Seeing and speaking in the face of the modern world’s evils

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

If you see something, say something.

We’ve been reading and hearing those few simple words since terror crashed into our world on Sept. 11, 2001. Now it’s time to apply them to other global problems: human trafficking, sex trafficking and child/forced labor.

Utter the word “slavery” in this country, and the first thing that pops to mind is a major birth defect peculiar to America — namely, this nation’s ornery position on black Americans.

However, beware the slavery, forced labor, child labor and the trafficking of humans that still goes on all over the world today.

Cotton, for example, is no longer king in America, but China surely wears a crown when it comes to young cotton pickers. According to a report by the U.S. Department of Labor, “between 40,000 and 1 million students are mobilized annually for the harvest, beginning as early as the third grade. Most children are paid little if at all, after deductions for meals, transportation and [education]. These students are required to pick daily quotas of cotton or pay fines, and performance in the cotton harvest is assessed for the students’ promotion to higher grade levels.”

Do you know where that cotton for your kitchen towels originated?

While many of us here in the U.S. ponder whether our kids will ever pay off that college loan, children in nations like Bolivia wonder whether they will ever pay off loans of their parents.

According to the Department of Labor report, almost a quarter of the migrants working in Bolivia’s sugarcane harvest industry are children under the age of 14, and many of them are subjected to forced labor. “Some children inherit the debt of their parents if their parents pass away or stop working, and remain bonded and [liable] to be sold to a different employer.”

If selling is the oldest profession in the world, the sex trade is part and parcel of the market since the beginning of time (from the serpent’s pitch to Eve and Adam’s lips).

In more recent times though, we see terror groups that rape villages of their precious women and children, and gangs and thugs that trade in arms and human cargo. One such case involved two women in Northern California who kidnapped four men and forced them to work on a marijuana farm.

Another case is the August arrest of Richard “Scott” Silverthorne, at the time the mayor of Fairfax, Virginia, who was caught hustling methamphetamine because he wanted to have group gay sex.

More often, however, the exploitation targets women and children — like the girls kidnapped and passed around by Nigeria’s murderous Boko Haram, or those girls forcibly “converted” to Islam by the Islamic State.

Victims and activists spoke of global tragic circumstance of such human souls at the U.N. General Assembly gathering this month in New York City, an event President Obama attended.

Zainab Hawa Bangura, a special adviser to the secretary-general for sexual violence in conflict, pointed out the consequences of forced displacement, sexual violence and trafficking: “This is a fact. Sexual violence has become both a push for displacement and a consequence of displacement. Women and children remain extremely vulnerable to sexual violence — including rape, survival sex and trafficking — not only when they flee, but in places where they are seeking refuge.”

Another speaker, genocide-prevention adviser Adama Dieng, offered faith-based solutions, saying religious organizations are on the ground providing humanitarian aid and comfort to women and children, efforts that too often go unrecognized.

“I believe that faith has a special role in the current migration and refugee crisis. It is often faith that leads people to embark on their desperate journey,” Mr. Dieng said. “It is faith, again, that helps [the victims] overcome the trials and challenges they encounter along the way and to cope with the challenge of integration into new societies.”

There is much to be done to ward off inhumane treatment, and the time for a global reckoning is at hand.

Prayer is a good start, but action is an even better way to make a difference.

So when you see or hear tell of something, do something.

• Deborah Simmons can be contacted at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.