How could the exploitation of a human being go unnoticed? It’s easy. Just ask Jean Roberson.
About five years ago, Roberson, ministry consultant and leader of national Woman’s Missionary Union’s (WMU) adult resource team, witnessed how human trafficking can begin. While on a WMU visioning trip to Moldova, she was eating at McDonald’s with some colleagues and their hosts and noticed two men in leather jackets talking to a young girl nearby.
“Our hosts told us, ‘They’re trying to talk her into leaving the country for work,’” Roberson remembered. “It was poignant because it was in a McDonald’s — a familiar place. And it was happening right next to me.”
Because people often don’t know what constitutes human exploitation, they miss it and miss an opportunity to help stop it.
To raise awareness, WMU is planning to introduce a two-year initiative, Project HELP: Human Exploitation, in September. The goal is to educate people about various types of human exploitation — including human trafficking — and then encourage them to help eradicate it in their communities and around the world.
“Through our work to fight poverty, human exploitation came to the forefront,” Roberson said, explaining why the organization chose to tackle the topic.
It’s a topic that involves more than just trafficking, said Sheryl Churchill, a WMU ministry consultant.
“We must consider all of our age levels from preschoolers through adults when we choose a critical issue. For example, trafficking would be very difficult for preschoolers to understand,” she said.
WMU’s emphasis on human exploitation will deal with issues such as pornography, “sexting,” bullying and cyberbullying, media exploitation of children and families and human trafficking, which includes forced labor and sex trafficking, Churchill explained.
WMU is pulling from a number of resources to develop educational materials about human exploitation, and when it comes to human trafficking, Sara Jane Camacho, director of Birmingham-based Freedom to Thrive, is one of those.
Like Roberson, her interest in human exploitation was piqued by personal experience.
On a visit to Thailand, Camacho remembers walking through neighborhoods and seeing Western men with local children. She remained burdened by what she’d seen and when she returned to the United States, began raising awareness about human trafficking.
“I decided there was a need for a coalition for trafficking here to advocate for the victims,” Camacho said.
So Freedom to Thrive was created to raise awareness of trafficking on a local level — to help the “average” person become aware of the definition of trafficking and how to spot and report it.
The biggest misconception is that trafficking is just an international issue, Camacho said, but anyone in the United States can fall victim, too.
“Most of the trafficking that happens here domestically affects homeless and runaway youth,” she said. “They don’t have food or clothing, so sometimes they’ll trade sex to get those things. The definition of human trafficking is any commercial exchange for sex or sexual acts with a minor.”
One large problem that stems from unawareness of trafficking is the lack of legislation put in place to fight it. Currently Alabama is devoid of a law that addresses human trafficking, although a bill has recently been drafted and has made some progress in the House of Representatives. Having no law on this issue leads to trafficking going unprosecuted or even being mislabeled.
Sometimes, for example, mothers trade sex with their children for drugs or money, and while this is often called abuse, it technically falls under the definition of human trafficking.
To Joyce Vance, U.S. attorney for the northern district of Alabama, the absence of legislation is unacceptable.
“We see trafficking as a civil rights crime, and it’s a priority for us,” Vance said. “Our goal is to create jurisdiction and then enforce it in such a way that traffickers realize it’s too tricky to practice trafficking here.”
Like WMU, she recognizes that awareness is crucial.
“People see trafficking in their daily lives and would be able to (help us) enforce it if they knew what they were looking at,” Vance said.
Information on Project HELP: Human Exploitation will be available closer to September on www.wmu.com.
(WMU)
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