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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “A quarter to a half of the exploitation that’s happening to our own nation’s youth … it’s a caregiver doing it—it’s a familial figure,” Jaco Booyens says.

He is the founder of Jaco Booyens Ministries (JBM), an anti-human trafficking organization working to protect American children from predatory exploitation.

“We’re talking about a $52 billion industry of buying and selling predominantly women and children inside this country—American citizens. The discussion about an immigrant child or an immigrant in the country is a completely separate conversation,” he says.

Booyens says laws against human trafficking are not being sufficiently enforced. Why are cases continuing to increase, while prosecutions decrease? And how is pornography a “gateway drug” into the trafficking industry?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Jaco Booyens, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you, Jan. Pleasure to be here.

Five years ago, we sat down and you exposed me to some of the really, frankly, horrifying realities of human trafficking, child sex trafficking, and so forth, the things that you have been working on trying to stop for decades. We then looked at what happened during the pandemic. That was a whole different ballgame because there were these lockdowns, different policies, the border, online exploitation, and a huge increase. Here we are today in 2025, where a lot of things seem to be back to normal. What is the reality today?

Thank you for consistently tackling the tough subjects, Jan, and to the network as well. You guys do phenomenal work. Unfortunately, trafficking of persons continues to increase. With that, we see something very important that maybe we’ll cover later on—prosecutions decreasing. So we’re at this inflection point in our culture where it seems that things are back to normal, back to pre-COVID. People are back at work, systems, and kids are on regular school schedules because, you know, a country runs around school schedules.

But things are not normal. There’s a very, very dark element underneath the surface. I’d say the biggest change from when we sat down last, when we discussed things like the impact of the border on human trafficking and online exploitation, would be that now, other than back then, human trafficking as a slogan, as a concept, has become easy to say, and it’s lost its gut-wrenching impact on American culture.

And that’s particularly dangerous because if it becomes table talk or its regular talk at lunch hour, and it doesn’t have that guttural, visceral imagery of what am I talking about? The pause effect of, wait a second, human beings in 2025, predominantly children, are being enslaved through servitude, now debt bondage, labor trafficking, but mostly sex trafficking. That’s a big concern for me because when society grows numb to the definition and it loses its impact, society will easily allow it to blend in. And that’s what’s happening.

Can you give me a picture, first of all, of the scale of this? Then I want to get you to, I guess, remind our audience, especially those that may not have seen some of our interviews before, what you do and why you do it.

Yes, thank you. The scale is enormous, and I wish I could tell you that it has decreased. But we’re talking about a $52 billion industry of buying and selling predominantly women and children inside this country, American citizens. The discussion about a migrant child or a migrant in the country is a completely separate conversation. Those statistics are purely just on American children.

We are still, by a long stretch, the number one nation on earth where sexual exploitation is happening, and it’s commercialized. Unfortunately, we’re the number one producer of pornography and consumer of pornography. American Gen Z is the societal category that watches the most pornography on planet earth.

Hold the presses for a second. What age group? And where do these numbers come from?

These numbers are all collected from think tanks, the Department of Justice, FBI, agencies that collect data that we constantly are curating. Here’s an example. The average first exposure to pornography in America is now boys age eight. When we met last time, the average exploited child was age 12 to 14. That is now age 11. So we’re moving in the wrong direction, part and parcel because of technology, and technology is rapidly advancing and putting tool sets in predators’ hands to make it easier to conduct their atrocities.

But culturally, we’re not frowning upon the details. Can we talk about how many 16 to 17-year-olds in America today are walking felons? When you distribute naked imagery of a minor, that’s a felony. Children are distributing sexual images of children among peer groups. In our society, it’s blending into everyday life.

There’s a study that was recently done by a group that I’m an advisor to a phenomenal group, the Institute for Survivor Care, with Dr. Jeanne Allert. This study looked at 2,000 cases in law enforcement of human trafficking of children. The studies proved the following: 22%, a quarter, to 47%, a half, of all domestic trafficking cases are perpetrated by the caregiver.

So I’m telling you, this is in 2024, a quarter to a half of the exploitation that’s happening to our own nation’s youth. It’s a caregiver doing it. It’s a familial figure in the family. We knew that was happening when we talked last, but those numbers are staggering. It’s inverting to where the predominant force exploiting our youth is closer in proximity than it used to be. That makes it infinitely more difficult for the victim to speak up.

Because when we use terms in this country such as grooming and desensitization, what are we really saying? We’re really just saying a predator is gaining proximity to a target and desensitizing to get proximity. Well, what if you do not have to desensitize and the grooming doesn’t have to happen because the predator is the provider? The predator is already the caregiver. The predator is already a coach or a figure with influence, real power.

Remember, human trafficking is, at a ground level, just the exploitation of vulnerabilities. The predators are just really good at identifying vulnerabilities. When you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the bottom of the rung is food and shelter. We see people trafficked all the way up to the top tier of love and belonging, of purpose, of identity.

So now let’s ask that question of American Gen Z. If you take a snapshot of American Gen Z, arguably, they’re the most identity-less members of our society. They are very wide in surface level information. There are evident vulnerabilities displayed online. The predators have their pick.

You’re basically saying that this lack of a strong developed identity makes someone much more vulnerable to being used by these people.

Absolutely. Because if your deepest desire is love and belonging, we have real cases that we can discuss. I’ll give you a brief example, a real case. We’ll call this girl Sarah. Sarah is 13-years-old. She has a deep desire to play on a soccer team. She doesn’t make the team, but she serves the team as kind of a water girl, right?

This predator notices this online because she talks about that. She talks about how her sister makes the varsity team. The predator starts affirming her, encouraging her for nine months until one day he shows up at her soccer game. He flies two states over, takes a selfie with her in the background, doesn’t introduce himself to her, and goes back home.

Two weeks later, he sends her the selfie. He said, when your dad doesn’t show up, I will show up. You can trust me. He’s earning her favor. She says to him online, you should have said hello. There’s such a deep desire for that child to be seen, to be affirmed. So it’s the exploitation of vulnerabilities.

Unfortunately, Gen Z displays their vulnerabilities publicly. It’s not hidden. They overshare publicly. It’s easy to read them. And so that’s why you see some of the movements in our country where it feels like, why would they just be swept up in a movement? Because they can be. Because they’re looking for purpose. If the purpose is nefarious and it’s an exploiter, they will always implicate the victim in the crime.

Here’s what happens, Jan, that we’ve now determined unilaterally. The second sexual exploitation happens to a person, whether it’s a rape, as egregious as a rape, or repeated violation or trafficking, right? We have to do better in this country looking at EQ [Emotional Intelligence], not IQ. The emotional health of our nation is not good, okay?

The first thing that happens to that person is guilt, shame, and condemnation floods them. They feel guilty, but they’re not the perpetrator; they’re the victim. But that’s the nature of humanity. It’s in Genesis 3. It’s biblical. It’s literally in Genesis when Adam and Eve realize they’re naked. They hide from God. Because of what? Shame, guilt, condemnation.

Now you have predators that are so good that they coerce the victims to feel, it’s my fault. I did something. This is why sextortion is exploding with young boys in our country. Because they don’t talk about it; they get trapped, and so it’s really just an assessment of vulnerabilities, and the predators are excellent at it very briefly

The connection between pornography and trafficking, however it manifests, if you can kind of explain that picture?

Yes, when we say pornography is the gateway drug to human trafficking, those who watch porn would say, well, I don’t buy people, but you are engaging in the gateway drug. Why is it the gateway drug? Because it’s the only drug that triggers an internal drug. Sex is internal. It’s chemical.

When you go through puberty, your brain releases a hormone. Your body releases chemistry. When you bond trauma to the internal chemistry of your body, this is trauma bonding. That’s deep-rooted trauma that normally goes and gets hidden. It gets suppressed. Then dissociation happens. So it takes years for someone to be willing to even recognize or talk about it. So pornography desensitizes any individual to what could be, and most often is not okay.

I just told you that the average exposure to porn for the first time is a boy that’s eight years old. So when an eight-year-old boy sees hardcore pornography, we’re not talking about a pin-up girl without her top on in a magazine. We’re talking about 2K, 4K cameras, multiple angles, two guys nude together with one girl.

Immediately, in a second, there’s a chemical reaction in his brain. Neurons start to fire. He’s prepubescent, which means he’s now starting to produce sex hormones. Pre-puberty, you can never turn it off. Immediately, love and belonging are shattered. Consent is shattered. What is conditional and unconditional love is shattered because it’s all fake. He’s probably watching take 52. This is not reality. No marriage is pornography.

So there’s a complete altered reality that is then what we call imprinted into him. It’s internal. It’s not like you’re taking alcohol from an alcoholic and he dries up, he sobers up. Sexual violation stays with you. It’s internal. So now that child is grappling with issues that married adults struggle with. But he is only eight-years-old, or she is only 12-years-old .

And when it becomes physical, now it’s dangerous because that child can now very quickly develop an attraction to it because it’s highly addictive. Porn is highly addictive because it alters the neural pathways in the brain. It literally shuts down certain areas of the brain and fires up other areas. This is real. This is science. It’s biology. It’s physiology. The child’s defenseless at this moment.

Now, let’s just say that child doesn’t engage with anybody. A predator will see that child online because they speak a certain way. They address themselves. They present themselves a certain way. So that’s why we say porn is the gateway drug. It desensitizes. It breaks down barriers societally, but definitely at the individual level. And it’s the number one tool a predator uses to prepare a child for human trafficking. They use porn to desensitize the child. They use porn to train the child on how to perform.

Why would we allow a tool like that to freely impact our children? It’s a dangerous, dangerous game, which is, and I know it’s contentious because you’ll find that those who are pro-pornography will cite the First Amendment and want to make it a freedom of speech, freedom of expression issue. This is me speaking for me. I highly doubt that our Founding Fathers considered that we would get the freedom of speech in order to take our own demonic vices and impress them and express them onto children that are vulnerable under the guise of freedom of expression, freedom of speech.

So it’s something we’re grappling with a lot in this country.  I’ll take a snapshot of the church. In 2023 and 2024, only 22% of American pastors mentioned pornography from the pulpit. It is this dark, dangerous dragon that is prowling among our youth, and not even the church is addressing it for what it is.

I’ve heard argued that the reason for that is that just too many people are themselves addicted and, you know, have their own shame and their own issues that are right with it and they don’t, you know, they don’t want to deal with it. I’ve covered the issue of pornography specifically a number of times on the show and that’s exactly my sense; like it’s just something that is unbelievably impactful but it’s just something that’s societally, you know, the thing you can’t you don’t really ever talk about.

You’re nailing it. And to perhaps move on from pornography, but I’ll say this to you. This is how I explain it. Asking a man to close the poison well he drinks from doesn’t work. He first needs to stop drinking from the poison well. So when we ask fathers to step up and fight for the morality of children, but the father is living under guilt because he himself is addicted to pornography, it’s very difficult. So at the end of the day, it’s always going to start with me. Am I a contributor to the problem or am I part of the solution?

Let’s go back a little bit and just tell me how you got involved in trying to counter human trafficking.

Yes, what a story. I’m from South Africa, as you know, a very proud immigrant to this country, and a very proud citizen of this country. A momentous moment to stand in front of a judge and hear, welcome, newest member to the United States.  But in South Africa, in 1994, I was a senior in high school. My sister Ilonka that year was 12-years-old.

She wins a national singing competition. The record label delivers on everything they promise. We are with her all the way, every step of the way. And it ends up that Ilonka is trafficked through that record label. Ilonka then goes on and she’s trafficked for six years through the entertainment industry.

We don’t know that she’s trafficked while this is happening. I’m an 18-year-old. Ilonka was rescued in 2001. I am, by God’s grace, there for the rescue, part of the rescue. Still, we don’t know what she endured. We made an agreement that we would immigrate to the United States, and we would get to the U.S.

After arriving here, months after 9/11, Ilonka sits down with the family and tells us in great detail what men had done to her. She exposes us to human trafficking, which wasn’t even a concept in my mind. She talks to us about hundreds of 12 to 13-year-old girls in sex trafficking rings across the globe that she was exposed to, particularly in Africa. She talks about the type of clientele or buyers, and the profile is not what people think, and your world shatters.

Your heart breaks for your sister, but immediately I condemned myself. Where was I as the brother, the caretaker of the family? There’s no father in the family, and the reality is I had no chance. Nobody had a chance because the predators are so skillful. Yes, being raised without a father made her more vulnerable. Yes, a single mother working two jobs, and a brother that’s in sport, and a younger brother, makes her more vulnerable. So we learned firsthand.

Our entry into human trafficking was through the horrific testimony of my sister. And that night, when the rescue happened on the border of South Africa and another country, I heard God’s voice. I’m walking across the street to part of this rescue, and I hear God say, not another one. And that’s still our mission every morning. One child at a time, not another one. We will never stop. We do not lose momentum or steam.

As a matter of fact, we are more gung-ho than ever before. And gung-ho with what exactly? Gung-ho to see the afflicted liberated, but not just see survivors restored, but combat this thing before it happens. By the time a child gets trafficked, society has failed that child. We need to do a lot better at recognizing the vulnerabilities in children and shoring up those vulnerabilities before the predator exploits them. Because that’s all the predator’s doing.

Jan, I don’t know if you know this, but the average predator in America invests nine months in a victim before they strike, asking the potential victim to self-expose or physically meet in person. Nine months. The average predator at any given time profiles and engages with 32 potential victims at the same time. One predator, 32 potential victims at the same time. At any given moment in America, there are three quarters of a million, 750,000 active predators online right now as we speak, times 32.

You’re talking about millions, millions of American children being profiled as we speak in everyday life. And they don’t know what the wolf looks like. They don’t know how the wolf talks, where he would show up. They’re told that it looks like kidnapping or you would self-evidently see it when it happens.

They don’t know the wolf is in their DMs. He’s the one sending them emojis. He’s a coach, a pastor perhaps, an elected official, a maintenance man. The average buyer of sex with children in America is a father of two, married, earning north of $100,000 a year. That profile is a staggering profile.

That is genuinely shocking. For a moment, I think you were saying earlier that it’s important to be very clear on what this is, this human trafficking thing. And it feels like I’m still not clear in my mind. It’s all the way from a single predator finding a single victim and abusing them in whatever way, all the way up to, you know, putting them online, all the way up to, you know, multiple people pimping prostitutes. If you can just sort of give me that picture of what encompasses this whole horror show.

What a question. I’d say the lowest common denominator that people could probably relate to would be a father that engages in sexual abuse with one of his own children and then introduces a third figure where that child is then forced to perform for food, for belonging, for love, shelter, whatever, protection. The buyer of that child or adult woman, man or boy, and boys are on the rise, the numbers are staggering, could be a janitor that has the affordability to do that once a quarter.

Or it could be a highly affluent member of their community that could engage in that kind of activity multiple times a week. Or as a high profile case in the U.S., we know that that individual engaged every two hours in the exploitation of children. So it’s disposable income on the side of the buyer. It’s their own addiction and level of addiction. Because remember, this is progressive. You build up a tolerance, so they have to consume more, like pornography.

Now, on the trafficker’s side, if it’s a father, that’s familial, or a coach, or someone with access to the child, that would be unorganized. It’s an individual that, at a whim, is exploiting someone else. Then you have reasonably organized structures where an individual like that may become more of what people in the 50s and 60s saw in a movie like Hustle & Flow, that Terrence Howard was in, this guy who runs four, five, six girls. He is the conventional pimp, trafficker, and has two bottom girls that are handlers, right? And then a stable of women, right?

What is the American picture? From there, it becomes a network of trafficking. It’s pimps sharing territory like cartels share territory in Los Angeles. And there’s treaties. You can cross into my territory at these times, and I can cross into yours. There’s treaties where they will intentionally swap victims in order to evade law enforcement, to move victims around.

So now you’re getting into organized crime. You’re getting into organized fashion. Then you bring actual cartel activity that is its own organized crime network, normally first through contraband paraphernalia, drugs, that have learned that pathways and systems that they set up, trafficking drugs, is extremely efficient to traffic people. They don’t have to rebuild a pipeline, whether it’s into the country or domestically. You’re just now trafficking a product that you can sell over and over. Sell a pound of cocaine one time, sell a child 10, 12, 15 times a day.

So now you’re getting into pre-existing organized crime that has transcended from one product to another product. That type of trafficking is interstate. It is cross-jurisdiction. Very difficult for police to fight because it is ever-moving.  Then you get to national syndicates where sex trafficking of children is a means to an end for power.

That’s what’s gotten the most attention in America’s eye today. It’s how the Senate in Rome used to exploit children. It’s why the gladiator games went on while policy and legislation were passed. It’s to numb the people and blind the people to one thing while we do something else.

The trafficking of persons, of children at that level, for what we would call the elites or what you would see in the high-profile cases in our country, is literally children are a means to an end for them to gain power, to either coerce or corrupt an individual, compromise an individual, supply to a demand of mindset. It’s a different human behavioral science at that level because now it is intentional. It is intentionally profiling not just a child to traffic, but profiling a particular target to compromise and then putting those two together, either by force, by fraud, or by coercion.

What does that look like in real life? It looks like a political gathering, an event. Some elected official is in a hotel room. He goes to an event. There are children at this event. There’s illicit activity going on. There’s a photograph taken surreptitiously. He may or may not have engaged with that child.

There’s a knock on the door, and there’s, we’ll leak this. Or there’s a profiling of, this elected official has a pornography account. We know that he has watched child porn. Law enforcement doesn’t know. We’ll coerce him, and we’ll provide him with actual children. We’ll move him from being a visual consumer to an active engager in sex.

Normally, what they’ll do is they’ll sell sex with adult women to them first. But they understand, like any other drug, it won’t last. Ultimately, every pedophile that I’ve ever interviewed, talked to, apprehended, or helped law enforcement apprehend, has told me a couple of things. They’re addicted to pornography, and none of them started with children.

Most of them tell me that they went out the first time they purchased sex to buy it from a woman that they thought was older than them because they did not want to run into law enforcement. They wanted to buy what they would consider a prostitute. And then they’ll tell you how the desire wasn’t met. And they go younger and younger and younger.

I think our society is crying out for real solutions and justice. If we do not do that, we’re going to see prosecutions plummet. If we do not shore up and prosecute accurately according to the law, federally and at the state level, fantastic laws on the books. If we do not start prosecuting accurately, there’s going to be an inversion. Because a law that’s not enforced means nothing. It’s as good as toilet paper.

Basically, you’re telling me, and I know we’ve talked about this, that there are many states that have passed very good laws and regulations to deal with this, right? But somehow, when it comes to actually prosecuting and finding guilty the perpetrators, there’s a huge failure.

They walk, and I think this culture is now finally seeing it. They’re crying out. We’re in the middle of society saying, where is justice?

Because the vast majority of this, you know, you gave me this picture, right, all the way from the bottom to the top. So the vast, vast majority of this, of course, is not at that top level.

And what a great distraction for society to think, well, it’s Hollywood, it’s just the elites, where actually, the majority is local in the communities. Remember the statistics of up to 47% are caregivers. There was a high-profile case that we recently had. That survivor, Jessica in Lubbock, Texas, who is being trafficked, doesn’t get a news agency to cover her story. She doesn’t get a high-profile lawyer. She is relegated to a county judge that has no experience in human trafficking, a prosecutor that doesn’t know how to build these cases because they don’t even know how to build it federally.

All 50 states now have phenomenal laws against human trafficking, but let me tell you how dismal the prosecutions are. Recent studies said that we only prosecute and convict human trafficking cases at the highest, at a 45% rate in the States. A more recent study says it plummeted to 16%. The district attorneys and the prosecutors plead these cases down because the judges do not know how to adjudicate this.

So they plead it down to a marijuana charge, a gun charge, a kidnapping charge, a transportation charge, like you saw in a very high-profile case recently. The RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] charge was dropped, trafficking was dropped, but transportation was there, right? So what should be a 30, 40, 50-year sentence gets down to 18 months served. Okay, so remember that.

At a federal level, with tens of thousands of cases of human trafficking a year, we’ve only convicted 148 cases in the last two years, prosecuted and convicted. It is dismal. When you look at any other felony outside of exploitation and human trafficking, right, you’re talking about 16% conviction rates in the States, 92% plus for other felonies.

So we are proposing, and for the last two years, we’ve been working on what we call human trafficking special courts. There will be an Article 3 congressional court that goes through Congress, where if it’s a human trafficking case, it has to go, it goes to that court, administered kind of like circuit courts in the state, in the county, with a judge being nominated and confirmed as a human trafficking judge across the jurisdiction.

We’re not growing government, the funding is already there, but we’re funneling, channeling human trafficking cases to a judge that’s proficient, to a judge that gets educated, to a prosecutorial class that gets educated, down to the bailiff and the court clerk. Start to get a lot of repetitions on human trafficking, understanding the vernacular, the methods, the ways, and the means.

On average, a judge in the county may see one human trafficking case brought to his court in five years. And they go, you don’t even know how to deal with a witness that’s still in trauma. How do we take testimony? How do you build this case? And I would argue the two high-profile cases that were recently displayed publicly in the U.S. were built very poorly by the prosecution. They’re built on straw. These are straw houses that will fall.

And so when we have a designated human trafficking court system, federally, but at the state level, it doesn’t take the power from the states, it doesn’t take cases from the states, but it gives the state another arrow in the quiver to say, we don’t have a judge in our county that has any proficiency in human trafficking. Give us jurisdiction. We want to go try this case in front of the human trafficking judge. I believe what you’re going to find is you’re going to find that those cases are all going to go to human trafficking.

There’s precedent for this. In 1978, the U.S. was grappling with business law bankruptcy. So if you think of specialty bankruptcy court, the courts, the judiciary said we’re having a problem. The judges don’t know finance to the degree where there are M&A [Merger & Acquisition] deals with tag-along, drag-along clauses and shares and it took 27 months for reorganization. They bring in specialty courts on bankruptcy, and the cases increased with 100% proficiency. The timeline for reorganization went from 27 months to 21 months.

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How Traffickers Prey on America’s Youth: Jaco Booyens