Why Human Trafficking?

This past night we stayed at First Baptist Church in the little town of Sebree,  KY.  We were welcomed like long-lost family and given a key to the building to come and go as we please.  I’ll have more to say about their ministry to cyclists later, but I want to use the hospitality we experienced here as a contrast to the problem of human trafficking – to not simply the inhospitable character of modern slavery but its wicked inhumanity.

The word “wicked” is not in vogue these days.  Problems are the result of dysfunction in systems.  But evil is still evil by any other description, and human trafficking is one of the most evil of ills the world faces.

As an adult I had been aware of prostitution as a vague sort of “out there” societal issue that had nothing to do with me – and the onus of the problem focused more on the women and their “johns” as the “wicked.”  Only after attending a preaching conference in Nashville, TN where I learned about Magdalene House was my perspective changed.  Magdalene House is named after the New Testament character who in some traditions is thought to have been saved by Jesus from a life of prostitution.  The ministry in Nashville provides a home-like environment where women off the streets are loved unconditionally and nurtured until they can build a new life of their own. 

These women often entered into prostitution as young teenagers, usually under the “protection” of a pimp who promises much but delivers little.  I began to see that women (and children, unfortunately) are often forced into this street life and kept in psychological or drug-dependent bondage to their pimps.  A culture of slavery then ensues.

There are many other forms this evil takes but in the majority of cases all over the world the victims are usually women and children.  Statistics are hard to verify but the U.S. State Department states that worldwide 1.8 out of 1000 persons are trapped in modern slavery.  In Asia and the Pacific that number is 3 out of 1000.  While that number may sound small, it means there could be upwards of 90 such victims in bondage in the small town where I live.  Ever since I saw the human face of the women at Magdalene, this is no longer a cold statistic, or a vague societal ill; it is someone’s sister, or mother, or child. 

What would it look like for women and children who have been victimized by human trafficking to receive the kind of hospitality that I received last night?  How may we be a community where modern slavery is less possible, and perhaps even unthinkable?