Isaac Crockett:              Well, welcome and thank you for tuning in to our program today. I’m joined by Sam Rohrer, our regular host and president of the American Pastors Network. If you are a regular listener, you will realize that I am not Pastor Gary Dull or evangelist Dave Kistler. Neither of them are able to be with us today, so you have me, Isaac Crockett, pastor of Hamburg Bible Church and the substitute player, as it were. Yesterday I was supposed to be helping substitute, but the town of Hamburg was a little bit underwater. Where I was going to be coming from, a satellite office there, was closed due to flooding from the Schuylkill River there. I’m glad to be here with Sam in the same location and we’re dry, so that’s good.

But today we do want to welcome a special guest in just a couple of moments here, as we talk about a subject matter that is prolific. It’s all over every church I’ve worked in for any length of time and in hundreds of churches that I’ve preached in. If I talk to pastors or people in the church much at all, you would find out that there’s a lot of this going on in communities, rural communities, cities, everywhere, and that is this issue of human trafficking. If you’re parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles listening today, there’s some important information. I will just put a warning out there that this is the subject matter. If you have children listening with you, we will be talking about these issues.

We won’t be pulling any punches, as it were, but we’ll be looking at an overview of a ministry that has been dealing with this for decades. Long before the recent #MeToo movement began, this has been going on. I don’t think you want to miss this. In fact, you may want to use the archive of this from our website or from our smartphone app. You might wanna use some of that for information, might go back to it or pass it along to other people and, again, you can go to our archives and you can email or text or put a link out there on social media. To really help us understand the issue of human trafficking, to also give us a biblical context and understand, and as well as solutions in this very sad issue, I wanna welcome our special guests, Becky McDonald.

She’s the president and founder of Women At Risk International, also known as the acronym WAR International. There is a war on women and there are women at risk in our country and across the world. Becky has spent much of her life in different places in the world, has worked for decades to help people, women and children, as well as men, anybody’s who’s trapped in this situation of being taken advantage of, human trafficking. She’s spoken in many places, churches all over, as well as even military bases, even the Pentagon, spoke with law enforcement. She’s an expert in this area. Becky, I wanna just thank you for working your schedule out to be with us on our program today and for being and Stand in the Gap Today with us.

Becky McDonald:          Thank you. Thank you for being the voice of the silenced and stepping in there with us.

Isaac Crockett:              Well, you know, Becky, right now for our listeners because some people have a better idea of what’s going on than others, but just to start out with the definition of what we’re talking about. We wanna look at what it is, what human trafficking is, and just look at the basics of it, and then look at the scope of where it’s going on. Then in the next segment, we’d really like to get into your ministry that you work with, WAR International, and your personal testimony. Then after that in the program, we’ll hopefully have time to get into more specifics, as well as looking at solutions, looking at practical things that we can do to help this. Just to start us off, what exactly would you define human trafficking as?

Becky McDonald:          Well, human trafficking is the fastest growing arm of crime. It’s growing faster than guns and drugs. It is basically, in layman’s terms, the sale of a human being, male or female, against their will to do something they would never do on their own, either labor or sexual slavery. By far, sexual slavery is the higher of the two, but labor slavery is very real. This is basically slavery. This is this century’s slavery. We got rid of legal slavery years ago. We did not get rid of racism. We have a long way to go on that.

But we now have an illegal slavery that has more victims than all the victims ever in time put together. It’s the sale of a human being against their will through force, coercion, or fraud to either sell them for labor or for sexual slavery. It is rapidly growing in organized crime and small mom/pop groups are moving into this fast. You sell 100 pounds of drugs and there’s just real consequences to that, and you have to hand it off and do it over and over again, but you can sell a 100-pound child over and over and over and over and it’s just good business. It makes a lot of money.

Sam Rohrer:                  Becky, the entire theme is something we’re glad that you’re here with us, so we can bring this thing out to people. It’s a hard concept for us to grasp that in America, we think maybe around the world somewhere, yeah these things are happening, but we’re talking about here in America, are we not? I want you to clarify a little bit more, to what extent is it here in America? How many people are involved each year or each month, however you want to break it down so that we understand exactly and get a grasp of what’s actually happening here.

Becky McDonald:          Well, over a decade ago, Homeland Security came into my offices here in west Michigan and they were coming to west Michigan, the nice little Midwest three times a week because it was that bad even right here. They now have a full time staff here. At that time, we were an international organization and we are in 54 countries, 53 then. They came and sat in my office.

We had just rescued a baby, sold at two weeks old for $200. Rescued at one month old, and I was sharing with them that the face of trafficking globally is becoming children. They shared with me then, over a decade ago, that they at Homeland Security were looking for an advertisement of a six month old, pay-per-view live feed, that you could sign up to watch, of an anal rape of a six month old in this country, in the land of the free.

That changed the trajectory of Woman at Risk International in the United States. We were about advocacy here and aftercare overseas. We stepped into aftercare, rescue and after care here with a vengeance because this is the land of the free, and our children are at risk. In fact, they told me, the State Department estimates that up to 300,000 minors, that’s just the minors statistics, your daughter, my daughter, my granddaughter, American citizens with constitutional rights, are at risk every year of being trafficked. This is a carnage of the innocent.

Sam Rohrer:                  Becky, clarification here. Are these children that are being trafficked and others, are these being brought into our country from other countries, or are these children being born here in the United States, that are being pulled into slavery? Tell us about that.

Becky McDonald:          Yes. So there are international statistics. We’re the third highest destination country in the world, depending on which study you look at. The FBI estimates that about 17,500 of the million people who cross international borders are brought to America. That’s foreign people. But inside our borders, American boys and girls, and boys are on the rise too of being trafficked, but American children, I’m just giving you the minor statistics. That doesn’t count the person who’s over 18 and was trafficked at two or five or seven or whatever.

So this is the minor statistic for under 18 year olds, up to 300,000 of our own children in this country. Only a third of those are kidnapped or runaways. It’s another myth to think that these are just kids who are down on their luck and out and about. Over 90% of traffickers are somebody your trafficked kid knows. This is somebody you know, family, neighbor, friend, schoolmate, somebody.

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Isaac Crockett:              Well welcome back to our program. Unfortunately today we’re talking about something that I wish we didn’t have to talk about, but fortunately we’re talking about it with somebody who knows the issues and who is able to help. That is this issue of human trafficking. It’s an insidious modern form of the slave trade. It’s never gone out. The slave trade has been around for a long, long time, and this human trafficking that we’re talking about is just so sickening and so sad, even during the break we were talking about it some, but these numbers that even in our own country, 300,000 American children each year, and those are probably conservative statistics but that they would be abused in this way.

So as we look at this issue, we have our special guest with us, Becky McDonald, the president and founder of Women at Risk International. Becky, I would just like to start by asking if maybe you could give us a little bit of your testimony, of how you got involved in this kind of a ministry and how long that you’ve been working in this field, because this isn’t the kind of thing that most people want to even think about, much less actually step in and get involved with it, because the more you know, the harder it is. I know, even as a social worker, as a pastor, as a teacher in the public school system there are times that I go home at night and I just, it’s just, you carry a burden with you because of what you’ve been dealing with during the day. So could you maybe give us a little of your background on how you got involved?

Becky McDonald:          Yes, well as you know, I’m the founder, but my story began at an early age. I was five when my father moved me and my brothers, our family to the land of East Pakistan, and he built a hospital there, a humanitarian mission hospital in the jungles there. So I grew up in lands steeped in the tradition of the Taliban. I went to boarding school in West Pakistan.

By the time I was 14, I had been through two wars there, that we stayed there through so that my father could protect the Bangladeshi people and at 14, it was the civil war where West Pak conducted a genocide against East Pak. India came to our defense and we became Bangladesh, as it’s known today.

But my 14 year old girlfriend was raped and fought back and to teach her you are a woman, you have no voice, how dare you fight back, you are property, they poured acid not in her face as is usual but down her throat to take away her vocal cords forever. That experience in my life burned a hole in my heart, and it set me on a pathway of being the voice of the silenced and whispering words and dignity and the message that they were created by the Creator God with worth and dignity and they are not the sum total of all the junk that’s been done to them. They are who God says they are.

Just giving them a safe place where they can rewrite the story of their life and start over, and rebuild their lives and have dignity and worth and dream again. My greatest joy is seeing them dream. Just saying to them, what do you want to be when you grow up, whether they’re 3, 13, or 33 or 53. Because that’s what we do with our children.

So these, my commitment to your daughter, if she falls in my path, is I will do for her what I would do for my own daughter. This is not a program or a project. This is family. So giving them that place where they can rebuild their lives and have that, have wrap around services in a safe place. So Women at Risk International is in 54 countries and we address many risk issues like honor killings and acid attacks and female circumcision and rapes, but we are most known for our fight against human trafficking because it is the wildfire.

It is the fastest growing arm of crime, and it is attacking our nation in every city and every back corner, rural, urban, doesn’t matter. Where there are children, there’s risk. So our passion as an organization is to create safe places and leave a legacy of safe places for people to rebuild their lives.

Sam Rohrer:                  Becky, you said that you’re in a number of different countries. How many different countries again? What do your chapters look like? I’m just kind of … I mean I know we’re going to get into more, but what you actually do to help people, but you’re emphasizing young women and girls, but you’ve also talked about boys. Are boys also a part of this effort that you’re trying to help or is it primarily girls?

Becky McDonald:          Yeah. Overseas, we’re rescuing men, women and children. Children then are pulled into orphanages, where they’re going to school and growing up and going to college. We’ve graduated doctors and lawyers and school teachers and goat herders and cosmetologist and whatever their dream is. In the States here, we are rescuing men and women, mostly women in the States, but boys are on the increase. In America, when it’s a child, a minor, it goes into the foster care system. That’s another whole conversation because in America, everything is sliced and diced by over and under 18.

We are, I’ve been in over 70 countries, and we partner in 54 countries, including the land of the free, this country, and so our partnerships look like everything from something we started from scratch to somebody who comes along and says we need help in this area and we come alongside and lift their arms in the battle.

Isaac Crockett:              Well, you know, Becky, I’ve known of your ministry now for I think maybe about a decade. I have friends, I have a family member who’s been involved with you all and someone who in her past, has gone through a lot of things. I’m somewhat familiar with it, but for our listeners and just for anybody who asks, well what is WAR International? What is Woman at Risk? How do you describe what you do and how do you kind of put it out there for describing who you are as a ministry?

Becky McDonald:          Our mission statement is to create circles of protection around wounded in the name of Christ, and give them culturally sensitive intervention projects. What that means is, it looks different in every culture. The bottom line is, men and women do not heal until they feel safe, but every culture defines safety differently. So a safe house in Cairo is going to look very different than in Europe or Asia or America. But we are involved in over 200 partnerships in 54 countries, and we address all manner of risk because all kinds of things put people at risk.

But as I said before, we’re most known for our fight against human trafficking, but we partner all over the globe with people and in the United States of America. But our mission is to create circles of protection. Very simply, I’m just a mommy to the mommy-less. We’re just creating family that has been denied people and giving them that safe place to rewrite the story of their life and start over. We’re non-sectarian in who we take. We take male, female, transvestite. We have rescued traffickers. We will take anybody who is running from that world and wants to start over.

We’re not bopping anybody over the head with our faith. We don’t have to. We just wait until they ask us why we care. We earn that right to answer that question and then we show them that we care because God created them and God cares.

Sam Rohrer:                  Becky, as a ministry are you working through churches to help communicate and to come alongside? Have you been really forced, perhaps because churches are not aware and are not really involved, have you been forced almost to create a parallel structure, more or less, to help in this case, those who are in need? How are you working with churches?

Becky McDonald:          We work very closely with churches. Honestly the faith community is one of the reasons that the anti-trafficking effort is growing in America. According to my law enforcement friends, who are not in faith communities, they have often given credit to the faith community for keeping this thing alive. Micah 6:8, this is what the Lord requires of us, right? To do justly, love mercy and walk humbly.

The other thing is that this generation, so 30 years and under, my son’s generation, I swear they’re born with a social justice gene in their DNA, and I love this generation because I’m a lone abolitionist in my generation. I’m 60, and I’m a weirdo, but when I speak to universities and young people, they are not deer in the headlights. They are not surprised that babies are being sold on the internet with the umbilical cords still attached and being attacked in live feed. You can sign up to watch.

They know it all. They see it all. So working with churches and pastors, shepherds, and so I honor you men for opening the subject up. In the last year and a half, two years, I’ve seen men step into our circle and I feel like there’s a moving of God among men to step into this issue. This industry’s dominated by women for obvious reasons. We’re rescuing mostly women, but we as an organization are honored to be surrounded by good men who help us be all we can be and give us what we need and are there for us when we want them.

So I feel that the church is stepping up to this plate, especially as younger pastors are getting involved. The good news is people really care. You can tell the story in the wrong way and turn people off and if you throw vomit at people they’ll run for cover, but my goal is not to gross you out. My goal is to break your heart, and break your heart for what breaks God’s heart, because what we’re experiencing in this nation is a wildfire, and it’s our children, it’s a carnage of the innocent, and we will have no future if we don’t step into this.

We work very closely with churches. We do a lot of training, eight hour training days, and we hold, we do those in secular settings as well. Military bases, government departments, law enforcement, hospitals, but we also train at churches and the thing I love about the body is when I speak to 1000 lawyers or military, that’s all I get. Or 1000 doctors, that’s all I get, but when I speak to 1000 people in a church or in a civic community, I’m getting one of everything. This is 1000 piece puzzle and it takes every piece of the puzzle.

The body is uniquely set up to be holistic and have wrap around services. If I go to lawyers, there’s only one thing they can do to help me, or doctors, and those are important pieces of the puzzle, but when I speak to the body, I’m getting everyone and that’s what it takes because this is about creating safe places and all the wrap around services that a person needs, and not just say I’ll rescue you, everything else you’re on your own, or I’ll get you the stitches, everything else you’re on your own. You can’t …

Isaac Crockett:              Amen.

Becky McDonald:          Separate people that way and divide woundedness like that. You have to …

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Isaac Crockett:              Welcome back to our program, Stand in the Gap Today. I’m Isaac Crockett and Sam Rohrer, our host and president of the American Pastors Network is with me. We’ve been talking with our special guest, Becky McDonald about this issue of human trafficking. We just know that the heart of man is deceitful and desperately wicked and just the wickedness of man brings about these things with the modern slave trade, to areas that we don’t even want to think about, but we have to discuss because the bible talks about this, and the bible brings solutions to it.

Even as we think about the ancient slave trade or what used to happen in our country before slavery was outlawed, you think of the United Kingdom, of John Newton and William Wilberforce. You think of here in the United States, of so many Christians and pastors that were passionate about the abolition of slavery, and so it was neat to hear you saying, Becky, that there are a lot of churches pushing for the end of human trafficking and helping these people.

So we have a lot more to talk about that, but first of all, any of you listeners who are just joining us here, right now in our program, I want to thank you for joining, and remind you that if you want to hear the whole program, or to listen to this program again, and I think many of you are going to want to listen to this and share it with others because it is impacting our culture. It’s impacting our small towns as well as our big cities, this idea of human trafficking, but also other programs, if you want to listen to those again, you can find all of these resources on our website standinthegapradio.com, or you can get our mobile phone app and listen online via that. You can also get our archives on the mobile phone app.

You can follow us on social media and use different posts and things that we have that you can share it with friends, maybe family members or friends who are younger than you are. Maybe you’re trying to reach some of the millennials in your family and you can use our online resources that way, or even ask a friend or a family member to help you figure it out. In doing so, it will help show them some of our information. Then I also want to ask any of you who are listening right now, whether on the radio or online, if you would just help us by praying for our ministry, praying for the ministries of people you hear on this program, and also we’d be very grateful if the Lord lays it on your heart to support our ministry financially.

Well as we go back to this ideal of human trafficking, the problems that we have in our own country as well as around the world, and we’ve seen that God is using Women at Risk International in this area. We want to go back to our special guest now, Becky McDonald. She’s the founder and president of Women at Risk International, somebody who since she was a teenager and saw this happening first hand with a friend, has been used of God to reach out and to help women, as well as children and boys and even men, all people in situations like this. Becky, you’ve often spoken of, and you were even mentioning it earlier on the program, of creating circles of hope and protection around the weak and the wounded. Could you maybe explain that again and maybe go into a little detail there of what you mean by putting circles of hope or protection around people and maybe a little bit of how you do that there at WAR International?

Becky McDonald:          That is a phrase that is dominating everything we do, and really it’s not a cute way of saying that you need to network and you need, it takes a village to raise a child. You cannot do this on your own. You need a circle. You need multiple people. You need everyone to come around the wounded and the weak. You cannot rescue them, pat them on the head, say, “Nasty little life you had there honey buns, go do something nice.”

You have to give them an immediate way to find safety and to find dignity and to find income. 90% of the women that get picked up in a police raid in Cambodia and sent home without job training get resold. If you’re sold once, you’re messed up. If you’re sold twice and you’re a Buddhist, and you believe in karma, you really give up. We are very, very exercised about creating safe places where there is immediate dignity.

If they’re an adult, while we’re sitting there counseling, and talking to them, we are also giving them income, immediately so that they have something they can do. When I was speaking at Quantico, at the Marine General, annual generals’ conference, their wives were fighting over the jewelry and there was one particular pearl necklace, all our pearls are real, and it was made by an American rescued woman, who part of her story was rape in the military.

When I got back to Grand Rapids, I sat down by here and I said, “Girlfriend, the most powerful men in the Marine Corps wives were fighting over the work of your hands.” She jumped up, ran around and sang a worship song. Went home and told her babies, “Your mama is an artisan.” That wiped out her past. I can tell her til I’m blue in the face that she has worth and dignity, but when someone buys the work of her hands, it’s not a handout. It’s a hand up, because she deserves to be paid for it.

So our circles of protection mean wrap around services, where we come around these people and help them. It is one thing that’s different about us, is that we do a lot of hard work at helping them come up with immediate income if they’re adults, and ways that while they heal and put their lives back together, whether it’s a barista certificate in our Tea Trade Café or whether it’s jewelry or cake decorating or micro-enterprise and so we’re very exercised at that, because we need to give them immediate ways to feel safe and have dignity.

Sam Rohrer:                  Becky, let me come back home again here to the United States. We know about some of the circumstances overseas, although we don’t know very much, but I would be confident that our listeners today are shocked by the numbers of 300,000 children a year in the United States, that are born here. That are pulled into this area of slavery, and nothing really being done other than perhaps what you are doing. Let me just ask you so people get a better handle on it here. If you identify or find a baby, that’s being trafficked or a young child, how are you able to step in and to help them? Is law enforcement helping with? You just can’t go in and take a baby from a circumstance, so how are you doing that?

Becky McDonald:          No. The truth about the United States of America is that law enforcement works with us. Overseas, we would never call the police. I raised my children overseas. I taught them to be afraid of the police and nice to stranger. Then I brought them to America and I said, “Now, you be afraid of strangers and you run to the nice policeman or woman.” Doesn’t mean we don’t have bad cops. We have bad pastors and dads and brothers and mothers and everything everywhere.

But for the most part we do not, I’m not an advocate of being a vigilante. We call law enforcement. We got a call on a Friday here at headquarters from a brother who happened to be a pastor. His sister called him. She had been trafficked by what we would call a savant trafficker, which is like a boyfriend that pretends to love you and then gets you to another city and says, now here’s what you really have to do.

She called her brother and by Saturday, Homeland Security had rescued her because we called them. We worked closely with law enforcement and by Sunday, she was in a treatment program. We did an eight hour training day at a church for the community and a mom sat through that day, and then a year later, her daughter was trafficked and she knew to call us and the FBI picked that child up in a raid and reunited that family.

We work very closely with law enforcement here. Overseas, the hardest thing for me is to walk away. I’m offered babies all the time in the red light districts of the world, and I can’t take them. That makes me a trafficker or a kidnapper and I have to walk away and figure out a way to step into that child’s life. If anybody knows anything about WAR, they know the story of Sweetie, the baby tied to a pole in the red light district in India, being beaten black and blue by the madam.

Finally, at seven years old, she’s in a home and being raised and going to school and hearing lullabies and she just loves me, when she’s tucked in bed at night. But in America, when we deal with children, of course we’re dealing with the foster care system because child protective services. We follow the laws in every country we’re in, and when I was working … I still am working overseas in the 50 some countries we’re in. I learned all their laws.

I came to America and I had to learn 50 sets of laws because every state has a different set of laws, and if there’s no nexus, then it’s not federal law, it’s state law. That’s something I share with law people, legal organizations all the time, because it gets complicated here. We always work within the system, and the hardest thing is these children, these babies. For me as a mom, I mean that’s the hardest thing. It’s one thing to walk away from a woman who hasn’t made up her mind yet what she wants to do, and I never talk a woman into leaving. That is not for me. That’s me looking down my nose and telling her how bad her life is. How dare I do that.

All I do is say, “Hey, if you ever want to make a living in a different way, call the number on the back of this card. I’ll teach you to make jewelry or sew or cake decorate,” or whatever her dream is. But when I have to walk away from a baby, I’ve told my children, if I ever end up in jail, it will be because I snap over the babies and I’ll grab one and become a trafficker for Jesus or something. But, there’s ways around that. We just have to work within the system.

Isaac Crockett:              Becky that’s something I really appreciate about Women at Risk, is that they don’t try to recreate the wheel. They work with groups that are already in place in these countries and in our own country and they work with the law enforcement and it makes it more practical. Real quickly, we just have a few moments before we go to our last break here, where we’ll have a little more time to talk some more about it, but could you maybe just list briefly some of the types of ministries you have? You mentioned the jewelry that was made. Could you tell us about what you do with that and some of these other ministries you do so the women can make a living?

Becky McDonald:          Anybody can go to our website warinternational.org or the War Chest Boutique and look up where we have over 6000 products that our rescued men and women make that we sell so that they can support themselves with dignity. We also provide housing and counseling and stitches and childcare. In fact right now, there is a serious need. I sit on panels all the time with law enforcement in this country, and the number one need in this country is for housing.

In fact, Grand Rapids, Michigan right now has a 2% occupancy. Like you can’t rent anything here. We are in the middle of a fundraiser to raise money for an emergency shelter because it is so desperate. We had a mom running with her four kids on a Friday night, hiding under a bridge. We had to put her in a hotel, which is often the scene of their attack. That’s the worst place you put a person like that. It triggers them, but we didn’t have an emergency shelter and so right now we have a match up to 100,000, and so we’re constantly coming around them and pulling into that circle whatever their needs are.

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Isaac Crockett:              Welcome back to our program. I’m Isaac Crockett, pastor at Hamburg Bible Church and of course I have with me Sam Rohrer, who all of our regular listeners, you recognize he’s the president of the American Pastors Network and our regular host here on Stand in the Gap Today. Our regular listeners will realize that we don’t have the southern accent of evangelist Dave Kistler, or the wisdom of Dr. Gary Dull, longtime pastor here in Altoona, Pennsylvania today. I’m the substitute for them today, but we do have a topic that we’ve been looking at, a topic of the awful reality of modern day slavery.

We have our special guest Becky McDonald. She’s the founder, the president of Women at Risk International or WAR International. She’s been discussing some of the things that her ministry does to reach out to those in need, to those being involved in human trafficking. In particular how difficult it is when children are part of this, which is becoming increasingly more a part of what the big part of the human trafficking trade, which is growing constantly.

So before we close, we have a few minutes here just to kind of close things up. So Becky, I want to have you maybe talk to us a little more. Just telling our listeners what the War Boutique is as well as letting us know about your civilian first response education. You’ve kind of referenced both of those things, but maybe you could just briefly describe these for our listeners, and again also give your website or any kind of contact information, how our listeners could find out more about your ministry there, WAR International.

Becky McDonald:          The War Boutique is our online store and people can hold parties. We mail you the product for free and we mail you a label to mail it back, so it costs you nothing. We hold parties all over the United States of America and it’s all products made by rescued and at risk men and women and it supports them. It’s really hard to go buy something at Penney’s or Macy’s after that, when you know that you’re helping someone rebuild their lives and it comes with a story card.

Each piece comes with a story card, so you know exactly what you’re getting and it’s a great gift moving into the holidays. You can go to the War Chest Boutique or our website and go to the shop section. The civilian first responder training was our response to Homeland Security coming into my life over a decade ago and telling me that the fastest growing arm of crime, human trafficking is a wildfire in the United States of America.

We hold eight hour training days now that talk about the 15 demographics, the 15 things that draw the eye of a trafficker to a community. West Michigan has 12 of them. The next one we’re holding that I’m aware of is on November 30th and it’s in Wellsborough, Pennsylvania. But you know Albert Einstein said that evil, the world will not be destroyed by evil people but by good people who see evil and do nothing.

Our civilian first responder training is our effort to train people who care to be a circle of protection to those they love and give them the 21 lures and the 22 signs and the 15 demographics, and how to share this with your circle of influence in an age appropriate way, and how to create a circle of protection and safe place for those you love.

We give continuing medical, CEUs and there’s also an online CFR. You can take the course online, if you go to our website. You can get the specifics for your area. So if I were to come to Wellsborough, I would be speaking specifically there about which of the 15 demographics are true of that area, but you do get the three keynotes. So you get the lures and the signs of it, and you can take that online. But then we also do them in person. Our passion is to give people the opportunity to be that circle of protection to those they love.

Sam Rohrer:                  Becky, let’s go here in the last couple of minutes if we can. Suppose there’s someone maybe listening to the program right now or maybe they know of someone who perhaps are in this category, and they’re stuck. They can’t get out or they know of someone that may be and they don’t know where to go. Can they contact you for help, and if they do, how do they do that?

Becky McDonald:          What I want to do is give you a couple numbers. You can call us, which is 1-877-END-SLAVERY. That is our 1-800 number. If you can’t remember the other number, just think 1-877-END-SLAVERY, and we will talk you through or walk through that with you. You can also call the government Polaris number which is 1-888-373-7888. Now if you call that number, this is not like calling 911. This is a government 24/7 hotline, and they will record what you tell them and then they will call the police in that area that you’re calling about and it will rise or fall by how well the police are trained in this.

But it’s definitely a starting point. That brother, that pastor that called us on a Friday, his sister was set free on Saturday and in a program by Sunday, he called that number too, but if you’re calling about a minor, they won’t even talk to you. So my survivors hate it when I give that number out, because this is not 911, going to run out and rescue. But, I really want you to call that number because it’s a government funded number and they’re a database.

Traffickers don’t fill out census reports, and so call that number and then call us or call a local nonprofit that’s working. You can also text that government Polaris number. You can text, if you’re in trouble and you need help immediately, you can text HELP, just the word HELP to the word BE FREE. B-E-F-R-E-E, which is also 233-733, and they will respond to you if you are in trouble.

You can also call us, and sometimes we have people who see things, and they don’t know what to do with it, and they’re afraid to make that phone call. They can call us first. Back in the day when I would call Homeland Security, I would be like, “Oh, I don’t know if I should be bothering you,” and they would be like, “Becky, stop it. Your tax dollars pay us to vet that tip.” So never, never doubt your tips. Sometimes those tips are what take down a whole organization.

We’ve taken down whole organizations, nefarious organizations from a tip that we didn’t think was going to go anywhere. You never know when that tip matters, but if you’re in trouble, by all means, call, text HELP to BEFREE or that number or call us and we will call … I got a call from a church in New Jersey one time. A woman ran into a church for sanctuary, and the church secretary Googled anti-trafficking, got my name somehow and we had Homeland Security over there within an hour.

Isaac Crockett:              Wow.

Becky McDonald:          So, just make that call. Don’t question it, and if it doesn’t go anywhere, oh well, but you have done the right thing.

Isaac Crockett:              So helpful, yeah. Sometimes it builds up too, as they get more of these calls. Well thank you so much for all this information and the number again 1-877-END-SLAVERY to get a hold of WAR, Women at Risk International. Sam, as we get ready to close, I’ll ask you to close our program in prayer, but maybe any final thoughts on this program as we’ve really just scratched the surface of this issue?

Sam Rohrer:                  Well, Isaac, we have, and Becky I want to thank you for being on. All of you listeners today, to this program, I would really like you to pray a great deal about how you can be involved in this. Be aware that this is an issue of enormous consequences right here in America. Take it as a matter of prayer. Keep your eyes open. These numbers, 877-END-SLAVERY, call WAR International to report certain things that you see, all of these things are most helpful. Let me go ahead and pray here now for us.