Investigating modern-day slavery cases-Looking Deeper

Last night we took a bus and then a train called BART to Berkeley for an optional dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant. After dinner we walked about two blocks and then we stopped on the sidewalk and our leader read the first couple paragraphs of their book, NOT FOR SALE. It said that the Not for Sale movement started when one of their leaders read in the newspaper that their favorite Indian restaurant was the center of a human trafficking operation that had brought in 500 slaves from India. The cooks and servers who had been serving their food were all slaves. We looked across the street and there the restaurant was. It was closed on Monday evenings, but still in operation. The owner, a wealthy man who owns multiple apartment complexes & other buildings in Berkeley, got off on a plea bargain for a lesser charge and is still in business.

The crime came to light when one of the girls, who were all kept locked up in one of the owner's apartment buildings, died from a gas leak in the building. They rolled her body up in a carpet and were just about to load it into a van when the police happened by and noticed suspicious activity. The message was one we've heard over and over in just these first two days: Ask more questions. Look deeper. Think about what you are seeing. It could save someone's life.

Some of the leaders in NFS told about how they were seeing slavery right under their noses but not seeing it because they didn't yet have eyes to see it. I thought about how I saw the market boys in Congo for years before I realized that after dark, they crawl under those outdoor stalls and go to sleep. I didn't know they were street children. Yes, Lord, give me eyes to see. I thought of how many people write that they traveled through the Volta Region in Ghana and didn't see any such thing as trokosi slaves. Yes, Lord, give them eyes to see.

The encouraging part of the Indian slaves story is that Dave Batstone didn't just say "Imagine that. We were being served by slaves," and look the other way. For him it was a wake up call that lead him into the heart of the abolitionist movement. For me, it the wake up call was when a young man walked up to me during a break in my very first Christian ed seminars in Ghana in 1999 and handed me a T shirt that said, "Stop Trokosi". When he told me that trokosi was a form of modern-day slavery in his country, I was shocked. I began to investigate, and what I heard and saw shocked me so much that I once described the experience as lifting up the lid of hell itself to peer inside a little.

So here I am. This morning we learned how to use the internet and public records to investigate cases of human trafficking or modern day slavery. We had an assignment to find and document one case in our area. Tomorrow we will discuss them and then put them up on SlaveMap.com. Some people had a hard time, but rather quickly I picked up on the case of Dick Drost, former owner of Naked City near Roselawn, IN & originator of Miss Nude Teeny Bopper Universe Pageant. It was disgusting and infuriating reading about the case. He had a long string of charges against him at least three times, but got off through a plea bargain on one of the least of the charges. He went to CA and opened the same kind of place, and he was clearly guilty of human trafficking. He is suing the State of IN for $1Billion and New County for $50Million for violation of his human rights. His lawyer said that his prosecution was just fundamentalist Christians trying to establish their religion.
Getting off with very light sentences under plea bargains is something we are seeing a lot. What on earth are we thinking?

It was another interesting & worthwhile day at Abolitonist Investigator Academy.

Abolitionist Academy

Here I am at Abolitionist Academy in San Francisco. Our training in researching, documenting & intervening in modern-slavery starts tomorrow, but already I have enjoyed such stimulating conversation with others who are on the front lines of the abolitionist movement. My roommate works with a ministry that rescues girls in Houston, trafficked into prostitution. Another gal I've met is trying to find out what has happened to a long string of Native American girls who have disappeared along a certain highway in Canada.

I am hoping to learn from others' experiences and to go home with new ideas & skills to help us move on in our own efforts to free trokosi slaves in Ghana, Togo and Benin. We are also interested in child trafficking from the major markets in Ghana where we already have a well-established street ministry, in trafficking of children to dive for oysters in the Volta River (a practice that not infrequently results in their deaths and they get tangled in the fishing nets), and in sex/labor trafficking between Gulu, Uganda and Juba, Sudan. Lord, each child is a human life full of potential and promise, a child You love. Help us to know what to do to snatch them from those who would abuse them for their own profit and pleasure. You who came to set the captives free (Isaiah 61), do it again. In the next two weeks, let me not miss one lesson You would want to teach me. Thank You, Jesus! Amen.