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.
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