Phil Williams Commentary: Child trafficking is here in our backyard
Child trafficking is here; let that sink in. It is right here, in your state, your community, perhaps even your home. It’s not just a symptom of third-world failed states or the storyline for action movies.
In the past couple of weeks, the Fultondale Police Department, in collaboration with the Alabama-based Covenant Rescue Group, arrested 11 perpetrators in a one-day sting operation — 11 men who traveled from all over the region intending to pay someone for sex with a child.
There’s no greater mission than saving our precious kids from perpetrators who would seek to do them harm. Kids are our greatest asset, entrusted to us by God Himself, and we have a duty to provide for, protect and defend them.
Early in our marriage, I took a job working in an adolescent treatment center with kids who had all manner of problems. There were psychiatric disorders, drug addictions, behavioral problems and, very often, the aftereffects of abuse.
Every time I saw what I thought was the upper level of awful, a new kid would come in with a new tragedy, and I'd have to raise the awful meter up another notch.
To be sure, some of those kids were their own worst enemies, but too often I found that the bulk of the issues they faced stemmed from an adult who was partially if not fully to blame. Some of their stories are still burned into my mind.
I remember one kid who had done so much acid, he kept seeing things in his peripheral vision that weren’t there well after his detox. Part of his personal history was abuse at the hands of a parent who thought a good punishment was to put him in the oven and turn it on to teach him a lesson.
I remember a young lady who shined until the day came that she was to leave and return to her parents ... the same parents who had used her in satanic rituals when she was small. On the day of her discharge, she put on dark clothes, dark makeup and left to go back to what she called “that dark world”.
By day. I worked with really messed up kids. In the evenings, my wife and I worked with kids as volunteers with YoungLife ministries. At some point, I realized that within our YoungLife kids, there were just as many problems as there were in the lives of my treatment center kids. The ones at the treatment center were the ones who were getting help for it.
We chose then to move to full-time ministry with YoungLife and to focus not on healing kids from the outside in, but the inside out. For the next seven years, we followed that calling with wonderful and often hilarious times.
But amid all the smiles, there were moments that rattled our cage as kids would let us in on their traumas and troubles. My wife had a girl tell her about her suicidal thoughts, leaving her no choice but to talk to her parents, after which the girl wouldn’t talk to her again. But she was alive.
I once had kids let me know that they had been getting drunk at a friend’s house. It was the friend’s mom who supplied the alcohol and partied with them. I confronted it, after which some of those kids wouldn’t talk with me. But the drunken parties stopped.
We knew we had to love them enough to be willing to make them mad at us. We had to love them enough to be willing to go into their situations with every intent to do what it took to get them out.
As significant as those experiences were, they don’t hold a candle to the level of depravity, and evil, that is perpetrated on kids every day. We are in an epidemic of evil.
There are certainly overt attempts to co-opt our kids. But the covert activity must also be addressed, and it has reached levels previously unheard of. Perpetrators have honed the use of social media, online chat rooms and even video games to gain access to our kids. It is not enough anymore to simply watch out for the creepy guy who hangs out by the park. Evil finds its way into our homes, and in my experience, the evil was often already somewhere in the house.
The FBI estimates that at any given time, 750,000 child predators are online trying to find a way to violate our kids' innocence.
Operation Underground Railroad, an organization committed to rescuing kids from trafficking, cites a UN study that says human trafficking is the second largest illicit industry in the U.S., behind only the drug trade.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than 19,000 reports of child sex trafficking from all 50 states in 2022 alone.
Globally, more than 10 million innocent kids are forced into a desperate existence of pornography, prostitution or forced labor. The Fultondale PD proved the problem is not “out there”, it is here.
Evil does not stop. It does not take rest breaks or go on vacation. Evil is at work 24/7, and it wants our kids — and it is here in our backyard.
Jesus told us in Matthew 25 that “whatever you did for one of the least of these…you did for Me.” These are our kids. We have to love them enough to be willing to make them mad, or to make ourselves uncomfortable. If, as a society, we sit idly by and allow perpetrators to operate unabated, then we will have failed as a society.
Phil Williams is a former state senator from District 10 (which includes Etowah County), retired Army colonel and combat veteran, and a practicing attorney. He previously served with the leadership of the Alabama Policy Institute in Birmingham. He currently hosts the conservative news/talk show Rightside Radio on multiple channels throughout north Alabama. The views expressed are his own.
This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: Phil Williams looks at problem of child trafficking
