SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES

King County to sex trafficking victims: ‘Sorry. Not sorry.’

Jun 1, 2018, 1:08 PM | Updated: 3:49 pm

seattle homeless, prolific homeless...

King County Courthouse. (penjelly, Flickr)

(penjelly, Flickr)

It must take an enormous amount of energy for people so skilled at business — which describes many in our area — to ignore the blatant fact that their votes are building up sex slavery in our area.

If it’s not choosing to pretend that is not the case, it must be apathy — believing their kids will never be victimized. Sex trafficking follows drug crimes. In business terms, it is simple vertical line extension. In human terms, it’s one form of slavery — drug addiction — creating another form of involuntary servitude: sex slavery.

RELATED: Reward for missing Bonney Lake girl

This is not a difficult concept. It takes real concentration to not see it. Here is how sex trafficking — a $150 BILLION global business with a 70 percent profit margin — works and how King County’s obsession with normalizing and subsidizing heroin and meth feeds it.

Courtesy of Dan Sattergberg — the so called King Count Prosecutor — and Executive Dow Constantine, with strong assists from Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and Councilmember Mike O’Brien, you are free to sell, possess, shoot and push heroin and meth. You can consume it in your city- or county-subsidized house or tent. Or in your RV and even on the street. In business terms: voters in King County have created a strong supply for drugs.

Gangs sell drugs. To defend their turf, they kill people. Many of the so called customers of the gangs need help paying drugs. MS-13 doesn’t do credit cards, but people will commit acts of prostitution to feed their habit. This is, in business speak, alternative financing.

The cartels see no reason to share money with independent pimps. Gangs get into the sex trafficking business, this is called vertical brand extension, just like Amazon getting into shipping.

Girls who are trafficked become ill and less profitable. The cartels know this, and are are aware of the general product utility horizon of the people they enslave. When a “product” (read: someone’s daughter now enslaved) becomes less profitable, they sell the sick, older girls to other gangs, maybe in other states or countries where the economics are different.

They still need young, fresh girls. So the gangs push heroin or meth at them — after all, they get it wholesale. If the drug pushing doesn’t work, they turn to kidnapping or buying kidnapped girls. This apparently just happened to Lily Christopherson from Bonney Lake who is still missing. They buy a girl for a relatively small amount and rent her body for 70 time return. They rent her out six or seven times a day for as long as they can, they quickly move her around the country, keep her constantly stoned and totally dependent upon them for drugs, food, drugs, water and drugs. 

King County voters continue to elect people who create policies that make our area a hot-bed for sex trafficking. Jenny Durkan, Mike O’Brien and Dow Constantine are literally fostering the business of slavery which is rampant in underdeveloped nations.

In an article by author and activist Siddharth Kara in the International Harvard Review, Kara discusses the role supply-side economics plays in perpetuating human trafficking. He writes: “The supply of contemporary trafficked slaves is promoted by long-standing factors such as poverty, lawlessness, social instability, military conflict, environmental disaster, corruption, and acute bias against female gender and minority ethnicities.”

He continues: “Whereas slaves in 1850 could be purchased for a global weighted average of between US $9,500 and US$ 11,000 (adjusted for inflation) and generate roughly 15 to 20 percent in annual return on investment, today’s slaves sell for a global weighted average of US $420 and can generate 300 to 500 percent or more in annual return on investment, depending on the industry. This alone is great reason for pause. It shows us that the value of a human life has decreased. It also reveals a huge increase in the intense exploitation of individuals.”

We hear a lot from King County’s politicians about social justice. Until they stop getting people enslaved, they can go ahead and stop talking. Seattle voters who support these politicians can add sex trafficking to their resumes, unless they will wake up and vote them out.

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King County to sex trafficking victims: ‘Sorry. Not sorry.’