EWOP Represents Freedom Stones at Girl Power Hour - Eastside

FREEDOM STONES at GIRL POWER HOUR - EASTSIDE
HELD AT WILLOWS LODGE IN WOODINVILLE

(Check out our lovely EWOP ladies, representing).

Ginger Neisz

Anna Schaufler, Ginger Neisz, Patti Orrico

THANK YOU GIRL POWER HOUR!!

Prayer Focus

City in Focus: Belgrade, Serbia

Prayer Briefing

(Please be aware that the content of this post is only appropriate for adults and includes intense descriptions of how enslaved women are "broken" before being sold)

The new slave trade has a new middle passage. And in the middle of the new middle passage, somewhere between where a girl is first lured and where she will be sold for sex night after night, there is a new slave auction. Here is where the slave-trader meets slave-buyer and decide together the worth of their human cargo; the buyers then transport the women to a sex-market.
Belgrade is an infamous stop on the new middle passage. Thousands of women from Eastern Europe and Western ex-soviet states have stories that start when they are whisked away across the majestic Danube river and into the dark underworld of Belgrade to be traded to a slave buyer. But Belgrade is more than a trading post. Belgrade is the breaking grounds.

To get a woman to submit to sex slavery, slave traders must wear her down methodically and brutally. Her own sense of worth and dignity must be effaced beyond her own recognition. In Belgrade, trafficked women are kept for weeks in large apartments or houses where they are raped and tortured by slave traders. Slave traders know that their "product"must be convincing; buyers are not interested in women who are not submissive, who might try to escape, or who won't pretend like they enjoy having sex with as many as 20 clients a day. So the women must be trained to act like whores through repeated rapes, often in front of the rest of the girls. If they resist, they are further raped, beaten, or murdered.

Breaking grounds in cities like Belgrade embody the monstrous brutality without which the modern day slave trade would not survive. By the time a woman leaves the breaking grounds of Belgrade, on her way to exploitation in a brothel in Tel Aviv or a street corner in Dubai, she has been destroyed in every way. She feels polluted beyond cleansing after having been ravaged relentlessly for weeks; her terror is unconsolable after having watched her captors beat and even kill other girls; her fathomless humiliation is so comprehensive that going home to friends and family is no longer a desire. Her captors like her like this. And so do the Johns who will rent her one after another in the nights to come.

Scripture Focus:

Open your mouth for the speechless, In the cause of all who are appointed to die. Open your mouth, judge righteously, And plead the cause of the poor and needy. - Proverbs 31:8-9

Prayer Points
*Pray for massive revival to come to Belgrade.
*Pray that police forces would gain the necessary access to troubled areas.
*Pray that God would disrupt the new middle passage and redeem slaves and traffickers for His glory.

Information and call to prayer from Exodus Cry

A Local Incident

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/416477_pimp10.html?source=rss

What is going on in Thailand today...

The following is a facebook entry from an amazing woman I know currently serving in Thailand... (Please forgive her spelling.) :)

When for walk this morning & praying for this city,but then I saw two girls, one is lay on the floor cover with blood. nobody do anything about it, God compassion move me to talk & minister to her and praying for her. Thank YOU JESUS for lead me to hand YOUR love,hope for this girls..When I told her JESUS love her, she look at me and smile so beautiful.. Lord save her please.

Please pray for her,she know what I am talking about,she was full of blood on her face and nose and mouth when I was her face she not do anything, the I start praying on her ear and whispering to her that JESUS really care for her and JESUS really love her and suddenly her eyes open she sit up and give me the biggest smile and beautiful too.. GOD save her..


Why does Human Trafficking exist? Because people choose to walk by it. They choose to ignore it. People are NOT disposable. It is your DUTY to not sit by and watch this happen. Take action! Educate yourself! Get INVOLVED in the fight!!

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

"Knowing the facts and crisis of human trafficking and slavery will lead one to compassion, cry for justice, and action as a modern day abolitionist." ~ Anonymous

1) “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.” ~ Universal Declaration of Human Rights by UN National Assembly

• U.S. State Dept.'s Trafficking in Persons reports says, "severe forms of trafficking in persons" defined as:

"(a) sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age; or (b) the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery."

2) Global human problem: 29 million+ slaves today (2009) – if this was a country it would be the 42nd most populated country in the world

• Source: Kara, Siddharth, Sex Trafficking - Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. Columbia University Press

3) Up to 300,000 domestic minor sex trafficking victims are in the streets right now in the U.S.

• Source: SharedHope International, The National Report on Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking (2009)
  

4) Up to 800,000 victims annually trafficked across transnationally, 80% women & girls

• Source: US Department of State

5) Human Trafficking is 2^nd Most Lucrative Criminal Industry in World at rate of $12-$60 billion dollars annually (#1 is drugs + #3 is weapons)

6) In U.S., up to 17,500 children and women are trafficked in to the U.S. annually

• Source: US Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report 2006

7) Global health problem: 50-90% sex workers in South Asia and South Africa have HIV/AIDS

8) Multi-crimes are commmitted against victims of sex slavery:

• Kidnap, physical abuse, threats, rape, gang rape, emotional trauma, sexual-labor exploitation, drugs, STDs, murder, etc.

9) Slavery is a horrendous part of the U.S. - both in its gruesome history of it being legal and the growing problem today of the U.S.

10) The hope is the U.S. ended slavery once and we can do it again. Help us end slavery once and for all and making giving support for a slave-free Seattle and taking it one city at a time and focus our efforts on:

(a) Victims rescue

(b) Perpetrator accountability

(c) Better survivors care

(d) Structural prevention (i.e. adequate laws + enforcement)

(e) Cultural transformation

Facts & Figures

• 29.2 million slaves today
• 64% bonded labor/debt bondage slaves
• 27% forced labor
• 9% trafficked slaves
• $340 per slave is weighted avg. global sales price
• 800,000 people are trafficked transnationally with 80% women & girls and up to 50% are minors

Stats provided by www.seattleagainstslavery.org
Photo Courtesy of Carlee Avery

BASIC STATISTICS ON HUMAN TRAFFICKING

Trafficking in persons is modern-day slavery, involving victims who are forced, defrauded or coerced into labor or sexual exploitation.

It is estimated that at least 27 million people are currently enslaved around the world; many have been enslaved through being trafficked.

Approximately 800,000 people annually are trafficked across national borders. Around 80 percent of these victims are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors. The majority of females are trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation. (2007 Trafficking in Persons Report, U.S. State Department)

United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) now believes that the number of children trafficked each year is around 1.2 million. (2006)

That's two children per minute trafficked for sexual exploitation/slavery.

45,000-50,000 persons are trafficked into the U.S. each year; 15,000 of them are children. (ECPAT-USA)

The U.N. and other experts estimate the total market value of illicit human trafficking at $32 billion. (UNODC)

These numbers make trafficking in persons the second most lucrative crime in the world, second only to the sale of drugs. (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2006).

About $28 billion of this is generated from commercial sexual exploitation. (International Labor Organization)

Learning From the Sin of Sodom

NY Times

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: February 27, 2010

For most of the last century, save-the-worlders were primarily Democrats and liberals. In contrast, many Republicans and religious conservatives denounced government aid programs, with Senator Jesse Helms calling them “money down a rat hole.”

Over the last decade, however, that divide has dissolved, in ways that many Americans haven’t noticed or appreciated. Evangelicals have become the new internationalists, pushing successfully for new American programs against AIDS and malaria, and doing superb work on issues from human trafficking in India to mass rape in Congo.

A pop quiz: What’s the largest U.S.-based international relief and development organization?

It’s not Save the Children, and it’s not CARE — both terrific secular organizations. Rather, it’s World Vision, a Seattle-based Christian organization (with strong evangelical roots) whose budget has roughly tripled over the last decade.

World Vision now has 40,000 staff members in nearly 100 countries. That’s more staff members than CARE, Save the Children and the worldwide operations of the United States Agency for International Development — combined.

A growing number of conservative Christians are explicitly and self-critically acknowledging that to be “pro-life” must mean more than opposing abortion. The head of World Vision in the United States, Richard Stearns, begins his fascinating book, “The Hole in Our Gospel,” with an account of a visit a decade ago to Uganda, where he met a 13-year-old AIDS orphan who was raising his younger brothers by himself.

“What sickened me most was this question: where was the Church?” he writes. “Where were the followers of Jesus Christ in the midst of perhaps the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time? Surely the Church should have been caring for these ‘orphans and widows in their distress.’ (James 1:27). Shouldn’t the pulpits across America have flamed with exhortations to rush to the front lines of compassion?

“How have we missed it so tragically, when even rock stars and Hollywood actors seem to understand?”

Mr. Stearns argues that evangelicals were often so focused on sexual morality and a personal relationship with God that they ignored the needy. He writes laceratingly about “a Church that had the wealth to build great sanctuaries but lacked the will to build schools, hospitals, and clinics.”

In one striking passage, Mr. Stearns quotes the prophet Ezekiel as saying that the great sin of the people of Sodom wasn’t so much that they were promiscuous or gay as that they were “arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” (Ezekiel 16:49.)

Hmm. Imagine if sodomy laws could be used to punish the stingy, unconcerned rich!

The American view of evangelicals is still shaped by preening television blowhards and hypocrites who seem obsessed with gays and fetuses. One study cited in the book found that even among churchgoers ages 16 to 29, the descriptions most associated with Christianity were “antihomosexual,” “judgmental,” “too involved in politics,” and “hypocritical.”

Some conservative Christians reinforced the worst view of themselves by inspiring Ugandan homophobes who backed a bill that would punish gays with life imprisonment or execution. Ditto for the Vatican, whose hostility to condoms contributes to the AIDS epidemic. But there’s more to the picture: I’ve also seen many Catholic nuns and priests heroically caring for AIDS patients — even quietly handing out condoms.

One of the most inspiring figures I’ve met while covering Congo’s brutal civil war is a determined Polish nun in the terrifying hinterland, feeding orphans, standing up to drunken soldiers and comforting survivors — all in a war zone. I came back and decided: I want to grow up and become a Polish nun.

Some Americans assume that religious groups offer aid to entice converts. That’s incorrect. Today, groups like World Vision ban the use of aid to lure anyone into a religious conversation.

Some liberals are pushing to end the longtime practice (it’s a myth that this started with President George W. Bush) of channeling American aid through faith-based organizations. That change would be a catastrophe. In Haiti, more than half of food distributions go through religious groups like World Vision that have indispensable networks on the ground. We mustn’t make Haitians the casualties in our cultural wars.

A root problem is a liberal snobbishness toward faith-based organizations. Those doing the sneering typically give away far less money than evangelicals. They’re also less likely to spend vacations volunteering at, say, a school or a clinic in Rwanda.

If secular liberals can give up some of their snootiness, and if evangelicals can retire some of their sanctimony, then we all might succeed together in making greater progress against common enemies of humanity, like illiteracy, human trafficking and maternal mortality.