Reality of Modern Day Slavery

My family was so poor. I had no future, she recalled. When he came to my town and offered me a job in America I knew this was my way out. I left with him the next day. He told me I could achieve my dreams. He even reminded me that I could send money home to my family. I could help them! My dreams were coming true. When we arrived in America, I was amazed by the homes and cars and children playing outside with toys. It was a world which I had never seen. We pulled up to a building in the city which didn’t look as kind as those houses we’d passed by. But I was happy to be here—to start a new life. He brought me inside and told me to rest here while he went out. He said he would be back after a bit. They fed me and I slept. After several hours, I had a bad feeling in my stomach. I sat on the bed waiting for him to come for me. But when the door opened, it was not him. A tall man with a large belly walked in. He grabbed me by the arm and began dragging me into another room. I fought him—kicking, screaming, and biting—but he was relentless. With a single blow to my jaw he knocked me unconscious. Days later when I woke up, I was locked in a room, chained to a bed. In that moment, I realized my dreams were not coming true.

            Many believe slavery has ceased to exist in the modern-day society in which we live, but this is simply not true. Each year, 1.2 million girls are forced into human sex-trafficking. Often referred to as modern-day slavery, the sex-trafficking industry has a current market value exceeding $32 billion.

By the end of this year, human sex-trafficking is predicted to be the number one crime world-wide. This is no suprise because right now the buying and selling of drugs is the highest crime, but with dugs you can onl buy and sell one time. When it comes to women and children, however, you only buy once but sell over and over again.

With girls being trafficked from 127 countries around the globe and exploited in 137 countries, there is no end in sight to this horrific form of slavery. Hearing this statistic made me wonder, okay this seems like a lot of contries, but aren't there hundreds and hundreds of countires in the world? Actually, it turns out there are only 194 countries in the world today, and girls are being trafficked into 137 of them. This is astounding to me.

While this is a world-wide epidemic, it is happening in our own backyard as well. Believe it or not, between 14,500 and 17,500 young women are being trafficked in the United States alone each year. The average of these girls is a mere fourteen year old, but recently there have been increasing numbers of girls being trafficked who are merely 5 and 6 years old in the US. Over 300,000 children here in the States are currently at risk to become victims of trafficking.

Every TWO MINUTES a child is being prepared for sexual exploitation through this miserable industry, some being forced to have sex with forty different men a night. How does one’s mind even comprehend such slavery?

These statistics are difficult to read and even more challenging to comprehend, but we MUST remember each one of these precious girls has a story to tell. They are someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s friend. It is the responsibility of this generation to stand up and give these girls a voice when their own has been taken. Through the uniting of women with a passion to see these girls not only rescued, but set free from the physical, psychological, and emotional pain inflicted upon them, an end to this modern-day human sex-trafficking industry can be attained.  

            Personally, I had no idea such slavery was in existence within my generation until about a year ago when I heard the testimony of a young girl who was victim to such crime. Hearing the horror of her story and past was indeed horrendous and sickening. But as she continued to share about the freedom she had found in her life after being rescued out of the trafficking world, I became very interested in somehow being involved. Not only did she speak of physical freedom, but also emotional and psychological freedom which she found was only possible in coming to know Jesus Christ as her savior. I knew from experience that Jesus was the only way for me to overcome my past as well. It was in this moment that the Lord began the process of breaking my heart for these women.

Mercy or Justice?

            For the past eight months, as God has been breaking my heart for these girls who are enslaved by human sex-trafficking, I have spent hours, days even, brainstorming, planning, thinking, and dreaming of ways to get them out of their enslavement. My mind has so deeply focused in on the girls trapped right now. The girls waiting for us to come for them…to get them out. As a result of this mindset and vision, all of my efforts have always been focused on after care. I mean, here I am knee-deep in trying to raise $10,000 to build a Safe Home for the girls trapped in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It has truly become something I live, eat, and breathe at times. And honestly, I would not change it for the world. I love what I get to do. It is a privilege and gift to play just a small part in doing SOMETHING.

            And yet, somehow, my thoughts have never migrated to consider any methods of helping these girls in any way outside of after care. For some reason or another, I have never taken time to consider that perhaps getting them out of the red light district may not be the only answer to the growing crisis. Of perhaps, even the least effective method of helping them. I don’t claim to have all the answers…this is something difficult for me to come to terms with, difficult for me to rationalize really. But I think that it IS something we need to be talking about…we need to be thinking about. Even if the truth is painful.

            I heard an activist, Rob Morris (founder of Love 146) share some profound and challenging truth regarding the battle between after care and prevention of human trafficking. Rob strongly believes that we need to focus our efforts on prevention.

I want you to consider this story. Picture a huge cliff. You are standing at the bottom of the cliff taking in this scene before you. Many people are falling off of the cliff. There are ambulances waiting at the bottom, to rescue the people after they fall off of the cliff. The ambulances drive in a continuous stream, picking up the dead or injured victim, racing them to the hospital, then returning for the next victim. Just picture an ongoing cycle of ambulances circling from the bottom of this cliff to the hospital and back again. Then we must ask ourselves, how much good are the ambulance drivers doing? I mean, yes they are rescuing the people and sometimes saving a life. More often then not, however, the fall proves to be deadly, leaving the paramedic helpless to save the individual. There is no doubt, the ambulance drivers are continually fighting for the victims, working as hard as they possibly can to save them, to fix them. They are truly brokenhearted for the injured and dying. But there comes a point, where they can’t play God…they cannot bring the dead back to life. There is only so much they can do to manage the situation.

Suddenly, one of the ambulance drivers stops what he is doing. The others yell to get his attention, urging him to keep fighting for these victims. He resists, still paused in mid-action. His eyes have drifted from the plight of the hurting patient who lies before him, as his eyes move upwards. He is frozen, gazing up at the edge of the cliff. He sees another one fall. Hears the thud as the young woman’s body collides with the hard ground. He hears the paramedics racing to her aide. And then it hits him.

A hard, unimaginable, incomprehensible truth. He stands up and walks away from the man he was supposed to be saving. He gets in the ambulance and drives away. Everyone is astounded, confused, angry even. How could he just abandon the hurting, the dying, the broken? This man needs his help!

Several hours go by and the paramedics, still cycling through and helping the hurting victims, feel the ground begin to tremble. Some rocks begin to tumble down the side of the cliff with the great vibrations. A continual humming sound fills their ears. Their attention is drawn upwards. As their eyes move to the top of the cliff, they are completely astounded.

They see the man. The one who abandoned his patient. One of their own, up atop the mountain. In his hands he holds a large machine from which the noise echoes down. He is using it to dig a hole in the earth. They yell for him to stop, stop because the rocks are falling on them! He ignores their pleas, once again.

An hour goes by, he has plowed several holes into the rocky earth. He finally sets his machine down and returns to the ambulance. Out of the back he removes a wooden post. He walks to the edge of the cliff, gazing down at the men still completely confused by his blatant lack of obedience to their commands. He raises the wooden post into the air. A large thud sounds as he slams it into the hole he had drilled into he rocky earth.

At this moment, it clicks. In this moment, the paramedics realize that he left his ONE injured patient so that he could go to the top of the cliff and build a guard rail so that the people would stop falling of off the cliff. He abandoned the ONE to prevent the imminent injury and death of MILLIONS. He stopped reacting and decided to think.

Often times, especially as Americans, we just react to things. We see the face of an 8-year old girl who has been sold by her dad in exchange for $50. We hear how she is raped by 40 men every single night. We are told that we can help her, we can save her. So naturally, what do we do? We REACT! Of course we react. If someone didn’t react to something like this, honestly I would think something were wrong with them!

But this creates a problem. We react out of emotion, out of our pain, out of a desire to help this young girl, but we don’t think. We just instantly want to do something, anything. I find myself doing this all the time. And if I am really vulnerable, I don’t think that I REACT for her. I think that I react for me. I react by doing something because I know that I could not live with myself if I didn’t. Do I truly desire to help this broken young woman? OF COURSE I DO! It sickens me to think that she should have to spend so much as one more night in such a hell as she is in. But I react for me. Instant gratification, in the most unspeakable manner. I react so that I can feel better…so that I don’t have to feel the deepening burden of her pain, that seems to mold itself into everything I am, everything I feel.

As activists, as givers, as believers with a heart and passion for seeing these girls walk from enslavement to the freedom of the Gospel, we have got to stop reacting and start THINKING. Americans never think, we just react. We are so much better at doing mercy then doing justice. Mercy produces immediate results. It lends a quick solution to a colossal problem. On the other hand, justice takes time. Justice is more complicated. Justice encompasses a need to actually go in and deal with the systems which could be unjust, the systems with protocol, the systems with bias, the systems with traditions and methods which have been standing for decades. Fighting the systems, the mindsets, the plan…that takes time. It takes it out of you. It really is a seemingly endless and ever-increasingly difficult battle to do justice for these girls. So, what do we do? We continue to do mercy, to do what is easy and gratifying to us.

This forces me to GO THERE…to that unspeakable place. Do we realize that by doing Mercy, we are essentially driving the ambulances in circles, saving one or two here and there, but bringing more to the hospital dead then alive? Do we understand that doing Justice means building the railing at the top of the cliff? And if we are able to grapple with this to the point of coming to terms with it, then will we have the selflessness essential to abandon Mercy in favor of Justice?

Let me explain what this means for me, and why it is such an unimaginable battle in my mind. A few weeks ago, I had this dream. I was in a red light district somewhere in another country. I was just watching a scene play out. After a few minutes, I realized who I was. I was posing as a client. I walked into a brothel where girls lined the outskirts of a large, dark, eerie room. I will avoid going into too much detail, but I saw one girl. She could not have been more then 6 or 7 years old. She stood out from all the others. She was literally burrowed into a very small hole in the wall. Her long dark hair gently covered a good portion of her face. I walked towards her. All I wanted to do was hold her and tell her it was all going to be okay. I was about six steps away from her, when a man stepped in my path. He wasn’t a stranger, but a friend. He was there with me, to help me. Excuse me, I nudged him gently, I need to go over there and get her, I explained. Courtney, you can’t go any further. We are not here to save these girls. We are here to get on the inside in order to break this trafficking ring. You cannot save her. You may not be able to save any of these girls here tonight. But when we get to the bottom, when we break this ring, hundreds of girls will escape. We are not here for the ONE today. We are here today for the HUNDREDS next month.

I mean, where do I even begin in what an incompressible horrific crisis this brings me to. It is a moment in which I must determine whether I will display Mercy or Justice? After care or prevention? I am still wrestling this out hourly, it seems. The ONE…she does matter. From the very beginning, I have always fought for people to understand that these are not just numbers, not just statistics, but that these are real girls with real stories with real feeling with people who love and care about them somewhere. I mean, Jesus cares about the ONE. He sees her, He knows every hair on her head, He has plans for her future, He desires to give her a hope, He loves and has compassion for the ONE. In His eyes, she is the most important girl in the world…she has value, she has worth, she has a divine purpose and calling on her life. As I have spent hours crying out, begging Him to give me HIS eyes, His eyes so that I can see the ONE.

So how in the world so I begin to reconcile the plight of the ONE in exchange with the plight of the 1.2 million girls who are trafficked every year? How do I reconcile the plight of the ONE with the reality that every 2 minutes two more girls are exploited? How do I heed the call of God on my life to tell the ONE that she is worth it, that she is a beloved daughter of the Most High King, that she has a purpose and this is NOT it, all the while heeding the call to prevent future ONES from ever becoming enslaved to such horror? How do I tackle Justice in the midst of Mercy?

"Victims of injustice don't need our spasm of passion; they need our legs & lungs of endurance." -Gary Haugen

What Keeps You Awake at Night?

Recently, I was asked this question:

What keeps you awake at night?

I would respond to that by saying, do you really want to know what keeps me awake at night? I will tell you, truthfully, and yet the truth is ever so painful. In my place of pain, in her place of pain, I will tell you.

I lie awake at night because I hear her cries. I see him approach her shanty. I watch as he walks inside. I hear as he grunts hello. I feel, as her entire body begins to tighten up. I know the helplessness as she lays back, unable to bear his weight. I see the terror as her innocent eyes double in size. I smell his slimy breathe as his steady inhale and exhale cause the hairs on her arms to rise in alarm and the spread of chills down her spine. I hear her cries of agony and helplessness. Again and again and again. Then silence.

I watch him rise up. I hear as he hisses goodbye. I feel, as her entire body begins to crumble. I know the numbness as she attempts to sit up, unable to carry the weight of her life. I see the guilt in her shameful eyes as she struggles to look anywhere above the ground. I smell the stench of death hovering in the air which lingers in her tiny room. I hear her weeping in torment and hopelessness. Again and again and again. Then silence.

Night after night, I hear her cries.

I lie awake at night because she NEVER leaves my mind.

SHE is what keeps me awake at night.