Child Trafficking Is a Western Problem

Teach your children about heart-led moral truth.

There are some who say the current political regime in the USA has accomplished great things. On the list of victories they cite is a huge number of “child trafficking” prosecutions. It’s a lie. The vast majority of prosecutions under that label were merely going after individual child porn consumers.

It is the biggest waste of time and resources to go after the end user. If you could survey the clinical literature on pedophilia, you’d find that the vast majority of pedophiles have never once molested a child, nor do they have the self-will to try. They know it’s evil and harmful to children. Granted, for the few victims there is no distinction, but if we allow victims to rule our policies from their rage, it would be hell on earth. That’s a fundamental flaw in our political debates today. Satan alone speaks through rage; the angels will not go there.

There have been very few prosecutions of actual child molesters in our current government. Have any big shots from Hollywood of Washington DC been prosecuted? In the US population, there aren’t that many child molesters out there in the first place, though far too many. Still, on the scale of things, actual child sexual molestation — in the sense of lasting harm to the child — is quite rare. In the context of biblical justice, there is nothing you can do to make life better for victims who get on with their lives and aren’t deeply tormented by whatever happened to them, and there are a lot more of those than you might imagine.

In the Bible, actual harm is never measured objectively, but always rests on the sense of loss and hurt. People whom the Lord heals aren’t hurt any more. There is no secular State to which we owe all moral debts. All things belong to God personally, and His decisions are final, and by definition, normative. Human reasoning is incapable of discerning moral truth.

We have to get away from this absolutism common with materialistic assumptions. I can’t say that enough, and unfortunately, I know the people who most need to hear that never will. In the broader context of reality after the Fall, we all carry wounds on our souls, and we can’t pick out one kind of wound as somehow far more terrifying than another. The greatest threat to victims of child molestation is the absolutist campaign against child trafficking, as if it were the single greatest threat to our human future. It’s a problem that must be addressed in the wider context of what sin has done to us.

I am against prosecuting people who are found with child porn on their computer, unless they refuse to reveal where they got it. The real crime is not looking at the pictures, but enriching those who produce them. To the degree we can stop people looking at the pictures, we have to go after those who produce that stuff. Wasting time with the end users is a very hollow victory. It changes nothing of substance; it’s a lie of Satan. There is simply no proof that gazing at those images provokes actual molestation. It may seem obvious to Western legalism that it does, but that’s not how it actually works in the human soul. The human race is full of harmful fantasies that almost no one dares to actually try indulging.

Ever looked in the mirror and examined your own perversions? What keeps you from indulging them? We all lust for things we shouldn’t have. Even without faith, culture is the single greatest restraint on human perversity, and at the same time, it gives birth to the temptations we didn’t know would call to us. Scripture says that; do a search on the word “temptation.” The point of having a covenant of law is to hinder the action, not the temptation. It’s the Curse of the Fall that law also identifies things for our fallen nature to lust after. In our fallen condition, having a desire for something is not sin in itself, but it is merely the result of being fallen.

It is a perverse lie of Satan written into Western assumptions that the desire for something is itself a sin. This horror at the very idea that someone would desire sex with a child is itself a perversion of our culture. The horror provokes the desire. The West has way more child molestation because it’s such a shocking thing in the first place. It’s an obsession arising from a materialistic outlook, in which this life is all there is.

So we have this rather open obsession with youth as an idol, and it’s only natural that people with sexual urges would include in their lusts a lust for younger flesh. It’s just not a big deal where cultures tend to mysticism and reject materialism. Do you know that child trafficking in Asian countries was not about sex until Western tourists showed up? Until that kind of tourism became a way to make money, child trafficking was all about labor slavery.

I don’t advocate for making pedophilia legal. I advocate dismantling Western Civilization as the single greatest threat to moral truth in human history. Short of that, I advocate putting arrest pressure on pedophiles collecting child porn only so the source can be prosecuted. We should work through the dealers until we get hold of the producers. Offer clemency to every link in the chain until we find the folks who actually perform this crap. The product itself isn’t worth prosecution. Such a false and shallow endeavor serves only to protect the wealthy and powerful who routinely indulge in this predation on children.

And the protection of children would go far, far better if we took it for granted that our children would be desirable to almost any random person, both family and strangers. We should consider that normal, not creepy and certainly not criminal. And because it should seem common to us, we can take sane precautions, including teaching our children about it as early as possible. Our obsession with childhood “innocence” is bizarre in the extreme compared to what the Bible teaches. In the Bible, children become aware of human sexuality very early, and saw it in the proper context, as well.

I’ll harp on this because it’s one of the biggest problems I’ve dealt with myself. It’s a part of the much bigger question of how humans should relate to each other, so as to build shalom. We should want social stability, and only divine revelation can get us there. It requires a complete shift away from the “American dream” and to look for the things God has promised, which is most certainly not the same thing. Create an atmosphere of understanding the risks and rewards of living in a fallen world while walking the path back to Eden. This issue is just one part of a much larger whole.

We need to completely revamp how we look at human sexuality. Westerners have some of the most perverted understandings of what it means to man and woman, and what was lost in the Fall. We have made monsters of little things, and ignored the monsters that devour us (“chasing gnats and swallowing camels”).

Teach your children that expressions of admiration can be deceptive. Teach them that what looks and feels like love is not always giving and compassionate, but can be consuming and destructive. Teach them not to trust people too easily. Give them armor and weapons they can handle. Teach your children how to love, which includes being cynical. Humanity is fallen. Learn those things for yourself. Give them a worldview that reflects biblical revelation, not the foul stinking mess that is Western Civilization.