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- [00:00]
Victor Boutros
We thought if we can actually make this model work in the heart of Sub Saharan Africa, that could actually impact millions of lives. So what if we could do that?
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Hey, everybody.
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Sky
Welcome to the Sky Pod, brought to you by Holy Post Media and Omni Consumer Products. I am joined today by a new friend of mine, Victor Boutros, who we met a few weeks ago when you were speaking the Chicago Fellowship.
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Victor Boutros
That's right.
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Sky
And you're back in Chicago. You're from Dallas.
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Victor Boutros
That's right.
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Sky
But you're back in Chicago and you're sitting down in studio with us, which I'm really grateful for your time while you're here. You are the co founder and CEO of the Human Trafficking Institute, which is not an institute to learn how to human traffic.
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Victor Boutros
Correct. Thank you for clarifying that.
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Sky
Yeah, no, see, if you just brought me in as a branding expert, we could have labeled this much. Obviously, it's an organization to fight human trafficking and we're going to get into all that. But I want to begin by just hearing more about your background. Where did you grow up? What was your family like?
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Victor Boutros
So my parents are both from Egypt.
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Sky
And Boutros is an Egyptian name.
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Victor Boutros
Yeah. In fact, Butros is the Arabicized version of Peter. So in Greek it's Petros, in Arabic it's Butros. Okay. And so it's a very. It's a. It's a. It's a Christian name. So Boutros Boutros Gali. Yeah. The UN Secretary General of the un.
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Sky
So I thought he was Hispanic.
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Victor Boutros
No, no.
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Sky
Is he Egyptian?
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Victor Boutros
Yeah, I was a teenager at the time. Yeah. Yeah. So they both grew up there and they were actually non Coptic Christians in Egypt. So they're a tiny minority within a minority. American Presbyterian missionaries started a Christian school in the 1800s that my grandma and my mom went to. Wow. And then some Canadian missionaries started a church that my dad and his family went to.
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Sky
And so I'm assuming it's a fairly small community in Egypt.
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Victor Boutros
Yeah, relatively small community.
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A town called Asute, about 300 miles south of Cairo. Okay. And so they grew up there and you know, as you can imagine, it's not a lot of cultural Christianity in Egypt. So the church was actually incredibly tight knit. It was. It was much more like family and faith was very, very, very central. And my dad left at 18 and ended up going to the University of Baghdad, which in the 1960s was kind of the Paris of the Middle East. It was a place that was mostly is a British protectorate, so taught mostly by Oxbridge professors in English. And he had A great experience. There was more religious freedom there than there was in Egypt. And he loved it, thought cult of medicine and ended up becoming a physician and was the. The company physician for an American oil company in Kuwait for a few years and then felt called the cardiology and applies all over the English speaking world. And the first letter he received was from the US and that mailman who delivered that letter changed my life because he called a friend who was already in the US and said, what do you think? And his friend said, I wouldn't even wait for the other letters. The medicine's amazing, the service is amazing. Doesn't matter where you're from. There's religious freedom here. Get here as quick as you can. And he did. And that.
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Announcer
So where did he. Where did he settle?
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Victor Boutros
So he ended up. He was at Yale in New Haven, which he hadn't really heard of, except his friend had gone there the year before, and he did that for five years. And then he was in Syracuse for a couple years. Angioplasty was just being developed and he was a part of learning that procedure. And then he moved to Dallas. Was not married at that point. Goes back to Egypt basically to get married. Okay.
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Sky
And had he known your mother before this?
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Victor Boutros
Not really. They were. He had left Egypt and he had not been back for 20 years. Wow. So he left at 18, didn't go back until his late 30s. His family and my mom's family were friends, but he had been gone for a long time. And so, long story short, through a letter writing campaign, and they wrote letters back and forth for a year and then got married about a year later. And then my mom, who's also a physician, did her residency at UT Southwestern just outside of Dallas. And that's where I was born. And my sister was born. Born and raised in Dallas.
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Sky
So what year did your father immigrate?
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Victor Boutros
He immigrated in the early 1960s, so 63, 64ish.
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Sky
So, I mean, there's some similarities with my family story. My father's an immigrant from India, a physician.
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Victor Boutros
Is that right?
- [04:35]
Sky
As most Indian immigrants seem to be. But he. He landed in Chicago. He tells the story. He went to a British medical school in Mumbai and always wanted to come to the U.S. in fact, he went to a high school, a Jesuit high school in Mumbai.
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Victor Boutros
No kidding.
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Sky
Run by Jesuits from New York City. And across the street from his high school was an American cultural museum set up by the State Department, where he listened to Elvis Presley records and read American magazines and watched American movies. And just like I want to Go to America when I grow up.
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Victor Boutros
That's incredible.
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Sky
So he finishes medical school and he applies to do his residency in the US and he said, I think in the State Department forms you could specify or request where you wanted to do your medical residency. He put Honolulu. That's what someone in the State Department thought. They laughed, and they sent him to Cook county in Chicago in February 1972. 73, something like that.
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And my mother's American, but also tons of medicine on that side of the family, so lots of medicine. She was a nurse.
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Victor Boutros
Yeah.
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Sky
So lots of medical background. So you're Egyptian.
- [05:43]
Victor Boutros
Yes.
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Sky
Grew up in Dallas.
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Victor Boutros
That's right.
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Sky
And you're an attorney now. I was reading your bio. I don't know how this is humanly possible, but it says you are a graduate of Baylor University, Harvard University, Oxford University, and the University of Chicago Law School.
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Victor Boutros
Yeah.
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Sky
How did you do all of that?
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Victor Boutros
Was.
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Sky
It was there, like, I don't know.
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Announcer
Double courses here where they qualified for.
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Sky
Multiple universities or you just did these sequentially.
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Victor Boutros
You know, it was just a circuitous route to God's calling in my life. But I say that half in jest, but also in some ways, really it was true. I didn't know exactly what God was calling me to. And I did have this, I think, very deep sense, particularly with my parents, like growing up. Maybe you had this too, growing up in a developing country and thinking about that mailman and how that, you know, but for that mailman, I might not be sitting here, I might not be speaking English. These just sort of like incredible providential inflection points in my. In my history. And for me, there's just this question of like, well, what is it all for? My parents were very clear. Like, they, they. They wanted to give their kids two things, faith and education. And faith was the centerpiece of their lives and. And education was the means by which you would discern your calling and be equipped to go and serve in the kingdom of God.
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And so that just question kept lingering, like, what is this all for? I am growing up in Dallas. I'm growing up getting to have this amazing education.
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But for what? It's gotta be for more than just enjoying having this education. There's gotta be more to it. And so honestly, part of my path through those educational institutions was discerning, like, what is that calling?
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Sky
So I'm curious, that path, what did you study initially at Baylor? I assume you started at Baylor.
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Victor Boutros
I did. I started at Baylor and I was initially pre med. Surprise, surprise. And I was kind of a Math and science, kid. And then I had to take a.
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I took a logic course. And the logic course was really interesting because it was like math but applied to all these different topics. And I remember I went to kind of a prep school and for high school in Dallas and I had a bunch of really smart friends who were atheists. And I had these memories of just like staying up till two in the morning talking about like arguments for and against the existence of God, Christianity, when we're supposed to be studying for AP History. And here was like this logic course is like there are actually arguments that are, that can be formed, that can produce conclusion. And it's like, and it's like math. And that was like very interesting to me. And then, you know, started. One of the big questions that came up was the problem of evil. And that was one of the biggest objections that my friends who were atheists had. And I remember having this experience of like, it felt like it was a little bit of an intellectual game. Like we're sitting at a beautiful coffee shop getting ready to go a football game and you're saying that you don't believe in God because if God were all powerful and all good, he wouldn't allow all this evil and suffering in the world. But you're not experiencing that evil and suffering.
- [09:00]
And it felt there was something hollow about it. And then when I ended up at Harvard, I ended up traveling with an intervarsity group of students there and some alums. And that was my first experience of actually meeting people in the world who had trouble believing that God was good because they were personally in so much pain. And you know, being in the developing world, I saw there was a lot of pain that was very obvious and visible. I mean you can, you can walk off the plane and see hunger and homelessness and illness. But when I started meeting people, one of the things that really loomed large was the sense of like not being safe, that there could be bullies in the community that could come in and, and even take away all these goods and resources and services that, that the body of Christ was trying to provide to them. And that was the thing that was like central in their mind. And that's in that process that led me to my first exposure to human trafficking, which was in the form of a very specific case involving a 12 year old girl. And we can talk about that. But that, that really, that moment really shifted. That was the moment where.
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I felt probably for the first time in my life that sense of clarity, of like, this is what it's for.
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Sky
And was that experience overseas?
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Victor Boutros
Yeah, this 12 year old girl was in India, actually in Mumbai. And she was.
- [10:20]
From a rural village, got sent to the big city to earn some money, found a job washing dishes in a restaurant, earned some summer money, is getting ready to head back home. She goes to Victoria Station in Mumbai where she's trying to catch her train. And as you know, Victoria Station is one of the busiest train stations on the planet. I think at the time, something like a million of people a day were churning through that station. So she's feeling totally overwhelmed by the chaos and she doesn't know where to go. And a couple of older women approach her and they see that she's struggling, say, are you doing okay? She says, well, I can't find my train. I said, where are you going? She tells them. And they said, well, that's our line, we'll show you where that is. And so they get on the train together. She feels like these kind of grandmas are looking out for her. And they start chatting, they have some tea, and turns out the tea is drugged. And so she's knocked out. And when she wakes up, she finds herself on the third floor of a brothel in the red light district of Mumbai where these two women have sold her for the equivalent of 250American dollars. And the trafficker says, hey, I paid money for you, you're now going to make money for me. You've got to service seven 12 customers a day, seven days a week, that's your quota. And she says, I don't want, I just want to get home. And, and I think that was a crystallizing moment for me because it was like, this is not someone who's making some kind of economic decision to engage in commercial sex. This is a 12 year old who just wants to go home to her family. And meanwhile, here's her parents over here at the rural train station who have no idea where she is. They don't know what happened to her. They don't even know how to start looking for her. And it just made my blood boil. I thought, how do you do that to a 12 year old? And then I started learning about the size and scope of the problem. And honestly, sky, it was actually very unhelpful for me. It made me very jaded. I was like, oh my gosh. It was like I couldn't articulate it at the time, but it was like this tug of war between my heart and my head and my heart is going, oh my gosh. Like in the philosophy classroom, we're talking about all these like moral nuances. But this is black and white, like this girl needs to be out today, like, what do we have to do to get her out today? And my head's going, you can't draw near to this. Her story is one of a million stories replicated around the globe. It's whatever you do, it's just going to be a drop in the ocean. And I didn't want to hear from any trafficking orgs. I felt like, I don't want to be rude, I know you're trying to do good things in the world, but I don't think you're really even making a dent. And that kind of divided soul moment was a very painful place to be. But at the same time there was this sort of sense of clarity where I felt like this is what it's for, like this is what you're supposed to do. And I thought maybe it's an emotional high and it will just kind of wear off. But it really never did. And that really changed the course.
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Sky
How old were you when you heard this story or met this girl?
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Victor Boutros
This is like probably 21, 22. Early 20s.
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Sky
Yeah. I'd been back to India a number of times as a kid, but I remember being there when I was 19, after my freshman year of college. And you know, as you get to that age, you just see things differently, you recognize the magnitude of things differently. And I wasn't exposed to anyone who was trafficked to my knowledge, but you see just the overwhelming amount of poverty. And a lot of these kids that are begging on the streets, you know, are being exploited, if not sexually, they're being exploited just to make money for whoever's handling, you know, the ring of beggars. And it's so easy. I remember coming away, going back to my college in Ohio and being like, these people have no idea how most of the world is actually living. And you feel powerless because the problem is so overwhelming and so big. You can give money to one kid on the street, but you don't know if he's getting any of it. And it's a drop in the bucket. I mean, you're describing it with a 12 year old girl being trafficked. And when it's personalized, when you can see one person, you feel it differently. But then.
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Knowing there are millions of others, it's overwhelming. So we'll get into your good work in this area in a minute, but let's finish kind of your education and training. So when do you make the decision that you're going to go into law.
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Victor Boutros
So really after that moment, so I ended up being in a graduate program at Oxford, and that could have led to a doctorate. And I left that program early with the vision of, like, going to law school because I had that clarity of, like, I need to be equipped with the professional skills to be effective in this space. And I. And it felt like that is the next step.
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Sky
So you went into law school. I mean, a lot of people go to law school not knowing what kind of law they want to practice or what that looks like. But you, you went in with a sense of, I want to be involved in criminal law and I want to.
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Victor Boutros
Be combating trafficking 100%. It was very clear, like, this is why I'm coming.
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Sky
Okay, so University of Chicago Law School, and then you end up working for the Justice Department. Was that immediately after completing law school?
- [15:14]
Victor Boutros
No, I clerked for a judge, and then I was in the private sector for a few years at a big law firm. And then I had the opportunity in 2007 to move to D.C. and join the Justice Department, which was just starting its first human trafficking prosecution unit. So this was the first group of federal prosecutors that wouldn't work cases just locally, but would have national enforcement authority and work cases across the US on human trafficking.
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Sky
What was it about that time frame that led the Justice Department to initiate this? I mean, obviously, human trafficking is not a new phenomenon. Why did it take until 2007, 2008?
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Victor Boutros
Yeah, the.
- [15:54]
The medium length version of the story is there were some very old laws that, that were really targeting slavery in the US that, that stopped being useful after a Supreme court case in 1988 that really restricted the scope of those laws. And so Congress, with its usual speed and alacrity 12 years later, said, we need to really solve this problem. And so they created a new suite of anti trafficking laws that were really targeting the way that traffickers were actually behaving. And so really those were among the earliest meaningful anti trafficking laws that were passed global, globally. And those were the laws that I used as a federal prosecutor. And so those laws had been in place, you know, for a few years. And they were trying to figure out, hey, is there a need for some really special. Like, these cases are actually quite specialized in the way that you do them is very different from some other types of criminal cases. And so there was a need of like, okay, what if we had a specialized unit that could build some of these special skills, maybe help build some of those special skills around the country and, and do some learning? And I think There was a sense of, like, this could be actually a worthwhile experiment to see could this kind of specialized national team help drive impact in a meaningful way?
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Sky
And I'm assuming at the time those laws were passed by Congress and this department was initiated, this is a nonpartisan issue, or was it partisan?
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Victor Boutros
No, it was actually this, like, incredibly unlikely coalition between, at the time, the conservative evangelical right and the secular feminist left, who didn't agree about a lot, but they agreed this is wrong and it needs to stop. And so it was a real. It was. You know, I lived in D.C. for 15 years, and people talk about bipartisan issues a lot, but there are very few social issues I can think of where there isn't vocal opposition. There isn't, you know, one team saying we should do this and another team saying we should not do this. Yeah, I can't.
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Sky
Who's on the pro trafficking?
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Victor Boutros
But that's the thing. I mean, this is, like, one of the only issues truly in D.C. where the conversation is very clear. It's not should we or shouldn't we stop this? The question is, can we and how? Which is a very different kind of conversation. And so, yeah, it is a really, truly bipartisan issue. It's one of the very few things that is truly bipartisan.
- [18:11]
Sky
Okay, so that raises a question I've had for a while. When I was growing up in mostly the 80s and then even into the 90s, I don't recall hearing about trafficking, especially in Christian communities or church communities. It didn't seem like it was on the radar, at least not my radar, as. As a problem that Christians should be involved in. We heard about a lot of other things. Hunger, malnutrition, education.
- [18:38]
Go on down the list of social issues in the US but even globally. But I didn't hear about trafficking. And now it's pretty common. It's up there in recognition in Christian communities that this is a big problem. How do you explain that shift? What put it on the radar of so many more Christians? Is there some inciting incident? Was there a particular spokesperson? Or how did this become what it has now become in the Christian community?
- [19:06]
Victor Boutros
Yeah, I mean, I think part of it was the. The nature of the crime is that it. It. It's hidden. Right. So if you and I hopped on a plane and traveled to the developing world today, in the first 24 hours, we would see, in most developing countries, you could see the homelessness, you can see the hunger, you can see the. The illness, but you won't see the trafficking because the trafficker doesn't want you to see it. The trafficker is deliberately trying to keep it from view, from those who might intervene to stop it. And in this tragic irony, the victims feel so embarrassed and ashamed of what's happened to them that they also don't want you to see. So, in a sense, all the parties involved are trying to keep it hidden, and if you are going to surface it, you have to actually go look for it. And so I think that was part of the problem, is it remained hidden for a long time, and it wasn't coherently understood as a. As a single crime. So people would say, oh, there's like, commercial sex, and maybe there's kids in commercial sex, which feels bad, but there wasn't a name for that. That also cohered with the kids who were being forced to beg and being maimed as a way of trying to drive up the kind of contributions that they would get. And the kids who are being, you know, forced to work, maybe in a hotel or restaurant, like, all of those things were just kind of slowly being parsed out as different types of crimes. But there wasn't this coherent understanding of, hey, there are traffickers who are basically operating on the same business model, which is they're trying to profit by forcing people either into commercial sex, which we call now called sex trafficking, or into labor in a whole array of industries, which we call labor trafficking. But in every case, the model is similar. It's like, hey, I could use voluntary laborers who I got to pay and keep happy, or they'll go somewhere else, or I could use force and threats and violence and coerce them, and then all my labor costs magically get turned into profits. And so even if there's laws in the books, as long as those laws are not enforced, there's a lot of people who are willing to make that choice, willing to pocket those few extra shillings or rubles that they would otherwise not have and put those in their pocket. And I think there. So I do think there was a bit of awareness movement that began in late 90s, early 2000s through a variety of different means, both secular and Christian, that started having this sort of coherent thing of like, hey, all these little stories that we're hearing, there's actually a coherent crime that's happening that is an umbrella that explains all of this. And I think giving that language and structure and the moral clarity of like, hey, this is what's happening, Because I think it's very evil. You know, it was for a while, it was like, well, commercial sex is maybe for some People, it's complicated. There are debates about like, what do we think about commercial sex? Are there voluntary sex workers or not? And you could get embroiled in that. But there was an awareness of like that 12 year old girl who's like, everybody's like, no, no, no, no. That 12 year old girl is not making an economic decision to engage in this. She should be home with her family. And that clarity started to emerge I think in the late 90s and early 2000s.
- [22:19]
Sky
So you end up in the Justice Department. You're living in Washington D.C. it was around that time that I first became aware of International Justice Mission and Gary Haugen and his writings and he talked about this issue as modern day slavery, involuntary laborers or sex workers.
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Explain that era and your time at the Justice Department and what did you learn about the problem of trafficking and what solutions did you see being brought to the issue that you were enthusiastic about and which ones did you feel were not as effective?
- [22:56]
Victor Boutros
Yeah, I mean, I think Gary played Gary and when I first met Gary, it was like the very earliest days of International Justice Mission. He actually came and spoke at Harvard while I was a student there. And that began what's now a 20 plus year friendship. And I think he did an amazing job of. He's a, I think he really is a central part of that story of how especially the church began to understand what was happening and reinvigorate the biblical call to justice. And it was powerful. For me that was very instrumental in my own story. And so I think that was a big, big part of that. And I think that there was some, there were some interventions there that were, that I sense like, were more effective. You know, there was a time when Christians were going to places like India and saying, oh, here are these kids. And I met kids like this who were in bonded labor, who in a moment of, you know, medical crisis, the family doesn't have enough money to do something for their kid who's sick. They need the money. They go to a local money lender who says, okay, I'll give you, you know, the $20 that you need, but only if you sell your eight year old kid to me. And in that moment that kid gets sold and then, you know, there's such crazy interest that's being charged that that kid is really in. It really isn't a form of modern slavery for the rest of her life. I mean, I remember sitting across the table from a kid who was, who was basically in bonded slavery for a debt that had been incurred by his grandmother, a $20 debt that had been incurred by his grandmother. And then grandma works and then mom works, and then here he is, the third generation from this $20 debt. And so you had Christians who are like, well, I got $20. Let's just solve this right now. Let's just pay that out. And the traffickers were only too happy to say, oh, amazing, hey Christians, over here, I've got lots. And as quickly as the Christians would be buying them out the front door, they'd be ushering more in the back door. And then they were just not only getting the lifet labor, they were also getting this new revenue stream from the Christians, which was totally well intentioned. Right. But that, I mean, I think there is a sort of a lesson for, for me that these victims need more than good intentions. And my parents being physicians, I think there was a sense of, you know, my mom would sometimes go on the, she was an ophthalmologist and she would go on these medical mission trips and do cataract surgery in developing countries. And, and in that case, it was abundantly obvious, like, hey, I feel bad for these, you know, for these poor people who, whose life experience is so diminished by their cataracts, but I, they need a lot more than my compassion. They actually need my mom. They need actually a skilled surgeon who, for, for an ophthalmologist, it's almost routine surgery to do this cataract surgery. And likewise, I had this sense of like, hey, these trafficking victims need more than good intentions. They really need specialized skills and they need smart, strategic approaches that aren't just targeting, caring for the victims after the fact. But I wanted to see, is there an approach where you could move upstream and begin to stop the trafficking at its source, which from my perspective, was really the trafficker. Because if you could stop the trafficker from making that decision to use force and threats and violence, then not only would you free their current victims, but you would spare that future stream of victims from ever enduring that trauma in the first place. And that felt like a game changer.
- [26:26]
Sky
We're going to get into that in a minute. I want to wrap up your time at the Justice Department and what you learned about trafficking here in the US and law enforcement in the US what does trafficking look like here? Because we can talk about India or Africa or Southeast Asia, but in the US this is happening.
- [26:44]
Victor Boutros
Yes.
- [26:46]
Sky
Either from your time at the State Department or even now when you talk about trafficking in our country. What are the blind spots people have or the assumptions they make about the way it happens? That isn't helpful. And what would you say to people today that are worried about this in our communities?
- [27:04]
Victor Boutros
I would say there's a few big myths that can cause people to have a misperception of what trafficking is like. One myth is that it's all about movement and it's about crossing borders. And, and this myth is fed almost every day in the newspapers. I'll read a story that is claims to be about trafficking and it's really about smuggling. So smuggling and trafficking are distinct crimes. Smuggling is a crime against the border. You can't have a smuggling case that doesn't involve the crossing of a border, but you can be voluntarily smuggled. You can actually pay someone to help you be smuggled across a border, or you could be involuntarily smuggled. But trafficking is quite different. Trafficking doesn't require movement of any kind. The heart of the crime of trafficking is really about coercion. It's about using force or threats or violence to coerce someone into commercial sex or into labor or some other form of exploitation. And that doesn't require travel at all. And that's. And as a, and as a result, traffickers often don't cross borders of any kind. So 75% of the victims never cross a border of any kind. Of. And so I think that's one missed opportunities. We think it's all about cross border. It's about the borders. And that's not to say the borders are irrelevant, but there's a huge volume of cases that don't involve the crossing of borders.
- [28:24]
Announcer
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