No Human-Trafficking Awareness Month?

I am admittedly a little bit annoyed and let me dive right in and tell you why. As most people close to me know, I am very passionate about the issue of sex-trafficking prevention. To me, sex-trafficking is one of the most heinous, deplorable crimes because of all the factors that play into it: kidnapping, rape, deceit, fraud, bribery and sometimes murder. As if that isn't enough, young and innocent girls are often the victims, girls as young as 6 years old. It is illegal everywhere, but it happens anyway. And most people, if they don't know about it, don't want to talk about it.

I was exploring something on the internet today with this in mind. Everything seems to have an "Awareness Month" these days. When I was looking over all the different months, I found things as silly as Pet Dental Month, Lawn Care Month, Hamburger Month, Soul Food Month and Peanut Butter Lovers Month (the last one obviously being one I plan to celebrate in it's entirety). Sex-trafficking Awareness Month...nowhere to be found.

Unless there are more sources out there than my very extensive online research gave me (that being the first and only "hit" I checked out), I cannot find anything even closely resembling a sex-trafficking awareness month. So, this is why I'm annoyed. I started to realize how caught up we get with inconsequential things in our society. I really don't care what Brad and Angelina are fighting about now or what the stars look like without their makeup on. Okay, maybe that's only half true. But to have nothing about human-trafficking? NOTHING? Twenty-eight million people are enslaved today, more than ANY time in history, and the majority of it is either slave labor or forced sexual servitude.

This is a child's issue, a man's issue, a woman's issue and it should be EVERYONE'S issue, whether it is simply and soley just to pray for the issue. An issue like this that is so darkly and intricately woven into the threads of a society and culture can only be broken by the power of intentional prayer. I believe that very firmly. But is must, it MUST, first have awareness of what it really is!

Paul and I, together with Tiny Hands International, have created a prayer initiative specifically for this reason. The initiative is called "One Girl". It is a spiritual and prayerful commitment to uphold sex-trafficking prevention up in prayer. Daily, you commit yourself to pray for one girl, whether it is a girl vulnerable to being trafficked, already across those borders, being sold into a brothel or one who has been discarded into the streets as a useless because of HIV. You can pray for a brothel owner, a man entering the brothel, the parent's who unknowingly sell their daughters into this life thinking they are giving them a hope for a better future in education and employment. The bottom line is, we need prayer warriors to bring this issue into the light of reality for people, one girl at a time.

Since May, Tiny Hands International has had a hand in intercepting over 400 girls at the border monitoring stations between Nepal and India. But whether it was 400 girls or just one girl, it was a life that was saved from this unthinkable atrocity. So whether or not we have the backing of an official month of awareness, we ARE going to get sex-trafficking prevention into the forefront of people's minds.