"Human Trafficking" - the TV miniseries by Lifetime Network

I wanted to call it "The story of Woman objectified and abjectified" but I thought such a clunky, loaded title will just turn potential readers off. It is not for nothing I work in advertising. :D


Here it goes

It was really hard on me, but I forced myself to sit through four hours of this feature film. It is not because it is boring or long. Even a person with short attention span like myself could not tear myself away from this riveting show. It is not just good script and good story line. It is a subject that is very close to my heart. The story about the lives of women (and children) living under oppressive and dehumanising condition. The story of sexual slavery.

When I first came across this DVD, I realised that I must buy it, and get a friend to sit with me through it. And that friend has to be a woman. So that's what we did. Two of us, watching this tale that make you want to break down and cry many times. And it is particularly painful for a woman to watch the way other women are being treated. If you are already cynical and bitter about men, this is one show that would make you even more cynical of those sweet-talking, dashing charming "knight of charming armour" who is merely impatient for the time when he can get his reward by making you fall in love with him.

I dont' want to give more details, which I suggest you read here
http://www.maynardije.org/columns/guests/051024_sextrafficking/

But what I'll say is that the scenes are very intensed. And it makes me extremely incensed when I read newspaper articles and you have callous reporters saying that these women are indulging in "immoral" activities whenever there's a raid and some of these sex slaves were arrested. Yes, there are some women who enter into the flesh trade "willingly", though if you ask me, they are more in the range of high-class escort who have a say about who they will service or not, and can choose their own hours and days off. Who have full economic control and power over their own body. And this is only at the tip of the icing, which is like perhaps less than 1% of the overall women involve in the flesh trade. Most of the other women, in the words of Helena, the Czech woman tricked and sold into the trade by her "boyfriend", they are "bent backwards, raped, fisted, gouged, beaten up" and thrown around like ragdolls by both their pimps and "clients"


Please try and catch this and share this with your friends, students, families and everyone else, men or women. Be wary though of sharing it with children because it would certainly kill their innocence (though there are children involved in the making of the story). The lovely Mira Sorvino plays the rookie Kate Morozov, herself from a family of Russian immigrants with skeletons in the cupboard, is obssessed with breaking an international organized crime in sex trade run by a well-heeled, educated, and sophisticated Russian with a Masters Degree in Computer science, Sergei Karpovich, who earns millions in extra income by dehumanising women and children.

You can find out more about the movie here

Doesn't this remind you of the ordeal of the "comfort women" during the Japanese occupation in 1940s?

Also, slavery takes other forms, and it is not just women who suffer, but men. Indenture slavery is something that is not alien to Malaysia's history, and even under the feudal days prior to the British's coming, the feudal Malay lords had been known to enslave aborigines and their "serfs". More on that later.