Stopping Traffic: The Movement to End Sex Trafficking

- You want to start somewhere or?

- Well first just introduce yourself as the author,

what has led you to this time and what you're doing

and then we'll take off with questions later.

Sure .

Yeah, I've been having sex since I was four.

My first sex act I was engaged in was to watch

my father put bread and water in my mother's vagina

and I was engaged in an oral act.

They talk about the impact on a child

and that's true it does it

but it's not the impact that is necessarily felt as a child

because you're incredibly resilient it's when you wake up

30 years later and you realize what was done to you.

And that your life is in total disarray because of it

and it all tracks back to a series of events

and things that were done to you not by you.

It's not the breaking of the life as young

because it is, it's having to deal with

the consequences of it in adulthood.

- I grew up in Thailand so I'd seen

sexual exploitation and all these things growing up.

- The second largest criminal enterprise in the world.

- It takes a lot to shock me, we'll say it that way.

And to see it rampant, it literally just makes you revolted.

- I think she got aroused watching him beat me and

he got aroused in watching her engage me sexually.

- There was one boy, they wanted him to work as a beggar

but he didn't look pitiful enough so they cut off both

his arms and then set him on the side of the road

so people would feel sorry for him and give him money.

That's when I decided I wanted to fight human trafficking.

- You get over there and they're bringing these

10-year-olds into their rooms and, oh, that must be somebody

that's taking care of their boots and no, they ain't.

Yeah, they're taking care of 'em, but not in that way.

You know, it floors you.

If you take a young boy of 12

and he is anally raped by 30 or 40 men,

and then he's made to kill his mother

by inserting barbed wire in her vagina repeatedly,

somewhere in that process his soul is broken.

- And I think that is the real legacy of child sexual abuse,

and the horrendous thing which is sexual-trafficking.

It's pretty fucked up.

- What's cool about this film is that we actually really had

no idea what we were doing.

We were just moved by a vision, we were just moved

by the movement, we were just moved by the idea

that we can possibly make a difference and an impact

and raise awareness and inspire the youth to take action.

You know, this is a non-profit film, I'm a monk,

and so there's no personal gain for me, or for our center.

The gain is impact, reach, awareness.

People can possibly change.

And so during the research phase,

searching for people to interview,

it was a scary process, well at least for me.

I think the others were good with sending an e-mail but,

for me to approach these organizations and high-level people

and non-profits like UNICEF, it's kind of intimidating.

I introduce myself, like "hey, I'm a nun, I'm a US veteran,

and I'm directing this film to help raise awareness

on sex-trafficking by inspiring the youth movement."

And all of them were just like,

"yes, it's all about the youth, let's do this."

We really went into this project with no expectations.

All we wanted to understand was what sex-trafficking was

and how we can be of help by raising awareness of this issue

so we were inspired to travel to the Philippines, Mexico,

and New Orleans and even locally, Dallas to meet the heroes

of the movement but it turns out what we were initially

looking for was completely different.

We just wanted to know what sex-trafficking was,

and we thought it was pretty straightforward,

but really it turned out to be something completely

different and we had a bunch of misconceptions.

- This is a difficult question.

And in fact, historians can be useful in this process.

- A lot of us, we think that ended 200 years ago

with the Emancipation Proclamation and absolutely did not.

- A recent work by Joseph Miller called The Problem

of Slavery as History encouraged historians and others

to talk less about slavery and more about slaving.

When we use the word slavery, we're conjuring an institution

and an institution that most people associate with

chattel slavery, with the transatlantic slave trade,

these kinds of things,

and that institution did in fact die in the United States.

But if we look at slaving, that is the ways

of maintaining unfreedom, commodifying the body,

all of the practices that really make up the constitutive

experience of what it means to be enslaved,

then slaving certainly doesn't stop, it maintains,

it morphs and it continues.

- Look, I mean, it's a tough sell to a lot of people because

it's a subject matter that a lot of people don't want to

deal with, it's just kind of uncomfortable.

Well I think the missing piece for me was the scale of

this crime, whether it's 20, 30 million people a year

worldwide and it's like a huge industry.

- I've been working in this field

for almost 25 years already.

Because the victims are really younger and younger.

The youngest victim that we cater in this shelter

is a one-year-old girl,

sold to sex, cyber-sex.

- Down in a lot of South-American countries,

I've been involved with some guys that do rescues

from sex-traffickers and one of the guys goes down there,

he's involved in a great organization, a couple of them

I know and they go down there and they act as

people coming down to buy girls.

American real-estate moguls coming down to buy girls,

and they set up the people, they get a big suite in a hotel

and they do deals with the local cartels.

And it's simply a spreadsheet.

The guy brings in a spreadsheet.

He says "what age girl do you want to buy?"

"If you want to buy a 12-year-old girl, it's going to be

"$20,000 because that's how much money she will make me.

"If you want to buy a 16-year-old girl, and I've had her for

"four years, well you can get her for three or four grand."

And they've got the whole thing worked out, it's a business.

And it's a business based on prostitution

that's really enabled by tourism.

I've got some great friends involved in recovery on that end

and they do a fantastic job, but those guys will tell you

because of the level of depravity they see,

for every 10 girls they rescue, they're leaving hundreds

if not thousands behind.

That next week, another American tourist, male or female,

is going to be down there demanding to buy children for sex.

- Almost more than half of my life doing this.

I'm always running there and there, rescue in the port,

in the airport, anywhere.

It doesn't stop.

It just continue.

And there's a time come that I said,

"it will never stop."

- Parents try to find different ways of survival,

but also finding ways out,

for their children.

I think, unfortunately many parents do sell their children

cold-heartedly, but many parents are also fooled

into believing that these children are moving onto

a better future, if you like.

Very few children here it seems are actually kidnapped,

taken off the street and then sent for trafficking.

They are actually handed over by their parents

one way or another.

But these are small kids being told to carry out

sexual acts with themselves or with another child.

Of course it's abuse, yeah.

And so there is a twisted mindset, I think, among parents

who maybe don't want to admit or realize

that they are actually committing a crime and that they

are allowing abuse to happen to their children.

- These boys, a lot of them were from up-country Thailand,

where they didn't even speak mainstream Thai,

they spoke different dialects, or they'd come from Cambodia,

Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia different countries and they'd just be taken.

The traffickers, they'd go to their home towns,

and they'd tell the parents, "listen, you can't afford

"to feed your kids, we can give your kid a job in Bangkok.

"He'll work in a restaurant, he'll wash dishes,

"he'll make maybe 5,000 baht a month.

"We'll send some of that money back to you."

And these parents, they don't have a choice.

They can't feed their kids, so they send them and then,

of course, these kids don't work in restaurants.

They're either sexually-exploited as male prostitutes

for gay men in Thailand or they're put on the streets

as beggars, or they're even made to steal.

So those are the sort of situations that these boys

are coming out of and they're so young,

some as young as four-years-old.

Four to sixteen was the ages at this school.

- People know that they can get vulnerable people

so they kidnap them, literally.

And they take them by force to work in fields or in drugs,

or in criminal actions,

or in sexual-exploitation.

- If this is all you experience day to day,

then you don't know of anything else.

If you're expecting to be treated a certain way,

if you're expecting the only form of affection to come

through sexual contact, then if you want to be touched

at all, then you'd behave in a certain way and you

receive that human touch through sexuality, then that's

what you go looking for 'cause we all need touch.

I think if you're brought up in an environment

and you don't know it's different,

then you don't know that there's something else out there

that's different, so you don't actually see yourself as

a victim of trafficking unless it's happened later in life.

If it's happened early, or abuse is early,

then that's all you ever know.

So there's no reason to cry out, I know that sounds odd but,

if you're 16 and you've been having sex since you were four,