Agape International Missions Interview

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Every day you and I get bombarded with negative news. Just like the body becomes what you eat, the mind becomes what we’re putting in. It is important to listen to stories that not only give you hope, but also inspire you and uplift you. In this podcast, we’re interviewing experts who will break down the solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. And I promise you, if you listen to this podcast, you’ll not only stay informed, but you’ll also feel more energy in your life=. Welcome to great.com talks with.

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Hey, if you want to contribute to protect planet Earth, make sure you like and subscribe to this channel, because great.com is is a philanthropical project where we’re donating 100 percent of our profit towards the most effective causes, like protecting the rainforest and funding climate change technology and the topic of today is human trafficking. How do we stop the evil on earth – human trafficking? And to understand more about this, we have invited AT Holder from the organization AIM Agape International Missions. So I want to say welcome, AT, to this interview.

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Thank you for having me.

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AT, If we go directly into understanding the problem that you’re working with, how extended is human trafficking today? Is that a good start to start out?

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Yeah, so it’s hard to actually narrow down the statistics when you’re trying to find crime. It wants to be hidden. And so for the last decade, when they come up with human trafficking statistics, they’re just best estimates.

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But what we know from our work is that it’s a myth. A problem on a global scale that’s happening in every country in the world, in some countries.

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aren’t doing much about it.

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Of course, this would be the time when people don’t want this to be shown.

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So you’re saying it’s hard to kind of get those statistics. Could you tell us more? Help us understand what would be human trafficking? What is that for?

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Yeah, so we specialize in anti-sex trafficking work. Human trafficking is when someone’s coerced to work, their wages are withheld from them, it is just very much modern slavery taking place. Sex trafficking, is that adding in rape in a consistent amount.

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Now, the protocols that we follow is anyone under the age of 18 who is being coerced into sex is falls into sex trafficking. Anyone who is forced to make pornography under the age of 18 is being forced into sex trafficking. Over the age of 18, if it’s being forced than it would be sex trafficking versus someone who has their own agency and wants to participate in sex work. That’s not considered sex trafficking. Our primary focus is on rescuing and restoring those under 18, specifically women. It does happen a lot to men as well. Statistically, it’s 90 percent women. And so that’s where our primary focus is. But we have partners that help boys and men also exit and be

rescued from sex trafficking. Every country is different. So what we often look at just to be helpful is the US government puts together something called the TIP report every year. It’s a report card for every country. And it’s not just a grade, it is an evaluation. The US government, the embassies around the world, they work with different organizations to try to get a good feel on what is happening and what is being done. And so you can go into the United States TIP report and pick any country in the world and look at it. And you can see where a country is falling short. Even the US ranks in this of where they fall short and what they’ve done in the past year to improve the conditions, to fight sex trafficking or human trafficking, that that’s actually a pretty good method of getting a bird’s eye view of every individual country or your specific country you want to know more about. You can look at that report.

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And what was the name of that report? It’s just the T.I.P. TIP report, Trafficking in Persons Report.

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Ok, that is the best documentary we have to understand.

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It’s a good evaluation. So in the countries that we work in. We would agree with most of what is being written in those reports.

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Sometimes.

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It is a difference of someone going to do a report versus the people who are actually doing the work right. So we’re intimately familiar with all the details and we know the cases that we know the kids. The TIP report doesn’t have that type of information. They come, they interview. They try to figure out how they best can express what is happening. So it’s a good enough report. And it’s also estimated and we look at numbers of how many people are trafficked in the world. It’ll show how they’re coming up with those numbers.

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AIM, which is a short name for Agape International Missions, you’re located in specific countries. Could you tell us how come that you’ve chosen the countries that you are working with? Tell us more about the work that you are doing.

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It’s a good question, so 15 years ago, AIM started in Cambodia. There was a little town outside of the capital of Cambodia where it was the destination point for pedophiles around the world. If you wanted to have sex with little kid. This is where you go. So AIM went and started our Christian organization. So we started in a church and an aftercare center. Fifteen years have gone by and we’ve grown immensely from that point. The best way to kind of look at what AIM does is look at the model that we try to implement. We call it a holistic model. We’re not just trying to address one aspect of sex trafficking. We’re trying to figure out how to end it completely. So we have the organization started with just a couple; two Americans who went over.

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Now there’s about five hundred Cambodians on staff and a whole bunch of people from around the world contributing to try to make an impact with 11 different programs. Eleven is a conservative number of the programs in Cambodia that the first thing you think about when you think of rescuing somebody is the police. For six years now, Agape International Mission has been having a branch of the police that we work directly with, we have an office where an ex Scotland Yard, Scott, works and runs, we have police on contract, but we do the investigations. We have confidential informants. But since last six years, we’ve rescued over fifteen hundred children from sex trafficking. Now, one thing we don’t do is we don’t rescue unless we have a place for a child to go. The problem is if you rescue a kid. Out of. Just nightmares, not nightmarish thoughts, situations, they’ll go back to where they came from, right? We’ll go back to the family, explain to them to begin with. They’ll go back to very desperate situations. So you need a place for them to go. And that’s why a restoration center is so important.

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So rescue would be the first thing we do next would be restore. We have three restoration centers in Cambodia. As of now, we’re expanding to another.

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And this is a place where children find healing. We have therapists who work with them through their trauma.

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We have a social worker assigned to every child who ever comes to our program. So our social workers, we just keep growing with staff in that the most important staff, in my opinion, would be what we call Housemoms. These are. Oftentimes, grandmothers who spend the majority of the time with these kids. If you take a teenage girl, late teens, the first two weeks that she’s in our program at a residential facility, she wants to escape.

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Her soul has been so impacted, her identity has been transformed. She thinks this is who she is and she wants to go back to being sold. It’s called Stockholm Syndrome. Call it whatever you want, but after two weeks.

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They come to a point of realizing, like they’re loved. But they are experiencing things they never experienced before, and most of it happens with these housemoms because these girls are self-destructive, they’re violent, they’re coming off of different drugs, and the housemoms just loves them the entire time. I mentioned before that we’re a Christian organization. And one aspect that really encourages my faith is. Something called the recidivism rate. Now, when a girl gets rescued from sex trafficking, normally there about 80 percent likely to go back to fourty-five girls to go back into being sold or entering and voluntarily after that point, with our organization, it’s three percent. So. Ninety seven percent likely not to. It’s a huge change.

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And the reason I say it encourages my faith is because I, I don’t know how else to explain that number. Other than God is stepping in to help these kids.

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All right, so after we rescue, we have the restoration center, 18 months is what you want. That’s what you’re shooting for, for how long you want a kid. But oftentimes we have them for years and we’re trying our best to stay away from an institutionalising system. But finding placement can be difficult. And so we work hard to find.

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To find a place that’s safe and they can go and be with a family or an aunt or uncle or a grandma, something that’s better than just being institutionalized in 18 months of the program, we’ll get him to a place of being. Able to function again. And we call the next step, reintegration.

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We have.

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When you do an intake of a kid at a restoration center, a nine year old, you’re going to do an evaluation of can we get them caught up in school? If you got an illiterate 16 year old, your evaluation is what kind of vocation can we help prepare them for? And so we have lots of partners in Cambodia where we’re trying to place employment opportunities. There’s some. Great, great. Opportunities these kids have, but there’s also a limited supply, so we also have three garment factories, places where women can find employment. We found a certain salary number that decreases the. The vulnerability of people right between 150 and three hundred dollars a month and salary will ninety nine percent of these people will never get sold again, never go back into being in sex work or anything like that again. You’re trying to figure out how to sustain them for the rest of their life and our social workers follow them through all this process, right? We’re in it forever with them. It’s about five thousand US dollars to rescue a girl, it’s about a thousand dollars a month to house a girl in a residential facility. But the primary work that we do is preventing. A dollar goes so much further in prevention than it ever does. And, well, if you impact a lot more people. So I mentioned we rescued over fifteen hundred kids. We’ve had about a thousand through integration, a thousand through our restoration program, and our numbers are about eleven thousand twelve thousand in preventative work.

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We have a school in that community I mentioned. We have a church, we have a kids club. We even have a kick boxing gym that reaches out to pimps and traffickers because we want to end the whole cycle. We don’t want to just protect the vulnerable. We want to teach those who are exploiting what it means to be a real human, what it means to you. If you’re a guy exploiting, we believe God created you in a way that you can use your strength for good. And so we try to teach how that happens, and it’s through coaching and mentoring and that kind of thing. This year, it’s been a hard year for everybody. And so we’ve shifted even to a lot of. Humanitarian aid in trying to meet the tourism industry crashed all around the world, and when the countries we operate in tourism is a big deal, that’s a lot of people’s income. And now they don’t have food and they’re fighting lockdowns. How do you feed when you can’t work? How do you feed your kids when there’s no opportunity? So we’ve had to shift and apply our resources to actually feeding people. We do that all the time. But it’s just been a great need this year. So this is the way AIM operates. You have the holistic model, rescue, restore, reintegrate and prevent.

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I would like to be able to say something quick? We’re about to get two words down there if you are someone who is actually exploiting at the moment. People with pornography or actually you’ve been traveling to to buy some kind of sexual service. What is it? Uh. Let’s say that a person doesn’t want to have that behavior. What would you want to say to someone like that?

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Yeah, so.

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Obviously, the demand is a huge problem in fighting demand is a huge problem if even by consuming pornography, unfortunately, pornography is a big problem in sex trafficking.

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From personal interaction with these kids, most of them are forced to make porn, most of these little like we have kids as young as two years old in our program up to 18. Right. It’s disgusting, but.

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Oftentimes they’re forced to make porn, and then when you come into the pornography industry, the West, the coercion is still there. These people, a lot of them are being forced to do things they don’t want to do.

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I find.

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If you want to break those chains on your own soul of desire, we’re men, we’re sexual beings, I understand that. And I think it’s a good thing, actually, but the beauty of sex is the humanity that’s involved with it. And if we don’t start seeing people as humans, that’s so much value. And I believe that they’re made in the image of God. I think when you look at someone, you’re looking at God’s image. I feel like that is the way to stop our own wickedness and start magnetizing everybody else. If you see pornography, look can say what is going on in that person’s life. Is there desperation? Is there oftentimes sexual trauma in the past that’s taken place? And what are you contributing to? By just viewing it?

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By traveling.

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You could think about, OK, well, these people are getting paid to do something, but as a Westerner who goes to Southeast Asia or Latin America, I have a lot more money even as a poor Westerner. I have way more money than I’ll ever have. And cohesion is having money and paying someone to do something they don’t want to do. Right. Think of it. So what would you do for a million dollars? Simple question. Well, it’s a lot less in these countries. And so it doesn’t make it right that you go to Thailand and you can pay for sex. Your power dynamic over that person is great because of the resources that you have. So my advice, stop, don’t do it, don’t buy it. See humanity and people see them that they are in the image of God and value them that way.

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It, uh, it we, um, I want to end this interview by asking you two questions. So my first question is what kind of, uh, support or what would you like people to do after hearing this interview?

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I asked you to share what I see God doing in the world, and I’m like, this is a dark subject, but I see so much light, I see so much change, like I said, that the rate of girls going back in so small and what we do and I see lives transformed and it’s we’re branching out.

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We’re starting a new country next year. 2021. We’re starting in Belize.

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We need money to do it.

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But when I’m talking to people, I don’t want to be honest. I don’t want your money. What I want is your heart. I want you to wake up to the evil of what’s being done to very vulnerable people and say, OK, what can I do? Giving me money is an option. But wherever we are in the world, there are vulnerable people, usually teenagers. In my country, in the States, two out of three homeless, two out of three runaways. Kids are sold for sex. If you’re living in the States, what can you do ? Reach out to these runaway’s people who are in the foster system are exploited constantly. So how do we get involved in that? So you look at your own country and say, OK, how do I get involved? How do I help vulnerable people? You might be called to do stuff like we’re doing where you go out into a different country, that nothing is being done, when I’m asked why don’t I stay in the states to do my work? Because I see people doing stuff. Yeah, it’s there’s still help needed in the United States and Europe. But there are police, there’s governments, there’s NGOs, non-government organizations that are doing stuff. There’s other countries in the world where nothing is being done, and that’s where we try to fill the void, where we try to go and create a movement that’s not based around us, but space around the host country nationals and what they can do, empowering other people to be able to fight in their own country.

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What I love about your program, Spirit, is you’re bringing people all kinds of amazing causes, and that’s another thing that I really appreciate, because as a Christian, I think God is calling us all to something. Maybe it’s

not anti trafficking work, but he’s calling us all to something. So it’s what is God calling you to? Is it to take care of the world? Is it to take care of certain vulnerable people? I don’t know what it is for each person, so I don’t want to make a blanket statement like you need to get involved in this. I would like everyone to get involved in it, of course. But what can you do?

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The last question I want to ask you is I’m. What? If you could, um.

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If people would understand one thing or what would you like to emphasize that you would really like for more people to understand, what would that be?

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I think.

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To look into the darkness, it’s easy to see something and so dark that you don’t want to engage in it.

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You hear about little kids being sold and raped and all that, and it’s easy, it’s easier to just try not to think about it and move on, right.

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I would encourage anyone listening just to not avoid that pain. But to enter into it and say. Let that pain actually move me to action.

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I want to say thank you for taking the time to be here. I want to let people in the audience know that the organization, if you want to go there, is AIMfree.org. You would get to a Agape International Missions website. So AT Holder, thank you very much for taking your time to talk about this heavy topic and doing it in a way that.

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It’s both heavy, but it’s also, um. Yeah, I feel inspired that I want to do more.

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