Do you remember a song that got incredibly famous? For a short while, it was all that would play on car radios, Spotify recommended lists, and television advertisements. Then, enough people would start to tire of hearing that song to the point where it would begin receiving hate for being overplayed. Due to this phenomenon, the song would quickly drop in popularity until years later, people on apps like TikTok would discover it and the cycle repeats.
In that sense, activism or advocacy around Women’s Rights is very much the same. Due to a UN speech or a riveting documentary, many topics in Women’s Rights — especially the touchy ones — are actively discussed and debated from school classrooms to bills in the White House. Instagram posts and media articles boom, and charity organizations or NGOs get more donations than ever before. In a way, this faulty, temporary publicity attracts attention to very real issues. However, given the fickleness with which such topics rose to the public’s attention, it is only inevitable that they fall just as quickly, leaving many of the victims defenseless and much of our population in the dark.
This is exactly what happened with female sex trafficking and child marriage; when the beautiful documentary Girl Rising was first released, it shocked the world. Everyone was moved to tears at the terrible realities that such rampant social pandemics had caused, as reflected by their harrowing statistics. For example, there are approximately 800,000 people trafficked across international borders annually and, of these, 80% are women or girls and 50% are minors. To add to this, the global sex trade is the fastest growing form of commerce, worth $32 billion annually. According to the UN, female sex trafficking is also the least known crime globally. This is a dangerous combination with heartbreaking implications on millions of people; FGM (female genital mutilation), severe physical and sexual violence, adverse physical and psychological health conditions, and social disadvantages are some of the many symptoms of this problem. Child marriage is equally terrifying; almost 400 million women globally now aged 20–49 were married before the age of 18. 1 in 3 girls in the developing world are married before the age of 18 and 1 in 9 are married before the age of 15. If present upward trends continue, more than 140 million girls will be married as children in the next decade alone. Girl Rising, as accurate and realistic as it was, didn’t introduce these problems; if anything, the documentary only shed a fraction of light on a mountain we hadn’t yet scaled as a global society.
Many people began to speak out and lend their support, donations, and time to these causes. Michelle Obama’s #bringbackourgirls trend was an outcry to stop girls from being taken by Boko Haram and likely being sold into sexual slavery. On a much smaller level, civic engagement for these topics were huge; teachers and parents transformed their guidance from your everyday “don’t talk to strangers” to helping their children understand the severe ramifications that human trafficking can have. This wave of outrage at such issues brought up an extremely good point; as much as the United States did not think of itself as a developing country, our sex trafficking rates told a very different story. The United States was and remains the second-largest epicenter of sex trafficking globally.
Unfortunately, this is where the quick decline of activism played in; citizens were tired of hearing these words over and over, rather avoiding the topics altogether and playing a role in initiating the stigma that surrounds them. When girls began to speak up about this, schools, governments, and organizations shut them down, asking them politely to back off and stay in their place. I was one of the advocates who faced the same fate. Not only did I speak up, but for three years was unheard by my school, society, and many other institutions. Those were three years that we all lost, millions of victims that we could have helped save. In a world like ours where issues like these worsen in the shadows while “Ignorance is bliss” for everyone unaffected, we have to look beyond our myopic bubbles and get involved with the reality. It’s time to start listening.
