Launch of UNANIMA International Campaign to STOP THE DEMAND FOR TRAFFICKING IN WOMEN AND CHILDREN 13 March 2008

Sixty women and men from the United Nations community including government representatives and NGOs and UNANIMA International board members attended the launch/reception at the Church Centre across the street from the United Nations.

Jean O’Meara, SHCJ, and president of the UNANIMA board chaired the event which featured Dorchen Leidholdt, co-founder and former executive director of the Coalition against Trafficking in Women, Jeff Bradley, psychologist and director of the AHIMSA Center in Boston and Clare Nolan, Sister of the Good Shepherd, NGO representative and former social. 

What follows is an excerpt from Clare’s comments which express clearly the need for the campaign:

I am thrilled to see a focused campaign on Demand… because it will both have an effect on improving the lives of  individual women and girls who are now victims of male demand for prostituted sex and because it has the potential, if we each take this campaign to heart, to alter, change, to transform our very social systems  so that no longer will we accept a society where patriarchal and economic prerogatives create our acceptance that some women become  a ready pool for the demand for prostituted sex in any form – from the Emperors Club to the brothels of Bangkok.

So a word from the women and girls at the grassroots and why they also are excited about such a campaign…

Here are the voices of women from all geographic areas of the globe, survivors of trafficking, who agreed to be interviewed for research being done by a member of my organization –

I have pulled out what they said their greatest fear was when asked – they said this about the men who purchased them (not the persons who trafficked them):

What was your greatest fear?

That I would be killed by a customer,”

“That the customers would get violent,”

“Getting AIDS and STDs,”

“That what they did to others, they would do to me,”

“I was afraid most of sadistic clients.”

Some of the women who I have visited in Thailand, Brussels, Lima Peru, (and most recently Iraqi refugees women in the Mid East) are so socially un-empowered that they think of being prostituted as simply their shameful fate in life. Others know prostitution as the only economic option to feed their children. All of them fear violence. And while some of them may call themselves sex workers, none of them have pride or future-hope in this so-called work. Many resort to drugs just to get through another night of being a receptacle to many unknown persons. Many have no choices in a society where many forms of gender violence assault them – trafficking and prostitution are merely another form of gender violence.  Are these the social institution we want to tolerate in the 3rd millennium? The actress Emma Thompson said in a current Newsweek article “As consumers, we need to think about what we buy, where it comes from and under what conditions it's made” do we really want to be consumers of other human beings even as we publicly support gender equality and social justice?