Human Trafficking

I wrote Traffic Stop: Human Division to bring mass awareness of how prevalent human trafficking is in our world. Sex has become a commodity to make powerful people rich and children broken. I long for trafficking to stop.

When this topic comes up, most people I know turn their attention elsewhere fast. I get it. Discussing sex trafficking is uncomfortable and it’s easier to pretend it doesn’t exist. It is even harder to live through. The common misconception is it could not happen to me or someone I loved or that trafficking doesn’t occur in places like small town USA.

It does.

It’s happening everywhere.

And I guarantee you have met a trafficking victim, a perpetrator/consumer, or both.

People are divided in thirds when it comes to trafficking. The first third are those with power and control. These people, like my character Otis Kennedy, are not motivated to stop human trafficking because there is pleasure, power, and an overwhelming amount of money involved. If it weren’t for this third of the population, there would not be the other two thirds. Innocent victims and oblivious bystanders.

Innocent victims are those vulnerable people, namely our children, who are resourced, used, and manipulated for other’s gain. Although these people may be motivated to stop trafficking, they don’t hold the power to do so. They have lost their voices, like my main character Marley Kennedy. She won’t get to share her story until the end of the novel for this reason.

The last third are those people I wrote this novel for. These are the people who are in denial or unable to acknowledge the effects sex trafficking has on us all, like Marley’s father, Layne, or her grandmother, Momma Jane.

I have spent the majority of my counseling career loving those who suffer. Although not the majority of my practice, I have worked with trafficking survivors in a Central Nebraska town population 10,000. Just south of my hometown in an even smaller village, the authorities caught and sentenced a man and his colleagues for trafficking a teen.

Trafficking starts in our homes through the internet and other means. Perps are stealth and cunning to identify the vulnerable, gaining our children’s trust, and “snatching them away.” I wanted to address this misconception by writing the novel. Most trafficked individuals actively live with their family while being manipulated, coerced, and/or bribed to participate in trafficking activities.

Trafficking effects boys, as well as girls. It effects children as young as infants and beyond. Some parents sell their children as a means to survive. Some parents are oblivious to where there children are and the dangers that lurk. Some homes these children have grew up in was were where they were sexually perpetrated on first, leading them to believe sexual abuse is “normal.”

I hope you will join me in spreading awareness, protecting and loving the vulnerable, and holding perpetrators accountable for the suffering they cause to humanity. I believe the only way to stop human sex trafficking is for the third bystanders who has been stagnant in “the by and by” to actively stand together against perpetrators.

Elvis Presley “By and By”