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Quote by Shenita Etwaroo

“What haunts me is that the prevalence of human trafficking, particularly the sex trafficking of underage girls and young women, means that I have almost definitely seen one of these individuals in my daily life. I’ve sat next to them on the bus, or ordered coffee right behind them. Were their eyes begging for my help, and I simply overlooked, did not notice? Shenita Etwaroo”

Quote by Shenita Etwaroo

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Shenita Etwaroo

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“Although a handful of progressive individuals favoured independence from Spain, Cuba's economic elite was conservative, fearful of the economic and social consequences of a break with the colonial motherland. Without Spanish support, the planters would not be able to sustain the slave system on which their economic power was based, nor would they be strong enough to crush slave revolts”

“What if I make it through this, so damaged that the rest of my life is a living hell? A graphic rerun of everything I survived, but over and over and over again?” She inhaled a shuddering breath. “So every single detail—that was already burned into my brain and every inch of my body—gets worked in like oil on a cutting board!” Tears dribbled down her face. “But I’m not a cutting board, Dakota, and what I went through in British Columbia was not oil to be worked in,” she whispered. “It was worse than dying, and I’m afraid that living after this will be a worse punishment than I ever imagined.” She shrugged one shoulder. “And I don’t think I’m up to the task.”

“Who are these girls? Where do they come from? How do they end up on the street? Outsiders- and that includes most police officers, judges, the general public, and politicians- mistakenly believe that if these girls don't like what they are doing they can just walk away. What a growing number of dedicated cops and community activists began to realize is that the illusion of choice is the biggest obstacle to getting people to see these girls as the victims they are. "In order to have a choice you need to have two viable options to choose from," says DIGNITY's Kathleen Mitchell. "The choice for these girls is not 'Do you want to turn a trick or do you want a wonderful life?' That's not even on the table." Most girls on the tracks are running from something worse they faced at home. In survey after survey, in one city after another, statistics show that prostituted children suffer prior abuse as a staggeringly high rate.”

“At any hour of the day or night, Stanton will get a call about the latest underage victim who was picked up in a prostitution bust or an undercover operation, and he makes his way to the detention center. He is always struck by how the girls change. When he first sees them in their "work outfits," they do not seem much like children, with skimpy dresses, daring hairdos, heavy makeup, and flashy nails. After they shower, clean up, and put on the detention center's sweatpants and tops, they lose their street-worn years. "Then it hits you, these are really just kids," Stanton says. Invariably, the girls are not receptive to him, at least not at first. They are tough, and they are angry, and Stanton knows he has to be straight with them. "I never try to bullshit them," Stanton explains. "These kids are sharp. They have radar. Their lives depend on reading a man, be it a pimp or a trick, so they know when someone is lying to them. You really have to be genuine to earn their trust.”

“The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self" --- self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling --- come at last to knowledge of the self, the kingdom of the self, the kingdom of God that is within. Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside himself, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being. Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate.”

“Too often in the past, Garrabrant felt, some prosecutors were reluctant to take on complicated cases against pimps. "If I went to any federal prosecutor in the country and said, 'Listen, I have a thirteen-year-old girl who was kidnapped, forcibly taken from her home, and forced to have sex with a forty-year-old guy and then sold to other men,' they would be saying, 'Bring it on.' " But Garrabrant found that if he took the same scenario and instead described the girl as a prostitute working for a pimp, prosecutors got cold feet. Their attitude was that if some young girl wants to go do that, there is nothing to be done.”

“The movie and the political campaign GEMS built around it were typical of [Rachel] Lloyd's in-your-face approach to politics and publicity. "If we just framed it as 'rescuing children,' people would give us more money," she says. "I could put pictures of little scared blond kids on our Web page. But this isn't about rescuing a child from a bad situation. This is about what we, as a culture and a society, are creating; why can this be perpetuated within our society?”

“Our guns were still strapped onto our backs, because a gun meant life. Without it there was no life in the LRA. After crossing the water and walking for a long time, there was a whisper in my heart, telling me that if we kept the guns we would get killed. I was learning to listen to this gentle voice that spoke to my heart. This time what was said was hard to accept. I didn't know how I would convince my friends to throw away what seemed to be their last hope. The voice would not leave me alone. It continued to whisper in my ears to drop the guns.”