IGNORANCE IS NOT BLISS…

Today is the end of National Human Trafficking Awareness month, and I felt a great need to write about it if only to remind myself of the importance of awareness. So why do I care about Human Trafficking? Why do I volunteer with Treasures, an organization that reaches out to women in the sex industry? Why was I compelled to join my church’s Anti-trafficking Task Force? Why does this subject resonate so much within me? I live in the blessed US of A. These things don’t affect us here right? I myself have never been trafficked. I am quite fortunate never to have been forced into the sex trade, or sold into slavery. But I know what it means to be abused and oppressed. I even had it done to me by someone I loved while being told they loved me back and cared for me. I know what it feels like being systematically stripped of worth and a sense of value, to be manipulated and controlled, and to feel so trapped you think the only way out is death. Anyone who has gone through the trauma of abuse whether emotional, physical or sexual, both as a child or adult, knows the suffocating loneliness, confusion, desperation, and hopelessness that it can bring.

I recently watched an amazing documentary film (Nefarious-Merchant of Souls) about modern day slavery through the global sex trade industry. It is absolutely chilling to me how closely some of these women’s experiences of abuse and manipulation and sense of fear and entrapment and hopelessness mirrors the extreme psychological abuse I experienced in my marriage.  It has been noted that 90% of women in prostitution, even those who enter “by choice” come from a history of abuse in their past. The average starting age of prostitutes in the US is 13-14 years old. Pimps groom their targets using tactics of control, manipulation, brainwashing, and promises of a better life. They also systematically break down these girls into submission worse than dogs loyal to their masters believing there is no other way. I know that feeling. It is one that many abused women feel. But I was lucky in the sense that only one man abused me. I also had a fairly healthy upbringing and value of myself before him to look back on and draw from. I had a God who I knew loved me and gave me worth and with his help and those he sent me, was able to get out and stay out. Not an easy task for many women trapped in abusive relationships. How much more difficult is it for those young girls and women who don’t know anything else. Sometimes it just seems easier to stay in a terrible situation you know rather than step out into the unknown. And for those who have NO choice, where are they to get their help?

Human trafficking doesn't exist in a vacuum. It’s not just in third world countries or only happening to the impoverished. Education and money don’t diminish wickedness. This is a Societal issue, and both a moral and spiritual battle! This world can never have peace, and even free peoples cannot claim equal rights and freedoms when all over the world, our little girls continue to be subjected to evils such as sex slavery and forced prostitution. We all need to be held accountable when our culture glamorizes Pimps and Strip clubs, and where our worth lies in our sexuality and where there are governments, law enforcement and children’s own families complicit in creating this culture.

I am calling on myself and all those who dare to keep reading to no longer be ignorant. We need to do the brave thing here.  To be strong and stand up for what is right. We as a nation are blessed and able to claim freedom and equal rights for women. How can we claim and live out our own unalienable rights and freedoms and look the other way when we know that others who are no less deserving then ourselves don’t have access to these same rights and freedoms? Awareness is the first step. It is the very least thing that we can do to honor the bravery, strength, and the courage of millions of young girls all around the world who are suffering. We cannot look the other way, because ignorance is not bliss. We have no excuse not to be aware in this day and age of the horrors that are happening.  And then once you know, how can you not do something?! 

"You can choose to look the other way, but you can never again say that you did not know." ~William Wilberforce (19th century Abolitionist).

There’s no way that we as a human race can go on and enjoy whatever freedoms we have when crimes against humanity are happening right in our backyards. We cannot turn our heads and ignore what’s happening. To do that only allows for more of it. How then can we honor the courage and strength of those fighting for their very lives as they endure their abuse and oppression? It is unconscionable to claim ignorance anymore.  It’s time for humanity to unite together as people, as a human race to say it’s not okay to treat our children, our women or anyone as property, and things to be used and abused; that the hopes, the dreams, the choices, the value of all people are worth fighting for. At the very least we need to say we will not tolerate this. It is unequivocally wrong.

In whatever small way we are able to take a stand, with our voices, our pocketbooks, with our actions, with how we teach our young, our boys and our men about respect and about valuing women; not for their bodies but for their minds and hearts, how we teach our girls to value themselves and know their worth, how we create laws, how we uphold human dignity…These are the things we need to be doing. These are the things we need to be thinking about so that we can actually live out these claimed freedoms we have and honor those freedoms and how we ourselves have come to them.

Be Free.

Be Strong.

Be Courageous.

Be Aware and Take a Stand.

Hannah Bee