The Daily Signal - His Sister Was Sex-Trafficked for 6 Years. Here’s How He’s Devoted His Life to Fighting It. (Repeat)

Episode Date: December 30, 2020

Top 5 of 2020 Day 3: During this Christmas season, we're sharing some of our favorite interviews of the year to allow our team to take time off for the holidays. Ilonka Deaton was trafficked into sex slavery at the age of 12. She suffered for six years before finally getting free. Now, her brother, Jaco Booyens, runs a film company that brings the darkness of sex trafficking into the light. He’s out with a film called “8 Days.” Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to day three of the Daily Signal's top five of 2020. Today is Wednesday, December 30th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. All this week, we are ringing in the new year with your and our top favorite episodes of the past year. We hope you have been enjoying this look back at 2020. Yako Boyan's sister was sex trafficked for six years beginning at the age of 12. Boyens has now made it his mission to fight for the ending.

of human trafficking. He joins the show to share his sister's story and discuss his film eight days. And if you haven't already, please do be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. It would be a great gift to us this Christmas season. We are joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Yakub Boyans. He's the president and CEO of the film company After Eden Pictures. He is also the founder of Share Together, a nonprofit organization fighting against the global crisis of sex trafficking. Yaku, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Rachel.

It's great to be here. Well, it's great to have you. Can you start off just by telling us about your film company after eating pictures as well as shared together? Yeah, so after Eden Pictures was born to transform culture through uplifting entertainment. So that's our mission statement, right? So we're going to take social issues and then produce entertainment content, film, television, docu-series,

books, media, broad spectrum media, to speak to culture, to transform it positively, you know, through uplifting entertainment. So it's, yes, family-friendly values, for sure.

Yes, I'm a Christian, so that's my root, right, and my foundation. But we're going to speak to big issues like sex trafficking and tackle heavy issues and in show, because if a picture is a thousand words,

then a video and a film can do so much of the start of a conversation, right? And then we can do our real work after the fact. So that's the purpose of AfterEaten Pictures. And we've got an amazing team. Great writers and producers. My wife is an amazing writer by far more skilled than I am, right, on every level, because we marry way up, because women are amazing. But no, an amazing team. And just a humble to have a voice in media. That's incredible. So you directed a film called Eight Days, which raises awareness about sex trafficking. It's an incredible story. And can you go into that story behind the film?

Yeah, we wanted to make a movie, not a documentary about sex trafficking, and we wanted to make a film that spoke from the victim's perspective. So Amber, in this film, her name is Amber, all the cases in that film are actual rescue cases that we were involved with, right? So these are real life events that we reenact, but in a feature film style, not a docu-series style. And so you hear Rachel's thoughts and it's riveting. I mean, it's a, it's a gut punch when you start understanding what happens to a human being when they're mistreated. What happens to a woman or a guy when they're sexually violated? What are the thoughts and what does that process look like, right? How does a person get to a place where their self-worts stripped, their value was gone, their self-image, and then the guilt comes in,

and the loathing and the justification and just that process? And so we wanted to do that to show the audience This is the result of predatory behavior. When people come in and steal people's innocence, this is what... Unfortunately, we're at a place in America, definitely, today, where we've got to bring humanity back into the conversation. We've got to remember when we talk about child sex trafficking, people, children, 12-year-old kids here,

being raped repeatedly. When we talk about domestic violence and abuse, that is a woman with a beating heart, a real person, with real feelings and emotions, right? So we've got to bring humanity back into it because so much of what we're doing today is political. It's political. It's almost like it's, you know,

this ethereal alternate universe that we're talking about and it's politics. No, it's real. I mean, it touches families. It touches people. In the film, is there a particular story about a particular young woman or girl

that you highlight, that you like to tell that's particularly, I don't know, it just draws the audience in. Is there any particular story that you like to highlight? when talking about the film. Yeah, it's Amber story because Amber is sex trafficked out of a stable home. It's not a runaway. She's not a foster kid.

She's not in CPS. She's living at home. And that is the number one rising trend of trafficking girls today is girls who live at home. It's not what you think it is. And so there's a huge misconception with Americans thinking, oh, yeah, okay, it's that part of town. It's the underprivileged community. It's the black community. No, it's not.

it is it is today infiltrated suburbia because now the softest target the easiest victim if you talk to any of these secret service guys that are here or any of the police force they'll tell you the easiest victim is the victim whose radar is way down who's living at home with her mom and dad not getting love but money right and stuff solves problems but her real emotions and her real feelings she explores that avenue online and the real person comes out online and now a predator trolls online and spots her and go, that's my girl. She needs attention. She's got daddy issues. She's void of purpose. She doesn't feel like she fits in.

She feels like nobody can understand her. I'll be the one that comes and says, I understand you. I get you, I know, I have the answers, and then they'll court her for a period. They're patient. There's a Romeo effect. and win her heart. This is why so many of these women will tell you when they're abused, it's love, he loves me.

They're convinced. Women that stand on the witness stand after guys bounce their heads off the wall and go, and then defend the guy, he loves me, because they've been conditioned to, this is love. I'm giving you worth. I'm the person that understands you. It's so easy today. So that film shows clearly how a girl is. literally sex trafficked from a stable home.

Both parents. Both parents there, because it's so easy today. Wow. You mentioned just the lack of self-worth and how that is one of the contributing factors to this problem. What would you say, looking at everything from kind of a wide-angle lens, is the driving force of sex trafficking in the United States?

We have, in our country, for decades now, made an agreement that we're going to decay our sexual morality. The sexual revolution hit in the 60s. People wanted sexual freedom. And historically, three generations after you make a decision like that, a society implodes.

When there is sexual immorality in society, they fall every single time. No society in history has ever survived a sexually immoral culture. Because ultimately, it's a drug. It's the most addictive. Look, there's two things. You know the two things that are in every family?

There's only two things. Faith is not in every family, right? The two things that are in every single family on the planet is money and sex. Now look at the two things that I believe the enemy attacks people with most. Money and sex. So if you're going to corrupt a society, where would you go? Money and sex. So if you now can introduce sex to a child early, that is now a corrupted, quote-on-quote,

right, a misguided young person. Their vision of what sex is for, what love is, how do I get love? Do I get love through sex? Because this is what they want the girls to believe. So you're taking a direction and you're changing the direction of a whole society by making them sexually immoral. Well, how do we get people to accept that? You go with gender neutrality, gender fluidity, same-sex marriage,

You know, you go with teaching sex at to 10-year-olds in school where you show them how to perform sex, which is going on at the moment, where you normalize anal sex. This is what's going on. And so all of this is to create a culture that is immoral, and we have an immoral culture today. And so we can fight politically, sure. And for those who want to keep certain people in power and politics, that's amazing. But the next morning when you wake up after an election, that election doesn't fix the country morally. The moral responsibility comes to the individual. It's you, Rachel.

And my cry to you today is Rachel, do everything you can to keep yourself morally strong. Because no government can fix that. Because if you're not morally strong, you will attract people that will harm you. Because they'll see it in you. So how does Rachel keep Rachel safe? Have a moral compass. For Rachel's sake, not even for the country, but for Rachel, right, for you. Because ultimately, if you're corrupted there, it's a difficult place to come back from.

It takes a lot of rehabilitation. It takes a lot of therapy to come back from that. Now we can go into the abortion argument. It's self-justifying. Pleasure. People go, I want to have sex. as much as possible, but I don't want any consequences. It's my body, and I want sex. I go, okay, great, go have sex. But if you don't want to be pregnant, then use a condom. But once you

fall pregnant, now all of a sudden you've elevated the conversation to a whole other level. Now it's not just you. Now there's a life there. Now you've got a real issue. Now you have out of reckless behavior. Number one, I don't think people should have sex with whoever they want to, because that creates problems. But let's just say that's the individual's desire. Now you've now gone outside of yourself. But it's immorality. And so now if you're a predator,

if you're a pedophile in America today, this is like a playground. Because we are socially normalizing a sexually immoral culture. And the predators are saying, thank you for doing my grooming work for me because before I had to work really hard. to convince a girl to give it up now society encourages it yeah yeah something that's not talked about

as much and the very little research i've done about sex trafficking there's a lot of mention that's made and i feel like we don't talk about enough about pornography and the the link that's between pornography and sex trafficking is there a link there and everything that you've done what is the relationship you see is there one there if i may if you and cut me off here from two verbose i want to i want to show you how this works. The average age of young boys today that's introduced to pornography is eight. It's the average age. So now you show porn to an eight-year-old boy. You instantaneously change his view of women immediately, immediately, because the natural instinct in a man is to hunt with a hunter. A woman is to take care, to nurture, to grow life, to protect life. So now you tell

that boy, hey, woman is here for pleasure, so you've already altered how he sees woman. Now he's makes decisions immediately. It's a drug. That drug progresses very fast. It goes from soft porn to hard porn. 100%. No question. Porn feeds sex trafficking. It creates demand. 100%. Can't get away from it. So anybody that's engaging in porn, you are in the system creating demand for child sex trafficking. Yaku, that's a leap. No, it's not. Because the ultimate drug for a sex addict, which the entry drug is porn. The ultimate drug is sex with a pre-puberty young girl. That's where you go.

You don't start with heroin. You start with an opioid that they steal out of their dad's medicine cabinet or smoking a joint. And then all of a sudden they end up with heroin. It's the same with sex. You don't start with abusing a child. You start with an introduction,

and it's always, always. Rachel, there's not a single pedophile in the world it's not a porn addict. They all started with porn. They just progressed all the way. There wasn't an interception in their life somewhere where someone stepped in and go, hey, it needs to stop.

That's why my cry is, you've got to stop engaging in porn if you're involved because that is a vicious drug. Do you know that today the statistic is 68% of porn users will divorce? I've heard that the divorce rates are extremely high. 68% which means a difference. destroys the family. It steals everything.

It robs you of everything. I mean, it is so destructive because there's actual chemistry alteration in the brain. There's actual, there's actual physiological makeup that changes. It's a vital, because it's sex. Why is sex so important? Because sex is primal. It's foundational. So you can distort someone sexually.

I mean, then just throw anything else. What else do you want to do with that person? It compromises everything. Everything. You talk to students a lot. I know you're at the Turning Point Conference this week talking to students here. What is the best way you encourage them to help stay morally straight? I know that this is a conversation we're trying to elevate more.

And so what are some ways you encourage people to actually walk the walk and stay morally straight and to be accountable? Look, I'd be completely off-kilter if I don't say this. It's a relationship with God, number one. 100%. there's no way because you don't have the strength in yourself to do this it's like me saying hey rachel you need to face the world on your own all the temptations or you don't have it right you got to dig deeper and go to a place to say okay where's my source of source of power and encouragement so god a relationship with god and then secondly self-accountability they know

every pedophile that lays in bed at night with themselves know they're abusing children they know. At some point, they just stop listening to that moral voice that says, hey, this doesn't feel right. Pay attention to the moral voice, and then small groups hold each other accountable. Sisters, friends, your BFFs, best buds, the guys. You see your buddy engaging in porn. Pull them aside. Don't publicly shame this guy. Don't do it on social media. Pull the guy aside, according to what the word of God says to do, and say, listen, man, I know that you're hooked on this, but I want you to know what it's going to do to you, number one. It's going to corrupt you. You're going to lose it all.

You're going to lose your family. You're going to marry the wrong woman. You're going to maybe end up in jail. You're going to end up abusing some people. So let's get help now. Hold one another in love, not in judgment, but hold one another accountable, and then walk with that guy or that girl. Do you know how many young students today again at this summit

will come to me and say, I'm addicted to porn? Staggering number. And women. There's a crazy rise in how many women. So we've got to hold ourselves accountable. For me, it is you've got to connect with God because that's where you get your encouragement, your inspiration and your direction,

according to his word, on how to do this. How to tackle these very heavy issues? How would you encourage people who don't have a platform but still want to make a difference when it comes to fighting pornography, fighting sex trafficking? What do you tell them, they're like, hey, I don't really have a platform here, but I want to do something.

What do you encourage them to do? I got that question five minutes ago, right? I'm like, go online and connect. with us, you either connect with us, our organization, or we will connect you with a local organization. And look, we work in 56 countries, right? We've very connected in the U.S. So if you say I'm from Omaha, Nebraska, I can get you in touch with an organization locally where if you physically want to donate time, you can do it, or if you just want to plug in with our organization, right, and help what we do, then they can do it online with our organization

as well. So you mentioned at the beginning when we started talking that you have a passion for media, that's what you do. How did you particularly get involved with sex trafficking? Was it a passion that you've always had? Or what was a story that led you to do the work that you're doing right now? I love how you ask questions, by the way, right? This is real for us, right? This is not something we just read a book, my sister. So we're two brothers. I'm the oldest, the younger brother and then a sister. My sister was sex traffic for six years. Six years. So this is real. This is, we wake up morning and our sister's gone, my brother and I and my mom. How did we learn what sex trafficking is? On the streets. Talking to people, trying to find a sister and everybody said, oh, she's a runaway.

She's a runaway. No, this is very real. And then that harsh reality hit me when she came back. The person that left is not the person that came back. It took 10 years. It took a decade to get Ilanka healthy. Three suicide attempts. I mean, it is a disaster. disaster, the suicide rate with these victims are through the roof because they come back to people who think they just should be normal. But when you abuse a woman sexually, you strip her of everything, everything, personality, identity, self-worth, purpose. It's a shell. The life expectancy of people that are trafficked to seven years, they don't live because they commit suicide. So if you look at teen suicide rate today and then draw the correlation with sex abuse,

It is staggering. Staggering, right? Because they feel like they can't talk. I can't tell anybody. Nobody will understand. So for us, it's very real. Very real. And so then I started witnessing sex trafficking in the USA.

And we just made a decision. My wife is a writer, an incredible writer. Philippa wrote a book and they said, listen, we're going to fight this fight because no child, no child. And again, yes, I'm a Christian. I'll fight for the Muslim kid, the Buddhist kid, the Hindu kid, any American child, we're focusing on American children. We fight in other countries too, but it's such an epidemic in the USA.

We said, listen, we're going to focus in the USA. No child should be sexually exploited. Zero. And unfortunately today, the rising trend, as I told you, is in suburbia, but it's also parents trafficking their own children. That is just unreal. It's the number one rising trend. And what is behind that?

Is it just money? Financial gain. Huge financial gain. And the sickness, you got a dad, who's a pedophile, who used to, to go out of the house. Now society said, no, but it's normal. Now dad goes, you're making it easy. Now I can just do it in the house.

Because now the dad knows, oh, I've learned how to get my wife to a position where she won't say anything. This is massive manipulation and coercion and force and fraud. So it's an epidemic. But for us, it's very real because it's home. So, no, I didn't learn about this because I got passionate about some movement. we had to find our sister. And then, now Ilanka is healthy.

She runs our own ministry in Nashville, Tennessee. She goes to the bedside of these girls at hospitals and tell them, hey, I was there. Six years, by the way. I mean, this is not, you know. In the movie, eight days, and that girl was from California, she was gone for eight days. Fifty-eight, fifty-two men had abused her in eight days, right? And she was found, praise God. I said it was six years.

I mean, she's got a book out keeping secrets, which talks about why women keep these secrets. Why do you see a woman being beaten up and then go back to the same guy? It doesn't make any sense. No, not to the logical, healthy mind. But

when a woman gets violated, logic's out the window. Survival mechanism. It's about just getting through life and guys. Look, boys are abused, absolutely. but 97% are girls. Then I post this question.

I don't have a single feminist group in the country that's fighting this fight. That is tragic. That is so tragic. Okay. I just tell you, I just give you a stat, 97% of child sex traffic victims, who are, the average age is 12 in the United States, by the way,

lowest average in the world, are girls. Now we're not even talking about the girl in the womb. We're not talking about a walking around 12-year-old. old women and feminist groups will not defend them. Because if they do, they know the second they acknowledge that child sex trafficking is real, they have to investigate their own, and all of a sudden they have to look at where are the kids coming from, all of a sudden it leads them to a border conversation, all of a sudden they go, well, wait a minute,

if we're going to fight child sex trafficking, it's going to go against our political views. They go, yeah. But remember, it's people. And they go, nah. Hands off. We'll sit on the sidelines on this one. And I go, you hypocrites. You're not feminist.

You created a movement to justify yourself and the things that are important to you. But you're not really for every woman. And then I'll go and say, if you're for every woman, why is over 60% of the babies aborted black babies, girls? Fight for that girl. You just mentioned the border crisis and something else, along with pornography and sex trafficking, other link that's rarely talked about is the situation we have at the border and how sex trafficking feeds into that as well. What is the situation there and what are you seeing in regards to people that are brought over legally and how they can be trafficked into slavery? Our border patrol,

I sat with the head of CBP recently in D.C., right? The head, right? And I said, come on. His name is Sell. Talk to me of communications. And he said, Yaku, here's the deal. Our guys drink from a firehouse. This is the process that family comes across, as you know Yaku, it's almost impossible to know, is it her dad, is it not? You need time. We don't have the time. You know, we get incredible pressure from not interrogating. 30% of the children that's coming across that border today will be in the sex trafficking rings. 30%. That's not even a fearmongering. That is a fact. 60% of the children that come across the border have at some point or will be at some point in their lives at least sexually violated once. Means rape, whatever. But in the

a sex trafficking ring, 30% of them coming over will go into sex trafficking. But here's the most shocking stat that I learned. When CBP hands that child over, that child goes to HHS, health and human service, that has zero training, zero experience on even identifying a child sex traffic victim. All they care about is their disease, is the child nourished or malnourished, and food. Now health and human services holds that child, right, and release them into the system, and then we find children all throughout America, can't speak English, being rescued from sex trafficking, don't know who they are because that child's a ghost, there's nothing, birth certificate,

there's nothing on that child, where does that child come from, who's that child? So now if you're a trafficker, think about how amazing that is to traffickers. You mean you're just going to bring children in here that no one's going to look for? And when they find them, there's nowhere to send them. And oh, by the way, we don't have enough facilities to house the kids when they rescued. So the trafficker picks them up from JV, picks them up from the shelter. It's a disastrous system. And the longer the left placates and is not willing to publicly recognize that even their own people,

both sides of the aisle are perpetrators. it's being aided and abetted. We have our work cut out for us. So final question for you, it's no secret that the work you do, it's draining emotionally. I know it, I mean, just reading about it a little bit. It's tough stuff.

You mentioned your faith in Christ. I know that must be a huge part of what keeps you going, but how do you stay strong and committed to the fight when it can be so hard, especially given you do? Not everyone's job, you know, every day to day, nine to five. I don't know what hours you work,

but they don't always have to face the kind of things that you face. So how do you stay grounded? Yeah, it really is my faith. And it's a core belief system for me, that every life matters. Every life. And I just, you know, as we're talking here, you know what goes through my mind as we're sitting here? I see my sister's face. Every day.

I remember and will never forget the moment when that girl sat in front of us as a family, just me, my mom and brother. and the truth came out. And I had to hear what men did to her. And not once, although one rape is horrific, but six years. And I had to listen to explicit detail because it was part of her healing process. There's no words for the emotion. So I see that face and that conversation every day.

So I wake up and I go, stop it, get them. Save the kids, get the bad guys. And yes, and then Christ brings the power. And then we've got an amazing team. I mean, and my wife does it with me, right? And my team does it with me. And we create, so there's an amazing team, and it's people who really love people. They really care about people.

And I can tell you, 90 plus percent of the people who we end up being involved with rescue and whatever, these people aren't, it's not like, we're going to go rescue the Christians. Okay, this is not like, oh, you're going for your kind. No, it's just every child. but also now every pedophile. I'm putting my sights squarely on demand, those who are paying for sex with children. I'm coming for those guys.

Fortune 500 companies, CEOs, congressmen, senators, I don't care who you are, what your name is, where you're from, what may happen in society if it gets out. Run, hide, or repent, change your ways, because we will get you. We will. Epstein was the tip of the iceberg. was a minion. I mean, wait till you see what comes out this year. People above him, the people

he answered. The people who pulled his strings. It's going to rock society because it's, and it's going to scare people because it's among us. It's here. I mean, it's here at this conference today. That's the reality. It's in the church. Every church. Deal with it, Pastor. start getting your people safe or you're not doing your job. It's in every corporation. Because why? It's sex. It's in every family, right?

And so fathers, do your job as a dad. Get involved with your daughters. Know their hearts. Build them up as young women. Tell them who they are. Get them real identity. Make sure that the first time they really believe that they're loved It is not from some creep online.

Make sure it was you, dad, and mom, and brother. Teach your sons how to respect women. Teach your sons how to protect women. Not that I'm saying women are weak and can't protect themselves. No. But man's job is to be a watchman, to go out there and hunt evil and look for the bad guys. But dads are not doing that. They're not.

So ultimately it comes down to the father. Now look at what's happening at the African-American community. fatherless nation. Gotta bring those dads back. Got to get him back. Got to get him involved to those young girls do not go trust some weird guy

to tell them what love is, what their purpose is in life, what their worth is in life because they'll do it. Yaku, thank you so much for joining us today on the day of the podcast. We are honored to have you and thank you for sharing everything you shared.

Thank you, Rachel. You guys are amazing. Thank you for your work. It's an honor. Well, thanks for being with us. Bless you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal Podcast.

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