There are some things you expect from 15-year-old girls. Lots of pointless phone conversations and rapid-fire texting. Maybe a bad test grade or report card here and there. Falling outs with friends, overdramatized crushes on boys, and an exorbitant amount of time spent in the shower, the mirror, and the mall. But here’s a new twist to the things-a-teenage-girl-might-do repertoire: human trafficking.
Two 15-year-old Canadian gals -- and a 17-year-old who’s since gone on the lam -- are facing multiple charges after police say they forced other underage girls into prostitution. Using (surprise, surprise) social media, they corralled three victims between the ages of 13 and 17 to a home in Ottawa. The abductees were allegedly driven to various parts of the city, pimped into prostitution, and forced to perform sex acts on men. Wow. Talk about innocence lost and, apparently, stolen.
It’s 10:30. Do you know where your teenager is?
To make matters worse, police say there’s no evidence that the girls acted on behalf of a manipulative adult like a pimp, a wayward parent, or even a nasty older sibling. They may have, however, been products of the human trafficking system themselves at some point and decided to balk against the prostituting and stand up on the money-making end of the deal instead. It’s the classic cycle of victimization when the underdog becomes the aggressor and repeats the very pattern they suffered.
That’s all speculation, though. They could just be girls with a premature, early developed penchant for taking advantage of unsuspecting peers, like A Clockwork Orange type of affair. And that’s even more frightening than the standard issue male perverts and pedophiles lurking about to rob them of their virtue. Who sees a teenage girl as a potential threat to the sexual sanctity of another teenage girl?
We’re always hollering about keeping our kids safe on social media, but I’m pretty sure most of us wouldn’t see this kind of rancidness coming on Facebook or Twitter because, again, it’s cloaked in the innocence of an average teenage girl hangout. Incidentally, human trafficking as a whole is on the rise in the U.S. So the girls’ involvement is just another aspect to a socially crippling sign of the times.
How harshly should the girls be punished?
Image via meghannash/Flickr
This Hot Dad Wants to Do Your Ironing
This Hot Dad Wants to Cook You Dinner
This Hot Dad Cooks AND Does the Dishes
Kanye West is Gay?! 
Comments 17
I believe they should be tried as adults
These girls were not forced to do anything, it was all done with consent and willingly and no guy is responsible for the action of these CURIOUS babes. Young girls see their mothers with a different boyfriend every few months and think nothing of doing what mommy is doing and there should not be any punishment of any kind for any of these females
Get off of the high horse, no one is guilty of anything, everyone satisfied their curiosity and enjoyed themselves so I would suggest that the D.A lock up anyone who has any complaints about this whole matter.
If everyone took care of their own business........etcetra!!!
It sounds like the person who wrote this article have no clue about the seriousness of the human trafficking problem and the harsh methods used by human traffickers. It may not be the parents' fault. The girl could have been kidnapped, beaten, raped, and told that she was now the property of the traffickers. They could have told her they'd hurt her family if she ran away from them and tried to return to her family.
That the authorities refused to help when the parents turned to them makes those authorities at least partially responsible the vigilante actions that followed. Vigilante actions happen when criminal justice system offers no protection. Either the police don't arrest the vitimizers or the courts don't convict. There's no protection from those who want to victimize you. That's when people take the law into their own hands to force the abusers to leave them in peace.
It's also possible that the authorities wouldn't help these parents because the traffickers had paid them off. Were these police on the take? Were they customers and didn't want to enforce laws that interfered with their sex lives? Even if not, their refusal to help this girl and her family make them partially to blame for the vigilante action that followed.
I hope the girl is in a safe place now. More than that I hope that the human trafficking networks get destroyed soon.
This isnt new, and there isnt always some big king pin pimp behind it. Years ago, probably about 10, this happened in my hometown, in the middle school I attended. It was a bunch of middle school girls who chose to be "pimped out" by middle school boys, and preformed sexual acts on other middle schoolers. Its a horrible thing to happen, and there needs to be more accountability by parents to stop this stuff before it starts, but unfortunately its also so prevalent in our society in movies, tv, video games etc that we have become desentisized and what used to be an atrocity is now becoming just unacceptable. Especially to those who are young to really understand the ramifications.