The where have all the children gone?

ave you ever seen a girl who was being trafficked? Do you know the signs to look for? No? Yeah, me either. Most young women should be full of life, all smiles, vivacious, enjoying life. So when you see someone depressed, scared, clothing in disarray, unkept hair, with a man always in attendance and when you ask them a question they look to that man for permission to talk, those are some of the warning signs that something is wrong. This country has so many missing children, not only run always, but kidnapped kids, stolen kids, and they are just hidden in plain site, and they are around us but we don’t see them. Or we see them, but don’t won’t to get involved, even as little as calling the police, or a hotline. I can remember once my family and I were spending the day in San Francisco as tourists and we came across a young woman being disciplined by an older man at a bus stop. He was looming over her in a threatening manner, shouting, and raising his hand to hit her. I looked at him, and he yelled at me, “ what are you looking at? Mind your own business“. We quickly walked away. Not our business. There was no police around, and it was before cell phones.

The police do rescue these lost kids every day, and lock up bad guys for their crimes. But that is not how it ends. The kids don’t just go back home to their relieved families with hugs and kisses all around, and a perfect life lived ever after. No, there was a reason why the kid ran away in the first time, or why they were seduced away by the sweet talk of the predator. Their home life wasn’t so good in the first place. Maybe they were being abused, neglected, wha, and so after being rescued, going home might not be an option. They might be so traumatized by their experiences that they will need months, if not years of therapy.

A help center I spoke to told me some of the conditions of the girls they have seen after rescue:

they’ve seen a girl come in with a broken femur because the trafficker dragged her from a car as she tried to escape

Girls regularly come in with broken noses, broken teeth, black eyes and bruised faces

they’ve got sexually transmitted infections that take months or years to heal from

We see minds that have been warped to think that every man is only out to abuse them or manipulate them into doing something

Many girls come in with their trafficker’s names tattooed and sometimes burned into their skin like a farmer brands livestock

Many of the girls have hearts that have lost the will to live and to love and to trust people

Often we see girls that have spirits that have been broken like an animal through the mental and sometimes physical cages that the traffickers lock them in

So, no, they don’t just go home and start back in 8th grade where they left off…they end up in a mental hospital and hopefully with therapy will be able to function normally and live a fruitville life.

And hopefully the predators will be locked up and prevented from preying on other young people again.

so that is where the young people have gone… they are there amongst us, in plain site. The beggars, the prositutes, the rag a muffin homeless drifters on street corners and in parks. They are there because of a reason, and will be preyed upon by criminals for a profit.