Enter the chat rooms where men buy and sell children for sex, and you might initially think you're in the domain of avid stamp collectors or car enthusiasts. Men with names like "Daring Dan" and "Chicago Al" express passion for their "hobby." They enthuse about "new product." They trade tips on where to go for highly specialized amenities. They give reviews of their purchases, compare price points and boast about their acquisitions. Senior "mongers" help newbies navigate.
Keep reading and the perpetrators of a multi-billion dollar human trafficking industry show their true colors. They swap info on hotels that look the other way at a constant stream of men checking in with girls who look like they could be their granddaughters. They confer on how to spot cops. They strategize on how to keep their "hobby" a secret from their churches, their children, their wives, their coworkers.
Opening Aug. 30 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, Mary Bonnett's Monger is her fourth play about children and sex trafficking, all produced by Chicago's Her Story Theater. "It's an incredibly lucrative industry. That's what makes it so difficult to fight. A lot of very bad people are making a lot of money," Bonnett said.
Bonnett has been addressing the sex trafficking of minors since 2013, when she debuted Shadow Town, the story of sex trafficking and children, told from the supply side. Her next play, The Johns, depicted the men who buy children for sex. Money Make 'Em Smile is a piece she wrote for seventh graders about how young people their own age are trafficked.
Bonnett has interviewed buyers, sellers and trafficked children firsthand. For years, she's been frequenting the "monger" ( as in "whoremonger" ) chat rooms, anonymous places where men hiding behind pseudonyms and encryption make plans to rape children, then return to boast about their actions. Bonnett's interviews sometimes come from men "in recovery" and are trying to help, but they always are on untraceable burner phones. She's talked to social workers, detectives, school guidance counselors and students. She's heard directly from girls who have been trafficked, whose stories are usually unseen even when they play out in plain sight.
"When I talk to the johns, they don't see what they do as a problem. They'll say, 'I'm a good father, a good husband. This is my hobby,' like its a sport. They don't see the girls as people. They see them as a product. And like any product, they're entitled to get what they've paid for," Bonnett said.
Bonnett's dialogue contains verbatim passages from the chat rooms and her interviews. Monger deals with a "senior monger" in the chat rooms: JB is a high-powered attorney called on to take a statement from the mother of a 16-year-old girl who has been trafficked and murdered. The play was inspired in part by Desiree Robinson, 16, who was found badly beaten and with her throat slit in a Markham garage on Christmas Eve, 2016. The Sun-Times reported that before she died, Desiree made a final Facebook post: "He won't let me leave."
Roughly two million minors are sexually trafficked every year, according to statistics from Ark of Hope and UNICEF. The average age of a child when they are first trafficked is 12. For those who stay in the industry, the average life span is another seven years. Common causes of death include AIDS, malnutrition, drug overdose, suicide and homicide.
The play ties trafficking to toxic masculinity, said Monger director John Mossman. JB, for example, offers to buy his sensitive, artistic son a girl as a means of helping the kid "be a man." When the son snaps after years of bullying and beats up a high school jock, the father is proud. Mossman has a history of directing plays and films that deal with masculinity, but Monger stretched him beyond his comfort zone.
"I've had to limit my visits to chat rooms. They make me feel infected," Mossman said. "I don't like talking about what goes on. But we have to. It's important. You can't intellectualize it. You have to realize it's happening in real life. Every single day. Maybe to people you know."
They are also people in the immediate area. JB was inspired by a real-life Chicago lawyer, Bonnett said. JB's son is based on an interview she did with a high school boy who had been bullied. As for Diamond Jones, the never-seen dead girl at the heart of the play, a version of her story is playing out in the court systems right now.
Charles McFee has pled guilty to recruiting Desiree Robinson into the trafficking industry. He was reportedly promised a $250 "finders fee" for bring Desiree to Joseph Hazley, 33, who was arrested and charged with the sex trafficking of a minor. Antonio Rosales is charged with buying Desiree Robinson, and killing her.
While Desiree Robinson's case continues in court, Her Story is continuing its mission to fight trafficking. The company has donated more than $40,000 in ticket sales to organizations dedicated to fighting sex trafficking.
For those who want to donate to anti-trafficking non-profits, Bonnett recommends the following:
—Traffick Free: traffickfree.org/donate/ .
—CAASE: http://caase.org/donate.
—The Dreamcatcher Foundation: thedreamcatcherfoundation.org/donations/ .
Mongers runs Aug. 30-Sept. 30 in a Her Story production at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave. See GreenhouseTheater.org .
