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Boston's Chinatown up till around when I moved out to CA in '02 had some really nasty, sketchy, run-down parts that were the dictionary definition of ghetto... butcheries operating without permits in the basement of buildings that were a step up from condemned, massage parlors on the ground floor, hookers asleep in the stairways leading up to bachelor apartments crammed with ten people. Around 1999, a friend and I looked at a studio in the building I described because it was cheap and they didn't seem overwhelmingly concerned that I was under 18... someone opened up the door to the room next to the one we were looking at. I looked inside and they'd erected three-tall bunk beds that wrapped around the walls. The rooms were maybe 250 square feet, but there were at least nine people in there. The elevator was out and people had been dumping trash down the shaft; the stench was awful.
There are certainly places in SF's and New York's Chinatowns that are similar, if not quite as dank - I've been to them. For the most part, the gangs keep their violence away from non-Chinese because the SFPD and NYPD have Chinatown task forces that are dedicated to dealing with the areas, and can be really bad for business. As such, crime goes under-reported. Drug trafficking, human trafficking, racketeering, extortion, etc. are real issues that don't always make their way out of the community.
Location: The western periphery of Terra Australis
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Originally Posted by Nineties Flava
As you've pointed out, gangs are not a substitute for your family... they'll lead you to do things you'll more than likely spend the rest of your life regretting. But for kids stuck in dysfunctional homes, on the surface the gangs offer something that their homes lack.
And the Cambodia of today is not the Cambodia of the 1970's. Not by a long shot.
It's still the poorest country in SE Asia. Sex slavery is a big problem there too.
Boston's Chinatown up till around when I moved out to CA in '02 had some really nasty, sketchy, run-down parts that were the dictionary definition of ghetto... butcheries operating without permits in the basement of buildings that were a step up from condemned, massage parlors on the ground floor, hookers asleep in the stairways leading up to bachelor apartments crammed with ten people. Around 1999, a friend and I looked at a studio in the building I described because it was cheap and they didn't seem overwhelmingly concerned that I was under 18... someone opened up the door to the room next to the one we were looking at. I looked inside and they'd erected three-tall bunk beds that wrapped around the walls. The rooms were maybe 250 square feet, but there were at least nine people in there. The elevator was out and people had been dumping trash down the shaft; the stench was awful.
There are certainly places in SF's and New York's Chinatowns that are similar, if not quite as dank - I've been to them. For the most part, the gangs keep their violence away from non-Chinese because the SFPD and NYPD have Chinatown task forces that are dedicated to dealing with the areas, and can be really bad for business. As such, crime goes under-reported. Drug trafficking, human trafficking, racketeering, extortion, etc. are real issues that don't always make their way out of the community.
^This. People who think there's nothing going on in the Chinatown in SF (or Oakland for that matter) don't know anybody from there. Most of the heroin that's being sold in America comes directly from China via SF's Chinatown, thus why they call it "China White". The "model minority" stereotype is believed by people who've never known any poor Asians personally.
Location: The western periphery of Terra Australis
24,544 posts, read 56,043,908 times
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Originally Posted by 415_s2k
Boston's Chinatown up till around when I moved out to CA in '02 had some really nasty, sketchy, run-down parts that were the dictionary definition of ghetto... butcheries operating without permits in the basement of buildings that were a step up from condemned, massage parlors on the ground floor, hookers asleep in the stairways leading up to bachelor apartments crammed with ten people. Around 1999, a friend and I looked at a studio in the building I described because it was cheap and they didn't seem overwhelmingly concerned that I was under 18... someone opened up the door to the room next to the one we were looking at. I looked inside and they'd erected three-tall bunk beds that wrapped around the walls. The rooms were maybe 250 square feet, but there were at least nine people in there. The elevator was out and people had been dumping trash down the shaft; the stench was awful.
There are certainly places in SF's and New York's Chinatowns that are similar, if not quite as dank - I've been to them. For the most part, the gangs keep their violence away from non-Chinese because the SFPD and NYPD have Chinatown task forces that are dedicated to dealing with the areas, and can be really bad for business. As such, crime goes under-reported. Drug trafficking, human trafficking, racketeering, extortion, etc. are real issues that don't always make their way out of the community.
Boston's Chinatown felt pretty Asian but not too bad. It must've improved since then.
It's still the poorest country in SE Asia. Sex slavery is a big problem there too.
Sex slavery is a big problem here in the US of A... there's millions of them, and they're literally everywhere. Here in the Bay Area there was a big scandal involving an Indian restaurant ten years ago where women were forced to work there as indentured servants and were prostituted in various apartments throughout Berkeley.
Location: The western periphery of Terra Australis
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Originally Posted by Nineties Flava
Sex slavery is a big problem here in the US of A... there's millions of them, and they're literally everywhere. Here in the Bay Area there was a big scandal involving an Indian restaurant ten years ago where women were forced to work there as indentured servants and were prostituted in various apartments throughout Berkeley.
Poorer countries are where the "product" (underage women) is brought over to the states from. We're the market, they're the suppliers. That's also not mentioning our own homegrown "product".
The better question is if kids here are as likely to be kidnapped into sex slavery as they are in other countries. I don't have an answer for that, but obviously I hope that we're not as bad.
Location: The western periphery of Terra Australis
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nineties Flava
Poorer countries are where the "product" (underage women) is brought over to the states from. We're the market, they're the suppliers. That's also not mentioning our own homegrown "product".
The better question is if kids here are as likely to be kidnapped into sex slavery as they are in other countries. I don't have an answer for that, but obviously I hope that we're not as bad.
I highly doubt that.
Any parent who would sell their kid into the sex trade, for instance, would probably be jailed for life in the US (or close to it).
In SE Asia it's common for authorities to turn a blind eye. Many of these policeman themselves are involved in underage prostitutes, along of course with a lot of foreigners.
Any parent who would sell their kid into the sex trade, for instance, would probably be jailed for life in the US (or close to it).
In SE Asia it's common for authorities to turn a blind eye. Many of these policeman themselves are involved in underage prostitutes, along of course with a lot of foreigners.
I wasn't talking about kids being sold into sex slavery by their parents, I was talking about kids being kidnapped and forced into sex slavery by pimps and traffickers. Perhaps my viewpoint is a little different because I live in a city where this is a very real issue, but it's not like it's a rare occurrence.
And speaking of Cambodians, here's an interesting article on redefining the sex trade in Oakland:
OAKLAND, Calif. — Dr. Kimberly Chang, a physician at a community clinic in Chinatown, will never forget the first young girl she suspected had been sold for sex.
Kalea, a 15-year-old Cambodian-American girl who grew up in Oakland, kept coming in to be examined for sexually transmitted diseases, the beginning of a grim cycle of diagnosis and treatment. “I started asking, ‘Are you having sex with new people?’ ” Dr. Chang, 37, recalled. “It was always, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ Eventually she confided that she was worried about ‘a friend.’ That’s when I asked, ‘Are you trading sex for money?’ ”
Emerging from a long, dark tunnel, Kalea slowly began to spill her stories. How her father beat her. The childhood rape. The out-of-control john who tied her up in a motel bathtub and filled it with scalding water.
Quote:
An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 American-born children are sold for sex each year. The escalating numbers have prompted national initiatives by the F.B.I. and other law enforcement agencies, and new or pending legislation in more than a dozen states, most recently Georgia, which enacted a toughened human trafficking law this month.
Frankly, I don't think sex slavery is any "better" for these girls in Oakland and the rest of America than it is for girls in Cambodia or any other country.
Any parent who would sell their kid into the sex trade, for instance, would probably be jailed for life in the US (or close to it).
In SE Asia it's common for authorities to turn a blind eye. Many of these policeman themselves are involved in underage prostitutes, along of course with a lot of foreigners.
In countries like China, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, etc., slavers from big cities will go out to impoverished areas in the countryside and offer families comparatively-huge sums of money for their cute little daughters to come to work for a rich family in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Mumbai, San Francisco, LA, New York... wherever. Chances are good they know exactly what's going to happen, but they do it for the money. Increasingly in China, gangs just straight-up kidnap, and pay off the authorities in little podunks to turn a blind eye. From there, they make their way all around the world via smuggling, fake passports, etc.
In the US, it certainly happens, however we have much more strict laws about it and our authorities are generally harder to bribe; not necessarily because they're intrinsically more moral, but because if there's even an allegation made and it gets to the media or to the feds, you are 100% done for. Different ball game in the developing world... really sick situation. It's obviously a problem wherever it occurs, but I don't think it's quite the same crisis/epidemic level in the US that it is overseas. Not that this means anything to a kid who finds themselves in that situation
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