I need to say something just to stop my stomach churning. I am hoping, if you read this, you will post it in response to every abolitionist org that tries to use the street children of Rio to support their agenda during the World Cup.
@turnoffRL and @ruhamaagency have begun to put up tweets and one letter to the papers, using the sale of underage sex around the World Cup in Rio as yet another topic to exploit to further their agenda.
Notice I deliberately avoid using the term “child abuse” in connection with the sale of sex in Rio? That is because, compared to the rest of the abusive, absolutely hopeless reality those children live 24/7, selling sex does not even register, and probably adds up to “one of the better, safer days”.
The lives they live, and the speed at which they have to grow up just to make it to next week earns them every right and respect which we would usually extend to an adult. God knows, most of them will be dead long before I am, and they know it, and I am a Grandmother already. So many of them will never get to be old enough to have children, let alone Grandchildren.
They only have a little time to fit a whole life into and that changes *all* the rules.
There is nothing in the world I will ever be able to do to help them, but I never forget them, not for a single day…
…and I would never, EVER, for one minute, presume my idea of the best way for them to live another day would do anything but endanger them.
They know what they need to do to survive 10 times better than I do, that is why they are still alive.
An adult Brazilian sex worker in Europe sending money home, is sometimes the only thing that stand between other children and those dead-end streets.
Are you quite sure you want to “end the demand”?
Could you look into the thousand-year-old eyes of a Rio street child and explain why they must die so you can live in your idea of a “gender neutral” society?
“Turn Off the Red Light” and Ruhama neither knew, nor cared, that those utterly doomed children existed until they could use them as an excuse to demand legislation that will only create utter desperation for other families for them to exploit for big salaries, lavish junkets, and obscene expense accounts.
Children being executed so an ex cop can make a few quid is just FINE AND DANDY as long as the child is not being subjected to sex.
In real, heart wrenching terms, selling sex at the world cup for a pittance will probably be the best summer those tragic children will ever know in their lives…because sometimes life really is shit…and you do what you have to do…
…and spoiled Blackrock brats and ex-beat coppers on a power trip haven’t got a clue how that feels.
Neither have I, because I was only a street child in a privileged country, where they aren’t allowed to shoot you.
Chris Rodgers at the BBC finds me “disgusting” for stating the above truth…but, I notice, he couldn’t care less about the children existing, and dying on those terms except to sensationalise them for the wealthy abolitionist lobby, while completely ignoring the far deeper and more dangerous horror of their real plight. However, if he could find a few celebrities and/or royals to participate in a documentary, that reality could turn on a sixpence.
Mark Williams Thomas is now chiming in and calling me a “disgrace” which is pretty flattering compared to what I have thought of him since he came hustling me not once but “twice” looking for celebrity dirt from Duncroft.
I was more innocent then, I thought he might genuinely care about kids and asked him if there was anything he could do about double convicted paedophile Anthony Luckwill trawling around. Because there were no headlines in that for him he did not even bother to reply to suggest I go to the Gardaí - meanwhile three more boys were seriously assaulted and damaged for life before Luckwill was apprehended.
Note well that neither of these paragons of the 5th estate has expressed the slightest dismay at street children in Rio being exterminated like vermin over the past 20 years or so. Apparently that is totally cool with Chris Rodgers and Mark Williams Thomas, despite the fact that they have only recently stood face to face with some of those doomed kids (I feel certain Dr Robert Hare could shed light on how they can be that cold-blooded.)
It would now seem Chris Rogers is reporting me to the Police for endorsing the exploitation of children on the strength of this article alone…and yet, he and Mark Williams Thomas are the ones who took lavishly funded trips to Rio to exploit the street children in the context of selling sex without even noticing, much less mentioning or caring that many, if not most of those children have no way, AT ALL, with or without selling sex, to survive the next 5 years. Some will have no way to survive to Christmas…and these are real kids I am talking about…not cardboard cut outs.
Whether they sell sex for enough to eat, to buy something to kill the pain and fear is a great big NOTHING compared to the fact that they have no way to stay alive, and no hope at all. All the great white pseudo-crusaders for children care about are the tabloid headlines that make fame and fortune for themselves…and that, assholes, is DEFINITELY the ruthless exploitation of children.
They even had the chance once I raised the wider and more devastating issues affecting Rio’s street children to seize the moment and the opportunity to use the positions they have wheedled and clawed their way into, to highlight those issues for the sake of the kids they both just made a shitload of money out of, and couldn’t care less about, but, instead they attack, threaten and bully me for catching them out and showing them up.
Good luck with that.
Then the next day (12 June 14) it got even more chilling with this tweet from Mark Williams Thomas (presumably, by then, he had actually read this article rather than blindly attacking anyone who dares to suggest he is not a minor God):
I am sure Himmler was convinced that it was “distorted thinking” to suggest that being Jewish was better than being killed too.
Is Mark Williams Thomas really suggesting that wherever we have no better alternative to offer than selling sex to survive we should exterminate the victims for their own good?
Strangely that has often struck me as being at the heart of abolitionist thinking and something that might start creeping out into the open as time goes on.
Does Mark Williams Thomas intend to go on making a name and a fortune for himself by becoming the vanguard?
Rolling out documentary after documentary “proving” that anyone forced to sell sex (which would be everyone according to the abolitionists) is better off dead, children first, without once attempting to check whether they agree with that.
If John Pilger was really as sick, twisted, phoney, and self-serving as this new generation of journalists – don’t tell me, I need to go on half believing in SOMETHING.
Would I rather sell sex and get a REALLY good meal, or huddle in the shadows, trying to ignore the hunger inside while I wonder if the death squads will get me tonight?
Decisions, decisions…
The real scandal here is that we *do* live in a world where life is still allowed to be so cruel and unfair that real, innocent children are trapped in situations where selling sex is their best and only option. That is not because selling sex is in any way acceptable, but because the options those children wake up to every single day of their lives are so drastically and hopelessly worse.
To add insult to injury, instead of even trying to find a way to change that and help them, all anyone is willing to do is make a name and a fortune for themselves out of making those impossible, unbearable, lives even harder. To me that beggars description…
WHO CARES if they are selling sex until they get the same right to survive at all, let alone eat, as any other child.
You can exterminate the problems if it hurts too much to look, at any time you want, because you have the power and the victims do not, but you cannot make that fair, right or even forgivable.
I do not want an apology from Chris Rogers or Mark Williams Thomas; they would not mean it, and I would not believe it. I want them to GO BACK at their own expense, apologise to those children in person for exploiting and mocking them and then tell their true story…
…with all proceeds to go straight back to the street children of Rio…without stopping to be tithed by any form of “admin”.
If you are in Rio, and a child tries to sell you sex ask them their price, hand them at least double, apologise for the terrible life you have abandoned them to, then walk away.
I endorse that.
©GD