It’s possible that Lawrence Taylor may not have known that the skinny Latino girl he is accused of paying $300 to have sex with was only 16.
It’s possible that Taylor, the 51-year-old NFL great once known as LT, who now faces charges of statutory rape in New York, didn’t know that fear, not greed or wantonness, was what brought her to his hotel room recently.
Then again, it’s also possible that Taylor, like many other men whose lust blinds them to reason and obviousness, didn’t want to know those things. Didn’t want to see her black eye or know that the girl he ordered up like a Domino’s pizza wasn’t a sex worker fulfilling a business proposition, but a child who had been beaten and coerced into having sex with strangers.
And in that respect, Taylor, who lost his contract with NutriSystem Inc. over the charges – and may lose his freedom if convicted, isn’t that much different from the scores of men out there who enrich human traffickers like Rasheed Davis, the girl’s alleged pimp, by clinging to the belief that prostitution is a victimless crime.
The belief is especially obsolete now – especially in a world in which family and neighborhood dysfunction have led many young girls like the runaway Taylor allegedly raped to scramble to find love and acceptance from men, only to wind up being exploited and abused by them.
But even though the girl that Taylor is accused of having sex with is Latino, the fact is that young black girls – girls who look like Taylor’s own daughters – are increasingly becoming victims of sex traffickers.
And not much attention is being paid to their plight.
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, some 800,000 children younger than 18 are reported missing each year. Out of that number, around 33 percent are black – and nearly half of those are girls.
Anti-trafficking awareness groups, such as Change.org, say that many of those black girls wind up in strip clubs and in brothels. Sometimes they are sold into slavery by a parent who is addicted to drugs.
Cities with high black populations, such as Atlanta, have become havens for child prostitution and sex trafficking.
Yet human trafficking is, for the most part, thought of as something that happens to pale, skinny, Eastern European girls looking to find modeling careers or nanny jobs in the West. Or Latino or Asian girls lured to the United States with the promise of a factory job and three squares a day – only to wind up imprisoned in a desert trailer or a building basement to service several johns a day.
But that kind of thinking ignores the fact that the same kind of societal dysfunction that causes Eastern European and foreign-born Latino and Asian girls to wind up as sex slaves is the same kind of dysfunction that is behind the trafficking of young black girls.
Like their foreign counterparts, many young black girls come from impoverished situations, longing for money, love and esteem. This is especially true of young black girls – the majority of whom are growing up with no father in the household, and who have never had the chance to see what healthy male relationships look like.
They are also growing up in the era of Lil’ Kim, Superhead and neighborhood strip clubs; where black girls confuse love and desirability with overt sexualizing.
Such girls are perfect prey for pimps like Rasheed Davis.
It’s anyone’s guess as to what fate will befall Taylor. But if nothing else, his predicament ought to provide a teachable moment for any man out there who persists in believing that …..
