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Mira Sorvino: Shedding light on sex trafficking
(AFP/Frederick M
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(AFP/Frederick M. Brown/Getty Image) (AFP)
(AFP/Frederick M. Brown/Getty Image)
Far from the bright lights of Hollywood, Academy Award-winning actress Mira Sorvino is pursuing justice in a way she knows best ' through her involvement in a powerful new documentary, in which she shines a light on modern-day slavery.
In the CNN Freedom Project's documentary, Every Day in Cambodia, she teams up with American campaigner Don Brewster to reveal a disturbing reality in Cambodia, where girls as young as five or six are sold to pedophiles who pay hundreds of dollars to have sex with pre-pubescent virgins.
'Cambodia's situation was especially grievous to me because there was a high demand for virgin girls, not only among sex tourists but also local Cambodian men,' revealed Sorvino, who is goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to combat human trafficking, in a phone interview with The Jakarta Post from Vancouver, Canada.
Being a mother of four children herself, she said it was heartbreaking to see girls who were trying to save their families from economic desperation and their mothers asking them to sell their virginity to strangers.
'[I saw] how it destroys them inside. How they're just so heartbroken and devastated. It's very hard to see that and to really take it in and understand that this is happening, as we say in the title, Every Day in Cambodia. Every day, girls are being exploited by men, and there is a high demand for it,' explained the 46-year-old, who rose to fame after winning an Academy Award and Golden Globe for best supporting actress for her performance in Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite.
In the hour-long documentary, which premiered on CNN International on Saturday, she talked with survivors and urged governments to prosecute traffickers. She also demanded to know why the Cambodian government was still allowing such practices to continue.
'The documentary is very powerful. It focuses on the story of three young girls, who all share frighteningly similar experiences of having been sold by their mothers to brokers, to be basically deflowered by men in hotel rooms after having been checked out by hospitals and given certificates of virginity,' she said.
'It's a very methodical situation. It's a very established trade now. The fact that they have the collusion of doctors who issue official certificates of virginity is very disturbing to me.'
The documentary also exposes the stories of three mothers who allowed their young daughters to be so cruelly exploited.
ECPAT International, a global network dedicated to protecting children from all forms of commercial sexual exploitation, has reported that more that 60 percent of the clients seeking virgins for sale in Cambodia are local men.
During the nine days of filming, Sorvino said that despite the horror, she found a glimmer of hope from some local heroes.
Among others, she met an amazing young girl who heads a group of fellow teenagers who go door-to-door in rural areas to alert Cambodians about the dangers of human trafficking and how to prevent their own children from being trafficked.
'There is like a neighborhood watch, made up of high school students, run by this amazing 16-year-old girl, who's just full of light and positivity and hope, and she goes around and tries to reduce her neighbors' vulnerability to being trafficked along the border.'
The daughter of veteran actor Paul Sorvino is no stranger to tough, heartbreaking issues. The actress, who attended Harvard majoring in Chinese, graduated magna cum laude in 1989 for her thesis on racial conflict in China. And then in 2004, she became the spokeswoman for Amnesty International's Stop Violence Against Women campaign.
She is hoping her latest documentary will raise global awareness about the extent of the sex trafficking being committed.
'I guess what we want to achieve is to sort of wake up ['¦] the world ['¦] everyone on the demand side. It's something that's really come to the fore recently; that you cannot address human trafficking without addressing the demand.'
She said she was fully aware that every country faced human-trafficking problems. The US, she said, had a huge problem with trafficking, adding that no government in the world was doing enough.
'I saw my chance to contribute toward finding a solution for the problem by being personally involved in the documentary. I hope the Cambodian government watches it,' Sorvino said.
She admitted that her experience looking into child trafficking in Cambodia had affected her personally in some ways.
'You know your heart is breaking for them because you see them as your own children. If you love your child, you understand how sweet they are; how full of love and openness they are when they are young, and how much more terrible the crime is when it's perpetrated upon a child.'
