When Nothing Goes Right Just Go Left

For this week's entry, I watched three TED Talks dealing with modern day slavery. The first featured a man named Kevin Bales, who  offered insight into slavery as an economic crime. The second was by a woman named Sunitha Krishnan, an advocate for sexual slavery who has rescued over 3,200 women from imprisonment in Inida. The third and final talk was given by Jessica Minhas, a sexual abuse survivor who has dedicated her life to raising awareness of child slavery. Through these three perspectives, I was able to learn an immense deal on modern slavery, its victims, and how big of an issue it really is. Being a Social Work and a Women and Gender Studies student, the topic of human trafficking is a common one throughout my education. However, each time I learn new details surrounding the matter, I never cease to be appalled and amazed by how many victims suffer daily from slavery in our world. Sunitha Krishnan's talk in particular really shocked me. Not only did she project horrifying images of victims she had rescued, but she also displayed three case studies of children between the ages of three and five who had been brutally raped several times over. I had never seen stories of children that young being sold into sexual slavery and it left me at a loss for words. Sunitha was incredibly brave not only for her work with children like the ones she discussed, but also due to her own story as a survivor of gang rape committed by eight men when she was only fifteen. She spoke with an inspiring passion and unimaginable amount of courage, especially for this terrible, unspeakable crime. Sunitha also said that the victims she rescued were not always young children. She has worked with children as young as three, but also women in their late forties. Devastatingly, she reported that one of every three women she rescues is HIV positive. It is hard to put into words how truly heartbreaking it is knowing that even if victims are rescued from their lives as sexual slaves, they still potentially have a long road of incurable illness ahead of them. This theme was also prevalent in Jessica Minhas' talk, in which she shared her own story growing up with an abusive grandfather and how it motivated her to begin work in India with young girls in orphanages. She said the most shocking piece of knowledge she learned when she began her work in the orphanages was that most of the girls who aged out of care when they were sixteen would have no choice but to marry immediately or sell themselves as prostitutes. This issue, the helplessness and lack of true escape for victims, especially female victims, of abuse, is an issue we are not working hard enough to solve. It is an epidemic which we, as Americans, are not paying attention to. Human trafficking and sexual slavery are things we see as tragedies of the past, but statistics suggest 14.29 million people live in slavery today in India alone. Kevin Bales discussed in his talk how when he began his research on modern slavery, he was only able to find two recent studies done on the matter. Slavery is not an issue where we can ask, "Will it happen again?" It is an issue where we need to be asking, "What can we do to stop it?" (WC: 569)

http://bit.ly/2KyH9eN