The Face of Human Trafficking
While filming Nefarious: Merchant of Souls, a documentary on the global sex trade, my crew and I traveled to a hotspot for child sex tourism on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I wasn’t sure what to expect.
The drive took us down a long, bumpy dirt road. When the dust settled, we saw a white man, probably in his late forties, standing in front of a dilapidated shanty brothel. He was bartering with the madam for sex with a child.
Incensed, we jumped out of our vehicle just as he took off down the dirt street. We gave chase, catching up to him just as he saddled a moped taxi. I grabbed him by his shirt, stared straight into his eyes, and demanded that he never return.
As I released him, I was struck by his eyes, which seemed glossed with a film of perversion. Even more arresting was the look of sheer cowardice on his face. A barrage of questions assailed my mind. Why was the most lucrative business in this village child sex tourism? Who was this man? Where did men like him come from, and what drove them to participate in the exploitation of children?
Then it hit me––this man didn’t just wake up and decide to fly to the other side of the world to buy a child for sex. We have to ask what kind of culture is producing men like him, eager to buy women and children for sex, contributing to a 32-billion-dollar human trafficking industry. To a significant extent, the answer is: the kind of culture that spawns a 100-billion-dollar-per-year pornography industry.
Of the many men we talked with who had purchased a woman or child for sex, there wasn’t a single one who didn’t have a history of viewing pornography. Hyper-sexualized people create demand for illicit sex. Those who pay to view sex aren’t too far from buying sex.
Western boys form an objectified view of females at an early age. Ninety percent will view pornography between the ages of eight and sixteen, the average age of initial exposure being eleven. When a young child’s fragile mind is exposed to pornography, his or her view of the opposite sex, sexual behavior, and relationships is distorted. For many males, a woman or girl is an object, a thing to be conquered instead of a person to love.
When we first started filming Nefarious, in 2008, we conducted a series of street interviews, asking people what human trafficking was and if they would explain it to us. To our surprise, most had no clue, never mind insight.
Human trafficking awareness has now exploded. Almost everywhere I turn I hear about it. Trafficking has been a significant problem for the better part of thirty years, yet it is only now gaining widespread recognition. I don’t think there is any explanation for this other than God’s decision to highlight this injustice in a pronounced way, getting our attention so that we make the right connections between our “normal” culture and “abnormal” atrocities. Suddenly, an issue somewhere out there, far from here, is close to home.
After returning to America, I emailed our contact in Cambodia to see if he could send me any artifacts for a human trafficking museum I am opening in Missouri. He told me about some pajamas he recovered in a brothel raid. They belonged to a seven-year-old girl. The only problem, he explained, was that they were still stained with her blood from the abuse she had suffered.
When men and women view pornography, they often fail to consider the ramifications. At the other end of the pornography industry are the blood-stained pajamas of a seven-year-old girl. Hers is the face of human trafficking.
