war on sex trafficking—much like the government’s war on terrorism, drugs and crime—has become a perfect excuse for inflicting more police state tactics (police check points, searches, surveillance, and heightened security) on a vulnerable public, while doing little to make our communities safer.
 
So what can you do?
 
Educate yourselves and your children about this growing menace in our communities.
 
Stop feeding the monster: Sex trafficking is part of a larger continuum in America that runs the gamut from homelessness, poverty, and self-esteem issues to sexualized television, the glorification of a pimp/ho culture—what is often referred to as the pornification of America—and a billion dollar sex industry built on the back of pornography, music, entertainment, etc.
 
This epidemic is largely one of our own making, especially in a corporate age where the value placed on human life takes a backseat to profit. It is estimated that the porn industry brings in more money than Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.
 
Call on your city councils, elected officials and police departments to make the battle against sex trafficking a top priority, more so even than the so-called war on terror and drugs and the militarization of law enforcement.  Stop prosecuting adults for victimless “crimes” such as growing lettuce in their front yard and focus on putting away the pimps and buyers who victimize these young women.
 
Finally, the police need to do a better job of training, identifying and responding to these issues; communities and social services need to do a better job of protecting runaways, who are the primary targets of traffickers; legislators need to pass legislation aimed at prosecuting traffickers and “johns,” the buyers who drive the demand for sex slaves; and hotels need to stop enabling these traffickers, by providing them with rooms and cover for their dirty deeds.
 
That so many women and children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.
 
But the truth is that we are all guilty of contributing to this human suffering. The traffickers are guilty. The consumers are guilty. The corrupt law enforcement officials are guilty. The women’s groups who do nothing are guilty. The foreign peacekeepers and aid workers who contribute to the demand for sex slaves are guilty. Most of all, every individual who does not raise a hue and cry over the atrocities being committed against women and children in almost every nation around the globe—including the United States—is guilty.