Friday, January 11, 2013

150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation

People get away with enslaving village girls for the same reason that people got away with enslaving blacks two hundred years ago: The victims are perceived as discounted humans. India had delegated an intelligence officer to look for pirated goods because it knew that the United States cares about intellectual property. When India feels that the West cares as much about slavery as it does about pirated DVDs, it will dispatch people to the borders to stop traffickers. 
The tools to crush modern slavery exist, but the political will is lacking. That must be the starting point of any abolitionist movement.
--Excerpt from Half the Sky (2010) by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

Today is National Human Trafficking Awareness Day. "Human Trafficking Awareness Month" will continue until February 12, Abraham Lincoln's birthday. If you are in the SF bay area, consider attending any of next week's awareness events.

Even though it may be hard to know where to start to address the trafficking of persons within and across borders, we can begin by acknowledging and learning more about the issue. The more we learn, the more passionate we will become; the more passionate we become, the greater the social movement; the greater the demand for freedom of all persons, the greater the response from policy makers and governing bodies to effect changes that could impact and potentially save the lives of millions of people around the world.

If we believe that we can make a difference, we will.

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