A recently inactive student organization, Union’s chapter of the International Justice Mission, restarted on campus last week with a student interest meeting on Thursday, Oct. 4.
Dr. Beth Wilson, professor of social work and the club’s sponsor, and Grace Ingram, sophomore zoology major and IJM’s student president, led the meeting. Ingram said that she came across IJM while looking at the student campus organizations, and, after learning that Union’s chapter had been inactive for several years, contacted Wilson. The two met and decided to restart it.
IJM, the largest international anti-slavery organization in the world, is an organization consisting largely of social workers, policy developers, legal assistants and other human rights professionals who advocate for and work to help free people trapped in human trafficking, forced labor, exploitation, commercial sex trafficking and the modern-day slave trade. IJM comes alongside countries, evaluates the laws that exist and tries to enforce those laws that are not well-enforced. IJM also conducts research before starting a project in a community or country to determine the nature of the problem and what kind of social services already exist there so that they can come beside and assist.
According to Union’s student organizations page, Union’s IJM chapter is a “student-led organization that exists to promote awareness of injustice around the world, to encourage and organize prayerful support for the victims of oppression and those seeking to bring relief and to provide people with practical methods of actively pursuing justice.”
According to a video shown at the beginning of the meeting, 40.3 million people are enslaved worldwide. Of those 40.3 million people, 10 million are children.
The meeting began with an icebreaker game in which everyone in attendance had to organize themselves by age without using their voices. Ingram explained afterward that the game was intended to show the power our voices have when we’re able to communicate with other people, a voice that those trapped in human trafficking and the slave trade do not have.
A video about a young boy who was rescued from Ghana’s fishing industry was then shown. The Volta River, located in Ghana, is the largest reservoir in the world, but it has also been a major hotspot for forced labor and human trafficking for centuries. Boys are captured and used to fish, being put on boats early in the morning and forced to cast out the nets and capture fish all day and to dive in the water to free the nets whenever they get caught on a stump. They later have to process the fish when they come back in the afternoon.
For a while, only boys were used in this industry, but girls are now being used to sexually exploit the older boys and to be brides because the traffickers want to keep the people there fishing under their power. The traffickers believe that the boys will stay if they give them a wife.
“If you grow up as a little child having a master kind of tell you what to do, a lot of times you get brainwashed and you lose all hope or vision for what you can do in the future, and so you want to stay there because they’re meeting some of your needs even though there’s a lot of illness and beatings and sexual exploitation,” Wilson said.
Because Ghana has a strong culture of fostering and because of the extreme poverty there, parents will often send their children somewhere else, thinking that this relative or distant relative will care for them. Because fishing is seen as a labor or a trade or apprenticeship, parents will assume that they’re sending their child off into better circumstances, unaware of the awful circumstances that await them. Although Ghana has laws against this type of labor, they are not readily enforced.
After the video ended, Ingram explained the reasons for the video and the purpose behind the club.
“Through this club, we want to remember that this club is more than sharing statistics of social injustices,” Ingram said. “This is a club that wants to humanize those statistics. We just want to keep in mind that these are real people. We want to give faces to these people in bondage and we want their stories to be told.”
Ingram said that another goal of the club is to overcome the silence and passivity that keeps people in bondage. She pointed out that we have an opportunity to incite change with the resources that we have and that we can be just as much a part of the problem when we choose not to act.
“Sometimes it’s harder for us to get involved in efforts such as these because it’s harder to relate because these slaves aren’t our parents, our brothers and sisters or our friends, but these slaves are someone’s child, they’re someone’s brother or sister and some are parents too,” Ingram said. “They’re people that God has created and values and loves, and just as God loves us, we need to love these people, whether they are victims of domestic abuse and sex trafficking here in Jackson or whether they’re little boys forced to work hard and long days without pay in Ghana’s fishing industry.”
The IJM’s mission statement is “to end modern slavery in this lifetime together,” and its motto is “seek justice for the oppressed.” The campus goal is to “bring awareness to the Union University and Jackson communities concerning the global efforts to bring slavery and other social injustices to an end.”
Although the IJM doesn’t have a Bible verse of emphasis, Ingram that they have selected Isaiah 1:17 as their theme verse to remind them that God is the one guiding their efforts.
“We want to be a club that is faith with action,” Ingram said. “We want to utilize our skills, our majors and minors and our experiences and make a difference in this club. Whether you’re a political science major who knows how to get people stirred up or whether you’re a social work major who has a passion for helping people, we believe all of you, regardless of your major or experience that you bring to this club, are vital to the effectiveness and influence of IJM throughout this campus.”
Ingram also explained that this club has a dual purpose in giving people freedom. While they want to physically free people, they also want to give them spiritual freedom through Jesus Christ. She said that one way to do this is to respond to people who ask why they’re serving the trafficked women and children in the Jackson community by saying “because we are free in Christ.” She also said that one way of therapy can be sharing the Gospel to these victims, who have been devalued, dehumanized and demoralized.
Wilson said that Union’s IJM chapter was first started by male pastoral majors at the same time that she was teaching a town-and-gown course on human trafficking. A year after she taught that course, Dr. Justin Barnard, who helped organize the Union’s chapter, asked her if she would be interested in being the faculty advisor for IJM because of an increased interest in the human trafficking issue by female students.
“Sometimes we had like 35 people,” Wilson said. “We’d pray mostly. It was really cool.”
IJM’s past activities have included fundraisers, selling jewelry made by women from different programs overseas and organizing an event called Stand Up for Slavery in which different people would stand at a spot during a 24-hour period to represent the plight of slaves.
This semester, IJM plans to do a service project on Campus and Community Day on Tuesday, Nov. 6 at a house in downtown Jackson in association with The Scarlet Rope Project, a local faith-based nonprofit dedicated to providing healthcare, therapy and a safe place for survivors of human trafficking to heal, realize their self-worth and be restored. Participants will serve the women at the home by cleaning up and beautifying the yard, planting plants, putting together a refrigerator and organizing the garage.
Other planned service projects include helping Wilson teach a 10-week curriculum to girls at Madison Oaks, a residential facility for boys and girls with mental health and behavioral problems who are at high risk for becoming involved in the commercial sex trade because of a lack of parental involvement.
“They just are looking for something, and so sometimes when somebody’s grooming someone to become involved in the prostitution and sex trade, they capitalize on those vulnerabilities,” Wilson said. “So we try to just teach the girls through a 10-week curriculum what the signs and symptoms are and how substance abuse and mental health issues can make them at risk.”
Lydia Ezell, freshman English major, attended the interest meeting and is eager to join the organization’s efforts to fight for trafficking victims.
“I had visited the headquarters of IJM in Washington D.C., and I just have such a love of people,” Ezell said. “It just physically hurts me to know that there are people in slavery, especially children because I love kids so much. I feel like I can do something about it. I’m so blessed, so why should I not help other people?”
IJM’s next meeting will be on Thursday, Oct. 25 in the Bowld. Dr. Mark Bolyard, chair of Union’s biology department, will be the guest speaker.
For more information about the IJM, visit https://www.ijm.org. For more details about Union’s chapter and about future meetings, contact Dr. Beth Wilson at ewilson@uu.edu or Grace Ingram at grace.ingram@my.uu.edu.
Photo by Tamara Friesen
