Today was a very busy day.

After interviewing my old boss and heading back to Mason. I went into DC for my first DC Stop Modern Day Slavery group meeting. I found it to be extremely interesting, there were a lot of new people and people of various ages. But what I thought was very interesting was the fact that they had a speaker come and talk about SHared International’s Demand documentary.  Shared International is a nonprofit that focuses on rescuing women and children in crisis. I’ve seen the short version of it but never the full length version of it (though we only watched half of it). But this documentary spoke about the main reason behind the human trafficking is due to the huge demand for it. It goes on to point out different examples about how a lot of things we let slide and the fact of the increase of porn industry and how all of that is linked. For example, it mentioned the term “pimp”. Here in America, it is seen as good and as bad at the same time. No one really wants to think about prostitutes being forced into prostitution, just that she has no morals or is on drugs, blahblah. But we see it as wrong, but then we have tv shows called Pimp My Ride or Snoop’s depiction of a pimp/him hanging out with Bishop Don Juan. The fact that there are scenes in our video games like Grand Theft Auto with the street walkers, it kind of makes us numb to certain things after a while. I’m not saying that is the reason behind human trafficking. I think people take advantage of situations and are always looking for easy ways to make money.  One thing from the night that summed up what I feel is the true basis behind human trafficking was that people just don’t think about it. They think of it as being a one time thing or that eventhough it is illegal or shady, our society kind of turns it’s head in the other directions sometimes.

Shared International also came to our GMU a few weeks ago, I don’t know if anyone caught their showing but I had to work that day…

Here is a link where you can watch the Demand documentary there are 3 versions (brief, condensed, full):

http://www.sharedhope.org/what/enddemand3.asp

and the pdf that goes along with it:

http://www.sharedhope.org/files/DEMAND.pdf