Exodus Cry - The Prayer Movement to End Slavery

For the law will go forth from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. -Isaiah 2:3 

Israel needs your help to see righteous legislation go forth from Zion.  Israel has been entrusted with a mandate to bless the nations and there is an opportunity in the coming weeks for the passage of an important anti-prostitution bill in the Knesset translated as “The Prohibition of the Purchase of Sexual Services”. This bill criminalizes the client and can set a precedent for purity, creating a ripple effect in the nations of the earth. There is a strong correlation between prostitution and trafficking. The passage of this bill would be a significant blow to the lucrative trafficking industry in Israel which generates an estimated one billion dollars annually. It would hinder both the cover and ease which enable the oppression of women to operate freely. 

Prostitution is currently legal in Israel. It is estimated that there are one million visits to 10,000 prostituted women in Israel every month. This is in a country with a population of only seven million. Many of these clients “visit” more than once a month. 

Do not profane your daughter by making her a prostitute; lest the land fall into prostitution and the land become full of wickedness.-Leviticus 19:29

The Israeli government stands on the threshold of a historic opportunity, an opportunity to close the door to wickedness and bring a blessing to the nation of Israel. Your involvement is crucial.  On February 12^th, the bill will be presented to the Israeli Ministerial Committee, known as the Knesset Committee.  The decisions and recommendations of this committee have profound influence on the vote of the full Knesset.   Israel’s democracy is extraordinarily responsive to their citizens and the concerns of the global community; your voice is crucial.  Your impact will be most effective by joining us in the following three initiatives. 

Pray: Cover the ministers and 119 Knesset members in prayer, that they may defend the cause of victims who are being exploited and oppressed. We are asking you to mobilize prayer for this issue as it is the only foundation for justice to be established upon.

Social Network: spread the word. Raise awareness concerning Israel’s opportunity to address and effectively combat trafficking through the passage of this bill. Please tweet, Facebook or repost this blog and the link below.

Write: Israel takes human rights issues very seriously; therefore it is essential for public support to be raised on behalf of this issue.  For this purpose a petition has been drafted to be sent to the Knesset Committee. Your voice can play a significant role in the debate and vote of the Committee on February 12th.

If you would like to join us in this endeavor please read and sign the petition below:

 http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/israel/

Catherine’s Story

There is more than one way to try to understand the Horn of Africa. You can get only so far looking at the political boundaries of the nations. Crisp geometric lines divide the countries in some areas, whereas in others a meandering border clearly follows a river or a mountain. More telling, perhaps, is the geography of the region: the arid span of desert begins in northern Kenya and then widens east until it swallows almost all of Somalia and is stopped only by the Indian Ocean. Overlay that with a third and perhaps most important schema of population density. You will immediately see first an artery of densely populated towns streaming south from Addis Ababa through Ethiopia’s rift valley, and then another dense conglomerate huddled around Kenya’s capital city, Nairobi.

But a dynamic that cannot be mapped is political stability. On the Horn, rife with internecine conflict that adds insult to the injury of natural disasters, and turns the crises of famine into crises of mass migration, political stability is a relative idea, often as rare and unpredictable as the rains. But these days, Kenya has more than most. So when the largest drought in 60 years hit the Horn of Africa, slashing at the southern part of Ethiopia and threatening the lives of millions in South Somalia, Nairobi is where the people went.

Eastleigh Estates, a Nairobi community with a high Somali population, is known as “Little Mogadishu.” Once an unassuming suburb, it has become an international business hub. Over the last few years, a steady influx of Somali refugees has completely changed the landscape, and then began investing when the Kenyan government gave the district its increased parliamentary authority. Now littered with money transfer organizations and travel agencies, Eastleigh Estates has become a metaphor for the globalized economy, powered by technological breakthroughs.

But that also makes Nairobi one of the most reliable and stable markets in a region that is in many places descending into chaos. The contrast makes for a predictable osmosis of crime that sweeps vulnerable women and children out of the pastoral hinterlands, into the hope of food and work that major, developed metropolitan areas provide, and often into slavery. Eastleigh Estates holds the promise of a job and a life to many such vagrants, and is the perfect context for fraudulent employment agencies.

In addition to the usual trends of brothels, that front as massage parlors and strip clubs, there are growing trends in prostitution even among Nairobi’s wealthiest. The Nairobi Chronicle reported that a growing number of young women in Nairobi are resorting to professional escort services to provide their means. Women post their profiles on dating sites in hopes of attracting a wealthy, Western, “romantic” interest. In the same article, the Chronicle reports, “scenes of octogenarian Caucasians walking arm in arm with young Kenyan girls are quite common in our streets. Maternity hospitals in Kenya are also recording an increase in inter-racial babies born to unmarried mothers.” Even men, according to the article, are selling sexual services to an upscale female clientele who either, in the pursuit of career have not made time for meaningful relationships, or who are traveling to Kenya’s resort and tourist areas.

Nairobi underscores a trend that will likely be repeated and amplified in many regions in the earth in the days ahead. Globalization is not an equal opportunity employer: some areas thrive, but usually at the expense of others. As impoverished and vulnerable masses are drawn into modern-day slavery and, more specifically, into sex trafficking, the effete, wealthy classes engage in prostitution, but by the more civilized monikers of “escorts” and “dating services.” When a region or community suffers the practice of prostitution at the highest levels, it will always rationalize the slavery of prostitution at the lowest. Sex should not be included in the practices acceptable for making a living, or we will turn a jaded eye to those who are, under compulsion, sold by madams, pimps, and bar owners night after night.

This City in Focus comes from The Horn of Africa Region. To read an overview of this region click here.

The current trend towards pervasive hyper-sexualized behavior has flown under the banner of progress and freedom. Our western society has cast off conservative values to embrace a new expression of sexuality and freedom. Traditional views of purity are considered prudish while promiscuity is heralded as achievement. The rhetoric surrounding this movement beckons us to be open-minded, experimental, and tolerant. The pressure to conformity preys upon our most vulnerable primordial instincts – the desire for love and pleasure.

I find it interesting that people in our society wish to talk about dignity without morality; when in fact, no such thing exists. Freedom without morality is simply anarchy.

The torrent of injustice that cascades through the global sex industry threatens the very substance of our humanity. Veiled by seduction and masquerading as freedom, the injustice of sexual exploitation has become deeply entrenched within our world. Little by little, our sanctity and solidarity are breached. Little by little, our decency and dignity are shredded like a cheap cloth. This pervasive sexual brokenness exposes the depth of humanity’s wound like perhaps no other issue. The gaping sore of our sexual abscess requires healing that is beyond humanistic solutions.

A girl caught in the vortex of today’s sex industry faces challenges that are insurmountable in the natural. On the outside she has been ostracized from friends, family, and community. In most cases she has no education and cannot just pull herself up by the bootstraps. Emotionally, she suffers from a deep sense of personal shame and self-hatred. She has become psychologically ensnared in a pattern of thinking that alienates her from her true self and prevents her from experiencing love. Spiritually, she is heavily oppressed, with an inner barrenness. Freedom for these girls is much more than being rescued off the streets, or out of a strip club, brothel, or cage. Restoration in the lives of these broken individuals is ultimately not about human perseverance, but about God’s relentless love.

Tantamount to the tragedy suffered by women whose innocence is stolen form them is the tragedy suffered by the men who steal it. The men in the sex industry are the gatekeepers. They are the owners of the strip clubs, brothels, karaoke clubs, girly bars, and massage parlors. They are the bouncers, managers, pimps, and traffickers. They are the johns who drive the demand for sex that fuels the industry. And they are an emasculated representation of the male race. Blinded by their own lust for sex, money, and power, their lives are reduced to the basest form of cowardice. Strutting about as studs, pimps, and players, they ignore the overt exploitation of the girls they seek to dominate, unaware of their own sickness. One simply cannot purchase happiness from another’s misery.

Men must rise above the egocentric rationalization of their sexual dominance over women. A redeemed masculinity begins with a sacrificial love that doesn’t seek its own interests, but the interest of others. Our sexuality is something to be guided with discretion and great respect for our female counterparts. Dominating a women and exposing her economic inequality is not macho and does nothing to demonstrate manhood. Jesus set forth the kind of masculinity that is honorable—love expressed in humility and servanthood. As desperately as women must be freed from brothels, karaoke clubs, and cages, men must be freed from the self-centered lust that parades as manhood.

While the lamp of liberty fades in the winds of change, we must not remain silent. We must arise and fight to recover a freedom in society that is worthy of its citizens. The global swell of unrestrained perversity necessitates a wholesale countercultural revolution to invoke the kind of widespread change that restores our dignity and expunges every counterfeit. Amidst the fog of social corruption we must regain a moral compass to navigate our way to a new day—a day where a young woman is valued not just for her body, but for her humanity.

The last thing Somalia needs is military unrest. With droughts wreaking havoc on the entire southern half of Somalia, and neighboring countries willing to invade to “help” (the last time Ethiopia invaded Somalia, the casualties ranged in the millions), this is the exact wrong time for a militant Muslim faction to arise and assert tribal dominance. But arise one did: al-Shabaab.

Drought and famine alone do not cause people to flee, the Guardian points out. While Kenya has seen refugees from all of the Horn countries in decades past, recently only one population of farmers is fleeing across international borders: Somalia’s. The reason is that for the last 20 years Somalia has lacked a stable government, and al-Shabaab currently has control of much of southern Somalia.

Seeking shelter from the famine and military transcription by roaming al-Shabaab militias, refugees have gone generally to one of two places: Mogadishu, the bombed out shell-of-a-capital-city that has never really recovered from American-led war maneuvers in the mid 1990’s, and DaDaab, the world’s largest refugee camp. While DaDaab technically sits in Kenya, the border is nothing more than an imaginary line through the desert, one boldly crossed first by al-Shabaab militants when they raided DaDaab and abducted several aid workers, then crossed later by the Kenyan military in an effort to route insurgents allegedly hiding in 10 Somali towns.

To the West, DaDaab, a refugee resettlement camp that has swollen in population and, were it officially a city, would be Kenya’s third largest. Built to house 90,000 refugees, it quickly filled to five times its capacity when, at one point, 1,300 Somalis a day were streaming across the Kenya border.

Nighttime is a dangerous time to be a woman in DaDaab. With no shelter to speak of, and a scant military presence that cannot possibly patrol the farthest outskirts, rape and abuse is common.

But an even greater threat in this migration pattern, to Mogadishu or DaDaab, is the rise in human smuggling and trafficking. In the midst of the chaos, it is far too easy for criminal enterprises to deceive young women and girls into traveling to Kenya under the auspices of safety and protection, as was the case with the young women interviewed by the Guardian.

To understand the utter lack of protection, one must only look to Somalia’s capital city, Mogadishu. Mogadishu is populated by the huddled masses that have streamed there (instead of Kenya) from the hinterlands to find any meager ration of food or medicine, perhaps the last in all of southern Somalia’s drought stricken regions.

Throughout the long months of the drought in the Horn of Africa that started last spring, al-Shabaab has seized what little control it can grasp, kidnapping and murdering westerners, raiding the offices of aid organizations, and even infiltrating refugee camps to “recruit” new members. Al-Shabaab has turned a natural disaster into a crisis as hundreds of thousands of people have fled from their homes in the pastoral, arid prairies. Now, there are no aid groups even in Mogadishu: last autumn, al-Shabaab scared off all of the aid groups when they abducted and killed several workers in the city.

Though al-Shabaab has largely lost its hold in Mogadishu, peace and victory seldom last long there. Somalia has lacked any unified government to speak of since conflict broke out in 1991. It would be inaccurate to say that Mogadishu is the nexus of the struggle against al-Shabaab; the terrorist group that has been tormenting aid groups and western visitors all along the border of Kenya and the coast.

But the battle for Mogadishu is the battle for a stable government, a rule of law that will extend protection to the hundreds of thousands of women and children sent fleeing from their homes and into the machination of highly sophisticated human trafficking networks.

This City in Focus comes from The Horn of Africa Region. To read an overview of this region click here.

We have selected the Horn of Africa as our first regional focus in 2012. The typical list of devastations that plague many parts of Africa ravage this region, and make people particularly vulnerable: poverty, poor education, unemployment, and HIV/AIDS. In addition, these countries cannot effectively control or track the flow of people across borders and suffer from a massive immigration crisis, generally into Kenya and out of the surrounding countries. Imagine a stretch of border 250 miles long that is so porous that roughly 200 people a week can simply walk from one nation to another undetected and you have the beginning of an understanding of the problem Kenya is facing with its African neighbors. And where there are people on the move, there is an opportunity for human trafficking.

But it gets worse. Currently the Horn is facing a food and water crisis due in part to the largest drought the region has experienced in 60 years. The famine of 1984-85 claimed the lives of 1 million people in Ethiopia and Sudan. The current crisis is not yet classifiably a famine, says the Guardian, but between Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, and Somalia, 10 million people are in danger. The regular droughts that in the past have come once every 10 years are getting closer together, recently spaced only 1 year apart. DaDaab, a refugee camp engineered to house 90,000 people, sits just across the Kenyan-Somali border. Because of the drought and threat of Islamic radicals, DaDaab has swollen far beyond its capacity to 450,000 people. At the height of the crisis last summer, Christian Aid reported that between 1,300 and 1,500 people were daily streaming into DaDaab’s three camps. Nick Guttman, head of Christian Aid’s emergency programs, reported that Ethiopia’s Kobe camp for refugees, engineered to house 25,000 people, was maxed to capacity just a month after opening last June.

al-Shaabab

A big part of the problem is that the radical Somali Muslim organization al-Shabaab is looking to institute a strict application of Muslim shari’a law, a state-wide implementation of the rules and values of the Koran. In keeping with this agenda, al-Shabaab has rejected outright any influence from western powers, including intervention by aid organizations. In November, al-Shabaab raided the offices of many prominent aid organizations (including World Vision) in southern Somalia and cut off all aid including food and medical supplies critical to the survival of 160,000 children.

All of this amounts to a heightened vulnerability for women and children throughout the region. With dire and desperate circumstances comes a migration of people that otherwise would not be happening, and with so many people on the move it is nearly impossible to track who is where—or who is missing. Thousands heading to refugee camps to Arab nations provides an easy cover for smugglers and traffickers moving victims to major city centers. Displaced peoples rarely have the appropriate papers to begin with, and traffickers can easily inveigle trusting and desperate people with even the flimsiest promise of protection and hope.

Predator and Prey

When UNICEF conducted an investigation into human trafficking in Africa, they found that almost half of the women interviewed regularly experienced physical abuse. The climate and culture of gender inequality has subjugated women to a de facto second hand status which provides the basis for all manner of abuses and human trafficking. This continent-wide trend is only magnified within the sprawling refugee communities in DaDaab, where young girls face molestation and abuse each night on the outskirts of the camp, far from the protection of the scant police presence.

But if this seems at all ad hoc, think again. One Kenyan human trafficking expert told the Guardian that human trafficking in the Horn of Africa is a very developed network of professionals. The network includes representatives and allies in every agency and aspect of transportation, including “politicians, senior police officers, NGOs, senior immigration officials, airline officers and resettlement officials in various countries. The general flow of people in this region is from surrounding countries, into Kenya and more specifically Nairobi, where human trafficking victims are then either dispersed to tourism destinations or countries abroad.

Children for Sale

Places like Mombassa, Kenya, a coastal resort city just a few hundred miles south of Mogadishu, has become  a sex-tourism hot spot. The awful thing about human trafficking globally is that it can be a bit like the game whack-a-mole. As one area of the world gains notoriety as a “hot spot,” governing officials crack down through a rash of new legislation. Sex-buyers, particularly those in search for child prostitution markets, get the point. Before you know it, another region sprouts up as the new “it” spot. In the last 20 years or so, Thailand, Costa Rica, and the Philippines have all at one point or another ebbed and flowed. Now, Kenya is in the limelight.

A study conducted by the African Network for the Prevention and Protection Against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN), indicates that there is an increase in the numbers of women and children trafficked not only within the Horn countries, but also out to other nations such as Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, and even Arab countries like Yemen and Saudi Arabia which are just a short trip across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea from the Horn.  The United Nations High Commission for Refugees reports that many refugees seeking asylum in nearby Yemen travel the frequented Ethiopia-Djibouti trucking corridor only to be swept up into the sex trade by organized criminal activity.

All of this amounts to a familiar story: when war, poverty, disease, and drought send hundreds of thousands fleeing from their homes in desperation, there are always those criminal enterprises who look to capitalize on their vulnerability. For the first part of this year we will take a deeper look into a few key cities in the Horn of Africa and learn how we can intercede on behalf of the poor and vulnerable.

The holidays hold an array of memories and emotion for the women in restoration with Exodus Cry. For some, the Christmas season is associated with the acute pain of neglect or violence. While for others it was the only time of year where some vestige of positive memory can be traced.

A sense of home and belonging is immensely important on Christmas. The deepest wounds surrounding this season are connected to family relationships and abuses. Therefore, the greatest healing comes through God’s covenantal love and spirit of adoption made flesh through earthly families receiving His daughters as their own. To be joyously accepted by a Godly family, given an identity as cherished daughter, valued and enjoyed for one’s unique personhood, and shown unconditional love is a wonder that works miracles for all of us – especially for those who have never experienced this accurate reflection of the Father’s heart.

At the heart of Christmas is celebrating Immanuel – God With Us. Surely Jesus is, has been, and will be with each one who has suffered the anguish of a broken family. Jesus put on flesh and came into a natural family as a vulnerable baby. He experienced our pains and our joys. He lived a sinless life and took the full extent of sin for all time upon Himself that we may be brought into His family forever. What a glorious value statement and promise from God on being with us and on becoming part of a whole family with Him.

During these next weeks, please keep our girls in prayer specifically through the following requests.

• May they experience God’s shalom and joy deep in their hearts, knowing they are beloved daughters.
• Pray that the Lord brings redemption on this season and opportunity for new memories during the holidays.
• May our girls be surrounded by covenantal friends and spiritual family members who overflow with unconditional love and support.
• Pray for God to raise up more families who would open their hearts and homes to adopt, both in the spiritual and the natural.

It was only after the Taliban, the reigning clan of Islamic warlords that had terrorized Afghanistan since 1996, fell in 2001 that the stories of their most brutal oppression came to light. While the Taliban had tasked the terrorist organization al-Qaeda with developing its military defense, the real war it was waging had been concealed: a war on women.

In one sense, sex trafficking everywhere is classifiably a “war on women.” To the uninitiated, the UN’s definition of human trafficking may seem cumbersome, a laundry list of qualifications and contingencies. Why not just say “slavery”? A global survey of the many faces of human trafficking, and sex trafficking in particular, demonstrates that the modern face of slavery is anything but monolithic, and a wide net must be cast in order to rightly include every possible victimization, every front of this war of abuse and degradation. One prominent haven of such degradation, the Afghan capital of Kabul, demonstrates a nuance not found in any other region of the earth.

Since Afghanistan is largely broken up into Islamic fiefdoms, the control of the capital has major influence on the culture of the country. Ousting the Taliban and driving them into Pakistan meant that room could finally be made for a top-down democracy that upheld the rights of the poor and oppressed. Part of the reason the conflict has lasted more than ten years (and counting) is that a premature withdrawal of allied forces would leave a vacuum of power that could easily be filled again by Taliban violence. Most of the world might not care or even notice, but the world never has been quick to heed the abuse of its most vulnerable people groups. If women are to find refuge anywhere in Afghanistan, Kabul must maintain a democratic concern for the weak and marginalized; in short, for women and children.

Human trafficking in Afghanistan, a traditional Islamic culture, is not the egregious deception of false job offers in Chisinau; nor is it the generational poverty of Mumbai; nor the chronic fatherlessness of New York City or the outright collapse of a country at war, as was the case in Juba, Sudan. Though Afghanistan may share similarities with any or all of those, its chief problem is a comprehensive cultural subjugation of women to the rule of men, an abuse in and of itself, but one that leads to even greater abuses.

One of the most striking features of human trafficking in Afghanistan is the overwhelming number of child brides. According to a study by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), over 80 percent of trafficking victims were underage brides, and half of that group were married off by the age of 15 or younger.

Poverty plays a key role in the giving of child brides. Wealthy older men may offer a handsome “bride-sum” for a young girl, and her father, once he has “married her off,” then has one less mouth to feed. In 2005, a video was released to the AIHRC that showed a thirteen-year-old bride, who had escaped from her forced marriage after refusing to consummate it with her new husband, receiving forty lashes upon being returned to the man by the authorities. Both underage marriages and beatings are illegal in Afghanistan, but that made little difference in a country governed largely by provincial warlords.

Unfortunately, Western forces that are supposedly trying to liberate the country often become part of the problem. If there is a sad but common refrain of military personnel taking advantage of those they profess to protect, that trend has only been further accentuated by the advent of privatized military security forces. These “mercenaries” are even more out of sight and out of mind of government scrutiny and, as a result, have been making headline news for nearly ten years for abuses and alleged war crimes. One of the more flagrant violations in Kabul came from a non-government paramilitary group contracted out by the US State Department to provide security for the US Embassy in Kabul, ArmorGroup North America.

In 2009, a suit was filed against ArmorGroup related to the frequenting of brothels known to house victims of human trafficking by members of ArmorGroup. Buying sex from women known to have been trafficked is a clear violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. At one point during the development of corrective actions, a process that unfolded over several years, an ArmorGroup trainee was alleged to have been reported for bragging about the human trafficking operations there, and boasting of the “opportunity” to actually purchase a woman for $20,000 and begin making a profit himself. No serious repercussions were faced by any member of ArmorGroup, even though copious evidence was produced; but make no mistake, deviant sexual practices are not new to the warlord culture of Afghanistan.

One of the more disturbing trends of effete Afghani warlords is actually making a resurgence—the practice of Bacha Bazi. Bacha Bazi, literally “playing with children,” is the practice of dressing underage boys in women’s clothing to dance for private parties of wealthy and influential Afghani men. While the practice is thought to be dead, outlawed by Islamic law, and publicly decried by authorities, it nonetheless persists. At the end of the night of dancing, the boy is generally sold for sex to the highest bidder. If this concept presses the credulity of the reader, videos of the scene—a roomful of men utterly transfixed by a twelve-year-old boy, dressed in flowing silk and jewelry, leaping and twirling—do nothing to aid comprehension.

The only thing more devastating is the allegations that another privatized military group, DynCorp, has been involved in the selling and transporting of Bacha Bazi. This only serves to underscore that while a democratic government is needed to protect liberties, even those forces that are being used to establish such freedoms are as sinful as the culture they look to replace. Submission to Christ is the only path to liberation.

Prayer Points:

Pray for the establishment of a righteous government in Kabul that will champion the case of the poor, marginalized, and oppressed (women and children).

Pray for privatized military groups to be exposed if they are truly taking advantage of the people they seek to serve.

Pray for a revival in Kabul that will usher Afghanistan into an age of freedom: political freedom, gender freedom, and spiritual freedom—from sin and all of its consequences.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ06Df03.html

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112728404

http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/topic,4565c22544,4565c25f551,4e301baa2,0.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/world/asia/31flogging.html?pagewanted=all

http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Full_report_156.pdf

http://www.humanrights.asia/opinions/columns/AHRC-ETC-035-2011

“Seek justice, rebuke the oppressor, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.” – Isaiah 1:17

Working in the anti-trafficking field, I am confronted with stories of execrable sexual abuse almost daily. I have found oppression to take many forms: emotional or psychological manipulation, physical bondage, verbal abuse, or even sexual exploitation and, worse, enslavement. Considering all the disturbing elements of these cases, one of the most prevalent is the absence of an advocate. Time after time, no one was willing to stand up against the exploitation of a little girl or boy.

Oppressors can be found in every walk of life. They range from priests of the cloth to human traffickers in Russia, and often, they are veiled behind a cloak of respectability. In most cases when one of these individuals is finally exposed, there is a track record of people who were aware of their abusive behavior and yet did nothing to stop it. My heart breaks when I consider how many of these atrocities could have been averted through the simple actions of an advocate—an intercessor.

In the book of Isaiah (chapter 59), we hear God’s revealing response to the injustices permeating Israel’s society. He “wondered” that there was no intercessor. “Wondered” can also be translated as “stupefied” or “appalled” and is only used twice in Scripture (Isa. 59:16 and Isa. 63:5)—both times to describe God’s shock that there was no one to bring justice, no one to stand up for the oppressed. Piercing through the cloud of Israel’s outward piety, God identifies the core of the nation’s malignant condition—social inaction.

Today many people consider the pursuit of social justice as an addition to their faith. But God considers it evidence of our faith (Jas. 2:20). As the Church, we are called to embody the heart of Jesus on behalf of the oppressed. “Pure and undefiled religion before God . . . is to visit orphans and widows in their trouble” (Jas. 1:27).

If we are to express God’s heart to those who are oppressed we must be aware of every aspect of this calling. We are not only to care for the oppressed, but to literally stand against their oppressors and “rebuke them.” God exhorts us to “REBUKE the oppressor” (emphasis added).

Too often we mistake silence as mercy. It is not. Silence and inaction provide the perfect atmosphere for injustice to permeate our churches, schools, workplaces, and homes. The apostle Paul charges us to “have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them” (Eph. 5:11, emphasis added).

If we are to walk out the biblical mandate to pursue justice we will inevitably take a radical and assertive stand against those who seek to oppress others. Messengers of justice do not tolerate or coddle the oppressor. We do not make excuses for them or rationalize their behavior. Oppressors are not to be psychoanalyzed. They are to be stopped.

Our morally relativistic culture is painfully deficient of accountability, forming the seedbed from which oppressors are arising, en masse, many times without the conviction that there is anything wrong with the acts of injustice they perpetrate. Once they have reached the point where they can justify their oppression, their conscience is seared. Delivering an incisive rebuke will be as much for them as it is for the vulnerable ones they seek to exploit. The light of truth has the power to awaken any individual from his cave of delusion.

Oppressors must be confronted with the essential truth that all human life is sacred and inconceivably precious in the eyes of God. They must be admonished that they are destroying a person whose life is made in the very image of God and created for an eternal purpose. To rob a person of this divine right is to rob God Himself.

There can be no confusion regarding the judgment that awaits those who oppress other human beings. To the oppressed, God says, “Be strong, do not fear! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God; He will come and save you” (Isa. 35:4). But to the oppressor, God says “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea” (Mk. 9:42). In other words: What I will do to you is far worse than any retribution you could possibly face at the hands of the most ruthless person. It truly is a “fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31). Those who oppress and exploit others have nothing to look forward to but the fiery judgment of God’s eternal wrath.

An Open Letter to Oppressors and Perpetrators of Suffering and Injustice

What you are engaged in is a violation of human life. You are causing severe, possibly irreparable, damage to the person you oppress. Through your heinous actions you have destroyed their spirit, their soul, and their body, robbing them of the freedom, sanctity, and dignity their Creator endowed them with.

I feel compelled to warn you that though I have many ideas of how to punish you, none can compare with the judgment God Himself has prepared for you if you persist in your oppression of others. Incredibly, you have a marvelous and almost unbelievable opportunity to surrender to God, to repent of and turn from your oppressive actions, and to receive Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, who bore the wrath of God for all who turn from their wicked ways and accept and follow Him. For it is only through the cross of Christ that a just God is able to forgive sin without denying justice.

However, should you choose to continue in your current path, make no mistake, you will surely die and bear the full weight of God’s wrath, for He is righteous and just. And in your eternally reprobate condition you will suffer incomprehensible torment for the ages to come, without end. On the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men (2 Pet. 3:7), when “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Cor. 5:10), these very words will testify against you, and you will know for all eternity that your path of destruction was avoidable and that you alone are to blame for the judgment you bear.

Therefore, I pray for you, as Jesus instructed us to pray for our enemies. But I don’t pray that God would overlook your despicable actions. Rather, I pray, with trembling in my heart, that God, in His kindness, would lead you to repentance (Rom. 2:4), and that you would come to your senses before you stand face to face with the eternal Father of all those you defiled through your self-centered lust for power. He is the God who said, “For jealousy is a husband’s fury; therefore He will not spare in the day of vengeance” (Prov. 6:34). “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap” (Gal. 6:7). I can only fathom what the bowels of hell hold in expectation for you, should you refuse God’s offer of mercy (see Isa. 14:9). But if you turn from your life of sin and oppression and call upon the living God, He will make you a new creation and give you His peace, for you were “created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:24).

If your heart is stirred to turn away from your oppression and accept God’s free invitation of forgiveness and you would like to receive further prayer and counseling, please email us at: info@exoduscry.com.

When did Bombay change its name? In 1995, actually––it was a change meant to reflect India’s roots in Hinduism, and shed one of the last vestiges of British imperial reign. Mumbai is in many important ways a modern city, though with centuries of heritage. Mumbai is a city that forces you to bring into focus a different version of India, to realize that India can no longer be relegated to a place of pity. This is no longer the India of Rudyard Kipling. This isn’t even the India of Mother Theresa any more. And it was arguably never the India of Slumdog Millionaire. India is home to more than a few billionaires, not surprising for a country that jumped 51% in the number of millionaires in 2008 when the rest of the world was in a recession. It is a land of giants, and Mumbai is one of its capitals.

Mumbai is the fourth largest city in the world, a major industrial hub in one of the worlds fastest developing BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China). In these rapidly expanding economies, business––commerce, industry, technology, education––is booming. With each new high rise that cuts into the Mumbai skyline, labors by the drones are drawn to this city. Migrant workers provide a steady stream of labor––and sex buyers

Forming the western edge of the bay at the mouth of the Ulhas River is Kamathipura, a district whose name means “work” and which is famous for a particular kind of work: Kamathipura, Mumbai’s redlight district, happens to be the largest red-light district in the world. Kamathipura, a unified cluster of islands on the southern tip of Mumbai has been called India’s “HIV timebomb.” Since prostitution is illegal in India, brothels are owned and run by mobsters. HIV screening is nonexistent, and mixed with a largely uneducated clientele who do not make the connection between condoms and transmission of STDs, Kamathipura is an epidemic waiting to happen.

Poverty is the problem here, generations deep. Women raise their daughters in the brothels, owned by madams and pimps before they even come of age to be sold (somewhere between 11 and 13). Other girls were abducted outright, or sold for a pittance by their parents. What they don’t know is that, if their lives turn out like the thousands of others whose lives began as theirs, they will one day get used to servicing a long list of clients that will gradually get shorter as theirs lives get longer; they will get used to the beatings, the pregnancies, the abortions, the births, and (eventually) getting very, very sick. They will likely become so complicit with their own condition that they will one day lure, seduce, and coerce other girls into this horrendous lifestyle.

But none of that makes this a choice. When a women is reduced to a sexual object against her will day in and day out thousands of times over, when she one day ceases to hope that she will ever be anything more, and when every one of her dreams is effaced beyond recognition and she becomes only a fixture in the tableau of the “largest red light district in the world,” this is by no means free will. Slavery breaks the slave.

There is no such thing as a rescue for a problem of this magnitude. What is called for here is a massive, sustained, and prolonged labor on behalf of the church to shift the entire tide of a culture.

Jesus said, “Lift up your eyes and see; the fields are already white for the harvest.” What we learn in Kamathipura is that a ripe harvest looks like broken humanity. Laws may change, and democratic freedoms may come, but it is not likely that either of those enacted would bring to bear any real change for the impoverished thousands of woman and girls being sold for sex here.

This is how you an pray for Mumbai, India:

1. Pray for laborers to be sent into the harvest of broken souls living in Karathipura, and being sold daily.

2. Pray for the church to be emboldened with light and truth to serve the least of these.

3. Pray for righteousness to be exalted in Mumbai through just laws and police forces.

Sub-Saharan Africa is a point of concern for many world leaders. Genocide, civil war, disease, and rampant poverty have overwhelmed many of these countries. Even by the measure of these problem-stricken states, Zimbabwestands out as a grave case.

A “paint-by-numbers” portrait of Zimbabwe is grim. According to the CIA World Factbook, Zimbabwe ranks 159 out of 220 countries in terms of their gross domestic product. At a paltry $500 per person per year, it ranks nearly last in GDP per capita. Conversely, Zimbabwe ranks first among world nations for public debt, with a 234 percent deficit of their GDP, and an unemployment rate of 95 percent. Consequently, in a population of nearly 12 million people, almost nobody can find work. This is not a picture of a country falling down, but a picture of a country lying dead in the street.

At the street level, it’s impossible to miss the one alternative that always presents itself when a collapsed economy limits job opportunities: prostitution. Women of all ages (including scores only 12 or 13 years old) from all social strata, including professionals and college students, find themselves succumbing to the sex trade. For many teen girls growing up in poverty-stricken townships around the nation’s capital, coming of age includes a “haj” to Harare, the major metropolitan center. While they tell themselves and one another that they will find jobs in the service industry as maids or waitresses, too many end up dancing in dilapidated night clubs, competing for an anemic male patronage which comes to buy ten-dollar sex.

The fate of women swept into the sex trade in Harare serves to underscore a reoccurring theme: when men fall, women fall prey. In one instance, a homeless teenage girl resorted to prostitution after her father’s livelihood disappeared in the chaotic land-redistribution of 2000 and he died of malaria. Another found no recourse but to sell her body after she was left homeless, along with 700,000 others, from the 2005 urban rationalization program, ironically named Operation Restore Order. A mother of two can find no other way to pay bills when her husband leaves for Herbert Chitepo Avenue, a prostitution hub for upscale buyers,includinggovernment officials and celebrities. A married mother of four might resort to selling her body to put food on the table—sometimes without her husband’s knowledge, and sometimes with.

Hardly any woman in Harare is immune from the steep slide of poverty into a lifestyle of prostitution. Recent crackdowns on curfews—women are not permitted on the streets of Harare after 8:00pm—aimed at reducing the number of females out at night and hence eliminating prostitution, have terrorized even non-prostituted women. However, a growing trend finds its way around even the curfews: many road-side lodges harbor an underground prostitution industry. The opportunity is obvious: widespread poverty means many roadside lodges sit vacant, and prostituted women are always in need of temporary lodging to conduct “business.”  Prostitution becomes a win-win enterprise—not only for the lodge owners, but for a network of ailing industries.Thus, they enjoy shelter from violent crackdowns, a makeshift security system of police and security guards, and profit from a steady stream of sex-buyers whose taxis clog the parking lots. In difficult financial times, everyone looks for a kick-back: from landlords, corrupt cops, and security guards, to drivers. What emerges is a complicated symbiosis of industries, all profiting from the sale of a woman’s body, and all demanding a cut of her meager wages—adding insult to injury, and heaping humiliation upon exploitation.

When economies collapse, the unavoidable byproduct is that the girls and women of a nation resort to the world’s “oldest profession.” This trend is only possible when men, who are meant to be pillars of communities and whose strength is never needed more than in such dire times, decide instead to demand en masse that their desire for sex be fulfilled. When men fall, women fall prey. But to what? Poverty? Temptation? Victimization? No—to men.

Prayer Points

1. Pray for a revival in Herbert Chitepo Avenue that would dry up the demand for paid sex.
2. Pray for light and truth to wash over Harare, and that government leaders would arrive at wise solutions to the complicated sources and chains of poverty.
3. Pray for the leaders of Zimababwe, that they would be empowered to restore rule of law and sound financial practices, and that “righteousness would exalt” the entire nation.
4. Pray for a revival in the church in Harare. As in most places, prostituted women report that their clientele includes Christian ministers and musicians.
5. Pray that the church in Harare would take its rightful place as a prophetic community of holiness and justice that boldly proclaims Jesus.