PANGEA's fledgling Modern Day Slavery Committee kicked off an awareness campaign about global slavery yesterday with a screening of two documentaries in Sophia Gordon Hall.
"We're a new committee, so we thought it would be good to start off with a movie screening," said junior Yolanda Fair, a PANGEA co-secretary who heads the committee.
Each film focused on a particular side of child slavery. "Armed and Innocent" (2003) discussed child soldiers in wars around the world, and "Sisters and Daughters Betrayed" (1996) examined the selling of women into sexual slavery in Asian countries.
Fair said that modern-day slavery is an increasingly important issue in society. "It's growing with all the different international wars that are starting," she said. "It's an issue that's often ignored. ... People think it's been eradicated, but it hasn't."
"Armed and Innocent" was produced, written and directed by Roya Hakakian. Robert De Niro narrates the film, which features three teenagers: Ishmael, Isham and Bernard.
Ishmael, Isham and Bernard all experienced child slavery in their home countries, either as soldiers themselves or through witnessing child soldiers. They are examples of the approximately 300,000 children estimated to be fighting as child soldiers.
The film describes the terrible violence in which child soldiers are involved. "To teach a child to kill, you first have to kill everything a child knows," De Niro narrates.
In the film, the child soldiers are forced to fight. After all other elements of their lives have been destroyed, the armies offer them a sense of belonging they cannot find elsewhere.
Ishmael says in the film that the sight of children dying around him "pushed something in me that made me pass beyond that human thing that makes you feel for all the people ... it became like a normal thing."
Child soldiers as young as 11 or 12 years old are given drugs, some of which keep them up for a week with no desire except to fight.
"It takes only days and weeks to turn a child into a soldier," says De Niro, but it takes much longer to help a former soldier recover.
The teenagers profiled in the movie reflect on their lost childhoods. "I never really enjoyed my child[hood]," Ishmael says.
According to the film, there are now an increasing number of organizations helping to deactivate child soldiers and give them opportunities to go to school or do other work, but thousands are still being recruited every day.
"Sisters and Daughters Betrayed" was directed and produced by Chela Blitt. It explores the trafficking of women and girls in Asia, most often for prostitution.
According to the film, women and children are often recruited from rural areas and sent to urban areas or across national borders to serve as prostitutes. They are sold to brothels and forced to work off what they cost to buy.
They often receive no pay for their work. The recruiters who sell them to brothels and bars, on the other hand, reap substantial profits.
The film profiles the trafficking of women and children in Nepal, Thailand and the Philippines. Many sex-slavery industries flourish because they lobby governments to prosecute the women instead of the organizations when a prostitute is caught.
The film also focused on aspects of the social and cultural atmospheres that contribute to the problem. In Nepal, women are not considered part of their father's family. In Vietnam and the Philippines, the sex trade began largely to cater to American troops stationed there in the 20th century.
"It's like a mass rape of the people" when a country such as Vietnam or the Philippines hosts huge, foreign military bases, the film's narration says.
But movements to counter the trafficking of women and children have gained momentum recently, according to the film. Victims are becoming activists themselves, and media campaigns and lobbying efforts are being launched worldwide. In some cases, countries that export sex slaves and those that receive sex slaves are now cooperating to combat the trade.
These groups are now calling for support from the United Nations and U.N. members' governments. But they still face significant barriers from uncooperative police forces or governments in both sending and receiving countries.
"We can do a lot through activism on campus and just through our personal networks to end [modern-day slavery]," Fair said.
