World Changer

The 60,100

"She lied to me that I was going to a house to babysit. Instead, she sold me to a brothel." — PhhoungAt age 13, Cambodia Girls like Phhoung are held captive in a brothel and often forced to serve 8 to 12 "clients" every day. We praise God for the opportunity to care for those who are rescued. They're often drugged and beaten if they don't obey.

My stomach lurched. Tears welled in my eyes. I wanted to un-see everything I had just read, but I couldn't. In November of 2014, when I read the Christmas catalog for World Vision, I hadn't given much thought to human trafficking. Sure, I had seen Pretty Woman and heard about Taken but I was unprepared to realize the reality of sex trafficking. The End it Movement describes human trafficking as "when someone is taken away from their home, family, or community and transported to another city or country, many times under a false promise of employment or a better life. Victims are stripped of their identity, then forced to work against their will, with no hope or way to return home." The majority of the time, this results in being forced into sex. God continually has been revealing this issue to me, but especially in the context of the United States, where "there are an estimated 60,100 people trapped in slavery" (). The average age of a girl to enter the trade is between ages 12 and 14. That means there are girls older and there are girls younger. Sex trafficking ranks as the second highest grossing illegal crime organization, producing more revenue annually than Google, Amazon, and Ebay combined at $150.2 billion a year (). It's the crime hidden in plain sight and happening all across America and the world.

Some big questions come to mind after realizing these facts:

How do girls end up in brothels? In America, there are three different ways:

1. Force is when a girl is kidnapped by a pimp and sold to a brothel, where she is held as a prisoner. One highschooler in Atlanta was kidnapped while walking home from the school bus when a man in a white van kidnapped her and sold her to a brothel. This brothel happened to be inside of a $1.5 million home, owned by a doctor and nurse couple.

2. Fraud is when a pimp poses as someone who he isnt' (a model agent, potential boyfriend, etc.) in order to kidnap a girl.

3. Corrosion is when a pimp blackmails a woman into bondage.Source: Susan Norris 

  Who is involved in this? Pimps, like slaves in sex trafficking, come in all races, ages, and genders. I learned of a real event where a 17 year old male student was pimping out his classmates. Pimps are in it completely for the money, making on average $35,000 a week. In addition, between 1994 and 2010, an estimated 15-20% of all men in the United States of America payed to have sex with a prostitute at least one time in their life. () I assume that the percentage is actually much higher than this, as thousands of men remain silent. In addition, this doesn't account for the men in America who have raped other men or women. (Rape and sexual molestation is a huge initiator for people resorting to prostitution.) 

  Why do pimps do this? Knowing that pimps can be teenagers or fifty year old men, where does it start? What makes them view women as commodities? What gets them into this evil, evil trade?

Porn

Porn is a new drug that is rampant in men and womens' lives today. I heard about a former pimp who was a husband, had two kids, a steady job, and even attended church. He seemed completely normal; in fact, no one knew that he was a pimp. After he was caught, he said that getting into the trade started at 11 years old when a man showed him a porn video. Then it became an addiction.God gave us dopamine for a reason. When this hormone is released, it tells our brain that we're happy. This is the same hormone that is released when getting high off of marijuana. And when watching porn. "Because of its addictive nature, in order to just feel some sense of normality, an individual usually needs an ever increasing dosage of porn. The material that they seek out also evolves. Over time, their appetite pushes them to more hardcore versions to achieve the same level of arousal." () Porn is a drug, just like marijuana, cocaine, and meth. You get high off of pot but after a while it doesn't work anymore. So you switch to cocaine. Then meth. It's the same with porn. It starts with viewing a Victoria Secret commercial or a sex scene in a movie. Then it advances to watching pornography. Progressively, this doesn't create the same "high" so the user will start watching more "hard core" porn.The fighting slogan of Fight the New Drug is "Porn kills love." And that couldn't be all the more true. Porn portrays sex as violent, nasty, and manipulative. It sexualizes women, equating them to a possession. Sound familiar? This is exactly the view pimps have on women they sexually exploit.What can we do to stop this?

For the first time in human history, we have a platform to the world and it's through social media. So raise your voice! Create awareness for this epidemic because so many people don't know the facts. If you're a volunteer and a relational type of person, find corporations where you can help girls that are already out of the trade. If you like politics, "[c]ontact your members of Congress. Urge them to support robust funding to fight human trafficking. U.S. government funding to fight modern-day slavery accounts for only 0.003 percent of the federal budget." () Get your friends to join in with you. And the biggest thing you can do: pray. Pray specifically and continually because God wants to answer these prayers.[Jesus] replied, "Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you."Matthew 17:20