Sex-trafficking
is not just a Third World phenomenon. It very definitely happens here, because
this is where the money is. Men are also victims, as well as women and young girls
and boys. Intellectually, we accept these facts, but we do not act like they
have sunk in emotionally. Activist-filmmaker Sadhvi Siddhali Shree, the first
North American Jain monk (she sometimes also uses the term nun) and a survivor
of sexual abuse, forces viewers to examine rampant human trafficking in directly
personal terms throughout Stopping
Traffic: The Movement to End Sex-Trafficking (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
It
is hard to imagine anything more harrowing than the childhood of abuse survivor
Dr. John A. King. He wasn’t trafficked per se, but his parents horrifically abused
him and repeatedly pimped him to their friends. As a result, he can well relate
to the experiences of trafficked women who are raped twenty or thirty times per
day. Thailand remains the trafficking capitol of the world, but Houston and Los
Angeles are also major hubs, while Afghanistan is a special category unto
itself.
Unfortunately,
sex-trafficking is a growing business in Vietnam, where it personally touched television
host (and co-executive producer) Jeannie Mai, who discovered the daughter of
her family’s neighbor had been sold into servitude at a hostess bar. Shree
interviews a few such celebrities in Stopping,
but they are personally involved and invested as activists. That definitely
includes the eternally cool Dolph Lundgren, who appears with the first two
minutes.
In
fact, Lundgren sort of throws down the gauntlet, categorizing sex-trafficking
as a massive collective failure in empathy. It is hard to argue otherwise when
you hear the stories survivors tell. Survivor-activists like Karla Jacinto (who
estimates she was raped over 42,000 times) really demand to be heard—and those
who refuse tolisten are deliberately keeping themselves obliviously ignorant.
Watching
Stopping Traffic really throws into
stark relief how misplaced the majority of contemporary activism has been. Just
imagine if the thousands who will show up at a congressman’s office to protest
legitimate political differences instead gathered outside the Thai embassy to insist
on stronger crack-downs on trafficking or at strip clubs and massage parlors
where trafficked women have been forced to work in the past, to demand assures
they are not currently involved in trafficking. We might actually start making
inroads against a truly evil crime, instead of heightening the divisiveness of
current discourse.
