“While there is much to celebrate at the beginning of 2020 and during January — the National Human Trafficking Awareness Month — there is an overarching problem that has yet to be resolved. The “blind eye” problem remains an issue: people still don’t see what is happening right under their noses. Many Americans still think the issue of human-trafficking is other nations’ problem. Far too many people fail to see that trafficking victims exist in plain sight.”
(Janice Shaw Crouse – American Thinker) Some 20 years ago, I was invited to a meeting to discuss “human-trafficking.” Held at the Salvation Army Center on D.C.’s New York Avenue, only 10–15 D.C. policy analysts were invited — feminists, conservatives, evangelicals, politicos — and none of us had previously heard of the term “trafficking.”…
That meeting, convened by Michael Horowitz, then at the Hudson Institute, opened our eyes to a problem that is now addressed at the national level as well as internationally through cooperation among nations, as a consequence in large measure of the diligent work of those whose eyes were opened that day.
Prior to that meeting, sex-trafficking was seen as something that happened somewhere else; it didn’t affect Americans. Besides, it was an “underground” kind of crime that was isolated and rare. Through Horowitz’s passion, we learned that we had been blind to reality. With our eyes opened, we had to do something!