And it's about the one of the most horrible things happening in the world today
is the sexual exploitation of children. May the darkest, deepest recesses of hell
be reserved for those in that particular line of work. And I think so
much of that is happening now because of cross border crossings of children. Many
times the person being exploited must pay with body or with labor in some sense
or another, and it is disgusting. And I had thought that ninety nine
point nine nine percent of us understand this, But there's a little bit of
a pushback happening about maybe this is not real, maybe it's a conspiracy theory,
God knows what. But to Haley McNamara is the vice president of the
National Center Sexual Exploitation. They've been doing this work for about the last sixty
years. Hailey McNamara, welcome, I think for the first time to the
Bill Cunningham Show. And Haley, First of all, what impact has this
movie head on the awareness of individuals that are being sexually exploited to the tune
literally of millions around the world. But has this movie been an impetus or
has it always been there? You know, this issue unfortunately has existed probably
since the dawn of time. But it definitely is sparking interest and awareness,
which is always a really good thing. And I'm heartened by the number of
people who are seeing this movie and then saying they want to learn more and
they want to do something about it. Is the cross border situation, not
just in America but really all over the world, especially in Europe and elsewhere.
Is that an impetus for more children being sexually abused because of what's happening
on our southern border. Yes, unfortunately, you know, sex traffickers and
abusers of any kind will always target a vulnerable population, and so we see
that this happens, you know, internationally at border crossings, but it also
happens domestically in America as well, often online grooming of children, and so
yeah, so it definitely happens across borders, but it also happens even within
our own communities. Sometimes even children that go to school and sleep in their
own beds at night and their parents don't realize that they're still being sexually exploited.
It's in the suburbs. Can you explain, first of all, give
us a definition of sex traffick and then I want to talk about in the
suburbs. If you're in Austin, Texas, Cincinnati, Ohio's Chicago, it
could be happening next door to and your next department, next house. But
what is sex trafficking? So, sex trafficking is any kind of commercialized sex
act that's induced by force or fraud or coercion. People often think about force,
maybe the movie Taken someone being kidnapped and held in chains. Unfortunately,
that can happen and does happen. But one of the primary ways in America
that sex trafficking is in force is through psychological coercion, whether with children or
adults. This can be grooming, building a relationship, building trust, and
slowly escalating abuse until it gets to a point of sex trafficking. So yeah,
So, like I said, unfortunately, this happens all across America,
in small rural communities and in large cities as well. Very often it's online
grooming on places like Instagram or even video games that are child centric like Roadblocks
and other places, and so it's something that everyone definitely needs to be aware
of and engaged on. Haley mc mary, Let's take us through a typical
circumstance all of them are outrageous. Let's say there's a mother and two little
girls, or a mother and a boy and a girl making their way from
El Salvador and they work through Mexico. How does the grooming, how does
the process, How does the selling of those children begin? So all of
sex trafficking, all of the money comes into this because of people who are
willing to purchase someone for sex. So that's the market that the sex traffickers
are using. So they'll find someone for vulnerability. So in the case of
a border, it's might be someone who's trying to cross and needs assistance and
then they're told, you know that this is that by allowing people to buy
purchase them is a way that they'll get save passage, or they might have
a debt that is incurred and they're told this is a way to work off
their debt, or you know, domestically, this might be a person who
believes that they're in a romantic relationship with the trafficker who says that, you
know, by allowing someone to buy them is a way to make money for
them to maybe run away or what have you. Of course, this is
also such a big problem for homeless use as well, So there's always kind
of an extortion based on a vulnerability. But I think it's really important that
we recognize that it's the sex buyers who really are as a root cause of
all sex trafficking. You know, if people didn't buy sex, the sex
trafficking would disappear overnight. And as far as the long term impact, if
you're a seven, eight, nine, ten year old girl or a boy,
it happens to both genders, and you find yourself trapped in this world,
you look toward your mother or your father for protection and for guidance.
And when that wall of trust is broken down because the mother or the father
or the person you're with has said you go with that man over there and
do what he tells you to do, how does it? How does a
child process that? How does a child look at that and say, a
child doesn't even know I can get out of that. But what impact does
that have on the child's life immediately? Yeah, the trauma is really I
mean almost unmeasurable. So of course, you know, trust, the ability
to trust is greatly damage. Of course, there's physical damage and trauma and
also psychological trauma. You know, severe mental health impacts have been noted in
survivors of sex trafficking, you know, leading to struggling sometimes lifelong with depression
or substance abuse issues as well, which is why you know, really donating
to or supporting volunteering with exit services and recovery services, mental health programs for
survivors is so key because yes, it's just an untold amount of trauma as
we sit here now, do you have some number as the number of children
in the United States of America being sexually trafficked at this point? Are we
talking thousands, hundreds of thousands or more. I would say at least hundreds
of thousands. You know, the numbers on these things aren't really difficult because
this is a crime that happens in the shadows, and most of sex trafficking
doesn't get reported. You know, sometimes we think that every sex trafficking victim
would identify themselves as such, but typically they are, you know, in
psychological chains and don't even recognize that they're being exploited while it's happening. So
it's it's very difficult to get a strong number. But we do know that
the majority, large percentage of youth online around a third or a fourth do
experience some kind of sexual overtone from adults online, whether that's sexualized comment,
a direct message trying to initiate a relationship. Obviously, not all of those
are onboarding to sex trafficking, but we do see that there's a large amount
of grooming and potential abuse that contacting children online and for some that could escalate
to sex trafficking. Is what we've seen in Sound of Freedom, the number
one movie of this summer is that. Is that a real depiction of what
occurs. Yeah, Unfortunately, it's true that there are, you know,
around the world, brothels and massage parlors and strip clubs where miners are sexually
exploited. I would say that in America that does happen. Absolutely it does.
But also, like I had said, a lot of it is facilitated
online, and even recording of child sexual abuse being uploaded to mainstream pornography sites
and social media is a real epidemic right now. So I would say it
looks somewhat different in scale on internationally versus domestically, but the issue is very
much still the same and is really real. If you're a mother, a
father, if you're an adult, many times are antennants are not up on
this kind of an issue. I know airlines and flight attendants are watching for
this kind of stuff, but this is happening in suburbs, It's happening next
door, It's happening constantly. What are some of the cues? Are the
keys that someone who wants to help can actually observe and see definitely, So
I would say do some research on the signs of sex trafficking. This could
look a lot of different ways depending on your context. And they're our national
hotlines that you can report any suspected signs of sex trafficking too, but especially
even for within your own community among children, especially if you see real changes
in behavior, maybe a kid suddenly acting out, a kid who's maybe scared
to go to sleep, or maybe regressing things like wedding the bed or there's
a number of different signs you can look for in children that you know in
your own life, and even just crushing your own gut. If something seems
off, it's good to ask questions and if there's a concern, to report
it or contact additional supports to assess the situation. And it's a really important
thing to do. It happens also I've done topics on this before, where
a teenage boy or girl gets into a situation with a trafficker that does not
know it's a trafficker. When that's going on and pictures are taken, are
shared, and then extortion takes place. So, if you live in a
fine suberb community and you have a vulnerable child, a boy or a girl,
explain the process of how traffickers get into the minds of children and then
turn them for profit. Absolutely, So, unfortunately, you know, every
child online is vulnerable to these things. I think people will often assume,
even thinking of their own family as well, my child comes from a stable
and loving family, they will be fine. This is an issue for other
people. But unfortunately, with the Internet, every child is vulnerable. So
and a predator might reach out initiate a relationship. They might even be known
to the victim, or claim to go to their school, claim to be
a friend of a friend. So in the child's mind, they don't think
to tell their parents that they're talking to a stranger online. They think they're
talking to someone that they know, and then and then there really is a
process of gaining that child's trust and very often, like you said, it
will escalate to asking for sexual images, and then those images can be used
to extort either for the creation of more images, sometimes more extreme, or
to even meet in real life for sexual abuse or sex trafficking. And this
kind of dynamic doesn't even only happen to children. It happens to adults as
well. And I'm sure your listeners are familiar with the terms like revenge photography
or the non consensual sharing of explicit images, which is often used to extort
or keep someone in an abusive relationship as well. So if you or someone
that you know has dealt with this, if they're a minor, I would
recommend going to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and they have
an entire program that helps removed images of children online and to get you connected
with law enforcements. So that's the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children.
And if you're an adult who's experienced your images being shared online, I would
recommend the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, and they also have a lot of persons
for how to get images removed and how to involve law enforcement is needed.
Haley mcmarrion in the United States of America, I think ninety nine point nine
percent of us consider this to be a representation of absolute evil. But there
are some movements of groups who contend that a child, even a teenager,
has the right to determine to have sex with an adult. And we did
that topic about ten years ago and I cut off in the middle. I
said, that's it. We're not going to do that anymore. And isn't
there a movement or an idea that if you're a child, but that I
mean seven, eight, nine, ten years old, or a teenager sixteen
or seventeen, you should have the right to have sex with an adult.
Yeah, Unfortunately, there is a real normalization of that concept that's happening,
and so it's really important for us all to be vocal and strong about recognizing
that that is child sexual abuse, and especially if there is the commercialized element.
You know, under federal law, any kind of commercialized sex act involving
a minor is by definition sex trafficking, even if that minor quote unquote agreed
to it. Right, So it's really important for us to know the laws
on these matters and to speak out against normalization of child sexual abuse. Well,
in this hit movie, of course, the star Jim Cavezel plays the
part of a government employee who becomes enraged at what he sees observing. In
certain parts of the world, this is acceptable. For example, in Asia,
Africa, India, it is not that unusual for moms and dads to
sell their children. Am I correct about then? Yeah, And unfortunately that's
happening in America as well, of adults even from theimes, selling their children
or allowing sexual abuse to happen to their children. So this is, you
know, this is a worldwide epidemic, and it's something that's a really dark
topic. People often feel like there's nothing that they can do, but there
really is so much that can be done. So of course, you know,
we've talked about investing in aftercare services, volunteering, knowing the signs yourself
and being such an important part. But we also have a campaign called the
Dirty dozen list, or we named twelve mainstream companies that contribute to sexual exploitation,
and many of those are online platforms that contribute to sex trafficking, such
as Instagram, roadblocks, Twitter and others that people don't really realize there's grooming
happening. There's facilitation of advertisements for sex trafficking, happening there, and if
you go to dirty dozen list dot com you can take action in really tangible
ways. You can email the executives at these companies, and we've seen progress
happen. TikTok, for example, has made it so that adult strangers cannot
direct message miners anymore on their platform. This is so common sense, and
there's much more progress that needs to happen. But I would be I would
want to encourage people that while this is it's quite a dark issue, and
it is an epidemic around the world and within America as well, but there
are steps that we can take to try to prevent some of this harm from
happening. And handling mcnamary, You've been at this, your group has for
about sixty years. But I have a sense things are getting worse, not
getting better. Is that fair? I think that that's true, especially with
the rise of the Internet. You know, it's just made anyone who has
an inclination to abuse another person have easy access to vulnerable people. So I
think that's why we really focus on kind of mass scale prevention is what we
want to enact. We will always need exit services for people who've been victimized,
but if we can prevent a number of people, especially children, for
being contacted it by exploiters in the first place. That can just prevent so
much untold trauma. So that's a large part of what our organizations are working
to do, both with corporate policy, legislation and also litigation on behalf of
survivors. I'm looking at the headline of USA today the newspaper. It says
why Sound of Freedom, Jim Caviezel's controversial child sex trafficking film is a hit,
And I don't think it's controversial. I would hope we're divided politically among
so many areas of life, but I would hope that the exploitation of the
most innocent among us is such an issue that it's not controversial. It must
be stopped. Those who are involved in it must be stopped, and men
and some women mainly it's men involved in this trade have got to stop buying
children once again. Dirty dozenlist dot com is out of sight and what's another
website. If someone suspects somehow the child being exploited for sexual purposes, I
would go to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, and there's a number you can
text for a call and they also have a website. All right, Hailey
McNamara, Vice President, National Center of Sexual Exportation of Children, thank you
for coming on the Bill Cunningham Show. I'm glad this movie's out. I
would encourage everyone to see this movie. It's one of those things you have
to understand what's happening, and this all around is constantly we must act as
one. And Hailey McNamara, once again, thank you for coming on the
Bill Cunningham Show, and good luck on all your ventures. Thank you,
Hailey, thank you. All right, let's continue if the line becomes available.
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