KJS DC 08.25
We need to face an uncomfortable truth about American culture: we are driving the world’s most vicious industries. Our appetites, our money, our demands are feeding systems of exploitation that destroy children and families across the globe.
This is not opinion. This is documented fact.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Among human trafficking victims identified between 2002 and 2022, the highest shares were citizens of the following countries: Ukraine (16%), Philippines (11%), United States of America (10%), Republic of Moldova (9%) and Mexico (7%). But this statistic obscures a darker reality: Americans are not just victims—we are the primary customers.
Human trafficking generates $172.6 billion in dark market economics, and American demand drives a disproportionate share of this blood money. The more demand increases for commercial sex, the more supply rises to meet that demand. We are creating the market that enslaves children.
According to Enrile, some statistics report that 100,000 children in the United States are commercially sexually exploited every year. But our demand extends far beyond our borders. Today, the average age at which a person becomes involved in the sex trade has dropped to just 13 years old in the United States and 9 years old in Asia.
Nine years old. Let that sink in.
Demand Machine
American consumers don’t just participate in sex trafficking—we’ve industrialized it. There were 88 million child sexual abuse material (CSAM) files reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children tip line in 2022. Multiple organizations estimate that 500,000 predators are online every day, and they’re not coming from failed states or war zones. They’re coming from American suburbs, American offices, American families.
Nine defendants were federally convicted in FY 2022 of engaging in extraterritorial child sexual exploitation and abuse—Americans traveling overseas specifically to abuse children. This is what we’ve become: a nation that exports pedophiles.
The normalization is complete. People have come to believe it’s normal, for instance, for a man to expect a sexual reward in return for taking a woman on a date. These kinds of beliefs are dangerous because they create murky territory in which sexual exploitation becomes the status quo.
+ Violence Epidemic
Our appetite for destruction extends beyond sexual exploitation to random, inexplicable violence that has no parallel anywhere on earth. Nearly one-third of the world’s public mass shootings between 1966 and 2012 (90 of 292 incidents) occurred in the United States.
Think about that statistic. America has 4% of the world’s population but 31% of its mass shootings. We are not just violent—we are uniquely, systematically, culturally violent in ways that other societies cannot comprehend.
Every day, 327 people are shot in the United States. Every day, 23 children and teens (1-17) are shot in the United States. Since 1966, 1,714 people have been killed and 2,657 injured in mass public shootings.
The U.S. makes up 35% of global firearm suicides while accounting for just 4% of the world’s population. We don’t just kill others—we’ve made killing ourselves an industrial process.
Cultural Sickness
These are not separate problems. They are symptoms of the same cultural disease: the worship of dominance, the commodification of human beings, the belief that power gives you the right to destroy others.
Our entertainment glorifies violence. Our politics rewards cruelty. Our economics treats people as disposable resources. Our technology platforms profit from rage and exploitation. We have built a civilization that systematically destroys empathy and celebrates predation.
Globally, women and girls account for 71 percent of total slavery victims. Of sex trafficking victims, more than 99 percent are women and girls. This is not random. This is the logical endpoint of a culture that teaches men they are entitled to women’s bodies and children’s innocence.
Perpetrator demographics vary by type of mass shooting, though in almost all cases they are male. Again, not random. We are raising boys to believe that violence is the solution to feeling powerless, that destruction is preferable to vulnerability.
Global Reach of American Sickness
Our cultural pathologies don’t stay within our borders. Private sector supply chains currently exploit an estimated 16 million trafficking victims, many of them feeding American consumer demand. We export our appetite for exploitation through global supply chains that hide slavery behind corporate logos.
The growth of technology has provided numerous tools to human traffickers, increasing the challenges faced by law enforcement and advocate organizations. American technology companies have built platforms that facilitate the sexual exploitation of children, then claim ignorance when confronted with the consequences.
Reports now identify 100 million suspected child sexual abuse material files circulating online. These aren’t just numbers—they represent 100 million instances of American and Western demand creating a market for the rape and torture of children.
Our Complicity
Most Americans don’t want to confront these facts because it’s easier to believe that exploitation happens “over there,” perpetrated by “bad people” who are fundamentally different from us. We prefer to think that mass shooters are mentally ill outliers rather than products of our toxic culture.
But the data is clear: we are the demand. We are the market. We are the customers.
Of the 1,070 defendants charged with any of the three types of human trafficking offenses in U.S. district court in fiscal year 2022, 91% were male, 58% were white, 20% were black, 18% were Hispanic, 95% were U.S. citizens, and 71% had no prior convictions.
These are not foreign criminals or career offenders. These are American men, many with no criminal history, who decided that buying another human being was an acceptable transaction.
No Longer Pretend
We can no longer pretend that America’s violence problem and America’s exploitation problem are separate issues, or that they’re caused by individual pathology rather than cultural sickness. We have created a society that treats other human beings as consumable commodities, and then we act surprised when that philosophy produces mass shooters and sex traffickers.
Survey findings also indicate that domestic or family violence was a factor closely connected to 57 percent of the cases, in that the shooter killed a current or former spouse or intimate partner or other family member. The violence starts at home and spreads outward.
According to recent studies, as many as 90 percent of women in the sex trade were sexually abused as children. The exploitation starts in childhood and continues through adulthood.
We are producing both the perpetrators and the victims of global suffering, then exporting both around the world.
Your Choice
Every American who claims to care about human rights, children’s welfare, or basic human decency must confront this reality: our culture is actively creating the markets for slavery and violence that destroy lives across the globe.
We can continue pretending this is someone else’s problem, that we’re the good guys fighting the bad guys, that American violence and American demand for exploitation are unfortunate aberrations rather than logical products of American values.
Or we can face the truth: we have built a civilization that runs on the suffering of others, and until we change that fundamental reality, we will continue producing the predators and victims that fuel the world’s darkest industries.
The children being trafficked know who’s buying them. The families of mass shooting victims know what culture produced their killers. The question is whether the rest of us will finally admit what we’ve become and choose to become something different.