It is the last week of Easter, the season when Christians celebrate the Resurrection of Christ, the new reality of a new creation, of Light shattering the darkness, of healing and redemption for all the lost and hurting places in our lives and our world.
How timely to focus on the lost and the hurting and the heartbroken and the downtrodden during this season of Resurrection, to shine light on the dark corners of our world, and to give generously to others because God has given so generously to us!
In that vein, I say again, thank you, dear readers! Thank you for reading, for not looking away, for leaving comments (93 so far!) on the difficult-to-read posts in this Stop Slavery series. And deepest thanks to the ten lovely ladies whose donations to Love 146 and International Justice Mission are funding this series: we’ve raised $971 to date!
It is not a lot, really, given the vast scope of the problem, but I keep coming back to Edmund Burke’s words that my pastor quoted the week after I launched this series: “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.”
A blog post, a comment, a dollar, a hundred dollars—all of it is just a little. But we are doing something, and all our little somethings together add up something bigger and more beautiful than any of us could have managed alone.
Today is the last post in our Stop Slavery series. I want to share with you a story that IJM founder Gary Haugen recounts in his book Terrify No More, which I would highly recommend: it gives a helpful overview of just what we’re up against in battling human trafficking, especially sex trafficking, and it’s a powerful story of hope and redemption.
The book is mostly about IJM’s undercover operation and eventual rescue of the girls of Svay Pak, a sex-for-sale market of children outside Phnom Penh.
When IJM first decides to take on the brothel-keepers of Svay Pak, their operatives go undercover to get video of the children who are for sale. Gary and his colleagues use this video footage to mobilize people in power—both here in the States and in Cambodia—to stop looking away, to enforce the laws that are in place to protect these girls. Here’s the rest of this story in verse:
How Young Does She Have to Be?
There’s just one problem:
the girls look
happy, crowding around the
men who’ve come to rape
them, smiling and flirting.
“It can’t be that bad,” the men
at the State Department say. “Look
at them. Look how happy
they are.”
They are eight and nine and
ten years old and already they know,
as the men at the State
Department do not, that if
they don’t smile, flirt, and look
like they’re enjoying
themselves, they’ll be beaten,
electrocuted, maybe
killed.
“I’m sorry,” the suited men in
Washington say, “there’s really
nothing we can do. They’re fed and
happy. We can’t make international
waves if they don’t want
to be rescued.”
“Wait,” Gary tells them. “Watch.”
They wait. They watch.
The eight and nine and ten
year old girls smile and simper
and flirt and sidle up to the men
who will pay to rape them.
This is not enough? These children—
the age of my son, my son’s best friends,
a girl named Madeline
who is nine, a girl named
Abby, a girl named Diya—
they are innocent
and beautiful. I would want
to kill with my bare hands
any man who hurt them in this
violent and violating way.
But these girls in faraway
Cambodia, even though they
have faces that smile into
the camera, they have no
names.
The men in suits
shake their heads, but
what can they do?
Then,
a girl of twelve or
maybe thirteen comes onto the
screen. On her hip,
a little
little girl,
maybe five, my daughter
Jane’s age, maybe four.
This girl, too, is for sale.
The men in suits pale. They suck
in their breath. They say,
“What do you need? What do we have
to do to stop this?”
I want to scream, to shake
them, to beat my fists against
their suited chests. How young
does she have to be?
How young before it’s too
horrible? How young before
you do something that only you
have the power to do?
In the silence that follows,
the questions turn
on me: how long
does she have to suffer?
How long before it’s too
horrible? How long before
I do what only I
have the power
to do?
*****
This is the last post in my Stop Slavery series, a fundraiser for International Justice Mission and Love 146: for every comment (up to 100), ten lovely women and I will donate a total of $10.50 ($5.25 to IJM and another $5.25 to Love 146′s aftercare programs for girls like those rescued from Svay Pak). So please, leave a comment!
