Child Trafficking is the Issue That All of us Can Get Behind
We desperately need something that will unite all of us, and this should be it
A good friend of mine owns a beautiful yet modest home in the suburbs. He does well for himself and provides well for his wife and two kids. Walking into the main areas of his house, you’d feel right at home with its cleanliness and its simplicity but if you went downstairs into the basement, you’d see a different story. No judgment here as he is a very good friend of mine but the basement is a complete disaster. It’s stuffed to the rafters with junk, unfinished projects and exposed framing as only part of the basement is completed. The house tells two different stories. How it wants to look and how it really is.
In the U.S., our society is exactly like this. At first glance, it’s nice until you poke your head into the dark hidden basements of our society. That’s when it turns into a goddamn horror movie and I’m not exaggerating. A lot of people don’t realize, for example, that there is a huge colony of ‘mole people’ living underground in Las Vegas. It’s as horrible and dystopian as you can possibly imagine. You can easily look up YouTube videos where people take their cameras down there to document this living hell. One filmmaker even found a former porn star living down there, drug-addicted, teeth missing and destitute. Below the facade of the Las Vegas lights lays a dark underbelly of intense human suffering. Vegas undoubtedly has a huge undercurrent of human trafficking flowing through it as human trafficking is extremely lucrative to those who have found a way to murder their own ability to be good to other people. We all know what Vegas is known for, I don’t have to lay it out for you. The city is rife with illegal trafficking and crime.
If you watch any content about these underground colonies in Las Vegas, you should look up Kensington Avenue in Philadelphia. It’s a scene from the most dystopian thing you could imagine. The street is filled with prostitutes and homeless drug addicts who mindlessly shuffle around clutching their few belongings. It’s like a scene from a zombie movie. Most of us remain willfully blind to this amount of suffering. One might think, if they were watching from a distance, that America's biggest problem was plastic straws because plastic straws are something that people can comfortably talk about.
The truth is that all of us share the blame for the human atrocities in our own communities because of our insistence on being willfully ignorant of them. Instead of facing and dealing with our problems, we just prefer to shove them into some corner in the basement where we don’t have to look at them. The bigger and uglier the problem, the deeper and darker the corner it tends to stay in. The darkest corners are where our darkest secrets grow and thrive.
We must take an honest look at this
Somehow, there are those among the day-to-day citizenry here in the U.S. that still live in a state of denial about the horrific child trafficking problem. It’s a brutally painful thing to look at but something that we must force ourselves to do. Our deliberate ignorance of this issue has made us all complicit. As easy as it is to blame someone else, wash our hands of it and scream at people who use plastic straws, we all share a responsibility here. Our willful ignorance just doesn’t allow it to live among us but thrive. It hides in the shadows because we allow it to and because we insist on allowing those dark corners to exist.
Speaking from personal and professional experience as a mental health professional, most people are pretty apathetic about the tragedies surrounding our children. Most people say they care about things like child abuse, child sex trafficking, foster programs or the sky-high teen suicide statistics. Let me play the devil's advocate for a moment. You can tell what a person cares about by their actions. You can easily determine what’s important to people by observing their behavior and frankly, people do not give a flying fuck about kids. They say they do but they’ve bullshit themselves into thinking they’re doing some good in the world by waving a Ukrainian flag or screaming about plastic straws on social media. I’d bet that 9 out of 10 people do almost nothing to actually alleviate the ocean of human suffering that surrounds us. The closest most people get is handing a couple of bucks to panhandlers standing on the side of the road but by doing that, you might easily be keeping that person drug-addicted. You’re more than likely enabling their suffering and making it worse. Don’t bullshit yourself into thinking that you’re helping them. If you want to help them, hand them food or donate money to charity. Unfortunately, too many of us aren’t just failing to alleviate human suffering but we’re also directly or indirectly contributing to it.
Sadly, people are bullshit artists. Sadly, there just aren’t enough that are trying to be good people, we’re just trying to look like good people. We tend to care more about what people think about us to the point that it severely blurs our vision of what’s really important. I contend that it’s important for all of us to face human suffering directly. As painful as it might be, we need it. It’s good for us individually and collectively because it increases our empathy.
We’ve built our society on a foundation of child abuse
Speaking from my experience as a mental health professional, child abuse isn’t just real, it’s pervasive. We’re immersed in it. We’re so immersed in child abuse that we think a lot of it as normal. We can easily harm a child with our words or even being apathetic to them and their needs. We all know this, deep down, because we’ve all been on the receiving end of a myriad of destructive things in our own childhood. We trust adults to express and provide love because we don’t know any better. Even sadder still, we don’t learn the important lessons as we grow up and we often end up repeating the cycle by enacting the same types of harm onto our own children.
“Child abuse isn’t a goddamn conspiracy theory”
Again, speaking from experience here. Child protective services are completely inadequate and often do more harm than good. Most cases of child abuse that I have reported have been closed and in many cases have resulted in an abusive parent retaliating on vulnerable children. Recently I had an adult tell me that, as a child, she was a personal witness to the neighbor's children being abused by their parents. As an adult, this individual asked her mother why the other adults around remained quiet and complacent. Her mom told her that she and the other neighbors agreed that it was “best not to get involved” and that they were afraid to do so. Just another story of abused children who could have been helped but were not because capable adults choose to be afraid.
I recently watched a Tik Tok video about how in Japan, young children are often seen going places on their own without their parents. They walk to the store or even ride the subway to get where they’re going. The Americans new to Japan thought this was strange and even alarming but when they asked the locals about it, they replied that in Japan it’s commonly held that the safety of children is everyone's business and everyone’s responsibility. Parents feel safe sending their kids out into the world because they know that other adults are looking after them. “God,” I find myself asking, “what would that be like?!” The U.S. is rife with child abuse and child kidnapping. A quick Google search reveals that more than 365,000 children go missing in the United States every single year and I’m pretty sure that doesn’t include any of the undocumented migrant children that come across the border who go missing. If you trust mainstream statistics, which I don’t, that’s still an incredibly high number. If you leave your child outside in the front yard to play, they seriously might get snatched and you seriously might not ever see them again.
We can all agree child trafficking is an important issue
Child trafficking seems to be the one issue that could unite a divided nation. It’s the one issue that most of us would be able to agree on. We can bury the hatchets that we have with our neighbors and come together on this issue. This is the one thing that most of us will have in common and will help us see that we all have far more in common with each other than we had ever thought. At the end of the day, we all have far more in common than we are different.
We’ve allowed ourselves to be divided by politics and social issues and even though it’s obvious, at least to me, that this division is deliberately engineered, we collectively keep falling for it. None of us are perfect and none of us are without fault. All the blame and finger-pointing continue to get us absolutely nowhere except backward and deeper into a state of total deterioration and decay. The only thing that can save us is planting a unified flag into the same ground and I can’t think of any other issue that will help us get there. I don’t know that there’s anything else that will help us learn to listen and understand each other except through the ever-present elephant in the room. Child abuse.
In recent years there have been some nasty allegations of child sex trafficking leveled against prominent celebrities and politicians. It’s unfortunate to see so many people who are far more willing to come to the defense of their favorite celebrity and/or politician before they’re willing to consider the validity of these claims of child abuse, immediately dismissing it as a conspiracy theory. Even if there’s a one-in-a-million chance that there’s any truth to any of it, it deserves for us to look into it. These kids can’t help themselves. If we don’t come to their aid, nobody will. Nobody.
I’m speaking as someone that has worked with troubled teens for 22 years. Child abuse isn’t a goddamn conspiracy theory. Child abuse and child trafficking fucking exist and shame on you for dismissing it as a conspiracy theory. Evil exists, I promise you. Hell exists right here and right under our feet. I promise you. Calling it a conspiracy theory is just a way for sick people to wash their hands and absolve themselves of any responsibility. We know the Jefferey Epsteins of the world exist and we know that they fly politicians and celebrities to their private islands so they can enact unspeakable horrors on powerless victims.
“We need to talk more about this… and we need to listen. Not enough of us take the time to listen”
Go ahead. Call it all a conspiracy theory and be a part of the problem. Protect and defend the absolute worst of the worst that human beings can imagine doing. The evil element is thanking you, I promise. These victims deserve for us to consider what’s possible and talk about it long enough. Imagine being kidnapped and sold like an object knowing that nobody except for nobody will ever come for you because of how many of the plebs are on a witch hunt not for the child abusers but for virtually anything and everything else, no matter how absurd. If it’s bullshit then nothing will come of it, otherwise, we need to take any and all allegations of abuse seriously. I say again. Child abuse is real. Evil is real. It’s not a CoNsPiRaCy ThEoRy!
It’s all right in front of you. If you can’t see it, I don’t know what the fuck to tell you other than suggest that you might want to look at your willful blindness.
It’s painful to look it; do it anyway
We live in a society with trigger warnings. We’re expected to protect fragile egos who want to stuff their heads into their soft bubble of denial. The world is an uncomfortable and horrible place sometimes and we only make it worse by refusing to look at it or face it. Child abuse doesn’t go away because it’s difficult to talk about.
I recognize and fully appreciate how difficult this issue is to look at and face. I recognize how easy it is for us individually to fully experience the pain, despair and powerlessness of this issue. I had one close friend tell me once that it wasn’t so much that he didn’t care about the harm done to children so much as feeling totally inadequate. He confided in me and told me that didn’t have any idea what he could possibly do about it and it caused him to feel guilty and ashamed. I’m sure other people can relate and my answer is this. Allow yourself to be inadequate. It’s okay to be flawed, it’s okay to have faults. It’s okay to be a fuck up. We’re all fuck ups and we won’t do better until we’re more honest with ourselves about our flaws and mistakes. Lean into that discomfort and struggle through it. The worst thing we can do is continue to ignore it while it stays shoved underground.
This is also why we need to unite on this issue. Together we’re so incredible and strong. Together we can shine a light on this darkness and come up with solutions. Together we can heal. But we can’t do it individually and we can’t do it as long as we allow ourselves to keep being divided and outraged at each other for our… *checks notes* voting choices.
There are people and organizations already working to help these victims and we can be a part of the solution by joining those causes and those organizations. We don’t have to produce a solution, just support existing ones. People tell me they don’t know how to help a suicidal teenager but I do and all they have to do is ask and I’ll happily teach them. It’s actually a lot easier and simpler than people might think. My point is this. It’s okay to admit that you feel inadequate and ashamed and it’s okay to listen, learn and get involved even though you feel insecure about not knowing how to fix it.
Have you ever heard of The Clothesline Project? It’s an organization that works to bring awareness to domestic violence and child abuse. Survivors decorate a t-shirt that tells their story of abuse. Real people and real stories. I came across this one day while I was in college. It was a sobering and en emotional experience for me. It left an impact on me when I was young and I’ll never forget it.
I write this story about child abuse on what I hope will be a new dawn and a new chapter in our society about this issue. A movie is being released that depicts the horrors of child trafficking and though I haven’t seen it yet, my ticket is already purchased. Some of the mainstream media is calling it a conspiracy theory. Why on earth would they do such a thing? Think about it.
My friends, it’s time for us to get honest with ourselves about this issue and it’s time for us to find allies in our political enemies on this one. We need each other but more importantly, kids need us. We won’t ever get anywhere unless we all decide to make this an issue that we care the most about. We have to talk about it and we have to encourage others to talk about it. We also have to listen. Not enough of us know how to just shut up and listen when listening is so important. Find a way to get involved. It’s time to make a change. Don’t wait for other people to care about this. Don’t wait for other people to talk about this. Don’t make like Ukraine and jump on the bandwagon of social causes. Make the decision to make this important and don’t back down. Stand for something and help make a real difference.
