[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 149 (Thursday, October 6, 2011)]
[House]
[Page H6629]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       DOMESTIC MINOR TRAFFICKING

  (Mr. POE of Texas asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute.)
  Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, 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.

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