Bystanders Are Not Innocent

By Becky Banaszak, 11.15.2006

Almost two minutes have passed since I wrote the headline. It’s not because I’m a terribly slow writer (although I am) but I just realized I’m guilty of apathy.

Two children per minute.

I’m counting the number of children that have been trafficked for sexual exploitation since I sat down. It’s been about five minutes. That’s ten kids. A few more minutes and I’ll be out of fingers and toes to count on.

In the time it takes to watch an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy,” 120 kids will have been forced into the most dehumanizing form of slavery. Annually, that’s about 1.2 million children.

I wonder which little lives will be stolen this minute. What do they look like? Where are they from? Who will help them?

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 13 is the average age of victims when they’re first forced iinto prostitution.

When I think about human beings as sexual slaves, I picture a timid, petite, 13-year-old girl with messy braids. The young girl has one yellow bow in her hair. The other one has been ripped out. She’s being forced to perform sexual acts with a 45-year-old pedophile. He’s almost three times her size. A size that crushes her miniature frame.

Silent tears fall from her brown eyes as her innocence is robbed for the fifth time today and her mind tries to make sense of what’s happening to her. But she smiles because they tell her to. Smiling slaves are good for business. And business is looking good — real good.

According to The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), human trafficking generates $10 to $12 billion dollars a year for organized crime. Did you catch the “b” before “illion”? That’s at least $9 billion more than the $50 million our government spends to combat this crisis.

It’s been 24 minutes. We’re up to 48 kids.

If I continued to count kids more than the calories I consumed or the cell phone minutes I used, I wonder how affected I would be. I wonder if I could ever be more aware of what’s happening to those children than of my waistline or my phone bill or myself.

It shouldn’t be that hard. Everywhere I look, I see faces of children around the world who are suffering needlessly. They’re in my mailbox, on my television screen and in between the lines of most news stories.

They’re beaten, broken, tired, hungry, thirsty, lonely and crying out for someone, anyone, to just do something

Distracted, I turn away unaffected and apathetic.

Distracted because I live in America, a place where it is easy to escape reality. I have a computer and a MySpace account — the ability to flee. I have a television that dictates reality in shows like, “The Real World.” I have a job and a cell phone. My social life is very demanding. I’m just too busy.

67 more children.

Unaffected because my life tends to revolve around things that have to do with me. If it doesn’t directly impact my personal well-being, it doesn’t exist in my world. I live in a bubble. And it has a steeple.

Apathetic because my heart doesn’t break at the thought of even one child being enslaved. I’d like to say it does, but I’ve felt the pain of a broken heart. I don’t want to feel brokenness because I’m afraid of what I might feel if I felt what those kids feel. I like not hurting.

80 and counting.

100.

I can’t get the words of Holocaust Historian Yehuda Bauer out of my head.

“Thou shall not be a victim. Thou shall not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shall not be a bystander.”

I’m no longer an innocent bystander. I’m a guilty one.