October 3, 2005 – 6:35 pm
An Interview with La Strada’s Tetyana Mityura, a leading activist that has spent over five years on the front lines of Ukraine’s war against human trafficking and sexual slavery.
There is something about Tetyana Mityura’s calm manner that inspires hope. She is a long-time associate of La Strada , an NGO for the prevention of trafficking in persons, and one gets the impression that in her line of work, she has seen it all. Mityura is a person that has known both victory and defeat; has saved lives and watched lives go to waste; has faced stereotypes and did not let them deter her.
Throughout our conversation on August of 16th of this year, she stressed to me the importance of obtaining knowledge and educating oneself in the face of the ongoing problem of trafficking, because ignorance is the slave trade’s greatest ally. Read More »
When you’re privileged enough to attend a top-tier American university such as Duke, losing sight of the fact that your fate may have been different often comes with the package. Strutting to class in a pair of pricey high heels to hear well-paid professors talk and relaxing afterwards with a glass of pinot grigio at night, many girls at Duke and schools like Duke never entertain a serious thought about the less fortunate members of their sex, the ones who service twenty so-called clients a day on a dirty mattress in a room with bars on the windows. For some, it’s even acceptable to poke a little fun at the “‘whores,” especially the ones who are imported from foreign countries.
There are a number of “isms” I could direct at my fellow students for this: racism, classism, over-privileged-idiocy-ism, but I’ve grown to believe that in order for criticism to work, it must be constructive. I grew up with mummy and daddy who sent me to private school instead of a brothel; it would be hypocritical of me to act like some kind of self-righteous Mother Theresa out to instruct the less-informed members of her gender on how to combat the plight of trafficked women worldwide. The truth is, a few years ago trafficking in humans barely registered on my radar.
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