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    Walking Prey: How America's Youth Are Vulnerable to Sex Slavery
    Unavailable
    Walking Prey: How America's Youth Are Vulnerable to Sex Slavery
    Unavailable
    Walking Prey: How America's Youth Are Vulnerable to Sex Slavery
    Ebook398 pages6 hours

    Walking Prey: How America's Youth Are Vulnerable to Sex Slavery

    By Holly Austin Smith

    4.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Today, two cultural forces are converging to make America's youth easy targets for sex traffickers. Younger and younger girls are engaging in adult sexual attitudes and practices, and the pressure to conform means thousands have little self-worth and are vulnerable to exploitation. At the same time, thanks to social media, texting, and chatting services, predators are able to ferret out their victims more easily than ever before. In Walking Prey, advocate and former victim Holly Austin Smith shows how middle class suburban communities are fast becoming the new epicenter of sex trafficking in America. Smith speaks from experience: Without consistent positive guidance or engagement, Holly was ripe for exploitation at age fourteen. A chance encounter with an older man led her to run away from home, and she soon found herself on the streets of Atlantic City. Her experience led her, two decades later, to become one of the foremost advocates for trafficking victims. Smith argues that these young women should be treated as victims by law enforcement, but that too often the criminal justice system lacks the resources and training to prevent the vicious cycle of prostitution. This is a clarion call to take a sharp look at one of the most striking human rights abuses, and one that is going on in our own backyard.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 18, 2014
    ISBN9781137437693
    Unavailable
    Walking Prey: How America's Youth Are Vulnerable to Sex Slavery
    Author

    Holly Austin Smith

    Holly Austin Smith is an advocate for human trafficking victims who speaks about her own experience nationwide. She is the author of Walking Prey. After becoming a victim of child sex trafficking at the age of 14, she nearly committed suicide while the man who abducted her served only one year in prison. Her story has been featured on the Dr. Oz show, as well as in the Associated Press, the Richmond Times Dispatch, the Tampa Bay Times, Cosmopolitan magazine, and Dallas Morning News. Smith writes a weekly column for the Washington Times Communities, and she has submitted testimony to Congress. She has consulted for the National Criminal Justice Training Center and AMBER Alert Training and Technical Assistance Program.  She is in constant demand as a speaker, speaking over 30 times in 2012 at universities, law enforcement agencies, and government-sponsored symposiums. She lives in Richmond, VA.

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    Reviews for Walking Prey

    4.5/5

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    • 5/5

      Oct 12, 2018

      I was looking for something.In June of 1992 Holly Austin Smith had finished eighth grade in a small coastal town in southern New Jersey, 30 miles away from Atlantic City. She appeared to her neighbors and casual friends to be an ordinary 14 year old girl, with an unremarkable appearance, neither strikingly beautiful nor homely, a seemingly normal life as the only child of two middle class parents in an apparently stable home, and a good kid with a mildly defiant attitude. However, just under the surface lay much deeper problems, as she was repeatedly sexually abused by an older cousin, had multiple sexual partners and was subjected to forced intercourse by several of them, and was ignored and all but neglected by her alcoholic parents. She was a follower rather than a leader, struggled but failed to fit in to a clique that would accept her, and sought the attention from boys her age, along with older young men, as she believed from her exposure to MTV videos, pop music, teen magazines, and other media that love would provide her with the happiness and personal satisfaction that she so desperately sought.On an ordinary summer day she went to the local mall with friends, looking for someone to acknowledge her and help her escape from her suffocating and miserable home. Suddenly she noticed an attractive and well dressed young man gazing intently at her. He smiled at her, gave her his phone number, and asked her to call him anytime. She spent the next two weeks talking with him on the phone, as he gained her trust and her love, and when he promised to take her across the country with him in his red Corvette she jumped at the opportunity and met him. Before she could realize what was happening he bought her alluring clothes, shoes and a wig, took her to a motel, put her in the charge of an older woman, and prepared her to turn her first trick. Later that summer Holly was picked up by police, confessed what had happened to her, and after a brief stay in a rehabilitation facility she was returned to her parents, as both she and they were provided with little counseling or guidance on how she could best recover from the trauma of her experience. As a result, she soon found herself back in trouble, and it took well over a decade for her to put her life in order and finally achieve peace and fulfillment. Holly Austin Smith now serves as a consultant to law enforcement officials, mental health and other medical professionals, social workers and child advocates, as well as an inspirational speaker for other survivors of commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC). In Walking Prey, she shares her own story, openly and bravely, and discusses the extensive problem of child trafficking, using her own research and the stories of other survivors to effectively drive home her points. Although she focuses on CSEC in the United States, she makes it clear that this is a worldwide problem, and one that no community in any country is completely safe from. She discusses the risk factors for a child to become a victim of traffickers, most notably childhood abuse, particularly sexual abuse, poverty, homelessness, difficulty in school, and mental health problems. She provides useful tips to help those who encounter at risk teenagers determine if a child might be sexually exploited, along with resources that can be utilized to get them off of the streets and into effective programs to address the underlying problems that led to their downfall, and references for further reading. Walking Prey is a compelling and unforgettable personal story of a survivor of child trafficking, which serves as a clarion call for all people to eliminate this sickening cancer, and provide greater focus on the victims of sexual exploitation to help them re-integrate into society, so that they can lead fulfilling lives and not perpetuate sexual abuse on the children that they later become responsible for. I found this book to be very useful for me as a pediatrician who frequently cares for victims of childhood abuse and at risk teenagers, and as a result of reading it I hope to be able to identify and counsel child trafficking victims in the remainder of my career.
    • 5/5

      Dec 8, 2021

      The author opens the book by describing being tricked into running away at 14 and then tricked into prostitution. Later on she describes how she was already broken. Her parents contributed, but it seems the bigger attacks on her were older boys and the media around her.
      In the 90s when the author was a teen an even more so today, media sends a message that is pervasive and subversive to young girls. Your value is in your sexuality. Men can and should do what they want with you. You are never good enough.
      Before we get to how she was treated by males, the author describes what media tells young girls. These powerful messages combine with the developing brain. Young people’s brains have trouble judging danger. This and other vulnerabilities of a still growing mind make them susceptible. Susceptible to media messages and too being groomed.
      The author describes several sexual advances that led to sexual encounters that led to the author and many girls like her being emotionally broken. This societal drive (the natural drive is more easily subsumed) for boys to have sex and for young girls to have validation to be valued through sex causes girls to get confused and hopeless.
      Now a person comes in and convinces them to have sex for money. They see little reason not to- and if they do not value themselves, it is harder to see it as a loss.
      This book has takeaways for dealing with young people dealing with emotional problems. Teens may not be pleasant or cooperative, but that does not mean they do not deserve our attention and patience. Trying to ease their pain leads them to do painful things. Judgement does not help. The author Holly Austin Smith, discusses how people tried to help her, but it was not the right type of help. She needed specific individualized help. She describes what happens all too often- troubled people are given interventions and she kept doing harmful things. You can imagine the judgement that would follow as it does not make sense. But as Dr Phil describes, everyone has a series of filters on reality. What she did made sense through the filters given to her by life.
      The damage to many girls does not need to be caused by abuse or sexual assault. However, it is so prevalent that all girls have been exposed to it or have been scared of it happening. Whether you are concerned with sex trafficking or just young people in general, this is a valuable read.