Trafficking in my hometown

By Lauren Seibert, World Vision ACT:S Fellow

I came home from college in May to find my sister reading “Half The Sky,” a book by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn that explores the oppression of women across the world, focusing especially on sex trafficking and gender-based violence. “You should read this,” my sister prodded me. Dutifully, I plunked it on top of the stack of books I planned to read this summer.

As I began training for my fellowship with World Vision ACT:S, I was flooded with information about human trafficking and modern-day slavery. I absorbed the hard numbers—over 1.2 million children are trafficked for their labor each year—and the faces. I mentally began classifying stories into the three types of trafficking: sex slaves, forced labor, and child soldiering. I learned about the work World Vision does overseas to fight the deeper roots of child trafficking: community education and training, reintegrating formerly trafficked kids, even advertising at airports to stop sex tourists.

As I was getting started with my fellowship, James Pedrick, Advocacy Advisor for ACT:S, handed me a DVD, “Call + Response,” along with a black Human Wrong t-shirt with the word “SOLD” crackling in white across the front. I brought them both home and started wearing the t-shirt only to sleep. A few days later, I finally stuck the DVD in my computer to watch. Blown away by the testimonies of former sex slaves and the flood of responses from major figures like Cornel West, Madeleine Albright, Natasha Bedingfield, Cold War Kids, Switchfoot, and more, I barely registered the name of one of the speakers—journalist Nicholas D. Kristof.

The next morning, as I scanned the New York Times for a story that didn’t include the word “oil,” one Op-Ed snagged my attention: “Seduction, Slavery and Sex.” Skimming through it, my eyes caught on the words “Laurel, MD”—what? I backtracked, read it again. Last month, a man had been charged with human trafficking in Laurel, Maryland.

My home town.

Laurel is not a city that frequently appears in the national newspaper. A suburb 30 minutes out from D.C. by car, with a population of about 20,000, we’re not exactly a famed location or hotspot for crime. But just this June, the police freed a 12-year-old girl imprisoned in a local hotel in Laurel, charging the 42-year-old man with trafficking the girl for sex. A few days later, three other young women (ages 16, 19, and 23) were freed from another hotel, also in Laurel. They too had been trafficked.

After I had digested this disturbing information, I noticed the author of the Op-Ed was Nicholas D. Kristof.

Put all this together, and you realize that none of these things were coincidences. Kristof, a journalist noted for bringing human rights abuses to light, had been involved with the book, the film, and the article. As a recent Journalism graduate, I’ve been looking for something to pour my heart into that directly links to my passion for writing—and it’s all already connected. Inspiration just dropped out of the sky and landed in my lap.

Kristof reports that 100,000 to 600,000 children may be involved in prostitution in the U.S., and that’s only a fraction of the 1.2 million children trafficked worldwide. But we can’t relegate the issue to an abstract concept any more. If human trafficking is occurring 10 minutes away from my house, then it can happen anywhere. Check out the news archives for your town. Who knows what trafficking stories were glossed over in the past few years?

I wore the Human Wrong t-shirt to my friend’s house the other day, and I plan to wear it again. “Half The Sky” is coming with me to the pool this weekend. I’m supposed to act on this, and I will. If you want to be involved, just keep your eyes open—something might be trying to get your attention too.

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