There’s a series of somewhat related items I came across the
past few days. Some of them heartbreaking for a lover of civilization.
This first is from December, but it came to my awareness
this week. The piece begins, “Nearly 400 children have been rescued and 348
adults arrested following an “extraordinary” international child pornography
investigation in Canada.” This was the result of a three-year undercover
project. It wasn’t limited to Canada:
What they eventually found was a full blown child porn
production and distribution company in Toronto that was distributing their
content online. The site was run by 42-year old Brian Way and sold and
distributed images of child exploitation to people across the world.
The head of Toronto’s Sex Crimes Unit said they enlisted the
help of the United States Postal Inspection Service since many of the videos
were being exported to the U.S. and began a joint investigation. After a
seven-month long investigation, officers executed search warrants across the
city of Toronto including at the business of Brian Way.
It is hard for a civilized person to understand the demand—the
market—for obscene violence to children. There are actual people, among us, who
choose this evil.
This next story is about a man, a hero, named Tim Ballard,
who has dedicated his life to rescuing children enslaved in sex trafficking.
After 12 years working for the government as a special agent, he used his
skills to create a private organization, Operation Underground Railroad. They
recently had a successful sting operation surrounding a Super Bowl party. On
February 5 O.U.R. led to the arrest of 9 traffickers and rescued 29 girls. Since its founding four years ago, O.U.R. “has
successfully completed 73 operations, rescued 643 victims, and aided in 273 arrests.”
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| Tim Ballard, screen shot from here |
I’ve seen Tim Ballard talk about his operations on the Glenn Beck show. It is eye-opening to realize how
much slavery—and much of it sex slavery—exists. Estimates are that there is far
more slavery in the world today than there ever was during legal slavery.
Much of Ballard’s work is in Haiti, which the 3rd
highest rate of sex trafficking in the world, mainly because of severe poverty
there. He says, “If you just painted orphanage on the side of the wall, people
would bring children to you, and then the kids would go out the backdoor in a
deal."
But he adds that the US is the highest producer and consumer
of child pornography in the world. His operation is successful by posing as
American buyers, because they seem plausible to the dealers.
Again, it is beyond shocking that there are people among us
who would purchase sex with children, or purchase child slaves for the purpose
of using them for sex. This seems beyond the imagination of a dystopian novel.
Closer to home, I came across a third piece, about a woman
named Tracie Mann, who spoke to a women’s group in Montgomery County, just north
of the Greater Houston Area. Mann is the founder of Phoenix Charity, in which
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| Tracie Mann photo from here |
she oversees every aspect of the rescue and recovery
operations and with a team of at least 30. Her team increases to about 100 with
partners on the streets and from various levels of local and state law enforcement
agencies in Montgomery and Harris counties, as well as federal agencies such as
the FBI, DPS, and ICE.
She is working to provide hope and positively reprogram the
mindset of the recovering children who on average are raped in excess of 100
times within 24 hours, beaten, drugged, and branded. As the owner of Body
Restore Med Spa and Laser Center, which funds her recovery operations, her work
allows her to remove the brand marks, tattoos, burns, and scars the children
carry once rescued.
She has been involved in this work, on her own, since 2004.
She is trying to raise awareness. She says it happens in front of us, and we
don’t notice—at doctors’ offices, at fast food restaurants, through social
media and phone apps.
She said, "We watched the sale and purchase outside a
McDonald's in Montgomery County. It happens. It happens in plain site because we
all live in our own little bubbles."
I admit that I am in something of a bubble. This is a hard
thing to think about. Especially close to home. I wrote about a sting operation,
in Waco, a couple of years ago. There were 29 arrests, 9 of them for human
trafficking. The shock there was that one was a Ft. Hood sergeant. Another was a
law school acquaintance of son Political Sphere, who reports that the guy had
seemed normal.
That’s what I’m finding puzzling. People among us, enjoying
the benefits of civilization that come from a preponderance of people living basically
decent lives, yet who willingly engage in heinous acts against fellow human
beings—often the young and most vulnerable.
In the Spherical Model I offer a chart of behavior relative
to family, showing the ideal on down to the
savage, marking where civilization has decayed and the culture sinks. Since we’re
talking about the savage behavior, we’ll travel that chart from the bottom up,
in hopes of gaining understanding.
Starting at the bottom, my experience is close to nil. I
might not have ever met someone who would engage in any aspect of human
trafficking. OK—I just thought of an exception, because I grew up on the same
street as the kidnapper of Elizabeth Smart. But I’m unaware of ever meeting
anyone who would buy or sell people.
Moving up the scale, I can’t imagine anyone I know engaging
in child porn (although the less violent versions of porn have affected people
I know). I have never met anyone who would admit to participating in
prostitution, as either the prostitute or the buyer. But Mr. Spherical Model
has come across both in regular business-related circumstances. So it may be
shockingly common for people on business trips to pay for that degradation.
Going further up, I have known a very few people I would
consider promiscuous, but none that expected approval from me, although in the
celebrity world that appears common. And I’ve known a few more who were
adulterous; most were ashamed, and recognized it as a causal factor in their
divorce.
Further up still, I’ve known quite a number of people who
consider sex outside of marriage a normal part of a relationship, and many live
together before marriage as if that is an expected step in a relationship. This
is where much of our culture is today.
I attended a women’s interfaith event where we discussed
various belief questions at our tables. At mine, out of about eight religious
people, only two of us clearly believed that sex outside of marriage is sinful
and goes against our religions. The other was a Christian immigrant from Iran. Since
the scriptures are clear, I wondered why the other Christians were so vague on
the subject.
Going up further, we find people who believe as I do, that
sex outside of marriage is unwise and wrong, but fail to live true to that
belief, but then turn their lives around and work in their future toward a
strong family. This is the minimum level for civilization. If we don’t get back
up to this level, and work to sustain this belief and behavior, we sink
further.
There are a couple of other things I came across this week.
One is a quote from the Prophet and leader of my Church, President Thomas S.
Monson. He said, “Today, we are encamped against the greatest array of sin,
vice, and evil ever assembled before our eyes.” The thing is, he said it 50
years ago. There has been some serious sinking since then.
But not all of society sinks, and many individuals rise. And
that is reason to be hopeful.
The other thing I came across was a piece in my local
section of the Houston Chronicle last
week, by Rick Brown. He was talking about the history of
cultures that believe, as ours does today, that sex is “to be enjoyed
recreationally and that best happens outside of marriage.”
He made the comparison to the apostle Paul’s Greco-Roman
culture. As he put it,
There was a lot of sex in the city of Thessalonica. Many—if not
most—of the Christians that Paul is writing to came out of a pagan background
where sexual promiscuity was the norm and widely tolerated. They had to learn a
new way to walk.
The interesting thing is that they did find the new way—the way
that had been taught by God from Adam and Eve onward, but was new to the
Christian converts. That recovered truth eventually became the accepted and
understood way in most of the Western world for the next 1900 years.
It can be done. People can change. People can go against the
common culture and toward civilization.
The way—the only way—to civilization is a righteous people
honoring God, family, life, truth, and property. We know this. I guess we need
to do some Paul-style spreading the word.
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