Recently, the 700 Club did a report on three Kansas City based organizations, that includes Exodus Cry, that are fighting human trafficking. While, understandably, most people think that trafficking is a crime that takes place “a world away,” most are shocked to discover that human trafficking takes place in many American cities as in Kansas City.
Matt Gilman and his team led a powerful time of intercession last night. At one point, the Spirit breathed on a simple chorus and a packed prayer room together sang “Freedom!” over Tokyo and the victims of human trafficking trapped therein. Read the rest of this entry »
Culture is what happens when people live and work in the same vicinity. It’s automatic, and unavoidable. Where two or more are gathered, there you will find culture. It forms the sometimes unspoken rules of engagement and relationship of any people, and all too often, it can turn rancid right in front of us. When examining the sex trade, over and over, you find that it is the specific nuances of a region or city that have become overgrown and sanctioned abuses and vulgarities. Here are three elements of the Tokyo sex-trade that you need to understand: Sex-Strata (Shinto), Enjo-Kosai, and cartoon fantasy.
Sex Strata— At the core of Japan’s Shinto (“Way of the gods”) is a religion/philosophy that was first codified in the seventh century. In Shinto, impurity is something that can ruin your peace of mind, but is not necessarily something bad. Under this belief system, there is no way to conceptualize sexually immorality. Read the rest of this entry »
This post was originally posted as an article more than a year ago. It seemed like a timely moment to repost.
by Clayton Butler
February 2, 2009
After completing my schooling for Business Ethics and Biblical Theology I decided to pursue my dream of working on the mission field. I accepted an offer to work in Cambodia as the Anti-trafficking Program Coordinator for Agape International Missions. This organization has an After-Care center for girls rescued out of sexual slavery, an outreach center in the seedy red light district of Svay Pak, and a network of over 500 churches working to implement long-term strategies to crush the systemic injustice of Human Trafficking. I was excited about launching into this new endeavor, but my life thus far had not prepared me for the harsh realities I would face in Cambodia.
Every day in Cambodia I drive by brothels and condom vendors, and I see the young girls side by side with the men that profit from their destruction. I hear the investigative reports of new brothels that are discovered, some that contain over one hundred girls as young as seven years old. I have seen drawings from rescued girls in counseling sessions, where they illustrate their experiences in the brothels. They draw themselves getting beaten for refusing to satisfy more than ten men in one night, they draw themselves begging pedophiles to use a condom, they draw themselves tied to a bed with a rag in their mouth, and they draw other unspeakable evils. Read the rest of this entry »
Elisabeta (see, The Girl Who Lost Control) was sold for sex when she was just 13 years old. Repeatedly. She would still be taking “clients” today if it were not for a series of unlikely events. First, she managed to press back against the indomitable fear smothering her soul to find the courage to escape from the woman (yes, a woman) who was trafficking her. Next, she managed to find her way to a police station and explained her bondage. Then, she managed to circumvent the typical part of the story of a girl in her position—the part where the police don’t believe her story and return her to her trafficker. Finally, her trafficker was convicted and sentenced to years in prison, a verdict rarely celebrated by trafficking victims who usually must live with the dread that their trafficker is still loose and maybe even lurking in every dark corner to enslave them again. Read the rest of this entry »
Exodus Cry Director of Philanthropy Blaire Pilkington interviews Hanalee Linda on location in South Africa. With a spike in unsupervised children traveling around the country on school break, there is a need for programs like Linda’s which reach out to thousands of at risk children.
Exodus Cry Director of Philanthropy Blaire Pilkington delivers an update from Cape Town, South Africa. She is leading a team in various cities in South Africa that is praying for the ending of human trafficking, and raising awareness “on the battlefront.”
Monday night, the Exodus Cry team prayed for Jesus to move in South Africa. Specifically, Benji Nolot prayed that Jesus would walk through the streets of the cities and rescue women, one by one by one (see video at 00:30:00). It didn’t take long to see an answer to prayer: the next morning, Blaire Pilkington (Exodus Cry Director of Philanthropy) sent an email update of from Durban, South Africa. Using nearly the exact language she reported what God was doing with the Exodus Cry team as they ministered in the streets. Read her remarkable story of rescue and redeption below.
For the first time in its history, the Trafficking in Persons report (issued annually by the US State Department) included the United States in it’s analysis. The report demonstrated that victims of human trafficking in the United States are most often victims trafficked for forced prostitution rather than for labor.
Pat Robertson makes an important observation at the end of the above clip: the term “trafficking” sounds tame compared to the word “sex slavery.” The term human trafficking has been likened to the nineteenth century euphemism “peculiar institution.” In the linguistic battle to parse out the actual definition of crimes, there is more than semantics at stake. If human trafficking is nothing more than political-speak for modern-day slavery, then putting the United States in the TIP report is an admission that, more than 150 years after the Civil War, and fifty years after the Civil Rights Movement, slavery still exists in America today.
On one of the last legs of the trip to get interviews for the documentary Nefarious: Merchant of Souls, Benji asks a starlet Aiden Ashley, who is currently working in the porn industry, what she has to say about working in the industry. She gives a shocking answer.
For other updates from the journey visit Exodus Cry on Vimeo.
