Slavery never stopped!

Beyond the Neon (2022)

Director: Larry A. McLean

By the first 10 minutes into the documentary, I was hooked. I thought it was going to be some kind of investigative journalism. A daring YouTuber who was bored with his usual pranks and social experiments decided to do something more impactful. The YouTuber Joe Salads and his team found many name cards distributed on the streets of Las Vegas, offering escort and other forms of intimate services. Equipped with hidden cameras and microphones, Salads try to get the services of an escort to document her story in the flesh industry in the Sin City of Vegas.

The team managed to record the conversation for a short while before the female escort scooted off, suspecting something fishy. Footage of this interview made it online and became viral. Someone identified the escort as her lost sister. 

That started the rush to get the sisters reunited. By then, one gets the idea that the whole presentation was scripted. It turned out to be more like a B-list film with bad dialogue creating awareness about the lucrative human trafficking industry right in the heart of the most prosperous country in the world, the USA. 

We know that the flesh industry is as old as the history of mankind. What it turns out to be is that it is as ugly as how slavery turned out to be. It is no different from human slavery, ala the Royal African Company and their shenanigans in the Caribbean. Agents go around scouting for potential workers from their physiques. They are lured by the promise of a better life. By deception or force, the sex workers (aka slaves) are whisked away to the promised land of milk and honey. They are forced to work to the bone but see nothing of their hard work. They are tattooed with specific insignia, much like how Kunta Kinte and his fellow men were branded of ownership with hot irons. 

Freedom for slaves remained an elusive illusion. Most times, the release comes from the soul leaving the mortal body. 

People can scream at the top of their lungs about discrimination and abuse. Are they saying this because the powers that be cannot collect revenue from the clandestine industry? The last we saw, the enforcement team also had their hands deeply entrenched in the cookie jar. It is like civil society asking the British government to abolish slavery in the late 18th century. Taxes from slavery prospered in the kingdom. The burgeoning export of slaves developed the ports of Bristol and Liverpool. The democratisation of the industry just took slave capture from an appointed Royal company to public enterprise, again more slaves and more revenue. It did nothing to the welfare of slaves.

The documentary/drama did, however, highlight that there exist avenues for victims to escape the clutches of their pimps. Annie Lobert, a victim of the sex trafficking ring of 10 years, started a safe house somewhere undisclosed in the heart of Nevada. She has to keep her location secretive as thugs from the industry are hellbent on keeping their merchandise on their watch. Hell hath no fury if anyone would mess with their girls. They even have the state enforcement team under their thumb.

It is a wake-up call. Not everything is glitzy as it looks. Beyond the city's neon lights that never sleep, the Sin City, Las Vegas, thrives a lucrative sex industry where guns, violence, brute force and money speak louder than words. It is not a Sunday School. Jokers may say leave people alone. Let them do what they want. Let them do with their bodies; it is women's empowerment. The reality is that people are threatened and live in fear of death or bodily harm to themselves or loved ones. And it is one way to hell. In a civil society, this should not exist. To think about it, the world never was. As cavemen, we tried to dominate our neighbours for food and accommodation. Then as we became an agrarian society, we needed 'substandard' homosapiens to do our work. Imagine a time when the British were taking Africans for bonded slavery in the Caribbeans. The Vikings and Barbers kidnapped people from the western coast of the UK to sell as white slaves. 

Religion has nothing to do with it. Islam justifies the conquered as loot for victors to be used as slaves. The Church was silent and was, in fact, benefited from the trade itself. The Western civilisation thrived on it. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.