People climb for many different reasons. But we climb for the captives—the nearly 27 million men, women, and children who are bound in slavery and illicit human trafficking.
You will be shocked (and we hope you are) to know that that, despite living at the historical zenith of wealth, political freedom, and self-actualization, there are more people living in slavery today than ever before. The statistics are staggering and the total market value of illicit human trafficking is estimated to be in excess of US$32 billion (UN), or more money earned by Google, Nike, and Starbucks combined.
Although our history books teach us that slavery was abolished in the 1800s, the reality is that there are more slaves in the world today than ever before, and modern slavery manifests itself in a host of nefarious ways. Forced labor, child soldiering, unjust detention, the commercial sex trade—slavery in the modern world knows no creative bounds.
As if a shadow cast beneath the extraordinarily active and interconnected global economy, human trafficking is quickly becoming the most expansive criminal industry in the world today, rivaling even the drug and arms trades. The commercial sex trade perhaps epitomizes the cruelest forms of this practice, with each year, more than 2 million children are exploited in the global commercial sex trade (UNICEF). Despite the almost universal outrage over this injustice, sex trafficking remains one of the most profitable form of human trafficking, manifesting as prostitution, pornography, bride trafficking, and the sexual abuse of children for profit. This epidemic is not solely a “overseas” phenomenon either. An estimated 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked annually in the United States alone and the number of US citizens trafficked within the country is estimated to be even higher with an estimated 200,000 American children being at risk for trafficking into the sex industry each year.
Driving this underground economy of slavery is, at heart, a worldview that regards people as commodities—whether inhumanely working a man and his family to exhaustion to pay off debt, or subjecting young children to service the sexually demented of our world, the modern day slave trade is empowered by a deranged mindset that aggressively defies the innate dignity in each and every person.
We hear often about the audacious claims by abolitionists to end the modern day slave trade which oppresses nearly 27 million people through forced labor, prostitution, and indentured servitude. But what is the purported abolition of slavery without the restoration of the soil in which this ancient weed has sprouted, for as William Wilberforce so insightfully remarked, “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.” There will be no abolition of slavery without the reformation of our society, and it is to this end we must labor.
So the question is not why we climb. What we and our supporters know, is that it is the who we climb for that makes Climb For Captives so compelling:
We climb to give a voice to the voiceless.
We climb to give hope to the hopeless.
We climb to advance the modern day abolitionist movement.
We climb to inspire a generation to radical generosity, solidarity, and activism to end slavery in our lifetime.
**photo by ThEssenceOfFaith. Statistics provided by Kevin Bales @ NotForSale, International Justice Mission, the UN, and UNICEF.
