Scary
movies, decorations, and parties dominate during the month of October in
preparation for Halloween. Skeletons, witches,
and monsters grab your attention at Home Depot and Walmart. With no small
children in our life, we don’t involve ourselves much in the make-believe
celebration.
Real
life scary stories are harder to overlook. In my insular world, people don’t
talk much about slavery. After all slavery
is dead in this country, or so I thought.
My eyes have been opened recently to an ongoing form of slavery called
human trafficking. It is frightening to
think that over 100,000 children and young women are trafficked in America today. They range in age from nine to nineteen with
the average age being 11.
Some
of the forms of slavery involve the sex trade, labor exploitation, organ
harvesting, and black-market babies. And
the law enforcement and legal communities are struggling to stay ahead of the
exploding criminal organizations that profit from exploiting others.
A
human trafficker can earn on average over $250,000 a year pimping out a young girl
for sex. Many victims are brought into
the U.S. from Eastern Europe and southeast Asia and sold to work in sweatshops,
as domestic servants, and in agricultural work. It’s not a topic discussed much
on the nightly news or in the halls of Congress. However, the U.S. State Department calls forced
enslavement the greatest human rights issue of our time.
Any
child or teen runaway—both male and female—is in danger of being snatched and
forced into slavery. The internet plays
a significant role in grooming vulnerable minors to meet up with older men and
women who sell them to traffickers for a healthy profit.
Florida,
California, and New York are the states where most human trafficking occurs. Metro
Atlanta, where I live, sits on important Interstate routes that provide quick
access to the interior of the country. The
income generated by forced slavery in the U.S. is expected to exceed that of
the drug trade in as little as five years.
I
suspect you are equally disgusted and saddened by what I have written. These are just some of the statistics that
you can find on the internet. Those who
manage to escape are psycho
logically traumatized for the remainder of their
lives. Many live with lifelong disease and
disfigurement from their capture. The
problem seems so overwhelming that I wonder if there is anything being done to
combat it.
A
lady recently spoke at our church about what is happening at the local level to
rescue teenage girls. The group is
called “Out of Darkness.” Also, I have become aware of the efforts of the
financial industry to track down the criminals that engage in laundering money
from their illegal enterprises. My son,
Stuart, is involved through his banking job in Toronto. I will interview both for
my next blog post in order to raise awareness of how we might get involved.
As
Christians with a moral compass, we need to pray for our lost children and
young adults that they will be freed from their slavery. Pray also for our law enforcement
organizations tasked with finding the criminals who perpetrate these heinous
crimes.
