SHARED HOPE

Do What is Just and Right

/ Preston The Nomad / Leave a comment

I’m tired and a little stressed out.  I hadn’t planned on writing anything today but I did get on to read the blogs I follow and read the stories with trafficking tags.  I came across a great video put together by MTV EXIT.  I honestly haven’t paid much attention to the Exit campaign in the past but this video is really very good.  Take the time to watch  it:

 

Also, I reached out to the Polaris Project earlier this week wondering if they knew of any good job/volunteer opportunists here in Texas.  The referred me to this great site http://www.idealist.org  If your interested in getting involved with any form of charity try checking it out.  It seems like a pretty good database so far.

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lastly, shared hope is having an event sept 10th:

Online classifieds like Backpage.com, MyRedbook.com and Eros.com are now a primary venue for traffickers to sell sex with minors and for buyers to purchase sex with child victims of trafficking.  Classified websites that promote commercial sex acts provide anonymity and accessibility to individuals looking to exploit vulnerable youth. The Feinstein-Kirk Stop Advertising Victims of Exploitation Act (SAVE Act, S. 2536) combats Internet sex trafficking makes it unlawful for a person or business entity to use the Internet to sell, commercially promote, or maintain an adult advertisement(s) with reckless disregard of the fact the adult advertisement(s) facilitates or causes a person under 18 years to engage in a commercial sex act under federal or state law.

 

Please call in September 10, 2014 at 3 pm EDT / 12 pm PDT

for a National Briefing hosted by Shared Hope International featuring Greg Tosi, Legislative Counsel for U.S. Senator Mark Kirk

to learn more about the SAVE Act and how you can TAKE ACTION.

 

Click here for a fact sheet on The Feinstein Kirk Save Act from Senator Kirk’s Office. You can read the full bill text here. 

 

Please RSVP to Eliza Reock, eliza@sharedhope.org, by Friday, September 5 for dial-in instructions.

“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

/ Preston The Nomad / Leave a comment

As vile of a crime as it is..Trafficking will continue to grow.  We need do more for these people.  Awareness can go a long way. Community involvement can have a massive impact. Many trafficking victims are rescued because someone recognized the signs of trafficking.  We have to do more for them.  This world is not such a big place and they are not so different than us.  This is our family being bought and sold by the predators in this world.  On any level society has a moral responsibility to do what it can.  If your a Christian remember Christ’s words in Mathew 25

“the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels..Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’“

We are called to give all the we have to spare for our brothers and sisters on this world.  Christ died for all of us and we are called to His example.  Our lives are supposed to be laid down for the good of this world.

I’m an avid reader –probably suffering a near addiction- reader of CNN. Today as I look at CNN I am met with the title “Report: ISIS selling Yazidi women in Syria.” This course of action is not really surprising given the atrocities ISIS has already committed prior to this. The Yazidi people do not believe in Islam, so the article goes on to notate that the ISIS leaders have said this women and children “converted” so they can be married to ISIS fighters. There is no conversion when you’re captured and taken into slavery by force, threatened with death, then sold for just a thousand dollars. That is the going rate for the Yazidi just one thousand dollars. These are innocent people stolen from their homes, who watched ISIS fighters execute their husbands and fathers. Beautiful people stolen away from their lives and sent fleeing into mountains, or captured as slaves.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

Aristotle

 

In Hawaii, there is a farm known as FAT LAW FARM. Fat Law, exports fresh basil to the mainland United States. Twice, Fat Law has gotten in trouble with the feds. The first time immigrant workers were spraying pesticides given to them by farm owners but were unaware the combination they were using was toxic to humans. They were forced by the FDA to burn all 29 acres when they discovered the basil was essentially poisonous. The farm makes up around 80% of the basil exported each year valued at millions of dollars. The second time the farm got in trouble, it was discovered that they were paying some of their workers below minimum wage and not giving them overtime pay even though they worked 70 hours+ a week. When confronted Fat Law said that because they supplied housing, laundry facilities, and food they didn’t violate federal law. Here is a photo of one of the “bedrooms.”

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The following are excerpts from a paper I wrote on trafficking. They give a quick crash course on the stats of trafficking as a whole and in the United States Itself, included the sources at the end.

Trafficking is essentially the forced labor of human beings. It is often assumed that trafficking is the actual movement of humans but humans do not have to be moved anywhere to be “trafficked” just forced into labor. There are approximately 27 million people living in forced slavery across the globe. Every year an additionally ~50,000 humans are brought into the United States with an estimated 2-300,000 living in forced labor total in the United States. Roughly 80% of trafficked humans are female while 50% are also children. 1.8 million Children are forced into the sex trade every year. The target age for traffickers is currently between 12 and 13 years old. It is estimated that within ten years human trafficking will overtake drugs as the leading monetary supply to international criminal organizations (Lalich 2013). Human trafficking is currently a 42 billion dollar a year enterprise (Wheaton, Schauer, and Galli, 2009).

In the United States the Department of Justice estimates the number of children slaves in the United States to be near 100,000. Trafficking is reported in all fifty states and all U.S. territories. California currently has 3/10 of the top child sex trafficking areas in the country and is overall one of the top destinations for traffickers. The cities with large ports are major points of entry including New York, Las Angeles, and Houston (Lalich 2013). The price for victims in the US can range as high as 100,000 dollars with sales in the US turning 13 billion in profit out of the 32 billion made worldwide each year (Wheaton, Schauer, and Galli, 2009).

  1. Lalich, Janja. 2013. Human Trafficking: Making Humans Invisible and Disposable.

California State University. Retrieved at: http://rce.csuchico.edu/sites/default/files/professional-development/connect-learn-engage/MediasiteMaterials/Making%20Humans%20Invisible%20and%20Disposable.pdf (11/24/2013)

  1. Wheaton, Elizabeth; Schauer, Edward; and Galli Thomas. 2009. Economics of Human

Trafficking. International Migration, Georgetown University. (11/24/2013)

“It’s not about what it is, it’s about what it can become.”

/ Preston The Nomad / Leave a comment

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

-Ronald Reagan

When Ronald Reagan said those words he was talking about fighting poverty in the United States.  They are words that have stuck with me since I first read the speech in High School.  They even started or ended many of the criminal justice and sociology papers I wrote for my degree.  I think the key part comes in at the end, that we justified our moment here and that we did all that could be done.  I guess it goes along with that idea that is better to die for something than live for nothing.  Our world currently is experiencing true problems all over.  There are a thousand causes one could rally behind.  There are a thousand ways a person could work to make this world a much better place.  The only thing in my head though, is the 30 million people who cannot choose what their life should and will mean.  I can’t really imagine what it would be like to live the lives they lead.  I sometimes try and I want to believe that in that situation I would find a way to break out of it or at the very last keep my hope and survive it.

In reality, I know that would likely not be the case.  Traffickers are the worst of the worst.  They excel at preying on psychological weaknesses not only to recruit victims but to keep victims absolutely terrified, broken, and hopeless. In this video linked just below, Shared Hope International kind of gives you a crash course in human trafficking.  At right around the 2:50 mark a sex trafficker named “Joel” gives an interview.  He pops up again later in the video.  I have not been able to get his voice, his smile, or his words out of my head for over a week.  Even if I could I am not sure I would because “Joel” will drive my passion.

I watched that video as part of my training for shared hope.  “Joel” will now be a constant reminder of the soulless husk traffickers are.  In the United States it is estimated there are 2-300,000 trafficked minors.   That is a lot of zeros.  When you expose yourself to this field at a constant rate you begin burning out.  You begin seeing the numbers as just a statistic.  When I first began researching trafficking I ended up burning out and distancing myself from it because it was too much to dwell on.  Every single one of those numbers, matter.  Where there are humans capable of great evil there are a dozen more capable of great good, compassion, and love.

Trafficking is a complex crime.  It is hard to detect, hard to prosecute, and near impossible to prevent.  That does not let us off the hook though, we must do all that can be done.  Where trafficking had its great boom in the 1990s, the anti-trafficking movement and the laws that follow in its wake are two decades behind.  There are still states in the US and countries in the western world that have no laws for trafficking.  Luckily in the US there are federal laws to prosecute them under and slowly but surely groups like shared hope and the Polaris project are getting the state laws updated.  Internationally, the United Nations office on Drugs and Crime is pressuring countries to establish trafficking laws and helping them to define what trafficking is (which sounds weird but there is a huge debate internationally as to what should constitute a trafficked human).  I am pleased that for all our short comings that the United States makes a truly international effort to curb trafficking.  The State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report (known as Tips) ranks every country on a scale of 1-3.  The countries who do near nothing to stop trafficking or do not do enough end up receiving no non humanitarian aid from the United States and also will have the United States vote no on any loans from the world bank.  The system has proven to be effective in a few countries.  Sadly, allegations of corruption and bias plague the report every year. Still.. It is something.

So what can the average person do?  Get involved and get educated.  The best way to curb trafficking is awareness.  Most people don’t even really know what trafficking is (this sort of goes with that argument I mentioned above).  Most people have the impression that trafficked victims must be moved from place to place.  Although that is often the case, trafficking does not require moving the victim.  Trafficking is really best defined as slavery, which has become a new push for the Anti-trafficking movement where many charities and NGOs are adopting the word slave or modern slavery to replace trafficking.  I encourage you to remember every time you hear the drastically large number concerning victims in the US or abroad that each one of those numbers matter.  Each one is a child, a mother, a father, a brother, or sister to someone.  Remember people like “Joel” are the ones taking these children and delivering them to even worse humans.  Remember the struggle these people must have and lives completely void of hope.  We are their hope.  We are their last best hope.

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But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

/ Preston The Nomad / Leave a comment

In the late 1700s the slave trade spanned the known world. Europe and North America were filled with slaves, humans forced into bondage at the hands of their fellow man. In the midst of the abolitionist movement in England, a man named William Wilberforce was brought to the forefront of the cause and is today still a face for the fight against slavery. Wilberforce died in 1833, three days after hearing that the bill that outlawed slavery in the British Empire would pass. I’d like to post a hand full of his quotes.

“God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.”

“So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did the Trade’s wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for Abolition. Let the consequences be what they would, I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its abolition.”

And of course there is the quote at the top of this page.

“You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”

Slavery may not be as easily seen as it was in the days of Wilberforce but the crime is still thriving. Human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal enterprise and second most profitable behind the sale of illegal narcotics. The exact number of trafficked victims poses a problem, we don’t really know how many are out there. Most anti-trafficking charities put the number at around 30 million people.   That’s more people than the entire state of Texas (actually larger than every US state except California). Even if you were iffy on trusting the charities approach to numbers, the International labor organization believes the number of forced laborers to exceed 21 million people.

Slavery on the mind. I knew human trafficking existed probably about as much as everyone. It wasn’t until I took a class at American Public University that I began to see the problem for what it is. My class on human trafficking hammered it into me. If that wasn’t enough, every class I take deals with international criminal organizations, all of whom have become involved in and are increasingly practicing trafficking. The reality that so many people live in such horrid conditions (vast quantities of these victims are right here in the United States and Texas for that matter but that will be a post for another day)breaks your spirit. I hate to think the country I live in, the one who is always branding itself with freedom has a market for victims. The truth is the market is everywhere.

I imagined myself by now making a difference in the fight but that hasn’t really happened for me yet. A few weeks ago I started a new job in an office doing nothing of real importance. It weighed on me significantly and I know it is part of the reason I just can’t stand the job. In my mind I am off someplace else fighting some worthwhile cause. Last week, I got accepted as an Ambassador of hope, which is essentially to say that I became a community activist for a charity called Shared Hope International. Shared Hope International focuses mainly on domestic trafficking of minors here in the United States. It’s a chance to raise awareness and teach people about how terrible the crime really is. In my heart, it isn’t enough.