Recently, I attended a human trafficking seminar put on by a local hospital and hosted at a megachurch.
Speakers discussed at length the impact of health care workers and other serving professions on victims and survivors of human trafficking. For instance, I learned about 90% of human trafficking victims encounter the health care system while being held captive. Yet, many leave the hospital with their traffickers because staff are untrained in identifying this type of abuse.
Where human trafficking is hiding
Part of what makes identifying human trafficking so difficult is the broad scope of what human trafficking can be and our misconceptions about it.
Mallory Challis
We often equate human trafficking with sex trafficking. We have an image of gross old men holding young girls captive in a basement or stealing children from a mall parking lot. We imagine patients entering the emergency room bursting at the seams to tell someone what is wrong.
These things do sometimes happen. But most real-life scenarios of human trafficking are a lot more inconspicuous than this.
Think about the Epstein Files, for instance.
Many of the children and adults trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein were living seemingly normal lives. They were living with their parents, attending school, socializing with peers. Epstein was a family friend or close business associate.
“You can be trafficked while living a seemingly normal life.”
But you can be trafficked while living a seemingly normal life.
If you are forced into labor and are not free to stop due to some financial, psychological, social, physical or religious source of manipulation, you are being trafficked. This includes things like blackmail, threats of violence, financial control, religious conditioning and much more.
Incarcerated folks are labor trafficked in prison programs that pay pennies on the dollar, which they cannot freely leave until their sentence is up.
Boys and girls are sex trafficked online while scrolling Instagram or playing FortNite by perpetrators who threaten blackmail with sexually explicit AI deepfakes.
Married women are trafficked in their own homes by abusive husbands who control household finances and force them into sexual, domestic and other types of labor.
Immigrants are labor and sex trafficked by employers who steal their documentation and force them to stay in underpaying jobs or do sex work.
“Prostitutes” are sex trafficked by “pimps,” who use money, drugs or other types of blackmail to keep them under control and out on the streets collecting cash.
And “sister wives” are trafficked by “polygamist” men who use religious control to exploit them for sex, labor and social status.
These are things that happen in our own communities.
“These are things that happen in our own communities.”
Evangelicals and human trafficking
And while human trafficking already is a jarring topic, one thing throughout the seminar was particularly striking: How evangelicalism showed up.
I hadn’t realized the location was a megachurch until I arrived.
I walked in and heard worship music playing in the auditorium. At the beginning of the seminar, there were prayers to the God who can deliver us from evils like human trafficking. Many of the speakers referenced Jesus and his power to redeem.
If you grew up evangelical, like I did, you know human trafficking has been a large concern for evangelical groups in the United States for the past three decades.
I remember seeing images throughout my childhood of poor, frowning foreign girls who needed a financial sponsor to help them escape sex trafficking. To be physically and spiritually renewed by our missionary efforts. Church leaders emphasized how gross it was to be sex trafficked and how their bodies had been degraded in irrevocable ways.
For just 10 cents a day, you (yes, you!) could save Amara in Nigeria and help redeem her from sexual impurity imposed by traffickers. Her name means “grace” — isn’t that a sign?
It’s no longer evangelically trendy to do this anymore. But as I sat in the megachurch’s auditorium and listened, I was reminded of similar themes of blame, shame and sexual impurity. Micro-references to ideas that can be harmful for survivors, and make it seem like they are irrevocably damaged by, or somehow responsible for, their experiences of abuse.
The ‘lifestyle’ of trafficking
South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson referred to human trafficking as a “lifestyle” that survivors leave behind. This language also was used during the next lecture.
What these speakers were explaining is this: Human trafficking does not look how we think it does. It can easily hide behind regular “lifestyles.” Victims often live otherwise normal-looking lives.
While we would readily identify a person in physical chains as an enslaved laborer, we are not so quick or equipped to identify an OnlyFans model, a child who plays online games or a teen with an STD from her “boyfriend” as a person in captivity. They don’t fit our mental image of human trafficking.
Yet there are people everywhere living in conditions of captivity via religion, blackmail, drugs or the internet.
And while I know this is true and believe the legislative work these speakers are doing is immeasurably important, something irked me about that term. My theological alarms were going off.
“Something irked me about that term. My theological alarms were going off.”
Hearing things like, “I’m so glad this woman left the lifestyle of trafficking” felt odd.
Instead of emphasizing the actions of abusers, this language highlights the choices of victims. And it is true that some survivors stay in situations of captivity because they fear what will happen if they attempt to escape. Others know they do not have the means to leave. Some have been groomed or conditioned and do not know their situation is abusive.
However, I think this language also risks implying that victims and survivors are accountable for the crimes committed against them. That they need to turn their lives around. That they have made choices that created their situation of captivity, for which they are to blame.
Turning away
Theologically speaking, it implies metanoia (repentance or turning away).
That human trafficking is a lifestyle choice victims can simply turn away from. That survivors need to be redeemed from a sinful, promiscuous or incorrect choice they are guilty of making, and that turning away from this will bring them out of sin and closer to God. It risks convincing survivors they are dirty (especially in a sexual sense) and need to be washed clean before gaining access to Christian community.
But they committed no sin from which to turn away. The sinfulness, of course, is on the part of their traffickers.
So, let’s reframe our thinking about human trafficking and metanoia.
Victims and survivors were forcibly wrapped up in a sinful situation. But it was created by the sins of their traffickers, by which they found themselves unfree to experience anything else. Although they experienced and endured sinfulness, they are not the ones who sinned.
So, I suppose my reflection is this: Trafficking survivors may have made choices that put them at higher risk of abuse, like trusting someone in an online chatroom, starting an OnlyFans account or being alone with a family friend. And once they escape, they must make choices for themselves, like seeking medical care, telling their stories, pressing charges against perpetrators and finding other ways to live a happy life post-trauma.
But their abuse really grew out of the sinful choices of others. The “lifestyle” they turned away from upon escaping was not their own.
They are not dirty or damaged or impure, although they may be wounded. They do not need to turn away from anything they have done, although they ought to be free to go far away from the choices of their abusers.
The words we choose to describe abuse matter. Especially when we say them in church.
If you or someone you know may be experiencing human trafficking, call 888-373-7888 for 24/7 assistance.
Mallory Challis is a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. She is a recent graduate from the master of divinity program at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. She is creator and host of the BNG podcast “Non-Disclosure,” about child sexual abuse at Kamp Kanakuk.