Taken

I watched a movie yesterday afternoon that really upset me, "Taken". I should have known not to watch it, I knew that it would be intense when I went to see it, but Jimmy and I haven't been out in so long that I knew I couldn't say no and stay at home. But I had no idea what it was about. I'd never heard of it when we went to see it and the description we were given was "A man's daughter gets kidnapped and he goes to rescue her." Which was true technically, what this friend neglected to say was, "A man's teenage daughter gets kidnapped overseas and sold into the human sex trafficking trade and he goes to rescue her." If I had known that I would never have gone to see it. I'm too emotionally unstable and hormonal right now to handle anything like that. I shouldn't be watching anything more intense then Winnie the Pooh! 

The thing that struck me about this movie was the sheer number of evil men involved in this trade. They come in all levels and with a variety of roles but they all have this one thing in common. They KNOW what is happening and they are participating in it for their benefit. From the government officials who look the other way so they can fatten their paychecks to the men who do the kidnapping to the men who guard the girls to keep them from escaping to the men who inject them with drugs to make them more easily controllable to the men who pay to rape them. And in the movie they portray men who pay a handful of dollars for a half hour in a filthy little stall to men who "buy" their girls at auction for many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Money goes out of the hands of one man and into the hands of another man and the girls are raped. How can there be that many men in this world who condone this practice? Surely there is someone who has found out about this repulsive practice and tried to stop it. Surely there's even someone who has paid to see a girl and then been shocked to see her deteriorating condition and took pity on her. It shakes me to my core to think that there are that many heartless people out there. That many men who are deaf to the shrieking, the terror, and blind to the deterioration and ultimate death of these women.

I can only hope that somewhere out there there are governments not willing to be bribed, and policemen not willing to look the other way. That someone somewhere is doing everything they can to put a stop to this. But if I have my way I will never have to watch it again.