So, you think only women can be sex slaves?

I read a piece in the the New York Times last night about boys recruited by Afghan police to be child soldiers, and even more frequently, sex slaves.

As a victim myself, I can only slightly empathize.  But really, I can't.  Can you imagine being an eight or nine-year-old boy that is kidnapped, forced to be a sex slave and shunned by people around you who don't have human rights themselves?  In the Arabic and Islamic world, pedophilia and homosexuality are far from accepted, but Afghanistan is different.  This sexual trade of adolescent boys isn't anything new.  It's a tradition that has been going on for centuries called bacha bazi.

See this article: http://articles.cnn.com/2009-10-26/world/ctw.afghanistan.sex.trade_1_boys-afghan-dance?_s=PM:WORLD.

The term "bacha bazi" literally means playing with boys.  Sick isn't it?  The only good thing to be said of the exiled Taliban is that they banned this practice, and now that the Taliban is gone, the tradition is running rampant again.

I'm constantly amazed at the cruelty of humanity.  So here's a new one to gasp at.

Making a difference is exhausting...

I'm just trying and I never know if I'll get anywhere.

Making a difference is a difficult thing.  When you look around you at people who are so content to be mediocre, why not join them?  I mean, everyone is trying to make it right?

I'm trying to make it.  I work around 30 hours a week.  I have a seven day work week this week, actually.  I have assignments and stories required of me in other places.  And sometimes, I don't get enough sleep.  And still I fail.

Sometimes my life demands so much of me.  I shy away from it.  I know why I do that, too.  After everything I've been through I have been so determined to not be a failure.  Failing would be anything less than amazing.  I don't feel amazing anymore.  I'm trying to see where my own thoughts and wonderings fit in.  And I don't want to give to something that isn't for me or isn't going to work.

I see kids my age who are bogged down with their own problems.  I'm sad for them.

The bad thing about being a victim of some sort is that you don't trust or care for anyone.  It's hard to love anyone else when you can't love yourself.  It's hard loving me when I don't see the fire I once had for this thing called writing.  I once loved it.  But now, I think I'm scared of it.  That's why I don't have much to say.  I'm afraid of what I might find.

Along with this, I don't care for the average person.  Part of me despises him.  I serve him for hours on end and get a two dollar tip.  The average person isn't considerate.  I guess that is why I try so hard to do everything at once, not let people down, be considerate...but deep down inside, I think it's letting myself down at this point.

Reasons why we shouldn't blog...

It seems like it's easy to blame a bloggers for the crap on the internet.  I mean after all, they aren't even real journalists, or are they?

Daniel Cavanagh doesn't consider himself a journalist.  Perhaps this is why he doesn't consider it ethically wrong to interview people and not mention that they might be recorded, or that the information they give would be used for a blog.  To many journalists, this is ethically wrong.  But what is a blogger?  Does writing about subjects in their community require them to adhere to the same standards as journalists?

With the struggle and eventual death of newspapers, the fate of news both locally and nationally lays in the hands of people like Daniel Cavanagh, but what are the rules to play by?  The Los Angeles Times isn't as highly regarded as it once was, with people complaining about the lack of content or the lack of class of the Times.

But what can be expected?  News is evolving and it looks like blogging is becoming a more legitimate source of news.   It's replacing the big city papers, and spring up in small towns where newspapers haven't been.  It's easier to do, but ethics and accurate reporting still need to be trademarks of news sources.  Without these, blogging is just a bunch of meaningless blab.

For me, blogging is a tool.  It's to spread the word, and maybe Cavanagh considers it to be so, as well.  For him, it helps him expose things, and I want to expose things myself.  If it ticks people off, then so be it.

So, it begins...

Have you ever had a feeling about something, so terrible and deep that it makes your stomach split in two? This is how I feel every time I think about my first year in college.

Here, I am starting a blog for women.  This a list of things that women should know about abuses, whether physical or mental, against other women.  These abuses can occur in the United States, but they can also cover topics such as trafficking, prostitution, and cultural differences between American women and women around the world.

I am very interested in topics that affect women.  I was raped the first week of my freshman year in college.  I went to a college pool party by myself, and a guy put something in my drink.  I passed out within thirty minutes and the last thing I remember was him putting me in his truck.  I woke up paralyzed and face down on a bed to someone raping me.

I come from a fairly small town.  I began my adult life very naive, but after the first week, that all changed.

I didn't tell my parents for seven months.  The night I was kidnapped, the man who took me had purposefully stashed my purse with my phone and keys at his friend's apartment.  When I woke up, all I can remember is asking where my clothes were, where my purse was.  And each time he would answer that we would get them in the morning.  My parents had been calling me all night and I never answered.  There's nothing like a parent's instinct.  Usually I call every day, if even just to say hi.  But I hadn't that Tuesday night.

They called my Residential Advisor (RA), but she said that I wasn't opening my door and that I was probably asleep.  

The next day, when he took me to get my purse, I said nothing.  I really think he believed that I didn't remember any of it.  I called my parents and lied about how I had taken some allergy pills and passed out.  Then I went to French class, only to get up and leave in the middle of it to throw up something bright yellow.

When I went back to my dorm, I told myself I would never speak of it, that I would forget, but I didn't.  I threw myself into work and getting straight A's in all of my classes.  My parents were proud.  I was excelling.  Well, at least that's what they thought.

I finally told them months later, when my managers at work were worried about me.  Just the smell of a certain cologne would send me into chills and sobs.  I would have to leave work because the smell of him sent me back there.

Four years later, I still have nightmares and major scars because of that one night.  I am past it, for the most part though.  Over the last couple of years, it has been my goal to take this experience and try with the best of my ability to stop it from happening to other women.

But it does happen, every day.  Women all around the world are subjects of sexual and physical abuses.  Women are discriminated against, treated as property, drugged, raped, beaten, and even ostracized for their terrible circumstances.   With this blog, I will come up with a list of things women need to know about these abuses, how to escape them, and how to deal with the aftermath.