Eight years ago, a teacher called me from Atlanta urgently seeking advice. One of her students, a bright 15-year-old immigrant from the Gambia, confided to Ms. Smith* that she was on her way to New York where she said her father had plans to forcibly marry her to a stranger...

Taquesha Dean is an ebullient cheerleader, who also plays volleyball and is president of the Outdoors Club when her classes end at The Brooklyn Latin School, the newest specialized New York City high school. Dedicated teachers and a rigorous curriculum define Brooklyn Latin, which prides itself in preparing...

The messages kept pouring into my email box on Monday when news that the anonymity of the accuser in People of New York vs. Dominique Strauss-Kahn was about to be destroyed. Shock, sadness, anger, fear and outrage were among the reactions from colleagues in New York and beyond who belong...

In 1994, a frightened 17 year old girl boarded a plane to flee an impending forced marriage to a much older man with three other wives. In a small room waiting for the groom, in Togo, West Africa, Fauziya Kassindja was also warned that a woman would soon arrive to...

Driving east from the minted Luis Muñoz Marin airport in Puerto Rico on a modern highway, peppered with well maintained gas stations, mini-malls, fast food chains, and signs for fancy resorts, I ached comparing this Caribbean island to Haiti. Much has been written about Haiti since...

In the early morning hours following the shattering news that an earthquake hit my parents' homeland January 12, the phone rang. "Alain's in-laws died," said my sobbing cousin. Tragedy had hit home. Our anxiety increased as we wondered about the status of Alain's parents, as well as the dozen other...

As she poetically recounts her chilling life story in her recently published book, The Road of Lost Innocence, Somaly Mam was sold into sexual slavery as a young girl in Cambodia. The reader is confronted with the unimaginable brutality and debasement that defined Somaly's days in the hands of her...

Regardless of your preferred presidential candidate, the magnitude of an African-American man chosen as the presumptive Democratic nominee is undeniable. Two hundred years after the Slave Trade Act was passed in England and after decades of relentless campaigning by abolitionists led by parliamentarian William Wilberforce, we bear witness to...