Georgia's Disgusting Underworld a Top Tourist Attraction
by
Hollis Gillespie
Georgia Online News Service
Personally, I can't think of a harder job than being a street whore. In fact, it's hard enough just being mistaken for one.
It happened to me when I was 14 and for 10 years afterwards I wondered what the hell that guy meant when he asked me how much I cost. He kept repeating the question, too, as though he were reading from a foreign-language phrasebook and all he had to do was get the accent right in order for me to understand.
"How much do you cost?"
"How much do you cost?"
"How much do you cost?"
The man was a well-dressed foreigner, with an accent that could have been from Bolivia or Bangladesh for all I knew. He approached me as if to ask for directions. I was a freshman in high school at the time, dressed in a turtleneck and jeans while standing on the sidewalk outside my friend's apartment building waiting for my sister to pull up in an old paneled station wagon to take me home. It was a nice neighborhood, too, with specialty stores, coffee shops and other local businesses interspersed with a pleasant cluster of condominiums here and there.
"How much do you cost?"
"I don't cost anything," I kept telling him.
I tried to walk away, but he followed me. I couldn't wander too far because my sister was coming and if I wasn't where I said I'd be she'd keep going and I'd have to head home on foot and try to track her down at one of the fast-food joints along the way.
"How much do you cost?"
"I have nothing for sale," I kept insisting.
Luckily, my sister finally pulled up and I hopped in the car. She asked me who that man was and I told her I had no idea, but that he kept asking me how much I cost.
"What the hell did he mean by that?" she laughed, as she motioned for me to take the wheel so she could light what was probably her seventh cigarette that day. "Are you sure you heard him right?"
"He repeated it, like, 500 times," I laughed.
Looking back, I certainly see the irony. My sister and I thought we were such a snapshot of worldliness, what with her smoking habit and me pretending not to be disgusted by it, but the fact that I had just been mistaken for a child prostitute went way over our self-involved heads. One day 10 years later it hit me in the face like a frozen mackerel.
"Oh, my God!" I cringed.
I was suddenly so furious that I wanted to go back to that neighborhood and track him down. I wanted to point him out and turn the community on him because this is not Thailand, is it? Soliciting children for sex doesn't happen here, does it?
Wrong. It does happen here. So much so that Atlanta is one of the top child-trafficking destinations in the nation, where thousands of children are sexually exploited every year. They are abducted, stuffed into trunks and driven in and out of our state to be traded like cattle. They are drugged, imprisoned and raped repeatedly by people who fly here solely for that purpose. Yes, Georgia is a destination. Child prostitution is our underworld tourist attraction.
You would think there'd be rabid, statewide outrage over this, outpourings of community support or, at the very least, maybe a decent modicum of tax dollars allocated to the needs and treatment of these victimized children.
Wrong again.
There are scant facilities, such as the admirable Angela's House in Atlanta, that scrimp along with mostly private funding. To make matters worse, it's been our state's practice to arrest the child and leave the pimps to roam freely throughout Georgia to collect more children to add to their stable. But things might change.
House Bill 91, which recently passed the Senate Finance Committee, places a surcharge on patrons frequenting strip clubs. The proceeds would be used to treat and care for sexually exploited children.
And Senate Bill 69, also making its way through the Legislature, amends the child-abuse reporting law making it mandatory for any adult who witnesses the sexual abuse of a child to report it to the police.
Pimps and johns, of course, witness this all the time, so if our laws to prosecute them are insufficient they could be nailed for not tattling on themselves.
One hopes that measures like these, though minimal, will increase awareness about Georgia's problem and that one day we'll be known for our peaches again or our Southern hospitality or something -- anything at all - other than being the child-trafficking capitol of the nation.
Hollis Gillespie is one of Atlanta's best known literary personalities. She has published three books, and a fourth is on the way. Gillespie for years was a columnist for Creative Loafing. She now writes for the Georgia Online News Service and Atlanta magazine, giving readers her unorthodox and often-hilarious point of view on life in Georgia. She also runs a writing academy. [full bio]
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