Abolition Wisconsin

Many residents of Wisconsin think of it as an agricultural state where major crime doesn’t exist, but exploring our state history reveals many things most people would not want to admit. References to prostitution are found in Milwaukee newspapers (1) two years after Wisconsin became a state in 1848 revealing that the state was actually a significant hub from the start for what we know as sex trafficking. Bonnie Ripp-Shucha writes that Eau Claire, a center for logging and mining, was also known for brothels every 100 to 150 feet along it’s main thoroughfare. The local workforce, mostly single men with money but no real to way to use it spent it at the brothels. Recruiters for the women in the brothels were “madams” from Chicago or Minneapolis enticing young women with empty promises of an affluent lifestyle. Those recruited found themselves more likely beaten into selling themselves to the men of the camps. Law enforcement did not take much action and legal penalties were uselessly minimal. (2)

History does not have to repeat itself… let’s DEMAND ABOLITION, WISCONSIN!

(1) Online Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, https://emke.uwm.edu/entry/prostitution/, accessed 10 April 2022.

(2) Bonnie Ripp-Shucha, “’This Naughty, Naughty City’: Prostitution In Eau Claire From The Frontier To The Progressive Era”, Wisconsin Magazine of Historical Archives, 1997, pp 33

As reported by Tyler Durden on the ZeroHedge news site, online recruitment of victims of sex trafficking happened “overwhelmingly” via social media platforms. Durden wrote that,

“A stunning new report ties social media platforms – the most prominent of which is Facebook – to “the majority” of online recruitment in active sex trafficking cases. The data was revealed in the Human Trafficking Institute’s 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report, according to CBS. Human Trafficking Institute CEO Victor Boutros said on CBSN Wednesday: “The internet has become the dominant tool that traffickers use to recruit victims, and they often recruit them on a number of very common social networking websites. Facebook overwhelmingly is used by traffickers to recruit victims in active sex trafficking cases.” “

Boutros also said in the interview that, contrary to popular notions, traffickers most often work individually, shrewdly taking advantage of vulnerabilities they already know about to exploit victims they have befriended. These individual traffickers handle small numbers of victims at a time and not large groups in an organized crime syndicate. Read the entire 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report report online by clicking here.

Here are three simple, common sense takeaways from the report:

• Maintain personal integrity and practice around the online content you are accessing as a parent.
• Build and maintain bridges of open communication with your children. Parents are still the number one source of influence in the lives of kids and teens.
• Know what sites your children are accessing and have the tough discussion with them about guidelines, boundaries, and limits.

What you do matters!

A quick search of the Wisconsin news site Channel 3000 showed nine arrests were made in the first four months of 2021 related to child pornography in some way… our children are in the line of fire! As extreme as it may seem to the average observer, men who choose to view child pornography and then eventually molest children or purchase sex with children do so out of a completely distorted reality developed over time.

According to Sarah Paquette, a student who investigated the issue as part of her master’s thesis at the Université de Montréal School of Criminology in 2011, men who sexually abuse children generally blame external factors to explain their actions and diminish their guilt. “Every reason they give is a cognitive distortion,” said Sarah in explaining her work. Her findings supported other studies on the issue.

Lexie Smith, groomed and trafficked as a child, tells her story of abuse, rescue, and recovery on the Exodus Cry blog. It is a wrenching story to read. Pornography desensitized the men who exploited her making her an object completely without human worth. Unless we overthrow our cultural acceptance of all types of pornography the demand for sex trafficking will not end.

Abolish demand… end trafficking!

Six long years, and many attempts in the making, this legislation could possibly be passed in the US House of Representatives in 2020. It is a critical part of eliminating sex trafficking both in the United States and around the world. This would be done through the an annual review conducted by the US State Department that assigns a score on how countries are doing in the fight against sex trafficking, with potential economic sanctions on countries that are consistently ignoring the problem.

Get involved by writing your legislators via this online tool. Use the example text below to write your letter.

Dear Mr. / Mrs. / Ms.
As your constituent I want to bring to your attention, and ask you to co-sponsor, an important bi-partisan bill to combat sex trafficking globally called The Sex Trafficking Demand Reduction Act (HR 4326). Reducing the demand for commercial sex is the only effective way to prevent and eliminate sex trafficking and this bill will be an important and effective way to ensure our nation is doing everything it can to put pressure on countries around the world to take demand reduction seriously. Please co-sponsor and support HR 4326.
Sincerely, ear Mr. / Mrs. / Ms.
Your Name
Your City & State

Find more information on this legislation and the work that Exodus Cry did to keep pushing it along right here.

bigbighouse (and yes, it’s all lowercase!) is the umbrella 501(c)3 non-profit organization that provides legal covering and administration for our two anti-trafficking initiatives. It had it’s start in 2009 in Indonesia and was officially incorporated in Wisconsin in 2012. The IRS approved it as a non-profit in 2013 and we’ve been slowly growing since then.

Abolition Wisconsin is our men’s initiative, hosted at this website. Every Daughter is our women’s initiative. Due to technical difficulties at the host server for bigbighouse we temporarily redirected traffic to Abolition Wisconsin. That problem is solved and the new site for bigbighouse is up and running.

If you happen to be on this site and you’re trying to donate to bigbighouse via our PayPal account, I’ve inserted the donation link below. Thanks for your support and patience!

Donate to bigbighouse via PayPal

Myth: women choose into prostitution. Reality: it’s RARELY a choice.

Women do not want to be prostituted. Instead they experience traumatic force/violence, pervasive fraud/lies, and terrifying coercion/manipulation and that amounts to sex trafficking by the legal definition.

@ExodusCry tweeted a quote from Melissa Farley’s research that “81% of the women in the Nevada legal brothels reported they wanted to escape prostitution regardless of its legal status. They said it is all (legal/illegal) emotionally the same.” – Melissa Farley #notajob #sexualexploitation #bansexbuying

This statistic mirrors research done in the Chicagoland area around 2013 showing 85% of the prostituted women surveyed wanted out.

Stop demand. End trafficking.

Brown County Sheriff, Jim Valley, testifying to the Wisconsin Assembly Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety recently about their online sting operations. They typically receive 200+ responses within two hours of posting a fake sex-for-sale advertisement online and can only deal with 5 of those men. Law enforcement cannot out-arrest the demand.

Exodus Cry and Epipheo teamed up to produce this simple, hard hitting video that we want to share with you…

This is what Abolition Wisconsin is confronting through building up a Prayer Corps of committed men of honor, and then starting a Cyber Patrol using the approach developed by Epik Project.  Men create the demand for trafficking.  Better men can stop it.