No Different From Your Own Child
Posted On: April 24 2008
We have discussed a number of issues in this blog that relate to poverty and victimization. What I would like to address today is a different, yet highly active kind of human victimization. The victimization I refer to is a multi-billion dollar industry that has been described by an Immigration and Customs enforcement officer as “on a path to overtake drug and arms trafficking” in terms of profits. Its victims are the nearly 1 million people who are sold as sex slaves every year and trafficked across international borders. Eighty percent of these victims are female and up to 50 percent are minors.
Human sex trafficking is an international problem involving almost every country in the world as a source, transit, or destination country. The United States, Japan, and Australia are the leading destination countries, while most of children sold into the global sex trade every year come from Asia, Africa, and South America. They come mostly from places where the problems of poverty, violence, and political conflict are strong fodder for human exploitation. Often they are kidnapped or orphaned, and sometimes they are actually sold by their own families, who themselves are on the brink of starvation and will do anything they can to scrape up enough resources to buy food. For these children, exploitation usually includes forced prostitution, participation in pornography, and other forms of sexual torture and humiliation.
According to David and Beth Grant, co-founders of Project Rescue, these children become so traumatized that they “move beyond hatred and into a hardened state of detachment; the light in their eyes visibly turned off. The dignity, with which we are all born, stripped from their souls.” Sold by someone they loved and trusted, these young women and girls find themselves trapped in a condition over which they have no control, wanting to escape but unable, craving love and affection where none is to be found. If given a chance they would rather play. And in this regard, they are NO DIFFERENT FROM YOUR OWN CHILD.
These kinds of victims need so much more than tangible help. They need restoration of the soul, reacquisition of meaning and purpose in life. And this is precisely the design of Project Rescue. The Grants have opened several Homes of Hope (in India, Nepal and Moldova.) These are places of safety that provide a holistic environment attending to the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of the girls who have been rescued from brothels and other places of sexual servitude. In addition to the Homes of Hope, Project Rescue also operates Vocational Training Centers, After-school Programs, Night Care Centers, and HIV/AIDS Medical Clinics.
If you would like to know more about Project Rescue please visit their website at www.projectrescue.com. I wholeheartedly endorse this program whose purpose it is to restore the lives of today’s young sex slavery survivors by giving them the love and ongoing support they need to restore dignity and bring meaning and purpose to their lives.
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