Contact: Pastor Phil Magnan, President, Biblical Family Advocates, 619-962-0659, info@bfamilyadvocates.com

SAN DIEGO, Sept. 29 /Christian Newswire/ -- Tony Nassif, founder and President of the Cedars Cultural and Education Foundation hosted the recent 7th Annual Preventing Abuse Conference in Irvine California. We are deeply in debt to him for his vision and desire to expose, educate and activate a truly godly response to one of the worst crimes against humanity.

It is estimated that there are currently over 27 million who are trapped in the bondage of modern day slavery. An estimated 800,000 annually are trafficked across borders, who are mostly women and children.

As President of Biblical Family Advocates I attended this conference; along with my wife Diane, with the hope of upgrading our ongoing education in another area that greatly concerns the family both nationally and internationally. We had no idea what we were going to experience at that conference.

For starters, we were shown short movie presentations about human trafficking. These were not theoretical exercises in the visual arts, this was the real deal. We witnessed law enforcement footage of Mexican women who were promised work in the United States only to be greeted with forced prostitution under the threat of death or torture, in the U.S.

There was another story of a Mexican man who came to the US to earn enough money pay for his son's cancer medicine only to be forced into labor with people who paid him very little money with threats of violence. Thankfully he was rescued by a local human rights group along with many others and prosecutors put that slave trade group into prison.

We saw the very real horrific story of a young 16 year old Mexican girl who was kidnapped in the US to be made a sex slave and tortured for years. Tragically when she had finally escaped because her captor rapist was killed, she was falsely accused of murder and found guilty, spending over 22 years in an American prison. The shear injustice and atrocity against this woman was beyond words. Eventually, she was finally released to her family and is working to become a productive member of American society. We thank God that U.S. trafficking laws have special provisions and benefits that can be afforded victims of trafficking.

We also saw how young girls in Cambodia were stolen and sold like cattle to buyers for use in prostitution. These are people who are used sexually at least 30 times a day. As you might imagine these girls are suicidal and terribly traumatized for years to come; both physically and mentally.

We were deeply moved by all of these stories and this would have been enough. But it was just the beginning. What was amazing to us was that we were able to speak to people who were directly affected by human trafficking. For many years I have thought that human trafficking was in some other country, only to be faced with the reality that it has been rampant in the U.S. for many years.

On the average, nearly 60,000 people a year are abducted in the U.S. by those who are not relatives. Take for instance the story of Noreen Gosch, whose 12 year old son, Johnny was abducted in 1982 while doing his paper route. Witnesses say he was stunned with some kind of gun and put into a car.

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