Every minute, 2 children are sold into the sex trade.(source: www.love146.org) I do not have the words to express the degree to which that is just not okay.
I joke about things being "unacceptable" in my every day life: "I have only been getting 4 hours of sleep. That is just unacceptable." "Five dollars for a box of cut up fruit? Unacceptable!" Or I say they are not okay. "There is hair all over the bathroom counter. That is so not okay." But really? I can accept exorbitant prices for food, or some sleep debt, or some stray hairs. Those are acceptable. My life is okay. This, though: this is Not Okay. Every minute, two children. Unacceptable!
And it is unacceptable that it takes a statistic like that for me to think, "Ok, this has gone too far." It is unacceptable that I would accept, not as "okay" but as irremediable, the fact that little kids are ever, ever sold in the sex trade. What if it was one little girl every month? or every year? or every decade? That would still not be okay. That would still be unacceptable.
Six year old girls should not be facing problems like that. Neither should sixteen year old girls, for that matter, or twenty-six year old women. There is so much wrong with the world that we just take evil for granted. The word "evil" has lost its force, because we don't face it often. "A test on the first day back from break? Your professor is evil." No! People sold into slavery, children abused, those made in the image of God starving, being tortured, that is evil.
Everyone else standing by and looking the other way, at only school and friends and stories and technology and ideas and the myriad other wonderful pieces of our lives, and not at the evil that is truly present, if we paid attention--that is also evil.
And yet I don't know what to do about it.
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