Sexual Assault Awareness Week Events, I

So, this week on campus is Sexual Assault Awareness Week. The event is participated in by a variety of different organizations and offices and is composed of a variety of events both enjoyable and educational, informative and "just for fun."

The event I attended tonight was a double film screening of Svetlana's Journey and Cargo: Innocence Lost presented by two students from the Third World Feminisms class being taught by instructor Hilary Marcus. The event information also linked the wikisite the two have produced in the course of their classwork.

Svetlana's Journey is a film by director Michael Cory Davis about a Bulgarian girl forced into prostitution. The project was an attempt to depict the brutal reality of sex work with three main purposes (as espoused by the website): show that that the victims of forced prostitution are not to be blamed for their situation, change the minds of any girls who had considered sex work as a viable option and to demonstrate that Bulgarians care about the rights of women. I would have to say that while I thought the film was able to show how terrible life was for one girl and did depict her struggles graphically and realistically, I didn't think it did a terrific job of meeting some of its other stated goals. If I hadn't been watching the film in an academic environment, I am not sure I would have understood that this was specifically a Bulgarian film or had access to information about how and why these women end up in forced prostitution situations. Certainly the project at large does raise awareness for the issue and the website provides a link to Face to Face, a non-profit group actually working against child and forced prostitution in Bulgaria.

The other film being screened, Cargo: Innocence Lost, was also directed by Davis, but did a much better job to to paint the bigger picture of international sex trafficking and the United States role within the larger transnational industry. Cargo blends reenactments of various parts of the trafficking process with interviews with victims and others involved in the fight against against forced prostitution including police officers, social workers and people involved in attempting to persecute the traffickers. The film illuminated the trafficking process, explaining how and why women were able to be convinced to come to the U.S. in the first place and showing the process of how they are eventually, often violently, wrangled into prostitution. I definitely thought this was a much more informative and interesting film and really thought the screening would have gone better had Cargo been showed first. Still, though, it was a worthwhile event and I am looking forward to the rest of Sexual Assault Awareness Week.