Jane Wells

At the National Colloquium on Demand Abolition last week in Boston, I was impressed by the solidarity of survivors of commercial sexual exploitation and their resolve to frame themselves as both experts and leaders of the movement to end sex trafficking. It's good to see a survivor like Rachel Lloyd...

What could be better in an election year than a scandal involving sex, prostitutes and the Presidential security detail? And it's overseas too. Now we can inflate the scandal, have investigations monitored by the House Committee on Homeland Security, the Senate Homeland Security Committee and the Secret Service. We can...

"I challenge you to tell the difference between a nude prostitute and a classy lady in the nude" said the lawyer (of Dominique Strauss-Kahn).

"The definition of a prostitute is a woman who sells her pussy for money, a woman who gives it away for free is a whore" said...

If you are part of the ninety-nine percent of Americans have not served in the military there's a lot to learn about what happens when those who do serve come home. If you are part of the one percent you already know all this. The one percent who serve not...

By definition, a victim is someone who is sacrificed, oppressed or subjected to maltreatment. In most cases, in order to get help, treatment or restitution, a victim must self-identify. But if someone is so habituated to maltreatment that it becomes normalized, do we have an obligation to help that person?

I started checking Huffington Post almost hourly after the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn over the weekend, expecting a deluge of bloggers opining on the scandal: where were they? Surely not waiting to see if the head of the IMF and a potential president of France is indeed guilty of crimes...

What do Peter Gabriel and Ann Curry have in common?
Kathy Freston and Luis Moreno-Ocampo?
John Prendergast and Carolyn Forche?

They have all shared their vision of what a world free of atrocity would look like.

With genocide and crimes against humanity occurring across the...

We've all seen scantily clad girls: on the street, on the Internet, in ads for "gentlemen's" clubs. Bodies and faces that conjure a myriad of responses: lust, fear, curiosity, perhaps even contempt, but rarely the most appropriate one: trafficking victim. UNICEF estimates that globally up to 1.2 million young people...

When I launched a campaign to end child sex slavery in the USA, I didn't imagine this might be something that I would blog about on the Divorce pages of The Huffington Post. Sadly, when I filmed a young mother recently I realized that her child was a...

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon praised the achievements of the International Criminal Court at a summit meeting in Uganda this weekend. This could not have been timelier: with 5 on-going investigations and one trial in process, the World's press and the countries that do not recognize the ICC should be...

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon praised the achievements of the International Criminal Court at a summit meeting in Uganda this weekend. This could not have been timelier: with 5 on-going investigations and one trial in process, the World's press and the countries that do not recognize the ICC should be...

As the President prepares to meet with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the world will get another chance to see whether he makes good on past words. In his campaign Obama was clear and unequivocal about Tibet and the human rights of Tibetans. In an open letter to President Bush...

4 years ago I spent the Jewish holidays in Eastern Chad and blogged about it for Huffington Post. Since then a mass movement has grown to inform the world of this genocide. I produced a film, The Devil Came on Horseback, which has been a galvanizing part of that movement....

April 24th is the 94th Anniversary of The Armenian Genocide. On this day we honor those who perished in the first genocide of the 20th century. The numbers are so huge and the events so long ago that it is increasingly hard to put a face to such suffering -that...

April 7th 1994 was the day the Rwandan genocide officially began. Over the following 100 days over 1 million Tutsi and moderate Hutus were murdered in the swiftest bloodbath in the history of genocide. Yet as one survivor recently explained to me: "if they had had gas chambers none of...

It was a surprise to hear Governor Palin so vehemently declare "Never again" during last night's debate and instantly realize that she was neither referencing the Holocaust (despite her protestations of support for Israel), nor the genocide in Darfur (despite her protestations of support for divestment from Sudan), but Wall...

There hasn't been enough coverage in the news and on blogs about what is going on right now, as I write this, in Zimbabwe. Suffice it to say that some of the most egregious assaults to human rights, political rights and principles of civil society and democracy are occurring there...

Hoping that Obama's win in South Carolina and the Kennedy endorsement would put some air between him and the Dynamic Duo I took the risk of checking the online bookie sites for a reality check. These are gentlemen who not unlike the pollsters make a living from being right at...

I just received a cold call to raise money for the campaigns of congressional Democrats. A young man named Donald started to read from a prepared script, I listened for a few moments until he explained that the legislation the Democrats wanted to pass through the House would "make things...

Four years into the conflict in Darfur, when it seemed things couldn't get any worse, they have. It's been a bad few weeks in one of the world's most troubled zones: the Sudan/Chad border. Consider these developments:

- Inside Sudan the government has been attacking established camps of internally displaced...