Guest, Author at Shared Hope International

April 5, 2018 by Guest

The Survivor’s Guide to Surviving the Bible

**This is the first guest blog in a series of posts by the 2018 JuST Faith Summit speakers. Check back for new posts highlighting the critical topics that will be featured at this year’s Faith Summit. Join us, June 20-22 at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, for this exciting Summit. Visit this link to see the full agenda and lineup of speakers.

When you’ve been purchased like some toy on a store shelf, hearing or reading that “you are not your own, for you were bought with a price”, is not such good news. Scriptures such as that one were a stumbling block for me in my healing journey. You might be thinking that there aren’t that many verses like that, but you would be wrong.

[easy-tweet tweet=”When you’ve been purchased like some toy on a store shelf, hearing or reading that “you are not your own, for you were bought with a price”, is not such good news.” user=”sharedhope” hashtags=”FaithSummit2018″]

Everyone likes Psalm 23, right? “He makes me lie down in green pastures”? No thank you. My pastor taught on that verse in October of 2011, comparing it to being a child going to bed at night with no worries – secure in the knowledge that mom and dad were in charge and would keep them safe. He couldn’t understand why that verse made me angry and hurt – until I told him that as a child, going to bed at night was the most dangerous part of my day.

That was Pastor Josh’s “aha” moment. He had never realized how certain scriptures looked, seen through a survivor’s eyes. Thus began a long process of my identifying problem verses to my pastors Josh Causey and Megan Kelly, and them contextualizing, discussing, explaining, rewording, and forever changing how I saw the Word. Exchanging truth for lies, that’s what it’s all about, right? I believe that juvenile sex trafficking is the enemy’s number one weapon in this world. It’s widely known that the best lie is one which contains a little truth. What better way could there be to undermine God than taking love, family, gender, and sex, twisting them into a gross caricature of the Kingdom, and using them as weapons against vulnerable children? And the crown jewel in the enemy’s arsenal? Twisting the meaning of scriptures into fiery darts.

“Be transformed by the renewal of your mind” is no joke. I believe that a deep relationship with Christ is the only path to true healing for survivors. When I first arrived at Living Hope Fellowship, I had been out of the industry and “functional” for ten years. I wasn’t healed, though, and I certainly didn’t have abundant life. The only reason I even went to church was so my daughter would grow up alongside church people and so belong and be accepted as I never could be (I thought). Like many survivors, I had a warped view of the Gospel. I thought the Father was angry at me and wanted to crush me, but as long as I believed in Jesus, then Jesus would protect me from Him and I would get to go to Heaven when I died. Working through Josh and Megan, Jesus brought the scriptures alive for me and I truly began to heal and live as a branch connected to the true vine.

Together, we wrote a guide for you to take back to your church. This guide will equip ministers and advocates to look at scripture through the lens of trafficking and apply sound, spirit-led interpretation in a way that brings life and healing to survivors.

[easy-tweet tweet=”This guide will equip ministers and advocates to look at scripture through the lens of trafficking and apply sound, spirit-led interpretation in a way that brings life and healing to survivors.” user=”sharedhope” hashtags=”FaithSummit2018″]

I didn’t ask what these verses meant because I was afraid of the answers. People at church would tell me that God loved me, but those people didn’t know the things I had done. Even as they got to know about my story, they still didn’t know all the stuff. Trust doesn’t come easy to survivors, and it certainly doesn’t come quickly. I was at Living Hope for roughly four years before I trusted Josh with my doubts and my questions. We want to put the truth into survivors’ hands in a non-threatening format. We will be giving the guide out free of charge, along with permission to copy and distribute it as long as you do so in its entirety and do not make any changes to it.

We cannot possibly identify all of the scriptures that hit survivors in a hurtful way, but we want to equip ministers and advocates to go after the hard questions. No two survivors’ stories are the same and we want church members and leaders to be able to see scripture through the lens of trafficking and apply sound, Spirit-led interpretation in a way that brings life and healing to survivors. We also want to equip survivors with the skills and resources to do their own sound, biblical research whenever a verse hits them weird. We want everyone to know that there is no scripture that is contrary to the character of God.

[easy-tweet tweet=”We want to equip ministers and advocates to go after the hard questions.” user=”sharedhope” hashtags=”FaithSummit2018″]

The Word has such power to heal and deepen relationship with Christ. Psalm 23 has become my favorite Psalm, but it took going deeper. On the surface, God allowed me to be placed in a family where I was surrounded by abuse and pain. Where was my green pasture – my “good”? I think the green pasture is not analogous to circumstance, that God is working hard to ensure that I have what is best for me, which is God working in my life to mold my character to be Christ-like. It is God using all that was meant for evil in my life to shape my passion against injustice and my love for the oppressed – to make my heart like his. And a heart like His is the ultimate good and the greenest of pastures.

It is beyond wretched that the enemy would use God’s own words to harm His children. We can take this weapon out of his hand for good.

3 Things You Can Do Right Now

PRAY! Always the first action.
Get involved with local efforts to fight trafficking .
Come to the JuST Faith Summit and get equipped!

By Deb Haltom, Survivor Advocate, Living Hope Fellowship

March 8, 2018 by Guest

Celebrating International Women’s Day

Another year has passed and today, on International Women’s Day, we should ask ourselves how much progress has been made since last year? Each International Women’s Day, we’re challenged as a global community to honor, empower, and center women in our discussions and actions. And this year, like every year prior, we should ask ourselves what more we can do to advance the rights of women.

No doubt this year’s national discussion will involve the courageous movement of women standing up and speaking out against sexual assault. In today’s #MeToo culture, women are breaking the silence of injustice and making clear that their bodies are their own. We can all agree that it’s past time that abusers are held accountable for their actions and face consequences, but even with this powerful movement underway, we’re leaving behind a tremendous population of women. When we talk about breaking the silence about abuse, we’re still ignoring the issue of sex trafficking.

When we say “time’s up,” it is a demand that sexual assault be recognized as intolerable. Women are refusing to stay silent about assault, harassment, and rape; abusers are being forced to confront a shifting culture that refuses to allow them to continue their exploitation of the vulnerable. So why is it that we don’t afford that same indignation and zeal to the fight against sex trafficking?

Each day, women and girls are being sold and raped against their will. But there’s no #MeToo movement in the mainstream media for victims of sex trafficking. There’s no outcry against the abusers who traffic and buy these victims, that their time is up. Ultimately, we’ve decided that because there’s a commercial component involved in their abuse, these victims are somehow undeserving of being included in the recent dialogue surrounding sex abuse. Instead, the silence persists.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. This year’s International Women’s Day campaign theme is “Press for Progress.” If we’re going to press for progress on the subject of sex abuse, we need to also stop allowing certain subjects like trafficking to go undiscussed. While International Women’s Day should absolutely be a triumphant celebration of the strides we’ve made as a nation and a global community to secure the rights of women, it’s equally valuable to take the time to consider how to raise all women up, and identify where progress can be made. We need to recognize the ways in which trafficking victim’s voices aren’t being raised up, and work to fix this.

This year’s theme opens the door to this kind of discussion; we can’t move forward if some of the most vulnerable women and girls are continuing to be exploited in silence. So here are some ways that you can press for progress this year in an effort to include trafficking victims:

Help us end the criminalization of juvenile sex trafficking survivors in our Stop the inJuSTice Campaign. Advocate here!
Ask the Senate to move forward legislation to amend the CDA to ensure that survivors of online sex trafficking receive access to justice. Use our tools to post to twitter and facebook!
Advocate in your state for laws to strengthen your state’s legal framework to protect juvenile sex trafficking survivors and hold offenders accountable. Use our State Action campaign tools!

By Arrianna Jian-Najar

Intern for Shared Hope International

October 19, 2017 by Guest

The Smoke Screen That’s Obscuring the Voices of Survivors – Why We Must Amend the CDA

By: Alisa Bernard, Survivor Advocacy Coordinator, The Organization for Prostitution Survivors

I am of the technology generation. I was born the same year the cell phone was invented and Macintosh Apple made its debut. I never knew a time when a computer was not an accessible tool. We live in a time where computers the size of a credit cards can stream a giraffe giving birth across the country and can teach us how to do anything from play the violin to fix a leaky drain. The possibilities are limitless. But what happens when those possibilities are twisted into something darker? What happens when we use our innovations to trade in the flesh of young girls?

[easy-tweet tweet=”What happens when we use our innovations to trade in the flesh of young girls? – Alisa Bernard” user=”SharedHope”]

The online sex trade is not new. When I was prostituted over a decade ago, I was sold online. Online prostitution is not glamorous and it is not safer than street prostitution. The violence endemic to prostitution is not somehow mitigated by the internet. One study stated that violence is perpetrated predominantly by buyers regardless of venue of solicitation. The internet has normalized the buying of sex down to a negligible transaction. Women and girls are being reduced to mail order masturbation aids.

[easy-tweet tweet=”Online prostitution is not glamorous and it is not safer than street prostitution. – Alisa Bernard” user=”SharedHope”]

[easy-tweet tweet=”The violence endemic to prostitution is not somehow mitigated by the internet. – Alisa Bernard” user=”SharedHope”]

The Senate’s proposed reforms to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would allow for the prosecution of criminal activity on the part of internet service providers for facilitating the online sex trade. Essentially, businesses like Backpage.com could be held accountable for their contributions to the online sex trade. This is an essential step forward in the fight against trafficking in the US. Opposition activists express concern that the sex trade marketplace would make trafficking somehow more hidden or move underground if the online market is eliminated through this act. In reality, a result of the now internet facilitated sex trade is the intentional disappearing of both victims and traffickers. Backpage.com’s business model assists traffickers in obfuscating information in their ads, keeping them hidden behind bitcoins. Photos of children for sale across Backpage.com and similar sites have had their meta-data scrubbed away. Identification of victims and perpetrators has become practically impossible. How much more hidden could the market be?

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children most cases of trafficking occur online and the majority of those are happening through Backpage.com. At first, I thought Backpage.com was simply ignoring the experiences of women and girls like me by populating their site with these ads. Backpage.com isn’t ignorant that we are being bought and sold on their website, they want us to be bought and sold on their website. Every ad costs a price and with hundreds of ads posted daily they won’t say no to such a profit margin. Never mind if most of the product is young girls and women so long as the profits keep rolling in. And why not if they can hide behind a bastardization of free speech laws.

The thousands of women and girls whose faces have glared across a Backpage.com moderator/editor’s screens are not products. Editing an ad for a child doesn’t change the facts. She’s 14 with a pimp, or 23 and her pimp’s name is poverty, editing doesn’t make that 14-year-old 18, and it doesn’t change the 23-year-old’s circumstances. It does, however, add another few dollars into the Backpage.com bank account. So yeah, I care that there are more stringent requirements to post a car for sale than there are to post a young girls body.

Do the rapes of innocent women and girls mean so little? Have we accidently put the freedom to facilitate the rape of girls above girl’s freedom to be safe from rape? Reform is needed. The changes proposed to the CDA do not allow for the mass hysteria the tech industry would have you believe. The changes in the language do not allow for overzealous trial attorneys to go suing innocent internet service providers. If they are doing nothing wrong, they have nothing to fear. If they are using the CDA as a cover to hide their own perpetuation of the sex trade then, yes… they should have much to fear.

[easy-tweet tweet=”If (tech companies) are doing nothing wrong, they have nothing to fear (from amending the CDA). ” user=”SharedHope”]

I am firmly for the protection of the First Amendment and believe that it is one of the most integral core tenets of any free society. However, using the CDA as a smoke screen to conceal trafficking is just as much an attack on free speech as stripping the First Amendment bare. The modern era is rife with technological advancement, and we must update our laws to reflect this ever changing landscape.

I stand in solidarity with those who work to reform section 230 of the CDA, and I beg you, from someone who has seen what the online sex trade really looks like, to mobilize around this issue. Get your voice out, get your opinion out, because our voices cannot be the only ones to stand up.

[easy-tweet tweet=”Get your voice out, get your opinion out, because our voices cannot be the only ones to stand up.”]

September 16, 2017 by Guest

Law Professors Weigh in on Amending the CDA – Part 3

Q: How did we get here? Could the Communications Decency Act have been drafted differently to avoid this problem?

It is very important to understand the history of the CDA and that puts in context the SESTA proposal as a mere clarification of what the CDA was meant to do in 1996 when drafted, and how it should be clarified in light of technologies and crimes that have emerged since 1996. At the time of the CDA the internet was barely beginning, the crime of human trafficking was not recognized in the law, and the extreme growth of sexual exploitation of children online had yet to be realized.

The CDA was enacted in 1996 when the Internet was in its infancy. It was drafted in response to at least one case, Oakmont v. Prodigy.[1] In that case, Prodigy used its software to filter profanity on its platforms, including a bulletin board. However, a security firm sued Prodigy when users put negative comments on Prodigy’s bulletin board about that firm. In a twist of fate, Prodigy lost the lawsuit in part because it had taken efforts to screen out material, but had been incomplete in doing so.

This case influenced Congress to act, as this decision seemed to punish a Good Samaritan who was trying to self-regulate. That is why the legislation is called the Communications Decency Act. Its purpose was to protect people from sexually explicit material online and encourage companies to “take steps to screen indecent and offensive material for their customers.”[2] It was not encouraging companies to engage in criminal activity, but quite the opposite. Therefore, the purpose of the CDA was to encourage a robust Internet while protecting service providers for their actions to restrict access to explicit content. It did so by declaring that service providers should not be treated like publishers for content on their platforms provided by third parties. §230(c)(1). It also provided broad protection for Good Samaritans who restrict access to sexually explicit material. §230(c)(2).

However, since 1996 this law has been interpreted far more broadly than intended or than the words of the statute suggest. Courts have tried to navigate the meaning of the CDA today. But the world today is very different from 1996. First, the Internet is no longer in its infancy. It has grown and is robust and thriving. However, crime and exploitation are also thriving on the Internet in ways unforeseen in 1996. Secondly, the drafters of the CDA could not have anticipated the role of the Internet in human trafficking which was not even recognized as a crime until 2000. Some courts, at the urging of Backpage.com and other tech companies and their representatives, have advocated that the CDA provide blanket immunity for their actions because they are internet companies. They argue that the CDA affords service providers immunity because Congress wanted a robust Internet. Some courts have read the law to offer such a broad protection effectively isolating service providers from liability simply because they are service providers. This is notwithstanding the fact that were these same actions committed by brick and mortar businesses, no immunity would be considered at all. This has prevented states from pursuing criminal charges or victims from suing service providers civilly.

Moreover, the law now recognizes a new series of crimes: human trafficking. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act was not passed until 2000. As a result, there is no guidance in the CDA on how to manage the CDA with the TVPA. So courts have tried to reconcile the immunity provision for Good Samaritans of the CDA with the intent of Congress to hold traffickers and those who enter into a joint enterprise with human traffickers liable in the TVPA. Some courts have struggled with this issue and resolved the conflict in favor of immunity for online entities. Many of these courts have expressed concern that they could not allow trafficking victims’ claims to proceed and asked Congress for clarification.[3] For example, a California Court explicitly stated, “until Congress sees fit to amend the immunity law, the borad reach of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act even applies to those alleged to support the exploitation of others by human trafficking.”[4]

Therefore, it makes perfect sense for Congress to clarify this tension. The Senate bill does so in some very simple ways within the four page bill. First, it adds a line to the “Findings” section of the CDA making the non-controversial clarification that “§230 was never intended to provide legal protection to websites that facilitate traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims.” Second, it adds to the “Policy” section of the CDA the similarly non-controversial statement that one of the policies of the United States is “to ensure vigorous enforcement of criminal and civil law relating to sex trafficking.” Again, this is not a controversial statement. Third, it leaves the Good Samaritan protections in place. Finally, it includes state sex trafficking and the enforcement of state sex trafficking laws as laws unaffected by the CDA, as well as clarifies what it means to participate in a human trafficking venture. These steps are narrow but critical to clarifying confusion experienced by courts trying to reconcile the express intent of Congress in the outdated CDA and current TVPA.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.

By Mary G. Leary, Professor of Law, Catholic University of America, Shea Rhodes, Director of Villanova Law School’s Institute to Address Commercial Exploitation, Chad Flanders, Professor of Criminal Law and Constitutional Law Scholar, St. Louis University, and Audrey Rogers, Professor of Criminal Law and the Internet, Pace University.

—

[1] 1995 WL 323710 (NY Sup. Ct. 1995).

[2] 141 Cong. Rec. H8470

[3] E.g., Jane Doe No. 1 v. Backpage.com, LLC, 817 F.3d 12, 29 (1^st Cir. 2016); California v. Carl Ferrer, Michael Lacey, and James Larkin, No. 16FEO24013, Ca. Super. Ct. (August 23, 2017).

[4] Ferrer, No. 16FEO24013 at 18.

September 15, 2017 by Guest

Law Professors Weigh in on Amending the CDA – Part 2

Q: We keep hearing that passing these bills will end the internet as we know it? What do you think of these claims?

These claims are misplaced. For example, the Senate bill is a 4 page bill that simply clarifies how the CDA (passed in 1996) is affected by the TVPA, which was passed 4 years later. It retains the immunity provision for Good Samaritans and will not substantively expose any good actor to increased liability, stifle creativity, or affect free speech.

In 1996 Congress had many goals with the CDA, most of which are mentioned in the “Findings” and “Policy” sections of the CDA.[1] On the one hand, the Internet was in its infancy, and Congress wanted it to grow to its full potential. That being said, it also worried that this nascent industry might allow access to sexually explicit material on a new scale. Therefore, Congress struck a balance between these two concerns and passed the CDA as part of a wider system to limit the ability to access sexually explicit material online. Congress also wanted to prevent service providers from being sued for screening out this material. Thus, they created a Good Samaritan provision which protects Good Samaritan companies from being sued for their self- regulation to screen out explicit material. It was never intended to give immunity to bad actors not engaged in self- regulation, but engaged in illegal activity, but that is how the tech industry has argued the CDA should function.[2]

Over two decades later, the Internet is no longer fragile or in its infancy. Rather, it has developed significantly and is on very solid ground. It has also grown criminally and Congress has learned two important facts. First, the Internet is the largest marketplace where trafficking victims are sold. Second, that bad actors are misusing the Good Samaritan protection to insulate them from liability for their criminal activity, arguing that the CDA provides absolute immunity because they are service providers.

These legislative proposals are narrow. The Senate bill simply clarifies the CDA by including sex trafficking in the list of crimes Congress seeks to inhibit on the internet. All these proposals will do is clarify and update the CDA but they do nothing to limit the Good Samaritan exemption. Good Samaritans will continue to be protected just as they are now. Bad Samaritans will not.

Q: How do these bills hold some bad actors, like Backpage.com, accountable without chilling free speech on the internet?

The claim of First Amendment deprivations are also misplaced allegations designed to preclude any common sense discussion of clarifying the CDA. The First Amendment was intended to help a free and democratic society navigate these issues where criminality and speech can sometimes intersect. The Free Speech provision was never intended to have certain topics taken off the table never to be analyzed. These arguments that limiting internet service companies from partnering with bad actors to sell children online will chill speech are simply scare tactics designed to remove amending the CDA from any discussion.

The First Amendment is critical to our democracy, but has never been absolute. For example, it does not protect offers to engage in illegal transactions.[3] The CDA sought to address the problem of access to sexually explicit material online. Congress intended to encourage corporations to limit this material, by protecting them from litigation for their efforts to actively screen such information. Finding there was a disincentive to self-regulate, Congress explicitly stated one of its purposes was to remove this disincentive by encouraging limiting explicit material. As such, it drafted the CDA to balance these interests. As a result, §230(c)(1) recognizes that service providers cannot be treated like publishers of news and be held responsible for the third party content of news posted on their platforms. §230(c)(2) provides for immunity by protecting ISP’s from litigation for their actions to restrict access, NOT for other criminal actions. §230(e)(3) limits contrary state laws but does nothing to limit state efforts to enforce their laws consistent with the CDA.