On this episode of the Denison Forum Podcast, Dr. Mark Turman welcomes Leigh Scarborough, founder and CEO of Shield of the Children, for a sobering yet vital conversation about the global crisis of child sex trafficking. Drawing from his firsthand work in Southeast Asia and beyond, Leigh shares the harsh realities of trafficking, including the distinction between “soft” and “hard” rescues, the long-term harm caused by pornography, and why major public events like the Super Bowl often become centers for trafficking activity. Leigh also opens up about his journey of faith, his military background, and the calling that led him into this critical mission field. This episode highlights how Shield of the Children is working to protect the most vulnerable—and how each of us can take meaningful steps to engage and support the fight against human trafficking.
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Topics
- (01:22): Highlighting transformative ministries
- (02:35): Discussing child sex trafficking
- (02:52): Introducing Leigh Scarborough
- (05:38): Leigh’s encounter in Vietnam
- (12:31): The start of Shield of the Children
- (14:43): Leigh’s faith journey
- (22:09): Recognizing human trafficking
- (25:18): Trafficking and major sporting events
- (31:18): Soft vs. hard rescue
- (36:44): Understanding trafficking networks
- (41:06): Shield of the Children’s focus on Texas
- (48:42): Call to action and prayer
- (54:48): How to get involved with Shield of the Children
Resources
- Website: Shield Of The Children
- Instagram: Shield of the Children
- Facebook: Shield of the Children
- “Sound of Freedom”: Choosing hope in the face of fear
- Sex trafficking in Italy and the need for new identity
- What does the Bible say about pornography? Can you break free from sexual temptation?
- God’s power and grace to break sexual addiction
- Fighting pornography and sexual sin: A conversation with Matt Jacobson
- Covenant Eyes
- Fight the New Drug
- Freedom Course
- How has Denison Forum impacted your faith?
- 2025 04 Who Am I? Identity • Denison Forum
- Subscribe to The Daily Article by Dr. Jim Denison
About Leigh Scarborough
Leigh Scarborough is the Founder and CEO of Shield of The Children. He has led operations against child-sex trafficking in South-East Asia and is currently studying a Masters of Leadership and Management. Leigh’s current focus is on expanding Shield’s operations in to Texas, however he continues to lead international operations and training of non-profits and law enforcement. Leigh holds a bachelor of intercultural studies and speaks 6 languages. Leigh spent several years in the Royal Australian Air Force and then went on to work in the Australian Intelligence Community.
About Dr. Mark Turman
Mark Turman, DMin, serves as the Executive Director of Denison Forum, where he leads with a passion for equipping believers to navigate today’s complex culture with biblical truth. He is best known as the host of The Denison Forum Podcast and the lead pastor of the Possum Kingdom Chapel, the in-person congregation of Denison Ministries.
Dr. Turman is the coauthor of Sacred Sexuality: Reclaiming God’s Design and Who Am I? What the Bible Says About Identity and Why it Matters. He earned his undergraduate degree from Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas, and received his Master of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. He later completed his Doctor of Ministry at George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University in Waco.
Before joining Denison Forum, Mark served as a pastor for 35 years, including 25 years as the founding pastor of Crosspoint Church in McKinney, Texas.
Mark and his high school sweetheart, Judi, married in 1986. They are proud parents of two adult children and grandparents to three grandchildren.
About Denison Forum
Denison Forum exists to thoughtfully engage the issues of the day from a biblical perspective through The Daily Article email newsletter and podcast, The Denison Forum Podcast, as well as many books and additional resources.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
NOTE: This transcript was AI-generated and has not been fully edited.
Dr. Mark Turman: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Denison Forum Podcast. I’m Mark Turman, the host for today’s conversation, and I also get to serve as executive director of Denison Forum. And if you’d like to know more about our work, you can find us at denisonforum.org. And today we just wanna remind you that God has said in very clear ways that He wants every person to be saved to come to a knowledge of the truth of Jesus Christ.
We just celebrated that recently at Easter time. We also know that he wants not only to forgive us of our sin and to lead us, but he wants to lead us to what he calls an abundant and full and beautiful life. Jesus spoke about that in the Gospel of John verse chapter 10, verse 10. Many are familiar with that.
Our part at Denison Forum is to help everyone get into that new life with Christ and to have it to the full. By equipping you as [00:01:00] followers of Christ with biblical truth. We want to empower you to not only flourish in your own relationship with God, but we also want you to help others to flourish to serve in intentional ways that bring about transformation, that share the gospel and bring people into the hope and the life, and the joy and the freedom that God intends for all of us.
One of the ways we do that through our podcast is by highlighting national and international ministries that are transforming lives, that are literally bringing life and hope to people on a daily basis in some of the darkest places and situations that you could imagine. We’ve done that on other occasions.
Ministries like Mercy Ships and Texans on missions in the international community. We’ve done that in a number of ways and we want to continue to do that to make you aware and hopefully to give you hope. God is working in some of these really hard places and on some of these [00:02:00] really big topics.
We do this obviously on a national and international stage because our ministry has that kind of reach and we know and we hope. There are great things happening in your local community and through your local church that you’re involved in, but we also want you and your church to know about some of these opportunities that are happening on a larger scale that’ll give you something that we hope will, you’ll pray about.
We want you to have places where you can engage, and we’re gonna do that today as we talk about a really, really hard and dark subject. Okay? Some of you will remember and you probably saw as I did the really hard story that came out in the 2023 movie, the Sound of Freedom about child sex Trafficking.
And we’re gonna dive in that today with someone who is on the front line. My conversation partner and new friend Leigh Scarborough is the founder and CEO of a ministry [00:03:00] called Shield of the Children. Lemme tell you a little bit about Leigh before he jumps into conversation with us. As I said, he founded Shield of the Children and has led for a couple of years now operations that directly fight against child sex trafficking, particularly in the Southeast Asia region.
He is also currently studying to receive a Master’s in Leadership and Management. He’s got a current focus of bringing some of the work of SHIELD into the United States in Texas. He is also continuing operations internationally that train nonprofits and also like I said, directly involve opposing and stopping sex trafficking rings.
He works with law enforcement holds a, a bachelor’s degree in inter intercultural studies. And just as a side note, he speaks six languages, which is really helpful when you’re traveling the world. He [00:04:00] formally served in the Royal Australian Air Force and also collaborated with the Australian intelligence community.
That is a lot Leigh to say at one time. So welcome to the Forum podcast.
Leigh Scarborough: Thank you. I really appreciate it.
Dr. Mark Turman: I’m not gonna tell people that you’re, you know, traveling all around the world, but you are not in the same time zone with me. And we appreciate you giving up some of your sleep today so that we can have a conversation about what God is doing in and through your work.
And we are looking forward to the conversation and just let me say on behalf of all of us, we’re grateful that people like you are willing to hear the call of God and to step into some of these incredibly hard situations that really would in many ways keep us up at night. And, and if we thought more about them, would really, really just cause us toter at a deep level.
One things we talk about in a lot of different ways at Forum, we write [00:05:00] about this. Is the sanctity, the just the inherent value of every human being from the time when they’re conceived to their natural death. We also talk a lot about, we write a lot about sacred sexuality and how our world is so twisted up and corrupt in so many ways, particularly as we’ll talk about today with children.
And I just wanna start off by letting you tell a little bit of your story about why you got into this kind of ministry, why you got into this work.
Leigh Scarborough: Absolutely. Thank you. I, I appreciate the opportunity. So for me, I was, I was not dissatisfied working in the Australian intelligence community as, as a military member working in a non-uniform capacity.
I had. Ventured into the field of counter-terrorism, and I found it very fulfilling. And we, Australia works a lot in Southeast Asia, and I was spending time in [00:06:00] Vietnam working with the Vietnamese government tackling a, a bunch of issues that we both care about. And I had a, a late night meeting with some American intelligence personnel.
And then as I was going back to my hotel, I actually decided, you know what, I’m gonna take a shortcut. I’m gonna go down an alleyway to get back to my hotel. I was in Hochin City or Saigon which half the population still calls it Saigon. It’s a beautiful city, very safe. So I thought, yep, I’ll take this alleyway.
I’m not worried about my own safety. I’m, I’m gonna get back to my hotel just fine. As I walked down that alleyway, I saw a shadow, a small shadow just emerge from my right side about 30 yards up. And I, I realized, oh, this is, this is the shape of a, a child. And so I got closer to this child and.
Realized that the child was actually wearing transparent clothing, so see-through clothing no, no underwear. And so it was very shocking to me. It was the first time I’d seen anything like this. I speak Vietnamese, that’s one of the [00:07:00] languages that I speak. So I, I squatted down a crouched down and spoke to this young girl and said, simply, what are you doing out on the street?
It’s 10 30, 11 o’clock at night. It doesn’t make sense for you to be here. And she was, she was very frank. And, and this is gonna be a heavy thing for some people to hear. So if you do have a background of sexual abuse or anything like that, I just wanna warn people that it’s not easy to listen to.
Mm-hmm. She said to me you can take me to your hotel and you can do whatever you like. And I said, what, what do you, what do you mean? And it shocked me. She rattled off a bunch of of sex acts. She said, you can do this and that, and, and a lot of very explicit things. Now, I hadn’t actually learned that Vietnamese vocabulary, so all of mine had been based around, I’m having political conversations, I’m having conversations with law enforcement, with military, with Intel.
And so I could only pick up a few [00:08:00] words that when she started rattling that off. But I could tell some of these words are sexual. And so I said I, I don’t want to do any of that. I’m, I’m gonna go now because I didn’t have a, a framework to operate. I didn’t have a team I could deploy. I didn’t have an organization behind me.
And and I was a lot younger. I. And so I said to her, I don’t know. I don’t, I don’t want any of that. You know, I kind of panicked a little. And she said, oh wait. If you don’t do any of this, I’m gonna, I’m gonna get in trouble and, and something bad is gonna happen to me. And I said, why would that happen?
And she said the guy, you know, that you can see behind me quite far back, he’s watching me and I have to, I have to do this. And I said, you, you, I, I don’t want to do that. And so we kind of had this back and forth where she was quite desperate to convince me that it was something that she needed me to do.
And I eventually said look, I, and I was, my mind was just racing. And eventually I just said, how about I [00:09:00] just give you some money? And I walk on? And she said, oh, really? And she, you know, her eyes lit up. She got excited. And so I handed her the money that I had on me, the cash that I had on me. And then I walked on and it was only.
Two or three minutes before I was at my hotel. And my hotel was it was this Saigon, if anybody knows that hotel, it’s one of the most beautiful hotels in southeast Asia. French colonial design just takes your breath away as you walk through the building. And I was used to staying in five star hotels and flying business class and being, you know, in that sort of environment, right?
So I go in and, and this time I went into the hotel, it was different. So I, I, I’m not saying it was a five star hotel to brag about what, what I had, but I realized what I had. So as I entered my room, I looked around almost in awe to be honest. Mm-hmm. Mark, I of. This is, this is where I am [00:10:00] in this huge room with this beautiful decor, massive bed, extremely comfortable.
You know, I kind of had, you know how if you get put up somewhere for a while, you’ve got a kitchenette and you’ve got this and you’ve got that. And it’s all just very luxurious. And and it really hit me the injustice of her life and, and the comfort and beauty and decadence of my life. And I sat down on that, that massive bed, and I just wept.
I wept for longer than I’d ever wept before then. And I. Raged at God, essentially, and said, what? Yeah, what is this? You know, why, why does this exist? Because up until then I knew about sexual abuse. I knew that kids, you know, maybe some kids got kidnapped or had bad parents or that, you know, those, I didn’t, I didn’t realize that kids were being sold into sex trafficking for the profit of [00:11:00] somebody.
And so here I am sitting here and I’m getting paid very well to, to talk, you know, every day my job was to talk with officials and convince them that this was a good idea or that was a bad idea or whatever. And she was being exploited every day and every night. And it just really, it really hit me.
And so I, I lost my taste for what? For the work I was doing. And I very quickly found myself pleading with God. Show me. Is there a way I can do something here? Is there a way that I can Yeah. Correct this injustice? Because this, God, you’ve taught me that just as you were saying before, the sanctity of every life.
And this little girl, and she was seven.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. Wow. Seven years old.
Leigh Scarborough: Seven years old. Wow. And so for me, it actually wasn’t really a choice anymore. In my, every time I would pray, every time I would try and [00:12:00] engage with God, it was all that came to mind. It was the injustice and. And so I tried, I tried within the Australian government to find a, a place that I could combat this effectively.
And I, I soon realized Australia doesn’t operate that way. The US does. You, you, there’s a lot of efforts in the US government to fight human trafficking Australia mm-hmm. Has a task force that works against online sexual exploitation. But I didn’t feel like I was, I was equipped to do that, you know, none of my training, none of my background was gonna serve well in that area.
So I went back to Australia and I very quickly started applying to a lot of organizations and Sound of Freedom. Was one of those sorry. Operation Underground Railroad, who produced Sound of Freedom, was one of those. Okay. Yeah. And so I went and, and trained with them and, and deployed with them and spent six weeks with them in Thailand.
And it was a crash course. It was a. Very fast realization of how huge this problem is and how widespread it is. And then I started [00:13:00] exploring, you know, which countries didn’t have NGOs or nonprofits working against this issue. And I quickly, quickly realized that Indonesia didn’t really have that.
And so I, operation Underground Road Railroad wasn’t there. Destiny Rescue wasn’t there. International Justice Mission had a, a representation in an office, but they were dealing only with illegal fishing and, and exploitation and trafficking within phishing, which is very important. I’m, I’m not at all criticizing, but there wasn’t a.
It wasn’t an area to, to work in anti-child sex trafficking specifically. I have 11 fostered and adopted siblings who are all Indonesian. And so very, very large family. Yeah. And a lot of, a lot of love for Indonesians. And so that was very much the start of the journey was, alright, we’ve gotta tackle Indonesia.
Yeah. And I soon realized that a lot of the customers, or a lot of the clients are Western they’re Australian, they’re American, they’re, they’re British, they’re European. And so I soon realized I need help. I [00:14:00] need my friends. I need my, my previous colleagues. I, and I need more, I need a, a network of men who can step up, stand up and do something in this space.
And so I started collecting good men around me and, and training them and yeah, and, and assisting and and that. Yeah, we can, we can go into how we are now in Texas probably in a minute, but that’s, that’s the origin story really.
Dr. Mark Turman: Okay. Let me, yeah, let, let me back up and just ask are we talking like two years ago, five years ago?
When, when did you encounter this little girl?
Leigh Scarborough: 2015 is when I met her. 2015.
Dr. Mark Turman: Okay. So this has, this has been a 10 year journey for you now. Yes. And Leigh, give us a little bit of your faith background that you, you just as you tell your story, it’s just this is the second time I’ve heard your story. And for our audience sake, you and I got to meet several months ago, and that’s part of the reason we’re having this conversation now, just because how, how [00:15:00] heart wrenching and how heartbreaking this is.
And, and just to hear you describe it again, just how God was just breaking your heart for this issue and for these children. But paint the picture behind this a little bit from a faith standpoint of how you really frame this in the context of your faith and how you felt like God was working in that.
What is, I mean, tell us about, were you raised in a Christian home? What, what was your faith context for this?
Leigh Scarborough: Yeah, absolutely. So I, I first came to Christ, you know, immature faith, but at seven years old I remember very clearly because I had my presence that I was given for my birthday, and I said to God, God, you are so important to me.
I’m not gonna open my presence before I commit my life to you. And so on my seventh birthday, I. I said, God, I want you to be a, a huge part of my life. I didn’t, I expected to hear an audible voice back from God saying, you know, welcome son. I love you. I didn’t hear anything. [00:16:00] And so the next week, every morning I would wake up and say, God, I, I wanna be a Christian.
Why, why, why aren’t you talking to me about it? And so I was quite worried about it. So I, I had, I had very my parents have very strong faith in Jesus. They’ve, they’ve lived their whole lives for Jesus. And so I. I obviously after about a week, I said to my mom, you know, I, I don’t know what’s going on.
Maybe I’m not, maybe I’m not, you know, welcome or something. I don’t know as a 7-year-old the ideas you have. But we, we were in Indonesia at the time. My parents were working over there for the kingdom. And so my, my faith was very much formed in an environment where you’re surrounded by majority other faith and then also very spiritually active.
So we, you know, from a very young age, we were taught you, you’ve gotta pray, you’ve gotta worship, you’ve gotta glorify God. And if you don’t have your priorities right you know, the devil will just continue to attack you. Even if you do have your priorities right, the [00:17:00] devil’s gonna be attacking you, but you need to yeah.
Be focused on, on God. And so it was a very early age that I feel like my faith was really pushed. Now I, there were also, and I’m sure this is the case for a lot of people’s faith journey, there were milestones, you know, when I was 13 mm-hmm. I felt I got baptized and I felt like that was a really big deal when I was 16, I took part in a program in Texas and that was when I first experienced Texas and absolutely fell in love with it. There’s a lot of funny stories about when I was 16 ’cause I was a little unruly, you know, I talked back a little. I but I, I went to this 10 day program with Kma Ventures called Leadership Expedition.
And I’m actually wearing the shirt tonight because I led on it last year and it was incredibly impactful. I there’s a point, and I won’t reveal it in case anybody who’s listening wants to send their son to the program, but there’s a point where there’s an an in an initiation. There’s a point where [00:18:00] there’s a very much a rite of passage.
Where you are given a mandate to serve. And that was a really big milestone for me as well, and being surrounded by such good Christian men. So from 16, Texas was in my heart. Yeah, I felt like Texas, you know, had my back, and Texas was a good, a good place of spiritual growth and all of that. So that was another milestone.
When I was 18, I joined the military. That was a big milestone for me. I was the only Christian in my course. And we were a, what’s called a, which is very different to the us. I mean, Australia, so many years has been wavering in, its, in its faith and certainly mm-hmm. We don’t have that many Christians around us here.
And I, I was on what’s called a super course. So our course had almost a hundred people just on our, on our recruit course, and I was the only Christian. Yeah. And that was, that was really it was really interesting. It was part, partly it was discouraging and partly it was very, very easy to, to be a [00:19:00] Christian because clearly I wasn’t going out and partying and clubbing and getting drunk and sLeighping around right.
And, and doing all the things that everyone else was doing, but also I was being ostracized. And you know, a lot of the, the guys on the course were, were very clear about how they, they felt about my faith. And, and they were also very condescending when it came to things like why aren’t you hooking up with a girl?
Don’t you like girls? You know, like all these sorts of things that you go through when you join the military. So I, there was a bunch of times where I think God really sustained me early on and then over the years. There were just times, you know, I’d go to a conference or I’d, I’d something would just really bring home who God is.
And so there were a few traumatic experiences in, in the military just with regards to PTSD and, and moral injury. And I, I really felt met by God in that as well. So my faith [00:20:00] was very much, it’s a blessing that my parents brought me up, Christian and, and very practically Christian. Not just, you know, understand your theology and go to Sunday school, but, you know, we go out and we do this because God told us that we need to, to feed the, the hungry and, and clothe the, the naked and you know, provide for the poor.
And so it was, it was very practical. And for me, there really was no option but to be an Onfi Christian.
Dr. Mark Turman: Sounds like, sounds real ground level practical Christianity in every way. And, and even just, again, so many ways that you listen to that story and you see God putting pieces together years before you would see how they would bloom into different actions and ministries even this, this reality that was led by your parents of adopting and fostering these Indonesian children and being very practical about how can we care for the orphan, right?
How can we be really involved, not just pray [00:21:00] for it, but actually find a way to get ourselves directly into those kinds of ministries, and that, that being the atmosphere in which you lived your whole life. Absolutely. You. Basically breathe in day-to-day. Christianity in, in real terms every single day.
Growing up in that environment is God prepared you that prepared you in and for the military and then for things beyond the military and just I wanna point that out to our folks so that, you know, maybe this is a season in somebody’s life listening to us where they need to look back and say, okay, where were those milestones and those pivot points where God was moving in my life in a particular way?
And how has that been preparing me for what he wants me to do next? And it, maybe it’s in this area that we’re talking about today in this very dark place of human trafficking. Maybe it’s somewhere else. But can you look back and see how God has been working in those places? And even [00:22:00] going back five 10, you know, even further into your background and say, how has God been preparing me for what he wants me to do now?
In getting me ready for that. Leigh, help us understand, you know, this is dramatic encounter with this little girl who has been basically enslaved for somebody else’s profit. In the United States, we we’re trying to grow a movement where we use phrases like this. We, we talk to people all the time.
If you see something, say something. That doesn’t mean go get involved with the direct experience or encounter that that bothers you or concerns you. That doesn’t look right to you. But it is, go tell somebody that has the, the standing and the authority to get involved. Have you seen this?
Child trafficking is happening in plain sight. It’s, it’s really around us more than [00:23:00] we realize. Is it, or is it, or is it only kind of tucked away in the back alleys of big cities or places like that? How, how can we become more aware of this issue?
Leigh Scarborough: I think that it absolutely is happening in plain sight a lot of the time.
I think that it’s happening in places where you wouldn’t find a non-fire Christian usually. You know, it’s happening around cheaper accommodation where there’s already prostitution going on. It’s happening around things like gambling establishments or, you know, even things like adult video stores or adult toy stores, or it’s happening around centers where you would, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t find yourself, if you’re an Onfi Christian, you’re not going to that place.
So you’re not going to see. These things happening, but they are happening within kilometers of your house or within my, a couple of miles of your house. Same with massage establishments, you know, most massage establishments in major [00:24:00] cities. Or, or I think massage is the way that it’s set in America.
But they, they often contain sex, sex trafficking and sexual exploitation. And people don’t think that, when you look at the front of the establishment, you see a little massage sign and you think, oh yeah. You know, people go in and, and out and get massages there. But it is happening. Same with labor trafficking.
A lot of farms have labor trafficking and sometimes even the owner of the farm, the farmer themselves, they don’t know that the group of of men or women that are working on the farm are being trafficked. They don’t know because they’ve gone through an agent who seems reputable to say, Hey, I need 20 people to work on my farm over the summer.
They get the 20 people, the person they interact with, they know, oh yeah, that person’s got all the qualifications and certifications and registrations. So they assume that the other 20 workers do as well. But actually at the end of the day, a lot of them don’t. And they’re in debt bondage and they’re, they’re in slavery.
So it’s usually centered around sex establishments. It’s centered around illicit [00:25:00] massage. Brothels is what we refer to them as ibs. And around stores where there’s gambling or any sort of sexual interaction. And it, it is happening in plain sight, but not in, in plain sight in a way that us as Christians would interact with.
If that makes sense.
Dr. Mark Turman: Okay. Yeah, it, that, that’s helpful. But I’ve heard a couple of hints around, around this, not, not anything with any real depth, but tell me a, you’ve encountered this you know, that Americans and people, the world over are huge into sports. We, we love football, basketball. We’re learning to love soccer with the rest of the world.
We’re gonna host some of the World Cup matches coming up soon. Have you engaged with or, or experienced how, when there is a major sporting event like the Super Bowl or other major sporting events, that those actually become kind of hotbed environments for not just prostitution, but for even things like child sex trafficking.[00:26:00]
Leigh Scarborough: Yes, that’s absolutely accurate. So any major sporting event will bring that sort of crowd simply because the majority of people who are psyched up and excited about major sporting events are men. And a lot of them travel away from their wives for that purpose. I’m going to this Super Bowl, I’m going to this football match.
I’m going to this massive event. And they’re no longer in a place where they have their wives and kids or where they have their girlfriend or where they have. And so it’s a time where if, if another guy says, Hey, let’s go down to the strippers there’s a, there’s less, there’s less around them to say, Hey, don’t do that.
Hmm. And so a lot of men start off maybe not intending to engage in sexual exploitation of a minor but the issue comes from. And a lot of research shows that a lot of the issues come from the consumption of pornography. Pornography promotes younger and younger actresses [00:27:00] or exploited women. I, I hesitate to use the word actresses.
And that is something that’s very subversive and very subconscious. And so the first time, now, the average age for watching pornography in Australia is 10, right? For first exposure for for boys. So at 10, generally speaking, a boy is seeing an 18-year-old woman on the screen, or a 19-year-old woman on the screen.
The issue is, as you get older as a man, when you are 40, when you are 50, when you’re 60, you’re still watching that same pornography of that 18 or 19-year-old, because that’s the way that the porn industry. Pushes you and there’s a thing, there’s a phenomenon called super stimulus super normal stimulus, sorry, and super normal stimulus is, is a, it’s a psychological phenomenon for everybody.
For me, for example, I love motorbikes. Now, if I have a 500 cc motorbike and I see a 600 cc or a seven 50 cc motorbike come past, I’m, my eyes light up [00:28:00] and I get excited. And the sound of, of the engine and the, the speed that I know that it has, and then if I get a seven 50, I’ve had a seven 50 before.
Then I wanted a thousand, and then I had an 1100 cc motorbike. It didn’t stop Mark. I never felt you know, oh, I’ve, I’ve reached the, and, and there’s a 3000 cc motorbike out there. Technically you can have, but it’s absurd. Yeah. But anyway, the, this same phenomenon exists within sexual satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
And the porn industry is so well funded and well researched that they know exactly what to go for. So research shows that the largest category within pornography now is called barely legal or, or just 18. And so what that means is. Every consumer of pornography is being pushed down a path to how young can, can, can these girls look.
And that in turn creates a desire for younger and younger girls. And when you [00:29:00] then you go to a sporting event where everyone’s together and everyone’s celebrating and there’s probably some alcohol involved, sometimes, you know, there’s some illicit substances involved, but it’s, it’s an environment where it’s, it’s time to muck around if that’s what you want to do.
And so all of a sudden a lot of these fantasies that these men have. Are starting to, to come about. And that’s why human trafficking around these events is so big, because there’s so much money to be made from the criminal organizations. They can fly women in or, or, you know, girls in relatively easily to a location and then sell them again and again and again and again in a lot of these accommodation you know, places which are now full because everybody’s here to watch the game.
But what do you do after the game? You know? Yeah. And so unless you’ve got good Christian men around you saying, Hey. Gonna, the strippers is a bad idea, or going to a brothel is a bad idea. Getting a a a massage at that place is a bad idea. A lot of these men just go straight for it. And so [00:30:00] that’s why a lot of these events end up being very big human trafficking events and the Super Bowl is the largest.
But there’s an argument amongst law enforcement circles that the World Cup will be larger for human trafficking, simply because there’s so many matches that are gonna be played. And so it’s not, it’s not as fast, it’s not over so quickly. I think there’s 16 matches being played in Texas for the World Cup.
And so you’re talking about a, a much longer period of time that people are going to be in one location without their spouse or their, you know, their daughter or their anybody, to remind them that you know, Hey, this is, this is bad.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And just like you said in a, in a similar way, you know, the devil always kind of mimics what God does.
And in the same way that God prepares us over a long time for the next thing he wants us to do, the devil adopts that same strategy through pornography as you described it. And he sets people up [00:31:00] for both, for failure and for enslavement. Not only is the, not only are these children and these young girls, particularly being enslaved, but the, the men who pursue them are actually enslaved to their own absolutely desire and and in some way need to be rescued from that themselves.
Leigh, I want to wanna go down this road. When you and I first met and we gotta talk, and I, I learned a lot just in that one conversation, but the thing that has stayed with me is, has been this understanding that you brought to me about. Working in this space and the difference between what you called a hard rescue versus a soft rescue we started talking about the movie Sound of Freedom and that really is a story of soft rescue.
But help us understand the difference and why you are working in the area of hard rescue.
Leigh Scarborough: Absolutely. Soft rescue is where you take a survivor or a victim of human trafficking and you take them [00:32:00] out of the situation. Whether you buy their freedom from their captors, from the people who are holding them or whether you snatch and grab you, take them forcefully, or whether you just convince them, Hey.
I know you don’t wanna be in this situation. I have a safe place for you if you wanna walk out this building now or if you wanna walk off this street right now with me, I’ve got your back. That is soft rescue. It sounds beautiful. It’s very, very, very easy to do in comparison to hard rescue. But the issue with soft rescue is it doesn’t deal with the root cause of the problem with either the person who is selling the child or the person who is buying the child.
Neither of these ends of the spectrum are dealt with. And so the most crude analogy that I would use, or the simplest analogy would be a a Coke vending machine. You have a can of Coke, it’s in the machine. You go and take the can of Coke out of the machine, and then the can of Coke is replaced. And that’s because there is still supply and there is still demand and you haven’t affected it.
In fact, [00:33:00] what happens is there’s an increase in unique victims of human trafficking. What I mean by that is. If can of Coke with serial number nine, seven on the end is taken out of that machine, serial number nine eight is gonna take its place then nine nine, right then a hundred, they tho those cans of Coke will not enter that vending machine unless you take that first one out.
And so for me, soft rescue is destructive because instead of having one person being trafficked for say a year while you do an investigation and figure out what the network looks like and how to impact it, instead you’re taking one out say every week. And instead you over that year you have 52 unique victims.
They’re, they never would’ve been trafficked if you didn’t get involved. But hard rescue is where you are chasing arrests and prosecutions and cutting their head off the snake so you’re not just looking for that one child and [00:34:00] okay, let’s get that child out at all costs, which really does sound beautiful, but.
It’s so damaging. Instead, you spend more time, you work with law enforcement, which can be grueling and it can take a lot of time. Mm-hmm. And it certainly takes more money and it takes more resources and more skills. But when you can stop that person, the impact is so much greater. Even the statistics on your average pedophile, your average pedophile has approximately 200 unique victims in their life.
Wow. So from when they start acting out their fantasies of what they shouldn’t be doing, to the point where they either die or stop or get arrested, statistically we’re seeing it’s about 200. So at any point along that, if he can stop that man from doing what he’s doing. How many of those 200 unique victims are not becoming victims?
So even if all you are dealing with is the demand side, the the men, that’s already extremely effective, but much better than that [00:35:00] is going to the point where the person has the transporter, the recruiter, the financier, and the network to bring these kids in. That’s where you really can make an impact with hard rescue.
But the problem is it takes such a long time and you have to have incredible relationships with law enforcement, with government, and, and people don’t generally have the patience for that because yeah, you’ll also go through a couple of failures and they’re devastating if you do an entire operation, entire investigation around a child brothel, and you go to the point where it’s ready to, for the police to raid, and then someone gets paid off or, mm-hmm.
Something happens, the information is leaked, and then it’s all over. That can one incident alone like that can take a good man out of the fight because you just look at it and go, man, what the, you know, like, how am I supposed to deal with this when the people I go to to ask for the help are the ones who screwed it up?
So a [00:36:00] lot of people in the hard rescue scene don’t last very long because when they come up to a failure, it’s not just a failure. I didn’t do well at my job and my boss had a go at me. No, it’s, it’s a child that you’ve watched and looked at and gone, this child is a child of God and I I need to get them.
I need to get them out. Wow. And then, yeah, the stakes are, they’re not,
Dr. Mark Turman: yeah. The, yeah. The stakes are so high, right? It just massive. Yeah. And, and which, which means that when you’re successful, it’s just a glorious, glorious time when you’re successful. But, but the other, the other side is also true, right?
When, when there’s a failure, there’s. I just I can imagine how hard it is to sLeighp at night and just it’s
Leigh Scarborough: devastating.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. Yeah. Can, can you this may be going a little bit too far into the details, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna ask you to go there to the extent that you can, which is, is in the work that you’ve done over 10 years, can you kind of paint a picture of what a typical child sex [00:37:00] trafficking organization looks like?
Like how many people are involved in, in, I, I’m sure that they come in all shapes and sizes. But is there, paint us a picture this, if you were pursuing over a long period of time with collaboration with law enforcement and you had identified an organization that you wanted to try to disrupt and tear down, what would that look like in terms of the number of people that you’d be tracking and trying to, trying to understand how this organization works?
Leigh Scarborough: It absolutely depends on the situation on where you are on, on a lot of factors. So I, I would hesitate to say typical, but the largest group that I have worked against they had 26 children that they were selling daily. That was their regular pool, and then they had a lot of adult women that they were also selling.
That was the largest group that I went against. But I haven’t worked in the investigation side in places like India where [00:38:00] you are talking about tens of thousands within one area. And so India has the largest brothel area in the world, and they estimate there’s over a hundred thousand prostitutes within that area.
And they, a lot of them, most of them are forced and a lot of it is intergenerational. So you’ve got three, sometimes up to three generations of women that have been trafficked. So you’ve got the mother who then gives birth to children within that within that. Trafficking circle, and then they eventually have children as well, and they’re still not free.
So there are networks out there that would take a nation to take apart. And then there are networks that, you know, I’ve, I’ve gone against a guy who’s selling six kids. I’ve gone against people who are selling one child and their fa and their family with that child. You know, it’s I wouldn’t say there’s a typical size.
I would say for our organization, our capabilities and our resources, we tend to target, if we can, groups that have maybe 10 children at their disposal [00:39:00] or less that tends to be sort of the sweet spot on. And, and so I would say maybe that’s more the regular size. I think it’s rare to have mm-hmm.
A, a huge, a, a huge organization. It’s also rare to have a very small organization. But when you talk about the size of an organization. It can be very large in terms of how many people are involved, even if they’re not necessarily members of the organization. So transporters and recruiters can operate mm-hmm.
Across many different states, many different islands, many different borders. It can be transnational, so they can be, you know, you can have a trafficking ring that traces across four different countries. And so you might have 500 people involved, but the people who are actually benefiting like properly.
Profiting from it. There’s only a small, a very small handful. So you see now a lot of recruitment online, for example, through social media, you, you see open, especially in Southeast Asia, open [00:40:00] ads for jobs in prostitution, which, you know, in the, in most of the nations that they’re, that they’re peddling these ads.
It’s illegal to do prostitution. Yeah. But those people are known as the recruiters. And sometimes there’s a lot of recruiters or there’s one recruiter who’s really good at their job and they’ve got ads on every social media platform you could possibly think of, and they put them up and take them down regularly.
And because communication is usually encrypted from that point, it’s very difficult to, to then track that communication as well. So some of these organizations are massive, honestly, there’s almost no end to them. But finding out who is benefiting financially, that’s where the power is.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah, and, and sounds as we would expect, and, and in some ways I guess, that there’s a, there’s a lot of people that are connected, but the networks are fairly loose with people who are contracting and who come out and do different parts of the work.
And but you’re trying to get, like I said, trying to work your way all the way up to the person who’s [00:41:00] profiting the most and who has the most to lose. So there’s so many different ways of working on it. Leigh, is there a part of the world where Shield of the Children is particularly focused right now?
Leigh Scarborough: So we would like to be focused in, in Texas and the only. Hold up at the moment for Texas is just seeking the proper authority and permissions. And we’ve had incredible favor and incredible just openness from Texan law enforcement for us. And obviously they’re, they’re doing their due diligence and, and they’re not loose at all about everything that’s going on.
But they. In a lot of places I’ve been rejected straight up regardless of qualifications and experience and, and whatever else that I can prove. Sometimes law enforcement just says, absolutely not. We’re not, we, we, and and sometimes you’ll get law enforcement that say, we don’t even have a problem here.
There’s nothing here. There’s nothing for you to see here. What I’ve found with Texas is law enforcement is, is very open and very keen to tackle the [00:42:00] problem. And I love that. And I find there are only a few places in the world where people are very much, Hey, we don’t mess around. We, we wanna do this.
Yeah. And I alluded, alluded to it earlier, but didn’t continue talking about why, why Texas has become a focus and. Texas has become a focus for two reasons. Firstly, I love Texas because of the, the reasons that I talked about earlier. I, Texas is sewn into me as a, as a man particularly when I was a young man and was a lot more difficult and, and hyperactive.
And unruly. But over time I’ve kept a lot of those those established connections and most of our volunteers that fly to Southeast Asia and some of these journeys, mark from Texas, are 40, 50, 60 hour journeys to get to a location. Wow. They fund themselves, they take their time away from their family or, or from their jobs or from, you know, their careers and they come all the way to the middle of nowhere surrounded by people who they don’t [00:43:00] understand the language that’s being spoken and do this, this work for children that they would’ve never met, would’ve never been part of, you know, these aren’t kids in their church, right?
Or kids in their community or at their school. These are kids halfway across the world. Evidenced by the fact that, that we’re currently on a time zone that’s extremely different. And so Texans eventually some of my Texan volunteers would say to me, Hey, Leigh, is there a reason why SHIELD isn’t in Texas?
And this was only within the last year and a half, two years. And I said I mean, there’s no reason why we wouldn’t do it, but. It costs more money to do things in places like Texas than it does in Thailand or Cambodia or, or Indonesia or the Philippines. You know, and it just, and there’s, I’m sure there, and you know, my initial reaction was I’m sure there’s a lot more red tape and I’m sure that, and I’m also sure there’s plenty of people doing stuff.
And so I. I had a lot of Texans that then started talking to law enforcement, talking to their, their representatives and saying, Hey Leigh, [00:44:00] they’re actually open to this, you know, and I’ve got some connections that you can sit down with and, and can we explore it? Yeah. And so we prayed about it and I spoke to my, my board of directors about it and they said, let’s do it.
You know, if we can, if we can make a difference in Texas, which is where most of our volunteers have been coming from all this time, it really shows an appreciation as well. And so then I started researching and realized, okay, Texas has a pretty, pretty sizable issue of human trafficking. Not because law enforcement’s not trying, and not because it’s accepted or anything, it’s just there are a lot of interstate highways that intersect.
There’s a lot of stuff going on. There’s obviously, we’ve had a lot of miners come across from, from Mexico. And a lot of those miners are not tracked. You know, if there, if, if she’s a 16-year-old Colombian girl. Who comes over from, from the border? She’s probably trafficked somewhere. That may be Texas, it may be further on, but I certainly experienced, we operate in California short of the children operated in California, and we found a lot of Colombian [00:45:00] Mexican Argentinian or Argentine survivors of, of sex trafficking.
And it was a shock to me that it was so common. It made no sense to me at the time because I didn’t really understand the poorest nature of the border at that time. But wherever there’s opportunity, organized crime will take that opportunity and make it into money. And so that’s, that’s the Texas.
Focus right now. And so when someone asks me, all right, what’s Shield’s focus? We’re well established in Southeast Asia, and we have a lot of strong partnerships with organizations here, and we can continue to do operations around the clock, really. So our focus now is getting Texas off the ground and making a difference, you know, in, in, in and around the hometowns of our people that have been supporting us so well.
I mean, most of our donors are from Texas. You know, I I, I feel like my home church is now in Texas. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons. It, Texas is such a second home for me, and it, it’s, [00:46:00] it’s it’s it’s time for us to give back.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And this, as you, as you’re pointing out it, this is not a somewhere else problem.
This is an everywhere problem.
Leigh Scarborough: Yes.
Dr. Mark Turman: And I don’t know if there’s anybody, maybe you can tell us if there’s anybody that’s producing. What might be the most reasonable statistics on, you know, what the, what the size and scope of the problem is, whether it’s in Texas or the United States or other places.
Is anybody doing good work at track trafficking or tracking the numbers? Of how, how significant this problem is.
Leigh Scarborough: There are, there are various organizations or projects that are trying to do that. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children does a good job. Organizations like Polaris Project have a big impact in what we are looking at.
The Department of State tracks as well. And certainly the Trafficking in persons report that comes out every year is crucial. I would say for anybody who wants to have a greater understanding of trafficking within any nation in the world, the first [00:47:00] place to go, the first resource would be the Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report.
And the reason why is because it, it’s not just a government written document. It’s every time the trafficking person’s report comes out, they consult each NGO, each nonprofit that’s working in that country, and they ask them directly for evidence and stories of what’s actually happening. And so each nonprofit including us.
Reports back and says, this is what’s happening. And that directly impacts us foreign policy and it directly impacts how we, how we operate and integrate with nations. And for us now, it’s gotten to a point where there’s a tier system. So you’ve got tier one, tier two, tier two, watch list, and then tier three we know as shield of the children.
If a nation is tier three, there’s no point in us going there because it means that the government is complicit, they’re actually assisting the traffickers. And so if you go there to try and stamp it out, you’re either going to jail or ending up in a ditch dead. And so we, we very much rely on, on some of these [00:48:00] organizations and particularly the Department of State tip report to guide us and to assist us to understand before we’re on the ground somewhere.
What does it look like there? So there are absolutely places where you can, you can find these statistics and you can see what’s being tracked. But there’s also a lot of unknown. There’s a lot of numbers that, you know, we just don’t know how many, how many undocumented miners came across the border and we’re trafficked.
For sec, we, we don’t know that. Yeah. We have some indications, we have some ideas but we don’t know.
Dr. Mark Turman: No. Yeah. And that’s just whatever numbers we could produce, we would know that they would not reveal the, the size and scope of a real problem. We knows bigger than that. Always. And Leigh, Leigh, as we get ready to finish up and, and just thank you for all the things that you’re doing, all the good work that you’re doing, but I just was wondering kind of a two part question here for us to maybe land on, which would be what are you hoping if, when somebody listens to this conversation that we’re [00:49:00] having.
What are you hoping happens in their heart? And then are there maybe one or two things that you would specifically ask all of us to pray for you and for your organization?
Leigh Scarborough: Absolutely. I’m, I’m hoping that it touches the heart of a bunch of people. And I’m hoping that, that people who are in that place where they’re thinking.
What, what is, so when I was doing counter-terrorism, my, my brother is a, is a minister, a very successful evangelist. And so when I was doing counter-terrorism, I was very discouraged. I thought, what am I doing? I’m not bringing anyone to Christ. I’m not furthering the kingdom. I’m not, but I had no idea.
I didn’t, I didn’t understand that God was preparing me for whatever he was for this. He was preparing me for this field. And so I, I, one of the things I want people to, to hear is, hey, if your heart is impacted by this, don’t be discouraged if, if your job or your skills or your experience don’t fit this space because God may prepare you for this [00:50:00] space or maybe preparing you or may have been preparing you for this space or.
The other thing is who are the perpetrators that I meet when I’m in Patia in Thailand and I’m sitting down and, and I’m, I’m working from the, from the opposite angle as my brother, right? My brother’s out there working to bring people to Christ. I’m working from the end of alright, I need to confirm that this guy’s actually doing this to children.
’cause he needs to go to jail. Now, the, what’s the best way for that guy not to end up in a, in a disgusting place in, in Patia exploiting children. He needs good men to get around him. He needs friends. He needs church. Yes, he needs Christ. And, and honestly, I wanna say to people who are listening and watching be that person, get that person out of that space, that lonely guy on your street, that guy who, who doesn’t really, he doesn’t have anybody that takes him fishing or hunting or camping or whatever it is that you do.
Take him along with you, get to know him, bring him out of a place of isolation, because that is where the devil [00:51:00] gets you. The devil isolates you. The devil gets you addicted to pornography, and then all of a sudden you’re, you’re sitting in a terrible place drinking warm beer, trying to negotiate the price for a child.
And that, that is actually the reality. So my hope would be that if you are listening to this, that you will befriend the person who, the, the outcast, the ostracized person, the guy at work that no one likes. Maybe he seems really angry, maybe he seems really standoffish, whatever. There’s a reason for that.
And, and we as Christians need to get amongst that and get alongside these men who are going over and being the perpetrators. And then also, you know, there’s always the hope that. If you do feel called to this issue that you would reach out and that you would support it in, in whatever way you are, you are wanting to.
So whether or not you want to get trained and actually be on the ground it’s a long process and it’s not, it’s not a calling for everybody because it is a calling. It’s not just, Hey, this matters, so let’s go deal with it. You know, [00:52:00] and then praying that the spiritual strongholds will break before we go to places, because some of these places have been under spiritual darkness for so long.
They don’t have the freedom and, and wonderful Christian heritage that Texas has, for example. A lot of these places have been, have been Hindu or Muslim or whatever for, for decades or for centuries, millennia sometimes. And, and you have certain, even sexually perverse spirits that operate over places.
And you can find a lot of that as well online, pretty easily understanding, you know, this is a spiritual stronghold here and there. So for those who are intercessors and prayer warriors, absolutely we want you to be praying that the strongholds are broken. We want you to be praying that our, that our volunteers and our investigators stay healthy with God.
That their relationships with their kids, with their wives, with their sisters, with their mothers, with, with everybody in their life stay strong and stay healthy. We want you to pray for freedom [00:53:00] for men from, from pornography, because that. That I’ve never sat down with a pedophile or a predator in Southeast Asia or in the US and, and they didn’t watch porn, you know?
Every single one of them were, were either former heavy addicts of pornography or current addicts of pornography. And there’s, there never has. Somebody said to me, no, I’ve never watched porn. I just eventually realized that I liked, I was attracted to minors, that that’s never been the case. Pray for them, but get around them as well and spend time with these men and, and obviously not in a way that’s gonna compromise you or, or anything like that, but these men need friends and they need brothers and, and sisters in Christ come around them.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. That’s such a good word and such a practical word for our audience of you know, we see it so many times in so many different stories where we never thought it would be that person. We ne we never thought it would be our neighbor or our sibling or, you know, our person that we go hunting with. We [00:54:00] never thought it would be that person until it is that person. Yeah. And reaching out and trying to be that compelling Christian witness wherever you are with whomever you can be.
Absolutely. ’cause like you said, the devil, the devil just loves to isolate people and then he deforms them into things and into the character and activity that they should have never been a part of and that God never wanted for them. And in many ways they know it, but the devil deforms them into that through things like pornography and isolation.
Leigh, thank you so much for all that you’re doing and for how you are so much on the forefront of this. And we, we hate I know all of our audience will hate to know. That there’s a need for a ministry like yours. But at the same time, we’re grateful that there are, that there is. Tell us, tell us before we go, how can people learn more about shield?
Can.
Leigh Scarborough: Yeah, absolutely. So raise your shield.org is our website. You’re very welcome to [00:55:00] go and check that out. If you email the office at Shield email, you’ll get my secretary who, who will forward it to me. If it’s something that, that I can answer, I’m very happy to engage with anybody on this or, or get one of my investigators to engage.
We, we can also let you know a bunch of resources in terms of documentaries, in terms of things that are out there that will really bring you up to speed on what’s happening right now. But like I said before the Department of State Trafficking and Personal Report will give you a good understanding of any country.
And then you can, you can talk to SHIELD and, and, and see where we operate. We don’t put as much information on our website as probably some other organizations. We, we take out the security of our personnel very, very seriously. So I’d prefer if you want to know, you know. Hey Leigh, I, I know about trafficking that’s going on in, in Cambodia.
Do you guys still work in Cambodia or I know about trafficking that’s going on in Puerto Rico. Like what, what do we, you know, do about that? So our website’s a good [00:56:00] place. We do have social media. We do have an Instagram page, which if you want to check it out that would be great. We also put a little bit on there about how to try and protect your children from, from, from being a victim to some of these very, you know, sophisticated grooming tactics that are happening out there.
And so I think first point of call would be to go to the website and then the social media. And then if you, if you wanna know more, just reach out. I mean, we are happy to share more information one-on-one. Happy to engage with people. And also, you know, if you’re in Texas and I’m in Texas, I’m happy to come and speak to you or have a coffee with you.
Dallas-Fort Worth is the area that I’m usually in, but I have great connections, you know, San Antonio, even down to places like Lake Jackson and El Paso. And reach out, you know, get in touch and, and we can chat.
Dr. Mark Turman: Sounds great. Yeah, and we will put all of those connection places in our show notes so that you can click on any of those websites [00:57:00] or reach out to Shield of the children directly as you feel led to do Leigh, thank you for, again, being a part of this conversation, staying up late with us so that we could do this together and share the word in a, a wider, larger way. And I wanna thank our audience as well for, for being a part of the conversation. Please pray for not only this issue, but specifically for Shield of the Children and for Leigh Scarborough.
And follow the Spirit as God leads you to become engaged in whatever way. And obviously we can pray together about that. And as always, we want you to rate, review our podcast on your platform, and share this with others that you know may have an interest and even a skill that could be useful.
In fighting this issue, and we’re grateful for your participation. Thank you for following and supporting us at Denison Forum. We’ll see you next time on the Denison Forum Podcast. God bless [00:58:00] you.
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