Save The Children

On Saturday, August 22^nd at Ellis Lake Marysville vehicles drove by honking repeatedly at the bystanders. Bystanders stood out in bad air quality standing in humidity with signs stating: Kids are our future NOT for sale. Standing around the pavement and on the lawns by Ellis Lake were peaceful protesters with signs of various shapes and sizes to call awareness to child trafficking. The person heading the event, the orchestrator was not the head of some state or government sanctioned organization, but an American citizen and a concerned mother who’s protective instincts were called upon when a man made an attempt to capture her daughter.

When approaching Michelle Shipmen, after asking around to learn  her whereabouts at the busy event, she informed me she wasn’t a public speaker but after she began talking about the issue she was standing against I learned she didn’t need to be, her strong feelings on the subject did all the talking. Miss Shipmen told me that the protest began because a man tried to take her sixteen year old daughter into his car by offering her money—that hit too close to home for her and as a first time protester, she put the event into action. When asking Shipmen if it was her family and friends protesting, she replied with a laugh, “I don’t even know half the people that are out here. It’s definitely the community.” In regards to future protests Shipmen said that she would love to get something else started in the future, and both of us agreed that the reason she could get a rally with complete strangers is because the topic was something that everyone could be united over. We discussed how everyone knows or has children and would be abhorred if anything happened to them.

I asked Shipmen what she hoped to accomplish and her answer was clear, “To bring more awareness, hopefully stricter sentencing for the ones that do get caught, [bring] awareness to people so they know the signs to look out for, you know because it could be any one of these people and we would never know.”

“So what’s your opinion on the stricter sentence, what do you think is an appropriate sentence for these types of crimes?” I asked and she had no trouble expressing an opinion.

“I don’t think they should ever be let out,” Shipmen said.

“Preying on children is one of the worst forms of crime,” I concurred.

“Yeah—monsters is the word—they need to be locked up,” she nodded in assent. I asked Miss Shipmen if there was anything else besides stricter punishment, awareness, and recognizing signs of a predator that she wanted people to be able to take away from their protest. She replied, “Just that, if we’re united—we can fight this.” She expressed. She was nervous since this was her first protest, and that all the people that had actually showed made her emotional but it also encouraged her to do something like it again. I had friendly parting words with Shipmen encouraging her to draw attention to the issue she’d chosen to protest, attention often makes people stop and think or look at what could be done or changed.

The Protest at Ellis Lake showed that someone doesn’t have to be an events coordinator, a public speaker, or an appointed official to call attention to something as horrific as child trafficking—they just have to be someone willing to stand in front of the public and do it. We as a nation and a community can all agree that child trafficking is an evil crime, but are we all satisfied with how it’s being handled by the authorities and the state?  Child traffickers, child molesters, they aren’t considered violent criminals, they typically don’t receive a life sentence, and they almost never receive capital punishment (which many of the signs at the protest were advocating for such as shoot the pedophiles). If we as the public are subject to or God forbid—victim to these crimes—want things to be different, we need to be willing to stand before the public and use whatever means we have to make governing authorities aware of our dissent. The Save the Children Protest also showed that when the public or the governing authorities don’t respond with immediate action, get a lot of people with you to stand by your point and don’t move—you’ll be hard to ignore.