Super Bowl – parties, team spirit, cakes shaped like footballs. Slavery – beatings, rape, torture. How could those two realities possibly be connected? They’re connected because the Super Bowl is the biggest profit event for sexual slavery in America. Most of us experience the big game as a good excuse for a fun time. But Clemmie Greenlee’s experience wasn’t fun - it was dangerous, demeaning, and depressing.
That’s because Clemmie had been forced to have sex with anywhere from 25 to 50 men EACH DAY of such an event! That’s right. The pimp who controlled her and continually sold her body was just one of many who shuttled their captives from city to city to “work” at large-scale gatherings. And the horrendous life of these young prisoners looks nothing like Hollywood’s lighthearted scenes of lovely girls gathered in the parlor of a brothel waiting to be chosen for a fun romp upstairs.
Ms. Greenlee’s nightmare began when she was kidnapped and raped into submission by her pimp at age 12, and then held in captivity as a sex trafficking victim for decades. According to Forbes, 10,000 women like Ms. Greenlee were brought to Miami for the Super Bowl in 2010. And they were under immense pressure to make maximum profits for their captors. "If you don't make that number (of sex customers), you're going to dearly, dearly, severely pay for it," Greenlee told the Times-Picayune. "I mean with beatings, I mean with over and over rapings. With just straight torture. The worst torture they put on you is when they make you watch the other girl get tortured because of your mistake."
Ms. Greenlee, who is now an advocate for sex trafficking victims in Louisiana, was speaking to a reporter in New Orleans prior to the 2013 Super Bowl. She was trying to raise awareness of the plight of tens of thousands of women help captive right here in the U.S.A. The Super Bowl is “commonly known as the single largest human trafficking incident in the United States" according to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott. (1) But the sex trafficking victims must endure this nightmare every day of their lives until they either die or escape.
They don’t call it “slavery” anymore. They call it “human trafficking.” But the pimps who control these women don’t care what you call it. They just hope that men continue to slap down their money for the right to screw a woman’s body without the slightest thought for the rights of the body they’re screwing. But our awareness and our demands for safety and respect for all women can help Ms. Greenlee to end such nightmarish treatment.
(1) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/03/super-bowl-sex-trafficking_n_2607871.html?ncid=wsc-huffpost-cards-headline
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