Conference on Women

Governer and First Lady of California Conference on Women. www.CaliforniaWomen.org at Long Beach, CA.


At the peak of the Atlantic Slave Trade there were 80,000 slaves trafficked in a year.

Today, the State Department estimates there are 800,000 slaves trafficked a year.

In the day, since a slave may have been worth $40,000 as horribly mistreated as they were, there was incentive to at least keep them alive, whereas today, a sex worker in India may be worth a few hundred dollars. So, a brothel owner will gather all his women together and beat one of them to death in front of them to teach the others a lesson.

The war in Eastern Congo (5 million deaths) is the deadliest since World War II and is the worst in ratio from deaths to column inches.

The best way to improve poverty, civil violence, terrorism, is to educate and empower women.

A Hawaiian story: Millions of starfish wash up on the beach. A young boy starts throwing them back into the ocean. A man reproaches him, "There's millions of starfish, what difference do you think you can make?!" He continues to throw the starfish back, "Well it made a difference to this one... and this one... and this one...."

Nicholas Kristoff
www.halftheskymovement.org (human trafficking)



Many of us don't want to hear about this human trafficking because they complain they can't sleep at night. But what of the actual victims of the trafficking, how well do they sleep?!

Somaly Mam
www.somaly.org



There used to be 2 male characters for every 1 female character. Now it's 3 to 1!!!

In Loony Toons there was only one female character: Grannie!!

The female characters in G rated films are hypersexualized, underrepresented, and scantily clad not any differently than R-rated films.

Geena Davis



Working with Channel 1, Lisa Ling went to Afghanistan in 1994 and was shocked by the number of child soldiers. "How old are they?" She asked her guide. "Ask them and they don't know, but ask them how to operate a bazooka and they know."

"Gang rape in the Congo" for the Oprah Show

Cable News Shows, a bunch of cantakerous, old white men telling you what to think. It's so insulting, when's the last time these guys were in flashpoints doing substantive stories?

Lisa Ling

Born Female

"The problem of prostitution and human trafficking in India."

Shakti bhaini is the name of the non-profit social program started by three brothers all who left their careers as bankers, bureaucrats, and journalists to help trafficked women.

If these trends continues, within 20 years 1 in 5 Indian women will have been trafficked.

In the end, interviewing some village men in Bengal, they said that if they women don't continue to work the fields while they sit around idly, they'll just beat them. But this is what they saw modeled for them by their elders for generations. This was seen as part of what allowed such a flesh trade to flourish.