Why Generation Z Must Lead the Way to Resolving this Silent Global Crisis.
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, roughly 2,000 children are reported missing each day in the United States. Most victims are abducted by people the child knows, but for the ones who are not, an unspeakable life of hell, and possibly death, awaits them.
In 2016, former President Barack Obama passionately and accurately summarized the horrors of human sex trafficking when he said: “I’m talking about the injustice — the outrage of human trafficking — which must be called by its true name: modern slavery. It is barbaric and it is evil, and it has no place in a civilized world.”
Yes, children as young as toddlers are being sold abroad as sex slaves. Girls as young as five are working seven days a week in brothels. Pre-teens are being kidnapped and murdered for their organs.
For instance, a ten-year-old boy can be bought in most countries for as little as $10,000, forced to service five men a day for several years, and when his body becomes too damaged, his heart can be sold on the black market for $250,000 for an organ transplant.
I wish I was describing some sort of disgusting horror movie, but I am not.
While older generations have a hard time comprehending, let alone discussing, the subject of child sex trafficking, the truth is that my generation is who these monsters are after. Therefore, we must lead the fight and be the ones to end it.
Every single day, children all across the world are praying to God that they be rescued from the darkness. And while human trafficking is indeed illegal in the United States, and the government has been trying to curb the amount of people being unethically exploited for decades, we still face an unprecedented number of innocent lives who have been forced to succumb to the evil abyss that continues to ruin hundreds of thousands of children every year. Here are the facts:
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, more than 300,000 young people in the United States are considered “at risk” of sexual exploitation every year.
The U.S. State Department has discovered, of the 600,000 to 800,000 people that are unwillingly trafficked across international borders every year, half are children and 80% are female.
The U.S. State Department also found that between 14,500 and 17,500 people are trafficked into the United States annually.
The U.S. Labor Department found that 148 goods that were identified from 75 countries were explicitly produced by forced and child labor.
Finally, the International Labour Organization calculated the number of modern-day slaves has reach a total of nearly 40.3 million people.
These children are often kidnapped on American soil, or while your family is on vacation, and you rarely hear about it on the news because no one wants to stare at this level of evil in the face.
While you should worry about the well-being of your children regarding the threats of human trafficking (especially since we live in a time of robust technological innovation that allows for the easy manipulation of young people), there is still something you can do to help eradicate the existence of the modern international sex trafficking industry.
Governments are failing, but the NGO sector is filling the gap. Take for instance, the amazing work of California-based charity, Operation Underground Railroad, or O.U.R.
I learned of this incredible organization when I attended Tony Robbins’s 60th birthday party in Los Angeles, California, earlier this year, despite my mother having been a previous donor.
Founded by Timothy Ballard in 2013, Operation Underground Railroad is comprised of former CIA agents, U.S. Special Operations Forces members, and other support volunteers, who physically rescue innocent children from sex trafficking operations all around the world.
Tim Ballard served 12 years as a U.S. Special Agent for the Department of Homeland Security, on the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and the U.S. Child Sex Tourism Jump Team. He helped infiltrate and dismantle dozens of trafficking organizations that kidnapped children and forced them into the sex slave industry. However, as a U.S. agent, Ballard was not authorized to rescue children if their cases crossed the border, or if the case could not be tried in a U.S. court. For this reason, he left his position and founded Operation Underground Railroad instead.
In the past six years of existence, O.U.R. has rescued 3,300 victims and assisted in the arrests of more than 1,800 traffickers around the world. The international law enforcement partners they train and empower have collectively helped rescue the lives of more than 10,000 survivors who were enslaved, exploited, or at risk.
O.U.R. has calculated that it takes $1,200 to liberate one child from the human trafficking ring. With your help, we can all finally end the inhumane practice of child sex trafficking that suppresses the voices of hundreds of thousands of people who roam in the shadows of society cold, hungry, and powerless.
You can help answer the prayers of tens of thousands of children who seek to live a promising life by committing yourself to this noble cause. It is a wonderful organization that I financially support with my allowance, and I highly recommend you look into as well.
Together, we must liberate those who do not have a voice. Failure, in this situation, is simply not an option. It is up to us to create a more thoughtful, caring, and peaceful world for generations to come; to leave behind a society that was greater than the one we inherited.
For more information about Tim Ballard and his work, please visit:
Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.)
1950 W. Corporate Way
Anaheim, CA 92801
(818) 850-6146
EIN: 46-3614979
For those who have swiftly taken interest in the O.U.R. organization, I sincerely thank you for joining the good fight.
#SexTrafficking #ChildSexTrafficking #OUR #OperationUndergroundRescue #TonyRobbins #MissingChildren #ChildSexSlaves
Article written by Jett James Pruitt
What are your thoughts? Please share this article with your comments.