Photo by Riot Jane
I've been thinking about something a lot since I was on the Love146 partnership trip, and it was brought back to mind after a conversation this morning with my friend/colleague. He watched the movie "Taken" last night (see my thoughts on the film here) and we were talking about the parts we found the most scary. **Minor spoiler alert if you haven't seen it yet, you might want to skip this.** I mentioned the part where Liam Neeson finds the young friend dead of an overdose and chained to her bed. He brought up the point where the girls were sold and selected by number.
The act of placing a number on a human being is evil--whether it's a price on their worth or simply a method of identification. This was one of the reasons behind starting (and naming) Love146. The 146 is a reminder about the little girl who inspired the organization, who had only a number on her life, not a name. This idea was reinforced during our trip to the Tuol Sleng museum in Phnom Penh, where room after room of displays showed murdered Cambodians (men, women, children) with a number pinned to their shirts. Reduced to a figure, easier to throw away.
After reading Richard Stearn's "The Hole in Our Gospel" I got to thinking about this idea even further. Stearns describes how deadened we become to the mass statistics of horror. The number of people murdered in genocides; people starving to death and dying of AIDs and being trafficked as commodities. The numbers become overwhelming and in a sense, one step removed. Alternatively, if you see a single person's face or name or hear about their specific situation, it is much harder to slip into that feeling of numb separation. We seem to be wired to care about the individual. I wonder sometimes if the vast statistics surrounding child sex trafficking (and human trafficking in general) do more to motivate us to action or paralyze us in our tracks. I'll most likely continue to refer to numbers and statistics in this blog as forms of information and depiction of the problem; but I think this is careful to keep in mind.
Time to stop thinking about human beings in terms of any numbers, and instead see their beautiful faces with hope for each individual future.
2 comments:
In the book, "A Crime So Monstrous" Skinner quotes Stalin... Stalin says, "The death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic."
I use this quote all the time when I am speaking... We can tell the story of a little girl in Portland , Cambodia, or India and get people's attention... But if the news reports that 50,000 people died in China due to an earthquake... we look at each other and ask. "what are we having for dinner."
I refer to it (I am sure I have not coined the term at all) as the "paralysis of analysis".
I love that term. Thanks for giving me another nudge on reading Skinner--I can't believe I haven't gotten to that one yet. It should be required reading for anyone in this field! I will try and pick it up and read it sometime soon. Thanks for your added thoughts!
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