I still believe that guy needs to be stopped. I still believe that girl deserves to be free. I still feel like the Red Light districts of Southeast Asia are crawling with … evil. But, what I’m saying is that I can see how we got here, to this place, where sprawling Red Light districts are plentiful, and where children’s bodies are for sale, and where pimps and child molesters abound.
I guess it’s just easy for me to see how a broken world full of broken people would have spots where the shattered pieces collect and congregate, surfacing like an open wound, in great need of care and healing.
I get all of that. I do. I believe that evil exists in the world (and in my own heart), so as I’ve spent this past year trying to learn as much as I could about all of this, it just wasn’t shocking for me to consider the historical and cultural roots and the current driving forces behind modern day slavery and find the presence of “evil.” That really doesn’t surprise me at all. I mean, duh.
But, you know what does surprise me? You know what I’m still super confused by?
Apathy.
I’m shocked by how easy it is to feel apathetic to the suffering of others.
Sometimes it seems like we all know this atrocity exists, but we just don’t actually give a shit.
That’s the one part of this giant humanitarian disaster that lingers in my mind with a big fat question mark above it, like a huge neon sign, flashing “What-the-hell-is-going-on-around-here?!”
Most of us already know about human trafficking.
A man directs a little girl to show off her flexibility …
in front of a brothel.
We know that young girls are being bought, coerced or taken from rural villages and sold into slavery.
We know that children are being raped for profit on a global scale.
We know that bad men are traveling to certain cities where it’s easier to buy little boys, or virgin girls.
We know that teenagers are being smuggled from one country to the next, to be used as sex slaves.
We know … but we don’t really care. Or, maybe we just don’t care enough to do anything about it.
