In many places in the world today, young people are being kept, sold and traded as sex slaves. It’s an epidemic– google it, and you’ll see many ministries trying to combat this evil practice.

The other day on the subway here in New York I saw a teenager with a bag from Hollister. For those of you who don’t know, Hollister is a clothing company (affiliated with Abercrombie & Fitch) that is popular in malls, with its California beach lifestyle themed stores. It is one of the main places teenagers in America shop for clothing.

What bothered me, to the point where I felt compelled to write about it, was the image on the Hollister bag the young girl was holding. To me, it looks like Hollister is using sex to sell clothing to teenagers. The man in the image looks like a boy; the woman looks more like a woman than a girl. They’re embracing in a way that says, “get ready for sex.”

Whether or not this image is of teens or “people over 18″ as the marketers might want to tell me to cover their butts, I don’t want to make a big issue of the models’ ages…what I do want to say is this: Why are we as a culture so accepting of this kind of advertising targeted toward kids?

Abercrombie & Fitch uses shirtless males to sell their clothes. I find it strange that a clothing company trying to sell shirts uses shirtless males to sell shirts. Ok, it’s not that strange– it’s “sex sells.” Hollister is also using this strategy, and it works because Americans from Peoria to NYC gobble this stuff up.

As a culture, do we want our kids– our 12-year-olds, for instance–sexualized? Do we want to encourage 12-year-olds to f#%*? If you’re a responsible adult, you’d reply, “No.” The problem is America has fewer and fewer sensible, responsible adults left, and companies like Hollister are allowed to fill our public spaces with sexualized images with nary a peep from anyone, anymore.

It’s no wonder, then, that a lot of teens are having sex– and whether that’s a good or bad thing is up for debate…what’s more important to think about is this– putting pressure on kids to f#%* (society’s term, not my favorite to use, but it’s what society calls it) leads to a whole lot of abortions, unwanted children, and single mothers struggling to get by because males, in today’s society, often impregnate but don’t love or get along with the women they make babies with.

I don’t want to boycott Hollister, but I would hope they’d re-consider the images they use to sell CLOTHES.