The Sex Trade in St. Louis

All healthy men, ancient and modern, know there is a certain fury in sex that we cannot afford to inflame, and that a certain mystery and awe must ever surround it if we are to remain sane.
GK Chesterton


It is impossible to think a culture that tolerates six year olds being dressed as fantasy nymphettes and paraded about should not leave Catholics entirely unscathed. For reasons we can guess, during this past year, the Archdiocese of St. Louis has begun something of a crusade against pornography, inagurating a program called "As For Me and My House".

If porn is such a big problem the Archbishop feels a need to address it specifically and publicly, the extent of the sex trade in St. Louis should come as no surprise.  The Sunday, January 29, 2011 edition of the St. Louis Post Dispatch ran a front-page story about how a St. Louis based event planner and the U.S. Federation of the Sisters of St. Joseph teamed-up to do something about the problem.



Read this article from the St. Louis Beacon; it is short and lays out the problem.

What it comes to is this: an advocacy group that got its start in Asia where the trafficking of children for sex is rampant, drafted a code of conduct that they wanted to get  hotels to adopt.  Trouble is they don't have much leverage – they'd have to go to the hotels and say essentially "Here, please sign this code of conduct. No, there's really nothing in it for you." But the tiny, seven person company all by themselves do business with around 700 hotels and do have something to offer: training, publicity, and (most importantly) bookings. What Ms. Kimberly Ritter of Nix and her colleagues have done is adapted the advocacy group's code meant for hotels for use by meeting management companies. She's taking a two-pronged approach: 1) try to get hotels Nix work with to adopt the hotel code, and 2) try to get other meeting management firms to adopt the adapted version, which encourages them to try to recruit more hotels.

According to the articles, St. Louis is something of a hot spot for sex trafficking because of geography. Traffickers based (say) in Chicago can drive a sort of circuit to St. Louis, Kansas City, up to Minneapolis, and back home again. A trafficker in KC might drive to St. Louis, up to Minneapolis, down to Chicago, back through St. Louis, and home again. Now add in other cities a day's drive from here. There are lots of them – St. Louis is where the routes overlap. And then there's the strictly local trade.

If all Catholic, Merely Christian, and Jewish organizations in St. Louis that hold meetings here inquire about whether hotels have adopted the anti-trafficking code and processes described in the articles, and begin to demand that they do, we might disrupt some of this. Here in St. Louis, the Millenium Hotel, host of the annual St. Louis Marian Conference, has adopted the anti-trafficking code. If a hotel salesman doesn't know anything about it, refer him to Ms. Kimberly Ritter: we evidently have a terrific resource right here in town.

Back in the day, this sort of thing was called Catholic Action: a specific thing done to promote Social Justice and the Kingship of Christ. Especially given current political and societal trends, it is high time we revive the idea.