Though the attribution is disputed, the writer C.S. Lewis is said to have quipped: “You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”
It might be closer to the mark to say humans are primarily neither one nor the other. Each of us is a complex, interconnected system of body, soul, mind, will and spirit. That’s why, as the medical community has recognized for years, emotional trauma such as grief, neglect or PTSD can manifest with physical symptoms such as hypertension, sleeplessness or weight gain. The converse is also true: physical trauma can have lasting effects on a soul.
Such seems to be the case with a Houston teen named Leticia Serrano, who was abducted two years ago and sold to sex traffickers. According to her parents, she was kidnapped, drugged and abused by multiple men. The ordeal lasted several days, and then she was rescued. Recycled is more like it. Her trafficker used her and then abandoned her in a local park like so much human litter. After that, Serrano did her best to live like a normal teenager, but the experience haunted her. Her parents said she couldn’t live with the pain. Last week, she took her own life.
Serrano’s case highlights an important truth in the ongoing fight against the scourge of sex trafficking: Our response must go further than laws and policies. The work doesn’t end with the physical rescue. In fact, that’s really just the beginning.
Progress has been made. Organizations have changed how police recognize and resource trafficking victims. If the victims are receptive, these groups provide assistance with critical services such as job training, housing and counseling.
But the need is immense.
A University of Texas study in 2016 estimated that there are 79,000 minor and youth victims of sex trafficking in Texas alone. According to SMU law professor Cheryl Nelson-Butler’s research, one-quarter of all trafficking victims in the United States are found in Texas. And just last week, the U.S. Justice Department took down a global child pornography ring; several of those arrests were in Texas.
We don’t know what soul wounds were carried by Leticia Serrano (“Letty” to her friends). Shame, anger, disgust, desperation, loss of self-respect, loss of empowerment, loss of value of her own life: All of these would have been possible, even likely.
In January, when Valiant Hearts executive director Rebekah Charleston shared her own incredible story, she said something that stuck: “Honestly, the hardest part to overcome has been that voice in my head. … It wasn’t until I had been out of it for a full two years that I was finally able to get my trafficker’s voice out of my head.”
Long after Charleston’s body was rescued from harm, her soul remained enslaved. This is the cost of human trafficking: not just the abuse of a body, but the poisoning of a soul. And when the souls of our neighbors are mistreated in this way, the poison spreads through our culture, to families such as Serrano’s who grieve the loss of a loved one they knew, to new parents who have to imagine the unthinkable in order to protect their children from it and would-be traffickers who learn how to maximize the business model of oppressing others.
— The Dallas Morning News