As a college student in 2007, Mike Masten spoke to his peers at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. In a week-long series of events, Masten, an International Relations major, described women their same ages being sold into sex slavery in unlikely places across Southern California and around the world. Nevin James was in that audience, and the words he heard that morning stuck with him. While James didn't get involved in the human trafficking cause right then, he recalls what he had heard at Pepperdine coming back to him when he was halfway around the world.
"I was walking in Amsterdam three years ago. I saw a woman in the window that I could buy if I wanted. She didn't look like she wanted to be there. That image really stuck with me." Together, the seed Masten had planted and that red-light district image inspired James, now 22 years old, to write and direct a passionate and inspired Death and Victory in Paris: A Social Justice Rock Opera.
James and his 12 member band performed the 9-song Rock Opera this month on Pepperdine's campus. James gathered together his musicians from campus and "around the music world" over the past couple years. The twelve performers debuted Death and Victory in Paris in Pittsburgh in June, before they moved onto New York, Richmond, Atlanta, and Louisville. He said he met and spoke with an audience member this summer who herself had been trafficked. She told him the show resonated with her and offered some healing.
Raised by a cardiologist and a former nurse in Pittsburgh's suburb of Upper St. Clair, James credits his musical inspiration to his parents exposing him to the classic male songwriters of their generation: Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, and Elton John with Bernie Taupin. If you watched Bravo's show Platinum Hit this summer, you may have seen James compete, as he was one of 6,000 musicians to audition but among the most talented who were chosen for the show. "But I wanted to not just release music, but use it to do something, to make a piece of art that people could react to and respond to, to move them" James explains.
James' creative vision takes the audience around the world in a visual and musical story that follows one young woman but rings true for millions of girls and women each year. Masten says that women who end up in sex trafficking were often offered a false job opportunity. "They may have been offered a career in modeling or even in a film," he says. Instead, they end up entrapped into a dark, exploitative, and violent world from which they cannot escape.
Since graduating in 2008, Masten co-founded Project-Exodus to free women who are enslaved by the sex-trade. He is training new surveillance teams to start their volunteer work in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley, known as a pornography hotbed, and according to Masten, "loaded up with brothels." Project Exodus sends out 4 individuals to observe one location. They work undercover. Before starting operations in an area, they meet with local law enforcement agencies, and after they make a report, they work with the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Having uncovered sex trafficking in areas you might expect it as well as in the cleanest, most affluent towns, Masten says, "No place is immune to it."
Masten sees a "revival and brand new movement" of youth activism. "Because of the internet age, we can see pictures immediately, whether they are Rwandan Genocide or the Congo" he says. "And there is a genuine righteous anger. Education and the internet have empowered the youth of our generation. We are tired of watching things happen without doing something about it."
When asked how and why today's young adults seem more aware and responsive to the issue of sex trafficking than their parents' cohort, James replied: "Our generation would much rather have the truth than have something packaged and pretty for us. It (human trafficking) might be hard to think about, but it's our job, to know and do something about it."
While James' parents are supportive of his artistry and cause, Masten says his parents "think I'm insane", and he knows what he is doing is dangerous work. With the Baby Boomer generation before them having fought for Civil Rights and Women's Rights, both Masten and James are examples that this generation of emerging young adults is passionate about their art, their faith, and connecting those parts of their lives to making the world a better place for the most vulnerable. Their form of social justice is both creative and entrepreneurial. James explains, "God says to take care of the widow and the orphan. God takes care of us, and we can help to take care of others."
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Joy Smith, M.P.: Be a "Dot"-- Protest Human Slavery
Unfortunately, even though these abuses violate several employment and money lending laws, the women cannot report them to the police if they want to continue to be sex workers. And like other sex workers, they're seen as easy targets by rapists and robbers who count on the unwillingness of their victims to go to the police.
This article is about yet another American silver-spooner who cannot fathom what it's like to have bills he cannot pay; to be facing eviction; to struggle to put food on his family's table. He wants to rescue women from the degrading work that they felt was their best option, so they can be put in some program that teaches them to weave baskets for 10¢ an hour.
There is something about the salacious story of a sex slave that get people all amped up. But very few ever sit down and talk with these women candidly about their wants and needs. They talk to the "rescued victim" being paraded around by the anti-prostitution non-profs, but hardly anyone wants to listen to the actual women they're trying to "rescue."
There is a difference between a woman who chooses to sell herself to pay some bills and women and girls who are forced against their wills into prostitution, chained into rooms, and mutilated or killed if and when they try to escape.
Actually, many were able to tell their stories, for example, to Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristoff. http://halftheskymovement.org/ and their award wining book Half the Sky is a good place to start.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2003/11/thailands-brothel-busters
http://www.thenation.com/article/oversexed
http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-01-13/opinion/17150521_1_slaves-trafficking-victims-melissa-farley
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/03/sex-women-trafficking-agustin
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/22/AR2007092201401_pf.html
http://www.alternet.org/rights/19693/?page=entire
http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1998/40/soderlund-grant.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2004/01/doubting_landesman.html
http://www.nswp.org/resource/why-feminists-should-rethink-sex-workers-rights
"The victims' testimonies included in the report are meant to be representative only and do not include all forms of trafficking that occur. Any of these stories could unfortunately take place almost anywhere in the world. They are provided to illustrate the many forms of trafficking and the wide variety of places in which they take place. No country is immune. All names of victims that appear in this report are fictional."
In other words, they made them up.
If I could recommend a book to you (admittedly I won't read Kristoff's book, as I am familiar with him and his "stories"). It's called-- Trafficking And Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives On Migration, Sex Work, And Human Rights (Transnational Feminist Studies) Edited by: Kamala Kempadoo, Jyoti Sanghera and Bandana Pattanaik A particularly good essay in the anthology is "The Gita Myth" which describes the evolution of the archetypal "sex slave" and how the anti-trafficking groups use these (supposedly reality based) made up people to put a face on their cause. http://www.amazon.com/Trafficking-Prostitution-Reconsidered-Perspectives-Transnational/dp/1594510970/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319014373&sr=1-1
The most amazing part is that the real information is readily available; blogs like that of Dr. Laura Agustin ( http://www.lauraagustin.com/ ) provide many facts and a recent two-part essay by Dr. Rhacel Parrenas of USC ( http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-12/what-i-learned-by-being-a-migrant-sex-worker-part-1-parrenas.html ) exposes the truth about "trafficked sex workers" in Japan. But as in the "Satanic Panic" of the '80s and '90s, people prefer to believe in phantom multitudes of "victims" than to consider extraordinary claims under the cold light of reason.
Sex work is work, and prostitutes work for the same reasons as everyone else, and usually choose our jobs as the best ones available for our individual goals. Moralists and self-proclaimed "feminists" wish to believe that "no woman would voluntarily prostitute herself", but that's nonsense; there are millions of women in the world who freely choose prostitution, and there are many studies (which I can provide) which demonstrate it.