President Trump recently announced $35 million in new Justice Department grants to organizations that provide safe housing for victims of sex trafficking, and the mainstream media hates it.
Anyone with an ounce of compassion for their fellow human beings should be able to see that fighting a heinous crime that affects tens of thousands of victims in the United States every year, over half of whom are minors, is exactly the sort of thing that federal law enforcement should be doing. But to mainstream media reporters such as the New York Times’ Kevin Roose, taking a stand against human trafficking and pedophilia is apparently a “bat signal” to conspiracy theorists.
It saddens me to see members of the media defend pedophiles and sex traffickers just to take a jab at the president. Having experienced unspeakable acts of sexual violence myself for years, starting just before my 13th birthday, this is deeply personal to me.
It took me four years of trauma therapy as an adult victim to be able to vocalize that I'm a trafficking victim, yet children are expected to be able to identify and vocalize whether they’re a trafficking victim in order for police to get involved. The most difficult factor in prosecuting traffickers is that children are often unable to openly identify and reject trafficking when it is their entire life, but it’s also a problem that adults are failing to report it as well. There’s an unspoken — and sometimes spoken — vow of silence between those involved.
People have known about Jeffrey Epstein for years. His vile trafficking island wasn’t something that happened overnight. Too many politicians and media elites ignore the gruesome reality of human trafficking, and will even go so far as to mock and ridicule those who speak openly about it, such as President Trump and his supporters. Perhaps some do it because of the need for popularity, success, or stature. Some might even have been a victim of it themselves.
President Trump is one of the few people in power to stand up and acknowledge the problem, and as a survivor I appreciate him for it. He puts a bullseye on his back by taking a firm stand against human trafficking, because of the many elites that are involved in the practice themselves.
Estimates suggest that about 50,000 people are trafficked into the U.S. each year, mostly from Mexico and the Philippines. Over half of them are minors. In 2018, 51.6 percent of the human trafficking cases active in the United States were sex trafficking cases that only involved children, according to the 2018 Federal Human Trafficking Report.
The overall number of prosecutions in these instances has historically been discouragingly low — a fact that has undoubtedly contributed to the belief that sex trafficking is much more rare than it really is. Fortunately, however, we have a man in the Oval Office who understands the gravity of the situation, and is determined to do something about it.
President Trump has achieved a number of underreported accomplishments on this front over the past three-and-a-half years. During his first month in office alone, law enforcement officers arrested more than 1,500 suspected pedophiles, compared to just 400 such arrests during all of 2014, according to FBI crime statistics. The following year, more than 2,300 suspected online sex traffickers were arrested during “Operation Broken Heart.”
In that single operation, 383 children who suffered recent, ongoing, or historical sexual abuse were rescued. Their stories are horrific, yet they are actually the lucky ones, because many other victims are never found and never reunited with their families. The rescue of hundreds of exploited children should have been front page news all over the country, which would have contributed to public awareness of this issue and offered a measure of hope to the families of other victims who have yet to be saved.
Most mainstream media outlets, however, have been oddly silent on President Trump’s efforts to combat sexual exploitation and trafficking of children, with a stunning lack of major coverage on this issue.
Sex trafficking destroys tens of thousands of American lives every year, and turning it into a political issue is not only callous and insensitive, but downright immoral. Regardless of one’s political beliefs, there’s absolutely no excuse for undermining efforts to save children’s lives.
Fortunately, there’s more treatment for survivors available now than when I first started my therapy. But it is only because the president has been constantly bringing light to the issue. He gives courage to anti-trafficking organizations in the U.S. to step up and do their jobs fearlessly, knowing their president has their backs.
If I ever get to meet President Trump, I'd shake his hand and say “thank you.” It’s impossible to fully describe just how much his openness on the issue means to survivors.
Ilonka Deaton was held in a sexual slavery bondage in South Africa for 5 years. She is now rescued, redeemed and set free, and is a healthy, full of life, complete women in Jesus Christ. Ilonka has authored two books “Keeping Secrets” an autobiography of her story and “Secret Freedom” a guided help-book for anyone who wants to share their own story.