Human trafficking, or sex slavery, is not just a problem for developing countries, but for the United States as well. Two activists, Hon. Linda Smith, founder and president of Shared Hope International, and Mark Blackwell, founder and president of Justice Ministries, brought attention to this issue and talked about how the church can help at a Wednesday Family Research Council symposium in Washington, D.C.
Smith began working on the sex trafficking issue when she was a congresswoman in the 1990s. After that, she used her business expertise to research sex trafficking and produce reports for the U.S. government. At first, her research was focused outside the United States. At international conferences, she recalled, people would ask her, "what about the United States?" So, she decided to produce a report on domestic sex trafficking and was astonished at what she found.
There are at least 100,000 American juveniles, at an average age of 13, who become victims of sex trafficking each year in the United States. Further, 77 percent of the women who are prostitutes today first entered the sex trade as a sex slave when they were a minor. Read more
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