NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE T he Sound of Freedom is a step in the right direction. Stop making everything about politics, especially when children are involved.
Sound of Freedom beat Indiana Jones at the box office over Independence Day weekend. The budgets behind them do not compare, but David beat Goliath and that’s a blessing in the world today.
As you might know by now, Sound of Freedom is about the sex trafficking of children. Not exactly summer vacation entertainment — and yet, critical viewing. I confess, I was grateful that, as a member of the media, I could watch it on my computer and pause it and walk away at times. They did a good job not showing too much, but the topic itself is too much. Every instinct in us should recoil at the thought of people abusing children. But we must know so we can do something about it.
The movie has been attacked as alarmist right-wing propaganda. Both lead actor Jim Caviezel and Tim Ballard, the former Homeland Security agent he plays, have been criticized for saying questionable things in interviews and over the years. Caviezel is an actor who did an excellent job in the movie, and Ballard helps children. I’m grateful for both. They are doing more than I am. The movie doesn’t strike me as a commercial for Ballard’s organization as much as a wake-up call about something going on in the world — and in America today.
Rolling Stone attacked Sound of Freedom as “a superhero movie for dads with brainworms.” It preaches: “Dramatic raids may make for good entertainment, but in real life, the process of helping trafficking survivors is far lengthier and more complicated.” Well of course it is. Sound of Freedom is not a documentary. Welcome to Hollywood.
Deb O’Hara-Rusckowski is a critical-care nurse who co-founded Global Strategic Operatives for the Eradication of Human Trafficking. She’s a delegate for the Order of Malta at the United Nations, and she’ currently opening a safe house in Massachusetts for women and girls who have been trafficked. If they are pregnant or have children, there are religious sisters from Nigeria who will welcome them and their children. Vulnerability and desperation can lead girls and women into the arms of traffickers. Over the past dozen years, O’Hara-Rusckowski has focused on training medical professionals to recognize the signs of trafficking — 750,000 people, including security guards and parking attendants, have been through the training.
In her experience — and according to evidence-based research — trafficked girls and women often wind up needing medical care. Sometimes a woman will have a broken bone from a beating. Sometimes a girl has an infection because of the sex work she’s engaged in. Other groups train airline workers and hospitality groups to see the signs of trafficking.
O’Hara-Rusckowski emphasizes that safe houses for boys, too, are needed. “There’s a particular shame they feel,” and they need healing after they escape or are rescued.
One of the things Sound of Freedom does well is show that you don’t have to be Satan to be using children. People can fall into it. One of the most jarring scenes in the film involves a former perpetrator explaining how after he had “done the deed,” he came to realize that the girl he was with was much younger he ever considered. (She was 14.) He talks about the sadness he saw in her eyes, and how he realized that he was the cause of her pain. He just wanted to have a good time. He wasn’t thinking of the other person. Or that that that other person could be a child — and one who had been sex-trafficked since she was six.
In the movie, after this realization, he helps free children from trafficking. He helps Caviezel’s character set up a sting. One of the criticisms of Ballard’s group is that even setting up such an event could contribute to creating demand. I have my doubts about how many people become attracted overnight to such a thing. And unfortunately, things we don’t want to talk about, such as pornography, are gateways to such horrors.
What the critics miss is that Sound of Freedom is an opportunity to talk about what’s going on — about how to better protect children. People such as O’Hara-Rusckowski are doing that work. We need to support them.
I know of a man who went to Mexico to adopt a child to have sex with. I sat in the same room with him a month or so before his arrest. It was obvious to me that something was wrong. It still makes me sick to think about. I pray that he is an outlier, but sex trafficking isn’t a conspiracy theory. I wish it was. Children are being sexualized. And the consequences include grave evils that most of us would probably rather not know about. But how can we look away? How can we dismiss a movie when the United Nations and other secular organizations say there are 50 million people enslaved in the world today? Estimates of children enslaved are in the low millions.
Ending the sex trafficking of children should unite us regardless of politics or religion or anything else. Adults must be adults and protect the innocent — and their innocence. “Let freedom ring” cannot be a thing of the past.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.