Resources

Want to Learn More?

Are you passionate about the issue of human trafficking? Do you want to learn more? The following is a list of resources that will help you grow in your understanding of the problem and the solution.

Recommendations

Books

Mind Games

Derek Williams didn’t want to be a career pimp when he grew up. He dreamed of becoming an attorney. Abuse, neglect, and other trauma led him to the streets in search of a father figure. Instead, he found a three-bag-a-day heroin addiction.

 

At 16, he talked his 14-year-old girlfriend into letting him sell her, embarking on a 32-year career, trafficking more than 150 victims in all 50 states, Canada, and Europe.

Derek takes us deep inside the mind of a trafficker, pulling back the veil on the psychological warfare they wage against our children. Each chapter intertwines Derek’s story with evidence-based research, practical tools, and personal insights to not only prevent children from becoming the victim of someone like he was but to keep them from becoming who he was.

Voices Against Sex Slavery in America

An estimated 45.8 million people are enslaved in the world today. Although many have heard about human trafficking abroad, not many Americans are aware that sex slavery is a threat here in the United States. Our goal is to break the myth that sex trafficking is a foreign issue. It occurs right here in America, and Voices Against Sex Slavery in America points to different ways we can combat this illicit trade.

Girls Like Us

With the power and verity of First They Killed My Father and A Long Way Gone, Rachel Lloyd’s riveting survivor story is the true tale of her hard-won escape from the commercial sex industry and her bold founding of GEMS, New York City’s Girls Education and Mentoring Service, to help countless other young girls escape “the life.” Lloyd’s unflinchingly honest memoir is a powerful and unforgettable story of inhuman abuse, enduring hope, and the promise of redemption.

Not For Sale

In the revised and updated version of this harrowing yet deeply inspirational exposé, award-winning journalist David Batstone gives the most up-to-date information available on the $31 billion human trafficking epidemic. With profiles of twenty-first century abolitionists like Thailand’s Kru Nam and Peru’s Lucy Borja, Batstone tells readers what they can do to stop the modern slave trade. Like Kevin Bales’ Disposable People and Ending Slavery, or E. Benjamin Skinner’s A Crime So Monstrous, Batstone’s Not for Sale is an informative and necessary manifesto for universal freedom.

Paid For: My Journey through Prostitution

Born into a troubled family, Rachel Moran left home at the age of fourteen. Being homeless, she was driven into prostitution to survive. With intelligence and empathy, she describes the exploitation she and others endured on the streets and in the brothels. Moran also speaks to the psychological damage inherent to prostitution and the inevitable estrangement from one’s body. At twenty-two, Moran escaped the sex trade. She has since become a writer and an abolitionist activist.

God in a Brothel

This is the true story of an undercover investigator’s experiences infiltrating the multi-billion-dollar global sex industry. It is a story of triumph for the children and young teens released from a life of slavery and the rescuer who freed many hundreds of victims leading to the prosecution of dozens of perpetrators. And it is a story of haunting despair for those left behind in corrupt systems of law enforcement. It is the personal story of Daniel Walker, one man who followed a path of costly discipleship, agonizing failure and unlikely redemption. And it is a challenge to God’s people to join in the battle that all might be freed. The Anti-Trafficking Tour featuring Daniel Walker is coming to a city near you in October 2011! Visit www.ivpress.com/antitraffickingtour for tour schedule and more information.

Made in the USA

The book is a compilation of five true stories of adults (4 woman & 1 man) trafficked as children. Each story is preceded by an overview of the type of trafficking the story addresses and followed up by a statement from the survivors themselves. The purpose of the book is to provide insights on how American children are taken captive and often coerced to remain in a lifestyle of commercial sexual exploitation. All profits from the book will be distributed to nationally recognized agencies providing either preventive or restorative service for child survivors of Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking.

The Slave Across the Street

In this powerful true story, Theresa Flores shares how her life as an All-American, blue-eyed, blond-haired 15-year-old teenager who could have been your neighbor was enslaved into the dangerous world of sex trafficking while living in an upper-middle class suburb of Detroit. Her story peels the cover off of this horrific criminal activity and gives dedicated activists as well as casual bystanders a glimpse into the underbelly of trafficking. And it all happened while living at home without her parents ever knowing about it. Involuntarily involved in a large underground criminal ring, Ms. Flores endured more as a child than most adults will ever face their entire lives.

Roadmap to Redemption

Roadmap to Redemption is the first of it’s kind, a workbook for survivors of sex trafficking written by a survivor. Rebecca Bender was lured into the life of human trafficking at the vulnerable age of 18. Now, rescued and restored, she uses the valuable lessons she’s learned to help bring other survivors toward redemption. This ten week workbook is cupped with her personal testimony and injected with scripture. Rebecca uncovers the seductive tactics traffickers use in America today and equips anyone who wants to work with exploited victims.

Fallen

In Fallen, Annie Lobert tells her remarkable story of surviving sex trafficking with sixteen years in the sex industry, breaking free, finding healing, and then reaching back to help others find freedom as well. This riveting memoir opens a window into a sordid, shadowy world of sex trafficking but shows just how bright God’s light can truly shine in the darkness.

Half The Sky

With Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in childbirth. Drawing on the breadth of their combined reporting experience, Kristof and WuDunn depict our world with anger, sadness, clarity, and, ultimately, hope.

Documentaries

20/20 Prostitution in America

For more than two years, ”20/20” cameras documented the daily risks of street walkers and expensive call girls. The report captures the realities of who these women are and how the law deals with them, compared to their male clientele. Whether a single mom, a college student, a housewife, a school teacher or a drug addict, the women the program follows have ended up in places they never planned to be… some are lured by the dream of a flashy lifestyle and fast money, others to feed their drug habit and just to survive, but almost all struggle with the challenge of how hard it is to get out.

Born into Brothels

A tribute to the resiliency of childhood and the restorative power of art, BORN INTO BROTHELS is a portrait of several unforgettable children who live in Calcutta’s red light district, where there mothers work as prostitutes. Spurred by the kids’ facination with her camera, Zana Briski, a New-York-based photographer living in the brothels and documenting life there, decides to teach them photography. As they begin to look at and record their world through new eyes, the kids, who society refused to recognize, awaken for the first time to their own talents and sense of worth. Filmmakers Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski capture the way in which beauty can be found even the seemingly bleakest and most helpless of places, and how art and education can empower children to transform their lives.

Not My Life

“Not My Life” comprehensively depicts the cruel and dehumanizing practices of human trafficking and modern slavery on a global scale. Filmed on five continents, in a dozen countries, Not My Life takes viewers into a world where millions of children are exploited through an astonishing array of practices including forced labor, sex tourism, sexual exploitation, and child soldiering.

Nefarious: Merchant of Souls

“Modern slavery.” It sounds like a paradox. Hasn’t humanity progressed? Didn’t we leave slavery dead on the battlefields of the American Civil War? Didn’t social reformers like Lincoln and Wilberforce legislate against such cruelty over a hundred years ago? So we had thought. But, with over 27 million enslaved people in the world, human trafficking is once again the battlefront of the century.

Sex + Money

Sex+Money: A National Search for Human Worth is a 90 minute documentary that reveals the alarming truth about sex trafficking in the U.S. and the rise of advocates striving to end it. Beginning in September 2009, the film crew traveled to over 30 states and conducted more than 75 interviews with survivors, former traffickers, sex-buyers, pornographers, law enforcement, politicians, activists, and many others.

Very Young Girls

Very Young Girls, whose title reflects the fact that in the United States the average age of entry into prostitution is just thirteen. The film takes us into the work of a former sexually exploited youth-turned-activist named Rachel Lloyd, who started the New York City organization GEMS (Girls Educational and Mentoring Services) to help victimized young women escape their pimps and find another way of life. We meet teen aged girls at different stages of this transition. Some have been so psychologically manipulated by their pimps that they feel compelled to return. Others have successfully broken with their pasts. As we come to know these girls better, they emerge as well-rounded individuals full of unexpected laughter and insight. One chilling element the film uncovers is a videotape – confiscated by police – of two pimps recording their activities with the intent of making a reality television show. Later we see Lloyd get recognized for her work at a human rights awards ceremony shortly after the song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” wins an Academy Award.

Movies

Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog millionaire is the story of jamal malik; an 18 year-old orphan from the slums of mumbai; who is about to experience the biggest day of his life. With the whole nation watching; he is just one question away from winning a staggering 20 million rupees on india’s “who wants to be a millionaire?” but when the show breaks for the night; police arrest him on suspicion of cheating; how could a street kid know so much? Desperate to prove his innocence; jamal tells the story of his life in the slum where he and his brother grew up; of their adventures together on the road; of vicious encounters with local gangs; and of latika; the girl he loved and lost. Each chapter of his story reveals the key to the answer to one of the game show’s questions. Intrigued by jamal’s story; the jaded police inspector begins to wonder what a young man with no apparent desire for riches is really doing on this game show? When the new day dawns and jamal returns to answer the final question; the inspector and sixty million viewers are about to find out.

Taken

When his estranged daughter is kidnapped in Paris, a former spy (Liam Neeson) sets out to find her at any cost. Relying on his special skills, he tracks down the ruthless gang that abducted her and launches a one-man war to bring them to justice and rescue his daughter.

Trade

Adriana is a 13-year-old girl from Mexico City whose kidnapping by sex traffickers sets in motion a desperate mission by her 17-year-old brother, Jorge, to save her. Trapped and terrified by an underground network of international thugs who earn millions exploiting their human cargo, Adriana’s only friend and protector throughout her ordeal is Veronica, a young Polish woman tricked into the trade by the same criminal gang. As Jorge dodges immigration officers and incredible obstacles to track the girls’ abductors, he meets Ray, a Texas cop whose own family loss to sex trafficking leads him to become an ally in the boy’s quest. Fighting with courage and hard-tested faith, the characters of Trade negotiate their way through the unspeakable terrain of the sex trade “tunnels” between Mexico and the United States. From the barrios of Mexico City and the treacherous Rio Grande border, to a secret Internet sex slave auction and the final climactic confrontation at a stash house in suburban New Jersey, Ray and Jorge forge a close bond as they give desperate chase to Adriana’s kidnappers before she is sold and disappears forever into this brutal global underworld, a place from which few victims ever return.

Priceless

PRICELESS is a powerful story of James Stevens who was, at one time, a good man with a great life, but that was then and this is now. After the tragic death of his wife and losing custody of his little girl, James is at the darkest crossroad of his life. Angry, desperate, and unable to hold down a steady job, he agrees to drive a box truck on a shady, one-time trip cross country for cash — no questions asked. But when he discovers what he is delivering is actually who, he is compelled to save two beautiful and frightened sisters who are unaware of the danger that awaits them. Can love, strength, and faith redefine his past and change the course of his future? This unlikely hero risks it all to save these women, confront the forces that oppose him and ultimately discover the life he was meant to live.