The Photo that Changed a Life—12 Years Later

 

Dear reader, I came across this mail in my mail box and I thought I should share it with you because the story is so touching.
Exclusive BCN News Release (Oct 15, 2013)
A worldwide movement to stop child trafficking began with a single camera click.
Twelve years ago independent journalist Diana Scimone was in Mumbai, India, working on a story when one of her contacts took her through the red-light district.  Read more after the cut....

Do you see the cages?" he asked pointing to a second-floor window.
"Cages?" she replied with horror. "What's in them?"
"Five-year-old girls. They're raped, tortured, starved, and urinated on until they no longer have a will to rebel or run away. Only then are they fit to be sold as child sex slaves."
Scimone wanted to throw up. Her contact told her she could take a picture but not to let the pimps see her or they'd steal her camera.

"I got my photo," Scimone says. "It's not the best in the world but you can clearly see the bars on the cages." (Photo: Mumbai (c) 2001 Diana Scimone)
She calls it the photo that changed her life because after she got home she couldn't stop thinking about what she'd seen. A few years later she launched The Born2Fly Project to stop child trafficking and began raising the funds to do something about the horrors she'd seen—to reach kids before the traffickers do so that they never end up in cages like the ones she saw.
She assembled a team of educators to write trafficking prevention curriculums for young children and teenagers and had them translated into Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Hindi, Thai, Nepali, and other languages. She also wrote a storyline for a wordless book that's an allegory for trafficking—wordless so that kids anywhere in the world can "read" it—and worked with artist Leah Wiedemer to illustrate it.
Twelve years later
Twelve years after Scimone took the photo that changed her life, hundreds of organizations in 65+ countries have now registered to teach the B2F anti-trafficking program to their children and teenagers. "All our resources are available for free download on our website," she says. "We just give them away because most organizations around the world that work with kids couldn't afford to pay for them anyway."
Those countries include Nepal and India--the nations that helped launch Born2Fly twelve years ago. "In India, we produce an anti-trafficking radio program for kids and parents that airs every Sunday afternoon to more than 80 million people," Scimone says. "On the Nepal side of the border, we recently co-sponsored train-the-trainer workshops using our curriculums with more than 40 young women from villages where girls are taken. They're all back in their own villages now teaching B2F in their own communities."
"What can I do about it?"
When people learn that kids as young as 4 years old are sold for sex 20 or 30 times a night, they get angry—but have no idea what they can do about it. Scimone is passionate about helping them find a solution.
"If child trafficking makes you angry," she says, "it's because God put that anger inside you—and He's also put a plan inside you to help stop the traffic. It's a solution unique to you. It's bold. It's brave. It's reckless. It's audacious." She points to her own story as an example and says she knew she couldn't rescue kids or help them heal, but she took what she knew how to do—write—and created something unique.
Scimone recently wrote Audacious: The bold, brave, brazen plan to shut down the global child sex industry. The book is specifically for millennials—the "justice generation" born between the early 1980s and early 2000s—to help them unlock their own audacious plan to end child trafficking (and other injustices, too).
The book is dedicated to the unseen girls in the cages that Scimone saw 12 years earlier.
Scimone asks millennials who want to stop the traffic to take a photo of their hand marked with 11 on the palm, and upload it onto Born2Fly's Facebook cause page as an indication that they are pursuing their own audacious plan to stop child trafficking. (Her own hand marked with 11 appears on the back cover of the book.)
"If child traffickers are a 10 at audacious, we have to be an 11 to stop them," she says. "You've got an audacious plan hiding inside you, too. Audacious gives you permission to dream big dreams. In fact it encourages it. Go be audacious. Go be an 11. Go change the world."
Lets join hands to stop and say No to Child Trafficking in the Country.