Campus Engagement

For one of my Campus Engagement assignments I decided to attend a speech given by Corban Addison. He is the author of the book “A Walk Across the Sun,” which is a fictional story based on human trafficking in Mumbai. In his speech he talked about young girls being slaves. He argued the rates of slavery in society today are so much higher than ever before because so many of these girls are being used as prostitutes in the human trafficking business. Human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal industry in the world. There are about 22 to 30 million slaves and 2 million of those are children used as sex slaves mostly in their 13 to 15 years of age. Addison emphasized that this is a very difficult topic to talk about and therefore, it’s often overlooked because society blocks it out of their mind, especially adults with children who can easily relate. Addison is a lawyer in Virginia married with two kids, but being a lawyer wasn’t what made him happy and he knew he didn’t want to do that for the rest of his life. He loved to write stories and for many years he’s had a pile of manuscripts which have gotten denied by publishing companies. But that all changed when his wife suggested he should humanize human trafficking into a fiction story.

In order to write his book he needed more information and he turned to government reports and scholarly journals. The things he read were awful and as he described it in his speech, the deeper he got in the subject the darker it was, and he we wondered if there was a light, a hope in all that darkness. He found inspiration in Mother Theresa, known for helping others in need and that's what he wanted to do. He said if there were any solutions in general, not just the human trafficking industry, we should commit our lives to solve it. His speech was very interesting and easy to understand and follow. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to stay the whole time because I had a class to get to but I am definitely considering reading his book to learn more about this horrible industry and insight on how us, as a whole, can help end this slavery.