“Suffer Little Children”

Mark 10:14. This was said about welcome. These days we have made it about something else entirely.

 I have two daughters, now grown and thriving, and a granddaughter who is five and afraid of nothing, which I guess is mainly the job of being five. I do not write this because of them. I write it because I can no longer pretend that the numbers 5, 8, 10, or 13, or any numbers in between, have not taken on an ominous meaning.

 These innocuous numbers are the ones traffickers use to label their “products”. That’s right: products. Not victims, not children, but products.

 Product is probably the most ‘honest’ word in the vocabulary of this business, as everyone downstream of the front end of this heinous trade has tacitly agreed to continue using softer terminology.

 The premise of the arrangement is not that it hides the crime, but that it disperses it so thoroughly that no single person ever has to bear the full weight of what they helped build. Guilt, like the product itself, is broken into shipments small enough that no link in the chain has to look at the whole picture.

 This efficient supply chain is neither American nor even mostly American. The sophisticated supply system has its roots in Eastern Europe and easily extends into the brothels of Western Europe. On another continent, it runs from the Philippines and Thailand into a thriving sex tourism circuit, fuelled largely by Western demand. 

 Across the Atlantic, it slips out of Central America and West Africa, satisfying domestic servitude that quietly curdles, before morphing into something far worse. 

 Somewhere tonight, a girl, a sweet, innocent young girl, is being handed over to a complete stranger whose sole aim is to inflict harm. The transaction will be conducted in the currency used for all commodity trades: an order number, a corresponding photograph, an invoice and a set delivery time. The one arranging the transaction and collecting his fee will not lose a single night's sleep over it.

 Sadly, this 'trade' is akin to livestock markets where cattle, sheep, goats, etc., are bought and sold for slaughter; that's it, nothing more, nothing less. However, these innocent children are bought and sold for repeated use by men who, in many cases, will go home to their own families, tuck their own children into bed, and, by every outward measure, appear entirely respectable.

 It's that innocuous detail that should keep us all up at night, not the crime itself, however horrific it is to contemplate. It is the ordinariness of the men who commit it, given that many of the girls smuggled through these networks are as young as eight years old!

 Ponder that number for a minute; don't let it slide by as a mere statistic, because it is definitely not just a statistic; it is a childhood, deliberately and permanently ended in the pursuit of profit. Eight is the age of innocence, with loose teeth and new ones emerging, taking the training wheels off a bike, or wearing that sparkly blue dress every day!  

Eight is not an age that should be anywhere near the word product, and yet there it is, in the paperwork, in the code words, and, of course, in the price.

 There could be a glimmer of hope for survivors of abuse and for future generations of young, vulnerable girls. That devious, evil trail, which had been in operation for decades, led to the one critical node in the depraved, sophisticated network of the wealthy and connected, who was careless enough to leave a paper trail three and a half million pages long. 

 In January of this year, the Department of Justice reluctantly released three and a half million pages of the Epstein files, including videos, photographs, and emails, not with great fanfare but amid considerable resistance. Yet even that avalanche of paper wasn’t quite enough to bury the almighty scandal beneath Pam Bondi’s veil of supposed transparency. 

  guess that was always the point.

 The irony (that's probably too light a word) was that the survivors, once labelled products, found their identities had been laid bare across those millions of pages. Their home addresses, emails, and entire family histories were exposed, while the men who had blatantly bought and sold them remained hidden behind neat black bars of redacted ink. 

 A federal judge has since ordered the government to hand over all the names the Department of Justice redacted; unsurprisingly, the government is fighting tooth and nail against that order in court. Not investigating. Fighting tooth and nail to keep those names a secret.

 That's the difference, and it encapsulates the whole tragic story.

 Somewhere deep within the bowels of the Department of Justice in Washington, a man sits at his desk, wielding a thick black marker. His sole job is to decide, page by page, which names should be redacted to limit the damage to 'powerful' people who run the government. 

 The alleged perpetrators will, in all likelihood, hold press conferences to express their outrage, telling the press, ‘something must be done.’ And all the while, that man in a nondescript office somewhere continues to draw those thick black lines at will, obliterating those names. This is what passes for a government confronting the heinous business of child trafficking: The only upshot is a mountain of paper, while a redaction pen, busier than any prosecutor’s or President Biden’s autopen, is wielded by a faceless bureaucrat.

 It is an altogether woeful situation, though woeful is too generous a word for it. It is closer to complicity by procedure, a crime laundered not through shell companies now but through "further review," "ongoing investigation," and the slow, well-funded machinery of appearing to do something while doing very little.

 And so we return to the verse used at the beginning of this piece and to what it actually asks of us. “Suffer the little children”. A biblical quotation about welcome, about who is protected, who is turned away at the door, and by whom.

 Two thousand years later, we have built an apparatus, global in its reach and bureaucratic in its cruelty, whose only real function is to answer that very question. 

The children are still being forbidden; we have simply become better at pretending otherwise.