These and other points were put on the table Saturday at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute during a film screening/panel hosted by state Sen. Daylin Leach, a Democrat representing parts of Montgomery and Delaware counties who is best known for having a sense of humor and a reliably liberal voting record.
The film was the 90-minute documentary "Not My Life," which detailed labor and sexual trafficking across five continents, from Lake Volta, Ghana, to Oklahoma City.
In Africa, kidnapped children are recruited as economic slaves - or forced to kill as soldiers for barbaric terrorists. In Nepal, 8-year-olds are forced to work as weavers rather than go to school. In America, teenage runaways are manipulated by pimps into prostitution.
"Human trafficking" has many faces, many procurers and many victims. There is no way of knowing how many, but the U.N.'s global estimate is 12 million enslaved for labor or sex.
The main enablers of "human trafficking" are poverty and lack of education, along with poor law enforcement.
Poverty explains itself. It may drive someone to voluntarily enter the sex trade, or position someone to be forcibly victimized.
Lack of education closes escape paths from poverty, but even worse, it makes the simple parents of young children prey for smooth-talking men who arrive in remote villages promising good jobs in the city as servants for benevolent rich families, or hotel chambermaids. The "lucky" ones wind up as household slaves in a Gulf sheikdom. The "unlucky" ones wind up in a brothel.
The movie has many revolting testimonies. The worst was reporting that very young girls were turned over to rapist "customers," then had their vaginas sewn up so they could be sold as virgins again. The most brutal pedophiles, the film said, are Americans.
Second worst was a jailed trafficker snickering, actually snickering, about how the women he sold to pimps would never have a normal life. I wanted to bash his grinning mouth.
