Updated since 2019.

North Carolina’s child sex scandal highlights the epidemic of Illegal immigrant crime on American children.

Although North Carolina’s capital city of Raleigh is more than 1500 miles from the nearest border crossing with Mexico, the children of the Tarheel state have been preyed upon as if they live in a border state. The sheer number of reported sexual assaults reveals the inability of the police to protect the children of the state.

While the number of assaults has gone down in recent months there are still peaks of over 200 offences per month. The number of assaults reached an all-time high of 672 charges in April 2014.

The grassroots organisation NCFIRE keeps track of all charges that are reported by local police in North Carolina but believes the true number of offences and therefore victims to be far far higher. The organisation has over 50,000 members and is always looking for more.

North Carolina however is not the only state facing this epidemic. In Northern Virginia there are over 20,000 child grooming victims every year from immigrant gangs, with an estimated 5,000 gang members in this area authorities have described it as “the tip of the iceberg”.(Gang sex trafficking, a growing trend in Northern Virginia ABC7 2016) The girls who are as young as 12-14 are sold to countless men a night and turn to drugs to numb their pain.

A 2016 report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reveals that the number of domestic child trafficking victims and convictions has increased substantially every year since 2010 in the United States.(United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime 2016) It is clear the problem is in fact getting considerably worse, not better.

In Fresno, California there are “thousands upon thousands” of child grooming victims in the city, where “every middle school” and some elementary schools have been targeted by grooming gangs for victims.(Don’t kid yourself. Sex slaves are all around us – and you may know some of them Fresno Bee November 2017)

In fact, American police have been described as being complicit in the child abuse due to them arresting parents trying to rescue their daughters from the gangs homes where they were being abused on numerous occasions for “menacing” behaviour and threats, with no action taken against those raping and abusing children.(Violent Crime Institute 2016, Washington Post 2016)

America needs to wake up to this stark situation. A nation that cannot protect it’s children does not deserve to survive and will not do so.

As well as runaways, multiple studies have found that many child victims of trafficking had previous involvement in the child welfare or foster care system. Sixty percent of child sex-trafficking victims recovered during an FBI Innocence Lost operation, spanning 72 U.S. cities in 2013, had previously been in foster care or group homes. Reviews of child sex-trafficking cases by law enforcement in other jurisdictions reveal similar numbers: Between 55 percent and 98 percent of child sex-trafficking cases involved children who had prior involvement in the child welfare system.

“One recovered youth told me that, ‘being in foster care was the perfect training for commercial sexual exploitation. I was used to being moved without warning, without any say, not knowing where I was going or whether I was allowed to pack my clothes. After years in foster care, I didn’t think anyone would want to take care of me unless they were paid. So, when my pimp expected me to make money to support ‘the family,’ it made sense to me.’”

Not only are hundreds of thousands of vulnerable American children who are runaways abused and sexually exploited every year, but so are foster children, regular school girls, and even upper-class children in gated communities, no matter the background, any American child can be a victim of immigrant grooming gangs.

This issue is widespread and occurs in every single city and town in the United States, police treat victims as delinquents, often arresting the children who have been gang-raped repeatedly instead of going after the gangs for fears of violence. The gangs themselves know this and act with impunity, able to victimize and abuse thousands upon thousands of children every year, without fear of prosecution or repercussion. Violence is also feared by the victims themselves, who are beaten, threatened with guns, knives, and even murdered if they go against the grooming gangs who have enslaved them. They are helpless, and the epidemic of child sexual exploitation in the United States by gangs is very real.

To read more about the epidemic of child grooming gangs in America read our special report here.