The Writer's Weekly

Good morning to all.

I read an article in The Montreal Gazette by Donna Nebenzahl that I found particularly disturbing because of its scope and complexity. The article titled Bus stop often the start to a life of misery outlines the fate of a lot of young, vulnerable women here in Quebec. Quebec Youth Protection estimates that several thousand young girls are sexually exploited here, in Quebec. Several thousand!

Apparently the increase in gang activity has increased the number of young women being sold as commodities. Some pimps settle debts by giving their girlfriends to rival gang members for sex as payment. Imagine! There is something so horrifying to me about people's daughters being used and abused repeatedly, and right under our noses.

You might ask why they don't run away from their captors. Well, they have nowhere to go. They either come out of abusive family situation here in Canada or they are from other countries that fear the police and other official authority figures. Often their families are forcing them into this 'better way of life.' So the gangs and pimps don't even need to lock them up. The women would never leave and disgrace their families. And the gangs threaten their families in their home countries so the young women are literally giving up their lives to save their families.

This is a vicious circle.

How can this circle be broken? I'm really not sure. I don't have enough knowledge of the big picture to even hazard a guess. Obviously, conjugal violence, poverty, hopelessness and organized crime are all very big problems that would need to be tackled from many different angles before progress would be made. My opinion, however, is that most of these problems begin at home. I have never understood why we are educated-to-death in our society about everything except the reality of being parents and raising and disciplining children.

When people have children they introduce all their own dysfunctional behaviours and patterns from their childhoods right back into their children's lives. There are very few parents that see the dysfunction of how they grew up and actively do not perpetuate that cycle.

The proof is in the way our society is behaving. I have a friend that is a child psychologist and she told me that there are very few children that are well mentally. After seeing articles in the newspaper about teenagers in crisis and this article today I am beginning to understand what she must see all day every day in her office. She was visibly scared for future generations.

We hear about the atrocities being perpetuated in other countries and I can't help but think we are perpetuating many here as well. People don't seem to care about the women that they ogle at strip clubs or seek sex from at escort services. Very few of those women do what they do voluntarily. Our world has become obsessed with instant gratification--no matter what the cost.

The cost here is human dignity and freedom.

It's too great a cost and horrifying in its implications.