Finding Momentum

The Inter­na­tional Jus­tice Mis­sion is a Chris­t­ian orga­ni­za­tion that fights modern-day human traf­fick­ing. I’m going to spend a lit­tle bit of time intro­duc­ing them to you and tell you why I care about this cause.

The modern-day slave trade

Last semes­ter, a few friends of mine taught a DeCal course on “The Mod­ern Slave Trade”. I had the priv­i­lege of attend­ing one of their ses­sions on modern-day sex traf­fick­ing, its roots and how it rears its ugly head today. On that day and through some sub­se­quent research, I learned:

• Women and chil­dren of little-to-no-education are the most com­mon vic­tims of the slave trade.
• There are 1.2 mil­lion child sex slaves, accord­ing to UNICEF. That’s just the children.
• The sex trade depends on vis­i­bil­ity. Thus, one solu­tion is sim­ple: pros­e­cute hard, drive it under­ground and starve it.
• It could start with kid­nap­ping: drugged food or drinks. It could start with decep­tion: a promise of a bet­ter job in another city.
• Decep­tion is key: you could be tricked by some­body you trust.
• Vic­tims often become per­pe­tra­tors in this twisted world
• Slav­ery can be fought with education

In the course of that ses­sion, we watched an NBC Date­line episode that sent a crew with a hid­den cam­era along with IJM inves­ti­ga­tors to bust a sex traf­fick­ing oper­a­tion in Cam­bo­dia. A brief sum­mary of that episode:

Why I care

I was feel­ing all sorts of things after watch­ing the video: shock, utter dis­gust and anger. I think what par­tic­u­larly riles me about this issue is the utter help­less­ness of the vic­tims and the cru­elty of the per­pe­tra­tors. What is even more dis­gust­ing is how ram­pant human traf­fick­ing is today (it’s in our own back­yard, for heaven’s sakes: Raj Prop­er­ties, any­body?).

The heart­less exploita­tion of another human being is some­thing that we should hate with a pas­sion. We should despise it, con­demn it, get all riled-up when we hear of it. But we can’t stay there; we need to do some­thing about it.

There’s more to come

I haven’t told you yet how I plan to fundraise for this cause. There’s some plan to do some online fundrais­ing, as well as some sort of word-of-mouth work I’d love to have you involved in. I hope to con­tinue writ­ing to fur­ther flesh out my thoughts and feel­ings about this heavy topic.

But I’ll open this up for dis­cus­sion: what are your thoughts about human trafficking?