- International YWAMer

Most of us assume that slavery ended in the 19th century. The brutal fact is that people of all ages are forced to toil in the rug loom sheds of Nepal, sell their bodies in the brothels of Rome, break rocks in the quarries of Pakistan, and fight wars in the jungles of Africa. In every major town or city in the world, there is a thriving commerce in human beings.

I first encountered human trafficking in one of my neighborhood restaurants in San Francisco, USA. The restaurant served as the hub of a trafficking ring that brought more than 500 teenagers from India into the United States for forced labor.

Moved to action by this experience, I began an international investigation into the slave trade in February 2007. I traveled to northern Thailand, where large numbers of women and children were being held captive and forced to labor for the profit of slave masters.

Shortly after my arrival, I bumped into Kru Nam, an unlikely modern-day abolitionist. She was an artist from Chiang Mai, the second largest city in Thailand. Every day on the way to her studio, she saw kids living on the riverbanks. One day she took empty canvases down to the river, handed tins of paint and brushes to the kids, and asked them to paint their stories. They created a series of disturbing images that added up to a horror story.

“Most of us are not from Thailand,” the eight- to twelve-year-olds explained. “We come from Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and as far away as China.” They had been kidnapped or sold by their parents, and told that they could attend school if they crossed the border into Thailand. They ended up in the child-sex brothels of Chiang Mai.

The kids told Kru Nam that they were the lucky ones. Many of their friends were still locked up in the bars, forced to submit to the pleasures of sex tourists. These river kids had escaped, yet remained aware that they could be captured and returned to captivity.

Kru Nam did not exactly have a plan when she marched into the city that evening. Only her mission was clear: Rescue as many of the young kids as she could find. She entered a karaoke bar, approached the table where the kids were sitting and calmly said, “Let’s go. I’m taking you out of here.” Within minutes, she was leading two girls and a boy out the door and to a safe destination in Chiang Mai.

I was overwhelmed with Kru Nam’s expression of love. I knew I had to stand alongside her and other abolitionists to help free the captives. Over the next year, Kru Nam rescued over 125 kids from sex brothels and border crossings in northern Thailand, and I launched the Not For Sale Campaign so I could help her build a village to protect the children and offer them a future.

The Not For Sale Campaign has gone on to intervene in cases of modern slavery around the globe and offer a future for freed slaves in Cambodia, Peru, Uganda, Nepal, Honduras, Thailand, and the United States. As our work progressed, we realized that helping survivors was simply not enough. Traffickers will continue to prey on new victims until the political, economic, and moral forces undergirding the slave trade change. So we turned the Not For Sale Campaign to address the causes of injustice that allow the vulnerable to be sold like commodities.

The first hurdle was to make this crisis visible. At the time, most citizens in the United States had a hard time believing that trafficking was happening in their own cities. The justice system seemed oblivious, while social service agencies were unprepared to provide protection and services to trafficking victims.

As a first step, we began investigating cases of human trafficking in the US. This led to the development of SlaveryMap.org which empower researchers to track cases of slavery, producing material for the use of grassroots abolitionists around the globe.

Slavery is a business, and we are all linked to it. For example, seventy percent of the world’s chocolate is produced in Western Africa, where the plantations are rife with children sold into bonded labor. If you consume chocolate made by Cadbury and Nestle, you are playing a role in driving the demand for the slave trade.

My encounter with irresistible love sent me on my search for justice. Justice is a rational pursuit, a calculated decision to balance the scales and ensure that all individuals are treated with dignity. Love, however, moves us to transcend what we calculate as reasonable. Justice moves me to search for answers; truthfully, that’s my natural inclination. But love takes me to depths of compassion. In the throes of love, all of us can recognize the conditions that day in and day out make people vulnerable to greed and exploitation and seek answers that only justice can provide.

David Batstone is the president of Not For Sale. A professor of Ethics at the University of San Francisco, he is also founder and president of Right Reality, an international social venture firm. Dave has authored five books, the two most recent being Not For Sale (HarperOne) and Saving the Corporate Soul (Jossey-Bass). Find out more about David’s important work combating human trafficking at NotForSaleCampaign.org.