Original subtitles

- [Man] You want to start somewhere or?

- [Woman] Well first just introduce yourself as the author,

what has led you to this time and what you're doing

and then we'll take off with questions later.

- Sure [clears throat].

Yeah, I've been having sex since I was four.

My first sex act I was engaged in was to watch

my father put bread and water in my mother's vagina

and I was engaged in an oral act.

They talk about the impact on a child

and that's true it does it

but it's not the impact that is necessarily felt as a child

because you're incredibly resilient it's when you wake up

30 years later and you realize what was done to you.

And that your life is in total disarray because of it

and it all tracks back to a series of events

and things that were done to you not by you.

It's not the breaking of the life as young

because it is, it's having to deal with

the consequences of it in adulthood.

[dramatic music]

- [Woman] I grew up in Thailand so I'd seen

sexual exploitation and all these things growing up.

- The second largest criminal enterprise in the world.

- [Man] It takes a lot to shock me, we'll say it that way.

And to see it rampant, it literally just makes you revolted.

- I think she got aroused watching him beat me and

he got aroused in watching her engage me sexually.

- There was one boy, they wanted him to work as a beggar

but he didn't look pitiful enough so they cut off both

his arms and then set him on the side of the road

so people would feel sorry for him and give him money.

That's when I decided I wanted to fight human trafficking.

- [Man] You get over there and they're bringing these

10-year-olds into their rooms and, oh, that must be somebody

that's taking care of their boots and no, they ain't.

Yeah, they're taking care of 'em, but not in that way.

You know, it floors you.

- If you take a young boy of 12

and he is anally raped by 30 or 40 men,

and then he's made to kill his mother

by inserting barbed wire in her vagina repeatedly,

somewhere in that process his soul is broken.

[speaking Spanish]

- And I think that is the real legacy of child sexual abuse,

and the horrendous thing which is sexual-trafficking.

[chuckles]

It's pretty fucked up.

[somber acoustic guitar music]

- What's cool about this film is that we actually really had

no idea what we were doing. [laughs]

We were just moved by a vision, we were just moved

by the movement, we were just moved by the idea

that we can possibly make a difference and an impact

and raise awareness and inspire the youth to take action.

You know, this is a non-profit film, I'm a monk,

and so there's no personal gain for me, or for our center.

The gain is impact, reach, awareness.

People can possibly change.

And so during the research phase,

searching for people to interview,

it was a scary process, well at least for me.

I think the others were good with sending an e-mail but,

for me to approach these organizations and high-level people

and non-profits like UNICEF, it's kind of intimidating.

I introduce myself, like "hey, I'm a nun, I'm a US veteran,

and I'm directing this film to help raise awareness

on sex-trafficking by inspiring the youth movement."

And all of them were just like,

"yes, it's all about the youth, let's do this."

We really went into this project with no expectations.

All we wanted to understand was what sex-trafficking was

and how we can be of help by raising awareness of this issue

so we were inspired to travel to the Philippines, Mexico,

and New Orleans and even locally, Dallas to meet the heroes

of the movement but it turns out what we were initially

looking for was completely different.

We just wanted to know what sex-trafficking was,

and we thought it was pretty straightforward,

but really it turned out to be something completely

different and we had a bunch of misconceptions.

- [sighs] This is a difficult question.

And in fact, historians can be useful in this process.

- A lot of us, we think that ended 200 years ago

with the Emancipation Proclamation and absolutely did not.

- A recent work by Joseph Miller called The Problem

of Slavery as History encouraged historians and others

to talk less about slavery and more about slaving.

When we use the word slavery, we're conjuring an institution

and an institution that most people associate with

chattel slavery, with the transatlantic slave trade,

these kinds of things,

and that institution did in fact die in the United States.

But if we look at slaving, that is the ways

of maintaining unfreedom, commodifying the body,

all of the practices that really make up the constitutive

experience of what it means to be enslaved,

then slaving certainly doesn't stop, it maintains,

it morphs and it continues.

[somber music]

- Look, I mean, it's a tough sell to a lot of people because

it's a subject matter that a lot of people don't want to

deal with, it's just kind of uncomfortable.

Well I think the missing piece for me was the scale of

this crime, whether it's 20, 30 million people a year

worldwide and it's like a huge industry.

- I've been working in this field

for almost 25 years already.

Because the victims are really younger and younger.

The youngest victim that we cater in this shelter

is a one-year-old girl,

sold to sex, cyber-sex.

- Down in a lot of South-American countries,

I've been involved with some guys that do rescues

from sex-traffickers and one of the guys goes down there,

he's involved in a great organization, a couple of them

I know and they go down there and they act as

people coming down to buy girls.

American real-estate moguls coming down to buy girls,

and they set up the people, they get a big suite in a hotel

and they do deals with the local cartels.

And it's simply a spreadsheet.

The guy brings in a spreadsheet.

He says "what age girl do you want to buy?"

"If you want to buy a 12-year-old girl, it's going to be

"$20,000 because that's how much money she will make me.

"If you want to buy a 16-year-old girl, and I've had her for

"four years, well you can get her for three or four grand."

And they've got the whole thing worked out, it's a business.

And it's a business based on prostitution

that's really enabled by tourism.

I've got some great friends involved in recovery on that end

and they do a fantastic job, but those guys will tell you

because of the level of depravity they see,

for every 10 girls they rescue, they're leaving hundreds

if not thousands behind.

That next week, another American tourist, male or female,

is going to be down there demanding to buy children for sex.

- Almost more than half of my life doing this.

I'm always running there and there, rescue in the port,

in the airport, anywhere.

It doesn't stop.

It just continue.

And there's a time come that I said,

"it will never stop."

[ominous atmospheric music]

[somber piano music]

- Parents try to find different ways of survival,

but also finding ways out,

for their children.

I think, unfortunately many parents do sell their children

cold-heartedly, but many parents are also fooled

into believing that these children are moving onto

a better future, if you like.

Very few children here it seems are actually kidnapped,

taken off the street and then sent for trafficking.

They are actually handed over by their parents

one way or another.

But these are small kids being told to carry out

sexual acts with themselves or with another child.

Of course it's abuse, yeah.

And so there is a twisted mindset, I think, among parents

who maybe don't want to admit or realize

that they are actually committing a crime and that they

are allowing abuse to happen to their children.

- These boys, a lot of them were from up-country Thailand,

where they didn't even speak mainstream Thai,

they spoke different dialects, or they'd come from Cambodia,

Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia different countries and they'd just be taken.

The traffickers, they'd go to their home towns,

and they'd tell the parents, "listen, you can't afford

"to feed your kids, we can give your kid a job in Bangkok.

"He'll work in a restaurant, he'll wash dishes,

"he'll make maybe 5,000 baht a month.

"We'll send some of that money back to you."

And these parents, they don't have a choice.

They can't feed their kids, so they send them and then,

of course, these kids don't work in restaurants.

They're either sexually-exploited as male prostitutes

for gay men in Thailand or they're put on the streets

as beggars, or they're even made to steal.

So those are the sort of situations that these boys

are coming out of and they're so young,

some as young as four-years-old.

Four to sixteen was the ages at this school.

- People know that they can get vulnerable people

so they kidnap them, literally.

And they take them by force to work in fields or in drugs,

or in criminal actions,

or in sexual-exploitation.

- If this is all you experience day to day,

then you don't know of anything else.

If you're expecting to be treated a certain way,

if you're expecting the only form of affection to come

through sexual contact, then if you want to be touched

at all, then you'd behave in a certain way and you

receive that human touch through sexuality, then that's

what you go looking for 'cause we all need touch.

I think if you're brought up in an environment

and you don't know it's different,

then you don't know that there's something else out there

that's different, so you don't actually see yourself as

a victim of trafficking unless it's happened later in life.

If it's happened early, or abuse is early,

then that's all you ever know.

So there's no reason to cry out, I know that sounds odd but,

if you're 16 and you've been having sex since you were four,

then those 12 years are the only memories that you have.

They would never know that there was a life outside that.

[somber atmospheric music]

- You know, the most hurtful, most traumatic experience

a child could have of both physical and sexual abuse

happens in the home by their own parents.

- In an article I just read by a woman that was engaged by

I think it was the FBI that they're involved in the

investigation of child pornography in America.

She was encouraged by a friend to turn the volume down

on the videos when she watched it and she decided not to.

So she would turn the volume up and she said

the haunting thing that was for her is that

not one of these children made a sound.

One case there was a man, a father, a step-father

videoing having sex with his five or six-year-old daughter,

videoing on a handy cam while he's penetrating her.

And this little girl, her eyes glazed over,

and she looked away and didn't make a sound.

And the woman said that that was the most

horrendous part of the entire thing.

Somehow they felt it was okay to engage with

a sexual act with a child.

So I wonder what they had done to get to that point.

Like, how can you, as a man, I don't understand how

penetrating a pre-pubescent child

could bring any form of sexual satisfaction.

There's gotta be a level of brokenness and depravity

that's happening at some level.

Kids, when they're constantly abused...

A child gets in a place where it's trying to survive,

and it'll do anything it can to survive.

- One of the things that we know is that

most women who end up trafficked were severely abused

either sexually or physically when they were children.

We now know that early trauma affects the brain,

and we also know that if your brain is suffering from trauma

you will become a vulnerable teenager and that is when

young women are recruited into sex-trafficking.

Once young women have quote-unquote

hooked up with a trafficker or a pimp,

then very often force is used and coercion is used

and that is what makes it into sex-trafficking.

So you might be lured into the arms of a potential boyfriend

who turns out to be a pimp by the promise of,

"oh, we're gonna be staying in hotels,

"we're gonna go to discos, we're gonna do drugs,

"you're gonna have great clothes," and that then very

quickly becomes something quite different.

- There is a consensus that something like this,

sex-slavery, sex-trafficking is only happening

in third world countries where,

people maybe don't necessarily care, they turn a blind eye,

which is completely untrue.

There are cities across the US where it is

a daily basis issue and living in Los Angeles,

it is one of the main hubs.

A lot of towns along the border of Mexico,

it's very easy to get girls and put them right into Mexico

and then move them wherever they need to go.

It's a very lucrative business for those,

that take children and take women and take men.

It's a $32-billion-a-year business,

and the average cost for a slave is $90.

So there's quite an uneven balance there monetarily.

The US is one of the top countries

where these slaves come from.

- I find this all the time, that people say,

"this is a problem outside of Houston, this is a problem

"outside of Texas, outside of the United States."

This is a much bigger problem

than what you might imagine it to be.

It's not just something that happens in other places.

That indeed it's happening here and I think there are many

who would say demand, because of our affluence, is greater

in the United States than in almost any other place.

People want to make money with this industry,

and the place where there's a lot of money is here

in the United States and so whether they're

domestic girls or international girls,

trafficking is here with us in the United States.

[melancholic piano music]

- Of course I was getting stares from a bunch of people

while walking in the Red Light District, like I'm wearing

white so it's definitely like I wasn't going undercover

or anything and so, for them to look and be cautious,

and then in my mind I'm just trying to say some mantras,

trying to say some really good sounds

and send out some prayers for the girls that,

if by chance their soul would hear me, like,

"hey, stay strong, fight, escape, do whatever it is

"you need to do to get out, people are ready to help you."

And all I could do was send those thoughts

as I'm walking down the strip.

You know, it's just so,

it's such a different way of life, there's girls selling

their body and then there's me, a monk. [chuckles]

It was definitely an interesting experience because

they're curious, like "what are you doing there?"

I just hope that they found some peace.

[Namokar mantra in Sanskrit language] [melancholic harp music]

[muffled chatter in foreign language]

[speaking Spanish]

[shouting in foreign language]

[thud]

[chatter in foreign language]

- Unless we're prepared to look at the darkness

within our own soul, and then have a look

at the condition in our world that caused it,

then we're never going to be able to progress and grow.

- A lot of this is just ignorance, I think.

People just don't know, and they don't want to know.

I think that's what's at the root of a lot of these problems

that people don't have enough compassion

for other human beings.

I think that's what has to be changed.

If you really knew that girl, if somebody knew what she

went through and everything, I'm sure there's no way

this guy would want to pay and have sex with her.

Right? I don't think so.

He'd probably want to take her outta there

and beat the hell outta those guys, you know?

[siren wails]

- We've got supply, if there wasn't a demand for it,

there would be no supply for it.

So again, in order for us to address the issue of

sexual-trafficking, it's not just a matter of rescuing girls

that have been kidnapped or boys that have been kidnapped.

At some point you have to ask the question,

"what has happened to us,

"that we actually crave and desire that?

"What happens to us as men and women that

"that's what satisfies us and makes us feel complete

"in a very intimate way?"

And I think only when we start to answer that question,

do we ever have a hope of truly stopping sexual-trafficking.

- How do we stop guys from saying and thinking,

"it's okay for me to go out and buy these girls?"

So part of the way that we stop demand is you change

the culture, it's sort of this idea of "boys will be boys,"

and when you think of your average buyer,

I think people sometimes think that they're pedophiles,

or they're people that are specifically after girls,

but I think what we see more than anything is that

these are men who want young women, and they don't know

whether they're 15 or 21, but they want these young women,

and it becomes very easy for them and these are guys that

anything from middle-class and above, but also sometimes we

see in these Latino cantinas

that the average salary is not very high with some of

these people, so I think it's a broad spectrum of these

men that are buying these girls.

But the common denominator for these men is that they feel

like it's very easy for them to buy a girl

and have quick sex, basically.

And so we're seeing this time and time again that

if we're gonna end demand, it's all about making it scarier,

making it harder and sort of eliminate a culture where

it's okay to do this.

It's always a gamble.

Is it worth a gamble to go online and buy this girl

when you might be arrested?

Most men would say it's not worth a gamble,

but when you live in a city where,

if you gamble you always win,

and when you gamble you're never going to be arrested,

a place like Houston, you're gonna go gamble more often.

You're going to buy sex more often,

if you feel like there are no repercussions

to you buying young women.

- Unfortunately, some people, to them ignorance is bliss

and they don't want to know because it's tough stuff to know.

It doesn't leave you and so they would rather just go on

about their merry day and sadly that's very prevalent in,

you know, just in general.

People don't want to know

the reality of what's going on behind closed doors in their

communities and across the nation and all over the world.

It's a hard thing to talk about.

- The problem with sex-trafficking, the problem with sex,

the problem with child sexual-abuse for boys and girls,

is that it's all taboo, can't talk about it.

You're not supposed to talk about those dirty topics.

One in five girls are assaulted.

Boys are assaulted, too.

And especially with the way society treats men, men can't

even express themselves, they just hold their stuff in.

And sometimes in crazy cases the victims

become the victimizers and you'll hear that story.

And so we have to think bigger, we have to raise our voice

to say it's not okay, enough is enough.

- It's a taboo, it's something that we

don't want to talk about.

And I think this is also where gender roles are coming in.

Men are not willing to talk about the extent

of which they have been victimized,

whether they've been victims of trafficking,

or whether they've been victims of male-on-male violence.

We don't exist in a world where young boys can stand up

and say, "hey, I'm being sexually-abused."

We're beginning to make a little bit of inroads

with bullying and I hope that that will create an atmosphere

in which more male victims can come forward.

- Well at first it made me really mad to know

that I lived in this country for 14 years

and I'd never even heard of this.

And if it's such a big crime, it's affecting

27-million people, why aren't we talking about it?

So that made me really mad,

and then it made me want to do something about it.

- At the Center of Hope there were 43 girls and I just heard

from the director yesterday, now there's 50.

The numbers shouldn't be increasing,

they should be decreasing.

[somber acoustic guitar music]

- Technology has made it very easy

on the trafficking industry.

It's made it very easy for those

that want to buy a young girl.

You only need to go on your computer,

and probably faster than a pizza can be delivered here,

we could have a young girl delivered to your home.

I think that social media and technology is really sort of a

driver in terms of this explosive growth that we're seeing.

- A lot of things that are trending with the new technology

are webcams, cyber-sex,

cyber-sex-trafficking.

Guys are making money, girls are making money,

from putting children in front of a webcam,

and there are these perverted people around the world that

are like, "yep, I want to watch a little Asian kid."

- You're talking about the commodification of bodies,

the consumption of bodies, and these are being moved along

the same networks of capitalist exchange that are

transferring other goods.

- There's no profile of white, black, Latino or Asian who's

behind this, 'cause it's happening all across the board.

And sometimes it's guys that you would think,

they should really be spending this money on their family,

but they're taking this money and they're spending it

on a woman.

I think there are lots of examples of guys that have become

addicted to this, that this is something they do a lot,

and you see this through some of the review sites

where it's the same guys that are doing this,

it's sort of become a hobby or something with them.

But you see plenty of other guys that do it

once or twice a year, you see guys who do it on vacation,

but I think when we're talking about

some of these Texas cities though,

it's not happening because people are doing vacations

or business trips, it's happening because it's easy.

- Each person that's a victim of human-trafficking

is a person, they're someone's daughter, someone's sister

or someone's mother or someone's son,

'cause boys, they're trafficked as well,

and we need to see them that way.

We need to stop thinking of the statistic.

27 million is a big number, but we need to break that down

and stop seeing it as 27 million, some huge big number.

We need to think of that as 27 million human beings,

a Kathy, a Betty, an Amir, a Daniel, human beings,

and once we see it that way,

we are not gonna be able to tolerate this and we will,

as a direct result of realizing that our sisters

and our brothers and our children are being tortured

and raped in these terrible ways,

then we're gonna do something.

- I have a friend, the mother of Lizette Soto,

nine-years-old, she disappear, and everything indicated

that she was sold to Americans in a yacht.

So that girl could be the woman that you are buying,

and you are so selfish because the parents are dead in life

crying every night,

praying to God that their daughter will appear.

So any time we are so selfish,

and we don't think of others,

we make a lot of pain in this world.

[speaking Spanish]

- When it's personalized, when you encounter

a survivor's narrative, it's emotionally impactful.

But what do we do with that emotional reaction?

One of the things that I find that a lot of American

students react is they immediately want violence, in a way.

There's something about the way our culture works

that the solution to every problem is some sort of military

intervention or some sort of law-enforcement crackdown

and some sort of use of violence.

So what I try to show students is that the ways in which

these interventions often exacerbate problems of trafficking

and we've gotta look at the more structural issues

of poverty if we want to actually make a difference.

- Poverty and trauma and drug-addiction

create opportunities that are being exploited

by traffickers.

Some women are snatched on the street,

I don't want to discount that narrative, but it is not

what happens to 99% of women who end up being trafficked.

I see a lot of panhandling as a form of human-trafficking,

and we see that all over the world.

Those who are weakest, and women included,

become targets for traffickers.

I think when you begin to lift the veil

that exists around the trafficking women in our society,

then it becomes scary.

[ominous chord]

- There's a line in Fight Club.

Edward Norton goes loose on a blonde-short-haired kid

in the film and the protagonist Brad Pitt,

his alter-ego says "why did you do that?"

He says, "I just wanted destroy something beautiful."

And unfortunately there's a group of people in our society

that great joy in destroying something beautiful,

and there's nothing more beautiful than the smile

of a little boy or a little girl.

[somber piano music]

[speaking Spanish]

[playful chime music]

- I was young when it happened, old when he left.

He came when it rained.

He said "lie still, hold still.

"I'll do it, don't struggle, no one will know.

But they can all tell, they see it, they know it.

I'm defiled, soiled, smeared like excrement

on a sacred altar.

He came telling me it would make me a man.

He came telling me if wouldn't last long.

He came telling me it wouldn't hurt.

Then why does it still ache?

Why does it never stop?

I lie awake pretending to sleep, hating the nights,

dreading the dreams.

Puddles in the corner of my soul.

Fearing the rain, longing for sunshine.

- I'm kind of embarrassed to say that up until being 27,

I had never heard of human-trafficking before.

The first glimpse I got was,

my family still has a lot of family at home in Vietnam,

in Vietnam, your neighbor could be your cousin,

so I've got the cousins, right?

On Facebook, I would see the cousins, I would send pictures.

Send them clothing, they would send me pictures of

themselves styling up the clothing, it was really cool

and everything and then one particular cousin of mine,

she was actually a neighbor to my mom when my mom was

younger in Vietnam, she started styling the clothing

very promiscuously, and so I,

picked up on it and the next time I traveled to Vietnam,

I started to hang out with her a little bit more.

So I said, "where do you hang out?"

"Show me where you'd go" and she'd take me to these coffee

shops where right off the bat what I noticed was a lot of

really sexy-dressed young women,

and a lot of American guys.

Found out that she was working there,

she was tending to the men there,

and later when I asked her why she worked there,

she said that it was a deal made by her uncle

and that she couldn't get out of it.

She was so afraid to tell me all of this

because of what her uncle could do.

So I looked into it and I realized that this is the thing

that's called sex-trafficking,

and that there's so many different angles to it.

Like that's just one story.

I met girls that were,

let's see, from nine to thirteen,

who had had sexual encounters with on average

about 20 to 25 men a night.

I also met women who,

who had been raped and then would get pregnant from

men, the clients of the brothels and then they would have to

abort the child but because it's a sin to abort a child

in Thailand and also with their faith, they would then have

to take the fetus and lay it outside of the doorway

of the brothel just to kind of ask for forgiveness for sins.

I met young girls in,

shelters in Vietnam who had scars

all up and down their arms just to mark who they belonged to

and just watching them sit and sift their shirts and,

just feel so inadequate with their own skin that they're in

was like, it's just disgusting.

- A lot of people have been assaulted, molested or raped

in this world and a lot of people are getting raped

every single day.

They're getting raped 30 to 40 times a day,

and someone's just countin' some $100 bills,

and just smiling and gambling and drinking and doing drugs.

But you know what it's like to be raped?

What's rape?

Rape is, I can't even define rape.

Rape is just wrong.

Rape is, you kill a person inside.

You make them dead.

And can you imagine when you're being trafficked,

you're dying 30 to 40 times a day.

Your soul is being totally ripped apart.

Your sense of aliveness, your sense of identity,

your sense of your own inner-power is ripped away from you.

Imagine that.

And it's going on all the time.

Every 30 seconds someone's being trafficked right now.

Someone's being raped right now.

Someone does not have a voice.

[woman speaks in foreign language]

[speaking Spanish]

[somber piano music]

- I think the saddest part is also some of these kids

are so desensitized with knowing that, like there's the

women that are aware of being ashamed,

okay that's one thing, but then there's kids who actually

don't know that they're working for

mafia-type guys in Thailand

or in their circumference and that they just think they're

doing right for their families, so they're walking around

with menus of women on what you can do with them,

how these women can service you, how these little boys

can lay with you and they'll just run after you in

the streets of these countries trying to sell because this

is their job and they feel like they're doing good

because of whoever they're answering to.

I would see grown men jump right into cabs with little boys

sitting on their lap, I've seen men play with little boys.

It takes everything to not go and just

want to claw these people's faces out,

but that's not the answer.

Going in on one disgusting person is not going to save

the bigger issue, so,

those are some of the images in my mind that will never

leave until I could do everything I can to

put a stop to human-trafficking.

- My family's life on the outside was very together.

Very prominent, very good, highly educated,

very influential people.

I never thought that my childhood was abnormal,

until I was 45 and it struck me that it wasn't.

I was never meant to start having sex at four,

but I had sex at four.

I had to crawl up some lady's kaftan,

and perform oral sex on her.

You know, if I didn't do a good job,

there was consequences for it.

I was beaten for it or punished,

or I was rewarded with being allowed

to participate in an activity.

Or taken to a party where,

I was used for sexual-gratification.

You know, it does something to you.

I don't know why they did it.

I think she got aroused watching him beat me and,

he got aroused,

watching her engage me sexually.

- As we're talking right now, somebody's being trafficked,

somebody's being sold, somebody is crying because they're

not gonna return to their family, someone thinks that

they're not gonna make it past another year.

It's happening right now and it's insane that it happens

in your own backyard, trafficking happens everywhere.

In fact, most people don't know that the number-one

most popular event where trafficking is happening

is the Superbowl.

The Superbowl is an event we all look towards to celebrate

and be, you know,

have a fun time with your friends and be crazy and

at that exact moment, there are thousands of trafficked

women coming in to service men, and that's something

that happens right under our very own eyes.

I've been at the Superbowl celebrating.

So just to be aware that it's everywhere.

[boy speaks foreign language]

- [Man] Girls are for procreation, and um,

boys and for pleasure.

You hear something like that and you're like,

"nah, that's not really" and then you hear about it

more and more and more.

- Some of the guys I know that served in the military,

they knew that it was part of every Friday night

in Afghanistan.

Young boys would be taken and forced into sexual acts.

- [Man] All the guys get drunk and everything else,

and you see 'em walkin' around, gettin' the kids out of

elementary school, bring 'em back home, get everybody drunk

and lo and behold, they have a great time.

- It wasn't just that they used the sex-trafficking thing,

it was that the sex was used a tool to brutalize them

and totally break them down and deprave them,

make them soulless, if you take a young boy of 12

and he is anally raped by 30 or 40 men,

and then he is made to kill his mother

by inserting barbed wire in her vagina repeatedly

and then chopping her head off,

somewhere in that process his soul is broken,

and he's destroyed.

So then you've got the ideal soldier.

Someone who'll live for you because you protect him,

you care for him and there's nothing in the world

for him to live for.

And it's the same in Afghanistan and Iran and those places,

it's not only the selling of them into trafficking, it's

the very deliberate breaking down of these boys and girls,

as just objects in gratification.

- A personal side for me to do this film

and to raise my voice,

is because I was abused when I was six-years-old.

A painter grabbed me and took me to the bathroom.

And I remember lying there on the floor,

just looking at the bottom of the toilet.

Just feeling totally empty and dead inside.

And right after, he looked me in the eye,

he grabbed my arm and he said,

"if you tell anybody, I will kill you,

"and I will kill your family."

And I never said a word.

So I just kept silent.

But that silence is stopping now.

[mantra in Sanskrit language]

One, two, three

- I fight against human-trafficking.

- I fight, I fight, I fight!

[cheers]

- [sighs] The power of the people.

Power of the people.

When you see a lot of violence in this world,

you're moved by it.

And I believe if you have a heart,

you want to do something about it, you can't live your life

living in violence, you don't want your children to live

in any kind of violence, so you want to do something about it.

There are activists on the line,

putting their life on the line to save these girls,

to save these boys and we don't hear their stories.

And so I think as a movement we get inspired

by other people's stories so this way we have

some kind of idea of what's going on.

We wanted to hear the ups, the downs, what keeps them going,

what are the challenges?

Everybody tries to be perfect in this world and they try

to act as if they have it together, but they don't.

And to know the struggle, to know their why,

to know why they didn't quit, to know that this is what

a survivor had to do or believe in in order to escape,

or through a social movement we can bring about change,

and if we focus on the movement behind sex-trafficking,

being human-trafficking, then I believe,

as a world, we can end this.

- [Activists] I fight against human-trafficking.

I fight, I fight, I fight!

[cheers]

I fight, I fight, I fight!

[speaking Spanish]

- So often times when we talk about trafficking,

and people will say,

"Is there a way to do a knockout punch?

"How do we really knockout trafficking here in Houston,

"how do we knockout trafficking here in Texas,

"in the United States?" [bell rings]

That's our clock.

[Dr. Bob and crew laugh]

Saved by the bell!

[upbeat music]

I'm often asked, "how do we knockout trafficking

in the United States, what is the big knockout punch?"

- I think we need to think two ways about this.

Both in terms of individual action and structural action.

- It always feels difficult when you're in the midst

of a fight, there's always, it's hard when you can't see

the light at the end of the tunnel.

We just gotta keep moving forward and be positive

and I think we can do it.

- Unless we get together and tell the world it's not okay,

to tell the sex-traffickers it's not okay,

to tell the perverts it's not okay,

to tell the pedophiles it's not okay,

to tell the johns that it's not okay,

then it's gonna be okay, everything's gonna be acceptable.

- I think when we think about specific things that we can do

within our community to stop,

I think the idea of talking about this and letting people

know that it's not just an international issue,

that it's a domestic issue as well.

I think that's important in terms of growing this awareness.

And letting people know where trafficking is happening,

and putting pressure on public officials to change laws.

There are plenty examples of good laws,

so you could find laws and you could bring them

to your public officials and say, "this needs to stop."

- I don't know if we have any laws

that actually protect women from human-trafficking.

I know that we have plenty of laws that punish women

for human-trafficking.

What I am beginning to see happen is legislation

that is being passed that protects minors from trafficking.

They very often become exempt from crimes

they might have committed,

in the act of being trafficked.

To what extent, however, those laws are enforced

is a different question.

They look very good when they're being drafted

and signed in the state legislature.

Whether they trickle down all the way to law-enforcement

is yet to be seen but I think that is a start.

- I think also in changing the culture.

I think we've all known young women who think,

well guys can go to strip clubs, it's just what guys do.

But I think guys and young women alike need to be saying,

"it's not what real guys do, it's not what good guys do,

"because this is part of the problem."

And we see these ties, there's a web between strip clubs,

between sexually-orientated businesses, the massage parlors,

and trafficking and I think people need to understand this

is all part of the web and when we do one of these things,

we're contributing to this web of human-trafficking.

- As long as we see women as commodities that can be bought

and sold, we will pay a price for sex.

If we begin to see sex as something that we cherish,

and that only happens consensually,

then the demand would hopefully decrease.

- Stop watching pornography, 'cause pornography very

directly fuels human-trafficking and our generation

especially is porn-addicted, we watch it so much.

And it directly fuels human-trafficking, these girls,

these men in pornography, lots of them,

have been sexually-exploited,

and it's a supply and demand thing.

So as we continue to demand more pornography,

they're gonna have to supply more,

and that involves sexually-exploiting more people.

- We need to being to also start

punishing those that seek prostitution.

We need to punish or criminalize the fact that

men buy sex and we need to criminalize the fact that men

hire women out for sex.

We need to empower girls to feel strong about themselves,

and I think whether it's sexual-assault,

whether it's trafficking, whether it's standing up

for yourself as an artist or as a creator or just as a girl.

We need to raise strong girls who believe in themselves,

and see their worth within themselves and not being

given to them by others.

- She had been put up in a room and had been performing

sex acts that were set up, not by her,

but by the three individuals for commercial profit.

In this hotel right here they found her

sitting in the parking lot.

So as you can see, this is occurring in our communities

right around the corner.

- And then I think if you really want to get active,

I think doing the equivalent of these tours where you

know where trafficking is happening in your town.

- Oh my gosh, I would say go out and serve.

That's the best experience, when I traveled with Night Light

and I actually volunteered, I actually stripped down and

just was a fly on the wall and source of love

for these women, just going there, holding their hands,

listening to their stories.

What I love is that out of seven-billion people,

so many people relate differently to one another,

but it takes you stepping out in order to connect

with that person.

Once you've felt the situation and you understand that

there is a need for your help, look at your circumference.

Like what is your area of influence?

Are you a blogger, are you a teacher, are you a musician,

are you an aspiring doctor?

Whatever your area of influence is, it's the perfect

voice to help human-trafficking.

It might be writing a song and dedicating the message

or the proceeds, it might be as a doctor going out there to

help the women who don't have that type of help they need.

Whatever it is, for me as a television host it's lending

my personality and my ability to emcee an event

and keep it light and so it just depends on your area

of influence but don't think that just because you don't

have a bunch of money or that you're not super-famous

that you can't help.

Everybody has an area of influence, you just have to really

figure out how it would bless you most

to make that impact that's needed.

This quote-unquote taboo subject that's out there,

how do we turn around and make it where

it's brought out into the light,

and how do we make our leaders, the decision-makers,

turn around and put people like myself,

other agencies, use some of those resources

to turn around and go after,

go after some of these folks?

- If I get pissed off for your ails and you can just be calm

and just walk in forgiveness and I champion your cause,

I actually think that's healthy.

You know you've got someone standing up with you

and for you.

If I felt like someone was standing for me and with me,

then my rage actually decreases,

I walk in calmness and forgiveness,

because the consensus is that this just isn't right.

It's when you feel totally isolated,

like no one really gives a shit,

and somehow you've gotta make your way in the world,

because no one's hearing you on this. It is just not right.

It's just not right to be fucked in the ass

by your father or his friends with tools.

That is not a wholesome thing for anyone to experience.

And when there's just a total lack of rage

over those sorts of topics,

then rage becomes personified on a personal level,

but I think if there's this sense of outcry that this stuff

just isn't acceptable, then it can be that Gandhi march,

it can be that Martin Luther King Jr., it can be that

soft walk in love of protest,

as opposed to the Malcolm X extremists.

- If the human spirit can prevail, it will be eradicated

and it will end.

- All of the great historical movements for social justice

have been driven by young people.

So young people have the energy, they have the passion,

and they have the time, also the creativity.

Something happens when you get older,

and you begin to become a little bit more set in your ways,

and thinking outside of the box becomes more difficult.

- I'm hoping that what we suffer now will be stopped

in our time.

And young people can take on the torch and

hoping that maybe the next generation can explore

opportunity without the risks of being sold and enslaved.

- We don't have the finances or the status in society to go

make a big difference, but we shouldn't let that stop us.

Just because we're super-young or just because we don't have

a bunch of money doesn't mean there's nothing we can do.

- I never stopped and thought, "you know what,

"I'm not gonna say anything because nobody's gonna listen."

I didn't care if somebody listened or not.

It was like, "I'm gonna say something because I'm upset,

"and I'm mad and I'm angry and things need to change,

"and if I don't start to do it, who is?"

So I think if millennials really think about

what they want to do, there's nothing they can't do.

- I still to this day can't get rid of it.

I'm 37 now, it's been 10 years and when you really allow

your mind to go there and you picture your children,

your sisters, your friends, in this case my mom's neighbors,

you can't just sit quiet.

- I think we're at a really opportune moment in history

to make a difference around these issues because

as your film I'm sure will show, people all over the world

are becoming aware of the problem and want to make a change,

want to make a difference.

That strength in the end can move mountains.

- I can tell you that the true life is when we discover

our purpose in life and we open our arms,

we open our hands and we really want

to give our life to others.

- Statistically,

in your neighborhood,

someone very close to you is being sexually-abused.

And if you don't take responsibility

and get actively involved in doing something about it,

then a little life will be broken.

- [Carolina] There is something every single one of us can

do to help fight human trafficking.

Just 'cause you aren't gonna give your entire life

to fighting it doesn't mean you can't do something.

- So to those young people that is watching this,

I can tell you that to save a life,

it's really to save our world.

- It is very important for us to raise our voice

about a cause we believe in because if we all just said,

"somebody else will handle it" or if we all just said,

"oh, what am I gonna do?"

Nothing would ever happen, nothing would ever get done.

There are plenty of people who were affected by something,

touched by something and said,

"you know what, I'm gonna talk about it,"

and because of that, change happens.

- Strength in numbers.

Like if you organize human beings and you have one cause,

you can influence the world, influence society,

but if you've got 20 guys running around on their own

doing something as opposed to getting together

and organizing, that's a big difference.

[somber piano music]

- I think it's too filtered.

I think that's the problem with the conversation,

is people don't want to talk about it.

They don't want to talk about it.

They don't want to talk about the fact that I put my tongue

in my mother's vagina at four,

and no one wanted to have a conversation about it.

They still don't.

I'm okay with it.

What the hell, man?

Someone shouldn't be okay with it.

I have to be okay with it, because it's part of the journey,

I can't get tied up in what that means, but it would be

really nice if someone was pissed off on my behalf.