Every single person, no matter their past, present, or future, is wholly worthy of love.

We stand firmly in that belief at REST. It is why we do what we do; because we believe that each man, woman, boy, and girl that has experienced sexual exploitation is worthy of love.

Every year, as we draw near to the Super Bowl, news cycles and our social media feeds see an increase in articles about sex trafficking. If you look at Google Trends for the terms “sex trafficking” and “human trafficking”, you’ll see searches for those terms take a sharp uptick in late January and February.

“In cases in our office, and in cases from service providers who work with youth, consistently many of the people affected are girls. Not only, though. There are many boys—and consistently we see in the data there are ten, to thirty, to fifty percent boys who are exploited.”

Here in January of 2018—National Human Trafficking Awareness Month—that definition seems more relevant than ever. The last few months of 2017 were marked with the hashtag #MeToo, bringing light to the pandemic abuses that stem from culturally embedded misogyny and abusive power dynamics.

Every single person is worthy of love.

That is the belief that drives our work at REST, and that was the theme of the evening at our fifth annual A Night of REST fundraising gala on Saturday, November 11.