This woman I know posted a notice on Facebook about a walk to raise awareness about human trafficking, and specifically sex slavery. Normally I wouldn’t take interest in an awareness walk. I mean, I like walking, but I don’t like protests. But this particular woman I used to have a crush on, okay, let’s be honest, I sort of still have a crush on her. She’s the only female I know my age with conservative values (which shows what kind of liberal bubble I live in—and am trying to burst!), and such a rare person stands out to me, although I haven’t seen her in years. She lives in New Jersey.
I decided to look up the organization the awareness walk is supposed to be raising money for. It’s called Stop Child Trafficking Now. According to their website, unlike other anti-slavery organizations, Stop Child Trafficking Now doesn’t focus on rescuing individual victims from abuse. Instead, their goal is to have governments arrest and prosecute criminals who are involved with human trafficking. Specifically, they want the US military to hunt down traffickers in the same way they do with terrorists.
Now I don’t know exactly how they plan to implement these goals, but something about the concept rubs me the wrong way. While I think that human trafficking is a loathsome practice and its purveyors should be brought justice, I am hesitant in advocating that the US military should police the world. The counterargument is that if we don’t do it, who will? We are one of the few countries in the world with the resources to stop criminal practices that are undoubtedly perpetuated by political corruption so that local governments are accessories to the crim. But I am of the mind that our military presence and our habit of using a military solution for world problems has a negative impact with unforeseen consequences. I can’t help but wonder and wish that there could be a better, more creative solution.
Incidentally, this last weekend during the hurricane I finally got around to watching Ron Howard’s The Missing, a western that came out a few years back. I always meant to watch it because I like Ron Howard, but it’s over two hours long and very serious, so I kept putting it off. The Missing, as it happens, is about child trafficking for sexual slavery, which I had not known. Cate Blanchett’s daughter gets kidnapped by this Indian witch doctor and his gang of thieves, who intend to sell the girl as a whore to Mexican pimps. So Cate Blanchett teams up with her estranged father, Tommy Lee Jones, who, years ago, left his family in pursuit of Indian ways, but showed up around the time of the kidnapping because a medicine man told him that he needed to protect his family if he wanted to be fully healed of a rattlesnake bite.
The premise of the film is obviously not very politically correct, and it made me wonder what caused Ron Howard to take on the project (it isn’t characteristic of his style) and if the story is based on some real incident or if it was merely trying to be incredibly cliché. I think few people are aware that the western story originated in the form of captivity tales. Captivity tales became a popular genre of literature in the 19th century during western expansion of the States. Presumably, the first of these tales published were actual accounts of people who had been kidnapped by Indians and subsequently rescued. But the true life stories proved so popular that soon fictional accounts were produced. I learned about this at the Rosenbach Museum, because Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach was a collector of captivity tales and the museum probably houses the world’s largest collection of them. So, The Missing fits well into the western movie category, harking back to the origins of the genre. See The Searchers starring John Wayne for a similar example.
To be honest, I didn’t really like movie all that much. It was too simplistic and too violent, much of it seemed to try to deliberately disturb the viewer. But what struck me about it was how it presented a situation in which violence was absolutely the only option for the protagonist unless she wanted her daughter to be sold into a life of constant rape. I came away from the movie thinking, well, that is certainly a case where violence is warranted. Of course there is the argument that if white people hadn’t driven the Indians off their land and into hostility against the States then the Indians wouldn’t have kidnapped their women. But this movie is not about the big picture. It doesn’t address sociological causes. It is about a single incident in which a women must fight for her daughter’s life. (Furthermore, in the film, Cate Blanchett happens to be a doctor, and the opening sequence depicts her treating an old Indian women, so she is absolved from the sins of her race.)
So I watched this movie, was mildly captivated by it (ha-ha, just kidding) and then I hear about the human trafficking awareness walk. Being a person who doesn’t believe in coincidence, I can’t help but think that God is trying to draw my attention to something. But what is the message? In the current crisis, which Stop Child Trafficking Now wants to address, the big picture is that human trafficking happens, not because of imperialistic expansion, but because the world has evil in it, and when this evil is given the opportunity to work, it manifests itself in the most horrendous ways. No not-for-profit organization is capable of culling the motivations of criminals who sell and buy children for sex. Other organizations attempt to rescue children from these situations, one at a time, but unfortunately this does not stop the illicit transactions from occurring, and there is a chance that it makes the human trafficking market more profitable by increasing the scarcity of the “product.” Is this a situation, like in The Missing, where violence is warranted?
It seems that the choice is between using force to stop a horrible crime, or allowing it to continue by not acting. Really, the bigger picture solution is stronger communities that instill a greater sense value for both a human life and appropriate sexual behavior. Such communities should be able to police themselves and stop these crimes at the root. There is probably a good argument that although hunting down and prosecuting criminals with the military is a longer term solution than saving one child at a time, the even longer term solution of a strengthening community is undermined by a foreign military presence. It’s a delicate balance, these problems and solutions where governmental powers are involves, and I can’t say I have the answer.
Either way, this probably wouldn’t affect my decision making process over whether or not I go to the awareness walk, because the only real reason I would consider going is to see this woman. For those of you who are more interested in my crush on her than anything else I’ve been talking about, I have to say, my chances aren’t great. A few years ago, I made it plain that I wanted a romantic relationship with her and she said she just wanted to be friends, so I stopped hanging out with her. Now, I think we’re on good terms, but she rarely responds to my comments on her Facebook wall, and I sent her a text message yesterday, to which she also has not responded. So I don’t know if I would be a welcome presence at this awareness walk or not. I’m hesitant to sign up for it in advance. Maybe I’ll just show up and see what happens.
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