Last night I was putting a onesie on my daughter that her nannie bought her from the Disney store. It said “you can’t stop me from dreaming…every little girl deserves a storybook life.” It’s such a sweet sentiment yet every time I read it, it makes me sad. I think it’s because I’m aware of the pain that many little girls live with on a daily basis. That very pain was demonstrated at Shiloh’s service on Sunday. Pasco Manzo, founder of Run for Freedom was a guest speaker who educated the congregation about the atrocity that is human trafficking. To think in this day and age, people…PEOPLE can be bought and sold is mind boggling. No, it’s disgusting. Of course, as usual, it’s the weak among us who are targeted. It is the vulnerable population of women and children (for the most part) with the average age of these victims being 14 years old. 14 is the age of my niece who I chatted with last night…who attends a ‘worth the wait’ program at her school to educate her on abstinence. Who went on and on about how she couldn’t live without sports and she loves sports and sports are her life and her basketball girls are ‘"the closest in the school.’" Yes. That age. FOURTEEN. It sickens me and breaks my heart that while my niece is playing basketball and thinking about getting “super cute boots,” other girls are mandated to make $1300 a day by having sex with strange men multiple times a day, 7 days a week. I don’t even want to write that out. It makes me flinch. I want to type “sexual services” or “sexual encounters.” But why try to make it sound more... digestible than it is?
*Human trafficking = modern day slavery
*Human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal industry in the world next to drugs and arms dealing. While you can only sell drugs or a gun once, you can sell a boy or girl 30 times a night.
*It is estimated that 1.2 million people are trafficked every year throughout the world (that’s 2 people a minute).
*Currently, there are 49 countries that traffic into 91 U.S. cities with the average victim being 13-14 years old.
Please visit http://www.runforfreedom.net/ and sign up to be a partner or make a donation today. You can browse the site to learn about the impact they’ve made on this social injustice and what they plan to continue doing to raise awareness and bring an end to human trafficking.
Romans 5:20: ...But as people sinned more and more, God’s wonderful grace became more abundant.
