My friends at Cherished and I are very keen to help those in the DOMESTIC sex trade. The issue of human trafficking is one for every locale, including yours. It is not isolated only to foreign girls and women who are sold by family members due to dire, crushing poverty. To be clear, the global issue of human trafficking is near to my heart. I believe it is time we considered how our daily decisions impact persons half a world away. The same day the garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed and killed 622 of the world's poorest people inside, I had just purchased underwear that bore "made in Bangladesh" tags. How can I know? I read the news after my purchase. Sobering. It's not a consideration I wish to easily dismiss.
Yet, I am rather more interested in dually serving local women in any area of the sex trade and in raising awareness about our own attitudes towards "throwaway" people - those not seen and therefore dismissed in their own communities than I am about jumping into a movement because its getting some media buzz. Remember? I didn't see a movie or hear a speech about the current issue of human trafficking. God laid it on my heart to do a web search: "How to reach a stripper for Jesus". From there I've been schooled about sex trafficking. Awareness is important, but exceedingly difficult to raise the closer one gets to home. The idea of little girls in literal chains pulls at our heartstrings. Chains around the mind are just as real. A girl-child on the street is no more free than a girl in a brothel. Stockholm Syndrome is real.
I've learned that I've been doing this work since I started in the field of psychology but now it's with a new awareness. I was blind to the issue of human trafficking as it occurs here because I've been socialized, as an American, that girls who are prostitutes here choose it, that they are bad promiscuous girls who like sex and who prey on ordinary joes or johns. I've bought into the nonsense that they are "rebellious teens" who need to be arrested and held responsible for their crime. While I recognized that many in the sex trade have attachment disorders, what I missed was that being sold/pimped is not part of a psychiatric constellation of "conduct disorder." It isn't, as I assumed, an issue of agency. It is an issue of slavery. The issues of poverty and women's rights (yes, I AM using feminist buzz words - more on that one later) are very much at the root of sexual exploitation.
Parenthetically: If you admonish me that sin is, I will have to ultimately agree with you. But then I challenge you with "stewardship." I'm not talking about an Al-Gore-ian ideology of stewardship but a biblical prompting about what you are doing with the talents/gifts God has blessed you with. I'd hope you would be moved with compassion to look beneath the surface where blaming and shaming resides, and begin critically to delve into the ravishes of a world system that aims to rob us all of innocence by employing the enemy's tools of judgement, blindness, hunger, pain, loneliness, trauma, nakedness, homelessness, etc. The gifts and blessings I enjoy are (Thank Jesus!) financial security, community, education, health, security/protection. It is much I have received. Therefore much is to be expected. My role is MUCH less to point out sin in an exploited woman's life and MORE to respond to God's call to welcome the least of these.
Back to my main point: Wherever
you find prostitution, when you look deeper, you find lack of real
opportunity for girls. So much focus is given to trafficking as a foreign issue
that we become blind to what it looks like in our own neighborhoods. It
is too "exciting" and "sexy" to think about rescuing little girls from
Asian brothels so that the issue of our own foster kids (and such) get
pimped and sold. And that while having the double insult of bearing the
shunning and rejection for being prostitutes. Does anyone know a little girl who looks forward to growing up
and being raped and used by men multiple times a day? It is no more a
"choice" for the girls on Sierra Highway or any town's prostitution "track" than it is for a Cambodian
girl. Our girls are enslaved in a system that punishes her for
prostitution - average age of entry here is 12- when she's not even a
legal age to consent to sex. The arbitrary distinction between an underage girl being arrested for prostitution and a man being arrested for statutory rape is whether or not money is exchanged. Injustice. She gets punished for being complicit in her own
rape/exploitation. Pimps and johns literally and figuratively "get
off."
This HAS to change. But maybe it doesn't necessarily change in the big dramatic manor depicted by brothel raids or even prostitution sweeps. Maybe it changes when we make the choice to notice - to see - someone. Maybe it changes when we refuse to dismiss someone or presume to know what their "choice" is. Maybe it changes when rather than going along with the world's system, we submit to Jesus and do the thing that alarms the Pharisees. Just maybe?
“Maybe it changes when rather than going along with the world's system, we submit to Jesus and do the thing that alarms the Pharisees. Just maybe?”
ReplyDeleteJoanna, WOW!
I am wondering, though, if it doesn’t sometimes take the “adventure” and culture shock of seeing the problem in another cultural setting to pry open some individual’s eyes to see the same phenomenon right on their own doorstep. What lies at our own feet too often becomes invisible until a jolt awakens us to its presence and horror. So, if for some it takes that faraway “adventure” to set the wheels in motion – so be it.
I now can see this phenomenon in my own day-to-day milieu, but I had to see it firsthand in India and East Africa – and then in Belgium and Vienna , London and Frankfurt, which led to recognizing it in Denver , L.A. and Portland . Because I observed it first in a setting where my guard was down, things were unfamiliar and culture shock was operating full-tilt, it gained the power to rend my heart. Who knows if I had just decided to stay at home if I would have ever allowed myself to become sensitized. For me, at least, it took the “adventure” to do the trick.
Thank you for your comments. They caused me to pause a little bit to reflect that this is indeed a global as well as local issue that many are not aware of in any shape or form. So it would maybe be key to embrace what this movie is doing.
ReplyDeleteBeing too close to the cause myself I have been frustrated that some who are within the movement still don't get that it DOES happen here. There is an unfortunate dichotomy that results in marginalization of people more accessible to us while tokenizing people more at a distance.
In my zeal - let me not overcompensate and influence folks to ignore it "out there." I have met a few activists in this work who for sure were spurred on to do something here following a time oversees. Some foreign transplants, such as Rachel Lloyd, are the most outspoken advocates here, too. So it goes both ways.
Great article, on a difficult and uncomfortable subject. As long as we can draw clean categories we can emotionally and mentally sort living breathing hurting people into hard ridged boxes of good and bad, and then rack and stack them into who we should help and who we shouldn't. If only Christ had done us the favor of modeling this kind of behavior, we could write a check and call it a day. Instead we have to take each “sinner” as a hurting broken family member.
ReplyDelete-RMG
Thanks for sharing this and calling my attention to Cherished... and thanks for the impetus to evaluate my thoughts and beliefs about exploited women and their "choices".
ReplyDeleteRMG - Thank you! The idea of "racking and stacking" does sort of strike at the mindset of the caste system. We should be righteously indignant that it happens and seek equality for all people. Again, I'm not trying to advance a political agenda where a third party (government) redistributes wealth from haves to have nots. This is about a spiritual perspective and heart condition that in humility reverses world systems. Do we in the west also adhere to some sort of worldly belief system that says some people are untouchable or don't really deserve to be seen? I know I have to fight the tendency in my own walk of faith. Considering each one as family member helps to do so.
ReplyDeleteLucy - look forward to hearing more about your thoughts. Thanks for noticing!