Author Visit with Peggy Kern, 12/12/16

On Monday, December 12th, Peggy Kern visited our class to talk about her book, Little Peach. Little Peach is about a girl named Michelle who runs away from her home and gets seduced by a pimp. He brings her home with him and takes advantage of her by forcing her to have sex with men so he could make money. Peggy Kern talked to us about sexual trafficking in the streets of New York, the different types of prostitution, some individual stories of girls she talked to, and why people initially get caught up in the sex trade. She told us about one girl named Dianne. She was trafficked at a very early age and she is still in the sex trade right now. Peggy met her while investigating different gangs that usually run the trade. Dianne was a really brave women, because although she was married to someone in the gang, she still gave information to Peggy and the police. Hearing her talk about these stories gave me another view on sex trafficking. I developed a deeper understanding of what the victims went through. The stories were like a completely new perspective on sex trafficking that wasn’t coming from a website or a statistic. Peggy went on to contrast the reality of sex trafficking to the fictional movie, Taken. In this movie, a girl is kidnapped during her vacation and brought into the sex trade. Then her father attempts to go rescue her. This is completely unrealistic, mostly because girls aren’t usually kidnapped into the trade. They run away and are seduced by pimps. Later, I watched the trailer to Taken, and I understood what she meant. In the trailer, sex trafficking was dramatized, and somewhat glorified. Watching this gave me another goal for the project: show the reality of sex trafficking.She showed us some pictures of girls she had met and she gave our group some organizations to talk to. I really enjoyed listening to her talk and I learned a lot about sexual trafficking.

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