I see it a lot in New Orleans. People are embarrassed to accept what people did freely, and so they try to justify it with crazy stories. But, the police say otherwise. I am not making claims what happened there, I am just saying it happens a lot. And I get it. You get the whole world worried and panicked and then you find out she was just holed up with some dude she just met on Bourbon Street for 4 days. Lots of times, the families want to explain it away that they must have been drugged or something. But nope! Just met a dude and decided to go to his hotel room for 4 days!
Exactly. Just a personal anecdote here, bear with me lol. My best friend in high school had her first baby shockingly young. Her sister followed her lead and had her first even younger. Lil' sis had two kids by 15!! By that age she was on the streets. She decided that welfare wasn't enough for her, and as she was so young she couldn't get hired anywhere good. She had a friend that taught her how to prostitute. She had arrests in ten states way before she was 18. The police would send her back home, and she'd be gone again in a flash. I think the regular customers of prostitutes get tired of the same ones or something, so the successful "ladies of the evening" travel from city to city, state to state to make more money.
I am not saying that girls never get trafficked, that's not what I believe at all, because I've definitely seen real trafficking cases. I just know that when minors are involved, it gets labeled as "trafficking" automatically, although these young girls are doing it voluntarily. Unfortunately nowadays with all the overly sexual messages on TV, movies, and in music, it's cool to be a "hoe". If you're not getting 8,000 likes on your Kardashian-style pictures of your butt or your cleavage, you're uncool. A popular message is "why give it away when you can get paid for it". A lot of girls have uninvolved parents that are too wrapped up in their own lives to give their kids attention, so they seek validation from men online, and in person, in any way they can get it. Some parents love and care for their children, but somehow the child looks to the media to find out what morals, or lack of, they should have anyway. Unfortunately, way more women and young girls are willing to be a prostitute than any of us would probably think.
Btw, last time I checked, my friend's sister was 32 and still "making easy money". :notgood:
The problem with getting arrests for trafficking is that it is often just a 'he said/she said' situation. Even if a victim is kidnapped and kept drugged in a cheap motel room, it is nearly impossible to prove it was not 'voluntary' on the victim's part. Unless she was kept chained to the wall, there is no real proof she was not there willingly.
If she is drugged repeatedly, brainwashed, coerced, mentally and emotionally abused, and repeatedly raped, then she will be broken down and become 'compliant.' And thus she might seem cooperative and so LE cannot say she was being held against her will.
Most definitely true. But, IME, when it's a minor they tend to be successful with the trafficking charges. But I believe SD is 17, right? Maybe if that's the age of consent in Nevada they don't treat it the same as if she were 13 or something. I have no idea what the AOC is there, but I know it's as young as 16 in some US states. I think? Lol. I'm still curious about those guys' charges, however. Hopefully they will release that info eventually.
Back to Maricela -- would anyone happen to know the name of the girl that also got abducted in the LA area whose phone was also found broken at the scene? It's probably a coincidence, but you never know what these disturbed people will do as a "trademark" or whatever to put their own personal stamp on their crime. I'm still very concerned about all the LA metro abductions going on lately, so I am wondering what they might have in common.
I'm really looking forward to that thread about the abductions. Are the mods/admins still in the process of making one?
