ASM215 The Fight to Stop Sexual Slavery with Jeremy Vallerand

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he's got questions he's got answers even though he may not understand he'll talk anyway he got problems he won't solve them but he'll talk and talk and talk until he flew in the face [Music] and here we go edited into the show as a really exciting announcement i just got an email from my friend and manager brent and it's a list of all the tour stops for the you're a miracle book tour that i'm going to be doing uh this april late april and early may and uh i wanted to go ahead and tell you the dates and the city so you can save the date and also know we will drop a link where you can buy tickets to be at these events i'm so excited to get back on the road a little bit again so april 27th atlanta georgia will be kicking it off with you april 28th that's the day of the book launch itself i'll be in nashville tennessee uh in on april 29th i'll be in minneapolis minnesota april 30th seattle washington may 1st portland oregon and back home in los angeles california on may 8th one more time that's atlanta georgia april 27th nashville tennessee april 28th minneapolis april 29th seattle april 30th portland oregon may 1st in los angeles may 8th i would absolutely love to see you at those events so here's what you can do if you want to make sure that you get the tickets as soon as they're available number one i will send those tickets to my patrons on patreon first they'll get a first shot at grabbing tickets to these events and then after the patrons have their chance i will email my email list with the events and then finally i will put them on the website and announce the ticket sales on this podcast so i'd love to see you in april and may for the you're a miracle book tour [Music] well you know i've been doing more and more interviews on ask science mike and i always feel self-conscious about that because as i listen to other people do interviews in media i'm becoming aware that a lot of people imagine who their audience might be interested in and then try to reach out and then they get a little briefing on that person and they do an interview and they have a lot of you know questions for that person because they're not terribly familiar with their work and what i do is i imagine who of my friends and people i follow that you all would be interested in that i happen to already be obsessed with and then i have to try to imagine what questions you might have if you haven't read every single book by a person or haven't really followed their work and it's and can be awkward and uh today is no exception to that because we are talking to a dear friend of mine whose work that i deeply admire and i think is important and i think every listener of this program will want to be a part of today we are talking to jeremy valerand jeremy valerand is the founder and ceo of rescue freedom international a non-profit organization that works around the world to prevent exploitation and to empower the rescue and restoration of those in sexual slavery jeremy's background is an international business and he has a graduate degree in diplomacy from oxford university in the uk he's an avid outdoorsman outdoor gear tester and the co-founder of climb for captives an initiative that utilizes mountain climbing to combat human trafficking jeremy lives in seattle with his wife marin and their three children jeremy welcome to ask science mike uh mike so excited to be here thanks for having me i am so glad you're here because uh lately i've been doing interviews of people who've books i've read and don't personally know and i get such like a sense of inadequacy in those situations and i just love that today we can both talk about something that's important to me and i get to do it with a friend who i'm really comfortable with so this feels much less uh performative for me we just get to talk about things that i'm really curious about and interested in and excited to share with this audience um maybe like an easy way to start uh would be kind of a little overview of what uh rescue freedom is and you know kind of the genesis of that whole project yeah i would love to so rescue freedom is as you mentioned kind of in the opening is fighting slavery around the world specifically fighting sex trafficking around the world and my journey started about 12 years ago when i was on a trip to india with a friend of mine who had grown up there and he invited me and it was before i was married and had kids when you could do things like just spontaneously jump on a plane and go to india and so i was i was there you know i was thinking i was just a tourist it was not meant to be some great humanitarian you know we weren't going to change the world but he had some friends that had opened a safe house and were rescuing kids out of brothels and when he told me that i was like wait what like what what are they doing rescuing kids out of brothels like it was nowhere on my on my radar and um so we said well let's you know we've got 36 hours on the tail end of our trip before we fly back and let's go and see if we can visit some of the sites and see the work and so we went and they drove us kind of first through the huge red light area and then we got to meet these kids that had been rescued out of out of that those brothels and they were just so full of life and hope and you know i had grown up in a faith context that would use words like hope and faith and redemption and these big words that indicated sort of transformation but when i saw kids that had come out of that and that it sort of transcended my my faith lens of like there was something some part of me when i heard about the darkness of exploitation that was like well yeah you can get kids out of it but i don't know that there's i don't know that there's recovery from that um and then meeting these articulate young teenage girls that were getting ready to graduate high school and go to college that had confidence and were excited about their future and it just honestly kind of wrecked me i was like i i i i didn't know that that at a spiritual emotional or even at a physical kind of neurological level that you could recover from that kind of trauma um so i kind of left feeling like i just got to be a part of this story and i don't know what that's going to look like and so that's when i started climbing mountains and just trying to turn them into fundraisers i was already my one of my hobbies was climbing mountains so i just started throwing these climbs together like well let's just support efforts to like bring that kind of hope to victims of human trafficking and it started sort of snowballed and the next thing i knew we were uh launching rescue freedom and and the kind of catalyst for that launch was i had supported a bunch of different initiatives with those climbs um but really started to see that there were a lot of sort of struggling locally led initiatives around the world that were run by nationals in country who were giving their lives they knew the language they knew the culture but a lot of them didn't have a you know a non-profit in the states they didn't have a funding community and a lot of them didn't have access to world leading you know trauma therapists and best practices they just had like the most critical ingredient which was they were literally giving their lives to serve this community and i was like well man where's the organization that's finding those who are already giving their lives and coming alongside of them to accelerate their incredible efforts instead of just trying to recruit americans to spend three years in language school and move to the middle of nowhere on the other side of the world and and the cost of sending americans to do that let's just find and accelerate the incredible work that's happening and so that was kind of why we launched and now we're working 20 different countries and getting to basically i mean i love what i get to do because i get to find the people that are literally giving their lives every day and just come alongside of them say how can we support you with you know funding is a part of that but the resources the training one of our first hires was a full-time phd trauma therapist that specialized in sexual recovery programs for uh victims of sexual violence and exploitation to say hey let's let's also bring the best of what we know about how the brain works and how healing works to give these women and children the best chance at a bright future i'm so glad that you named that right up top um i think so often that particularly americans with the best of intentions um try to rush into situations and take control and be the guiding force in situations where we don't actually have a lot of on the ground knowledge and where uh the expense of having america is involved you know undermines the effectiveness of the mission of the organization totally and what i appreciated like that my first encounter with rescue freedom was this notion and this intention of this practice of empowering and funding local led work and coming alongside people already doing that work and supporting them financially and with other resources like you say in trauma therapy which is like a a pretty specialized discipline that we're we're just getting our hands on in uh you know the academy in wealthy nations yep um and so kind of accelerating the impact of those learnings into these communities where trauma informed therapy work is so essential um it just immediately at least for someone like me it lets me take a deep breath and and and relax talking about sexual slavery because so often we we immediately start to run into the the cultural issues of white supremacy and you know american foreign policy and european foreign policy and your approach lets us actually focus on on the real issue at hand here and that is that issue of sexual slavery and human trafficking um how did you go about cultivating that model how did you um how did you get that off the ground because did that come naturally or was there a period of learning and research to realize that was the way to move forward yeah so there was a process of you know there was about a four-year window from when i started kind of raising support for different entities out there through these climbs and other means where i was learning a ton about the issue and um you know and there's certainly some fantastic you know anti-trafficking organizations that that we worked with or that that are you know sort of maybe more the the stereotypical kind of american um entity but that are navigating those cultural barriers really well but i just saw so many people around the world that were giving their lives for it and that we're alone you know so initially part of it was um you know there's there's nothing worse in in any area of life than feeling alone um you know but particularly in this where i thought man these i would meet these people who were doing such incredible heroic work and just felt like they were the only ones doing it um now coming out of the business world the the practical and strategic side of it was like well that's not if they feel alone and they feel like they're the only ones doing it that probably means they're also reinventing the wheel because they probably don't know what others have pioneered in their in their sector or in their sphere and so that means they're probably having to do a lot of extra leg work and so if if we can connect them together it solves that that emotional kind of loneliness and helps them feel like man we're a part of a community we're not just taking on the you know the mob or the mafia or the cartels who are you know the traffickers um and that's that's one of the challenges of this work is you're taking on sinister actors who are perpetuating it um but if you're doing it alone that means you're also isolated from knowledge and best practices and tools and training and so you know initially i thought well let's just help these people not feel alone have access to some of those those tools and those resources and and but you know in all honesty i was still a little naive in terms of you know i thought i probably overestimated the importance of funding too of like oh if if we could just double their funding we'll double their impact um but then realizing really quickly like oh some of those tools like the trauma trauma therapy tools um and trauma training and trauma-informed care models um how impactful that stuff would be and then also realizing like you know and it's funny i joke in the nonprofit sectors i've still never met anybody that launches a nonprofit or specifically a nonprofit working with traumatized population because they're passionate about boards budgets and bylaws which are like the three things that if you have a successful organization those three things become a huge part of your focus as you you know having a board having a budget and figuring out your bylaws but nobody gets into it because they want to build an organization the people we work with get into it because they want to save lives they want to show people love they want to bring hope into really dark places and if it works and they end up with a house full of of you know women and children or they end up with this prevention program that's serving a vulnerable population of a few thousand in a community then it's like oh no how do we sustain this how do we fund it how do we hire staff how do we build a board so we really realize we have to come alongside of them holistically we have to provide organizational coaching and help them i mean we have several that are going through major you know either a founder transition or they've you know had a some maybe it's a tragic accident and there's a new staff member that has to come in or um so realizing how much of our work is is just helping people not feel alone in the operations in the programs and in life in general hmm you're on the front lines how's it going uh i mean you know i've read that slavery has never been more common in history than it is right now that there are more human slaves on the planet in 2020 than there ever have been in the history of human civilization we know that human trafficking and sexual slavery happens in countries all over the world including western nations including the united states you know there are people right now probably within a couple miles of my house working against their will in sexual slavery right now um you're on the front lines of this is it hopeless or um or are we making some kind of headway yeah and mike you've probably heard me say this probably a few times over the years that we've known each other uh you know there's this mantra that i've i have to repeat to myself and it's actually written on the wall in my office it says it's not the injustice that drives us it's the magnitude of hope um that i have to kind of chant that over and over because one it i i do believe it but i don't believe it every day um there are times where it's hard to remember that you know the the thing that um at a big picture um that there's this you know there's this tension every everything we do i feel like we're holding these tensions where on one hand there's more slaves in the world today than any other time in history but then the flip side of that is it's the lowest number per capita that it's ever been so in other words we have to we have the largest human population that we've had in history and so the number of slaves yes there's more now than ever before but it's also the smallest number by percentage of the human beings on the planet which means there's more and more humans that are opposed to slavery it's the first time in the history of the world like you go back 150 years when most of the major civilizations were still built on legal you know slave legal slave trade certainly you know two centuries ago um the majority of the world's economies were built on the back of slavery and now for the first time in the history of humanity every country of the world has essentially declared slavery illegal has passed laws to say that it is illegal in our country now we don't have actual law enforcement of all those laws yet in all those countries um but to sort of feel like we're standing at a unique time in human history to say the whole world has actually declared that slavery is in violation of what we believe to be the inherent dignity of mankind um it's the first time in history every nation has actually said yep we agree with that now again it's not it's not implemented in practice yet in those places but that's a really strong thing to build on when you think back to like the british abolitionist movement and the fact that wilberforce had to spend decades just to pass the laws to say can we at least say it's wrong before we actually implement it can we can we first even say it's wrong well we we have now every country in the world saying yeah it's wrong and we'll hopefully get around to enforcing that but you know that's where we come in so there is room to be to be hopeful we are seeing momentum we are seeing a sort of human consensus that we want to point ourselves as a human species towards a future that is absent of slavery i mean that's uh it starts getting to the heart of something for me i mean obviously people who put other human people into slavery uh and especially into sexual slavery they aren't great people they're bad actors but they're not putting people into these into this bondage because they're bad people they're doing it because there's a market demand that they can capitalize on right these things wouldn't exist without a demand uh for forced sex work um what have you learned about where that demand is coming from and how does the demand for for sex work impact your work trying to liberate people from human trafficking well i think i think you're spot on in sort of identifying that you know fundamentally this issue is a demand is a demand issue um and it and it's hard in some ways again i came out of the business world where we you know you talk about things in terms of economic terms and it's it feels almost inappropriate to like distill sex trafficking down because this is like lives and people to distill it down to an economic like supply and demand chart but at its core it is a supply and demand um you know framework at play driven in large part by by this demand and and so that's become a huge focus for us is saying how do we get to the roots of it and you know i think when i first got into the issue i had the very visceral i mean my wife and i joke that i'm justice and she's mercy um and and i mean and in all honesty i mean i i i would um not just because i think my wife is amazing but i i think and and certainly even from a faith standpoint i think one of there's this this faith concept that was sort of permeated through my childhood this this this phrase from from scripture that i'm sure you know of where it says to to do justice to love mercy and to walk humbly um and i think that's transcendent of you know every every faith and worldview that so often we get that wrong i think sometimes as americans we flip that around and we love justice and we do mercy if we have to um and i would have been guilty of that i i got into this loving like i wanted to see justice i wanted to see people like locked up um or maybe even you know i get men that come up to me like hey like if you need a sniper to camp out on rooftops and just start picking off these guys like taking them out um you know and and i think that comes from a good place of like we want to protect the vulnerable we want to protect the innocent but i think for us one really remembering like the thing we need to love is mercy um we should love when people get mercy because one we all know that like we need mercy at times like i i need my wife to extend mercy when i you know i'm not a great husband or my kids to extend mercy when i'm not a great dad or my co-workers to extend mercy when i'm not a great coworker but if you love mercy without doing justice it's actually a horrible place to live if everyone's just giving mercy and nobody's willing to do justice then injustice runs rampant and so we have to do justice while loving mercy and i think if you do both of those things in that order the outcome is you're walking humbly because you remember like yeah i i needed to receive mercy at one point so i'm going to be a little hesitant to add i'll you know i'll i'm gonna love and celebrate mercy because that's what i need but at the same time we have to put bad you know perpetrators away and if they're perpetuating injustice like we have to do something we have to step in let's do justice but let's love mercy so that was a really important orientation shift for me and understanding the demand side is that many of these victimizers were the victims you know their stories of abuse and exploitation and the narratives that they received the the gender narratives they received as young men um you know and and by and large in the sex trafficking world the demand creators are men most of the buyers are men um and so the narratives they received about their masculinity and what that looks like and how that should play out in their sexuality or the abuse that they experienced at the hands of abusers and when you understand that it doesn't mean that that that you let them get away with that but i think it helps to to approach it with a little bit more understanding and compassion and it helps us then hopefully have the lens of you know the goal of decreasing demand is not just to you can't just put away the existing perpetrators you also have to look at where those perpetrators coming from and and i think you can only start to address like those kids who are being groomed to be future exploiters um you know looking at what what content in our culture i mean right now childhood exposure to pornography you know there's i think 11 states have declared porn a public health crisis because of you know essentially unfiltered access that children have to pornography and 88 of online pornography depicts acts of violence against women and so if if our young people um and and men and women are boys and girls are growing up you know consuming this um understanding the effect that that has on their brains and on their sort of dispositions and on their view of masculinity or femininity or their gender roles you know it it starts to feed this picture of i'm actually more interested in what's demand gonna look like in 10 years than i am right now because i think right now we're barely we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg with what's happening in culture unfortunately you know some of the most intense blowback i've ever gotten on this program is when i've made comments that um lead people to perceive that i'm anti-porn believe it or not um and but the reason i tend to have concerns about internet pornography is not because i want to be a prude or i don't think people should have control over their sexual agency uh but for the things that you've just talked about the the kind of pornification of sexuality which encourages kind of objectification of men and women seeing people as objects when sex comes into the picture but also seeing women as objects that should be demeaned the the the the you know the association of sex acts that are more gratifying towards men is common in pornography and as you just stated how common depictions of varying levels of violence towards women's bodies are becoming an integral part of the production of pornographic media uh you know these things are are wildly concerning and the the research tells us do impact the way people view themselves the way women view their bodies the way that men view their bodies it affects arousal outcomes it affects the expectations that people bring into what sex partnered sex looks like uh because of what they've seen in media especially as children are seeing pornography at younger and younger ages and i you know i thought about that and you know you spoke of i agree it does seem like like we have a nearly universal human consensus that slavery is wrong uh and yet in our media i see uh between throwaway lines and sitcoms and jokes and internet comments um references to sexual tourism for single men um you know light-hearted jokes about that and uh we're talking about a tremendous tremendous human impact a large economic system involving billions of dollars a year this is why i think it's important that we we have better conversations about sex and sexuality and sexual media in our culture uh the the kind of discomfort we we have especially christians especially christians who grew up in a religious context or excuse me americans who grew up in a christian context our shame over discussing sexuality directly drives the pornification of our culture and i believe therefore also drives this kind of shame based cycle because lots of people especially men um are so unable to communicate openly about their sexual needs and desires whether or not they're in a relationship with another person that they do things that go against their values there's a lot of people in the united states especially men who visit brothels both domestically and abroad in an attempt to have access to sexual activities that otherwise feel impossible to incorporate into their lives and i i've been thinking a lot about the role that that shame plays on the demand side you know i uh to be just a little open and i'll i'll pause for anyone who might uh need a trigger warning before i talk about anything that's personal and sexual you can hit skip a few times in your podcast player and you'll go right by what i'm about to say but i have found that after a faith transition and having more open conversations with my spouse about sexual needs actually makes um life easier and life more fulfilling and often i think if we look psychologically this this cycle of shame and the inability to communicate actually creates a more extreme dynamic in people's lives than would exist otherwise because we start to feel kind of fetishized sexuality as opposed to something that's based on you know honest and and sincere exploration of ourselves and and with our partners um yeah i don't know what what role do you think that shame plays in human trafficking yeah i i would i would agree in terms of you know that i think shame is is often a central ingredient certainly an accelerant um you know it's it can be the the gas on the fire that sort of pushes people further and further into isolation and loneliness you know i'm so grateful to see so much compelling research coming out about the role that shane plays and have yet to see you know kind of a positive role that that shane plays and you know i think for me that's one of the areas where i i get really excited to kind of open up the door for conversation because again in my experience you know and sort of understanding the narratives of some of these men and and i find that when i speak a lot of times men come up to me and almost feel a need to sort of confess of like oh i've been a sex buyer like what do i do i didn't know i didn't want i don't want to be an exploiter but i just thought like you know boys will be boys or i'll never forget one of the first times i spoke in a university on a university campus in an ethics class and i was talking about human trafficking and it was a business ethics class i was talking about it through the supply and demand lens and was talking about pornography's role in exploitation and also just the challenge of you know so many of those we work with that are coming out of trafficking pornography was a part of their trafficking and it can actually even be sometimes the more traumatic because it lives on after they leave the life and so they're you know they go on into the workplace and some man walks up to them and like hey you look familiar have we met before and the first thing they're thinking is oh you've been watching the porn that was made of me while i was trafficked and and you know so i was just talking about the challenge of in consuming porn statistically roughly one out of every five online or at least one out of every five online images would be a victim of trafficking that is and so the challenge is we don't know you don't know what you're consuming and i'll never forget and i so appreciated the honesty and the absence of shame of this guy raising his hand you know in this in this classroom men and women you know in the in the classroom and he was the first one he was like chomping at the bit to you know raise his hand and get his question answered and um i said you know i called on him and he said okay he's like well obviously like i'm a college age dude he's like obviously i'm gonna look at porn so like do you have a list of like fair trade porn sites where i could like find non-exploitative porn um and and i you know i everyone kind of laughed and i was like well one like thank you for asking that thank you for you know being open being real being honest and being willing to pose that question and and thank you for the heart behind that thank you for saying hey can i find non-exploitative porn like can i find fair trade porn uh because i appreciate the the heart behind that now now let's unpack you know and get into some of the why why i think that's probably a fallacy um and here's some of the brain science behind you know even in in the best case scenario if you had sort of quote unquote fair trade certified uh porn how that actually affects your brain and can predispose um you know men into sexual violence or into these other things um and again this is not this the the conversation around pornography now i i think is actually in a healthy way moved out of the realm of the the religious communities and the sort of the idea of like what is what is prudish or what is moral or what it's it's really i mean it's being led by brain scientists now the the brain the brain science community and are really the ones leading the charts say oh we can actually see how this affects the brain and probably the most passionate community of um that's sort of getting on board from a like online uh sort of social movement is actually former porn addicts who were so impacted and oftentimes physically numb to the point of an absence of an ability to engage in physically intimate relationships in person um because their brain needed a level of stimulus that couldn't be replicated in person those are actually the most vocal trying to lead this sort of like hey let's let's let's move a different direction um because this is um this isn't this isn't healthy or this is an ideal or this isn't how you achieve intimacy um and i think it's so much better to have that conversation not about like are you a bad person or are you less than or are you worthy of shame but to have it around like is this achieving the outcomes that you want in your life are you happy are you feeling emotionally connected to the people you love are you feeling connected to your partner does this you know does does this affect in a positive way the intimate relationship you have with your partner that um it's easier to have those conversations sort of scientifically and practically than it is to have them morally um and and hopefully our hope certainly is that it gives people the chance to say let's take shame out of this because this doesn't this doesn't mean you're a bad person that you should go hide in the shadows um this is a very this is a one a very common uh you know we're all sexual beings like that typically for most people um this is going to be a lifelong topic if you're an honest human being that's that you're on some progression of dealing with sex in health and unhealth at any given time in your entire life you have either a you know an increasingly healthy or increasingly unhealthy and usually probably ping-ponging somewhere in between so let's create the space to have honesty about that at least so i'm so thankful i mean i love just you know even your heart behind how do we ask honest and sincere questions without judgment um because most of us didn't grow up around context where you could apply that that phrase honest and sincere questions without judgment to sexuality um and so people were hiding in the shadows dealing with that and the only thing we know about the shadows is that push they get darker and darker and darker [Music] this episode of ask science mike would not be possible without the support of better help but did you know that betterhelp is not just a sponsor of ask science mike they are the provider that i use to get therapy myself every single product that you hear mentioned on this program is one that i personally use on a paid basis that's right i am a paying subscriber of better health and i get so much value from it better betterhelp is an online affordable counseling service that you can use anytime and anywhere to talk with a licensed and professional therapist you can do that right in the app with a video chat you can connect to a phone call you can do text chat back and forth whatever is most comfortable for you is what better help provides it's secure and allows you to connect with over 6 000 licensed therapists which is really amazing here's how the process works if you're wanting to pursue therapy in the comfort of your own home or an environment that is easier and more accessible for you than trying to get to a therapist office you can go to betterhelp.com science mic where ask science mike listeners will get 10 percent off their first month's service when you get there you'll fill out a quick questionnaire that will help better help connect you with a counselor that you love i know people tell me all the time one of the most intimidating things about starting therapy is trying to find a therapist and better help handles that process for you but you say but what if i don't like my therapist that's no problem either you can change your therapist at any time no questions asked for no additional fee so there's really no easier way to get started in getting the professional support that can help you grow and change and heal so why not start today go to betterhelp.com sciencemike for 10 off your first month's service well you know i think it's so interesting um this podcast because of that that approach um it has a very strange audience you know i've got uh evangelical christians who are political conservatives who listen to this program and i have atheists who listen this program and i have libertarians and i have literal marxists and anarcho-communists and it's just this very very uh different mindsets all listening to us talk right now and one of the reasons i wanted to have you on the program so much is because when we look at the complexities around sexuality and human trafficking uh it's overwhelming no matter what world view you bring to the table you know uh here's a story that uh i don't know that i've told public before i've told in probably a dinner party setting but a few years ago i got invited to um amsterdam to be part of a christmas special if you can believe that on on television over there um they were doing a christmas special with me and pete rollins which is a pretty pretty wild pairing for a christmas special and um when i travel to europe i i get jet lag so bad and i've learned that if i go to my hotel i will fall asleep immediately and then have jet lag for five days so what i do now is what i call like um you know my like uh endurance march as soon as i arrive i drop my bags in the hotel room and then i walk and i don't stop walking until the sun goes down i like it and it's also it's a good way to get to know a city so i just walked around amsterdam no map just exploring and i saw this steeple in the distance and i've i've got a thing for churches i just love church church architecture i love to find a church i love to ask someone there to tell me as much of the history as they know maybe ask a few people before i look it up because i like to get a feel for not only the church and the setting but when you ask someone about the history of a church you really learn about the impact of that building and the people who built it and so i found something that's called basically the new church was the name of the church it was a beautiful building and it was very old but i said well if there's a new church there must be an old church and i said is there an old church was it here a different site and the person said oh yeah it's over there and they point and in the distance i can see another steeple sticking out above the rest of the city so i on foot i walk and i walk and i walk and i walk and it was a it was a long walk and i get to the old church which looked very similar to the new church and layout and i'm sitting there just marveling i mean marveling at this building because it was old this church was older than the united states which a lot of things in europe are but as an american that's just cool to go to buildings older than your country and i'm sitting there looking this church and then i hear this um can i kind of look around i don't see anything so i keep looking at the church and i hear and i turn around and i'm just kind of looking around i still don't see anything so i turn around and then i hear and then a stop and it says i'm back here and i turn around and there's a naked woman standing in a glass door that she has now opened to get my attention and then she shuts the door and kind of gestures to her body and her window is outlined with red lighting and i realize this is the red light district in amsterdam that i am in the middle of so now i start to look around i'm i'm autistic i get a little focused so i've been so but steeple hit by my north star i look around and there are these windows everywhere and i don't know how i got in here cause i've been walking around this church so now i'm walking around the red light district a man by himself and so what happens every time i pass a window tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap now this story is going somewhere and it's going somewhere on purpose i was surrounded by families there were people like with strollers they have a very progressive and shame-free approach to sex and sexuality in amsterdam and in fact they legalized prostitution in an attempt to combat human trafficking um and so i keep walking keep knocking i keep like i'm having a very um former evangelical american reaction i'm blushing at all these women who are either scantily clad or nude banging on these windows with these key cards and um i finally passed a window and there was a woman there who was basically clothed and so i stepped over to her and i said can we talk for a second and she said it's i don't even remember the currency there she said however much it was i said fine here you go so then she's like come inside and say can we can we talk here she said no you come inside so i come inside she shuts the curtain i say could you leave the curtain open and she shrugs and i said i you know i've i'm new here i like to learn experientially you know the red light district i'm an american this is kind of a strange concept for me do you enjoy this work and she said oh yes i love this work and she goes to shut the curtain and i go nope please don't shut the curtain so she opens the curtain again and shrugs and i just kind of ask questions like to try to get a feel for how comfortable she is with this work whether this is something she's choosing in her agency or whether this is something someone's getting her to do and she said you know i'm here from russia i make a good living i'm so i'm so grateful to have this work to do um and i'm happy to do it um and so i talked to her for about 10 minutes and you could see kind of her shoulders drop when she realized that this wasn't like an elaborate uh pre-sex work ritual that i was in the middle of but that i actually yeah had questions and so then when i before the clock was up i said hey thank you so much for your time you've really satisfied a lot of curiosity thank you and so i go to walk for the door uh and she steps forward and she put her arms around me and she whispered in my ear and she said my husband makes me do it he doesn't want to work wow and then i left and so here in this city that has a progressive view on sexuality that legalize prostitution as a tactic to combat human trafficking here was a woman who was being trafficked by her husband yeah if that's even the the story i what i m my approach tends to be when people tell me their experiences unless i have a specific reason to believe otherwise i just accept people's experiences as they tell me and i walked away from that encounter with such a heaviness because how many clients does she see a day i don't know i don't have any idea but i do know that in the heart of amsterdam's red light district there is a woman who does not in fact want to be there and i say that because it's not a matter of progressive or aggressive social policy that will prevent human trafficking uh people in amsterdam are not they don't have hang-ups about talking about sex openly when i i sort of like embarrassingly admitted to my host that i'd found myself there at lester red light district he laughed and he said it's amsterdam no one cares and yet in that context still there's enough demand yep for sex work um that that people are forced into it against their will and that's why i think yes absolutely we need to encourage shame-free conversations about sex and sexuality and yes absolutely we need to work on the ways that especially men are conditioned around sex by culture by patriarchy and by pornography yes we need to do all those things and still there is a tremendous need and demand for precisely the kind of work that rescue freedom does and for people who agree with me jeremy how can people get involved how can they make a difference for people who are caught in sexual slavery well mike thanks for sharing that story i i haven't i actually haven't heard you share that before so that that was uh really powerful for for me to hear and i think it you know for maybe listeners that haven't spent time with you personally as i've you know been able to over the years you know i think at one it shows you know something about who you are that you know in 10 minutes with this person who you know is is sort of toeing the line and saying saying what she's supposed to say in terms of that she loves doing the work um but that she felt safe enough in a 10-minute window to confide in you something that was a high-risk truth to confide in someone you know the words that she spoke she spoke at great risk to herself and probably hasn't spoken to many people um and so you know that you know for me i think one it says something about you and the way that you engage people um but i think that does also capture the tension and and we live in that tension as well of of you know of people who who at times are willing to say hey oh yeah no i love this this is really empowering um but what we've found time and time again in working with survivors and and the more i've worked with survivors the more that i you know that i question those earlier narratives of oh no this is empowering or this is what i want to do um because the data suggests otherwise and certainly the survivor narratives suggest otherwise even though many of them were vocal while they were in the throes of it um to the contrary and um so yeah i so appreciate the way you kind of captured that that tension and you know i think that's one of the things that we want to invite people into is this understanding that yes many of us are drawn to this issue because in an era of like partisan politics you know seeming at their peak and people like what can we possibly agree on that human trafficking on one hand is a thing that most of us can really rally around and that's one of the things i love is i get to work with people from all different walks of life from all different political backgrounds from different faith backgrounds that are like hey we can come and unite around this but at the same time to understand it's a nuanced issue that there's there's nuance in it and we have to engage those those nuances we have to be informed about some of these realities of of how they play out in you know in in the real world with whether that's you know in amsterdam policies around legalized sex work or um you know around pornography and and what should we be doing as a culture to protect our children from unrestricted access to pornography and to kind of engage those nuanced conversations so one of the things we tell people is we try to put as much of that content out to kind of capture the nuance and educate people in a meaningful meaningful way through our social media um that's the easiest platform for people to access things typically so one thing i would say if you're interested in this follow us online uh follow us on you know every social media platform at rescue freedom rescuefreedom.org um because we're really trying to push out content that helps you understand the issue and dive into this issue in a nuanced way you know that's not that's not just pounding on the shame or this idea of like oh we're all just these you know it's not just about bringing justice it's not just a one-dimensional issue but it's a chance to really captivate your heart um for an issue that's plaguing humanity um in a significant way in this day and age um so certainly following us online um getting involved certainly if if people are you know compelled to to give and invest in this work we are always happy to to have new new people join the community in that way and deploying those resources to transform as many lives and to provide trauma-informed care to some of the most remote remote parts of the world so staying staying connected that way and and also i would say you know having conversations with friends being being that friend in your community that's willing to go there that's willing to start opening up about you know sexual violence or about your sexual experiences or about pornography to open up those conversations to create safe place because most likely you know somebody who's really struggling and maybe struggling with the shame around being a sex buyer and has never felt like they could talk about it and if they did they'd be rejected by everybody they they know and they don't know where to go to ask for help or for resources um and starting that conversation about pornography might be the thing that opens the door for them to have a safe place to say you know i i think i want help i think i i think i want to see my sexuality or my relationship my intimate relationships differently um but somebody's got to lead those charged in in the context lead those conversations in the context of community and mike that's something i appreciate about you that you've been somebody that has been willing to go first in hard conversations and say i'll put myself out there and hope that you know that that opens a opens up the safety and or creates a safe enough place for you to for you to follow along and feel like you can you can be known and loved and cared for for who you are and um in the time that i've known you you've been you've been pretty pretty consistent in that theme somebody who's willing to put yourself out there to create safe places for others i care a lot about it and um i'm going to say something i almost never say on the program but i want i want everyone listening to know how much this means to me every year uh my friend steve fortunato hosts a dinner that's a fundraiser for rescue freedom and every year now uh i build a discipline where um i sit down and as that date approaches i think literally what's the most i can afford to give rescue freedom this year what's the how deep can i dig what discomfort can i put myself in to meaningfully be a part of the work of rescue freedom because it's not that jeremy is my friend jeremy is my friend it's that this organization is doing this work well they're doing it right morally the idea that any person is put into sexual slavery is simply something that i cannot tolerate and if i didn't do something i wouldn't be able to function or get up in the morning but i don't know i i can't go to the right places i can't connect with the right people i don't have time in my day but what i can do is figure out what i can afford to give to rescue freedom who will turn around and take that money and they will find a person and an organization that is in a local community and they will offer them funding and they will offer them resources in a way that rehabilitates children and women who have who have been trapped who have been preyed upon and who have been abused so friends i ask you from the bottom of my heart with absolute sincerity would you join me in being a part of what rescue freedom does because what they do makes a difference and rescue freedom believes that slavery can be stopped for good and i know that the people involved won't rest until it is jeremy thank you so much for joining us on ask science mike today your life and your work is so meaningful to me and even saying that is less meaningful to me than the work of the people who you support so well thanks brother and uh thanks for thanks for your friendship thanks for your voice and thanks for all that you do on behalf of those who often feel that they have no voice i'm grateful for you thank you [Music]