Impossible is a Dare

by Cooley, Ben;

  The L-shaped sofa is at the back of the room. Directly in front of me is a door, and the door leads to a hallway. Above us are corridors and corridors leading to room after room of broken, vulnerable, abused girls. The woman stands at the door. There is a cord next to her that I hadn’t noticed until that moment. She pulls the cord and a bell rings somewhere in the distance, somewhere down the corridors. She pulls the bell several times, almost as if it were a code dictating which type of girl should come out. And within a matter of minutes, two girls arrive at the door.

  Stunned and petrified, I sit motionless on the sofa. I am thousands of miles away from home and I am not expecting the girls in front of me to be the same. They walk into the room and I can barely contain my shock. They are white. They are European. And they are young. I am sitting in a brothel in one of the metro cities of India and suddenly the reality dawns on me: this is a global issue. Women are being trafficked to every corner of the world to cater for the screwed-up, perverted tastes of men who want to buy them, abuse them and degrade them. I look into the eyes of the girls standing before me. The eyes looking back at me are not just sad; they are empty. They are hopeless.

  Everything in me wants to tell them: ‘It’s going to be all right. We’re going to get you out of here. There is hope.’ But I can’t. At that moment the woman at the door pulls another cord and a light suddenly comes on the girls. They start spinning. The woman asks: ‘Do you like these girls? Do you want to have them?’ Disguising our disgust, we both say ‘No’, make our excuses and leave.

  Standing in the street, my body goes into shock. My mind cannot focus. It’s almost as though I’d experienced a trauma. Our host asks us if we want to visit another brothel. Tears had begun welling up in my eyes. ‘No’, I say through tears, ‘I never want to enter another brothel until I know I can get them out. I don’t want to see any more girls and have to leave them.’ I don’t want any of those girls to remember my face as just another face that saw them as a piece of meat with no value.

  That experience repulsed me to my very core: as a father, as a husband. It was awful.

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I called Deb and could hardly speak through the tears. I left the television on all night just to fill the silence. That was the moment that I knew that seeing an end to modern-day slavery had turned from being a spasm of passion to a lifelong mission. Slavery once again had a face. Slavery was those two girls.

  Another side to the story

  Peter Stanley, former Strategy Director at Stop the Traffik

  I first heard about The Stand while I was working for Stop the Traffik, a global coalition united in the mission to help stop the sale of people, see traffickers prosecuted and protect the victims of modern-day slavery. After hearing about a team from Manchester who had travelled to India to serve with our organization, I decided to pay them a visit. As I met the leader of the group, Marion White, I also encountered Ben and Deb Cooley.

  I will never forget meeting the larger-than-life character that is Ben for the first time. He was so pumped with energy. More than that, he wanted to focus it. I knew he just needed the right direction and he would be off. Long before the name Hope for Justice was coined, he had a great group of people around him and was ready to take on the world.

  After that first meeting it wasn’t long before it struck me: I had been talking so much about human trafficking but never actually seen it in reality. I knew Ben was the same. And so my wife Gillie and I arranged with Oasis India to visit their team, and we invited Ben to join us. Needless to say, he didn’t need any persuading.

  Our first experience of India had a huge impact on us as we saw the vast slums through the plane windows and as we stepped outside the airport into the crazy traffic, which was complete mayhem. Our first night was in a ‘businessmen’s hotel’ but it was still a long way from what we had expected. Ben was up half the night unable to shut out the noise of dogs barking loudly and incessantly outside his window.

  The time we spent with the multidisciplinary rescue team was inspiring. They were dedicated and professional. And their stories were extraordinary: of secret compartments to hide children; of corrupt police; of the vast numbers of prostitutes in the huge red-light districts. Towards the end of our time with the team, Ben and I were handed a challenge. We were told that one of the agents was posing as a recruiter of sex tourists so that he could gain access to brothels and see where there was illegal child prostitution and trafficking. He was a church pastor who had decided to risk his life to fight trafficking. And then the team leader asked Ben and me if we would join the man on a visit to a brothel the following night. He said we were free to say no. It was meant as a challenge. He warned us that we would probably be locked in and there were likely to be firearms. So we had to sleep on it and decide whether we were up for it or not. It was difficult, but we already knew the answer.

  The next day we agreed to visit the brothel that night. We were to pose as sex tourists looking for ‘fresh young girls’. The idea was to see if we could help our agent friend locate any underage trafficked children. When the time came we got into a taxi and were driven to meet the pimp who would take us to the brothel. So we met the pimp and drove further into Mumbai. Then he told us that the police had raided the brothel the night before and he was taking us somewhere else across town. The safety car, who had been following us for protection, lost us. We were on our own. We eventually got to a grotty side street where we were told to wait on the curb for our turn to enter the brothel. The lasting impression was sickening. The madam was a cheery little grandma who gave the impression nothing was amiss as she offered us a glass of water and made conversation while the girls came down. We felt totally fake. It seemed obvious that we weren’t sex tourists. And yet nobody noticed. It was a scary moment but we prayed under our breath and kept faith in what we were called to do. We had been told beforehand that some agents had been attacked and forced to use the girls when they were found out. So we sat on the sofa, as two Eastern European girls stood before us, under the fluorescent light. There was no allure, nothing sexy, no glitz; simply a ‘Do you want me or not?’ Our experience was one of a meat market, a transaction, an impersonal recreation for men to get their nightly relief. It was sickening and dark.

  Though it is not enough, until we see the end of slavery, organizations like Hope for Justice and Stop the Traffik shed some light in this dark place. I know Ben, Deb and their team have used the India model of cooperation to real effect in the UK, and I know the energy that I first saw in Ben remains to this day.

  * * *

  Chapter five

  Jared’s story

  Jared had brought £100 with him to the UK. He had resolved to live on that for four weeks while he looked for work. He had always worked. He knew the value of working hard and contributing to society. Now he wanted to work in the UK and pursue the dreams he had for his life.

  After four weeks he was offered a job. He was delighted. It wasn’t the ideal job but it was a start and he could see it would give him a springboard from which to better himself. Unbeknown to him, the job was offered to him by a trafficker.

  The trafficker told Jared that the job was to be processed through an agency and all his salary was to be paid directly into its bank account. Jared, who didn’t speak any English, never saw the card or papers for this account.

  Not long after that he received a letter stating that there was a debt on this account, more than he could ever repay. He was completely dumbfounded: he had never used the account. He was desperate. Jared worked for ten hours a day, six days a week, sometimes seven days a week. He was moved from place to place, he slept in the kitchen at one house and in the lounge at the next. Often, his abusers would hit him and slap him.

  On one occasion Jared tried to escape. He thought he had made it, but that hope was dashed and the traffickers eventually caught him and beat him heavily. They took his documents to stop him attempting to run away again.

  Jared didn’t tr
ust the police. In his home country, most of the law enforcement officers were corrupt and often acted as criminally as those on the wrong side of the law. He didn’t know if he could trust the police in the UK. He did think about approaching them but the trafficker knew his family and Jared didn’t want to put them in any danger. His family had no idea what had happened to him. He hadn’t been able to contact them because he didn’t have their phone number, and had no idea whether the traffickers had told lies about him or his whereabouts.

  Jared managed to find the strength to keep going. The beatings were difficult. The abuse was continual. Day by day he could feel himself losing hope, losing strength and losing the will to live. And that’s when Hope for Justice found him. After years of hell, Jared was identified and rescued by Hope for Justice’s specialist team. He was eventually taken to a place of safety where he began to rebuild his life, his confidence and his trust in others.

  Taking the stand

  The congregation was silent. I had only been asked to talk, to share a little of our story, for two minutes, but here I was finishing off this story twenty minutes later. Since returning from India I had continued travelling up and down the country speaking to people, to churches, sharing the vision we had for The Stand. Yes, my visit had made me understand that the mission had to be much bigger than one conference, one event; but we had to start somewhere, and the arena event was it. Sharing the stories of people like Jared and Emma and Amaya, individual after individual, leader after leader, church after church began to understand what we were trying to do. They were fully in. This was not just my vision; this was now our vision, and we needed all the support we could get.

  As I’ve mentioned previously, the organization of an arena event is not easy. For a team of ten or fifteen people it would be a challenge. For us, it was me with the help of a handful of others. And though our passion and purpose were strong, the practicalities of it were becoming a strain.

  In the lead-up to The Stand, I remember going with Deb to another event at the NEC Arena. I walked in and took a deep breath. Wow, there were a lot of seats. It was a big place. Deb could see it was a big place. Everyone could see it was a big place. And yet I still made a point of looking up and down the aisle and telling Deb: ‘If we’re going to break even we’re going to have to fill up to this point. The seats are going to have to be filled up to here in order to make the money we need.’ In those kinds of moments it’s hard not to think: ‘What do we do if people don’t come?’ But we couldn’t allow ourselves to think like that. Only a few of the team involved with The Stand owned their own properties, and they were potentially set to lose them if this didn’t work. So emotionally, physically and mentally, putting on The Stand was stretching us. I was still doing my day job as a vocal consultant, and with the pressure of organizing the event was working all hours of the day and night. It was just becoming too much. Then Deb lost her job.

  I knew we needed help, so I turned once again to Rob White. We discussed our situation and he agreed that something needed to change and that really I should be working full time on the event. In some ways this meant we were forced into a place where now we were living by faith. It was the only option if we were to see the vision become a reality. When I say living by faith, we literally didn’t know how we might pay the bills each month. I don’t have an extravagant lifestyle, but I remember that there was an occasion when I just wanted my kids to have swimming lessons. So I booked them. Then Chris Dacre – now a member of our board – came around to our house one day to help us with our family budgeting, and told me that we simply couldn’t afford the lessons. So we had to cancel them. It was like a punch in the stomach. I was devastated, knowing we didn’t have enough money. My Dad had worked for an insolvency company so I had seen the dark side of debt and was desperate not to be in it. My kids were 3 years old and 1 year old. We needed to provide for them first. We didn’t buy Christmas presents for the kids until they were 7 years old. I started skipping lunches so the family could eat. Then I skipped breakfasts. I wouldn’t recommend this as a course of action but I felt it was the only way to survive.

  One day I attended a conference. There was a place where a number of leaders were meeting, and I was invited to join them. The lunch provided was a self-service buffet. I was hungry and there was an abundance of food on offer. Naturally, I filled my plate. At that point one of the leaders shouted across to me: ‘Where there’s a free dinner, there’s always Ben Cooley.’ They meant it as a joke but it broke me. I didn’t respond physically, but inside I felt so small. I didn’t blame them. They didn’t know I hadn’t eaten all day, didn’t know I hadn’t eaten much that week, but for the next few days I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I felt stupid and embarrassed. It hurt. And yet it taught me a valuable lesson: words have power. It has made me really careful about speaking into people’s lives. Throwaway, frivolous jokes can have a far deeper impact than intended.

  Organizing The Stand cost us. But nothing extraordinary that happens in this world comes without a cost, and in many ways, despite the hardship, these were some of the best days of my life. I realized then that being comfortable does not enrich my soul. Even though I was hungry, I had never felt so clearly that I was doing exactly what I had been made to do. I was right in the middle of my calling. Material things became so insignificant to me. Yes, I wanted to provide for my family. Yes, I wanted the best for my children. But even though we had so little in those days, in many ways I have never felt so rich.

  There were just two weeks to go until The Stand, and I’d recently been told that we’d pretty much sold all of our tickets. What’s more, despite my personal struggles I was now feeling confident about the conference’s finances; we were going to break even. But as so often with many of us, I was on to the next worry: the logistics. I was petrified. We had organizations and people to help us, we had volunteers; but there are things you just don’t think about when you’ve never organized an event. Such as hospitality.

  Through the help of Tim Nelson we managed to pull in a few favours from some people he knew musically who could come and play at the event. We approached the musician Tim Hughes and Switchfoot frontman Jon Foreman, as well as a number of other performers, to come across from the USA. The musicians flew into the UK and I had thought they could just get a taxi from the airport to our venue. False. Their team asked me who was picking them up. I had limited options. So my Dad went to pick up the Grammy award-winning, platinum-selling bands from the USA in his Renault Megane. With the kids’ car seats still in the back!

  I remember another one of the artists asking me: ‘Is there any water?’

  ‘There’s water in the tap.’ I thought, before we sent someone to a local supermarket to get some bottled water. I was oblivious then but now I see that there is great value in these things. These guys are on the road all the time, and far from demanding, these little touches really do help them do their job better. I didn’t mean to dishonour them in any way, I simply didn’t know. No-one had told me how you did these things. I was responsible for everything and I was learning on my feet.

  * * *

  The day finally arrives and I am trying to prepare for my big speech. This is the fourth time I have spoken publicly at an event. My fourth time and there are 5,884 people in the audience. This is serious, man. I am nerv-ous!

  About an hour before I’m due to take the stage, I’m standing by the side of the platform, holding my speech notes, practising my lines, when one of our volunteers comes up to me. He has a problem and I go to help him sort it out. When I get back to the stage I’m looking for my notes. They’re not here. Where are they?! I’ve lost my speech. I can’t find my notes. I panic. Breathing deeply, I have to go on stage without them. I’d been so consumed with preparing this event that I simply hadn’t had time to learn my speech. But with the notes long gone, I have no other option: I have to speak from the heart. I look out. Thousands of people are filling this great arena. I begin to speak, the words are com
ing, I am in full flow. Then I notice that the first five rows are empty. My heart sinks: ‘Wasn’t I meant to fill them?’ I think to myself while 5,000 or so eyes gaze on: ‘They were meant to be for the special guests.’ Catching my breath, I see them on the very back row. ‘Darn it, they were meant to be at the front.’ Silencing my thoughts, I get back on track, sharing the message, sharing the stories. As I finish my talk and walk off the stage, I feel terrible. Not because of the seats and not because of the logistics but because I am finally on the comedown.

  The momentum had been non-stop for the past few months building up to the event. There was a crescendo and peak of energy delivering the talk, and then it changed. I’ve been told that a lot of leaders, preachers and public speakers feel this. There’s a real low following any event. I’d spoken from the heart and tried my best, and yet all I could think was that I’d lost my notes and let people down.

  But the reality was that The Stand was an amazing day. Deb’s experience of the night could vouch for that. She often talks about how, on the night, she sat near the front and looked back across the crowds, totally overwhelmed. Just realizing how many people were ‘with us’ in our fight against this awful situation moved her to tears. As we stood on the stage to welcome everyone – Rob, Marion, Deb and myself – there was this massive eruption of cheering and applause. At the time this filled me with nerves, but Deb felt this lift, this incredible feeling of ‘Oh, people are with us. We’re not going to have to convince them. It’s all right; they’re with us.’

  And they were. People were hungry to get involved and to do something. The organizations we had highlighted during the evening grew. People had been able to hear from their leaders and about all they’d been doing around the world. One charity said they’d never had so many people sign up as they did on that night! Children were sponsored to prevent them being exploited. People gave money. They joined campaigns. We had fifty to sixty organizations in the expo area. People were motivated. They were mobilized. They were given purpose. And people gave to us. They gave incredibly generously. We had 300 individuals committing to starting an Act for Justice group to help promote Hope for Justice and fundraise for us in their local areas. Finally, after months of dreaming, planning and panicking, the passion had met its purpose. A movement was born.