#44: Where The Gospel Meets Human Trafficking

#44: Where the Gospel Meets Human Trafficking

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

RACHEL SZABO: Hey, it’s Rachel. So Jesse is actually out this week. And before we get today’s episode started, I just wanted to let you all know that, as you can probably tell from the title, we’re gonna be dealing with some mature subject matter. So one of our stories today does talk about the business of commercial sex, and there are also brief descriptions of abuse, as well as two instances of language. So if you’ve got young ones around, you might wanna screen the material ahead of time. Thanks, and let’s get to the show.

—————————————–

RACHEL SZABO: So back in the early 2000s, Nita Belles was a grad student working on her master’s. 

NITA BELLES: My master’s degree is in theology with a concentration in women’s concerns, and of course trafficking is definitely a concern of women. 

RACHEL SZABO: So as part of her study on women’s concerns, Nita and one of her professors traveled to several different countries to learn about human trafficking.

NITA BELLES: We went to Cambodia, we went to Vietnam, the worst parts of India, and watched little children, adults, all kinds of situations, both labor and sex trafficking. It was horrific. 

RACHEL SZABO: So it could be hard to understand the atrocities of human trafficking, so here’s how one news article describes a brothel in India. It says, quote, “Rooms are filled with darkness, and a smell of dirt and perfume lingers. The floors are littered with used condoms and cigarette butts. In the first room, all the windows are boarded up. 20 women sit on benches as men stand around ogling them,” end quote. And as is probably the case with most of us, when Nita saw what was taking place, she immediately wanted to step in and help. 

NITA BELLES: When I saw this, I said, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen on planet earth.” And I said to God, “I have to do something. What you want me to do?” 

RACHEL SZABO: So Nita was willing to move overseas. She was willing to work undercover with law enforcement, like whatever it would take to help end human trafficking. But the thing that God wanted her to do to fight human trafficking was not any of those things. Instead, God told her to write a book. 

NITA BELLES: My whole life never been one of those people that wanted to write a book. I’ve been like, “Oh no. Let somebody else do that. I don’t even like to write paragraphs.” 

RACHEL SZABO: But the fact that Nita didn’t consider herself a writer wasn’t the only obstacle. There was more. God just didn’t want her to write a book about human trafficking – he wanted her to write a book about human trafficking not in India, not in Cambodia, not in these other countries that she had visited, but here in the United States. 

NITA BELLES: That was 2008. And in 2008 there was nothing written on human trafficking in the United States. Nothing.

RACHEL SZABO: So that might sound surprising that nothing had been written, but honestly human trafficking wasn’t even officially illegal in this country until the year 2000. So the fact that there wasn’t anything written yet that would’ve been accessible to the everyday person, it makes sense. It was and still is a growing field. 

NITA BELLES: Because there was nothing written, I had to do boots-on-the-ground research. I began talking to people and researching and newspapers and television interviews and that kind of thing. That’s, that’s how I had to write my book. 

RACHEL SZABO: And here’s the thing – as Nita was writing this book, as much as she had been shocked by seeing human trafficking on all her trips overseas, Nita was in for an even bigger shock. Because in writing this book, not only did she realize that trafficking happens here in the land of the free, but that it’s happening right under our noses. 

NITA BELLES: It’s right here. Rather than, you know, spending all kinds of money going overseas, it’s in our backyard.

—————————————–

RACHEL SZABO: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Rachel Szabo. Today’s episode is where the gospel meets human trafficking. This episode is in partnership with the show, The Happy Hour with Jamie Ivy, and so our friend Jamie is joining me today via the wonders of the internet. Hey, Jamie. It’s great to have you back on the show. 

JAMIE IVEY: Rachel, I’m so glad to be back.

RACHEL SZABO: I’m kind of curious, Jamie, how you started learning about human trafficking. 

JAMIE IVEY: Yeah, it was probably about seven or eight years ago. A friend of mine was doing some anti-trafficking work here in Austin, and she said, “Hey, I’ll take a group of you guys around.” And she showed me places in my city of Austin, some of them a mile and a half from where I was living. Trafficking, like she said, is right under our noses right here in the cities where we live. 

RACHEL SZABO: So today we’re gonna look at both labor trafficking and sex trafficking here in the United States as we debunk three big trafficking myths – a myth about traffickers, one about people who are being trafficked, and also one about what we should be doing to fight it. Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.

—————————————–

LIAM NEESON MOVIE CLIP: I can tell you I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I’ve acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. 

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so that is a very iconic scene from the 2009 movie Takenstarring Liam Neeson. Uh, Jamie, have you seen that movie?

JAMIE IVEY: You know, I have not seen the movie and I’m still scared of Liam Neeson, so I don’t even know what that means about me. (laughter)

RACHEL SZABO: Well, you should be because basically the plot of this movie is that he plays a former CIA agent whose daughter gets kidnapped on a trip to Paris and involved in a child sex trafficking ring and basically he busts all the bad guys to get her back.

JAMIE IVEY: Of course he does. (laughter)

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. You know, let’s be honest, when we hear the term human trafficking, like, that’s kind of the stuff that we think about. It’s like this intense, crazy story about young girls being kidnapped and taken hostage in foreign countries and there’s some fearless person that busts in and rescues everybody, right? 

JAMIE IVEY: Right. And the thing is – that does make a great movie and maybe I should watch it, but if you Google Taken, you’ll find handfuls of articles explaining why it doesn’t actually paint an accurate picture of what human trafficking really is.

RACHEL SZABO: Right, so if those types of images aren’t what human trafficking is, you know, the stuff that we typically think of, then the question is – what exactly is it?

JAMIE IVEY: So here’s a very simple and brief definition that’s been told to me is human trafficking is a crime that involves exploiting a person for labor, services, or commercial sex. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, I think that’s a really helpful definition when it comes to trying to understand human trafficking. So I think the first thing to note about that definition is that it is a crime. I’ve heard human trafficking referred to as modern day slavery, but the thing that makes this type of slavery different from, like, colonial slavery – the type of slavery that’s a part of our country’s history – is the fact that it is considered illegal by the government. So colonial slavery – that had its own set of evils and atrocities, but technically it was considered legal. Human trafficking is considered illegal by the state. And another thing I think that’s helpful about that definition is the word exploiting, and I think this is where our faith really comes into play because you don’t have to be a Bible scholar to know what God thinks about exploiting vulnerable people.

Over and over again in Scripture, we hear God tell us his heart for the poor, for the vulnerable, and the oppressed. And this is perhaps best seen in the Book of Psalms. So I think about, like, in Psalm 10, it says, “You know mischief and vexation that you may take it into your hands. To you, the helpless commits himself.”

JAMIE IVEY: Yeah, and another psalm in Psalm 72 says, “He has pity on the weak and the needy and saves the lives of the needy. From oppression and violence, he redeems their life.” 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and even another Psalm, Psalm 1:40 – “I know that the Lord will maintain the cause of the afflicted and will execute justice for the needy.”

JAMIE IVEY: So we’re seeing pretty clear here that God’s thoughts on exploitation, they’re clear. So the question for us isn’t – “Should we care about this issue?” I don’t think we need much convincing on that matter. Instead, I think where we fall short is in recognizing where and how exploitation is taking place. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, I think you’re right. So to help with that, I’d actually like to look at one of the stories that Nita Belles came across in writing her book, and that story is about a man named Given Kachepa. So Given is actually not from America. He grew up in Zambia in a small town called Kalingalinga. 

GIVEN KACHEPA: It’s a town that you would probably call like, uh, a shanty town or whatever the term would be.

RACHEL SZABO: So the term we might use here is “inner city.” So Kalingalinga was an area of high population density and low income. Given actually became orphaned at age nine, and so he and his siblings lived with their aunt. And like a lot of people in their town, they all felt the constraints of poverty. 

GIVEN KACHEPA: So there were six kids from my family. She had six kids of our own, and, you know, we just survived. And sometimes we, we had something to eat for the day, sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes we went two, three days without eating, just depending on what was available. 

RACHEL SZABO: But Given’s luck started to change when he was about 12 years old and his cousins told him to come check out the local boys’ choir.

GIVEN KACHEPA: And, uh, when I got there, I loved it. I said, “This is actually cool. I could see myself doing this.” I loved the music, I loved the sound, I loved every – there were guys my age. I’m like, “These can be my friends.” And so it became a new community for me. 

RACHEL SZABO: And it was a Christian community at that because the choir – it was actually run by a Baptist organization based in Texas. So Given would go to choir, he would sing songs about God, he would sing songs to God, and he was happy. But then things got even better because Given learned that these Christians from Texas – they had other Zambian boys’ choirs too, and those choirs – they got to go live and sing in the United States. And it just so happened that they were looking for a new group of boys to join those choirs in America. 

GIVEN KACHEPA: I mean, we – just even having one meal per day to eat was a blessing, so to think that somebody’s gonna come to you and tell you you’re gonna go to America – America to us at the time was a place of great wealth, a place of great opportunities. I said, “I, I am jumping on this. I gotta do everything that I can to make this a success.” So I was excited. 

RACHEL SZABO: So the way you got selected to join this choir was through tryouts. So Given practiced. He sang everywhere. He sang all the time because Given knew what a chance to live in America would mean for him and for his family. 

GIVEN KACHEPA: The biggest thing that I wanted was an education. I wanted to be able to, to get an education so that I could change my family tree. Again, we grew up very poor and I didn’t wanna remain like that for the rest of my life.

RACHEL SZABO: Here’s the deal. If you were one of the boys that got selected to go sing in America, you would be paid for your time there, like a job, and you’d be able to send money back to your family in Zambia and you would receive a full education. So in the end, Given was actually one of the youngest boys chosen. So at just 13 years old, he and a handful of other boys left Zambia and came to the United States. 

JAMIE IVEY: Okay, so I just wanna say real quick that so far this doesn’t sound anything like the story of human trafficking, and I know that’s what we’re talking about today. It actually sounds like a great, very hopeful story for Given and these boys. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. Right. And a lot of the time that’s how human trafficking starts – with some opportunity or promise. But the reality is it ends up going south pretty fast, which is sadly what Given would soon find out. 

GIVEN KACHEPA: And I remember just sitting in that van and saying, “They’re out of their damn minds.” 

RACHEL SZABO: Coming up – myth number one, and how a Baptist minister turned the land of opportunity into the land of exploitation. We’ll be right back. 

COMMERCIAL

RACHEL SZABO: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Rachel Szabo. 

JAMIE IVEY: And I’m Jamie Ivy. Today’s episode is where the gospel meets human trafficking. 

RACHEL SZABO: So we’re following the story of Given Kachepa. At just 13 years old, he’s left his home in Zambia and come to the States to be part of a Zambian boys’ choir led by a group of Baptist missionaries, and the man in charge of that was a Baptist minister named Keith Grimes. So once the boys arrived in the States, Mr. Grimes bought all new things for the boys – new clothes, new shoes, he gave them toothpaste, all the essential things. And they’re also shown their housing in Texas where they would all live together when they weren’t traveling to sing, but most of the time would be spent on the road. They would travel all over the country singing in churches or in schools at events. And everywhere they went, a collection would be taken up to fund the choir and also pay the boys and provide them schooling. So right now, Given is on tour. He’s singing in his first round of performances.

GIVEN KACHEPA: There was a gentleman in one church – I, I forgot what location that was. After we sang, he went to every choir member. He gave each one of us two dollars, $2 bills, and I was so excited. It was the first time I’d ever held a, an American currency. I had never in my life held an American currency. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is – ” I, I was, I was excited. 

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, now, two dollars might not seem like a lot to you and me, but back in Kalingalinga, Zambia, two U.S. dollars was like a big deal. So once their performances were over, the boys piled into the van and they were all elated. Like if they had each gotten two dollars just on their first tour, imagine what they could have, like, after months of touring. But their excitement – it actually didn’t last long. 

GIVEN KACHEPA: It was hot outside. We were in a van and they said we were gonna get out one boy at a time and they were gonna be patting us down. And I remember just sitting in that van and saying, “They’re out of their damn minds.” But they were, they were after their business. Surely enough, one by one, they searched all of us to make sure that we didn’t have any contacts or any money or cash or anything that we got from anybody else. 

RACHEL SZABO: So before they were allowed to go inside, each of the boys got patted down and had their bags searched, and any money, phone numbers from folks they had met, souvenirs – it was all confiscated, including their two dollars. Given wasn’t allowed to keep anything. In fact, all the money – it went to Mr. Grimes, and that’s the way it stayed. For nine months, the boys never saw a dime. 

GIVEN KACHEPA: I mean, we had zero dollars. I mean, if I went to Walmart to go get something, I had not a dime in my pocket to go get me a Coke, you know. If I needed that, I had to go to the ministry to say, “I need a Coke. Can you get me a Coke?” You know, I’m like, “Well, gimme a goal, then gimme ten dollars, gimme a stipend. Give me something to know that I’m a human being, that I, I can go to a gas station and pick up a piece of gum if I need to or a water or blah, blah, blah, blah.” I don’t have to be just reliant on you as this big master that’s gonna tell me when to cough and when not to cough or when I can, you know – I, I don’t want that lifestyle. You know, nobody does. 

RACHEL SZABO: And they also weren’t provided an education either. 

GIVEN KACHEPA: All we had was basically the clothes that they gave us and the voice that they wanted us to use to sing.

RACHEL SZABO: The boys also were not allowed to have any outside contact, including any contact with their families. This was not at all what Given thought life in America would be like. Their schedule was demanding. Sometimes they were forced to sing six or seven concerts a day. Their housing – it was actually a cramped trailer. And if any of the boys decided to complain, they were threatened.

GIVEN KACHEPA: I believe we were at a university one time. We were singing, we were with Mr. Grimes, and he was very passionate about trying to make us to smile big while on stage, sitting in the back of the stadium just saying, “Smile, smile, or dance like this or move.” I mean, every concert he was doing we were with him he was doing that, and I just remember getting tired of it. I said, “I don’t wanna sing.” So I got fed up with it and a few of my friends also got fed up with him and I said, “You know what, I’m just not going to sing.” You know, we, we are trained. We, we have our culture. We have our way of doing things. And I took offense to that. I refused to sing. And when I refused to sing that day, they held me and a couple of other friends back. They said we were being disobedient and, uh, they wanted to send us back home to Zambia. 

RACHEL SZABO: And here’s the thing, is being threatened to get sent back home to Zambia – like it was a real threat. Given’s home culture was one of honor and shame. So to be sent back home with the report that you had been disobedient or disrespectful to Mr. Grimes, it would’ve resulted in being shunned and put Given even further into poverty than he had been when he left. So really, he had no other option than to simply comply.

JAMIE IVEY: So what sounds like to me is that Mr. Grimes turned out to be a trafficker. He’s exploiting these boys and profiting off of them.

RACHEL SZABO: Which actually brings us to the first myth that we wanna debunk, and that is the belief that traffickers are strangers who kidnap their victims. So again, here is Nita Belles.

NITA BELLES: The kidnapping is almost a fallacy. It’s very, very, very seldom that somebody is kidnapped and brought to become a victim of human trafficking. There’s plenty of opportunity without traffickers going out and kidnapping. 

RACHEL SZABO: Instead, what traffickers do is they locate and prey on vulnerabilities.

NITA BELLES: And they’ll watch for certain things. It can be somebody feeling unloved. It can be somebody mad at their parents. It could be somebody rebelling against their parents’ rules. It could be any number of things. It doesn’t have to be poverty. It doesn’t have to be homelessness. Any vulnerability can be changed to exploitation. 

RACHEL SZABO: So in Given’s case, his vulnerability was mostly poverty, but all the boys went willingly, they had the approval of their families, like literally nothing about the whole situation smelled like foul play until they got there and until it was too late. 

JAMIE IVEY: Well, and instead of kidnapping, the way traffickers obtain and then keep their victims is by using three tactics that are now a part of the legal definition of human trafficking, and those three things are force, fraud, and coercion. So force is probably what we most think of in cases of human trafficking. This could include kidnapping, but it can also include abuse. 

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, yeah. So sometimes if Given and the boys refused to sing, they would have food withheld from them. So that’s like a means of forcing them to comply, right?

JAMIE IVEY: Right, and there is an immediate consequence for not complying with the trafficker. So that is force. Next there’s fraud. And fraud is when lying or deception is used. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, okay. So in this case, uh, the fact that Given had been told he would receive payment and education for singing in the choir and then he didn’t get those things, that’s fraud. 

JAMIE IVEY: Exactly. And finally, coercion. And coercion isn’t actually harm, but it’s a very real threat of harm.

RACHEL SZABO: Right, like when Given was threatened to be sent back to Zambia. 

JAMIE IVEY: That’s right. So these three tactics – force, fraud, coercion – only one of them needs to be present to denote a case of human trafficking, but often all three are at play. And the other thing that is helpful in identifying human trafficking is to remember that it’s a business, albeit an illegal one, but it is about profit. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, actually Nita Belles talked about that. 

NITA BELLES: The parallels between domestic violence and human trafficking are tremendous. They are almost exactly the same until you get to the place of motivation. And for the abuser, the motivation is they want to control somebody that they love so they don’t lose them and love is kind of a twisted thing for them. But for the trafficker, it’s sheer money. 

RACHEL SZABO: So according to the International Labor Organization, human trafficking makes $150 billion per year. So to put that in perspective, in the year 2020, the NFL made $12 billion and the company Coca-Cola made $33 billion, but human trafficking made $150 billion. And all that money – it’s going directly to the traffickers. So yeah, profit is a huge motivation. Okay, so that was our first myth. So very rarely is a trafficker going to be a complete stranger who is kidnapping people. 

JAMIE IVEY: So myth number two is that victims of trafficking just need Jesus. That can sound controversial, so don’t hear what we aren’t saying. Jesus is the answer and our only hope, no matter who you are. So to better explain what we mean by this, I’d like for you to hear from my friend Rebecca Bender.

REBECCA BENDER: I grew up in a small town in southern Oregon, had only about 3000 people. It was actually called Cave Junction. We’re just kind of a small town, blue collar family. 

JAMIE IVEY: I loved what Nita said earlier about how there are many different types of vulnerabilities because Rebecca came from what you and I might consider a quote unquote normal family, but she still had vulnerabilities that could be exploited, especially after her parents divorced.

REBECCA BENDER: I had some deep vulnerabilities of wanting, you know, to love and be loved. I wanted to be wanted. I wanted to be invited. I think that stemmed from feeling really alone as a young girl. I was an only child and, right, my dad was busy drinking and my mom’s got two to three jobs now as a single mom to make ends meet and I just felt really alone, really unseen, and really unwanted, um, even though that was never their intention. 

JAMIE IVEY: Part of those vulnerabilities would result in her getting pregnant before college, but they also resulted in her being a prime target for her first trafficker. 

REBECCA BENDER: I met him on a college campus, actually met him at a, like a restaurant that’s right butted up to the college campus. Picked up a relationship, he pretended to wanna date me, and we exchanged texts and phone calls and spent time together, and he really appeared to me that he was a normal 24-year-old guy and he didn’t care that I had a kid. He made me feel loved. He made me feel a part of something. He painted these pictures. Everything was “we,” everything, you know – he had big dreams and ideas, and I just got swept up in this fantasy of “we would be happy.” 

JAMIE IVEY: So Rebecca’s new so-called boyfriend eventually convinced her to move with him to Las Vegas, covering all her expenses, but then claimed he needed to recover the money he had spent on the move, so he drove her to an escort service office and told her to sign up so she could make money and pay him back. When she began protesting, he slapped her across the face. So Rebecca went in and signed up, putting Kelby for her escort name, and for the next six years Rebecca would live as a victim of human trafficking being sold for sex.

RACHEL SZABO: Oh my gosh. So, but, you know, even already in the story, you can totally see this force, fraud, and coercion thing taking place. 

JAMIE IVEY: That’s right. All three of them quickly became her norm. 

REBECCA BENDER: Wow, he used fraud here. He actually wasn’t 24. Wow, he didn’t have a job in Las Vegas that he was moving to. Wow, those are really fraudulent pretenses at point of recruitment. Interesting. Right? And then you get to the force part, where it’s like, “Well, did he ever physically assault you if you didn’t wanna comply?” Yes. The very first time he asked, he slapped me across the face when I said no. Now I’ve been forced, right? Physical harm. And then coercion is the threat of harm. You know, if you don’t get, come home tonight with $1,500, you’re gonna find your daughter on the corner. It was a literal threat. 

JAMIE IVEY: So naturally, as part of her way of coping, Rebecca got highly addicted to drugs and everything sort of came to her head when Rebecca’s mom took her daughter away and demanded that Rebecca go to rehab. 

REBECCA BENDER: The only one that had an open bed was a Christian rehab, and I was like, “Oh boy, here we go.” It’s what I thought. And it was this, the coolest people and they were on fire for Jesus and they were, you know, ex gang members and they had been to jail like me. 

JAMIE IVEY: Rebecca hadn’t grown up in church, so she viewed God as more of a fairy tale. But at this rehab center, all that changed. 

REBECCA BENDER: And I got radically delivered from drugs. Uh, had a wild encounter with God, and so I knew he was real. 

JAMIE IVEY: While in rehab, Rebecca became a believer. She grew this passion to read God’s Word, and she wanted to teach it to others. Jesus had set her free – until she left the safety of the rehab center. 

REBECCA BENDER: I was still talking to my trafficker, and I thought, “Well, now that I’m sober, now he said he won’t do it again.” And I went back. 

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so this is breaking all of my, like, stereotypical evangelical narratives right now. When we think about, you know, prostitutes, we think that, “Oh, we need to go evangelize them because surely no prostitute is gonna know Jesus because if they did they wouldn’t be where they are, so we all need to go tell them about Jesus.” But like Rebecca, she had Jesus, but she still chose her life of being trafficked. What is going on? Like what would compel her to do that? 

JAMIE IVEY: So this is what we mean when we say it is a myth that trafficking victims just need Jesus. We have to understand that trauma plays a very big role for any victim of trafficking and that the trauma that comes with trafficking is a very specific type. Rebecca likes to explain it using a spectrum of four types of trauma. 

REBECCA BENDER: Where the first type of trauma is like acute trauma and it’s not interpersonal, so a traumatic moment like a car wreck or a hurricane. It’s one event. It doesn’t interact with person. It’s a certain type of trauma, um, that you can get therapy for. It’s acute trauma. And then there’s interpersonal trauma. You know, a one-time potential event, assaulted at a grocery store, assaulted at a college campus. It’s interpersonal, person-to-person trauma. It’s oftentimes with a stranger, and it’s one occurrence. And then you have complex trauma, which is multiple occurrences with one perpetrator. You see this a lot in domestic violence, in childhood abuse. Multiple occurrences, one perpetrator, very traumatic. And then you have trafficking, and it’s known as complex-compound trauma, which means it’s complex and it’s compounded. It’s multiple occurrences and multiple perpetrators.

JAMIE IVEY: There are actually diagnosable mental conditions that could be part of a trafficking victim’s life. There’s something called Stockholm syndrome where you come to believe your trafficker is the only one you can trust and actually is protecting you from everyone else. There’s trauma bonding, which is an emotional attachment formed when an abuser or trafficker follows periods of abuse by periods of love and affection. So, yes, Rebecca knew the Lord, but she was also suffering from very real trauma. And to complicate things even more, research now shows that domestic pimp-controlled human trafficking actually fits all the criteria of a cult. 

REBECCA BENDER: I mean, it’s like any type of organized crime where there’s certain rules you follow, there’s certain ideologies that you get indoctrinated to. Traffickers are very good at saying mantras over and over again. It’s very much like brainwashing. You have this high-control group leader that’s, everyone has to abide by certain rules. All of the income goes into one pot that the high-control group leader determines. They isolate you from outside information, they isolate you from any community support, and then they use a variety of techniques including abuse, sleep deprivation, and food deprivation, physical assault, sexual assault to keep you in compliance. And it really takes a hit on your, on your mental psyche, let alone your physical health. 

JAMIE IVEY: Sometimes Rebecca’s buyers would even ask if she was choosing to sell herself or was being trafficked. 

REBECCA BENDER: I mean, I’d have people ask all the time and we’d say, “Of course not.” You know, like, ’cause I need to meet a quota or I’m gonna get in trouble. So of course I’m not gonna answer this guy who I know, know – you know, I don’t know from Adam. I’m not gonna tell him, “Yes, I am being trafficked. Will you help me?” Well, A, I didn’t even use that language, right? I’m thinking, “I’m just forced into prostitution by my boyfriend,” quote unquote, “and we’re only gonna do this for a little bit longer until we get our moving money back. That’s what he promised (laughs) , and, and then things will be better.” That’s what I believed. That’s what he sold me. I, I bought that. And you continue to justify that. It’s like the analogy – you put a, a baby elephant on a chain or even a rope. In the beginning, it can’t move from that rope. As it gets older, it doesn’t realize it could just break the rope, just stays within the circumference that it had always been given. It’s a real same mental hold. That’s the goal is to get you to that point so that you’re in mental chains, not necessarily physical ones ’cause physical ones aren’t, aren’t sexy, they don’t sell.

RACHEL SZABO: You know, a lot of times we like to end stories on this big triumphant moment with someone getting rescued, with someone getting freed, or in Rebecca’s case with getting saved, and it’s this big victory. But for someone who’s been a victim of human trafficking, their story doesn’t end there. Rebecca’s story didn’t end with her getting saved and getting sober, and then everything was fine after that. Recovering from trauma or abuse – that’s hard work, and I think a lot of times we forget that.

JAMIE IVEY: And Rebecca needed the hope of Jesus. We all do. But she was also in a situation that she needed help to get out of. 

REBECCA BENDER: I needed opportunities. I needed someone to help show me that I could get out. I needed people to help get me out. I needed airline tickets. And, you know, you need relationship. 

JAMIE IVEY: And I think this is where we as God’s people have such a unique opportunity to provide that relationship and that help to people who are being or have been trafficked. 

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so if traffickers aren’t strangers who kidnap people and if their victims need relationship and support just as much as they need Jesus, then what does it mean for Christians, for people like you and I, to step in and help? And that question brings us to our third and final myth after the break. Stay with us.

COMMERCIAL

RACHEL SZABO: Welcome back to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Rachel Szabo. 

JAMIE IVEY: And I’m Jamie Ivy. Today – where the gospel meets human trafficking. So we’ve looked at who traffickers are, we’ve looked at who victims are, but what do we do with all this? In a country where anywhere from 15 to 50,000 people a year are enslaved through human trafficking, what is our role as Christians?

RACHEL SZABO: Well, that is exactly the question that a guy named Raleigh Sadler found himself asking. So Raleigh worked as a campus minister, and in the year 2012, he took some of his students to the Passion Conference in Atlanta. Jamie, I’m assuming you know what Passion is. 

JAMIE IVEY: Yes, I love Passion. I’ve been twice, actually. I got saved in Passion in 1999, and it’s a ginormous Christian conference for young adults.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, so Passion is huge. And in Atlanta, their main sessions were held in what’s now called the State Farm Arena, which can hold more than 20,000 people. So Raleigh is sitting up in the nosebleeds in this arena with his students and there’s a lady on the stage whose name is Christine Caine and Christine founded A21, which is an anti-human trafficking nonprofit. Actually, here’s a clip of Christine from that session in 2012. 

CHRISTINE CAINE CLIP: “And if we are crippled and we are broken, then we can’t help anybody else. But we who have been rescued have a responsibility to rescue lost and broken people. Jesus said, ‘As you sent me Father, I send them.'” 

RACHEL SZABO: And as Raleigh is listening to her talk, he has this weird sense that God was calling him to drop his dream job of being a college pastor and actually step into the arena to fight human trafficking.

RALEIGH SADLER: I felt something in my gut, you know, this thing, and it was just like, “You’re gonna do something.” And I can’t tell you if I ever felt that before. 

RACHEL SZABO: But again, what Raleigh knows about human trafficking, it involves tough guys like Liam Neeson busting down doors and taking people out in, in rescue raids. 

RALEIGH SADLER: I mean, I wear cardigans. I’m not gonna kick down the door of a brothel. Like what does it look like for me to fight human trafficking? I wasn’t trained, I didn’t go to law school, I wasn’t in the police academy. Like I went to a seminary. I mean, I know how to preach and I know how to eat. Like those are the things I felt like I got really good at in my time of seminary education. 

RACHEL SZABO: So Raleigh ends up doing the first thing that he can think of. He sells everything, and he moves to New York City. 

JAMIE IVEY: Why New York City? 

RACHEL SZABO: Well, okay, because Raleigh doesn’t think that there’s any work to be done in his small college town. You know, he needs to be in a big city to fight human trafficking. So Raleigh moves to New York. He starts jumping in. He starts doing these prayer walks. He starts joining up with other people who are fighting human trafficking. He’s like super passionate, like “We’re gonna fight human trafficking.”

JAMIE IVEY: “In my cardigan.”

RACHEL SZABO: “In my cardigan.” (laughter) But here’s the thing – as Raleigh starts jumping in, he also starts burning out, like fast.

RALEIGH SADLER: I remember meeting with this private detective and he was just talking about all the exploiting and just pain and stuff that he was seeing in Brooklyn, and I remember walking away from that meeting and being like, “I can’t do this anymore.” I’d only been doing this six months in New York, and unbeknownst to me, I was dealing with tons of vicarious trauma.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so vicarious trauma is something that happens when you work in a field that has frequent exposure to trauma victims or trauma situations. And, yeah, absolutely. Working in the field of anti-human trafficking – like this is dark, heavy, evil stuff. But here’s the myth that Raleigh believed and the third myth that we’re gonna look at is that we believe fighting human trafficking is this radical, dangerous, high-paced job. And because Raleigh thought that, he started to wonder if maybe he wasn’t really cut out for this kind of work. 

RALEIGH SADLER: I’ll never forget after that saying, “God, I’m, I’m ready to quit. I know I just started, but I think I’m done.”

RACHEL SZABO: You know, why did God even call him to this in the first place?

RALEIGH SADLER: And shortly after that, there was an illicit massage parlor in Koreatown and I had gone up to the 13th floor where it was and I just prayed over it. I just walked up, and I just prayed over it. You know, I’m like, “God, you love justice more than I do. You’re going to bring justice. I don’t know how, ’cause I can’t fix this and I don’t even know if I can keep doing this ’cause it’s just so overwhelming. God, I gotta trust this to you.” And I will never forget – a couple months passed, I went back up there to pray, and the place was completely gone. We did research and it was just gone, like it didn’t move. For some reason, it had been shut down. I don’t know if the police raided it. I don’t know what happened. I walked up to that building and there was this massive painting of a lion’s head on it – and this is in Midtown Manhattan – and underneath the lion’s head it said, “Call to me, and I will answer you.” It was in that moment where I was like, “Okay, the lion of Judah, God incarnate, has called me to this, and God is saying, ‘Pray to me, and I will do this.'” It was amazing. And so that was my first moment where I was like, “Okay, I think maybe I can stay in this because God is working.” 

RACHEL SZABO: So Raleigh slows down, and he realizes that in his zeal he maybe had bitten off more than he could chew. So, yes, God had called him to fight human trafficking, but maybe not with necessarily all the bravado and the intensity that he thought it required, like maybe he needed to change his approach. So, he decided to start small. And since traffickers seek to exploit vulnerabilities, Raleigh simply started to look for vulnerable people in his neighborhood. And in doing that, here’s what he came to realize is that human trafficking is what Raleigh likes to call a catch-all injustice. 

RALEIGH SADLER: When you think about human trafficking being the exploitation of vulnerability for commercial gain, then to understand that, like, ultimately, regardless of your vulnerability, a trafficker could target you. So if you’re an immigrant without the proper papers, you could be trafficked. If you have been in and out of prison and you can’t get a job and so you’re more vulnerable, you could be trafficked. If you’ve grown up in the foster system, you could be trafficked. 

RACHEL SZABO: Basically any place where there are vulnerabilities, there’s the potential for trafficking. So instead of busting down brothels in his cardigan, Raleigh saw that any work with anyvulnerable people group is fighting human trafficking. 

RALEIGH SADLER: I’ll never forget going to this church that was, like, a large church in, in Missouri, and they were doing great things. They had tons of ministries, like recovery ministries, divorce care ministries. They had ministries with those who were homeless, immigrants, prison ministries. They had all these things and I went up to their, one of their pastors and I said, “I know you’re doing a human trafficking event, but I’m gonna ask you to do something. I’m gonna ask you to not create a human trafficking ministry.” And he said, “Why?” And I’m like, “Because you’re basically already doing it. What you need to recognize is what vulnerability looks like when it’s exploited because you’re caring for vulnerable groups and now if you just add this addendum of here’s what it looks like when it’s exploited, then ultimately, you’re going to push back.”

RACHEL SZABO: So this approach to fighting human trafficking would eventually lead Raleigh to start his own nonprofit called Let My People Go, and Let My People Go helps the local church fight human trafficking by simply noticing and loving the vulnerable people in their own communities. 

RALEIGH SADLER: How do you identify your vulnerable neighbor? How do you recognize them? How do you respond to them? How can I empower you to actually care for those most vulnerable in your community in such a way that it just becomes as normal as breathing? Because at the end of the day, everyone who’s vulnerable could be, is being, or has been exploited. 

JAMIE IVEY: I mean, think about the work that you are all doing at Love Thy Neighborhood and your service site partners. I mean, you have interns that work in the area of helping people who are experiencing homelessness or crisis pregnancies and refugee ministries and the sex industry. And I think about the impact that those ministries and those interns are making on ending human trafficking. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, fighting human trafficking doesn’t need to be another item or agenda we add to our to-do list and it doesn’t have to be something that we go somewhere else to do. In fact, every single state has reported cases of human trafficking. So if we’re simply faithful to love our neighbors where we are, to love the poor and the needy – things that God has already called us to do anyway – then we are fighting human trafficking. 

RALEIGH SADLER: When one vulnerable person interacts with another vulnerable person, then God who was made vulnerable at the cross – I mean, he shows up and it’s just this magnificent thing that happens and it’s life-changing and I’ve seen more life change happen just by putting one person in front of another person and helping them have a conversation than I ever experienced behind a pulpit. And I mean, that’s hard to say, but it’s like getting people to face their fears, depend on God, and have a conversation with someone who’s different than them. That’ll change your life.

JAMIE IVEY: It’s this kind of relationship that Rebecca wishes she had known about and had earlier. So Rebecca eventually escaped her trafficker, and now she spends her time educating and equipping people to fight human trafficking. She’s worked with the FBI and Homeland Security, but really Rebecca wants people to realize exactly what Raleigh is doing and what you all say here at Love Thy Neighborhood – that relationships, they change lives.

REBECCA BENDER: I can remember going to my very first human trafficking conference after I got in the fight against trafficking and, and, um, I showed up to this, my very first conference and there was hundreds, hundreds of advocates and allies there that had been fighting to pass laws long before I was even trafficked. And so I saw all these people, and I thought, ‘This whole time there’s been hundreds if not thousands of people fighting for me? And like no one, no one told me that there was this army of people ready, like ready on standby to jump in and help.” And so, you know, I don’t know that it’s one thing that one person can say. I think it’s, it’s really about building intentional relationship, um, so that when I’m, when I’m ready to run – and every victim gets to a point where they’re ready to run – that they know who to call, that they actually know that there’s options out there. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, in fact, it was these kind of relationships and people noticing vulnerabilities that eventually also helped Given Kachepa and his friends.

GIVEN KACHEPA: We had pastors in some of the churches. We had some pastors that would call the ministry and saying how we were being mistreated and complaining about a lot of the conditions that we were going there. 

RACHEL SZABO: Because of those phone calls, eventually the U.S. government became involved and the boys were removed from the choir and from the trailer where they were staying and they were taken to those churches that had made those phone calls and the people in those churches helped find homes for the boys who wanted to stay in the States, including Given.

GIVEN KACHEPA: They’ve provided me a lot of help. Um, it’s just, uh, almost hard to believe. To love a different kid from a different country and to provide him with, uh, emotional support, mental support, financial support that they have for me has been tremendous. I don’t know too many people that do that. So if there’s anybody that really deserves any kind of award here, it’s my parents here that in America, my family here, uh, my aunt in Zambia – those are the people that, uh, deserve the awards. Because of them I’m here today. 

RACHEL SZABO: Given was trafficked in the choir for 18 months, and he was 15 when he finally got out. He went on to finish school and decided that he wanted to be a dentist. He graduated from dental school in 2016, and today, at 36 years old, he’s part of a successful dental practice in Dallas, Texas. Given’s also currently working on building dental clinics back in Kalingalinga, Zambia, and he’s also spoken several times about his experience and hopes to educate people about the reality of human trafficking here in the States. In fact, there’s a whole section on his dentistry’s website dedicated to raising awareness about trafficking. 

GIVEN KACHEPA: Yeah, and you know what I say. I say, “To get to this point, I went through hell and back, but I got back.” I say, “I am the luckiest guy alive.” I wake up. I’m happy. I, I have a good job. I’m incredibly blessed beyond what my wildest imagination could have ever dreamed. That’s what God has, has blessed me with, and, uh, I’ll forever be grateful for that.

JAMIE IVEY: You know, what I love about today’s, uh, episode on human trafficking is that there’s so much that we don’t know and understand, but when we hear stories like, like Given and Rebecca and, and they’re willing to tell us their experiences, we start to see, “Oh my gosh, so much fraud, so much coercion, so much, so much lying that happened to them.” But another thing that we see in all of these stories is there’s that someone noticing them, like someone saying, “I see someone vulnerable, and I wanna help them.” And it makes me think of Jesus telling the story about the Good Samaritan, and this man – he, he, he loved his neighbor, but he was also just doing his everyday life. He was just observant and he was willing to step in when he saw someone who was vulnerable on the side of the road, and that convicts me to look around and see who’s vulnerable in my life.

RACHEL SZABO: All throughout Scripture we see that God cares about those who are vulnerable and that he promises to execute justice on those who exploit them, but sometimes I think we can read that and think that it means he’s gonna do that single-handedly – which he totally could, but for some reason God seems to like using his people to accomplish his mission. So if you wanna see the evils of human trafficking end, just look around you. Who in your neighborhood is vulnerable? Who can you get to know and build a relationship with? You know, if we as the church came together like those thousands of people that Rebecca saw at that conference and if we decided that we’re gonna know our neighbors and we’re gonna know who they are and what’s happening in their lives, then not only would we be fighting human trafficking, we would be preventing it from ever happening in the first place.

—————————————–

RACHEL SZABO: If you’d like to learn more about human trafficking, I would encourage you to check out Nita Belles’ book, In Our Backyard. She actually has a whole chapter that goes even more in depth into Given Kachepa’s story. 

JAMIE IVEY: You can also check out my friend Rebecca’s book called In Pursuit of Love. She goes into her story, and it’s such a great book and would not only tell you more of her story, but also help you learn more about trafficking.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. And finally, if you wanna learn more about what it means to fight human trafficking right where you are, grab a copy of Raleigh Sadler’s book. It’s called Vulnerable: Rethinking Human Trafficking. You can find links to all these resources, plus all of our past episodes by going to lovethyneighborhood.org/LTNpodcast.

—————————————–

RACHEL SZABO: Special thanks to our interviewees for this episode – Nita Belles, Given Kachepa, Rebecca Bender, and Raleigh Sadler. Also, thank you to Jamie Ivy for joining us on the show today. 

JAMIE IVEY: Guys, thanks for having me. I love your podcast. 

RACHEL SZABO: If you haven’t yet, go check out Jamie’s show, The Happy Hour with Jamie Ivy. She actually has an episode featuring an interview with Rebecca Bender. It’s phenomenal. You can findThe Happy Hour by going to jamieivy.com. This episode was edited by the following Love Thy Neighborhood staff and interns – Kiana Brown, Rachel Hamm, and Abby Shaffer. Our media assistant and audio engineer is Anna Tran.

JAMIE IVEY: And our producer and media director is Rachel Szabo, who insists that no one should ever challenge her to a dance-off.

RALEIGH SADLER: It will always put people in danger. 

RACHEL SZABO: Music for today’s episode comes from Lee Rosevere, Blue Dot Sessions, and Zambian Acapella. Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX. 

JAMIE IVEY: Apply for your social justice internship supported by Christian community by visiting lovethyneighborhood.org. Serve for a summer or a year. Grow in your faith and life skills. Learn more at lovethyneighborhood.org. 

RACHEL SZABO: Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, “Go, and do likewise.”