Sex trafficking is a world-wide practice.
Below are two accounts of women doing what they can to eliminate it.
I’m so sorry
Forgive me
I Love You
Thank you for experiencing this. No suffering is in vain.
From chaos comes creation. The time is Now for Change.
The Doc Project: She Couldn’t Help
Her Daughter Escape the Sex Trade.
Now She’s Helping Create Change
Jennifer Holleman with a photo of her late daughter, Maddison Fraser. (Alex Cooke/CBC)
By Alex Cooke, November 18, 2019
It’s been four years since her daughter died, but time hasn’t made it any easier for Jennifer Holleman to come to terms with the circumstances surrounding her death.
Maddison Fraser died in a car crash at the age of 21, but Jennifer believes she lost her years before to sex trafficking.
“It breaks my heart. I miss her every day,” she said, speaking from her home on the outskirts of Yarmouth County, N.S. “I wish I could have done more to help her.”
She’s now dedicated her life to raising awareness around forced prostitution and sexual exploitation — starting with getting to the bottom of what happened to her daughter.
Jennifer hasn’t completely pieced the puzzle together yet, but she’s discovered enough to get a sense of the picture. She would come to believe that the man driving the car the night Maddison died was a john. She would find clues in Maddison’s belongings. Horrifying details in her phone.
Enough for Jennifer to suspect how Maddison was led down this path, but not enough to bring the people responsible to justice.
‘A really good kid’
Jennifer, 49, remembers her daughter as outgoing, creative, and feisty when she was young. She liked going to the beach, listening to music and playing with her friends.
“She was a really good kid, and she just loved life,” she said.
As she entered her teens, Maddison grew to love boxing. She started training at the age of 13 and soon became a two-time Canadian champion boxer.
“It was ridiculous, the strength that she had,” remembers Jennifer Holleman of her daughter Maddison in the ring. (Submitted by Jennifer Holleman)
In high school, Maddison stopped boxing as much. She started hanging around with different people, drinking, smoking weed, and skipping school.
At the time, Jennifer thought it was a rebellious phase that her daughter would soon grow out of.
When Maddison was 19, she did what a lot of young Nova Scotians were doing at the time — she packed up her life and moved across the country to Alberta.
Jennifer wasn’t happy, but she couldn’t stop her.
Maddison Fraser’s high school yearbook photo. (Alex Cooke/CBC)
‘It broke my heart that I couldn’t protect her’
Shortly after Maddison’s move, one of her friends sent Jennifer a picture from backpage.com — a now-defunct classified advertising website that was notorious for advertising escorts and sexual services.
Maddison was in it.
Jennifer confronted her daughter about it and she denied everything.
“But when you give birth to a child and you raise a child, you know what that child looks like,” Jennifer said. “And even though I couldn’t see her face in the initial pictures, I knew it was her.”
A few months later, Jennifer got another picture. This one was of a girl, beaten beyond recognition. It took her a few moments to realize that she was looking at a picture of her daughter.
Jennifer was floored.
“It broke my heart that I couldn’t protect her, that I wasn’t protecting her,” she said.
Jennifer tried to get Maddison out of that life, but the more she tried to get her daughter to come home, the more Maddison pushed her away.
Digging deeper
On July 8, 2015, Jennifer got a call from her other daughter, Tori.
“She said that an RCMP officer came to the door and said that Madison was in a car accident out West, and she never made it,” she said. The driver had been drinking.
Since then, Jennifer’s been looking through Maddison’s belongings, talking to her friends, and corresponding with police as she attempted to figure out how Maddison was lured into this life and what she went through in the months and years before her death.
The crash that ended Maddison Fraser’s life. (Lydia Neufeld/CBC)
She’s uncovered some information on Maddison’s phone: texts from her “clients,” as well as a disturbing voice memo describing being beaten and tortured by a group of men. In the recording, Maddison gave multiple first names and one last name of the men who beat her. Jennifer believes one of them was her pimp.
This was a separate occasion from the time Jennifer got the picture, which meant that Maddison — a champion boxer — had been assaulted more than once.
Some of Maddison’s texts indicated the man driving the car the night of her death was a john. But he died from his injuries a month after the crash, taking with him the answers Jennifer had been looking for.
Jennifer has passed along everything she’s learned to police in both Nova Scotia and Alberta. The RCMP in Alberta has since conducted two investigations, but nobody has been arrested for trafficking or assaulting Maddison.
A larger issue
Maddison’s story is one that’s touched Pamela Rubin, a trauma counsellor who has worked with victims of human trafficking.
Public Safety Canada defines human trafficking as involving “the recruitment, transportation, harbouring and/or exercising control, direction or influence over the movements of a person in order to exploit that person, typically through sexual exploitation or forced labour.”
Not all prostitution is considered sex trafficking, though Pamela said prostitution in North America as a whole is “very dependent on trafficking.” Given what is known about Maddison’s story, Pamela felt that it “is not only one of trafficking, it’s one of all sorts of misogynist violence.”
Pamela Rubin is a trauma counselor, and has worked as a lawyer evaluating the justice system’s responses to sexualized violence. (Alex Cooke/CBC)
It’s hard to get a complete picture of sex trafficking because it’s highly underreported. But Statistics Canada says police-reported human trafficking violations have been on the rise since 2011.
Pamela said traffickers tend to target young, vulnerable women. Victims are lured into it, often by pimps who make them feel wanted or special. Once they’re in, they’re trapped — by intimidation and isolation, as well as psychological and physical abuse.
“Pimps and traffickers are very good at taking advantage of psychological manipulation to confuse and paralyze their target,” she said.
“They’re like a horrible kind of psychological spider. . .”
Read more here – also, the radio broadcast
Nepal’s ‘Mother Teresa’ Has Rescued
Over 18,000 Girls from Sex Trafficking
By Gabrielle Deonath and Pia Gralki, Global Citizen, July 17, 2019
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/nepals-mother-teresa-has-rescued-over-18000-girls/
Inspired by Mother Teresa, Anuradha Koirala always knew she was destined to serve people. So she became a teacher, educating young children in Kathmandu, Nepal. But after two decades, she decided to pursue an even greater calling: protecting women and girls from abuse, trafficking, and exploitation.
On her morning walks past the Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu in the early 1990s, Koirala would regularly encounter women begging on the street. She was drawn to them and began to engage the women in conversation — they all told her that they had been victims of some type of gender-based violence, she recalled in her 2015 TEDx Talk.
Koirala was far too familiar with their pain, having suffered extreme physical abuse at the hands of her ex-husband.
“Every day, there was battering. And then I had three miscarriages that I think [were] from the beating. It was very difficult because I didn’t know in those days where to go and report [it], who to…talk to,” she told CNN in 2010.
Her decision to change careers was triggered by her traumatic personal experience.
Koirala began educating the women about gender-based violence and the empowerment of women. She offered to help them support themselves if they stopped begging on the streets.
At first, just eight women took her up on her offer, and she gave them 1,000 rupees each from her meager earnings to start small street shops. Through a portion of their profit — the two rupees that Koirala would collect from each of them daily — she was then able to provide security and economic opportunity to other women in need.
Soon after, she took her mission a step further, founding the nonprofit Maiti Nepal in 1993, through which she has served exploited women and children for the last 26 years. Throughout her career as a humanitarian and activist, she has specifically focused on tackling sex trafficking, a rampant industry that forces young girls from underprivileged communities across the India-Nepal border to be sold into sex slavery.
“These are poor regions with high illiteracy rates. If a relative or friend turns up offering someone a job, it is often the girls’ parents themselves who encourage them to go, without realizing what is really happening,”she told the Guardian. “It is the perfect breeding ground for traffickers.”
Maiti Nepal, which now caters to over 1,000 children, has grown to include three prevention homes through which at-risk girls are identified and educated on the dangers of trafficking. The organization also runs 11 transit homes that operate as immediate shelters for rescued girls, two hospices that treat women and children infected with HIV/AIDS, and a formal school.
Today, Koirala is 70 years old and, touted as Nepal’s own “Mother Teresa,” continues to fight against sex trafficking through her organization, which hosts a series of initiatives, including awareness campaigns, female empowerment programs, and skills training sessions for children and women.
Maiti Nepal, in collaboration with local law enforcement, regularly conducts rescue operations and patrols 26 points on the India-Nepal border in an effort to stop trafficking. The organization has saved over 18,000 girls since the founding of Maiti Nepal, Koirala said at the Global Peace Leadership Conference in 2012.
“When I see their pain — their mental pain as well as physical pain — it is so troubling that I cannot turn myself away. This gives me strength to fight and root this crime out,” she said in a phone interview with the Borgen Project.
Maiti Nepal also assists in the apprehension of trafficking criminals and has aided in the prosecution of over 700 traffickers.
While some survivors of sex trafficking are able to recover from their trauma and go on to live full lives, Koirala recognizes that not all are so lucky. Some survivors contract HIV, and require antiretroviral therapy to control the virus. The treatment can slow its progression and reduce the chances of transmission, so the organization also offers access to the treatment to affected women and children. Its two hospice centers provide those suffering from AIDS a safe place and comfortable place to live.
Koirala has been widely recognized for her work and has been awarded numerous local and international awards, including the Padma Shri, India’s fourth-highest civilian award. She was also named the CNN Hero of the Yearin 2010, for which she won $125,000 to further her work.
“Just imagine what would happen if your daughter was standing there, and if your daughter was there, what would you do? How would you fight? So you have to join hands. You have to take each child as your daughter,” she said in a video played during the 2010 CNN Heroes program.
“I want a society free of human trafficking,” she added, as tears welled in her eyes. “I hope I will make it happen one day.”