Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Meet an Abolitionist: Dan Archer

Dan Archer is a comics journalist, educator and animator from the UK. He was awarded the John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists at Stanford University. Recently, he implemented a an investigative journalism project, for which he has successfully raised funds, to gather stories and illustrate reportage to cover human trafficking in Nepal's brick. His work is then to be published both in English and Neapli (and possibly Hindi) as an interactive ebook and graphic novel. He will also be offering workshops that give participants the means to tell their own stories in comics form.

So, why comics? In the video on his Kickstarter page, Archer shares that the comic format gives the victims an opportunity to speak to their own community by concealing identity while still speaking powerfully through their visual representations. Archer says about sketching:
Not only does sketching  in the field create a more personal, universal connection with my subjects, as opposed to thrusting recording equipment in their faces, but publishing social justice stories in visual format has proven to raise far more awareness and enjoy more popularity among a younger, hard to reach demographic of readers.
As you might have figured by now, this is not Archer's first project. Here you can see a comic he produced to tell true stories of survivors of human trafficking, as told by Cindy Liou, a staff attorney at Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach Center in San Francisco. In the spring of 2012, he also illustrated a woman's experience with trafficking and rescue after the San Francisco Public Press published a special report on human trafficking in the Bay Area which "examined the financial and political challenges facing agencies that aid trafficking victims and prosecute perpetrators."

Click on the image below to see the full-page version.


Relevant links:

How does human trafficking harm the economy?

Roughly 2.5 million people are victims of human trafficking each year. This is roughly the population of Utah.

There is an important difference between migrant smuggling and human trafficking. Migrant smuggling involves the consent of the individual, and involves illegally crossing borders. Human trafficking is defined as “the act of recruiting, transporting, transferring, harboring or receiving persons for the purpose of exploitation, by using or threatening force, coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, or abuse of power against them, or by giving or receiving payment or benefit to those who control them.”

A 2005 International Labor Organization report estimates that more than 2.5 million people are exploited as victims of human trafficking, 1.4 million sexually and 1.1 million in other economic forms. The ILO calculates human trafficking to be a $31.6 billion industry. However, with regards to labor and production, human trafficking damages both the country of origin and the destination. The country of origin loses production capacity, thereby taking away potential GDP. In the destination country, forced labor depresses wages and, in the case of child labor, reduces potential GDP in the future by restricting access to education.

Source: 24/7 Wall St. (http://247wallst.com/2011/02/10/the-12-most-profitable-international-crimes/)

What does home mean to you?


From the December newsletter:
Freedom House volunteers and a talented film crew comprised of Academy of Art University grads joined together to create a poignant video about the holiday experience for a human-trafficking survivor. Inspired by testimonies of survivors at The Monarch, volunteer Elsye Muljono skillfully portrays a survivor who remembers life before coming to Freedom House. We applaud Elsye on her moving performance.

Please join us in thanking volunteers Alex Chan, Amy Chang, John Chang, Jennifer Doblack, Pedro Garcia, Natalia Hing, Pamela Kojimoto, Daniel Ong, Leslie Peay, Inez Wibowo and Esther Yu for their on-camera and behind-the-scenes work.

Producer Ray Lin created the YouTube video along with Kris He and Brian Chen. The beautiful musical score is an original composition by Gordon Situ and Tiffany Ng.