Takis

the night was desert dry and moody as his lion’s lips upon my neck; i could feel him breathing, purring, breathing/

i was taking him to delos where we would spend the night among the lions guarding apollo there/

this is forbidden/

to see the slender cracks between nights and days/

death so wide it shuddered/

to know the ruins and the music in an empty room you spend the night there visible but forever out of the demon’s reach/

the magical dogs running moonlight flash against the darkened blaze of land/

apollo calling our names wrought in suffocation matters to the end/

there are twelve people who live on delos/

we were careful to avoid them/

avoiding the ghosts was a different story/

we were the owners of pain’s abyss/

takis with his emphsis on dying/

melanoma on the underside of his cock/

just below the moist cock’s head down about an inch from the piss hole/

we did not know that then but it had to have been growing, brown cancer spreading to his lymph glands/

you have to peel the foreskin back to see it, and you can really only see it when he’s erect/

We’ve only known for two days, now.

Death’s privilege. They used to sell up to ten thousand slaves a day on Delos. He had enjoyed our small if forbidden adventure to know Delos in the dark. “So how are we getting back,” he signed.

Everyone who has talked to us has cautioned us to not be hopeful.

The morning sun of Delos was in our face. I pointed to our too small boat. “We’ll just turn the wind around.”

There are well-kept statistics accumulated by organizations such as the United Nations (The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, and the additional Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons),  the International Child Sexual Exploitation Image database, and Interpol have lead to greater public awareness of the extent to which the traffic in human beings exists. 

Most of the statistical emphasis has been on females since a majority of the people trafficked are, indeed, female. Numbers are ascertained for females trafficked for sexual exploitation and for labor. Child labor is also tracked. But there are no numbers kept (because there are no numbers collected) as to the traffic of males; especially boys who are trafficked for prostitution. The number of boys trafficked to the U.A.E alone is estimated to be in the tens of thousands. The operant word is estimated. When local law enforcement officials participate in the prosecution of traffickers, more accurate data is en-massed. Many Asian countries are culturally reluctant to participate in data collection because there are cultural prohibitions against recognizing young males within a sexual and social context. 

The African Union is currently attempting to enforce African laws as they regard human being on ships and their access to ships.  There have been, however, no known maritime boarding and seizure law enforcement efforts targeting sexually trafficked children.  If you take the estimated annual number of twelve million people being trafficked, and extrapolate even ten percent (as opposed to an over-inflated fifty) as being male you have one to two million males. Even if you cut that in half, you still have 500,000 to 750,000 males in transit. Even if three-quarters of those are being trafficked for slave labor, you are left with numbers approaching 150,000 boys a year being trafficked for sex. If you take that number and apply a low estimation of HIV Third World infection rate at between fifteen to twenty percent, you arrive at figures between twenty to thirty thousand boys being trafficked who are infected with HIV. 

The African Union’s enforcement paradigm employs the use of ports: both coming and going to and from African locations. So far, no one has been arrested or prosecuted for trafficking boys for sexual exploitation. What is needed is a transnational task force imbued with the powers of arrest whose reach transcends borders. Any such law enforcement entity created to stem the tide in human trafficking should be educated as to how to address HIV/AIDS issues at the immediate point and place of arrest. Within this organization, safe houses need to be established for HIV positive children to live in a safe place that treats their HIV at the same time it provides a safe and confidential shelter from organized crime, parents, and government officials who have colluded with traffickers. Children who will testify against any of these people must be protected and their HIV must be vigorously treated with medical models constructed by the United Nations and the World Health Organization as to accepted treatments.