This is what it is

“By the time i was 14 or 15, I came to this existential crisis. I was really mad, really angry, […] so I took up judo and karate. And every time in school a bully was molesting or being aggressive to a girl, I was there to defend her.”

“When I started doing journalism in Southeast Mexico, I kept going to these small Mayan towns to interview women, because I wanted to explain to the world how poverty and racism were affecting them. But they didn’t want to talk about poverty or the lack of food, they wanted to talk about domestic violence.

So after a while, after interviewing all these people, I had a radio programme. And here I was, talking about domestic violence, and the rights of women, and all of a sudden one day […] the producer starts banging at the window, […] so I open the door and there’s like 25 women, standing there going “Lydia, thank you, thank you for opening the radio, […] we’re leaving our husbands, you’re right, we have rights and this is not fair, we’re leaving.” So I told them, okay, let’s go to social services and find out what you can do. […] And [the woman at social services] was like “Oh no no no, ladies, go back home, behave well, cook the meals and stop complaining.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. So I gathered a group of friends and told them, we have to open a house, a big house where women […] can go with her kids, so she won’t be mistreated and can get a new life. So I opened a big shelter and I called it the High Security Shelter for Battered Women.”

“I dressed up as a prostitute, and I got in [brothels], infiltrated some clubs in which I knew were teenage girls, and I found clubs that had 12, 13 year-old girls, in the Dominican Republic, in Mexico, in the US, in Japan, in Cambodia. […] I was able to see, and count, how many little girls were in the brothels. In a very small area in Mexico City, I found 140 little girls, younger than 10 years-old, that were exploited sexually, and the police cars were outside there, protecting the pimps. So I documented this, and you can read it in my book, Slavery Inc. […] I wanted to explain to people how clients thought. [I talked to] some of these clients, from Europe, in their 40s, all of them married, some of them doctors, journalists, writers—I dressed up [as a prostitute] and […] they told me all their stories, and I wrote one chapter specifically on the clients. 

And I kept hearing this story over and over again in many countries: […] “You know, I’m happy, my wife is fun, she’s beautiful, I have these kids and everything is okay at home, but you know, I don’t know what happened to European women. […] They want to tell you when they want to have sex and when they don’t. I like Latin women because they’re so submissive, they’re so obedient. […]” That was a question I kept asking European and Mexican and American men—why do you go to these places? Aren’t you aware that these young women might be slaves? And they could have a joyful, happy, free sex life, and not have to be enslaved like this, and forced to have sex, or raped? And what they said was, “We miss the way women were. And we like this. How manhood feels like.”

And I think that’s one of the biggest secrets of the sex slavery industry. Men. […] It has become a tremendous burden for women in every country in the world, because 93% of all NGOs that work to rescue girls and boys and women, or work on psychology groups to help them go through the trauma of being enslaved—are women. Women who have a career, who have a life, and then on top of that are activists because they want to change things. Yesterday in Melbourne somebody said “Sex slavery is a woman’s problem.” And I said “It has become a woman’s problem, because men are not working with us to end slavery.” The male population is not only responsible for this terrible crime around the world, they are also responsible for not doing anything about it.”