Hope Shifts

On Wednesday, met Marisa at the Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition (bsccoalition.org) in San Diego. Her and her staff were incredible. Their goal is to raise the awareness of, protect potential victims, rescue those caught in all kinds of human trafficking and to see justice for the perpetrators.

She is as hard-nosed as they come and as passionate as anyone I know. She is rough in her language, direct in her delivery and honest about what it means to be in the anti-trafficking movement. She told us that you HAVE TO BE a person of faith in order to do her job and I sense that her passion for justice comes because she really believes that each and every person deserves to be seen and valued because they are God's creation. She walked us through a presentation that was horriffic; full of stats about how and why trafficking occurs. We then watched a video of them in action.

I learned some cool new words too.

"Blade" = street
"Vice" = police force
"Chicken Hawk" = one who looks and gets new prostitutes
"Stable" = the house for the pimp's B**ches (she didn't use asterisks though)

There are a lot of stories that she shared and I'm sure you'll see them sometime but I wanted to tell you a couple things that I remember most today:

-300,000-400,000 US children are victims of the sex trade
-poverty and economic disparity are ALWAYS precursors to the demand/supply for prostitution.
-San Diego/Tijuana are a global trafficking center (I was suprised to learn that Seattle also is a huge sex trafficking center as the women work there during warm weather and then come back to Tijuana.
-Psychology of Control - possibly the most dangerous effect a trafficked person has to overcome. They begin to believe that they "deserved it" that they "can't do any better" and that they could never be free. When one girl was rescued, she wouldn't leave until they told her that her pimp had 3 other women advertised on Craig's List. The woman THEN got mad because "he was cheating on her." He controlled her mind in ways that are replicated all over the world.
-THE CHURCH - we make it worse when we do not teach a holistic view of porn or worse yet, ignore its effects completely. Do we teach that porn trafficks mostly 8-17 year olds who DON'T want to do it? Do we teach sexual ethics? Do we surround ourselves with accountability structures that help us stay transparent?

We are privileged to have learned this and a whole lot more. They even expressed a desire to partner with US or for us to serve them somehow too. We were humbled and still are that we aren't doing enough...yet.