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Instead of telling women and girls — and increasingly boys — that their power is in their sexuality, what if magazine editors provided different content? Like this:

Seven things you should know about commercial sexual exploitation

1. What it is.
Commercial sexual exploitation is one of the most lucrative criminal activities in the world. It is a multi-billion dollar a year business that includes prostitution, phone sex, pornography, and nude photos posted on the Internet.

2. Why it’s not a “choice.”

Joy told me that people don’t choose to be prostituted. She was raped at 15, then prostituted or “trafficked” for more than 20 years by pimps and men who claimed to love her.

Walking away wasn’t easy, she said. “You lose your spirit and your will. You can’t trust anyone. Cops are customers too, and once you’re labeled, it’s hard to get out.”

Joy now works with women and girls who are prostituted and men who are court-ordered to attend “john school.” She tells men who have used prostitutes that it is a myth that women choose this lifestyle. It is about lack of choices which turns into a cycle of arrests, poor education, and addiction. We should “stop saying prostitutes,” she said. “This is being done to them. They’re being prostituted.”

3. How to keep children away from sexual predators on the Internet.

Children and teens need rules, clear communication, and supervision when they use the Internet.

Chelsea Snarr of Canada helps children, parents, and organizations know how to avoid the pitfalls of the Internet.

One in four children who are online have had someone they don’t know ask to meet them in person, Snarr said. Yet most children don’t think of an Internet friend as a stranger, and predators use the pretense of friendship to manipulate them. Snarr said that smart kids who would be suspicious of an encounter in person are often taken in online, where there’s no body language or other clues to suggest someone is lying.

4. It can happen to anyone.

Perhaps you can look back on your own life, or the life of someone you know, and think of at least one incident that could have turned out badly.

In high school, adult men would approach me and my friends in malls, on the street, and outside school trying to interest us in making money by “modeling.” Though tempted, we were cautious enough not to act on their invitations, having heard that this was how some strip clubs, porn producers, and so forth hired workers. One deeply guarded secret added to our unease: One of us had been molested by a neighbor when we were pre-teens. So we trusted no one outside of ourselves and our family.

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Four months after she has fled, her husband leaves his home town and seeks her out at her father’s house. In a scene that I’ve heard described as “excessive male bonding,” the woman’s father not only receives the husband gladly, he encourages him to stay for five days of feasting and drinking. We are not told what the woman was doing during this time or what she may have been feeling.

When the husband, wife, and a servant travel back home, they spend an evening in Gibeah, where they are taken in by an elderly man from their own land. The husband is threatened: The men of the city want to rape him. The elderly host resists the townspeople and offers instead his own daughter and the man’s wife: “Ravish them and do whatever you want to them; but against this man do not do such a vile thing” (19:24b). His goal is to protect the husband.

The band of men takes no heed of the host, so the Levite takes charge and uses his own wife as “human retail” to pay the way for his own safety. He throws her out the door, over the threshold of safety, and into the mob of violence-seeking men. She is gang-raped all night long.

At dawn, the men release her. Where should she go? She is an outsider in the land of Gibeah and has been violated and abused by the men there. Her only possible avenue of safety is the very house that had betrayed her.

In essence, she had been sold for the safety of the others who had slept in the elderly man’s house. After making her way back to the elderly man’s house, she falls on the threshold — the horizontal line between life and death for her.
Judges 19 reveals a terrible scene with a horrifying outcome. We discover that the unnamed woman’s relationships are defined by betrayal for the good of the other party. For example, for whatever reason the woman had fled her marriage, it apparently makes no difference to her father, who dines and drinks with her Levite husband when he comes to reclaim her.

Having a daughter married off was more profitable than having her at home, a dependent in the paternal household. The elderly host also betrays the Levite’s wife, for he is quick to offer her in addition to his own virgin daughter as satisfaction for the mob’s violent desires. Most egregiously, her husband betrays her for his own safety. He could do this because as the husband, he had control over her. In the ancient structure of marriage, the wife was dependent on her husband and understood to be his possession.

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