Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking

"Interview with Emma Thompson by
Louise Potterton: Film Catalogue on the ocasion of the Vienna Forum to
Fight Human Trafficking, 13-15 February 2008. page 15

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L.P.:
How did you get involved in human trafficking issues?

E.T.:
I´m the chair of the Helen Bamber Foundation. Helen Bamber is an 82-year-old one who started her work as a human rights activist in Bergen Belsen in 1945. She went there with the Jewish Relief Unit, which was one of the first relief units to go into the concentration camps. Helen has spent her entire life developing her human rights work. I´ve worked with her on various forms of human rights abuse. A few years ago she started a new foundation, and I said I would love to help and I did. I got more and more involved in her work, which concentrates on working with survivors of various kinds of cruelty.

L.S.:
And through this work you came into contact with victims of human trafficking. Can you tell me about the people you met, the stories they told you?

E.T.:
The stories themselves are varied. Trafficking is such a complicated issue. Most of our clients who have been trafficked are from Eastern Europe. But we also work with with women from Rwanda and Somalia. I can tell you the story of my friend Elena, who was trafficked into the sex industry when she was 18 but has managed to rebuild her life. She lived in a small place in Moldava. She was at school and her family was perfectly happy but when her father died, the money dried up. This is very common with a lot of the stories. Some member of the family dies or is taken away and the economics of the family implodes, and one member of the family is sent to work or feels they have to work to help the family. Elena had to leave school, which upset her greatly, she´s a very intelligent woman. She was sent to work at a market and she was groomed by this woman who said she could get her a job in Great Britain. She told Elena that she could be a doctor´s receptionist and that she could save some money and go back to school.
Her sister warned her, but she wanted it to be true and she admitted that she was very naive. She was brought here to the UK, told what she had to do, refused to do it and was put into solitary confinement for two weeks. Then they said they were going to hurt her family. So, under the threats and because she realized that she was illegal per se, since she had no papers and had handed over her passport, she started to work. She was forced to sell her body to strangers - for money she was not allowed to keep. She had never seen a naked man before, she didn´t understand the services on offer, such as oral sex. She had to be told everything. She was 18 when she was taken, she´s now 26.

L.P.:
When you hear these stories, how to they make you feel, motivated?

E.T.:
I felt very inspired by her and felt that her survival somehow contained the seeds of a rebirth and also of a creative act that could be taken. I think we need more stories, and that´s where someone like me comes in. I´m a story-teller and a communicator. There´s no point in me just banging on about human trafficking and how bad it is and how we´ve all got to do something about it. I decided I wanted to do something. So, I got into contact with other artists and asked if they would help me, and they said yes, because everyone feels very strong about it. And we got together and created this piece of art, not having any idea of how it would come together, or if it would come together at all. First of all, I went to the mayor of London to get a site. Then I went to the police because it seemed to me to be terribly important to contact the civil society members who are so involved and on the cutting edge of this. If you are a police person and go on a raid and you find 19 girls who don´t speak English, are dressed as prostitutes and don´t appear to have any sort of family to go to, you start asking questions. But the only option in this country, at the moment, is to put them in prison. My friend Elena spent three nights in police detention and then two months in detention. Now, as a civilised society to add that on top of the injury that has already been sustained by these woman seems a little daft, because they are further traumatised by the official response.

L.P.:
The Journey installation tells the story of the journey of a victim of trafficking. Why did you choose this method to raise awareness on this issue?

E.T.:
Because there have recently been some very good film versions of trafficking. There is a wonderful film called Lilja Forever, which is about trafficking, it´s quite brilliant, very brutal. There´s a great TV series called Sex Traffic, which was very pertinent and I think that´s good. Unfortunately, I think sometimes when you present things too graphically, people get frightened and they can´t cope with the suffering. I wanted to find a way that I could engage people that wasn´t simple story-telling, but there was a kind of story-telling that came halfway towards you and asked you to fill in the gaps. I sat down with Elena and it was because of her involvement that the journey came about. I said, ´let´s use shipping containers because it´s about moving people about´. I said to her, ´if we have seven containers, what would you put into each container?´ So , we took some time apart and both wrote down the things that we thought should go in each container. It was really interesting, because we came up with the same things.

L.P.:
Do you think that the average person knows this is going on in their town, city or country - that women are being brought and sold and forced into the sex industry, it´s happening all the world?

E.T.:
No I don´t think the average person knows and no-one wants to know about suffering, they have got enough going on in their lives. You have to find ways to engage people without having to say, ´I´m really going to depress you now.´Nobody wants to be depressed by another story about what´s going on the world. What they want is to be offered an opportunity to do something useful. There isn´t a single person I´ve met who doesn´t want that opportunity and that´s what we´ve got to work on.

L.P.:
But what can the average person do to fight human trafficking? It´s not like other causes when you can donate money.

E.T.:
Well, if you´re someone who buys sex you can go to the `madam´or whoever is taking the money and say, ´where are your girls from, have they got passports?´You can also report any incidences you see of suburban households that have a great slew of young girls walking in and out for no apparent reason. If you´re a shop keeper and some girl comes to you for condoms and tissues and doesn´t speak English, you can enquire whether she is alright. You can get involved, you can open your eyes, because this is something that is happening on the street and it might be right round the corner from you. So, it is time for the public to be involved, no one can close their eyes to this, just inform yourself and get active. As for lobbying, you can lobby any number of governments to actually do something about this. It´s time for everybody to look at this and say the buying and selling of human beings for whatever reason is not appropriate in the 21 th century and should never be allowed again.

L.P.:
As an actress do you think that the movie industry has a role to play in the fight against human trafficking?

E.T.:
Oh yes, of course. everyone has a role to play here. We are talking about taking responsibility really. I think that the movie industry sadly often lacks a kind of sophisticated enough perspective to say, `I wonder if all these films where people just kill each other endlessly with machine guns have an effect?´- for me the answer is yes, they do have an effect, and you have got to be very responsible about the way in which you present violence. If you are Martin Scorsese then you present violence within the context in occurs, therefore it is very understandable. There is a difference in the violence presented to us in a film like GoodFellas and a film like Natural Born Killers.

L.P.:
What do you think about the effectiveness of celebrity involvement when it comes to raising awareness on important causes?

E.T.:
It´s useful to get people talking about things. What I have difficulties with is when there is a famous person offering up solutions. I find that tricky, because I think it´s difficult from where we are to know the solution to anything. I think, if anything, the best use for us is to talk with people, engage with people and see how they can act. I think famous people have more freedom. They have freedom of expression. I think you need to be well-informed and if you are not, stick to what you do know. And don´t lay down the rules. Setting the agenda doesn´t seem right, but using your communication skills to engage the debate seems very appropriate.

L.P.:
How do you use your fame to raise awareness of causes, in this case human trafficking?

E.T.:
If I´m working on the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa, I think of myself as a small piece of human connective tissue. I´ll go somewhere and I´ll report on it. It´s a small action. In relation to trafficking, I suppose the way in which I used my celebrity was being able to get into contact with people who could help.

L.P.:
We Do know that when celebrities get involved in a cause it does raise awareness, but is there a danger that when celebrities stop talking about it, so does the media and the public?

E.T.:
Certainly. What you are putting your finger on there is the role of the media rather than the celebrities. I think what you are describing is a media, rather than a celebrity trait. Because celebrities tend to take on things that they stick to for quite some time, people like Sting, Bono and Cloony, and they see their role as trying to keep the media´s focus, because, let´s face it, the media has the attention span of a grasshopper. You always have to look at your motives and ask what is this about, why am I doing this? Am I doing it to somehow expiate, or doing it because it´s possible? I can remember a moment with BBC journalist Fergal Keane and him saying, `look you´ve got a voice, use it.´And I thought, well he´s right really, because I had gone through so many ups and downs with this whole issue and for years decided I wasn´t going to do anything except very hidden stuff and most of my work is very hidden. And indeed, Journey wasn´t about me at all or about my status as a celebrity. I was just a kind of conduit and that´s how people responded to it. They were interested to see me there, but it wasn´t about any of the artists, in the end, it was about the problem. +