RYAN ROEMER | guest writer
photo courtesy | ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS
The Trade movie poster displays a barcode placed on an enslaved woman.


Trade shocks viewers as issues of human slavery and trafficking are laid bare across the U.S.

It’s only a movie. It’s not real. At any moment, I can get up, walk out of this theater and step back into the comfortable reality of a life free of slavery.

Slavery. It’s extinct, right? Or at least most of us believe it to be. We were raised to believe that slavery in the U.S. ended with the Civil War and the thirteenth amendment.

This, in fact, could not be further from the truth. As cited in the movie Trade, as well as on their official website, “as many as 800,000 people are trafficked over international frontiers each year, largely for sexual exploitation,” and the majority of these slaves are sold in America.

Startled yet?

If not, go to Edwards Theater in West Covina and watch a movie based on a true story that will bring statistics into focus and tears to your eyes.

This is the premise, and goal, of the new movie Trade.

Simply titled, yet intricate in its account of the human sex trade and lack of government response, Trade is a narrative documentary that does its best to exemplify the stories of the many women and young girls and boys who are bought, stolen, and sold every day right under the government’s nose, and even next door to American families.

This brief glimpse of one small group of human “products,” being stolen, trafficked and auctioned off in America, begins in Mexico.

The film focuses specifically on the stories of a young Polish woman who was paying her way to a “better life in America,” and a 13 year old girl, riding her bike on the streets of her hometown in Mexico, who was kidnapped on her way to see her brother.

While enslaved in different ways, the movie reminds the viewer over and over again that it is greed, and sexual perversion that drives those involved in their capture and brutal treatment.

It is easy, though, to read about this brutality and discuss it as a fact, instead of imagining women and children in bondage, raped, beaten and forced to do terrible things.

We often get caught up with numbers and forget how individual each of these numbers are, and the families that go along with them. This is what Trade depicts so well, the unseen and ignored.

Trade takes the viewer into the unmarked vans and blind-covered houses, where mom, sister, son, daughter and cousin become objects and products, auctioned off for mere thousands of dollars. What price do you put on a life?

While graphic, I wonder how discreet a motion picture, especially one that is attempting to appeal to a large, fairly conservative American audience, had to be in comparison to the actuality of it all.

The unfortunate fact is that many people will avoid or refuse seeing this movie, because of its graphic content.

It is by no means enjoyable to watch but it is impossible to ignore.

I consider it difficult to be introduced to a young woman, learn about her family and young son, and then to watch her be viciously abused, raped, and drugged, and treated worse than most people in the United States would treat a dog.

It is impossible to walk away from it unaffected.

As the movie ends and the credits roll, all I’m left with is frustrations and questions after seeing this movie.

What is encouraging, however, is that the websites cited on Trade’s official website, are long-standing Christian organizations that have saved thousands of lives, out of slavery, rape, abuse, and, ultimately, death. My hope is that Trade, as well as the publicity sparked by it, will elicit not only awareness, but also a response.
Whether you see the movie or not, human trafficking will continue to be an overwhelming problem.

And, as it was said by Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers, “…you’re either part of the solution, or you’re part of the problem.” By reading this review, and by seeing this movie, you become responsible.

If you want to become part of the solution, attend the Matheteis Dinner Forum entitled ‘Human Trafficking,’ Tuesday Oct. 30.

For more information about the Matheteis Forum and Human Trafficking, visit the Ministry and Service (MAS) office.