Child sex slavery is real.

[emulatorloo]

13. Everyone here cares. The people who made that movie you promoted are bogus though.

Among other things, They did not follow thru and help the children.

I posted this article to you about Ballard.

Here it is again:

Tim Ballad and his organization behind this sound very problematic. It sounds like they do more harm than good, and their motivations are suspect.

It is a long article but well worth reading.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/05/sex-trafficking-raid-operation-underground-railroad.html

Called by God
In 2014, I went on a vigilante raid to “save” kids sold for sex. What we did haunts me now.

BY MEG CONLEY

I was told two of the children had been trafficked for the first time that day. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that OUR may have created a demand. After the sting, I asked people on the jump team where the 26 kids were taken. I was given only vague answers. Aftercare wasn’t really their focus, I was told, but they partnered with people who did it well.

Snip

I found out what really happened from a Foreign Policy report:

“In 2014, after OUR’s first operation in the Dominican Republic, a local organization called the National Council for Children and Adolescents quickly discovered it didn’t have the capacity to handle the 26 girls rescued. They were released in less than a week.”

Some testified, the article reported. The local organization lost track of others. All those kids in 2014 got from us was a soda and a swim—and Ballard came out ahead in the deal.


Disillusioned and disturbed, I sought more understanding of the group’s place within the anti-trafficking world. I reached out to anti-trafficking experts. When I told an international anti-trafficking expert about the 2014 raid I attended, she immediately said, “Do you know how wrong all of that was?” The research, I learned, tells us our 2014 raid was most likely just another childhood trauma for those 26 kids. We made their lives worse.

But what she grasped in a moment, it took me years to understand. When Ballard called me into that house, he put me in harm’s way so that I could write a story about him. (Ballard did not respond to specific questions about the raid.) A condemnation of Ballard? Yes. But it’s a condemnation of me, too. I’d imagined myself the same way he did, or said he did—as a savior of these children. I tried to find meaning in my own life on the backs of exploited kids.

I began to face the truth.

Operation Underground Railroad is now famous for its international sting operations. They are a big fundraiser: In 2015, a Silicon Valley man funded a sting with $40,000 and watched it happen in real time. With the help of OUR, a rich person can become a vigilante hero for the day, their living room transformed into a personal situation room. For those who can’t afford the situation room, Ballard carries the drama with him to every interview and every fundraiser. That drama, and a real desire to save children, moves a lot of donors, whether or not it’s accurate. Vice recently investigated a few of Ballard’s stories and found “a pattern of image-burnishing and mythology-building, a series of exaggerations that are, in the aggregate, quite misleading,” and has detailed “disturbingly amateurish” operations like the one I attended.

The TV show never got picked up. But Operation Underground Railroad made a video of the raid I went on and posted it to its YouTube channel. It’s still there. You can see the terrified housekeeper when she opens the door to a man with a gun, me lying on the floor while police pace around me, and Ballard winking at the camera. The video ends with the line, “26 victims liberated, 8 traffickers arrested.”