I recently spoke with expert Hannah Palmquist about seeing victims of human trafficking in our communities. She directs the Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit at the Georgia Attorney General’s Office. Here is what I want to share with you from our conversation.
When you hear the term human trafficking what picture develops in your mind’s eye? Is it a young woman on a vacation abroad that suddenly goes missing? Public pleas for her safe return from family, friends and even politicians? A social media frenzy of speculations, rumors and outrage? Try again.
Challenging Misconceptions by Seeing Victims of Human Trafficking
This time she is a teen. Instead of the international vacation, it’s a foster care group home on the other side of town. Replace family with a scattered and fragmented blur of people who once knew where and to whom she belonged.
Substitute friends with a man who shows her attention, affection, validation, and what she believes is love. This man will become her trafficker and abuser, and she will willingly go with him. The social media frenzy and outrage morphs into the sound of crickets. We don’t look for her. Nobody looks for her, because we never saw her in the first place.
Really? Did we never see her? Look again.
Overcoming Cultural Blindness and Complicity
She shows up all around us, indirectly, in the media we consume and in the media our children consume. A continuous flow of over-sexualized content flashes across every screen we look at. She is molded by our own hands through our thoughts of othering and excuses of complicity with the culture.
Her trafficker is enabled by her willingness to go with him and our need to blame her. In reality, we choose not to see her. We turn away from her because of geography; she doesn’t live in our neighborhood. Because her acting out makes it hard to like or control her. Because she pushes us out of our comfort zone. Because she represents a generational problem with no easy answer.
Christ’s Command: Seeing Victims of Human Trafficking Through Love
Jesus sees her and gives us the answer. Simply put, Love. Not sentimental or platitudinal love. But the Love that he commands of us, Love that makes us stand apart from the culture around us. Love that makes us the enemy of darkness. Love that compels us to lean into the ugliness of the world, to problems with no answers. A Love that shines so brightly through us that she can never be unseen again.
Jesus’s answer, though simple, is never easy. Jesus tells us his way is narrow and hard, and that few of us will find it. Most of us will choose the easy way that leads to destruction. Matthew 7:13-14. Jesus has issued a challenge, a call to action for all time and truth seekers through the ages. Which path is yours, through the narrow gate where she is waiting to be seen by you or the broad and easy path where she is forever unseen by the willfully blind who passes her by.
Choosing the Narrow Gate: Resources for Action
- Learn how to spot the signs of human trafficking.
- Watch the Human Trafficking Awareness Training video created by Marty Kemp, First Lady of Georgia.
