FILMS
Dan Rather Reports: Pornland, Oregon
Each year hundreds of thousands of adolescent girls are manipulated into America’s illegal sex trade. It’s considered by many to be modern day slavery and it’s happening big time in a city your might not expect…Portland, Oregon. Surrounded by rivers and majestic mountains, the picturesque city of Portland is often referred to as a model American city. But there is another side to Portland, a seedier side. The city has more strip clubs per capita than Las Vegas, and with all-nude shows and numerous sex stores, Portland has been dubbed “pornland”.
It’s not surprising that where you find strip clubs and sex stores, you’ll most likely find prostitutes. But what is surprising, is that Portland is becoming a major center for underage trafficking. Our investigation found a growing number of teenage girls being pressured into prostitution by smooth talking “boyfriends”, aka pimps, who wine and dine them before forcing them to sell their bodies on the street or sites like Craigslist.
Playground
Sexual exploitation of children is a problem that we tend to relegate to back-alley brothels in developing countries, the province of a particularly inhuman, and invariably foreign, criminal element. Such is the initial premise of Libby Spears’ sensitive investigation into the topic. But she quickly concludes that very little thrives on this planet without American capital, and the commercial child sex industry is certainly thriving. Spears intelligently traces the epidemic to its disparate, and decidedly domestic, roots—among them the way children are educated about sex, and the problem of raising awareness about a crime that inherently cannot be shown. Her cultural observations are couched in an ongoing mystery story: the search for Michelle, an American girl lost to the underbelly of childhood sexual exploitation who has yet to resurface a decade later.
Executive produced by George Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Steven Soderbergh, and punctuated with poignant animation by Japanese pop artist Yoshitomo Nara, Playground illuminates a sinister industry of unrecognized pervasiveness. Spears has crafted a comprehensive revelation of an unknown epidemic, essential viewing for any parent or engaged citizen.