27 Million slaves right now in our world. Compare that with 3.5 million in America at the beginning of the Civil War. My mind wants verification. My heart demands action. What I first need, as the TV detective used to say when I was a kid, “just the facts, mam.”
E. Benjamin Skinner, in A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern-Day Slavery (2008), agrees with an “unassuming scholar” named Kevin Bales (Disposable People, 1999) on both the difficulty in ascertaining the estimate and on the definition of who those slaves are: they are people (men, women and children) 1) compelled to work, 2) through force or fraud, 3) for no pay beyond subsistence. To be a slave, you have to meet all three criteria. Even if the stats are off a few million, the faces overwhelm.
I wonder if that definition includes those boys in Afghanistan, so abused that they believe their kidnappers’ lies about jihad and no longer want to be freed. Like Patty Hearst, a kidnapped heiress, who joined her captors’ cause in the 70s. They call it the Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological shift that occurs in captives when they are threatened gravely but shown acts of kindness by their captors. As much as they fear their masters, they remain loyal to them.
What about women prostitutes who are no longer minors? It is a question that comes up at a meeting of the Human Trafficking Series sponsored by Multnomah County Commissioner Diane McKeel’s Office and the Clark County Soroptimists Club. In this meeting, Wynne Wakilla, the program’s coordinator, has invited several experts to speak on state, national and international laws affecting human trafficking. During the extended Q&A, one attendee asks who is doing something about the women in local prostitution who are not minors. If they started out coerced at age 13, are they now still victims at age 31? Or are they off the screen as far as those we need to be rescuing whether they want it or not?
Whether they want it or not. The Afghanistani boys, still boys, on the TV, the ones kidnapped and brutally abused by the Taliban, they were freed against their own will, but are now so emotionally brain dead they would yet give their lives for a cause that has all but destroyed them. Some of them, the expert says, will never recover. Does a woman at 31 still give her body to her pimp and his johns because of the money she earns or because she’s an emotionally battered hulk of a person, completely victimized by her masters?
I do “get” how shame and abuse can imprison a person for life unless forces outside of that person intervene to bring healing and wholeness. I do understand as a Christian that Jesus has come to free us from all bondage. As the preacher said yesterday morning, he is our Savior in every need. I do understand that this same Jesus has called us to set others free, regardless of how they understand their bondage, regardless of how their slavery is defined.
Jesus’ inaugural address, taken from the words of the prophet Isaiah, comes to mind: “He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. . . . He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners … to release the oppressed.” (Luke 4:18-19) The preacher last night quoted these words of Jesus: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” (John 20:21) Jesus goes on a couple lines later to tell us we are to free people as he freed people.
I met with Bryan Colbourne again yesterday afternoon as we map out our immediate strategy for doing as Jesus has called us to do. Bryan is the chair of the advisory committee on Human Trafficking for the Oregon Center for Christian Values. He’s organizing a meeting in Salem, the state capital, hopefully in October.
I’ve got some other basic nuts and bolts stuff going – contacting some leads, surveying what is already happening, following up on those who say they want to be involved. Doesn’t feel like we’re setting anybody free yet. But information gathering, networking, educating and advocating are all steps in the process. As necessary as they are mundane.
What else did Jesus say in John 20? Oh yeah. We are to do it, mundane tasks and all, in the power of the Spirit.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
The First Step
“Human trafficking.” The phrase conjures up kidnappings and slavery and all sorts of sordidness in far away exotic places. Outside of the sinister, sleazy types who profit from human trafficking, who wouldn’t oppose it? Truth is, we all profit from it. And it goes on all the time and in some not so very far away or exotic places. Like 82nd Street and lesser known alleys in my town. With kids not unlike my own respite foster children and classmates of my own biological teenagers.
In the movie, “Amazing Grace,” the British politician and antislavery crusader, William Wilberforce, is getting to know the woman with whom he will soon fall in love. In attempting to show how closely she has followed Wilberforce’s cause, she talks about how she has altogether given up sugar. Antislavery activists of the day, mostly staunch Christians and equally staunchly secularists, were working hard to show how such commercial treats as sugar were directly tied to the abominable slave trade. They finally won their epic battle by bringing the cause home and by learning how to understand their political opponents.
Great epic movements can be captured in ninety minutes of cinematography, as “Amazing Grace”, “End of the Spear” and “The Mission” have shown. But what is cut out and left on the editing room floor because it will only put us to sleep are the countless hours of mundane discussions, committee meetings and numbing processes that go into making the great moments of these movements screen-worthy. Rosa Parks sitting defiantly on the wrong seat of the bus is forever etched in our cultural memory. But there were a lot of far less dramatic hours leading up to that standoff that made that standoff possible.
Monday night I attended the initial meeting of a subcommittee on Human Trafficking. It was by no means a cinematic moment. Seven of us gathered in the poetic “Earth Room” of the First Covenant Church in Northeast Portland. We were volunteers summoned by the Oregon Center for Christian Values to sort out what the OCCV, an advocacy group, should be doing about human trafficking in our home state.
Brian, the committee chair, and Karen represented the board of OCCV. They, with other OCCV leaders, have been drawn into the human trafficking cause as part of the organization’s larger commitment to advocating on behalf of the poor in our state. Three others who showed up, all women, are already deeply involved in various other organizations fighting human trafficking. Juan and I filled out the group as wannabes.
I had met with Brian the day before at a local coffee shop (I drank passion iced tea with sugar). He asked me about my background – missionary in Asia, Pentecostal/Charismatic, Evangelical to the bone, thorough-going theological conservative. His eyes got big. Isn’t that some sort of an oxymoron, a Pentecostal committed to social justice?
I smiled back. He has similar roots, but as he is young can be forgiven if he is a bit out of sync with those with whom he worships. I, on the other hand, have been both committed to my community of worship and to social justice longer than he’s been alive and am now at a time in life – closing in on senior citizen discounts – when I am supposed to have life neatly sorted out. Perhaps oxymorons are not supposed to age.
Pentecostal social justice advocates are few and far between, or so it seems, as I return from twenty years overseas to adjust to the current American religious and political scene. Fact is, I’ve been waiting decades to find likeminded activists with whom I can celebrate the other half of my spiritual heritage, the heritage that was lost in the Great Divorce a century ago. [“Great Divorce” draw a blank? Stay tuned.]
As I explained to the committee, I see the cause of fighting human trafficking as a bridge between Christians who fight personal sins and suffering and Christians who fight corporate sins and systemic suffering. Girls do not get into the “world’s oldest vocation” because they “just want to have fun.” I, a cross-cultural agent, want to be a bridge builder. But it starts with nuts and bolts like extensive, boring research, endless committee meetings, and mind-numbing canvassing.
We’re still a long way from rescuing the girls down on 82nd Street. But we have, as the Chinese saying goes, made the hardest step.
In the movie, “Amazing Grace,” the British politician and antislavery crusader, William Wilberforce, is getting to know the woman with whom he will soon fall in love. In attempting to show how closely she has followed Wilberforce’s cause, she talks about how she has altogether given up sugar. Antislavery activists of the day, mostly staunch Christians and equally staunchly secularists, were working hard to show how such commercial treats as sugar were directly tied to the abominable slave trade. They finally won their epic battle by bringing the cause home and by learning how to understand their political opponents.
Great epic movements can be captured in ninety minutes of cinematography, as “Amazing Grace”, “End of the Spear” and “The Mission” have shown. But what is cut out and left on the editing room floor because it will only put us to sleep are the countless hours of mundane discussions, committee meetings and numbing processes that go into making the great moments of these movements screen-worthy. Rosa Parks sitting defiantly on the wrong seat of the bus is forever etched in our cultural memory. But there were a lot of far less dramatic hours leading up to that standoff that made that standoff possible.
Monday night I attended the initial meeting of a subcommittee on Human Trafficking. It was by no means a cinematic moment. Seven of us gathered in the poetic “Earth Room” of the First Covenant Church in Northeast Portland. We were volunteers summoned by the Oregon Center for Christian Values to sort out what the OCCV, an advocacy group, should be doing about human trafficking in our home state.
Brian, the committee chair, and Karen represented the board of OCCV. They, with other OCCV leaders, have been drawn into the human trafficking cause as part of the organization’s larger commitment to advocating on behalf of the poor in our state. Three others who showed up, all women, are already deeply involved in various other organizations fighting human trafficking. Juan and I filled out the group as wannabes.
I had met with Brian the day before at a local coffee shop (I drank passion iced tea with sugar). He asked me about my background – missionary in Asia, Pentecostal/Charismatic, Evangelical to the bone, thorough-going theological conservative. His eyes got big. Isn’t that some sort of an oxymoron, a Pentecostal committed to social justice?
I smiled back. He has similar roots, but as he is young can be forgiven if he is a bit out of sync with those with whom he worships. I, on the other hand, have been both committed to my community of worship and to social justice longer than he’s been alive and am now at a time in life – closing in on senior citizen discounts – when I am supposed to have life neatly sorted out. Perhaps oxymorons are not supposed to age.
Pentecostal social justice advocates are few and far between, or so it seems, as I return from twenty years overseas to adjust to the current American religious and political scene. Fact is, I’ve been waiting decades to find likeminded activists with whom I can celebrate the other half of my spiritual heritage, the heritage that was lost in the Great Divorce a century ago. [“Great Divorce” draw a blank? Stay tuned.]
As I explained to the committee, I see the cause of fighting human trafficking as a bridge between Christians who fight personal sins and suffering and Christians who fight corporate sins and systemic suffering. Girls do not get into the “world’s oldest vocation” because they “just want to have fun.” I, a cross-cultural agent, want to be a bridge builder. But it starts with nuts and bolts like extensive, boring research, endless committee meetings, and mind-numbing canvassing.
We’re still a long way from rescuing the girls down on 82nd Street. But we have, as the Chinese saying goes, made the hardest step.
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