A typical day for Eric Proffitt, a singer-songwriter and public speaker from Canada, starts out a lot like anyone else’s. He wakes up at about 7:30 a.m., has family prayer and scripture study with his wife and five daughters, and spends some time gathering himself for the day by meditating and pondering. After that, his day gets much more unique—he leaves from wherever he ended up the night before and runs 20 miles draped in 10 pound chains.
On August 1, Eric began a 500 mile run in chains to end modern-day slavery. Eric got involved with the prevention of human trafficking in 2007 when a song of his was used for a feature film on trafficking. He said the more he and his wife looked into human trafficking, the more they wanted to help. Another thing that helped push him toward prevention of modern-day slavery was in 2008 when he was invited to perform at a conference about human trafficking.
“I came back from that and just felt like a lot of the ideas presented there were business jargon, and I felt that it was going to take real people doing original things, like running 500 miles in chains, to get awareness out there,” he said.
Eric’s Journey
“I’ll run for hours and hours. I’m running on the east coast, so it’s hot and humid. They’ve had record heat waves here for the past few days, and I’m wearing all these layers of clothing and padding. I’m also wearing chains that weigh 10 pounds. The weight is bearable; it’s being flogged for 20 miles as they whip my legs that makes it hard. I wouldn’t recommend this to people just for fun.”
Eric isn’t alone on his journey. Many people have been running different lengths with him to help keep him motivated. His daughters run half-miles with him on occasion, and he has even had the great-great-great grandson of Frederick Douglass (an American abolitionist in the 1800s) run with him.
“Really great people are rallying for the cause,” he said.
Eric began his run in Washington, D.C. and is now headed to New York. The 15-day voyage is about 250 miles. In New York, he is getting on a plane and flying to England, where he will run from London to Hull, which is about 280 miles. The run will take him approximately 46 days to complete. When Eric gets to Hull, he will be singing at their annual Freedom Festival. He said freedom is a very relevant theme for the UK at this time, because the festival marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Wilberforce, a leading light of the anti-slavery movement. He said coincidentally, in the United States, it is also the 200th anniversary of the birth of President Abraham Lincoln.
“Some really cool things have happened so far,” he said. “I’ve seen some neat things.”
For example, as Eric came out of Washington, D.C., he saw a whole block having a block party. There was music going and people came up and talked to him.
Another time, he ran past some gangsters, and was thinking to himself the whole time, ‘How can I run by inconspicuously with all these chains?’ He ended up having to go talk to them, but in the end they thought what he was doing was “really cool” and they even gave him money.
On a different day, a lady pulled up and said she’d seen Eric on Facebook, so she went home, got her niece, and came back and got pictures taken with him.
“One time I stopped to fill up with water and this guy came outside and said, ‘Wow, you’re the most important person I’ve ever met.’ That was a cool moment.”
At other times on his run, he’s seen things that he would rather not see, but they have motivated him to keep going.
He said: “If you had to run through some of the places I’ve run you’d feel sick. I’m running through these places and seeing the front of businesses for dancing and gentlemen’s clubs. I’m seeing prostitutes on the street corners. This is what this run is all about, and I’m running right past it.”
Raising Money and Preventing Slavery
Eric said so far about $10,000 has been raised. He said besides money, many people have donated their time, shirts, hotels, food and other things like that.
“I can’t put a money cost to what people have given,” he said. “The response has been amazing, but we still need more.”
He said about half of their trip has been paid for, and they’ve put in a lot of their own money to do this run, as well as many of their family members.
“Everybody always asks what we want to accomplish or how they can help,” Eric said. “Much like cancer, we can’t go into a lab and do the research to cure cancer, but people all over the world give millions of dollars a year to go toward curing it. This cause is the same way. Don’t try to rescue the victims, help them get the funding they need.
The money raised will go to organizations that prevent and stop human trafficking, as well as organizations that do the rehab for human trafficking victims as well. Anyone can donate money by visiting Eric’s Web site, run4therescue.com.
Eric said: “As consumers, we need to be aware of where our money is perpetuating slavery. For instance, when I learned that 60 percent of chocolate harvested was harvested by slaves, I did my research for what chocolate companies I could trust with non-slave labor. For us [members of the LDS church] this doesn’t apply, but to the rest of the world, I would say research where you get your coffee and tea. Oftentimes I think if we find a clothing label that says Made in USA, Canada, or the UK, then we can trust it’s not made by slave labor.”
Another thing consumers can do is buy locally and support their local farmers and markets, Eric said.“I have spoken in many different other churches since we started this, and what’s amazing about this cause is that people are able to look past their religious and political views. Everyone looks at this and says, ‘This is so wrong, we have to do something about it.’”
A Word on Human Trafficking
Eric said modern-day slavery is happening in the US too, not just in other nations. In every major city across America and the world there are slaves. He said slavery has a lot of different faces.
He said: “I realize most people don’t know what I mean by modern-day slavery. I know people think, ‘Oh yeah, I work for minimum wage so I’m a slave too,’ but these people are literally owned by another person. These are people who are forced to do what they do by fear, abuse, threat and violence. All these things keep people doing jobs they don’t get paid for, and 80 percent of that is sexual slavery. There are five-and six-year-old sex slaves. It’s hard to say, but so important to say, that there are people who are making child pornography that is getting more sick and twisted every day. They find it entertaining to watch six-year-old children get raped.
“There are people who are abducted and their organs are sold on the Black Market. It’s just sick and twisted.
“There are also child soldiers. Can you imagine giving a five-year-old a gun and telling him to kill other kids?”
Eric said there are an estimated 27 million modern slaves today. One to four million are enslaved every year, which means there can be up to 5,500 people enslaved every day. Human trafficking is the second most profitable illegal activity. Eric made the point that a drug is sold once, but a person can be sold many times. He said people are looking at each different face of this beast as its own thing and aren’t realizing that it’s all part of the same monster.
“Being LDS, for many years I looked kind of judgmentally at prostitutes or people who lived on the street. I’d wonder why they didn’t just change their lives. But the reality is many of the prostitutes didn’t start as teens. They were forced into it at 12 or 13. Every time we go to General Conference we always hear the brethren talk about avoiding pornography because it is something that enslaves the user. We should recognize that most of the people pictured are forced to do it.”
Eric said these modern-day slaves don’t present themselves as victims, because for many of these people they feel if they were to let go of that façade, they would be put in jail, be killed, or their family will be hurt.
Eric said a lot of prostituted children have run away from home because there was some form of abuse, and while they’re on the street they’ll be approached by someone who says they’ll take care of them. They’ll treat them nice for a while, but then they’ll force them into doing what they want them to do.
Why Eric is Running
Eric felt inspired to do something to raise awareness about modern day slavery. He said his family has been blessed and the miracles have been so evident. The first two days he ran he wasn’t getting direct sunlight because the clouds covered the sun.
He said: “On my second day of running, I was feeling so down, so I said a prayer. It wasn’t 10 seconds later, and a lady drove by and said ‘God bless you.’ She stopped and gave me $10 and told me to go get some water.”
He said he’s so grateful for blessings like that.
“I feel that I cannot turn away from this,” he said. “If we turn our eyes and our hearts away from this cause, what will happen when we come to the Savior and he says we could have made a difference if we’d tried? We can’t turn away because it’s terrible; that’s what needs to be enough to make us act. To me this is the most important issue of our time.”
