Human Trafficking

Australia is one of 21 countries in the "High" category for Human Trafficking destination countries

The United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking reported that more than 700,000 women are trafficked each year for the purpose of sexual exploitation and forced labour.And UNICEF report that about 1.2 million children are trafficked each year.

WOMEN & SEX TRAFFICKING:

Australian authorities believe that traffickers are primarily of individual operators or small crime groups that often rely on larger organized crime groups to procure fraudulent documentation. ... They say 'there are no reliable estimates on the number of trafficking victims in Australia. However, the Australian NGO Project Respect estimates up to 1,000 victims are currently under debt bondage, not including those who have been trafficked but already paid off their debt.'

Causes
There are many causes of human trafficking to Australia. Project Respect argues that the demand for trafficked women in Australia is fueled by: 1) a lack of women in Australia prepared to do prostitution; 2) 'customer' demand for women seen as compliant; 3) 'customer' demand for women who they can be violent towards; and 4) racialized ideas that Asian women have certain qualities, for example that they are more compliant and will accept higher levels of violence - from Human Trafficking.org website

Project Respect is a non-profit community-based organisation that aims to empower and support women in the sex industry including women trafficked to Australia. They are based in Victoria: (these newslinks came from their website)

Sex slavery case in Melbourne - Project Respect Links - May 2009 -
Women told to 'service 750 men' - News.com.au - April 2009 -
Cops Investigate Asian Sex Ring on Sunshine Coast - The Daily - April, 2009 -
Hear directly from survivors of trafficking - November 2008 -
Childhood lost: under-age prostitutes strain a system in crisis - The Age - March 2008 -

CHILD ABDUCTION:

World Vision Australia: According to UNICEF, about 1.2 million children are trafficked each year. That's 1,200,000 children who vanish, leaving distraught families behind. Most of them are smuggled across international borders and end up in dreadful situations, abused, exploited, mistreated, crying in silence with no one to turn to.... We don't see it happening, we rarely read about human trafficking in the media, but there's obviously a demand in Australia.

From Australia - International child abduction: Cases of international child abduction occur regularly across Australia and the rest of the world. In Australia an estimated 2–3 children are taken illegally by a parent out of and into Australia each week.

It is interesting that the media has been eager to show and show and show the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of a few US soldiers but few would air or depict the scenes of Abu Ghraib whilst in the hands of Saddam Hussein's thugs.

In 2004 the Pentagon released a video, one of many in their possession, t a select media audience, showing ' savage scenes of decapitation, fingers chopped off one by one, tongues hacked out with a razor blade - all while victims shriek in pain and the thugs chant Saddam's praises' 1. It was largely ignored.

Apparently only 'four or five' media representatives showed up to the viewing.

New York Post reporter, Deborah Orin, couldn't watch and walked out ... those who did watch wished they hadn't.

In a concerned article Deborah pondered a system that is so bound up in knots by its own web of agendas and squeamishness that it has become a propaganda tool for its enemies. This collective squeamishness, Deborah says, has created:

'a very complex problem in the War on Terror. It's worse than creating moral equivalence between Saddam's tortures and prisoner abuse by U.S. troops. It's that we do far more to highlight our own wrongdoings precisely because they are less appalling.

In this era, a photo is everything. We highlight U.S. prisoner abuse because the photos aren't too offensive to show. We downplay Saddam's abuse precisely because it's far worse - so we can't use the photos.1

Of course, none of us actually want to be defiled by watching footage of torture and cannot understand the minds of those who not only accept it .... but rejoice or even boast of it. But, we have to admit there is something wrong here .... In our attempts to personally avoid the face of EXTREME evil we have enabled our enemiies to compare our evils with their attrocities. Deborah says:

"So the world sees photos of U.S. interrogators using dogs to scare prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But not the footage of Saddam's prisoners getting fed - alive - to Doberman pinschers on Saddam's watch ".... or the decaptitaions of Nick Berg and Danny Pearl or US contractors in Fallujah getting torn limb from limb by al Qaeda operatives." 1

The article suggests that the media and the Pentagon had alternative agendas in wanting Bush to lose ... thats not a topic I want to explore in this update ... what is of major concern is that we have turned on ourselves: that we ignored the plight of those who were tortured and exposed to Saddam's evil during the time of his regime and that we are still avoiding the issues and allowing the wrong people to define evil for us.

As far as the media reporting is concerned - Deborah's article called them to account:

Reporters have to face up to the fact that right now, if we highlight the wrongs that Americans commit but not - out of squeamishness - the far worse horrors committed by others, we become propaganda tools for the other side.

This isn't to argue in any way against reporting the Abu Ghraib scandal. But reporters have to face up to the problems - and find ways to achieve a more balanced account.

Saddam's torture videos may be too awful to show, but it's hard to explain the low media interest in the story of seven Iraqi men who had their right hands chopped off by Saddam's thugs - and then got new prosthetic arms and new hope in America.

They're eloquent, they're available, they're grateful for the U.S. liberation of Iraq. No one can better talk about Saddam's tortures - and no one is more eager to do so. Yet, as of yesterday, the New York Times had written 177 stories on Abu Ghraib - with over 40 on the front page. The self-proclaimed "paper of record" hadn't written a single story about those seven Iraqi men. 1

As far as the church is concerned - we live in a day where we need to review how we allow evil to be defined and determine our responsible response to evil, in all its forms. I concur with Dr. Joseph D'Souza and Benedict Rogers when they say:

"We believe that the Holy Spirit is both speaking to God's people and doing a new work in the church as he challenges us to deal seriously with the problems of evil and injustice. Gary Haugen, former director of the United Nations' genocide investigation in Rwanda and founder of International Justice Mission, has remarked:

The Spirit is inviting the church into a new era of advocacy that is as significant as the global missions movement of the past 150 years and the relief and development movement of the last 50 years. The need is no less great, nor the biblical mandate any less fundamental. 2

1. Orin, Deborah. "Reporting for the Enemy; Media Won't Show Saddam's Evil " FDD Foundation for Defence of Democracies, http://www.defenddemocracy.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11773362&Itemid=348.

2. Dr. Joseph D'Souza and Benedict Rogers, On the Side of Angels Authentic Publishing 2007 Page 3

Our Response to Evil

We cannot deny the existence of evil, neither can avert our eyes in denial and pretend it does not exist. Evil, when ignored, will encroach itself upon our doorsteps whether we like it or not.

We are called to create an atmosphere around us that repels evil - one that defeats the growth or estalishment of evil in our families, our communities, our nation and our world.

This section examines a variety of thoughts on evil from a cross section of christian authors.

Albert Einstein understood that the universe revealed a designer with "an intelligence of such superiority" that it overshadowed all human intelligence. What he could not understand, however, was, "How could God be good and yet allow the terrible things that befall mankind?"

Chuck Colson explains that "the problem of Evil can be stated simply: If God is both all-good and all-powerful, he would not allow evil and suffering to exist in creation. But evil does exist. Therefore many people conclude that either God is not all-good (that's why he tolerates evil), or he is not all-powerful (and can't get rid of evil even though he wants to)." The Bible gives a clear answer to this apparent contradiction.... God created a world that is "very good" from the start (Genesis 1:31). God did not create evil.

THE ABSOLUTE GOODNESS OF GOD IS A FIRST PRINCIPLE OF CHRISTIAN THINKING

"We instinctively blame God for all our sorrows. Only the Bible tells us how God can be God - how he can be the ultimate reality and Creator of all things - and yet not be responsible for evil.

"The Bible teaches that God is good and that He created a good universe. It also teaches that the universe today is marred by sin, death and suffering. Since God is not the source of sin and suffering, there is only one possibility: that there is another source of sin, another being who can make moral choices and originate in God's world something that was not there before." This being need not be a second god, a second creator, for evil is not ultimate in the same way that good is.

Scripture tells that evil came into God's creation through the free moral choice made by the first human beings .... like a plague evil spreads through all of history because of the free moral choices that humans continue to make... God is not responsible for evil. We are. .... the universe God made was good ... a traumatic, ruinous, cataclysmic, disruptive change took place when sin entered as a result of humanity's choice to rebel against God's authority. Our choice threw creation out of joint. It distorted and disfigured the world, bringing death and destruction

THAT'S WHY EVIL IS SO HATEFUL, SO REPULSIVE. THAT'S WHY WE CRY IN THE NIGHT AGAINST IT. OUR RESPONSE IS ENTIRELY APPROPRIATE. WE SENSE THAT SOMETHING IS WRONG AND WE ARE RIGHT - SOMETHING IS.

[Colson, Charles W., Tough Questions about God, FAITH And LIFE, Tyndale House Publishers Inc., 2006, Pages 17-]

Free will is the basis of our human dignity:

CS LEWIS:

"Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong. I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because, free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

A world of automata - of creatures that work like machines - would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in the ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free."

Lewis, C S. Mere Christianity. 2002 ed. Vol. 21, C.S. Lewis Signature Classics Edition: Harper Collins Publishers, Hammersmith, London, UK, 1952. Reprint, 2002.

CHARLES W. COLSON:

The only possible answer is that God's can't wipe it out without violating his own nature. God's character is the standard of goodness and justice, once evil and injustice exist, he must set it right again.

God cannot ignore sin, overlook it, simply destroy th world and start over. Once the scales of justice have been tipped, they must be balanced. Once the moral fabric of the universe has been torn, it must be mended. Otherwise we would not live in a moral universe. There is an objective, eternal, cosmic standard of justice and its demands must be met. Evildoers must be punished; otherwise their free moral agency would have been a farce. For people to be fully human their actions must have consequences and afford ultimate meaning in an eternal context.

... but God is merciful as well as just ... he came up with a remarkable, astonishing, unthinkable alternative: He Himself would bear the punishment for his creatures.

GOD FACED THE UGLINESS AND BROKENNESS OF THE WORLD BY BECOMING PART OF IT. GOD IN CHRIST GRAPPLED WITH VIOLENCE AND DEATH BY SUBMITTING TO EXECUTION ON A ROMAN CROSS .... JUST AS EVIL ENTERED HUMAN HISTORY THROUGH A DEFINITE ACT ON THE PART OF HUMAN BEINGS ... SALVATION WAS ACCOMPLISHED THROUGH AN ACT ON THE PART OF GOD.

[Colson, Charles W., Tough Questions about God, FAITH And LIFE, Tyndale House Publishers Inc., 2006, Pages 17-]

This notion first gained popularity 200 years ago during the Enlightenment. Rousseau and other thinkers argued that through education people could eradicate sin and eventually build a perfect society ... The sentiment permeated the Humanist Manifesto II: "By using technology wisely, we can control our environment, conquer poverty .... modify behavior, alter the course of human evolution and cultural development ... and provide humankind with the unparalleled opportunity for achieving an abundant and meaningful life.'

This is the humanist doctrine of sanctification by progress. Its seduction lies in its appeal to our pride: The obstacles are not in ourselves but in our stars - or in unemployment, racism, poverty, or mental illness. Alexander Solzhenitsyn called this myth "the benevolent concept according to which man - the master of the world - does not bear any evils within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems."

The record of gore and inhumanity of the twentieth century, from the ovens of the Holocaust to the killing fields of Cambodia to the nightly slaughter on America's streets, ought to jar us into sober reality. The truth is, the human race hasn't outgrown sin, nor can we. It lives within us. Jesus put it succinctly: "from within, out of a person's heart, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft , murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit ... All these vile things come from within; they are what defile you and make you unacceptable to God" (Mark 7:21-23, NLT). That message may seem out of date in light of all the high tech wizadry and enlightened sophistry of this generation. But real progress, the kind that goes beyond satellite and fiber optics, comes from only one source: from the One who can cleanse the evil within us by creating hearts within us. He is our only real hope for pregress, in this time or in any other.

[Colson, Charles W., Tough Questions about God, FAITH And LIFE, Tyndale House Publishers Inc., 2006, Page 14]