These Are Our Children

The facts are staggering. Every year more than a million kids are trafficked for sexual exploitation and forced labor around the world.  Across the world, children are  subjected to rape multiple times every night. They are subject to beatings, abuse, and sexually transmitted diseases. They are afraid. They feel helpless. They feel unloved.

Victims of sexual trafficking often remain in the sex industry even after they become physically free to do so. It is the only work they know. It is the only value they have been shown. The slavery never really ends.

I knew trafficking was a problem. But it isn't something I really like to think about. When I decided to open my eyes to the problem, I found I didn't even know the half of it. Here's some things that shocked me.

 - It's not just girls. Although young girls may be the picture we often have in our minds for sexual trafficking, an estimated 400,000 boys and young men are victims of sex trafficking each year.
 - It doesn't just happen in some third-world country out there. An estimated 100,000 children in the U.S. are involved in the sex industry. The U.S. is the second largest destination for human trafficking in all its forms.
- It's big business. Human trafficking is the second largest criminal industry (after the drug trade) and brings and estimated $32 billion each year.

So I know what you might be thinking. I've never trafficked anyone. I've never participated in child prostitution or child pornography. Maybe I should think about donating money to an organization that fights trafficking, but really, this isn't my problem.

Business needs a supply and a demand to grow. The supply for child sex trafficking comes from poor vulnerable people in some of the poorest neighborhoods and the least developed countries of the world. But the demand - that comes from us. The demand for sex trafficking does not begin with a pimp on a seedy street corner. It does not begin with a creepy guy in a trench coat. The demand begins when people are looked on as something less than a bearer of the image of God. It happens when we objectify a person.

We objectify a person when we look at them for what they can give us. This can happen in a lot of ways, and not all of them are sexual. Most of us wold agree that  in viewing pornography, we objectify a person. But we can do the same thing by the way we look at someone who passes us on the street. There was a reason Jesus warned against looking at a woman with lust (Matt 5:28). It wasn't just some prudish, archaic rule to keep us in line.

Lust and pornography are not victim-less crimes. When we devalue one human being to an object, we devalue every human being. So what starts as an "innocent" second glance progresses to an obsession with fulfilling our desires at someone else's expense. It will hurt our relationships. Eventually, without any checks, it can lead to such an objectification that we would harm another person, even an innocent child to fulfill our desires. We like to think we are insulated from such evil, but it is not as far as we might think.

The bottom line is that we are all responsible for child sex trafficking. We are responsible by what we do. We are responsible by what we don't do. We are responsible by what we choose to ignore.

These are our children. They are not nameless faces on a street. They are boys and girls created in the image of God. Each has a name. Each has a story.

These are our children. This isn't a problem some other people have in some other part of the world. We can't pretend we don't know it is happening, both in America and around the world.

These are our children. We live in the wealthiest nation on earth. We have power and resources to stamp out human trafficking. We are not helpless to come to their aide. We are just unwilling to get our hands dirty.

These are our children. Our sons and daughters are just a step away from slavery, when we allow them to be viewed as objects. When we objectify another human being, we are adding fuel to the growing inferno that is human trafficking.

These are our children. Every girl you look at online is someone's daughter. The ad revenue alone from visits to such sites fuels the pornography industry, creating a demand, making it more likely that another life will be destroyed by trafficking.

These are our children. Because it is not right to deny justice to the innocent (Provebs 18:5). Because God defends the cause of the fatherless (Duet 10:18). Because Jesus was compassionate to the helpless (Matt 9:36). Because our highest act of worship is to look after widows and orphans in their distress (James 1:27)

If God has so moved you, please consider joining the cause of rescuing children from sex trafficking. For more information, visit raphahouse.org and blackboxinternational.org




Stats courtesy of: http://abolitionmedia.org/about-us/modern-slavery-statistics and blackboxinternational.org