sex trafficking – Frontline Club

Spotlight on Modern Day Slavery 1: The Trap

Laura Gane — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 11:48:05 +0000

The Frontline Club brings to you the first in a series of events focusing on the global phenomenon of slavery and forced labour. There are an estimated 40.3 million people trapped in modern day slavery around the world. This series looks at the nuances of this major human rights violation, what can be done and who is involved. From slavery in the food chain, migrant workers, bonded slaves or child slavery. This series will investigate victims and perpetrators both within the UK and on an international scale.

For the first in our series we will screen The Trap, a film that explores how prisons and jails have become a recruiting ground for human traffickers in the States, taking incarcerated women into pimp-controlled prostitution. The film will serve as a platform to open up to a discussion on the phenomenon in the US as well as sex trafficking testimonies from the UK.

For the past 18 months, The Guardian has been investigating the role of the criminal justice system in feeding vulnerable women into America’s thriving domestic sex trafficking industry. With unique access in Florida, Massachusetts, and Chicago, the film follows the stories of women caught in the trap of criminal exploitation and incarceration and those trying to stop some of America’s most vulnerable women from falling under the control of human traffickers. Including encounters in Texas with convicted human traffickers and correctional officers who expose the fault lines that are allowing women to be released from prison straight into the arms of pimps and sex-buyers.

Directed and produced by: Annie Kelly and Mei-Ling McNamara

Director of photography: Alex Healey

Editor: Agnieszka Liggett

Executive producer Laurence Topham

Run Time: 30 mins

Chair

Juliana Ruhfus is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker and interactive producer. She currently works as the the senior reporter for Al Jazeera English’s “People & Power” strand. Juliana joined Al Jazeera English in early 2006 and was part of the team that launched and defined the new channel and the People & Power strand in particular. In November that year her film about Liberian ex-combatants was chosen to introduce the channel’s programming content the day the channel went on air. Nearly 40 films later she has gone undercover in Turkmenistan and in Cambodian orphanages, produced the five part “Corporations on Trial” series, and her two-part investigation into the trafficking of Nigerian women for the Italian sex-trade is one of the most-watched People & Power episodes ever. In 2013 Juliana was named as one of the top 100 journalists covering armed violence by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV).

Speakers

Annie Kelly is a journalist, editor and filmmaker reporting on human rights, global development and social affairs for The Guardian and The Observer. She is also the editor of the Guardian’s multi-award winningModern Slavery in Focus series.

Dorcas Erskine was National Coordinator of the Poppy Project and prior to that the Director of Policy, Advocacy and Programmes at ActionAid. Her background is in working as a specialist on preventing and supporting women who have experienced violence, most recently in the Middle East. She started her career in the UK parliament and in corporate firms before joining the non-profit sector. Amongst other organisations, she worked with ActionAid Tanzania, the International Rescue Committee and a charity supporting female victims of trafficking.

Hazel Thompson is an award-winning British photojournalist. In the last decade, she has taken up assignments worldwide in over 40 countries for media organisations such as The New York Times, ABC News, Stern Magazine, Vogue, FIVE News, The Sunday Times, Observer Magazine, Le Monde 2 and Politiken. Her book ‘Taken’ is a photo documentary published in 2014 documenting Hazel’s life’s work, to investigate and expose the disturbing truth around India’s sub-culture of sex trafficking. Hazel immersed herself into Mumbai’s sex trade since 2002, and during this time she spent over 6 months living in Kamathipura, gaining unprecedented access into the second largest sex district in Asia. The result is an extraordinary glimpse into the secrets of Mumbai’s red light that reveals the moving real-life stories of girls tricked, trafficked and sold into 21st century sex slavery.

Investigating and Reporting on Sexual Violence in Conflict

Julianne Rooney — Tue, 11 Oct 2016 11:47:50 +0000

The Frontline Club is collaborating with the annual Trust Women Conference to present a discussion focused on investigating and reporting on sexual violence in conflict. Trust Women is committed to find real solutions to empower women and to fight slavery worldwide. The annual event brings together global corporations, lawyers, government representatives, and pioneers in the field of women’s rights and anti-slavery.

This discussion will ask: what ethical concerns arise when documenting the experiences of survivors of sexual violence, and how can journalists best help bring perpetrators to justice? Should journalists covering the issues of sexual violence and sex trafficking complete specified training?

With a focus on Syria our panel will be mapping out what is being done to help individuals and communities affected by sexual violence, and discuss ethical practices for journalists reporting on the topic and engaging with survivors.

Chaired by Liz Ford , deputy editor of the Guardian’s Global development website. Liz leads on women’s rights and gender equality issues. She was previously editor of the Guardian’s Katine website, and before that worked on the Guardian’s education desk.

Speakers (Full panel announced soon):

Lauren Wolfe is an award-winning journalist who has written for publications from The Atlantic to The New York Times. She is also a columnist at Foreign Policy magazine and on the advisory committee of the International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict. Previously, she was the senior editor of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she broke ground on the issue of journalists and sexualised violence. She studied at Wesleyan University and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, and is the recipient of the 2012 Frank Ochberg Award for Media and Trauma Study and four Society of Professional Journalists awards. Action on Armed Violence listed her as one of the “Top 100 Most Influential Journalists Covering Armed Violence.”

Marie Forestier is an independent journalist and researcher. She is currently a visiting fellow at LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security, researching sexual violence against Syrian women committed by pro-regime forces. Marie has been a correspondent in Istanbul, Turkey, covering Turkey, the Syrian crisis, Iraq and Iran for various television and radio stations, such as ARTE, RTS, France 2. In 2015, Marie directed a documentary about sexual crimes committed in Timbuktu, Mali in 2012-2013 and the victims’ quest for justice. Front 2009 to 2011, Marie was a correspondent in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Belinda Goldsmith is an award-winning journalist who has reported and led news teams from more than 20 countries on political, financial and general news. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the world’s leading provider of news and information. In this role, she runs a global team of nearly 30 journalists and a large network of stringers covering the world’s under reported stories, focusing on humanitarian issues, women’s rights, climate change, corruption and good governance. She also plays a key role in the editorial content for the annual Trust Women Conference, the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s global event dedicated to putting the rule of law behind women’s rights through concrete action.

Hillary Margolis is a researcher in the Women’s Rights Divisions at Human Rights Watch. Her work focuses on violence against women and girls, including sexual violence in conflict, interpersonal and domestic violence, and protection risks for female migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers. Most recently, she has conducted research on migrants and refugees arriving in Italy via Libya, and on sexual violence by armed groups in the Central African Republic conflict. Her previous work at Human Rights Watch includes documentation of the impact of the Syrian conflict on women and girls, including exploitation and harassment in refugee settings, abuse of women in detention, and risks facing female activists and household heads.

Mimi Chakarova and her film The Price of Sex

Charlotte Cook — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 12:26:13 +0000

by Antje BormannPhotojournalist and filmmaker Mimi Chakarova introduced her film The Price of Sex about women sold into sex slavery with the plea to ‘stay with us’. She was keen, she said, to observe the audience’s reaction.

The film follows three women from Bulgaria and Moldova who managed to escape from the vicious trap they had naively walked into at a young age and were prepared to go on the record with their clearly painful and humiliating experiences. Three of a worldwide number of 1.5 million women traded for sex, according to UN estimates.

The film explores those young women’s origins. Post-communist Eastern Europe with its mainly rural existence, the young generation leaving for the West to follow the lure of better-paid jobs or even any jobs at all… some of them turning out to be false promises.

There was a look at the traders, some of them women effectively betraying their own (all three women in the film were initially lured abroad and sold by women).

There was a description of the conditions sex slaves are held in, without papers, blackmailed into submission, in squalid lodgings they must not leave, working off their ‘debt’ at a rate of up to 50 clients a day.

There was an attempt to talk to punters. The statements from some clients in Turkey who were prepared to go on camera were truly mind-boggling. Equally telling was the testimony of a former pimp, even more so his friends’ attempts to stop him talking.

There was also a look at law enforcement and NGO responses to human trafficking and its fall-out, both doing their best but seemingly fighting a losing battle. The probably most enraging revelation was that foreign funds Moldova receives to fight human trafficking don’t benefit the victims but effectively help maintain the country’s status as ‘Europe’s biggest exporter of women’.

The questions after the screening explored the perceived incompleteness of the film as it focussed on Eastern Europe as the origin of the traded women and their destinations when we are clearly dealing with a global phenomenon, which Chakarova said was intentional as the story was built around the three main characters.

Other contributions bemoaned the lack of a more thorough foray into the demand side of the equation, making the sex slave trade such a profitable proposition in the first place, and questioned what the film intended to achieve.

The reply to the final question, how legislation on prostitution might solve the problem, was typical of the entire discussion. Chakarova maintained that the film, a result of years of work on what was originally a photojournalistic project, was the best she could do. She never set out to answer all the questions and let the audience go home slightly shocked but in the comfortable knowledge that the issue was taken care of. She encourages her viewers to become involved, to care enough to find answers to their questions by themselves, and to act accordingly – to contribute their ‘Granito’, their grain of sand, to what has to be a collective effort, in reference to a previous film screening at the Frontline Club.

Find out more about the project on www.priceofsex.org.