Modern day slavery is a hard issue to talk about, and seems like the sort of thing you want to turn away from, says Corban Addison, author, lawyer and human rights activist.
There are 22 to 32 million sex and labor slaves in the developing world, and developed world, including the United States.
Understanding human trafficking as the fastest growing industry due to challenge of demand and challenge of priority can hopefully cause a cultural revolution, said Addison, in an open forum on Thursday in the Cape Florida Ballroom at the Student Union.
“The whole story is supply, distribution and demand, someone is willing to pay for this product, in this case, humans,” Addison said.
The open forum was sponsored by the UCF Global Perspectives Office and is part of the 2012-2013 theme “The Changing Face of Freedom in Today’s Turbulent Times”.
Addison is the author of the novel titled A Walk Across the Sun a cultural story based in India with a fictional account of the horrors of modern day slavery.
“My awakening came in a number of stages,” Addison said. After watching the 2007 film Trade with Kevin Cleine about young teens bound in the ugly world of sex trafficking, Addison realized, “these kids are not fundamentally different from my own.”
Addison visited India, Europe and Washington D.C to witness and research the global trade. In Mumbai he went undercover to brothels to hear the victims stories.
“Slavery has a human face, they’re not just statistics and stories,” Addison said. He continues by saying that average age of entry in sex trafficking is 13 to 15, including the United States.
“Reality is, billions of dollars are coming from the buyers,” Addison said, addressing the challenge of demand by “ordinary American men, people who look like me”.
Addison says it is not just the criminals fueling the industry, but all people stating, “we are the solution”.
He also said that challenging priority is just as important to ending human trafficking.
“We spend more money, annually on outfitting our military marching band, more money is spent in one month on the war against drugs, than we have ever spent on rescuing our children or other people in our own shores and around the world,” Addison said.
Addison hopes to educate others, and for others to pass on their knowledge with the effort to eventually rid the world of human trafficking.
“I want to see more awareness, because like he said, it’s a big underground community that is in this fight that is behind this veil curtain, so to speak, so you don’t really know about it, and I didn’t really know about it until I was 20 years old,” said Geoffery McDole, criminal justice student and an intern with International Justice Mission and component for fighting human trafficking since reading the manuscript for A Walk Across the Sun.
International Justice Mission was one of Addison’s bases for his novel.
“One of my big issues is comprehensive immigration reform, and I think this ties into that because a good portion of the human trafficking are immigrants, often times undocumented, this is an important issue for me, and I hope to be part of the solution,” said Melissa McGuire-Maniau, immigration reform activist, undergraduate in international affairs at Rollins College.
