Redemption Song

Statistics get thrown around so much these days that they’ve ceased to carry much weight. But there’s one statistic that’s been lodged in my brain since I heard it several months ago: 27 million slaves live in bondage throughout the world today—more than in any other time in history. Growing up in the South, the legacy of slavery hung like a dark cloud over my Southern heritage with the unsettling likelihood that some of my ancestors presumed to own other human beings. In school, we learned of valiant abolitionists like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and I always liked to imagine that if I were alive in the South of 150 years ago, I’d have spoken out against the injustice or even helped smuggle escapees along the Underground Railroad to freedom in the North.

But, as far as I knew, the issue was settled soon after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. I mean, I knew about child soldiers forcibly recruited in Sierra Leone and northern Uganda. I’d read about raiding parties in Southern Sudan and Darfur carrying off children. I’d heard about American pedophiles traveling to brothels in Southeast Asia. But I thought of these more as isolated incidents rather than as one of the greatest sources of human suffering today.

“The vast majority of people who are victims of slavery are very poor people, and they’re from underdeveloped countries,” says David Batstone, author of Not For Sale. “And so, as tragic as it is to say it, they don’t matter to those of us who live in the United States and Europe. I’m sure that if a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl from our neighborhood was kidnapped and forced into slavery, it would be an urgent crisis that would be all over the news. Eighty percent of the people trafficked are poor women, half are children, and they don’t tend to have much of a voice in the world.”

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If it was the statistic that got my attention, it’s the individual stories in Not For Sale that have kept it. Batstone tells of people like Srey Neang in Cambodia, who was sold by her family at age seven and forced to work for a series of masters, who would constantly remind her that they “paid good money” for her. Soon after she turned 15, a neighbor offered to take her on a trip to the ancient Buddhist Angkor Wat. Instead, she found herself at a karaoke club in the town of Siem Reap, where she was sold for $150 and raped by four adult men the first night alone.

Batstone’s research hit close to home when he discovered his favorite Indian restaurant near his San Francisco Bay area home was being used as a front to bring young Indian girls into the U.S. as sex slaves and forced labor. “I started out writing a book, and it turned into a movement,” he says. “As I began to do research about it, I was blown away by how big it was, and how little I knew about it—a $32 billion industry, 27 million people. I’ve always been fairly connected to social movements, so the fact that this was all pretty new to me meant that it had to be unknown or invisible to a lot of people, so I set out to do a five-continent investigation. About a third of the way into the whole journey, it just got very personal for me. I would have dreams about the kids that I was meeting in captivity, and it started to consume my every waking hour, as well as my sleep time. I decided that I had the wherewithal to build a social movement. I decided to make this my full-time vocation—to become an abolitionist.”

The Concert to End Slavery
Musician Justin Dillon says the issue found him. After reading a story about the sex-slave trade in the New York Times Magazine, he was playing music in Russia and befriended one of his translators. “I found out that her planned trip to America that summer, a couple months later, was a plan to have her trafficked,” he recalls. “She would have paid her way to get to America, and they would have taken her passport, put her into a brothel and tried to kill her family if she tried to leave. That changed my life, and I started writing music about it, started putting concerts on, starting doing benefit shows for International Justice Mission—anything I could do to connect music to this cause.”

Late last year, he took his idea of a large-scale benefit concert to Batstone, who brought in producer and singer/songwriter T Bone Burnett. They settled on a series of filmed performances interspersed with interviews and information on human trafficking: The Concert to End Slavery will include performances by Burnett, Imogen Heap, Cold War Kids and Nickel Creek, and appearances by Ashley Judd, Daryl Hannah and The Fray. “Cold War Kids have a teeny bit of clout now, and we want to be effective with it,” says the band’s frontman, Nathan Willett. “[Slavery] is one of the few great injustices of our time, and people in the U.S. are generally unaware of its existence.”

One of the film’s highlights is the collaboration between Moby and Emmanuel Jal. The issue is personal for Jal, who was only seven when he fled his village in Southern Sudan and was quickly forced to take up arms with the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. Nearly five years later he was rescued by a British aid worker and taken to Kenya. He began singing about his experiences, and his first single, “All We Need Is Jesus” was a hit in Kenya and even received radio airplay in the U.K. In 2005, Jal collaborated with Abdel Gadir Salim, a Sudanese Muslim, on Ceasefire, singing of peace and reconciliation. “Hip-hop saved his life,” Dillon says of Jal. “It’s a way in which he healed and grew. Now he has a brilliant career, and all he wants to do is sing about the freedom that he was given, and to help free others.”

Batstone hopes music holds the ultimate key to building momentum among the abolitionist community. “Music moves people in ways that go deeper than reason. And I think that’s what’s needed, because the reason behind slavery and suffering is just too deep. I think we almost have a defense mechanism around it. But I think that music, like ‘Amazing Grace,’ a classic song [penned by reformed slave trader John Newton], connects in a deep way—both the tragedy and the redemption. We have lots of redemption songs, and that’s what artists are bringing forward. They’re helping folks. If you look back in history, the Negro spirituals were able to communicate the suffering and the hope in a way that a sermon couldn’t do. We want to create a whole subculture around suffering and hope, and music helps us do that.”

For more information, visit IJM.org.