Ted Poe: “Walking home from school, a girl of 12 is approached by a man who promises to give her everything. In her short life…”

“Walking home from school, a girl of 12 is approached by a man who promises to give her everything. In her short life, she has already suffered abuse and neglect from her father and her foster parents. She thinks the promise of food and shelter and love is something she cannot pass up. But the man takes the girl to a hotel room where he beats her, forces her to do drugs and rapes her. Then she is sold on the Internet, is taken from hotel to hotel around the country, and is regularly raped by multiple men and treated as a piece of property. She becomes a sex slave. This is the plight of an actual domestic minor sex trafficking victim in the United States. We cannot continue to be blissfully ignorant of this crime against these victims. As cochair of the Victims' Rights Caucus, along with Jim Costa (CA), I commend the work of Carolyn Maloney (NY) and Chris Smith (NJ) for their legislation to help stop this scourge of child sex trafficking. These children need to be rescued and treated as victims, not criminals. The customers and the traffickers need to be arrested, tried before a jury of 12, and need to get their just rewards for having been involved in sex slave trafficking. And that's just the way it is. ____________________”