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Website Content Calls for Action to Combat Human Trafficking
CHICAGO, IL (January 25, 2008) – New website content focused on the global tragedy of human trafficking went live today on this Evangelical Covenant Church website, developed by Women Ministries in collaboration with the Department of Compassion, Mercy and Justice.
Using Isaiah 58:6 as its foundation, the new Break the Chains initiative seeks to increase awareness and provide resources to local churches and individuals in the effort to aggressively combat what some are calling modern-day slavery.
 Although slavery was officially abolished worldwide in 1927, it is estimated that today there are 27 million individuals forced to work as slaves and domestic servants with the human trafficking toll rising at an alarming rate.
That reality hit home for one Chicago area family when their 17-year-old daughter was abducted and forced into prostitution. It would be seven years before she was found.
The teenager had decided to delay her college plans and answered an advertisement seeking a nanny, recalls Ruth Hill, executive minister of Women Ministries, who knows one of the girl’s cousins. The girl was kidnapped as soon as she arrived at the home for the job interview.
Five years later, the girl was able to slip out a postcard saying she was being held at a bar in Cincinnati, but her captors had moved her by the time law enforcement arrived. It would be another two years before the FBI found her - addicted to heroin and pregnant.
“Realizing human trafficking was in my backyard was shocking,” says Hill. She felt overwhelmed as she learned that the $10 billion-a-year trafficking trade ranks third in terms of dollars behind drugs and arms. “I wept to learn of little girls exploited 10 to 20 times a night.” She wondered what could be done.
The Break the Chains initiative helps answer that question, providing opportunities for individuals and churches to become personally engaged in the fight against human trafficking. In the new web content one will find numerous resources including suggestions of how people can be involved in tangible ways, highlights of what other ministry organizations are doing, and an extensive section on related scriptures.
The 2008 project also will raise funds to support the Hindustani Covenant Church and the International Justice Mission - both work with women and girls being sexually exploited in India, a nation considered to have the largest number of slaves.
“We didn’t want to merely raise funds to support others engaged in this work,” says Hill. “We wanted to provide an array of ways to engage it, to be people of compassion and justice as the Lord leads us.”
Isaiah 58:6 (TNIV): Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?
Copyright © 2008 The Evangelical Covenant Church. |
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