Matt Parker

For years undercover in Columbia, there's this wave of vulnerable women coming into Columbia desperate for money and trying to send work home.

And they often shave their hair and sell their hair to make wigs right there on the border.

Traffickers just wait there on the border for them, and then they offer them jobs.

And so you look at that situation.

I think this is a great story.

It's like if you were to drive by a homeless person in the United States and they had a cardboard sign and it says, I will work for food, you know, if that were genuinely true...

we should have an amount of compassion for that individual, right?

They're willing to work in exchange for money, right?

What we would probably consider to be honorable work, mowing the lawn or painting a fence.

But if that sign said, I will have sex with you for money, or I will have sex with you for food, that really should hit us a little bit differently.

But that is exactly what's happening, right?

vulnerable people are willing, on behalf of their families and their children, to say yes to an exploitive situation to survive.

And that is happening at scale, 50 million, right?

This is a large problem.

But the majority of us in society aren't equating what's taking place as...

vulnerable thing we we should not allow young women to sell their bodies we should be able as a society to care for them in a way where they get the choice perhaps to do that yeah but they don't have to do it to survive yeah

And in this way, it's easy to exploit them.

Someone who's desperate and trying to survive is willing to sell their hair or kidney, you know, willing to cross a border and make a journey that's treacherous to feed their families.

That is oftentimes that vulnerability that leads them to take the job, that leads them to the brothel on a promise of wealth or at least enough.

And then once they're there, and I think the reason the Exodus Road exists as a nonprofit and the reason I do what I do is oftentimes no one's looking for them.