ARTICLE TOOLS

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"Girls! Girls! Girls!" I pass that sign every Sunday on my way to church. It stands outside an old bar. The windows on the brick building are all covered up. The gravel parking lot stretches from the street toward the tavern and wraps around behind it, hinting at the number of patrons hosted the previous night.

I'm curious about this building. It contrasts strangely with the suburban neighborhood of pharmacies, restaurants, gas stations, and subdivisions that has enveloped it. But I don't want to spend too much time staring; after all, we're headed to church!

Oddly enough, a story in Christianity Today first informed me about what occurs behind the darkened windows of countless clubs that parade girls on stage. CT provided a glimpse into the grotesque trade in lust and flesh that keeps these businesses running and is just one example of the modern-day slave trade, forcing hundreds of thousands of women in the U.S. into bondage.

One human rights lawyer says there are more slaves today than all the Africans taken in the slave trade. "An estimated 45,000 to 50,000 foreign women and children cross the U.S. borders each year as fodder for sex trafficking," CT reported in 2003. "A layer down, intrastate domestic trafficking networks trade 300,000 to a million each year, according to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children." Wendy Murray tells the story of Heidi, who spent ten years as a sex slave. Unfortunately, Heidi's naiveté and church going made her particularly vulnerable to the wiles of a new "boyfriend."

"He took time enough to be my boyfriend, then sent me out on the Midwest circuit," she says. This meant she was carted around for weekly stints in strip clubs, forced to live out of rank hotels in small towns all over the Midwest. Her "daddy" and a few of his friends had beaten and raped her a few times, and forced her to take addictive drugs. At the strip club, when she refused raunchy requests, they pelted her with empty shotgun shells. On another occasion a man attacked her while she was on a stage.

"Who's going to protect you?" she asks. "You're in a dark room full of gaping men," which includes police officers, clergy, judges, and politicians. "Who are you going to tell?" she says. At the same time, Heidi's pimp was telling her, "If you leave me, I'll kill you."

As Heidi notes, too often those we trust to enforce the law turn a blind eye to criminal activity. Thailand's greatest source of external income, says Preston Jones, comes from the sex tourism industry. And much of that industry depends on the patronage of American military personnel. Jones, who served in the Navy, says, "Everyone knew that the chances of getting caught, let alone busted, were almost zero." 

But the problem, Jones believes, is not just with rowdy sailors. "The drunken deeds of America's unwitting freckle-faces in the brothels of Bangkok are bad enough. The willful refusal among the powerful to acknowledge that each year American troops pump millions of dollars into Asia's vicious skin trade is criminal."

There are some, however, who do acknowledge and work to combat this evil. As CT's March cover story notes, Christians have been on the front lines fighting sex trafficking and other forms of slavery for a long time. With the release of the film Amazing Grace on the 200th anniversary of the abolishment of the British slave trade, many modern-day abolitionists are taking their inspiration from William Wilberforce.

One such abolitionist is Bob, the director of investigation for the International Justice Mission and the subject of a 2004 CT report. "How much for three hours, to take pictures?" Bob asks a pimp in Mumbai, India. "I'm interested in this one and that one. Definitely these two we might be interested in."

Bob was gathering evidence he would later use to secure these girls' release. It's messy work, but work that IJM undertakes routinely. This organization is "nearly unique among human-rights agencies for its focus on dogged legal casework and its depth of Christian conviction," says Andy Crouch in his introduction to a recent essay by IJM founder Gary Haugen.

The Christian conviction that has driven people like Wilberforce and Granville Sharp is the same that motivates IJM workers and others who strive to free from oppression those God loves. It also compels Christians who aren't on the front lines gathering evidence or writing laws.

After all, Wilberforce could never have succeeded in his efforts to make slavery illegal without the support of the English people. It would be a shame to spend this bicentennial honoring an abolitionist while ignoring modern-day slavery. Here are four ways Gary Haugen says Christians today can do their part.

1. Learn and pray about modern-day slavery.
   
   
2. Petition government to make enforcement of anti-slavery laws a priority in its dealings with other countries.
   
   
3. Financially support investigative and legal advocates.
   
   
4. Support rehabilitation services for those freed from slavery.