PARENTING OR CULTURE DRAWS TEEN GIRLS INTO PROSTITUTION

Grant Swank* | February 28, 2008

Filed Under Conservative Musings, General Politics

J. Grant Swank, Jr.

Which is it? Lack of parenting skills and camaraderie or the lust-baiting culture that sucks mid-teen females into sex rings?

FOXNews reports today that “San Diego police recently arrested Dante Dears, leader of the city’s most notorious child sex ring – but investigators warn he’s only the tip of the iceberg. Though they are trying to control the growing problem of child prostitution, they say the key isn’t so much policing as it is parenting.”

Girls are leaving their houses, not necessarily homes, to go ahunting. Some seem to flit away as far as Mexico. They’re in junior high buildings, but not really. They’re more in the malls and hanging around school grounds, not looking for books, but connections to prostitution.

Police Chief Adolfo Gonzales of the National City Police Department said that such females are from “well-off families being lured into the sex trade.”

When I read that I went back again to the base question: Is it the lack of parenting whatevers or is it the suck-in culture the teens are immersed in?

There are lawmakers in a state capital who want to fine parents of such unruly children. Parents are to be fined $10,000.

Not.

Or maybe Yes. That is, Yes for those parents who don’t care, are out all hours of the night carousing, don’t talk to their kids, don’t eat with their families or spend salaries on booze and gambling.

But there are other kinds of parents — like my wife and myself. We care about our children — all three of them.

But one of our children decided to hold us hostage. We did not know if we were going to wake up alive in the morning. We did not know where he was when he ran away from home for weeks on end. We did not know if our home was going to be pitted with still another hole in the wall. We did not know when we were going to have another police cruiser in our front yard. We did not know when the phone was going to ring to tell us that a principal’s life was threatened.

There were a lot of things we did not know about our middle child. And because of that, we did not know really anything secure about our own futures. We were held hostage by our own child.

He was one of three children who was given candlelit dinners, prayers before meals, church every Sunday, discipline when misbehaving as a youngster, birthday parties and presents, Christmas celebrations with the clan, scolding when he strayed out of line, family vacations, hugs and kisses, books to read, museums to visit, high standards and expectations, and warnings of a dark future if he disregarded the authorities of our society.

But with all that, this middle child decided that he knew better than parents, teachers, principals, policemen and all the other societal fences that are supposed to keep youth from falling off the edge. In other words, he was his own authority; there existed no other. In short, he concluded that he was invincible.

Where did he learn all that strange, deranged stuff?

He learned it from a sub-culture that taught him how to disregard laws, snub his nose at authority, flip over school desks and kick in lockers, caress a knife, love the feel of a gun, kiss up to the drug dealers, skirt through alleyways in the night, bait the cops, and hang out with the toughs in the city.

He learned this in slice-‘em-dice-‘em movies and videos, on television and from demented printed material, from twisted lyrics on CDs, underground gangs and smart aleck heroes who lurk on the dark side.

This sub-culture made a lot of money steering my middle child against his family, teaching him how to undercut the schools. This treacherous club of the subterranean molded my middle child with a calculated and deadly hand.

All the while, our family was held captive behind bars of unbelievable fear. It was a fear that we would never want anyone to live under. It was such fear that we kept a suitcase packed just in case we had to make that hasty escape to save our skins!

You see, when our middle child was small, we could handle him. But when he became a teen, he was taller than the rest of us, could outrun the rest of us, could smack the rest of us to the ground.

There were no 911 numbers we could call, no agencies to step in, and no authority figures trained to rescue us. We, the all-American apple pie, flag waving middle class decent family, were victimized, imprisoned, and strapped down by our own.

We were left to the “mercy” of our middle child. We were left to the “mercy” of the perverted sub-culture that was playing surrogate parent to our middle child.

So I say to the lawmakers who plan to do in the decent, law-abiding parents of unruly children, think again before you lasso us with a $10,000 fine on top of the hell pit we already inhabit.

Don’t fine us. Fine the sub-culture of death and destruction that exists daily to do in our children. That’s where you can start in hopes of bringing about a needed change to our communities.

Don’t wipe out those already exhausted in the fray. Go after the real villains who tie up our children, then hang them from the noose, letting them twist in the winds till they die.

Contributor's website: http://jgrantswankjr.blogspot.com/

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