Woman fighting sex slavery named CNN Hero of the Year

From CNN:

Los Angeles, California (CNN) -- A woman whose group has rescued more than 12,000 women and girls from sex slavery has been named the 2010 CNN Hero of the Year.

Anuradha Koirala was chosen by the public in an online poll that ran for eight weeks on CNN.com. CNN's Anderson Cooper revealed the result at the conclusion of the fourth annual "CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute."

"Human trafficking is a crime, a heinous crime, a shame to humanity," Koirala said earlier in the evening after being introduced as one of the top 10 CNN Heroes of 2010. "I ask everyone to join me to create a society free of trafficking. We need to do this for all our daughters."

Koirala was introduced by actress Demi Moore, who along with her husband, Ashton Kutcher, created DNA, The Demi and Ashton Foundation, which aims to eliminate child sex slavery worldwide. "Every day this woman confronts the worst of what humanity has to offer," Moore said of Koirala. "She says, 'Stop. Stop selling our girls.' By raiding brothels and patrolling the India-Nepal border, she saves girls from being sold into the sex trade, where they are being repeatedly raped for profit, tortured and enslaved."

Read the full story here.

CNN Heroes 2010: Anuradha Koirala

Ms. Anuradha Koirala is the Founder and Executive Director of Maiti Nepal. According to the Friends of Maiti Napal:

Born in Nepal and former English teacher, Ms. Koirala started Maiti Nepal in a small house in Kathmandu with her own savings. . . Her commitment has been an inspiration to her largely volunteer staff. Most of the workers are rescued girls and young women who are healthy enough to work. "They need little incentive from me," states Ms Koirala. "They are working to help their sisters and they know the horror of the victims." She adds, "Society rejects me and my girls, but they are the most important thing in my life."

According to their website: In the border areas, Maiti Nepal operates Twelve Intervention Outposts to prevent girls from being trafficked. Here, Maiti Nepal volunteers, who have been rescued from the Indian brothels themselves, watch for the pimps crossing the border with innocent girls who are ignorant of their fate.

Maiti Nepal also operates physical and mental health programs, and a vocational education program.

"We try to give them whatever work they want to do, whatever training they want to do, because when you're economically empowered, people forget everything. People even forget [she is] HIV-positive or was trafficked," Koirala said in an interview with CNN.

"Anuradha is a hero. ... She's courageous," Geeta [who was brought to Maiti Nepal after police extracted her from sex trafficking at the age of 14, and who is now a peer educator for Maiti Nepal] said in an interview with CNN. "She gave me my faith back. ... If Maiti Nepal wasn't there for me, I would be dead by now."

To vote for Ms. Koirala click here.

The Slave Next Door: EATING, WEARING, WALKING AND TALKING SLAVERY

Excerpt from The Slave Next Door. Reprinted with permission.

CHAPTER 6: EATING, WEARING, WALKING AND TALKING SLAVERY

Slavery probably crept into your life several times today, some before you even got to work. Rolling off your bed, standing on that pretty hand-woven rug, maybe you threw on a cotton t-shirt. In the kitchen did you make a cup of coffee, spoon in a little sugar, and then kick back with a chocolate croissant and your laptop to check the headlines? After a shower, maybe you drove to the station. Waiting for the train, perhaps you made a couple of calls on your cell phone.

All in all a normal day, but slavery was involved in almost every step. Hundreds of thousands of rugs are hand-woven by slaves in the “carpet belt” of India, Pakistan, and Nepal. Cotton is grown with slave labor in India, West Africa, and Uzbekistan, the world’s second largest producer. Coffee cultivation also encompasses slave labor, mainly in Africa. Enslaved Haitian workers harvest the sugar in the Dominican Republic, the largest exporter of sugar to the U.S. The chocolate in that croissant can also be the product of slavery, from the cocoa farms of the Ivory Coast. Even the steel and iron in your car can be polluted by slavery. From a quarter to a half of all U.S. imports of raw iron in different forms come from Brazil.[i] In that country slaves burn the forests to make charcoal, which in turn is used to smelt ore into pig iron and iron into steel. In America, the single largest consumer of Brazilian iron and steel is the automotive industry, though the construction industry also uses a large amount. Pressed against your ear, that cell phone keeps you connected to friends and family, but also to slavery. Cell phones (and laptops and other electronics) just don’t work very well without a mineral called tantalum. In the Democratic Republic of Congo poor farmers are rounded up by armed gangs and enslaved to dig tantalum out of the ground. Every one of us, every day, touches, wears, and eats products tainted with slavery. Slave-made goods and commodities are everywhere in our lives, but, paradoxically, in small proportions. The volume is unacceptable, but rarely critical to our national economy or quality of life. And slavery in our lives is not restricted to cotton, coffee, cocoa, steel, rugs, and cell phones. The list goes on and on, with new commodities and products turning up all the time. Some of them, such as shrimp, might surprise you.

Huckleberry Finn it ain’t

If there is an archetypical picture of rural youth, it is the barefoot lad with the fishing pole over his shoulder. The dusty riverbanks, the lazy heat, the straw dangling from his lip, it all says that halcyon days are possible in our youth. Today even this picture out of Mark Twain is shot through with bondage. Across Africa and Asia children are enslaved to catch, clean, package, and dry fish. They feed a global demand for everything from shrimp cocktail to cat food. One of the world’s largest consumers of seafood is Japan, but the U.S. isn’t too far behind. Americans imported 2.5 million tons of seafood in 2006, worth over $13 billion.[ii] And when it comes to shrimp, the US imports significantly more than the seafood-loving Japanese. Americans love shrimp, and the little crustacean that was once an expensive specialty food is now as ubiquitous as chicken. More than three million tons of frozen shrimp were imported to the U.S. in 2006.[iii] The huge demand for shrimp in the U.S. and other rich countries has generated a gold rush along the coastlines of the developing world. From India to Bangladesh, from Indonesia to Ecuador, Guatemala and Brazil, coastal forests, mangrove swamps, and natural beaches are ripped up to build hundreds of thousands of acres of shrimp farms. In all of these places adults and children are enslaved to cultivate and harvest the shrimp.[iv] In some cases whole families are caught in debt bondage slavery, in others children are kidnapped and hustled off to shrimp and fish farms on remote islands. Children are regularly enslaved in fishing and shrimping, since kids can do the work and they are easier to enslave and control.

In Bangladesh, boys as young as eight are kidnapped and taken out to remote islands like Dublar Char off the southwest coast. Sold to the fishing crews for about $15, they are set to work processing fish on shore for 18 hours a day, seven days a week. If the boats return with a large catch they might work several days with no sleep at all. Like robots they clean, bone, and skin fish; shell mussels, shrimp and crab, and wash squid to remove the ink. Other children sort, weigh, check, and load the haul, processing and preparing the fish for freezing and shipment. The slaveholders sexually abuse the boys and beat them regularly. They get little food, no medical care, and sleep on the ground. If they sicken or are injured and die, they are thrown into the ocean.[v] Dublar Char was raided and the children freed in 2004 when researchers linked to the US anti-slavery group Free the Slaves discovered the situation. They worked with the State Department’s anti-trafficking office to bring diplomatic pressure on the Bangladeshi government, which led to a raid by military police. (The local police were on the take from the gangs running the island).

No one knows how many other remote islands conceal such slave camps. Much of the fish and shrimp from these islands enters the global markets and then comes to the U.S. Dublar Char is just one example of the slave operations that supply our hunger for seafood. Around the island of Sumatra in Indonesia the sea is dotted with what appear to be ramshackle rafts. They are actually fishing platforms, crudely lashed together and moored up to twenty miles off the coast. There are some 1,500 fishing platforms in this region, each holding three to ten children whose only avenue of escape is a twenty-mile swim. Promised a good job, they are left on the platform to cast nets, catch fish, and clean and dry the catch. In heavy weather the platforms can break up, children can be swept overboard, or they might simply fall through the holes in the rough bamboo deck. On irregular visits, the boss collects the fish and administers beatings to increase productivity. As in Dublar Char and so many other places, the children are sexually abused, and if they become ill, there is no relief. If they die of illness or injury, they are simply rolled into the water. The revenues from Indonesian fish exports reached $5 billion in 2006; America is one of the top destinations for frozen shrimp, canned tuna, tilapia and sea crab from that country.[vi]

________________________________

[i] See: Michael Smith and David Voreacos, “The Secret World of Modern Slavery,” Bloomberg Markets, December 2006.
[ii] See report of National Marine Fisheries Service, at http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/fishwatch/trade_and_aquaculture.htm. Accessed Aug. 2007.
[iii] Shrimp imports also reported at: http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/fishwatch/trade_and_aquaculture.htm.
[iv] See for example, “Dying for your dinner” Environmental Justice Foundation, accessed at http://www.csrwire.com/PressRelease.php?id=1932; and Report No. 32 on Forced Labor in Burma, International Labor Organization, accessed at http://burmalibrary.org/reg.burma/archives/199809/msg00281.html.
[v] Report on Indonesian Fishing Platforms, Anti-Slavery International, 1998.
[vi] See: http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-779909/Indonesia-hopes-to-increase-fish.html#abstract. Accessed Aug. 17, 2007.


Free the Slaves is very happy to announce the upcoming publication of the paperback edition The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today.

NYOF: a nonprofit rescuing Nepalese children as young as 6 from indentured servitude

Thousands of Nepalese girls are sold into indentured slavery for $30 or $40 a year. As heart wrenching as it sounds, the Nepalese government has been reluctant to address such issue. in fact, the higher officials in governments are the ones who buy Nepalese girls from the village for $30 a year.

But there is one organization who's been diligently fighting against the slavery of Nepalese children for the past two decades. Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation(NYOF) is that organization. NYOF was founded in 1990 by Olga Murray, a retired lawyer from San Francisco, California. When she visited Nepal in 1984 and 1987, she has witnessed a terribly impoverished situation of many Nepalese young girls who are sold to slavery for a few dollars. Olga Murray and Gregg Tully, the development director of NYOF explains the efforts and the missions of the organization in this interview.

Q: HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE GOALS AND THE MISSION OF NYOF? NYOF’s mission is to transform the lives of impoverished Nepalese children by providing them with what should be every child's birthright – education, housing, medical care, and loving support. NYOF’s goals include eliminating the tradition of selling Nepali girls into bonded servitude, reducing the prevalence of child malnutrition throughout Nepal, and making education more widely available to the most downtrodden children in the country.

Q: TELL US ABOUT THE UNIQUE EFFORTS OF NYOF THAT MAKES IT A PARTICULARLY EFFECTIVE MEANS OF RAISING THE AWARENESS OF TRAFFICKING In the areas where we have been working for a number of years, it is now shameful for parents to sell a daughter into labor, whereas, it was a matter of pride for a family to do so prior to our awareness raising campaign effort.

Q: THAT SOUNDS LITTLE BIZARRE TO SOMEONE LIKE ME WHO IS NOT FAMILIAR NEPALESE CULTURE. WHY WOULD ANYONE TAKE PRIDE IN SELLING HIS OR HER CHILDREN? (Olga): This has a historical context. In certain ethnic groups in Nepal, many fathers had been bonded laborers for generations. They lived and worked on the land of others. They were largely paid in crops, so when they needed money for various reasons such as medical care or clothes or a wedding, they borrowed it from the landlord, often at exorbitant rates. They could almost never pay off the debts during their lifetimes, and when they died, their sons were liable for the debt. This practice was made illegal in 2000 and the debts are forgiven. During the time of their bonding, if the landlord wanted a servant, the laborers wife or child were sent ot the landlord's home to work, often without compensation. Or someone who needed a servant would come to the villages to buy the services of daughters for a year. Though bonding service became illegal in 2000 and the government promised to rehabilitate the former bonded laborers, they failed to do so. Most were evicted from the land, they had lived on, and were living in shanties. So, when these freed laborers needed money desperately, they sold the labor of their daughters even more willingly. To them, this was a natural process, and no social stigma was involved in the practice in 2000 when NYOF began our efforts.

(Gregg) The custom of selling daughters into virtual slavery exists in the Tharu ethnic group, which is native to the hot flat parts of Nepal. They are traditionally uneducated farmers. In the past, other ethnic groups moved into Tharu areas, bought the land the Tharu farmed on, and the Tharu became sharecroppers. The prices that the landowners charged the Tharu were exorbitant, and the Tharu soon fell deeply into debts they could never pay. To pay some of the interest on the debts, they would send their daughters to work in the landowner’s houses. This developed into the custom today of Tharu parents selling their daughters to be trafficked all over Nepal, and sometimes into India. Many of the girls are trafficked into prostitution, and have spent so much of their lives as servants that they do not understand that they have the right to refuse to do what people tell them to do.

Q: CAN YOU GIVE US AN EXAMPLE OF YOUR EFFORT TO END TRAFFICKING OR CHILD SLAVERY IN NEPAL? NYOF’s public awareness campaign has been instrumental in the success of the program. NYOF’s staff informs people about the importance of education for girls and the plight of bonded children. As a result, local communities have turned against the bonding tradition, making the impact of the program sustainable. Further, NYOF trains other nongovernmental agencies in its methods, so the program can be replicated.

PBS broadcasted a story on these former domestic servitude victims to advocate for their rights and other Nepalese girls to be freed from their indentured servitude. Their effort of awareness raising not includes Marching on the street with their traditional instruments and a big band and loud singing, but also public speech by the victims crying out for ending the tradition of exploitation as well as a stage play performed on the street by the former victims.

Q: HOW DO YOU SEE NYOF EVOLVE IN THE FUTURE? Year after year, more people are supporting NYOF, even during the recent economic turmoil. NYOF’s programs in Nepal also continue to grow and transform the lives of more children. We are in the process of choosing new projects to expand our impact on the children who comprise the future of Nepal.

Q: HOW MUCH WOULD YOU SAY IT'LL COST FOR A GIRL TO LIVE A MONTH IN NEPAL? Expenses vary a lot in Nepal. The cost of living in the capital city of Kathmandu can be a lot more than in a rural village. But the cost of supporting children in Nepal is far less than in any developed country. NYOF gives college scholarships to impoverished children who do not have families or whose families are utterly unable to support them, and provides all the children’s clothes, food, housing, and health care, for only $750 per child per year! A scholarship for a young child in a rural area whose parents can take care of them and feed them, but don’t have the money for school fees, uniforms, and books, is just $75. For these amounts of money, the urge to help is almost irresistible. (According to PBS, an average Nepalese makes in a village makes $1 a day).

Q: HOW CAN PEOPLE SUPPORT NYOF AND ITS INITIATIVES? I encourage people to visit www.NYOF.org to learn more about NYOF. People who want to support our projects can donate online through our website and they can mail a check to NYOF at 3030 Bridgeway, Suite 123, Sausalito, CA 94965, USA. They may also contact us at info@nyof.org or 1-866-FOR-NYOF to discuss other ways to contribute.

NYOF is close to eradicating slavery in one ethnic village. But they have four more villages to reach out for further endings of slavery of Nepalese daughters. Development , regardless of culture and geographical locations, is certainly a long and difficult process to implement. One former UN senior official once said that one is lucky if he or she can change a traditional practice (such as indentured servitude in Nepal) in a decade or two. If this is hard to understand, look at the post-communism countries, for instance. Many have failed to completely step away from their communism culture even after two decades or so. In this respect, NYOF's success in eradicating slavery in a district just in two decades is not something to be overlooked. For more information on NYOF, visit www.NYOF.org.

Annie Lennox: Women on the Frontline, Traficking in Nepal

Women on the Frontline is a video documentary series presented by Annie Lennox that shines a light on violence against women and girls. The series takes the front to homes, villages and cities around the world where a largely unreported war against females is being waged.

Broadcast on BBC World for seven weeks in 2008, the series covers: Nepal, where thousands of women are trafficked each year; Turkey, where killing in the name of honour continues; Morocco, where women political activists who have survived torture and imprisonment testify before a government truth and reconciliation commission; the DRC, where women bear the brunt of a 10-year war in the eastern provinces; Colombia, where women have been tortured in the shadow of a guerilla war; Mauritania, where women who have been raped may go to prison; and Austria, where, under a new law, perpetrators of domestic violence are forced to leave home.

(Publishers: UNFPA, dev.tv, Austrian Development Cooperation, UNIFEM; Year of Release: 2008)

Read more about Women on the Frontline here

See more chapters from this powerful documentary series:

Afghanistan

Austria

Colombia

Republic of Congo

Mauritania

Morroco

Turkey

Cohen Milstein Files Human Trafficking Victims Lawsuit Against U.S. Military Contractors in Iraq

From Market Watch:

Aug 27, 2008

LOS ANGELES- Cohen Milstein, representing victims of human trafficking and their survivors, filed suit today in the United States District Court for the Central District of California against a prominent U.S. military contractor, Kellogg Brown & Root, Inc. ("KBR"), and its Jordanian subcontractor, Daoud & Partners ("Daoud"). During the relevant time period, KBR was the largest military contractor for the United States in Iraq.

According to the lawsuit, the trafficking victims include 13 Nepali men who were taken to Iraq against their will to provide menial labor at a United States military facility.

The men, ages 18-27, were recruited in Nepal to work as kitchen staff in hotels and restaurants in Amman, Jordan. Their families went deep into debt to arrange the jobs, which they hoped would lift them out of poverty. Once they arrived in Jordan, however, they were not provided the expected employment. Instead, their passports were seized, they were held against their will, and they were told that they were being sent to work at a military facility in Iraq, the United States Al Asad Airbase.

The men allege that the illicit trafficking scheme--from their recruitment in Nepal to their eventual employment in Iraq--was engineered by KBR and its subcontractor Daoud.

Tragically, as the men were being transported to Iraq, a car containing twelve of the men was stopped by members of the Ansar al-Sunna Army, an insurgent group. The 12 men in the car were taken hostage and executed by the insurgents. The executions were filmed and posted on the Internet.

The Inspector General for the United States Department of Defense investigated and confirmed the facts related to the fate of the 12 men, which led to increased enforcement of anti-trafficking measures by the United States.

The 13th trafficking victim, Buddi Prasad Gurung, was not kidnapped with the others and arrived at the U.S. military facility in August 2004. He was assigned to work as a loader/unloader in a warehouse, supervised by KBR.

For 15 months, Mr. Gurung was held in Iraq against his will, before KBR and Daoud allowed him to return home to Nepal. Mr. Gurung has joined with the family members of the 12 deceased victims to file claims under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and the Alien Tort Claims Act.

They are represented by Agnieszka Fryszman, Matthew Handley, and Molly McOwen of Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll P.L.L.C. (Washington, D.C.) Cohen Milstein's International Human Rights practice group has earned a stellar reputation for its work representing victims of forced and slave labor and other violations of international law.

A copy of the human trafficking complaint is available on the firm's website, www.cmht.com, as are copies of relevant Department of Defense documents. Ms. Fryszman and Mr. Handley are available for comment.

Alleged Ringleader of Kidney Transplant Ring Sent Back to India

From the International Herald Tribune:

KATMANDU, Nepal: The alleged leader of a syndicate accused of illegally removing hundreds of kidneys, sometimes from poor laborers held at gunpoint, was deported back to India on Saturday night from Nepal where he was arrested days earlier, officials said.

Nepalese authorities handed over Amit Kumar to Indian officials who had been seeking his extradition since he was arrested Thursday at a jungle resort in neighboring Nepal, said Upendra Aryal, a top police officer in Nepal's capital, Katmandu.

Authorities had been searching for Kumar since last month, when he fled after police said they broke up the kidney transplant racket they claimed he ran from an upscale New Delhi suburb. Police were also investigating whether Kumar was involved in illegal kidney transplants in Nepal, Aryal said. Indian authorities declined to comment on the case.

Indian police say Kumar headed an illegal organ transplant ring based in the affluent New Delhi suburb of Gurgaon. Authorities believe his group sold up to 500 kidneys to clients who traveled to India from around the world in the past nine years. Police said they raided the operation's main clinic in Gurgaon in January and broke up the ring, which officials claim spanned at least five Indian states and involved at least four doctors, several hospitals, two dozen nurses and paramedics, as well as a car outfitted as a laboratory.

Subsequent raids allegedly uncovered a kidney transplant waiting list with 48 names.

From Nepal to India: Trafficking and the HIV/AIDS Crisis

From the American Chronicle:

Nepal is certainly an important country globally for urgent HIV/AIDS interventions? UNAIDS predicted two years back that Russia and India were going to be the two largest centers for the future AIDS epidemics, though both countries are able to expertly handle any kind of pandemic when push comes to shove. In fact India's projected rate of 50 million next to South Africa's 56 million, is now hugely diminished re-totaling to only 21 million, but still a large figure nonetheless. China too has nearly 27 million known HIV infections. Both countries are capable of intensive AIDS patient care and produce their own anti-retroviral treatment based total health care packages.

Where would that leave Nepal, which is the only country that India shares an open border with? Has anyone thought about it seriously? The alarming fact appearing to both Indian and Nepali media these days is that a large number of Nepalese girls and women are trafficked to India and known to be engaging in the commercial sex trade in Indian brothels substantiating a decade old ILO estimate. There are only a handful of NGOs that work in this sector among the 6,500 registered at the national level.

Just imagine this likely scenario. A quarter of Nepal's female commercial sex workers numbering around 100,000 of a total 200,000 were infected with HIV or had full blown AIDS (a 2005 estimate that is quoted in You and AIDS, UNDP web portal), came back and got married into Nepalese communities, gave birth to Nepalese children, and infected their Nepalese spouses.

According to the UN website, "a major challenge therefore is to control HIV in the country is the trafficking of Nepali girls and women into commercial sex work in India, and their return to practice in Nepal. About 50 percent of Nepal's FSWs previously worked in Mumbai, India and some 100,000 Nepali women continue to engage in the practice there. The National Network against Girls' Trafficking, an Indian coalition of approximately 40 NGOs initially established to tackle the problem of girl trafficking, has also begun to address the issue of HIV/AIDS".

But many of the remaining have got married to Indians in Indian cities and stayed back. What kind of crises would Nepal and India jointly face in the future? Certainly, on of the most staggering geo-strategic cross-border security and human development challenges facing any two countries in the world requiring 'quick brew' interventions, availability of an international pool of knowledge bank experts, vast quantity of ART drugs, hospitals and hospices, 'stand-by' financial resources and workable intervention strategies comparable to a hidden, springing math formula.

It would be a major diversion from the two countries' development budgets and a loss of human lives as more people died of AIDS related illnesses. Are we capable of handling such a scenario in Nepal? The answer again is NO!"

The author of this stark and alarming article is Surya B. Prasai, a Nepali national who has written extensively on issues of the environment, HIV/AIDS, the United Nations, and migration, often with inclusion of Nepal's issues. The scenarios and figures Mr. Prasai discusses, however, are not only concerns he has. The Journal of the American Medical Association produced a report in August 2007 entitled "HIV Prevalence and Predictors of Infection in Sex-Trafficked Nepalese Girls and Women," which produced the following results among 287 repatriated Nepalese victims:

• 38% tested positive for HIV,
  
• Girls who were trafficked prior to the age of 15 were at increased risk for HIV with over 60% of this group testing positive for infection,
  
• Girls who were trafficked prior to the age of 15 were also at greater risk of being detained in multiple brothels with longer periods at each one,
  
• Additional factors associated with HIV positivity included being trafficked to Mumbai and longer duration of forced prostitution

In a New York Times article, written at the time of the release of the report, Dr. Jay G. Silverman, professor of human development at Harvard's School of Public Health as well as the lead author of the AMA report had this to say:

Girls from China's Yunnan Province sold to Southeast Asian brothels, Iraqi girls from refugee camps in Syria and Jordan, and Afghan girls driven into Iran or Pakistan all appear to be victims of the same pattern, he said, and are presumably contributing to the H.I.V. outbreaks in southern China, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"Most authorities fighting human trafficking don't see it as having anything to do with H.I.V.," Dr. Silverman said. "It is just not being documented."

Brothel owners pay twice as much for young girls, Dr. Silverman said, and charge more for sex with them, sometimes presenting them as virgins, because men think young girls have fewer diseases or believe the myth - common in some countries - that sex with a virgin cures AIDS.

"It's absolutely heartbreaking, "Dr. Silverman said. "Some of them are just shells - and shells of very young human beings. It's every father of a daughter's worst nightmare."

"About half of those tested had been lured to India by promises of jobs as maids or in restaurants. Some were invited on family visits or pilgrimages and then sold - sometimes by relatives. Some were falsely promised marriage. Some were simply drugged and kidnapped, often by older women offering a up of tea or a soft drink in a public market or train station," Dr. Silverman said.

Pop Culture Combats Human Trafficking

From eKantipur.com:

Nepal-- Experts on Sunday said media and popular culture could play an instrumental role in combating human trafficking.

Speaking at a program organized by Rights of Individual for Social Empowerment (RISE) in association with United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC), in the capital, Gary Lewis, representative of UNODC in South Asia, asked media persons and artists to join hands in global efforts to curb human trafficking. "Voices of people, who are instantly recognized by all, will be greatly helpful in bringing this practice to an end," he added.

He also lauded the initiatives taken by the government in Nepal including ratification of anti-human trafficking protocol to curb this practice. Babita Basnet, president Sancharika Samuha, said a large number of girls in the country are forced to lead a hellish life after being trafficked. "A short visual and a song by popular artists with an anti-trafficking message could bring great change in attitude and thinking of people," she said.

Actress Sanchita Luitel said concerted effort from all stakeholders was essential to curb this crime against humanity. She said gender disparity and illiteracy among rural folks was fueling the problem in Nepal.

Punya Prasad Neupane, secretary at the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare, said media could play the role of facilitator and be a means to create awareness among people.

Read the full article

With that in mind, check out part 1 of a 3 part MTV mini series about human trafficking hosted by Lucy Liu:



And let's not forget the single off my forthcoming album Beat Down Human Trafficking, which will be released via the soon-to-be completed official Human Trafficking Project website this spring:

J Nice feat. Meryl- Human Trafficking