Five Reasons We Should Fight for the Freedom of Enslaved Women - Guest Writter

Five Reasons We Should Fight for the Freedom of Enslaved Women

Guest Post By Kenny Jahng

By 1888, all countries had officially abolished participation in the transatlantic slave trade.

But, slavery still exists.

In fact, there are 30,000,000 slaves worldwide.

80 percent of them are women.

That means there are 24,000,000 women and children that have been forced into labor or indentured servitude; or that have been trafficked and sold; or that have been forced into marriage as a child bride.

24,000,000 women like us are told their lives belong to someone else.

24,000,000 women like us live without hope.

Many, many of those 24,000,000 women and children were sold to another human for less than the cost of a new cell phone.

Imagine that for a second.

Imagine a price of less than $100 USD on your head.

It.

Just.

Doesn’t.

Compute.

Women were made in the image of God. “God created mankind in His own image, male and female, He created them” (Genesis 1:27). We were created to be creative, purposeful, spiritual, intelligent, relational, moral beings.

Women are the hub of family and community. Whether women are breadwinners, co-breadwinners or stay-at-home moms, their role in the family is substantial. Mothers are the emotional backbones of the family. This is more than just a nice thought. Study after study has shown that a woman has tremendous impact on her family, affecting everything from the healthcare to academic performance of her children.

The enslavement of women (and all humans) is against God’s plan. When Jesus died for us, he gave us freedom from the slavery of sin. As freed slaves, it is our job to “set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18). Enslavement destroys the very humans created in God’s image. Enslavement kills human potential.

Women should not be sold. Human Trafficking is a $32 billion dollar industry. To put that in perspective for us, that is 8x more than the biggest company of the Inc. 5000 list in 2015.

Women are in crisis globally. Imagine every woman in America ages 18-24 was enslaved. Now add the entire population of New Zealand to that number… and the entire population of Jamaica...and the entire population of Fiji. That’s how many women are enslaved worldwide. Does that break your heart like it does mine?

We can do something about this. We can tackle this problem as a church. We can join movements like The Freedom Challenge to raise funds and awareness. We can free women together. We can provide restoration to women together. We can challenge ourselves in the name of sisterhood and freedom.

Our sisters need us. Let’s take up our own challenge for their freedom.

Would you let children look at porn?

The internet is full of porn, photo graphs, video and stories. It's very easy to find, just tap a couple of words into Google and your away, millions of pages of it. If Googles filters are turned off, you can discover some very dark pornography as well. I few years ago I was preparing a presentation about Christ's victory over Satan and I was looking for some images of the devil to put into the presentation. What I found then was some stomach churning horrible images and I hope that no children ever stumble across images like those, and that my friends is the reason for writing this article today.

The UK government is currently consulting to gauge opinion on the best way to protect children from harmful online material. You have a chance right now to think and act if you want to. You only have until September 6th, that's one month from today, to complete the consultation document and upload it.

How do you feel about an unrestricted internet? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

It does allow anyone to access anything whenever they like. Freedom of information is a gift and one I personally greatly enjoy. I can say what I like on this blog, and anyone with a computer can read it. I can access information from both sides of a debate and get the latest news and if I wanted gossip from around the world.

On the other hand, there are people out there selling pornographic images and videos, or giving them away and making money from the advertising. It's my choice as an adult if I want to access this. I may not like these images, I may not want them there, but I understand why people look at them, and many other people are perfectly happy that these images are available.

However, they are just as available to children, and I feel very strongly about that. As a kid in school I remember looking up sexual words in a dictionary in the school library with friends trying to understand what all the fuss was about. I hate to imaging what I would have found if I had the same access to IT and the internet that most modern kids have.

It's possible to filter adult content centrally, your broadband provider would then automatically filter porn unless you opted into receive adult content. These adult content filters, which are already used by mobile companies, also filter more than porn, for example they filter gambling and other over 18 content. Some reports I have read say this is easy and free for internet service providers, but having worked for one, I would disagree. There will be a small cost to them, and a couple of difficult projects, but these types of filter are not rocket science, and I believe should be put in place. As a small aside, please spare a thought and a prayer for those people employed to put these filters in place, some of them, always volunteers, have to review the images caught by the filters to make sure they work and continue to work correctly. While some people may joke about having a great job where you get paid to look at porn, in my experience no one doing this job was happy or comfortable doing it and no one did it for long.

So if you feel that you have an opinion and are living on the UK, please take a look at the government consultation here : Department of Education - Parental internet controls - Consultation

Or if you want a little help, this is a very helpful site that provides some background and an easy way to complete the consultation, click here: www.SafeOnline.org.uk

Please think about how children, maybe your children, will be effected by seeing pornography. Once you have thought, I hope you decide to act.
Thank you. John.

[Additional: You may be interested to know that as soon as this article was posted on my blog, Google started to filter the adverts they display. They don't show any adverts against this post or the homepage when this post is there. It shows that their filters work and they use them as I am sure they are picking up the word porn. Good for Google.]