Father's ministry seeks to save trafficking victims

BY JOHN W. COLEMAN
UMCONNECTION CORRESPONDENT

Bill Hillar of Severna Park UMC has felt the horror and heartache of human trafficking first-hand.

His 16-year old daughter, while traveling with schoolmates in Southeast Asia in 1988, was pulled off a train and forced into sexual slavery by traffickers. Hillar, a retired colonel in the U.S. Army Special Forces, quit his job and searched across 11 countries for nearly a year before finding a warehouse in Sarawak, Borneo, where she was last kept.

"With help from Interpol and government agents, we went in there and rescued 32 girls," he recalled. The youngest was 9. But his daughter was not there.

Because she had tried to escape, he was told, her kidnappers had brutally raped, sodomized, tortured and murdered her, and then thrown her body into the South China Sea.

The recent, popular Hollywood film "Taken," starring Liam Neeson, is partially based on Hillar's tragic story.

"I never saw my daughter again," he told about 70 people attending a Jan. 16 workshop on human trafficking at Severna Park UMC. "But the memory of what happened to her will never leave me." 

It's a painful memory he shares when he teaches audiences about what he calls "the second largest criminal enterprise in the world" - after drug trafficking - and yet, one of the least known: human trafficking.

This roughly $40 billion industry enslaves more than 27 million women globally. Well over 14,000 are trafficked annually from every continent into the United States, Hillar said, making ours the largest recipient country. Thousands more are bought, sold, transported and exploited within the United States each year.

Stunned workshop listeners, attending from several churches, heard Hillar cite recent arrests and high trafficking sites just miles from the church. The Washington, D.C., area is one of the most popular human trafficking centers in the country, he reported, because of weak law enforcement and easy access to other East Coast destinations.

The sordid trade, which ensnares mostly women but also children and men, exploits countless agricultural and construction workers, house servants, prostitutes and others who are kept against their will and forced to work for little or no pay. Many suffer threats, beatings, rape, starvation and psychological manipulation.

The average age of trafficked females has dropped to under 17 years old, partly due to the rising popularity of international child-sex tourism, Hillar told the Severna Park gathering. "A lot of them are runaway and throwaway children," he said.

Traffickers befriend and then kidnap many girls at shopping malls, food courts and other
public places, or on the Internet and through social networking sites. Often they lure them with the promise of attractive careers, usually in modeling or entertainment. Or they convince poor, rural families to place their daughters in their care for employment opportunities in town so the girls can send money back home.

The young women soon find themselves in the clutches of oppressive pimps and handlers who force them into sex or servitude.

Hillar shares candid, harrowing accounts of teen girls forced into round-the-clock sex with tourists, truckers, soldiers, work-camp laborers and other paying customers. Whether it happens in motels or massage parlors, brothels or behind bushes, "the sex is always unprotected and often violent," he said, "and the penalties for those who are caught and prosecuted are usually weak or non-existent." In many places law officers are complicit in the crime.

With few organizations dedicated to rescuing trafficked women and only about 150,000 shelter beds available in the world, Hillar explained, "most of them have no place to turn for help." But he has spent two decades trying to help by teaching and by doing.

A military expert in counterterrorism tactics, explosives, emergency medicine and psychological warfare, Hillar is now a consultant and trainer primarily for law enforcement agencies, firefighters and rescue
organizations. He teaches them about international crime, terrorism, drug smuggling and yes, human trafficking. But he also teaches those same topics at colleges in California and Oregon, where trafficking is also high, and in workshops across the country, sometimes for faith groups wanting to be part of the solution.

Hillar works with private organizations, including evangelical groups, to stage rescue missions in high-trafficking areas, such as Southeast Asia, the Philippines, East Africa, Latin America and Israel. They seek out and offer trafficked women shelter and opportunities for education and work to help them escape their bondage.

He also works with organizations that use microfinancing to offer small entrepreneurial loans that can help formerly trafficked women start businesses to support themselves and their families.

President Barack Obama declared January National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. So in addition to the Saturday, Jan. 16, workshop at Severna Park, Hillar also spent Wednesday evenings meeting with the church's young adult group to help them learn about and explore ways to address this growing crime.

With their awareness and concern growing weekly, group members have resolved to keep learning more from available Web sites, books and videos on the subject and to begin spreading their awareness to others. They agreed to request sermons, Bible studies and mission programs that address human trafficking as a heinous crime and sin committed by traffickers and their customers upon helpless victims.

They plan to take that message to other churches, schools and community organizations in the area.

But they recognize that many people in their church and elsewhere will not want to hear about this indelicate, troubling concern, certainly not with the same candor that Hillar offers in his presentations. Still, they expect to ask their church and others for special offerings to support anti-trafficking work and for donations of basic hygiene items to supply rescue kits for victims in shelters.

The young adult members also plan to advocate for several anti-trafficking bills currently before the Maryland General Assembly. Those bills would toughen penalties for trafficking of adult victims, allow any property used for trafficking to be seized and sold to help support anti-trafficking efforts, and require high-trafficking sites to display contact information for the National Human Trafficking Resource Center Hotline.

"I want to be involved in influencing legislation because this crime is so heinous; it deeply offends me," said Trisha Ferrell. "The traffickers are smart, and they stay off the radar. That's scary. There needs to be more help for victims and punishment for those who exploit these women."

Like others in the young adult group, she wants to talk to youth at the church about human trafficking and how to protect themselves when they travel. She also wants to accompany Hillar on one of his future rescue missions.

"We knew hardly anything about this problem before Bill brought it to our awareness," said Ferrell, who has a 4-year-old daughter. "He's a passionate, inspiring advocate. I didn't realize how impacted I would be; but anybody who hears about it can't help but be moved."

"This problem looks so big that you may not think one person can make much of a difference; but you can," said Hillar, who shared resources and helped the young adult group and workshop audience come up with ideas. He has received a dozen calls since the workshop from people wanting to help.

"Don't be apathetic; just do one thing," he urged. "There are lives at stake, and it's important for us to try to save the ones we can."

What can I do about it?

• The Polaris Project
• Campaign to Rescue and Restore Victims of Human Trafficking, U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services
• U.S. Department of State, Office To Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons
• Initiative Against Sexual Trafficking
• U.S. Department of Justice, "Reflecting on National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month"
• Not for Sale Campaign: Get information about Global Advocacy Days, March 1-2, in Washington, D.C.
• Shared Hope International

Social Media

• Get involved with "Slavery Still Exists" on Facebook.

Books

• Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade and How We Can Fight It, by David Batstone.
• Woman, Child for Sale: The New Slave Trade in the 21st Century, by Gilbert King
• The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade, by Victor Malarek

Videos (DVD)

• Human Trafficking, a 3-hour film produced in 2006 for Lifetime Television.
• Trade, a 2-hour film on human trafficking released in 2008 by Lion's Gate.

Human Trafficking Hotline

If you suspect that someone may be victim of human trafficking-perhaps they seem fearful, oppressed or show signs of abuse-you can report a tip to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center Hotline at 1-888-373-7888. This national, toll free hotline is available to answer calls from anywhere in the country at anytime, day or night.

1. Pray regularly that God might deliver and heal victims, thwart perpetrators, and uphold opponents of human trafficking. Pray also that God might move your church to become effectively engaged in helping to end trafficking and rescue and restore victims.
2. Educate your church and community about human trafficking and related concerns through research, mission studies, presentations, discussions, visual displays and public advocacy. Use multimedia resources. Remember: poverty is a major cause of human trafficking and a key focus of our denomination's mission in the world.
3. Meet with your local and state public officials and law enforcement officers to dialogue about the problem: what they are and are not doing, what they need and how your church can help. Build participation through petitions, public hearings, correspondence and use of local media.
4. Support and partner with viable organizations that fight human trafficking and try to rescue and restore its victims.
5. Contact your state lawmakers and ask them to sponsor and support bills that would help in the fight against human trafficking. Current bills in the Maryland legislature are House Bills (HB) 283 and 514 and Senate Bills (SB) 261 and 463. These bills, to be debated and voted on in early February, would increase penalties against those who commit and knowingly benefit from human trafficking and would seize assets used in trafficking to be used instead in fighting this crime and aiding its victims.