About Human Trafficking

Over the weekend, I had the privilege of co-hosting Coeur d’Alene’s 2nd Annual Walk For Freedom event. It’s part of a global effort in conjunction with the A21 Campaign to draw necessary awareness to the scourge of human trafficking. Put simply, human trafficking is the business of stealing freedom for profit. Across the globe, human beings are sold for their labor, their organs, and, most frequently, for their sexual exploitation. It’s modern day slavery, and, though not sanctioned by the law, it’s perpetuated primarily by ignorance and indifference.

To be blunt, a lot of us don’t do very much to help fight it because, if we’re honest, we don’t fully understand it ourselves. In our minds, it’s largely this unfortunate thing that happens to poor people in other countries, and it doesn’t really affect us in our daily lives, so it’s easier than maybe it should be to compartmentalize it, write it off as someone else’s job, and go about our day.

I had to wrestle a degree of imposter’s syndrome before fully embracing such a prominent role in this particular effort. I myself am not a survivor of human trafficking. No one in my immediate family knows what it’s like to be bought and sold. This is not my personal area of expertise, and I worried I would not do it justice. But about 10 years ago, I promised God that, whenever presented with the opportunity to speak on behalf of human freedom, I would say yes as often as possible unless He sent an obvious sign to stop me, so early Saturday morning, my husband and I rallied the troops and made our way to the event.

I was the second of three speakers. The first was a local pastor who had spent some time down on the southern border gaining first-hand experience of the issue. I listened as he shared heartbreaking stories about the numerous women and children smuggled across the border, lured by the false promises of a better life. He saw the suffering with his own eyes and roundly condemned the administration and the policies that enabled the harm. His was a righteous indignation, derived from a heart that hates injustice. But to focus exclusively on “illegals” and our corrupt government would be to fall into the trap of diagnosing the problem as outside ourselves. And I was so glad he didn’t land there.

Absent a personal story of my own, my task was to provide some data to inform the collective activism. I shared that human trafficking is a 150 billion dollar industry. To give you some sense of scope, the NFL brings in about 18 billion every year. Human trafficking brings in 150 billion. If you took 150 billion one-dollar bills and stacked them individually on top of each other, the stack would reach a height of about 4,572 miles, taller than Mount Everest.

I explained how it’s estimated that about 40 million people are being trafficked worldwide at any given minute. That’s more than the entire population of the state of California or the entire population of Idaho times 20.

And to be honest, these numbers are probably low. They don’t tell the complete story. Trafficking is notoriously slippery when it comes to collecting data because a lot of the cases go unreported, or they get miscategorized under labels like “prostitution” or “runaways.” It’s pretty easy to identify trafficking in the context of a child being kidnapped from a shopping mall and sold across the border. But most trafficking cases aren’t this cut and dry, especially in the age of social media when scores of young girls are lured into traps disguised as dates with that cute guy they were talking to online or invitations to modeling auditions. 

The third speaker segued nicely into the conversation as she shared her own story as a trafficking survivor who got roped into the oppression as a young woman looking for an income stream to support her drug habit. She provided some valuable insights into the psychology that keeps people trapped in that downward spiral.

It was interesting to me that, though none of us compared notes prior to the event, all three of us speakers were prompted to include the same admonition: the problem is not only that this many people are being sold as slaves. The problem is also that this many people are buying them. Human trafficking is a consumer problem, an issue of supply and demand. Where there’s a demand for something, the supply will always rise to meet it, and unfortunately, the demand for trafficked people is higher per capita in America than it is in most other places in the world. 

And one of the primary ways Americans contribute to this problem is through the rampant use of pornography. An amazing woman named Laila Mickelwait spends her career exposing the abuses of this industry. Here’s a story she recently shared on social media to illustrate the problem. It’s about a 15-year-old from Broward County Florida. We’ll call her Rachel, and she was missing for a year. As Laila explained,

“Rachel was found when her distraught mother was tipped off by a Pornhub user that he recognized her child on P*rnhub. The girl was found being raped in 58 videos on on an account called “Daddys_Slut.” Police matched the abuser’s face in the videos to 7-11 convenience store surveillance footage and identified 30 year old Christopher Johnson. When police rescued the girl from his apartment and arrested Johnson she said the videos were filmed inside the apartment and that he had impregnated her. A search of his apartment turned up information from an abortion clinic, where he had taken her to get an abortion. The videos on P*rnhub were monetized with ads and sold as pay-to-download content where P*rnhub earned 35% of the sale of the videos. Rachel’s life will never be the same.”

Laila continued to illustrate some of the myriad ways in which Pornhub was complicit in the harm:

• The CEO/owner admitted in emails that they did not verify the age or consent of any of the millions of individuals in the homemade user generated sex videos on the site.

• They ignored victims who were begging for their abuse videos to be taken down including underage children.

• Legal filings show they also ignored police demands to remove underage abuse on multiple occasions.

• Legal discovery proved Pornhub had only one person employed 5 days a week to review flagged videos.

• They had a backlog of 706,000 flagged videos and a policy not to even review a flagged video until it has over 15 flags. A victim could flag her rape 15 times without ever triggering a review of the video.

So not only did this poor girl have to experience the humiliation of being sexually assaulted, she also had to endure the agony of knowing that thousands of people across the world were paying to watch it happen.

The Human Trafficking Hotline identifies pornography as the top-ranked industry for sex trafficking. So for all our righteous indignation about the administration and our country’s immigration policies, if we truly care about the lives of the people caught in trafficking, then we also need to take a long hard look at the activity in our own homes and our own pockets. We forfeit the right to feign indignation about cartels and pimps if we’re the ones inadvertently purchasing the product.

As slavery abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman famously said, “Slavery can only be abolished by raising the character of the people who compose the nation; and that can be done only by showing them a higher one.”

I’m learning that you don’t have to be an expert in any particular topic in order to be a change agent. You just have to care enough to show up and speak up. I was grateful for the chance to that this weekend.