Pushout - Chapter 3 (pg 97-135)

Hello readers and welcome back to my blog!
Today, I decided to link the content that I have read for this week to some current events. Hopefully, you can relate and understand better since it is something that is happening in the generation that we live in.

I thought that this chapter really focused on the sex trafficking that was occurring to the female students in school. Morris specifically inserts dialogue between her and some students about how they live their life as a "prostitute." But as I read the conversation between the author and the student, I could see that this is not the student's choice by all means. I personally thought that their lives were technically "controlled" by the "pimps" that they mention which are also known as men who are way older than the students.

" "If you haven't eaten in a week because there's no food in your house," Bobbie in New Orleans said to a group of us discussing life in trafficking, "and someone pulls up to you on the street and says, 'If you do this for me, I will feed you'... you're going to do it." " (118)

In the passage above, I could visualize the student talking to the author like this, but with a hopeless tone. These children do not have food or money so they do whatever they can to survive. I personally have never heard anything like this before, or at least this specifically before so it was a surprise to me how such young children were controlled by people they do not know. So, I questioned myself, is this issue still going on today? How bad is it?

According to the Los Angeles Times, it says, "In addition to the 153 prostitution-related arrests, 133 arrests were made for various other offenses as police came into contact with criminal activity, authorities said." It is still going on. 153 is definitely not a small number and there are still people out there suffering from such events. As most of you may know, sex trafficking is a form of human trafficking which can also be known as sexual slavery. Someone is forced in many ways in a situation that is controlled by the trafficker. It is a give-and-take process that happens just like the paragraph mentioned; the child is given either food or money, the trafficker gains satisfaction.

"Black girls are not choosing to participate in the sex trade; they are in the traumatic throes of a "domino effect" of choices made for them. "Did they choose to grow up in poverty?" she asks. "Did they choose sexual abuse? Did they choose to get raped, some of them before they could walk? Did they choose to grow up in a world where women and girls are not safe?... As women and girls become more sexualized in the world, the more they are seen as property."

The questions that were asked in this paragraph definitely matched with the questions I had while I was reading. These girls who struggle due to poverty did not choose to live the life they are currently living. They did not have a choice when they were born. It is heartbreaking to see how people out there, STILL, are going through sex trafficking just to survive.

It was hard for me to relate to the content in this chapter because I have not seen or had the chance to approach this kind of topic at all. This topic surprised me very much and what I've realized is that "Child Prostitution" is not real. It is illegal for a child to be in such a situation because they are not the age where they can give consent to the trafficker. Although it is hard to completely end this trafficking, I personally had a moment where I wish I could do something in the future that would prevent situations like this so that those little girls would not have to go out to the city and do the "give-and-take" process.