Sex Trafficking: Jada Smith gets schooled by ATL Strippers
Acclaimed actress Jada Smith is working alongside CNN to produce a documentary on sex trafficking. While filming she got a chance to be schooled by a few of Atlanta’s strippers and learned a lot according to her facebook and vlog.
Jada Smith has been working non stop to try to bring about awareness regarding this problem, back in 2012 she granted Huffington Post an exclusive interview to discuss and combat this growing problem within the United States, check out an excerpt of her interview below:
by Jessica Anderson- Post 6/9/2012
“We’ve always looked at human trafficking as being a problem over there, somewhere else, but it’s actually happening inside of our borders … in our own backyard,” Smith said. For her, the battleground is Oakland, where she’s been boning up on information and drawing up an advocacy plan.
“Oakland is basically the center of my education. [It’s] where they’ve created theH.E.A.T. Watch program, which is a task force specifically trained to deal with human trafficking,” she said. It’s also where officials have begun to close in on child trafficking rings and earlier this month shuttered two motels thought to be hotbeds for illegal activity.
According to the Los Angeles Times, California is home to three of the FBI’s 13 highest-ranked areas for child-sex trafficking — Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego.
Smith’s efforts to stop trafficking parallel those of many others in the state, including representatives from Facebook and Microsoft who last month joined law enforcement and nonprofit leaders to create a new Department of Justice task force on human trafficking. Their goal is to devise best-practice guidelines for those combating human trafficking locally and online.
And in the age of Instagram and Foursquare, the Web is precisely what Smith says parents need to pay attention to. “The Internet is one of the biggest lures for young people getting caught up in human trafficking,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard about people who have met someone at a park or a mall and got snatched up, with their parents waiting for them in the parking lot!”
A 2010 report from NPR that highlighted a first-hand account of a young woman who was kidnapped into a trafficking ring at the age of 15 noted some 76 percent of transactions for sex with underage girls start on the Internet.
The crisis conjures some striking parallels to recent missing-persons cases and their prevalence among African Americans, but Smith thinks the trends are only loosely related and hesitates to call trafficking a more pressing issue for minorities than for other groups.
“I think it’s especially important in all communities. There are very, very high numbers of African-American and Latina women who are trafficked, but that’s not to exclude white women or Asian women,” she said.
With a perspective that “one woman is every woman,” Smith is working instead to help others identify the face of trafficking.
“Modern-day slavery wears a different face because you don’t see chains,” she said, noting her movement’s ironic timing with the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. “We have to be able to differentiate what trafficking looks like versus a gentleman coming into a hotel with his niece or daughter, or two girls sitting on a bus stop waiting for a bus and not for ‘John’.”
