Sex Trafficking Documentary Shown at USU
Operation Underground Railroad is an organization started by former FBI agent and Utah resident, Tim Ballard. The organization has rescued 1,682 victims of sex trafficking and has assisted in the arrests of more than 848 traffickers around the world.
Their new documentary “Operation Toussaint,” which details a mission in Haiti earlier this year, was shown at Utah State University in an effort to raise awareness to the cause.
“I really wanted to do something with O.U.R because it’s such a big problem that people don’t recognize,” said Brandon Jenson, one of the two business students who were in charge of the event. “People don’t want to talk about sex-trafficking so me and my partner, Kyle, put this together to raise awareness.”
O.U.R., which has a local chapter in Cache Valley, was on hand selling merchandise and accepting donations which are used to fund each mission that the team undergoes.
“The team gets with police departments and governments in other countries and track down and help in the arrest of sex traffickers,” said Kyle Dwiggins, co-coordinator of the event. “The company is straight to the point, they don’t try to hide anything. The founder and the team are transparent and want to do the most good as possible. I only recently learned about the cause but it’s real and now I’m in this fight for life.”
Jenson was surprised at how many people showed up for the documentary screening.
“It was more people than we were expecting but we are so glad that people showed up to learn about this organization,” Jenson said.
The Cache Valley chapter of the group is lead by Elizabeth Larchar.
“I saw a news story about this organization when it was still pretty new, about four years ago, and the second I read it I told my husband that we needed to help and we needed to do more than just give money,” Larchar said.
Larchar and her husband soon started doing events all over the state, including giving out information and raising money at fairs and festivals.
“This is a huge problem that people don’t know about because it is so dark and so underground. There are more people in slavery today than there has ever been in the history of the world and two million of them are child sex slaves. We need to make people aware that it normally starts with a pornography problem,” Larcher said.
Megan Nielsen Students watch a free screening of Operation Toussaint in the TSC ballroom on Nov. 26, 2018. Operation Toussaint is a documentary about children sex trafficking and how Operation Underground Railroad helps save children who have been kidnapped for sex trafficking.
The group believes that sex traffickers tend to get addicted to pornography at a young age and dive into more intense and illegal videos the longer they are addicted soon trading child pornography for real children.
To get involved in the fight against sex trafficking go to ourrescue.org.
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@GrahamWoodMedia