A Salute to Fathers and Father Figures Who #StandForHer

Written By - Matt Osborne, Liaison to the Men’s Advocacy Group at NFNL

As I write this article on Father’s Day, I reflect on how blessed I feel to be the father of two amazing college-aged daughters. Despite my very less than perfect parenting, I am thrilled to see my daughters slowly but surely growing into strong and confident women. They are two of the main reasons I have focused my career on combatting commercial sexual exploitation and human trafficking since I first became aware of these issues while working for the US Government (CIA and State Department) almost 20 years ago. During the past two decades I have seen unfortunately how fatherlessness—or at least the absence of a committed and loving father or father figure in the home—has contributed to several problematic social issues, not the least of which is human trafficking.

I read a study recently that claimed in the US there are an estimated 20 million children living in a home without the physical presence of a father. The study noted that “fatherlessness is associated with almost every societal ill facing our country’s children and creates vulnerabilities that are easily exploited.” At New Friends New Life, we have seen firsthand how a host of social problems feed the pipeline of child and adult sex trafficking, such as poverty, teen runaways, the lack of good education and job opportunities, the rise in child sexual abuse material online, and much more. But perhaps primary among these factors, the epidemic of absent fathers has created voids that are readily filled by human traffickers who seek out and prey upon those whose basic needs go unmet.

The US Department of Justice has reported that many sex trafficking victims come from fatherless and unstable homes, and sex traffickers exploit these vulnerabilities by creating a warped “father-child” relationship with victims and manipulating their need for love and acceptance. Without this love at home, many victims find in sex trafficking organizations the “love” and sense of belonging that they crave.

Our Men’s Advocacy Group brings together men who are willing to take a #StandForHer by celebrating and promoting engaged and committed fatherhood. For fathers of daughters, we note that human traffickers take advantage of women and girls who may be craving love, connection, and support at home. For fathers of sons, we encourage them to raise their boys to be Men with More: more intolerant of bad “locker room talk,” more respectful of women and girls, and more respectful of themselves.

 Our free curriculum known as The manKINDness Project combats the demand that is primarily driving the commercial sex trade. We do this by promoting an understanding of healthy masculinity, which our boys today are certainly not seeing on social media, television or in movies. We teach these young men that if they speak disparagingly of, or objectify, the opposite sex, those attitudes could easily translate into toxic relationships with women and girls later in their life. One of our standard lines to these boys is that no man just wakes up one day at the age of 35, 45, 55, etc., and says… “Today I am going to purchase sex for the first time,” but rather it is a journey of a thousand steps that brings a man to the point where he believes it is appropriate to buy another human being. The manKINDness Project would nip that prospect in the bud by challenging these boys to treat every female with the same respect he would give the most important women in his life.

As another Father’s Day comes and goes, may each of us who have been given the blessing of being a father, or father figure, recommit ourselves to being active, engaged, loving, and committed in the lives of our sons and daughters. Together we can raise the standard of fatherhood that our society so desperately needs, and in so doing can combat the negative effects that fatherlessness has had on human trafficking victims in the US and around the world.