By Tim Rohr
Upon posting my take on the movie "Sound of Freedom" and the issue the movie addresses, I was heavily criticized by one reader for comparing sex-trafficked children to parent-abducted children.
Perhaps the reader missed the connection between the following facts...
- In the US, 2300 children are reported missing per day
- Strangers abduct less than 1% of missing children
- Parents are accountable for over 90% of abductions - SOURCE
"...fatherless children are at greater risk of suffering physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, being five times more likely to have experienced physical abuse and emotional maltreatment, with a one hundred times higher risk of fatal abuse; a recent study reported that preschoolers not living with both of their biological parents are 40 times more likely to be sexually abused." - SOURCE
Certainly, children can and do become fatherless because the father is the abandoner - which is usually how the father is painted - however, as already demonstrated, parental-abduction accounts for 90% of child abductions and:
"statistics on child abduction indicate that 60% of the time, the person is the mother or another female relative." - SOURCE
And there's this from World Population Review:
The most common form of kidnapping in many developed countries is the abduction of a child by a parent, who is typically estranged from the other parent and does not have legal custody of the child. The parent resorts to kidnapping either to cause the other parent emotional distress, because they fear the other parent will keep the child from them, or because they feel the other parent poses a threat to the child's well being. Though much less common, there also exist instances of children being kidnapped for more nefarious purposes, such as human trafficking or sexual exploitation. - SOURCE
For sex-traffickers, sex-trafficking is simply business. And business is simply about supply and demand. And while it is right and necessary that we back all efforts to rescue children already abducted and trafficked, if we are going to do anything more than wring our hands and swear at Disney * we must do something about the supply and demand.
* Disney had the rights to the movie for several years but did not produce it.
The good news is that we, regular people, at least in the U.S. can do much more about supply and demand, and particularly supply, than we can about rescuing children caught in the child sex-trafficking cartels in Latin America.
Before addressing the supply side of this "business," here's what the real-life hero of Sound of Freedom, Tim Ballard, said about the demand:
The United States is the number one consumer of child exploitation material. We are the demand. So, that means that traffickers want to get children into that dark market. There's a lot of money to be made here. The United States, also according to the State Department, is in the top three countries for destination countries for human trafficking. So, there's every incentive to get children into America, into the black markets here of pedophilia. - SOURCE
There's a lot that can be said about how to address the evils of the "demand," not the least of which is speaking and acting up against the near constant sexual eroticism that permeates our culture in almost everything from full-throated porn to sexy news anchors.
Normal people may "pooh-pooh" this as prudish, but remember, when it comes to the consumers of child-sex we are not dealing with normal people. We are dealing with sick people whose minds and morals are already darkened and set to go off upon the slightest trigger.
But to the problem of supply. Ballard already suggests what to do about the supply in his above quote about the demand. He goes on to say:
And so, when I find out that in the last couple of years that at least 85,000 — I think it's much higher than that — that at least 85,000 unaccompanied minors [have shown up at the border], thousands of them, I've seen the CBP reports, are under five years old. Why is a three-year-old showing up at the border? - SOURCE
And how to address this problem?
Ballard says that the only compassionate border policy is border enforcement, including barriers and walls, because, as emphasized in Sound of Freedom, "the walls and the barriers lead the children who are being hurt into that funnel of rescue. Trained women and men in uniform are there. Those kids want to go through the port of entry. Those kids pray for a wall. The wall will save their lives! But let's take it all down. Let's open it all up. Kids are being abused by the thousands and our taxpayer dollars are actually funding it." - SOURCE
While we "regular people" can't build a wall, we can elect a president and lawmakers who will.
So that's one way we can do something. Meanwhile, there is something much closer to home that we can do about the supply side and that's working for laws that at least reduce if not eliminate government incentives for mothers to get rid of fathers. More on that in a future post.
