Couple Pleads Guilty In Case of Trafficking and Prostitution of a Child

Last January Bruce Lambert of The New York Times reported that...

A police detective and his female companion kidnapped a 13-year-old runaway girl and forced her into prostitution with 20 men at private parties, the authorities said on Wednesday.

Read the quote in context here.

Details of the story, which I first heard about via $pread blog**, are depressingly, predictably classic: runaway girl, gets "help" from a recruiter who evidently straightforwardly *sold* her to the couple, is prostituted to... quite a few of her pimp's customers, is smacked around (by the woman in the couple) for "underproducing," gets a chance to escape and heads straight for the police.

The story resurfaced August 4th of this year when the two traffickers were sentenced to three years for kidnapping.

So what I want to know (my personal bugaboo) is will the erstwhile detective, Wayne Taylor and his partner Zalika Brown be forced to register as child-sex offenders for the rest of their lives once they're released from prison? And what aboutthe 20 men at those "private parties," let alone all the other customers who paid Taylor and Brown for sex with a thirteen year old girl? (And it doesn't matter that Ms. Brown ordered the victim to tell customers she was 19. Last I heard ignorance of the law was no excuse.)

And not to put too fine a point on it, if adult prosecutors aren't interested how about giving child-protective agencies a crack at perpetrators of child-prostitution?

Anyway I think public policy should free anyone who actually *wants* to be a prostitute, or any other kind of sex-worker, to work independently of pimps, predators, pastors, and prosecutors. And I'd like to add that they should *also* be free from unfair and illegal (not to mention immoral, inhumane, and inhuman) competition from pimps, traffickers, and their conscripted and prostituted victims?

So, again, WTF?

[** I've known for a while about $pread Magazine, an independent sex-worker trade publication. I only found their blog a few minutes ago though. --fl]