Stepping Stones

Human trafficking is one the fastest-growing criminal industries. It includes the recruiting, transporting, maintaining, providing, confining, abusing, or obtaining of people for self-utilization or profit. It can involve men and women, adults or children, U.S. citizens or foreigners. A branch of human trafficking is sex trafficking, which involves young women being sold into prostitution or forced to be an object of the sex trade. The most common age for young women to enter prostitution is between the ages of 12 and 14, and there are 100,000 children estimated to be a part of the sex trade every year. The victims are threatened and often verbally and physically abused. They are forced to keep their heads low and obey their bosses. Their voice is unheard and they are forced to swallow years of pain and darkness, keeping it locked up deep inside themselves. This issue is often unheard of and misunderstood, and it isn't easy to spot a victim at first glance.

The state of New York is getting up on its feet to help victims of human- and sex-trafficking and to steer women away from the jaws of the sex industry. On Wednesday, September 25, New York's chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, introduced the first statewide system of specialized courts that deal specifically with trafficking offenses and help the victims of trafficking with the darkness of the experiences that they keep buried deep inside their beings. Eleven new courts were established across the state that will unite trained prosecutors, judges, and defense lawyers, along with social workers and an array of other services together in handling cases like human- or sex-trafficking. This new system was a counterpart for 3 laws recently passed by the New York State Legislature, including the Anti-Human Trafficking Act (which makes sex and labor trafficking a federal crime), the Safe Harbor for Exploited Children Act (which states that anyone under 18 who is arrested on prostitution charges is treated as "a sexually exploited child" as opposed to previous years, when they were treated as the criminals rather than the victims), and a third law that allows the victims of trafficking to have their prostitution charges vacated. 

Chief Judge Lippman is hoping that these actions as a whole will stop trafficking cases from just being brushed over at court trials without even going deep into the core reasons why the victims are there in the first place, which is problematic because each case of trafficking is so unique. Under this new system of specialized courts, called the Human Trafficking Intervention Courts, prostitution-related offenses cases will be evaluated by the judge, defense lawyer and prosecutor. If they reach a consensus, the court will then turn over the defendants to services like drug treatment, shelter, immigration assistance and health care, as well as education and job training, attempting to prevent them from returning to the sex trade.

“Human trafficking is a crime that inflicts terrible harm on the most vulnerable members of society: victims of abuse, the poor, children, runaways, immigrants,” Judge Lippman said. “It is in every sense a form of modern-day slavery. We cannot tolerate this practice in a civilized society, nor can we afford to let victims of trafficking slip between the cracks of our justice system” (NY Times, 9/25/2013).

To the Women in New Delhi: Be Strong!

On September 13th, people celebrated outside of Saket District Court in New Delhi, India upon discovering that four men convicted of raping and murdering a 23-year-old woman coming home at night from a movie theater were sentenced to death by hanging. Cases of rape are not uncommon in India; from January to August of this year, there were 1,121 cases of registered rape cases in New Delhi, more than double the number from the same period in 2011 and the highest number since 2000. In a nation where women are expected to keep their heads down and silently surrender to the men looming above them, every bus ride is fearful to a woman, every moment spent outside full of tension and anxiety.

When I first moved to New York from Texas, I remember one of the most daunting experiences was taking the subway for the first time. The coldly alert eyes of the busy New Yorkers looked threatening to me. Yet, kids barely in middle school were casually sitting in the seats, earphones on, bobbing their heads to the music playing in their iPods.

Taking the subway alone for the first time is a pretty daunting task, especially if you're young and everyone around you seems so much bigger and stronger. As Americans, and especially as New Yorkers, we are trained to be independent at a young age, learning to take public transportation and blend in with everyone else on the streets. Men and women, boys and girls, old and young, we all walk briskly to wherever we are headed, getting on and off the trains and getting on and off the buses with no second thoughts.

Other people in the world are not so fortunate. The things we do so casually, so nonchalantly, are luxuries to others. While we complain about waking up early to commute to school, other people would give anything to be able to travel back and forth easily. Women in India must commute back and forth to and from work every day, just like New Yorkers do. However, they live in a society where they are scorned, taunted, and violated for their sex. As reported in The New York Times, a young Indian girl in college who takes the bus every day to work described the bus ride as a very tense, uncomfortable ride where a girl doesn't know when a man will sexually harass or touch her, where a girl is unprotected and left open for men to lay their hands on. In India, girls are expected to keep their heads down and silently obey whatever man is above her--before marriage, this would be her father, and after marriage, it would be her husband. When something bad happens to a girl, she is blamed for having the audacity to set foot outside of her home, where she should be taking care of the house.

These issues have not gone away. We have improved in not discriminating based on gender, but cases of rape, sexual harassment, and all sorts of other issues dealing with sexism still threaten us today. When a woman is violated, she suffers for many, many years, sometimes even her whole life, with the scars that the memories leave behind. In nations like India, where the whole cultural mindset places women far below men and classify them as weak, the entire society's view of females must change if these issues are going to be diminished. To change a whole society, one person is not enough. The community must come together as one, accepting and welcoming females on an equal ground as males. They have no reason to not be able to pursue their dreams. They shouldn't have to walk around the streets shooting 180-degree glances in all directions, wondering who will hunt them down next.

Be that one person.

So many things happen in the world every second. We pass so many strangers on the streets, sit by so many different people on the bus, hear so many voices saying so many different things, and silently judge people based on their appearance or the words that come out of their mouths. But who are we to judge when we don't know the person's story? How can we ever know a person before we have walked in his or her shoes?

A 12-year-old girl in Florida named Rebecca Sedwick committed suicide this past Monday, September 9th, after more than a year of being tormented, threatened, and abused online by a group of 15-year-olds who urged her to end her life. She was one of the youngest people added to the growing list of teens and children who committed suicide. Attempting to stop the bullying, her mother changed Rebecca's cell phone number, deleted her Facebook account, put her in a different school, and tried as best as she could to keep up with her daughter's social activity. But Rebecca had found loopholes to other social media sites and had been interacting with her peers by posting pictures and messages to which she received only death threats and comments about how ugly she was. Her peers asked her questions like "why are you still alive? Can you please just go die? Why are you so ugly?" Being a 12-year-old, she kept it all from her mother, whom she predicted would just take her phone away and make her remain as isolated to the world as humanly possible. Left to bear this pain alone, she grappled with self-hatred to the point of being so overwhelmed that she was driven to end her own life.

Rebecca was a typical 12-year-old girl who wanted to audition for the school chorus and try out for the cheerleading team. She wanted to fit in. She wanted friends. Can you imagine how many people would have seen the hateful comments on her social media accounts, shrugged, and just clicked on the next link? How many people passed by her every day, pretending not to see the cuts on her arm that she with the razor blades she had at home, looking her up and down and mentally picking out every single flaw on her body? How many voices would it have taken to stop Rebecca from killing herself? Perhaps just one. Maybe all it would have taken was just one person to stop, look her in the eyes, and say, "You look really nice today." That would have given her a glimmer of hope, a small spark that could have grown into a huge fire.

How many people have you passed by today? How many voices have you heard today? What was your attitude, what did you say, and what did you do? Whether we realize it or not, we pass by so many people who are burying years of scars and pain deep inside themselves, wishing they were someone else, or wishing someone to come by who would appreciate the way they are. Maybe your attitude can change a person's mind about committing suicide the next morning, or even in the next hour. Be that one voice, be that one person who will shatter the lies of self-hatred that a person is facing, and realize how much power your words and your attitude can have on people you interact with. We don't know a person's story just by looking at them. So who are we to judge? How many more people must be driven to end their own lives before we realize what an impact each of our decisions can have on the people around us?