Sex+Money: A National Search for Human Worth is a documentary about domestic minor sex trafficking and the movement to fight it. The team is currently traveling the country screening the film and hosting awareness raising events.
Join them tonight in Tull Hall at Emory University’s School of Law from 6:00pm-8:30pm. Our own Kaffie McCullough will be speaking on a panel about ways the community can get involved.
A student from the Center for Youth Leadership prepares to hand out Human Trafficking Halloween Candy Bags
The Center for Youth Leadership, based at Brien McMahon High in Norwalk, Connecticut, has created a model of youth activism called socially engaged philanthropy. One of the issues they focus on is stopping human trafficking.
As part of this initiative, they pass out Human Trafficking Halloween Candy bags to students in between classes. Inside each bag is a note that says “she gets tricked out and he gets all the treats”, along with information about Backpage.com and the national trafficking hotline number.
We are so glad to see high school students taking a creative approach to raise awareness among their peers.
#16 Sign Groundswell’s petition on Change.org urging Village Voice Media to stop child sex trafficking on Backpage.com.
Join Groundswell in asking Village Voice Media to take a stand against this injustice:
Sex trafficking of girls and boys on Backpage.com, owned by Village Voice Media, is becoming a disturbing trend.
Village Voice Media has a moral responsibility to ensure that young girls aren’t being abused in the commercial sex industry with help from their website, and that they aren’t facilitating human trafficking.
Now, a rising movement of people of many faiths and backgrounds, motivated by their shared moral convictions, are taking action to end this practice.
Please join us in demanding that Village Voice Media – Backpage.com’s parent company – stop the sex trafficking of minors on Backpage.com by shutting down the Adult section of the website.
Click here to sign the petition.
Clergy Demand Village Voice Media Help Stop Boys and Girls from Being Sold for Sex
PR Newswire-US Newswire
NEW YORK, Oct 25, 2011
Thirty-six prominent clergy have appealed to Village Voice Media to end the sex trafficking of girls and boys made possible by its Web site, Backpage.com, in a full-page New York Times advertisement today. The advertisement featured a letter from the clergy in which they called on Village Voice company executives to immediately shut down the Adult section of its Web site where this activity is taking place. The clergy also launched a nationwide petition in partnership with Change.org’s more than one million members.
The newly formed multifaith coalition is made up of mainline Christians, Catholics, Jews, evangelical Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Humanists and other moral and religious leaders. Groundswell, Auburn Seminary’s social action initiative, convened the group.
“Village Voice Media CEO Jim Larkin and his Board of Directors need to stop Backpage.com from serving as a platform for the sex trafficking of girls and boys immediately. For over a year, advocates have demanded action, but the responses they have been given are half-measures and delays. We are tired of Village Voice’s delay tactics,” said The Rev. Dr. Katharine Henderson, President of Auburn Seminary. “The only way to end the sale of minors for sex on Backpage.com is by shutting down the Adult section for good.”
To read the rest of the article, click here.
thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com
Graffiti for a good cause
The CNN Freedom Project
June 10th, 2011
A section of Walton Avenue, between 149th and 150th in New York City’s Bronx borough, has some new graffiti gracing one of its walls. This, however, is not the work of neighborhood miscreants, but a call to action to end human trafficking.
The mural, created by a group of students, is dedicated to Somaly Mam – an anti-trafficking activist – and is part of a project to raise awareness by the Somaly Mam Foundation.
Organizers of the project say that the mural allowed the kids to work together to raise awareness in their communities.
The students say the mural is their way of raising their voices against human trafficking and that they hope that when people see the mural they will add their own voices to fight against human trafficking.
#15 Donate to the Voices Project.
Voices Project
The Voices Project is our pilot initiative working with girls, ages 11-17, to provide opportunities to strengthen and reinforce the initiative’s chief principle, “Yesterday I found my voice – Today I’m here to shout about it!”
The Voices Project provides healthy and holistic solutions to deter potential child sex trafficking contact, involvement and vulnerabilities. We strive to empower hidden talents, inspire self-esteem, promote healthy relationships and encourage the ownership of appropriate decision-making.
Donate to the Voices Project and become a key partner in this important work to end child sex trafficking by focusing on prevention.
You can donate through PayPal or by sending a check or cash to
Juvenile Justice Fund, 395 Pryor Street, Suite 2117, Atlanta, GA 30312.
#14 Urge your U.S. Representative and Senator to support the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2011.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) establishes trafficking as a federal crime, provides victim assistance programs, and authorizes both the State Department Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons and the annual Trafficking in Persons report.
While this bill is incredibly important in the fight to end child sex trafficking, it must be reauthorized every three years. The Senate and House bills reauthorizing the TVPA in 2011 include provisions to strengthen global and domestic anti-trafficking programs through the Departments of State, Justice, Health and Human Services, Labor and Defense.
Check out this video from change.org featuring the Juvenile Justice Fund’s Keisha Head urging community members to join her in supporting this bill.
What can you do to ensure that this bill is passed?
afuturenotapast.org
Today is the last day to register and get the $20 early bird rate for our 7200 Steps to Stop Demand 5k!
Join us this Saturday, October 1st at at 8:30am at Mary Lin Elementary in Candler Park.
Register today and get your Steps to Stop Demand t-shirt and help raise your voice to speak out against those who seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls.
A Future. Not A Past. Advocate Keisha Head shares her story with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution…
Child prostitution victim becomes role model
By Andria Simmons
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Keisha Head
In her role as counselor and mentor for young girls, Keisha Head is poised, polished and polite.
But she need only look in the mirror to be reminded of a troubled past. The name of her former pimp, “Sir Charles,” is literally branded across the top of her back in a dark, swirling script.
On a recent morning, the 31-year-old settled into a chair in a cheerfully decorated room at the Fulton County Juvenile Justice Center where she helps girls identified as being at risk for child sexual exploitation.
Head didn’t wait for questions before letting her life story unspool. It is a story of hitting bottom — hard — but then lifting herself above her past to become a positive role model.
Born to a schizophrenic single mother, Head was sent to live with a family member at age 4. The new home was far from a safe haven, though. She was sexually abused for the next eight years by two older male relatives.
By the time she was 12, Head was acting out so much that she was sent back to her mom. The situation was untenable from the start, with her mother wandering the streets at all hours and being committed several times to a state mental hospital.
Child protective services intervened when Head stopped going to school and placed her in emergency children’s shelter. For the next four years, she bounced among 42 foster or group homes. That is, when she wasn’t trying to run away.
At 16, she got pregnant and was so ill-equipped for motherhood that she gave custody of her newborn daughter to the father.
“After that I was very brokenhearted,” Head said. “I became very numb.”
Head was suicidal, dirty and hungry when she turned to a friend for help. Her friend said “I know somebody who can help you.”
That was the night she met “Sir Charles.” He seemed well-dressed, considerate, nice.
He set her up in his house with seven other girls who welcomed her like the family she never had.
He also told her that if she wanted to take care of herself, she needed to strip at a nightclub where several other of the girls worked. But that job lasted only three days before Sir Charles gave her a new task: prostitution.
He took her to Stewart Avenue (now Metropolitan Parkway) in downtown Atlanta and gave her a quota of $1,000 a night. If she didn’t comply, Sir Charles threatened to harm her daughter.
For the next six months, she wore high heels and skimpy outfits as she worked the corner of 14th Street and Crescent Avenue in Midtown, carefully following her pimp’s rules to avoid violent beatings.
During that period, Head said she was raped 15 to 20 times. Once, she was forced to jump from a car traveling 60 mph to escape from a john who tried to kidnap her.
“I saw a lot of girls getting in cars, and you never saw them again,” Head said. “I knew if I stayed on that track, I would die.”
To read the rest of Keisha’s story, please click here.
