Prevent Child Trafficking Through Education

Hi Friends,

Several years back, we had a scholarship student (we’ll call him Gade) who was very excited to watch chocolate chip cookies being baked. He’d never had chocolate chip cookies before, and when the cookies went in the oven, he sat down on the floor in front of the oven and watched the entire 13 minutes they were baking. His glee at his first bite of chocolate chip cookie was utterly infectious.

A few years later, Gade was a teenager. The change was surprising. Gone were the dimples and swipes at extra bites of sweets; instead, there stood a surly, emotionally wounded young man, who struggled from lack of affection at home and lack of direction for himself. Remembering the cookie-loving boy inside, Gade was easy to care for, but difficult to guide.

He’s exactly the kind of youth where risk becomes most salient and most thorny. Threading the needle of giving him freedom to choose while trying to guide him to better options when he lacked interest or determination was a challenge. However, swarming around him were the sharks – the lures of drugs or of a quick buck through dubious offers – anything could easily have led him astray.

It’s easier to tell you about the model students who just need a chance to thrive. Kids like Gade, however, keep us up at night. They may hear all the warnings about traffickers and their lures, but lack the wherewithal to turn down the too-good-to-be true job offer, or lack the determination to protect themselves because they, deep inside, believe the abusive words of their step-parent or grandparent who told them they weren’t worth protecting.

These days, the lures look like job offers in places just across the Thai-Myanmar border, or in neighboring Cambodia. But the threat is trafficking into forced criminality, running illegal scams for their traffickers’ benefit. It doesn’t matter how much they protest against being the ones to scam people. Resistance means torture, even death.

What started as a regional problem is spreading, with people as far away as Latin America now affected. 

Trafficking into forced criminality may even be morphing into force to other crimes – like the UK is witnessing now with women and children trafficked and forced to shoplift.

Today is Human Trafficking Awareness Day, and you’re probably seeing lots of anti-trafficking organizations share myth-busting facts about trafficking, what survivors need, and who’s most vulnerable. As you absorb that information, we hope this newest form of trafficking will also be on your radar, and that you’ll think of kids like Gade. Kids who, in their hearts, aren’t sure they deserve protection.

Because, though they’re uncertain, we are not. We believe they deserve protection. And though trafficking itself shifts and changes, and fighting it can be like Whack-a-Mole, what doesn’t change is the need for prevention: for awareness about the problem and how to protect yourself and the resources (emotional and otherwise) to make it possible to pursue other choices. 

Thank you for standing with us and protecting vulnerable children, no matter what.

Yours in hope,