Sex Trafficking

Harvie Conn was a missionary in Korea. And Harvie was trying to reach prostitutes for Christ. And in the Asian culture, prostitutes had a far lower status than prostitutes do in other societies. And Harvie couldn’t break through, because when he offered the love of Christ, they said, ‘sorry, Christ would never have anything to do with me. You don’t understand. I am an absolute…I’m scum.’ Finally, one day Harvie said, “Let me tell you the doctrine of predestination. Let me tell you the doctrine of election.”

‘Our God doesn’t love you because you’re good…doesn’t love you because you’re moral… doesn’t love you because you’re humbler…doesn’t love you because you’re surrendered. He actually just chooses people and sets His love on you and loves you just because He loves you. That’s how you’re saved.’

And the prostitute said, ‘What?!!

Harvie: ‘Yes!!”

She said, ‘You mean He just loves people like that?’

Harvie: ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, how do I know if He loves me?’

Then Harvie said, ‘When I tell you the story of Jesus dying for you, does that move you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you want Him?’ ‘Yeah!’ ‘You aren’t capable of wanting Him IF He wasn’t wanting you! You aren’t capable of loving Him unless He was loving you.’ And Harvie found that prostitutes started coming to Christ because they got a radical new cultural identity

Editor’s Note: You can access the entire sermon here

Sometimes the journey to Christ begins when someone encounters horrendous evil. At other times the journey to Christ starts as the nonbeliever joins with believers to promote justice.

Sek Saroeun was a Buddhist and a law student. Working as a DJ at a bar in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Sek knew liquor was not the only item on the menu. Girls, often young girls, were sold for sex. Disgusted by this evil, Sek began to work as an undercover informant for the International Justice Mission, a Christian human rights group.

While spinning music and scanning the bar for suspects, Sek also skimmed the pages of a Bible someone had loaned him. The words of Scripture brought him comfort and alleviated his mounting fear of being exposed as an informant. Sek found his heart changing as he worked alongside Christians to protect these vulnerable young girls. As he later shared, his “fear led to longing; longing led to transformation that is unimaginable.” Not only did Sek eventually become a Christian, today he is the top lawyer for the International Justice Mission in Cambodia.

In her book, Rebecca McLaughlin writes:

In 2018, ISIS victim Nadia Murad, shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Congolese physician Denis Mukwege. Dr. Mukwege, nicknamed “Doctor Miracle,” is a pioneering surgeon who has treated thousands of victims of sexual violence for the medical aftereffects of gang rape and brutality.

Recognizing Jesus's relentless call on Christians to serve the suffering, Mukwege urges fellow believers:

“As long as our faith is defined by theory and not connected with practical realities, we shall not be able to fulfil the mission entrusted to us by Christ. If we are Christ's, we have no choice but to be alongside the weak, the wounded, the refugees and women suffering discrimination.”

In Unbelievable?, Justin Brierley shares that in the 1970s, Jaime Jaramillo, a wealthy businessman, was walking along the streets of Bogotá in Colombia when he saw a young girl climbing down through a manhole into the sewers below. Jaramillo went home, put on a wetsuit and followed the girl into the manhole. To his amazement he discovered about 90 children living underground in the filthy, rat-infested sewers. They were the youngest victims of Colombia's so-called 'dirty war in which government forces and paramilitary groups fought running battles across the country. In the social chaos, street kids found themselves at the bottom of the pile, often addicted to sniffing glue, involved in prostitution, and suffering from disease and malnutrition. The reason for their subterranean living space was that paramilitary gangs were killing the children who lived on the streets above. One gang member said, "Killing these kids is like killing lice. We call them 'the disposables.'"

Appalled at the situation in his home country, Jaramillo (or 'Papa Jaime as he is affectionately known) went on to rescue as many kids from the sewers as possible, using his money to build a home where they receive an education and live in a loving Christian community. To date he has changed the lives of thousands of children.

Incredible perseverance paid off for a team from the International Justice Mission in Cebu, Philippines. After an eight year legal struggle, two traffickers were finally brought to justice.

The difficult case began in 2008, when a teenage girl and two young women were recruited and ferried to work at a brothel on an island far from their home. When they arrived and realized they had been trapped and would be forced to provide sexual services to customers, they escaped.

International Justice Mission, a Christian organization founded on God's Word and the power of prayer, offered aftercare services to help the two girls settle back into the rhythms of life in freedom, and took up what would turn out to be nearly a decade-long battle for justice. As the case moved to trial, it highlighted what was broken in the justice system. Hearings were frequently cancelled when a key party—the judge, the defense counsel, a witness—failed to show up. The courts were backlogged, and hearings would be rescheduled three or four months apart.

The trial was painstakingly slow, but IJM social workers were encouraged by the progress they saw in the lives of the two young women. After spending time in aftercare homes for sex trafficking survivors, both young women moved back into supportive communities where they are now thriving. Finally in November 2016, IJM announced: "On November 14, 2016 two traffickers were sentenced to 20 years in prison. This conviction brings closure and affirms these survivors of their worth. It also sends a message to other brothel owners and traffickers across the Philippines—justice will be served, no matter how long it takes."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Justice; Injustice—This illustration shows how all followers of Jesus should fight for justice for the oppressed. (2) God's justice; God's wrath—But it also shows how imperfect human justice is. We long for the day when "justice will be served" not just by human courts but by the Living God.

In his book Visions of Vocation, Christian author and thinker Stephen Garber tells the story of meeting a woman who directed the Protection Project, an initiative under Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government that addresses human trafficking. Garber asked her, "So why do you care about the issue of human trafficking?"

She told the story of her heart opening to the cries of women and girls who were sold into slavery, often involving sexual bondage. After writing on the issue, the Kennedy School hired her to work at their Protection Project initiative in Washington D.C. Then Garber describes what happened next:

As we talked in her office, I watched her staff walking by in the hallway outside her door, and their serious and eager faces impressed me. She eventually said, "I get the most interesting applications here. Just imagine. Harvard University, Washington, D.C., human rights. It's a powerful combination, and it draws unusually gifted young women and men from the best universities in America."

But then she surprised me with these words, "After a few weeks they almost always find their way down the hall, knock on my door and ask to talk. Now, I know what they are going to say. After thanking me for the position and the opportunity, a bit awkwardly they ask, 'But who are we to say that trafficking is wrong in Pakistan? Isn't it a bit parochial for us to think that we know what is best for other people? Why is what is wrong for us wrong for them?' To be honest, I just don't have time for that question anymore. The issues we address are too real, they matter too much. I need more students like the one you sent me, because I need people who believe that there is basic right and wrong in the universe!"

Self-worship is at the heart of all kinds of evils. Greed, lust, selfishness, fear—all are forms of self-worship … [Here's a graphic example of how self-worship works]: In Phnom Penh, a twelve-year-old girl has been sold to a brothel by her father. As a victim of her father's self-worship, she has been reduced to a solution for a desire or need that he has. She is the sacrifice to his self-worship. Every time she is raped for pay, the man raping her uses her to gratify his perverted sexual desires in an act of self-worship. The brothel owners who commoditize her flesh are worshiping self as they daily exchange her pain for their profit.

While this is most vivid in the red-light districts of Cambodia, the reality is that self-worship is at the heart of nearly every decision and every system or city that we make today. That same self-worship is at the heart of our decisions to go to porn sites and pay for the flesh of the downtrodden and oppressed, our decisions to purchase products manufactured by known violators of child labor laws, and our decisions to consume foods and beverages that come from people who receive little or nothing for their labor.

In the end, we are all Phnom Penh. We are all a part of the nightmare, and we are all unfit for the dream of God.

People sometimes ask, How could sex trafficking happen in America's small towns or big cities? Julie Waters, a family law attorney and director of Free the Captives ministries, offers the following scenario of human trafficking that occurs every day in American towns and big cities:

We turn a blind eye to the 15 year old inner city girl who is being trafficked. Why? Because we turned a blind eye when she was three-years-old being severely neglected by her mother. We didn't see the empty fridge or the apartment without electricity. We turned a blind eye when she was seven-years-old and being raped by her uncle. We turned a blind eye when she was 13 and started missing school and running away from home. And now today when she is forced to sleep with 10 men a night by her pimp at the age of 15, we turn a blind eye because we never saw her to begin with.

Ernie Allen, the Director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, says that human trafficking occurs when people "are owned by someone else, lack the ability to walk away, and lack the ability to make a decision in their own self-interest to do something else." Sadly, this doesn't just happen in countries around the globe. It's all around us even in the U.S.—as the following headlines from American newspapers demonstrate:

• "Northern California teens sold for sex"
• "Federal authorities from Memphis honored for breaking up child sex-trafficking ring"
• "Fort Myers, Florida, woman accused of using children as prostitutes"
• "North Alabama man convicted in sex trafficking of an underage girl"
• "Human trafficking ring used girls as young as 12 … prosecutors say"
• "Georgia man arrested for engaging minors in sexual servitude"
• "Somali sex trafficking ring in Tennessee"
• "Mississippi man pleads guilty to sex trafficking"
• "Sex trafficking in the U.S. called 'epidemic'"
• "18 years for [Chicago] sex ring boss convicted of human trafficking"

In their Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn report on [the] worldwide slavery [in sex trafficking], telling stories of girls who had been kidnapped or taken from their families on a ruse and then sold as sex slaves. These girls, many under ten years of age, are drugged, beaten, raped, and forced to sell their bodies night after night. It is a slavery even more horrifying than the slavery colonial America practiced, and the numbers are beyond imagination.

Kristof reports that it is far more effective to crack down on the perpetrators than to try to rescue the victims. That is because rescuing the girls from external slavery is the "easy part," but rescuing them from the beast within, such as the drug addictions that cause them to return or the shame they feel, is enormously challenging. They keep returning to their abusers.

Kristof tells of rescuing Momm, a Cambodian teen who had been enslaved for five years. Momm was on the edge of a breakdown—sobbing one moment, laughing hysterically the next. She seized the chance to escape, promising she'd never return. When Kristof drove Momm back to her village, Momm saw her aunt, screamed, and leapt out of the moving car.

A moment later, it seemed as if everybody in the village was shrieking and running up to Momm. Momm's mother was at her stall in the market a mile away when a child ran up to tell her that Momm had returned. Her mother started sprinting back to the village, tears streaming down her cheeks …. It was ninety minutes before the shouting died away and the eyes dried, and then there was an impromptu feast.

Truly it was a great rescue—and there was singing and dancing and celebrating, reminiscent of the singing and dancing of Miriam and the Israelite women when they were rescued out of their slavery in Egypt.

But as with the Israelites, the celebration didn't last long. Early one morning Momm left her father and her mother without a word and returned to her pimp in Poipet. Like many girls in sex slavery, she had been given methamphetamine to keep her compliant. The craving had overwhelmed her. No doubt she thought, I just have to have this or I can't go on. Perhaps she imagined she'd be able to escape after she got it, but even if she didn't, she thought, I have to have this.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Struggle against Sin—Use this story to illustrate our personal struggle with sin and how to work out the freedom we have in Christ. (2) Social Justice and Evangelism—This story also provides a powerful way to illustrate the need to work for justice and preach the Gospel. People need justice and compassion, but they also need to hear the good news that sets them free on the inside.

In 1901 a seven-year-old Indian girl named Preena escaped from a Hindu temple and sought refuge with a Christian named Amy Carmichael, a young woman who had come from Ireland to share the gospel in India. According to Preena's story, her widowed mother had dedicated her as a child to be "married to the gods," which ultimately meant a life of prostitution. The traumatized child, whose hands had been branded with hot irons as punishment for a previous escape, had heard Carmichael talking about a God who loves everyone. After checking into the details behind Preena's story of alleged abused, Amy Carmichael concluded, "Investigations not only confirmed [the child's story], but unveiled an evil greater in its extent and more grievously unholy in its character than ever imagined."

On the spot, Amy Carmichael made up her mind. "Since these things are so," she said, "I must do something about it!" Later she wrote, "I mean it with an intensity I know not how to express, that … such unutterable wrongs … in the name of all that is just and all that is merciful should be swept out of the land without a day's delay."

For Carmichael, Preena's escape launched a 50-year career in intercepting and retrieving girls and babies from a "life" worse than death and giving them a home. It eventually led Amy and her associates to discover little boys being trafficked too and to expand their rescue efforts to include them. Today, over one hundred years after Amy Carmichael launched her ministry, the Dohnavur Fellowship is still rescuing children who are at risk and would otherwise be trafficked or on the streets.