by Ted Lyons

YES!!! Unfortunately, Human Trafficking exists around the world. Yes, unfortunately, men, women, and children are being held against their will; they are being physically and sexually exploited for personal gain. However, the church needs to understand cultural and religious traditions that take place within a foreign country. It is one thing to evangelize for the sake of Making Disciples. However, when you conflate an issue and morph the narrative into a money making scheme, this is wrong and harmful. By using law enforcement to entrap and eventually arrest innocent victims just because your belief system doesn’t align with theirs, is extremely dangerous and un-Godly. Please Church, Force The Exodus Road to Go After the Real Victims. The dark secluded backrooms. The forced labor camps with armed guards keeping their victims inside. Please Church, tell them that gay men, and lady-boys are victims as well. Please Church pray that Matt Parker and his gang of “volunteer cowboy investigators” will get the courage to investigate real human trafficking, and not just spend their time in beer bars and go go’s with the attractive young girls.

“Critics say Exodus Road uses an investigative strategy called “search and rescue” that is not effective in the long term at helping people who have been sex trafficked or work in the sex world. It works like this: Undercover operatives find evidence of the human trafficking of underage children or women held against their will. The evidence is turned over to police for a “rescue mission,” according to its website. It’s a variant of what’s more commonly called “raid and rescue.” Whatever Exodus Road calls it, detractors say tactics such as these, which are used by some other organizations too, are generally ineffective and are falling out of favor.

 Five years ago, these types of investigations were more common. But after criticism and research into the risks and benefits, people are speaking out and calling for higher professional standards. “That’s a big change now,” said Julia Macher, director of Freedom Collaborative at Liberty Shared. But it’s still popular with the public. It’s even a movie plot. In “Taken,” actor Liam Neeson smashes down doors and shoots bad guys while rescuing his daughter, kidnapped by sex traffickers. The 2008 movie was box office gold and led to two sequels. The simple theme resonates — save the girl, with the help of brute force. The movies “give people the impression that in order to do an intervention you need your own personal SWAT team to break people out,” said Annie Dieselberg, the founder and CEO of NightLight Bangkok, which specializes in aiding women who are prostitutes, especially foreigners. That may be true in a tiny percent of the cases, but it’s definitely not the norm, she said. Most women in sex work range from older teens to their 40s, who feel that prostitution is their best or only option. They are there voluntarily. Are there some women and children kept in locked rooms? Yes, but they are rare. (But, this is where most of the money is going.) The problem with raid and rescue is that without extensive aftercare to help sex workers learn new ways of living, with marketable job skills, most people “rescued” this way quickly return to sex work, said Dieselberg. The aftercare groups work much differently. No doors get busted down. Often, a woman in the sex trade calls an aftercare group and the group takes them away. That’s about it. “It is not a dramatic rescue,” Dieselberg said. The lack of drama makes it a tough pitch for donors.(AND HERE’S THE REALL REASON BALLARD-PARKER OPERATE LIKE THEY DO. IT’S ALL ABOUT FAME AND $$$$ THE MONEY.) It goes something like this: We need money to help a woman heal for several years, to rediscover her identity, to restore her relationship with her family, and to build goals and dreams. It’s heartfelt, but not exciting. So funding often is simply not there, said Dieselberg, whose organization helps with long-term help, such as job training. When asked about its aftercare programs, Fisk of Exodus Road said the organization uses social workers and crisis care workers. They are launching a safe house and transition home in Thailand for adult survivors, which will open in the late fall. He declined to offer the names of any aftercare programs Exodus Road works with. “These baseless allegations against the Exodus Road certainly have the opportunity to be viewed negatively and we’re going to choose to protect our staff and partners from any of that negative publicity,” Fisk said. Fisk made it clear the organization was not fighting common prostitution. “We fight human trafficking,” he said in an email. “Our teams are not looking for women and men who are in prostitution by choice, but rather those who cannot walk away from their situations due to ‘force, abduction, fraud, or coercion’ (which legally qualifies them as human trafficking victims).” (The Parker’s attack small business owners because they are the easy targets. They are doing absolutely nothing to prevent, or stop the real issue of Human Trafficking.)

There are legitimate questions that need to be answered. There are good organizations that are doing their best to help people. However, as long as BALLARD-PARKER can run scams, and mislead individuals in order to fill their own pockets, human trafficking victims will continue to suffer. In the same article written by Matthew Carroll, he quotes; “Lauren Pinkston, who has studied and written about faith-based, anti-trafficking organizations, said more transparency is needed by Exodus Road and many other nonprofits in the field before their numbers can be trusted. Many “rescued” women often end up back in the sex trade because they lack needed aftercare. How are those women counted? How much money, she wondered, would be spent rescuing the same women again?” 

Let’s delve a little deeper. To actually rescue individuals who are truly being trafficked takes intense investigations, a lot of time, and a lot more money. First, volunteer investigators do not have, nor can they develop the skills necessary in a one week course, to investigate, and truly free individuals from sex or labor trafficking. Don’t be fooled by the military lingo, and the false rhetoric. In a discussion with an FBI agent, he asked me, “we have a highly trained agency, we have money and resources to fight human trafficking, and we find it to be extremely difficult to rescue individuals. Why do NGO volunteers think they can change the world?” His comments were directed towards the enormous number of individuals that NGOs claim to rescue.

The most important component of the false rescue narrative is the money! I ask, what constitutes a real rescue? I understand that this can be messy, and no two people have the same experiences. A rescue is going to be different for each individual. However, there needs to be a certain criteria that can be produced. I believe that an individual who is being trafficked and or exploited should have an opportunity for freedom. There should be a vast difference in their life. To start with, an individual has to actually be in the process of being trafficked and or exploited. A girl working in a beer bar, or a homeless child on the street is not necessarily being trafficked or exploited. Yes, they are at risk, (many girls don’t want to leave, they make good money) but they are not being trafficked. Many organizations claim they are rescuing a child by giving them food. Just because you have given a child some food, some clothing or maybe even a new home, doesn’t mean that you have “rescued” them from human trafficking or sexual exploitation.