A blind eye: Perpetrators of human trafficking count on us to turn away

There is a difference between not seeing something and choosing to ignore a thing.

But turning a blind eye has never been a solution to a problem. In fact, more so than continuing to enable an ongoing scourge, ignoring a crisis often exacerbates it until it becomes an epidemic.

Consider crack in the 1980s. AIDS in the early '90s. Or, as recently as this decade, the opioid crisis.

But there is another, as sinister if not worse, going on right under our noses and the turned-away nostrils of citizens and leaders of cities in countries across the world.

North Carolina recently jumped from No. 10 to No. 8 on the list of U.S. states most afflicted by sex trafficking and human trafficking. Let that sink in.

The victims are often teenagers and/or immigrants. They are forced into prostitution and servitude, abused, neglected and encouraged to smoke, drink and do drugs well past the point of addiction. They are being killed or killing themselves at alarming rates, and yes, it is happening here.

The Wayne Pregnancy Care Center recently held a forum and is looking to create a coalition similar to one started in nearby Pitt County, to bring together counselors, law enforcement, teachers and community leaders to learn about the issue and to seek to find ways to combat it.

As many as four local teens have so far been identified as likely victims of the human sex and labor trade.

So how do we as a community begin to confront this?

The first step, as with any problem is to identify it. What are the signs and where are the most likely pockets of a given community where the victims are going to be less difficult to notice?

Hopefully law enforcement and the city and county's elected officials and school system administrators will open their doors and minds when Beverly Weeks and the pregnancy center staff come calling to educate them about what they've recently uncovered.

This is a problem that needs us each, no matter how jarring, to force ourselves to look directly upon rather than away from.

Published in Editorials on August 27, 2017 10:47 PM