 Good afternoon. It's wonderful to see so many of you here. My name is Elizabeth Sackler and it is a pleasure to welcome you to a program which has been organized by the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. As many of you know, the center opened in March of 2007. We are an exhibition space and an education center dedicated to feminist art. Our mission is to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions to educate new generations and I'm happy we have all generations here and we have continued to have about the meaning of feminist art and to maintain a dynamic learning facility presenting discussions and panelists on feminist activism and on art itself. The center has hosted scores of outstanding lectures and panel discussions throughout 2008 and this today is my final wild card for the year and I put out an invitation to the most fabulous feminist of all, Gloria Steinem. She is today moderating her panel entitled Sex Trafficking and the New Abolitionists. The slide behind me ran on the front page, you may have seen it, of December 9 international section and as you can see, if you can read the bottom, financial crisis tames demand for world's oldest service. Obviously they didn't have room for the world's oldest profession so somebody came up with service equally offensive. I dare say part of what caught me about it other than what it is about and it is a full half page, six full columns in that section of the front page is that the photograph, that is a photograph reminded me it's reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting and I don't think that is an unimportant point and the final quote in this very long article is from the club's marketing director, Susan Brezanov and she said, people have less money but hard times also mean that people want to be cheered up. Well, I thought it could be worse, it could have been in the business section. But this is how the press handles what Gloria Steinem's first sentence in the forward to Sage and Caston's 2006 book entitled Enslaved, which is on sale at the museum's bookstore by the way and it's wonderful. Gloria wrote, in the long struggle against the idea that one human being can own another we have reached a dangerous stage, a time of believing that slavery is over. There is, there always has been, but there is now a global war being waged against women as simultaneously there are some of us arguing about whether or not we have a live in a post feminist world. It is a war whose atrocities range from distasteful to horrifying. A war that is ignored, a war that is accepted and or profiting governments, organizations and individuals millions of women and children are held as sex slaves around the world. Torturous violence against women in war is now status quo. Rape camps did not only exist and do not only exist in Bosnia. The sale of children, predominantly girls, but boys as well, as young as seven and eight into brothels is an accepted cultural norm in all too many countries. Kathy Austin who is an expert in arms trafficking just returned from the Congo and she observed that it is more dangerous to be a woman there than to be a soldier. Rape, she said, is the poor man's B-54 bomber and sex trafficking is second only to arms trafficking today. A numbness has come to surround issues of violence against women, also a breakdown in the rule of law. Rape was identified as a war crime in 1907. In 1926 the Geneva Convention on Slavery recognized enslavement and particularly even at that time the trafficking of women and children as crimes against humanity. That is 82 years ago and here we are. Today criminal and humanitarian law expert Patricia Sellers posits all gender crimes. Rape, sex trafficking, sale of children to be crimes against humanity. Enslavement of women is global, highly organized as I think we will hear and I believe at this point epidemic in proportions. Gloria Steinem is now giving voice to begin a war against the war being waged upon us. And whether young or old, woman or man, these horrors and abuses scar our humanity. Gloria's guests for today's discussion are Tiana Bienami, beautiful name, who is the executive director of Equality Now, an international human rights organization that works for the protection of the rights of women and girls. Issues of concern to Equality Now include rape, domestic violence, female genital mutilation, reproductive rights, trafficking in women and other forms of violence and discrimination that affect women and girls every day. Tiana holds a JD from NYU School of Law and a license, is that correct? That's wonderful, a license in political science from the University de Genève and the Graduate School of International Studies in Switzerland. Tiana has contributing essays in the 2006 Becoming Myself, Reflections on Growing Up Female, edited by Willa Shallot, and When You Need a Lift, Two Cups of Comfort and Support from Joy and Bahar and Friends. 2007, Tiana is also a contributing editor, a contributor to Huffington and Post. Our second panelist today is Rachel Lloyd, who is the founder and executive director of Girls Education and Mentoring Service, acronym GEMS. GEMS is the only nonprofit in New York State serving domestically trafficked youth and commercially sexually exploited girls and young women. Under Ms. Lloyd's leadership, GEMS annually serves 250 girls through its direct services and 1,000 youth through education and outreach. Ms. Lloyd is a nationally recognized advocate and expert on the issue of commercial sexual exploitation of children, actively involved in the effort to pass legislation to protect this population. She speaks at events and conferences across the country and she's been honored with the Reebok Human Rights Award and the Frederick Douglas Award from the North Star Fund, among others. She received her bachelor's in psychology from Marymount Manhattan College and her master's in applied urban anthropology from the city of New York. I must tell you that she has been caught in traffic and will be joining us a little bit later, but we are going to begin and she will join us shortly. It is also a privilege and an honor to introduce Gloria Steinem and it is always an interesting dilemma as to how to introduce Gloria Steinem. An icon, a national treasure, or for those of you who are the millennia generation and I had so much fun doing this and took one second this morning a woman whose name pulls up on Google, 609,000 hits in 14 100ths of a second. Though many say Gloria needs no introduction, I want to take a moment to highlight some of her important accomplishments because they are the backbone of the woman's revolution and because I think, and I'm sure you do too, that she is awesome. Gloria Steinem travels widely as a feminist activist, organizer, writer and lecturer. Her books include The Best Seller's Revolution from Within a Book of Self-Esteem, A Rageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, my favorite, Moving Beyond Words and Marilyn Norma Jean on the Life of Marilyn Monroe. She was editor of the Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History, co-founded New York Magazine and Ms. Magazine where she continues to serve as a consulting editor. She has been published in many magazines as we all know and newspapers here and in other countries and is also a frequent guest, excuse me, commentator on radio and television. She helped to found the Woman's Action Alliance, the National Woman's Political Caucus and Choice USA. She was the founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women and helped create Take Our Daughters to Work Day. She had served on the Board of Trustees of Smith College and was a member of Beyond Racism Initiative, a comparative study of racial patterns in the U.S., South Africa and Brazil. She has also co-produced a documentary on child abuse for HBO and a feature film for Lifetime. She received the Penny Missouri Journalism Award, the Front Page and Clarion Award, National Magazine Awards and Emmy Citation for Excellence in Television Writing, the Woman's Sports Journalism Award, the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Oh, I'm sorry, I lost track. The University of Missouri of Journalism, I know. She says, no more, too much, cut, cut, cut. It is our good fortune, indeed, to spend the next two hours with these three extraordinary women discussing a topic that affects us all. Please join me in warm and welcome enthusiasm for Gloria Steinem. This is Liz being generous and disguising the fact that the reason we're here is because of Liz. She took the already great populist tradition of the Brooklyn Museum and widened it to include feminist artists, not just from this country, but from all over the world. And she understood how important it is that we come together in the same space, not just our work, but our whole physical selves. Some of you who were here for the opening of the Center will remember that she insisted on having the artists come, not just their art. How revolutionary is that? And so they got to meet each other and do presentations to each other. And with that kind of understanding, she also has created this space where the museum can, as she says, be a launching pad for the future and where we can discuss and actually see each other. Now, I'm all in favor of the web, but it happens that we have reflector cells in our brains that allow us to empathize, understand, you know, many hundreds of times more when we are in the same space together. So my hope is that today, I mean I know that there are people here who might be understandably hearing about this international global trade in human beings for the very first time because it receives ambiguous or invisible kinds of coverage. There are those of you who know very much about it. And I know that all of us want to do something about it. So my hope is that each of us might leave here with a new fact, a new understanding, and a new way of actually practically combating this in our neighborhoods, in our own countries, in our foreign policy, in the kinds of legislation we lobby for in many, many, many different ways. Because it always seems to me that a person who has experienced something is more expert in it than the experts, I'm especially grateful that Rachel Lloyd is going to be with us. This has been part of her life experience and she has come to the final stage of healing, which is using what happened to us to help someone else. And she has also given us a film. So I'd like you to see the first ten minutes of the film and then we will discuss and we will also take your questions and your comments and your subversive organizing ideas. But this film is about very young girls. The average, yes, the average age of entry into the commercial sex industry in this country is 13. This uncompromising but strikingly warm-hearted documentary gives a forceful voice to the voiceless, to those women who have been tricked, seduced, neglected or abandoned and so have ended up selling themselves for sex from a very, very young age. We will see the film then hopefully the fiery campaigner that created it will be with us too. Thank you. I'm glad we started with this bit of footage because it shows us the human way, one of countless ways that people are brought into this sex trade. We think of it first of all when we think about sex trafficking, mainly as international. And of course it is a huge global trade that rivals the arms and the drug trade. But it's also important that we understand that it is happening in the just as it goes from poor areas of the world to rich parts of the world, it goes from poor parts of this country to rich parts of this country. I first became aware of this with what is called the Minnesota Pipeline which was so common that it was named by the NYPD, the New York police, the Minnesota Pipeline because it consisted of young women from farms in Minnesota who were often of Scandinavian heritage and so were blonde and blue-eyed and in this also racist structure had more commercial value who were brought into the sex trade in this way by boyfriends or by offers of jobs in New York and so on and ended up in the Times Square area, sometimes chained by the ankle to a bed, sometimes walking the streets free depending on the state of their rebellion, often tamed by drugs as part of this trade. Of course it happens over the border, as you know, a lot of the immigration problem that we hear about is unwilling. We don't hear about the unwilling immigrants who are brought in from Mexico or brought in from the Ukraine, from the Estans, from all kinds of countries hoping for being promised a job and ending up in this kind of sex trade. The net result of this overall from, and I brought along an atlas that shows in a map the kind of worldwide patterns and I'd be glad to leave this on the apron of the stage if you want to look at it, of the trade from poor areas of the world into more well-to-do areas of the world is millions and millions of people and indeed at this stage in history there are more enslaved people than there were in the 1800s. It's much easier to transport people, people are continuing sources of income, drugs are used up, arms are used up, people last somewhat longer so it is more profitable in fact. There are differences. The slave trade of the 1800s was about 60% adult males and about 40% women and a few children. This enslaved trade is about 85% women and children because it is so heavily the sex trade and then labor and slave labor as well. It is the subject of legislation which Taina can explain. There are laws against this in almost every country in the world which is ahead of the state of the abolitionists of the 1800s who had to get laws against the slave trade. It has similarities because it is regarded as you noted in the New York Times headline as inevitable in the same way that slavery in the 1800s was regarded as inevitable and enshrined in the Bible and talked about as natural or as a normal part of the need for labor and indeed then as a need for protection for people who could not protect themselves. The idea was that slaves and enslaved people could not fend for themselves. So in those days we had slave narratives which were very, very important in demonstrating that enslaved people were human beings and those stories were terribly, terribly important and today we need those stories again. We know that the enslaved individuals are human beings but we don't necessarily know that the enslavement is taking place or how big it is or that it can be in our own neighborhoods. One of the tracks is bringing people in over the Mexican border from a wide variety of countries not just from Mexico, bringing them eastward and using them along the way in truck stops for prostitutes for truck drivers and it is possible to buy on the internet a child or a female and collect them at a house in New Jersey. This was the subject of a New York Times Sunday magazine Exposé of a few years ago which was made into a very good film which is a very exact kind of film, a feature film but very like a documentary called Trade that you might want to get and show to the groups with which you are active. However, I want to say one other thing because we need to guard against hopelessness and that is that the New York Times was wrong when they said it's the world's oldest profession or the world's oldest trade or whatever. They said it's not true. There are many, many, many examples of societies that don't have prostitution and indeed the oldest societies were the least likely to have prostitution. Lately I've been reading the accounts of the colonists who came to this country and were shocked to discover that as they put it even these savages don't rape not even their prisoners, not even their female prisoners. It's a function of a power imbalance and in the societies that existed for 95% of human history as far as we know there was a far greater balance between males and females as between people and nature so it has not been true universally in all human societies and also it is not true that all men need to have the kind of control and dominance that comes with the demand for prostitution whether women or children. I think it's very important that we say this if we give statistics like one in three or four U.S. women will be sexually assaulted in our lifetime it makes it sound as if one in three or four men is sexually assaulting, that's just not true. The average rapist has raped 14 women and even though it is far too normalized the whole idea of purchasing of body invasion, of purchasing another person of dominating another person for sex it's far too normalized and there are far too many fathers who initiate their sons into sexuality by whether the sons want to do this or not by taking them to a brothel none the less it is a we have no evidence that it is inevitable in any way and much evidence that it is not and that when there is a power balance when there is not an idea of masculinity that is a cult of masculinity that requires control and dominance that this diminishes and diminishes and that's why it's so important that we address the demand. I was hoping that Rachel would be here if I vamp till ready she's not here yet but I would like to ask Taina to tell us if you can briefly how you first became aware of this reality of life that is hidden in plain sight and how you regard the stage we are in now in terms of recognizing it achieving legislation, achieving remedies well I came through it I guess through various entry points as many of us go through journeys in life through various entry points when I was at the university one of my housemates was a beautiful young woman who was, she was biracial I guess her father was of African descent and had been raped at the age of 10 and was studying and needed money and so she thought that it wouldn't be so bad to start selling her body and this was in Geneva in Switzerland where the standard of living is extremely high so her clientele was basically judges, lawyers, businessmen and you know we were all, we were a house of feminists and we, at that point I think there was still the debate just as there is a debate now as to what is consent and can you sell your body how harmful that is, et cetera, et cetera so we just accepted her her quote-unquote choice but then increasingly her behavior changed she started buying a number of sex toys that were, that were inducesive to violence like whips and cigarettes and she would, she would tell us what her, her Johns, her clients would want how they would want to be stepped on in great detail, so she would purchase stiletto shoes, et cetera but the most concerning part is she, her soul was dying and we could actually see her dying I mean her, she wouldn't look us in the eye anymore and she was very withdrawn and stopped going to classes and eventually we lost sight of her she left the house and some of us were trying to find out where she went and so we, we realized the extreme damage that, that she was actually being subjected to but also that it was, it was a direct result probably of the injury she had suffered as a child and if you look at the research particularly if you look at Dr. Melissa Farley's research education prostitution and research is her website there's a high percentage 99 to 94% of women in prostitution have been sexually abused at some point in their lives most likely as children and then I guess the, the second entry point was when I met Jessica Newworth when we were both at a Wall Street law firm in, in the early 90s and Jessica had arrived from Amnesty after being many, many years at Amnesty International and feeling increasingly frustrated at the fact that and I don't want to single out Amnesty but most human, mainstream human rights organizations did not consider abuses that happen to women because they are born female as human rights abuses and even me having come from a feminist background and not a human rights background really perceived human rights violations as political prisoners or people who had, whose rights had been violated because of free speech, et cetera but you never really thought of, of rape or domestic violence as under the context of human rights so she was thinking of starting an organization she didn't know what to call it and that's how Equality Now was born where, and happily now, 20 years later women's rights as human rights is an accepted concept that although sometimes within the halls of the UN you, you still have to debate that unfortunately and even more so now with the fundamentalisms growing but that's another subject of, of conversation and so in the early 90s once Equality Now started obviously trafficking was, was always a serious issue but it was, it was burgeoning I don't think it, it had reached the, the the scourge or, or the attention or even the magnitude of the problem that, that it is now Business Week had published an article in 93 on sex tour operators and said that there were 25 sex tour operators in the United States and this was pre-internet one of those sex tour operators was Big Apple Oriental Tours right here in Queens and so we worked with a male lawyer Ken Franz Blau who sent in this $3 for some information about Big Apple Oriental Tour and they sent a video and informational brochures and you looked at the materials and really left nothing to a man, to the imagination these tours specifically arranged for trips for men for $2,000 to go to the Philippines or Cambodia or Thailand for seven days and seven nights their tagline was real sex for real cheap with real girls and they even sent him a list of, of referrals of men who had not only been on the trip but had such a wonderful time that they were willing to share great details of, of their trip and in fact he spoke with a number of men who explained how the process worked once you arrived at the airport somebody would meet you there teach you how to negotiate the bar fines et cetera, et cetera which hotels to go to, which bars to go to, et cetera so what we did with that is we gathered all the evidence and we went to the Queens district attorney's office and said this is clearly in violation of New York penal law that prohibits profiting from prostitution or soliciting prostitution and it went nowhere for seven years it went absolutely nowhere the Queens DA's office said not our problem this is, you know it happens elsewhere these women probably have consented to this and so ironically it was it was only after Elliot Spitzer was re-elected as attorney general you laugh but this is just even the beginning that he actually investigated Big Apple Oriental Tours and a year after that shut it down which was the first civil action of its kind in the country and it effectively shut down the website and the business of the Big Apple Oriental Tour now we also wanted the owner operators of Big Apple Oriental Tour to be criminally indicted and now the campaign is in its 13th year I guess and there's finally a criminal trial that is going forward in February but all that to say is that here we here we were trying to alert this violation to law enforcement and they were really really not interested at all so the other point that I wanted to add is when we look at the market of human trafficking and again people are trafficked both for labor and for sexual servitude as Gloria mentioned the majority of people who are trafficked into sexual servitude are women and children and so there's a lot of debate on what we call the supply side because it is a market you have the supply side and you have the demand side so a lot of focus has been given on the supply side who are these women did they consent to being trafficked what kind of documents do they have are they illegal immigrants should they be deported etc but very very little attention until most recently was focused on the demand side who are the actors what are the elements that are contributing to this multi-billion dollar industry and that's why Equality now focused on sex tourism because human trafficking is such a complex crime it involves organized crime sometimes it involves corruption of government and so what does a small human rights organization do when you are faced with such enormous challenges so focusing on the demand and also focusing on legislation I think has been one of our two main main focuses and so we have seen incremental successes without a doubt I mean just the fact that we are talking about it you know breaking the silence as we know is always the first step in addressing issues of violence and discrimination against women and I think that silence is broken and now we are really trying to grapple as a community both national and international as how to address the situation in an effective way but one final point is we can't look at sex trafficking in a vacuum it is along the spectrum of violence and discrimination against women and girls women are trafficked for sex because they are female and even the men who are trafficked for sex are trafficked because of their gender in other words they cater mostly to men and so you are also looking at a gender equality situation and I think that's where we need to develop the discourse right now is that a number of human rights activists with incredible intentions really try to carve out the commercial sexual exploitation of women outside of the spectrum of violence and discrimination and we have to bring that element back into the discussion of gender inequality. Yes I think that we have a definitional problem sometimes because what happens to men is political and what happens to women is cultural and there's a sort of feeling well you can't change that that's culture and that difficulty has been with us in many different areas of activism and perhaps especially this one I think we have been fairly successful in demonstrating that rape is not sex it's violence we have not been at all successful in my opinion in demonstrating that pornography is violence erotica is sex you know because porne means female slavery it is material about the enslavement of women or men acting as women we are still we are still quite far behind in the understanding that prostitution doesn't happen everywhere what really happens in prostitution or for that matter in rape in New York State in most raves there is not as they euphemistically say a completed sex act there is sex with violence with objects used and so on so you know this is a very important time when each of us in talking to our networks and whatever groups we are in touch with can begin to highlight what is really happening as opposed to the myth of what's happening and I think the idea of blaming the victim is very much embedded in the law so we find that the prostitute is arrested the pimp frequently is not or the trafficker frequently is not and the customer is almost never penalized so there is this kind of false dichotomy between is it legal or illegal when the groups that are trying to provide alternatives around the world and are working most effectively it seems to me are probably trying to get services for the women and children not to decriminalize the women and children so that they actually do get services to criminalize the pimps and the traffickers so they really do get punishment and to try to figure out how to stem the demand side what is it that causes some men to get hooked really to get addicted to need this this domination so do you Tyena you know so much about the state of remedies and the laws in different countries what has successful what works and what doesn't could you help us to understand the state of the of the legal progress okay where to start the model law that we always quote is the law in Sweden where in 1999 Sweden recognized that prostitution and commercial sexual exploitation of women was really a form of gender inequality that needs to be addressed as a society so they have a law whereby only the demand side is prosecuted and the women and I'm saying women for shorthand because most of the people in prostitution are women are not what has that unfortunately no report has come out we only have anecdotal report from the government of Sweden saying that there's been a reduction in prostitution of 25% and certainly trafficking into Sweden has significantly been reduced actually Interpol intercepted conversations amongst traffickers saying no need to go into Sweden don't bother it's going to be too costly to do business they have this law why don't we go to the surrounding countries and it is true that the surrounding countries have seen an exponential increase in trafficking Norway just passed a similar law that Sweden has as well as South Korea and Nepal and hopefully the UK also may come out with a law they're debating right now now the other spectrum of the law that has the opposite effect in our view would be the situation of the Netherlands Germany, certain states in Australia New Zealand where prostitution is legalized and when we say prostitution is legalized we mean it's the industry of the sex trade that is legalized it gives you a is that Rachel yay he made it so when you give a green light to the sex industry what it does it creates a very it demand flourishes in other words it increases the demand so if you look at Netherlands 80% of the women in prostitution in Amsterdam are from outside of the Netherlands now the people who are generally pro legalization of prostitution believed that you legalize it because you you can regulate it then the state has a stake in making the sex trade safer so to speak but in fact the sex trade is inherently violent and demeaning and degrading and you cannot separate the legal brothels from the illegal brothels Gloria you just came back from Nevada where there are legal brothels that are basically like concentration camps where you have barbed wires around the premises women are not free to leave the premises so the model we think that is really a model that can help women in the sex trade is a model whereby they are not criminalized but you cannot legalize the industry of the sex trade and by the industry it's everyone from the traffickers to the procurers to the pimps all the way down down to the Johns far away from the Swedish model in this country unfortunately I think that there is still a lot of awareness that needs to be raised in this country about the sex trade and its dreadful impact on the lives of women and girls the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 was the first tool that we had at the federal level to address trafficking unfortunately since 2000 there have only been 111 successful cases of sex trafficking that have been prosecuted in this country where the statistics indicate that anywhere between 14,000 and 17,000 people are trafficked into the US so again the disparity between the 111 and the thousands of people trafficked into this country is really unacceptable as of yesterday or two days ago the Wilberforce Act which is a reauthorization of the federal law has passed it was not the bill we wanted but nevertheless it has some critical provisions that I think are incremental steps toward addressing the issue of demand so I think we are getting there it's just going to take a lot of awareness and I also think the survivors networks really need to be strengthened and I think this is where Rachel can speak more about it because I think we there are a number of grassroots groups not only in this country but around the world who are really getting stronger and building a national and international network to tell their stories and tell people how much the sex trade is actually a human rights violation that needs to end but I think that will take some time but yeah you made it Rachel thank you for the thank you for the film and I hate to make you sit down and speak right away but we need you so that we can then open up the discussion and I started out by asking Tiana a simple question which becomes more complicated when I ask it of you but I'll ask the same question which is how did you become aware of the sex trade what was your life experience that brought you into it and how do you regard the current state of our progress in recognizing it I mean my experience with the commercial sex industry began probably initially in England you can probably guess within about 30 seconds of me talking that I'm not a native New Yorker and so I grew up actually outside of about an hour outside of London in a place called Portsmouth and began to get involved probably about 13-14 years old in some pornography nude modeling etc in which you were able to do it when you were 13-14 years old and you were able to make money with kind of introduced to escort agencies etc but wasn't really kind of inducted into the sex industry until I was about 16-17 which happened in Germany and in Germany at that time and obviously Germany has legalized in many areas the sex industry at that time it was you could legally work in a strip club not under the age of 18 although most of us who were working in there were under the age of 18 we changed our passports this was just after the war had come down and there were I would say again most of us in the clubs weren't German you know there's Czechsavarkian girls and Russian girls and Croatian girls I mean from all over the place and so that was kind of my introduction to the commercial sex industry obviously you know I think there's a sense that when you're kind of you know as a survivor that you understand the industry you survive it that doesn't necessarily give you a context to kind of analyzing you're probably not sitting around analyzing how race and class and gender intersect in the sex industry while you're trying to like run from your pimp or not get arrested or whatever so it probably wasn't until kind of afterwards and I was you know in recovery and had been out for a few years and was just kind of in a good and safe place in my life decided that I wanted to come to the States and originally I just wanted to work with young people I mean I wasn't particularly kind of trying to revisit that area and got a job working with an agency here that was working with adult women coming out of the sex industry and came out here and was still fairly in denial about what had happened in my experiences and began to work with I think the first week I was out here I went out to Rikers Island for the very first time ever I was in front of about 70 or 80 women who were in a drug program adult women I was about 20 I was 22 when I came and they were like what's this little girl gonna tell us and I got up and I told my story and it was the first time I'd ever actually done that and kind of acknowledged what had happened and the harm that had been done and and in that space found women who had very similar experiences obviously and were incredibly embracing and felt this is something that I'm gonna kind of stick with this is something that I do want to understand more and so spent, you know, a couple of years really trying to learn about the issue and analyze the issue and analyze the role of survivors in it and saw people like you know, Norma Hitarling of Anita Carter who was survivors Kelly Hill at that time who was survivors who had begun their own organizations and felt very very strongly and just very compelled to kind of start my own not really having a sense of what running a nonprofit would look like and so after the first year of coming to the states I started Gems which is the organization, I'm not sure what clips you saw in the film, I don't know if they've gone to Gems yet but Gems is the only nonprofit in New York state that works specifically with commercially sexually exploited and domestically trafficked girls and young women and so obviously there is a very very personal kind of passion there, but also a passion I think that has come not just from my own experiences and being able to identify, you know, you kind of see yourself in different girls etc. but I mean really in just working with hundreds of young women over the years and seeing just the harm and the damage that's been done over and over again and seeing these amazing wonderful resilient young women but for whom, you know, not only have they had these experiences in the sex industry but kind of society has turned their back and you know, families and communities and law enforcement and institutions and healthcare and I mean nowhere is kind of, you know, stepped up and said this is something that we need to intervene and having said that, I mean I've been doing this work now 11 years came in August of 1997 and so have seen a lot of progress, you know, I think as advocates, right, we tend to be, you know, I don't know, half empty, half, you know, empty glass type people because you always want and something more but I will say I'm into here, I mean the fact that we have a panel and we have a full house, I mean 10 years ago you couldn't have done that, I mean you just you couldn't have got 10 people in a room to talk about this issue and if you did talk about it, you talked about it as with children, you talked about these chain prostitutes who just had loose morals and trafficking, well that's something that happens you know, I mean I'm sure it happens to people in another country but that's not anything and demand, I mean talking about having a conversation about men's involvement in the sex industry and who's buying and you know, I mean that kind of conversation just wouldn't have occurred a few years ago, obviously the TVP RA and you know, I'm excited that explain, when you say TVP RA sorry, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, it couldn't be any longer if it tried and now the will of a force which will be much easier to say, that reauthorization that did happen a couple of days ago, I mean that's exciting again, it's not everything that we're looking for and it's not everything that we're pushing for but we have to kind of, I think sometimes it's important to take a little step back and see some of the progress that's been made, this year in New York State we saw, I don't know if you talked about this Diana, but we saw the passage of the Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth Act, which was momentous, it meant the first time in the country with the only state that has this legislation that young people who were arrested for an act of prostitution would no longer be charged with an act of prostitution but would be considered a person in need of supervision, i.e. a child welfare issue as opposed to juvenile justice issue, this has been something that we've been fighting for for about four and a half years, the fact that in our state and in many states that a child of 12, 13, 14 who cannot be arrested for an act of prostitution and charged with that and go to juvenile detention for a year, two years, three years was unconscionable, so the fact that the legislature finally made that move after four years and Governor Patterson finally signed it is a huge step forward. I could list all the things that we haven't done and have yet to do and the way our media supports this and the way law enforcement still maybe doesn't quite get the lack of resources on the issue and the lack of attention to demand we're beginning to see steps and I think it's important even in the one thing that probably won't slow down is the sex industry and that folks who are vulnerable and challenged by poverty before are going to be even more vulnerable and so I think we're going to have to really continue to push and keep the momentum rolling over the next year or two in the face of people saying well we've got bigger issues to worry about well obviously we have large challenges right now but I do think that we have a level of momentum right now that if we could continue to stay focused we could see real change I think on this issue. Well I think we can see we have two polls here of progress and need for much more progress the very fact that this panel is called the new abolitionist tells that there are societies and groups mainly of young people in Boston all over this country and other countries as well who consider themselves new abolitionists which means that they understand that sex and labor trafficking is indeed the current form of enslaving men, women and children and it is economic and it is wrong and it can be remedied and devoted to remedying this at the other end as Rachel is saying about her experience in Germany is the legalizing of not just decriminalizing the victims but legalizing the entire industry with the result that you can be forced into sex work otherwise you don't get unemployment benefits I mean I brought along a clipping from a German newspaper that is called if you don't take a job as a prostitute we can stop your benefits. A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing sexual services at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts in her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year now prostitution was legalized in Germany just over two years ago this is from 2006 and brothel owners who must pay tax and employee health insurance were granted access to official databases of job seekers the waitress an unemployed information technology professional had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe she received a letter from the job center telling her that an employer was interested in her profile in other words the brothel owners had been recruited at the unemployment centers so this an end was put to this by great demonstrations even though it is of course still illegal and this actually was my first experience even before the Minnesota pipeline the national welfare rights organization I bet there are people here who know this organization early 70's demonstrated in Las Vegas because women who were on welfare were being forced off welfare and into prostitution because the relevant members of the state government saw this as a win-win situation they could create a tourist attraction and diminish their expense of welfare payments and we all went and marched up and down on the trip in front of the Mustang ranch I remember thinking to myself I didn't know that my life was going to bring me to marching up and down in front of the Mustang ranch and it was successfully stopped but in order to see what the current situation is I went back as Taina mentioned just before the election to Las Vegas for a few days to interview women who were working there and I thought I knew from these 35 years of learning but I didn't in fact how systematized it truly is in a place like Las Vegas in theory as you know prostitution is not illegal it's not legal in Las Vegas but is in a county that's some distance from Las Vegas and of course prostitution is everywhere in Las Vegas and the big influx is 11 to 14 year old girls the police said they it's quite systematized you know you work as a waitress then your salary is cut you are told that you could earn more if you were dancing in a topless bar then you find out and here's the part I didn't know women who dance in topless bars have to pay for the privilege of working there and getting tips but then kick back half their tips have to also pay the bartender, the bouncer and the the guy who plays the music that it really is prostitution in lap dancing rooms I had this vision left over from television that somehow people were clothed fully clothed and there was a decision wrong there are benches in there whatever the customer wants is really what happens and it's not just about penetration of a sexual sort as we would think but penetration with bottles and with objects and so on women really don't like to go into that room you know I asked the young woman, one young woman I was interviewing what money she had left with the bars and she was in a good, relatively good situation because she was living outside of this establishment she was still living at home trying to finish high school where it is legal it is as Tyena said in establishments surrounded by barbed wire in the desert you know say 10 or 20 miles from the nearest building of any sort the women are partly controlled by just having no other clothing not having cars I went to an establishment a couple of miles away a saloon run by a woman who said oh yes she said I feel sorry for those girls I throw food over the fence to them because they are and she said I figured out how to do it the guy who runs the brothel who has been indicted by the FBI never for bribery but never prosecuted goes to purchase food there's noodles you know those kind of round things of noodles he buys them by the case for a dollar a piece he charges the girls five dollars a piece Raymond I think they are called and she figured that out and so she buys the same thing so he won't know that she's throwing food over the fence so these women have more food I mean I just tell you I don't want to you know I realize this level of detail would not be acceptable in an academic study but I think it's important that we understand what the real life human situations are and what you know what the argument about legalization versus non legalization leaves out first of all it creates a false polarization it doesn't talk about decriminalizing the women and giving them services which clearly should happen it doesn't talk about the demand it really is ends up legalizing the industry but I say all this partly because every time I think each one of us has had this every time we have this discussion someone in some people present on a radio show the listeners whoever it is will realize that they have seen something that really was in fact suspicious to quite have the courage to say something about it or to reach out to the woman or the child concerned or to question what's going on so at I think the consciousness is always the first step to revolution and action always follows consciousness are there questions comments you would like to share I believe we have someone here with a Mike who will I'm going to let her select by her proximity and ability to run around which hand to attend to first but please feel free not just to ask questions but to give us answers well first of all you have three generations here my mother and my two daughters and it's to see such role models who have taken their power in their consciousness and brought it to other women can I just ask can you hear why don't you stand so I can also see you my question I hope it's not out of context or inappropriate is what impact and all posit you know damage to this consciousness and this argument and this consciousness raising something like Elliot Spitzer's experience have I'd really be interested in your view on that well I I think I mean we felt it very painfully because Elliot Spitzer's experience because he had been very supportive and he was helpful in prosecuting the sex or agency that was discussing so it seems to me there is a difference between a person who is committing a crime and trying to further it and someone who is committing a crime and trying to help society eliminate it do you know what I mean so but the press coverage yes the press coverage I thought was very very deceptive because it gave the idea by focusing on the amount of money involved that the woman in question was getting that amount of money when I'm sure she was receiving only a small fraction one and two it didn't get until much later on to the kind of childhood she had had which sounded as if it made her feel as if she had no choice that she only had a sexual value yes it made her seem empowered right do you want to address I would say as a survivor aside from being an advocate that week was incredibly frustrating and difficult I mean the media coverage was incessant our phone kind of rang off the hook and we had to have lots of conversations with the girls you know processing that and I mean I think for us right there wasn't necessarily a sense of surprise that Spitzer could being frank this Spitzer was a jaunt right I mean it was just it kind of is what it is but I think even knowing how people feel about the issue hearing it over and over and over again Cindy Adams not particularly a huge fan of anyway but I mean who had done peace and compared hiring a woman as similar for a wife as similar to Chinese food that it's less work for mother I mean just that and that's you know and so I mean there were women right I mean you know who were saying some pretty horrendous things they were you know very vulcan we got invited to be on a lot of different kind of panels and I think the tone and the way it was being sensationalized actually led me to turn down a lot of stuff that week because it was you know I mean you're going up against you've got Heidi flies you've got Tracy Kwan you've got you know some folks who are really very kind of established in the in the pro-sex work movement and that was what people wanted to hear that week that there's that kind of you know that higher tier of sex work and that there's escort agencies that are so glamorous and so wonderful and that you know these girls just kind of wanted all these women kind of wanted I think it was I think it was really really challenging I think it did you know unfortunately a lot of harm and I don't think there were a lot of alternate voices out there in the media didn't want those alternate voices which became very clear as we were doing like pre-interview stuff that they kept kind of trying to channel it into what they wanted to hear and I think that's one of the the difficulties in this movement and Tanya was talking as I walked in about kind of the survivor network and survivor movements and I think what the pro-sex industry movement has been very good at is ensuring that folks who have experiences within the sex industry are often front and center at the discussions I think the abolitionist movement the anti-traffic movement the anti-commercial sexual exploitation of children like that movement hasn't been as good at ensuring that survivors are kind of at the forefront and ensuring that those roles and not token roles but kind of legitimate roles and ensuring that kind of those voices are really heard and so and obviously there is a different level of validity there so I mean I think as we move forward that's something that we have to kind of get better at figure out ways to make sure that it's safe and supportive for survivors to come forward and not allow you know kind of the media to dominate that conversation or allow the kind of pro-sex industry movement to kind of take the lead on that. Yeah equally now had been working with Spitzer for about eight years on these issues of sex trafficking and prostitution so it was a very it was a huge sting to us I mean I think when we go meet with legislators, senators, state, federal whatever sometimes we leave the meetings and say he's definitely on the list. Spitzer was never one of those because not only was he so active on the sex tourism front but also he's the one who drafted the New York State human trafficking law which is the strongest anti-trafficking law in the country and we were actually waiting for him to be elected as governor because after three years of trying to get human trafficking law in New York we knew he was going to be the only one who could help us pass the law. Having said that I think you know just to echo what Rachel said during the whole Spitzer debacle it was really sex industry red carpet fest the whole week I mean from Anderson Cooper on down and if you listen to Kristen or Ashley or you know the number of names she uses which is also an indication of who she is I mean she is sort of the prototype of a sexually exploited woman in the sex trade homeless raped probably sexually abused and so when you are really at your lowest then you have a pimp come in and say I've just got the job for you and so I think that's also we're talking about a paradigm shift here we're talking about a national and international paradigm shift that the whole notion of consent I think feminist and society at large really has to think about what consent means it's the same term that was used in the domestic violence movement she stayed there because she wanted to she didn't you know she didn't like to be beaten she would have left it's the same argument that we heard in the rape in the anti-rape movement and so and it continues in prostitution and so I think that that was the sad aspect and also I think it's really a wake up call for us to as advocates to say we need to regroup and find out what kind of language we need to create to communicate the harm of the sex trade on women in that this is not a pretty woman speaking of the film you know the situation at all so in the sexual harassment law for instance we tried to instead of speaking about consent it uses the word welcome you know was the sexual overture or attention welcome and that in itself is a consciousness change hi first I want to thank Rachel for talking so personally because I think a lot of people will hear these very high statistics about sexual abuse and they'll just see a number when survivors come out and talk about their story it really puts a face on it where it's not just a number of things happening to a number of people it's your sisters your daughters your mothers everybody so thank you for that but I wanted to ask what what are the different sort of situations with metropolitan sort of sex trafficking situations versus rural and different demands of those and trying to combat them you want to just just kind of compare them what's happening on an urban level to what's happening kind of rurally right I mean look I'll say my agency is in Central Harlem I live in the South Bronx my expertise is definitely around urban as opposed to as opposed to rural what we have seen though over the last few years is and we do know and I'll say we do know that the primary areas for commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking of children and women do tend to be in large urban areas because there are New York for example has a huge sex industry huge existing adult sex industry so anytime that you want to kind of channel children into that or traffic women into you know the demand is already there the demand has already been created if you add in kind of poverty and I mean you can look at for example in New York if you look at stats of arrests both on a juvenile and adult level not for prostitution but just kind of across the board arrests generally happen particularly for juveniles in one of six different communities in New York City right and so those six different communities and I mean we could all take a guess where those are but those six communities generally have you know incredibly high rates of poverty the staff Bronx where Hunts Point is located at and Hunts Point is still one of the most notorious and active tracks areas for street prostitution in the city is located in the poorest congressional district in the country you know those kind of things mirror each other you know the poverty and the kind of abandonment of entire communities and you know the devastation that left many communities in New York just kind of you know like war zones in the early 80s and towards the beginning of the 90s have left an entire generation of kids who are really really vulnerable rural areas definitely we see the poverty a large issue we know the areas and this kind of cuts across the board areas where there are transient males you know that's been documented so you know in New York City that might be areas where there are lots of truck drivers i.e. Hunts Point industrial areas like that in rural areas you know we know that there are truck routes that go through many of these areas and it's strange I mean you go to kind of somewhere I don't know random in the Midwest but somewhere somewhere in the Midwest and it's kind of dead for miles right and you've got just you know miles and miles and miles of kind of nothing and then there's like a strip club and then like a Wendy's and then like a truck stop right like there's that kind of and so we know that those kind of areas have sprung up throughout the country and we know a lot of times those are underage kids those are women who have been trafficked in those areas industrial exploitation I can be anywhere now and I can buy a kid I don't need to be in a you know a cosmopolitan area I can be you know as long as I've got a laptop you know and we know that pimps and traffickers bring their children and their women to various areas kind of where they feel like there's going to be demand so I mean I don't know if that really answers the question but those are just some of the different things you know I guess I have two questions one is is there a legal differentiation between prostitution and trafficking and secondly speak more to the new abolitionists and what kind of campaigns and efforts are going on to reach the American public in this particular instance so that people are more aware of the problem about it and secondly changes in legislation and I guess also directing interventions on the demand side how many hours do you have I think that's the crux of the debate that is happening within the human rights women's rights community is the link between sex trafficking and prostitution some of us believe that they should be de-linked, that there is sex trafficking and it looks a certain way which would be what the definition of the current federal law is which is forced fraud coercion so unless a woman can prove that there is a gun to her head at all times or that she's chained to a radiator it's not really sex trafficking and then there are others who believe like we do that the reason why women are trafficked in the sex trade is for purposes of prostitution and if there were no prostitution there would be no sex trafficking so you cannot de-link both and slavery in women does not look like anti-bellum slavery you don't need once the forced fraud coercion occurs at the onset of the trafficking he's waving am I doing something no so that let's say since we work on international issues let's say a young woman from the Ukraine sees an ad in the paper for a babysitting job she winds up here at JFK babysitting job is no longer available but now you are indebted for your travel and for your room and board and so the woman is raped she sees probably given drugs beaten etc so that when there is a brothel raid 6 months after that a year after that is she still a trafficking victim we would say yes because she was really trafficked for purposes of prostitution but law enforcement you know what she's just another hooker on the street and won't ask the proper questions and so that's why it's really critical to not delink both in terms of legislation again as I mentioned the state human trafficking law is the strongest law in that there's a higher penalty for those who patronize prostitution than those in prostitution unfortunately we would have loved to see a total decriminalization of prostitution but again that's probably for another decade if we're lucky but nevertheless I think it's starting to open the conversation about the gender inequality of the situation in terms of prosecutions and prostitution we actually asked the law firm to look at to see whether anyone would have standing for instance somebody gems or another person would have standing to sue either the New York City police or another city agency in terms of discrimination and prosecution I don't know what the statistics are here in the US but they vary from state to state for anywhere between for every woman that's arrested you'll have four men or eight men who are arrested and so there's a huge discrepancy in the law and prostitution is mostly illegal in the US except for a few counties in Nevada so that's basically the framework of the law where nowhere close although again the Will Before Act and I'll just highlight the major some of the interesting changes I think that will help us even though we didn't get what we wanted is one is that now the Attorney General will mandate reports from each state to break down the number of arrests whether it's the victims or pimps or or the so called Johns and so that will help us to see the discrimination pattern another provision that will be helpful is what they call the look back provision whereby if a pimp is arrested or if a victim is arrested for instance and she's over 18 the prosecutor will have to look back to see at what point she was entered into the sex trade and if she was under 18 at the time of inception then the force fraud coercion threshold disappears which is very very helpful and so we're moving toward more of a demand looking country but it's the resistance is enormous I would lie if I didn't tell you that the resistance at the tippy tippy top is fierce the DC madam had 20,000 names of men working in Washington DC and when we asked what those names were and I believe CNN has a list of those names they said it was not news worthy the only person who was caught was Mr. Tobias was head of USAID at the time and also you know wasn't necessarily sympathetic to our vision of things and happened to be on the list and resigned so again I think the resistance is fierce so and you asked about the new abolitionists I think mainly the new abolitionists are trying to raise consciousness you know if you so choose you will be a new abolitionist when you leave this room today and the the heroes of the new abolitionist movement are the survivors who come forward and tell stories and what we can do is offer support to those stories it's those of us who are familiar with movements of all kinds this is the way it goes right first you change consciousness and that of course never stops but at least that gets to a critical mass of consciousness and then you begin to be able to take steps forward that have to do with the systems themselves and how people are treated and I would say we are really just at the beginning of that but the very fact that I would say it's only a couple of years that people have been calling themselves new abolitionists don't you think and then of course very importantly there are groups mainly movements movement groups as far as I can see around the world from Zambia to Nepal to Ghana to the city of Minneapolis and that woman is trying to start one in Las Vegas there are all these groups who are at least places where the women can go if they do escape in some places in India for instance they are more elaborate than that as an effort and they actually stage raids on the brothels they send men in with cameras to show that there are children and underage people that there are all kinds of practices of brutality going on then they stage raids which was in the beginning extremely controversial and now is best practices you know with many of the areas with the police in India they offer a kind of halfway house a safe house I mean it's not at all realistic to expect that a woman can emerge with what under any other circumstances would be called the Stockholm syndrome you know and immediately testify against her the people who have been imprisoning her so they offer places where women can stay together can begin to speak freely can gain confidence and if they wish also receive training and other ways of making a living so you know I they may and it's interesting because they're training them in professions that are not hairdressing they're becoming mechanics and making furniture and so on actually you know so they can make a living and establishing schools for their children so you know it ranges the new abolitionist I would say range from consciousness to starting very physical rescue operations and halfway houses and so on where it's possible to go to the river if we visualize this whole thing as a river I think we are still very much standing on the side of the river trying to pluck out people who are drowning we have not yet gone to the head of the river to keep people from falling in it's not anywhere near that Rachel where have you shown your movie did you just finish it no we finished it I actually started Aaron last year we premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival so we've done about a year's worth of film festivals everywhere from Jackson Hole to Warsaw to Edinburgh etc so I mean that's been kind of the festival circuit it just came out on Showtime we just had our television broadcast premiere on Thursday evening and so it will be available shameless plug it's going to be available on Showtime for the next month on demand till January 8th one of the things we were encouraging folks to do has been to sign up for a screening party and so we had a lot of people the night of the premiere even this weekend who've signed up on our website and have invited 10-15 friends over some wines and cheese thrown in the movie and then began to have a discussion about what that means and I mean I obviously biased we produced the movie co-produced the movie you know put a lot of effort into it but I'll say I mean everywhere that we've gone with this film we have seen people's minds change about this issue and so you know over the next year or two I mean the goal is to get it into detention centres and group homes and to hospitals and to I mean everywhere you know churches and synagogues and women's groups and colleges and I mean everywhere that anybody will screen it you know they can and so I think this hopefully will have a long shelf life to say as I was parking right here on Washington Avenue kind of flustered because I've gotten lost it's a sad story and was running late and was like oh god and I needed some quarters to feed the meter and I ran into the stern I said can I get some quarters with some change and this guy was behind me and he said you're you're on TV you're in a TV show and I was like no because I'm thinking I'm not even thinking about I'm kind of a showtime a couple of nights ago he was like you run an agency or something right and I was like yeah and I was like what did you think because he was like this big burly dude and I was like what did you think and he was like it's pretty moving I never knew so I mean I was like oh you recognize me it's very odd but he said it was the accent that gave it away and he said you know I'm going to go home and I'm going to tell my wife and I said look tell your family members anybody who's got to you know over the last few days we've had we've had emails from folks who are still in the life and really struggling from survivors who've never had an opportunity to talk about it from parents whose kids you know missing and then just from average people who are like wow it just happened to flick on the TV and never had I'd never thought about it in this context I didn't know what was happening here so I mean I encourage you know it will be available for college folks to go on our website and use it as much as you can I mean invite folks to see it forward the link on you know we really really want to make sure that this gets out as far and wide as possible and begins to change the conversation around this. Have you I'm sorry www.gems-girls.org as G E M at S dashgirls.org and there's a big link that says have you approached the Human Rights Watch Film Festival here in New York City? We actually did I don't know if we've heard back from them and I see people nodding so I think that means maybe there's a connection but we did approach them and anywhere that will take us right now we are totally shameless. I will just ask if we have a final word or two because I think each of us can contribute we can each watch this in our living rooms and discuss it and you know there are many obvious things but I see there are lots of distinguished academics here too and we need research we know that body invasion is a much more traumatic than even body assault external thing and this is just in the nascent age of research the people who seem to understand it most among my correspondents are men in prison who have been raped in prison and who say okay now I get it body invasion you know what takes place inside your body is even worse than getting or even more traumatic and long lasting and so on so you know there are many ways that you can contribute that you know and we don't but if you let us know we'll try to help oh I just I'd like to echo that and just say I mean I think sometimes we think about movements and obviously I mean you know always honored to get to be anywhere near the wonderful glorious diamond recognize and obviously you know her leadership you know over the years and over the decades really and I think sometimes though we can feel like intimidated leadership in movements and think you know it's you know these kind of name people or these people are really articulate and get up and do these really amazing things and every movement needs folks like that and I'm so you know happy that the glorious really kind of you know made such a stand on this issue but ultimately you know the way that things have changed in our country and you know across the world through social justice issues has been individuals that hasn't necessarily been about leaders and you know it just in the last six weeks or so we saw real change happening in our country and obviously while there is leadership around that I'm very clear kind of defined leadership it took everybody and it took individuals and it took my kids who are 18 19 voting for the first time up in Harlem and really excited and we're in the buttons I mean it took kind of everyone and so I think around this issue it can get overwhelming and sometimes it can be really tough to think about my god people being enslaved you know the the rape the assault the devastation and sometimes we can get so overwhelmed that we get paralyzed and so I think it's really breaking that down and saying yeah what specifically can I do so if the most I do this week which is huge is talk to ten people about this conversation that I heard if I email you know everybody on my Facebook page and say his three things I learned today here's a couple of links you should go check out those those are really manageable doable things and invite you know the next time that there's a panel invite two people particularly invite two men that you know two men in your life a lot of times we're uncomfortable talking with the men in our lives about have you ever paid for sex have you ever been to a strip club what do you think those women are doing what do you think they're thinking those are important conversations that we could be having and so I just really encourage everyone to think very specifically about what are the concrete action steps that you can take within the next week of the next few months and recognize how important that is to the overall movement I would echo that I think you don't have to dedicate your life to human rights in order to make a difference I mean we see that every single day taking action can mean sending a fax writing a letter picking up the phone if you go on equalitynow.org we've got two ongoing actions one we've been trying to shut down GNF sex tours in Texas for about four years the attorney general's office has refused to look at it and the other is India is also our partners in India are also struggling with a law trying to criminalize buyers in their trafficking law so those are easy letters to send and again as Rachel said I think just speaking about it raising awareness about this issue will go a very very long way and just the fact that you're here resonates so profoundly not just here in Brooklyn but around the world too I'd like to thank Gloria thank Rachel and thank Tiana for a wonderful panel thank you very much you will have an opportunity for more questions if you would like to come up to the fourth floor join us for some wine at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art take a look at the dinner party have some good conversation burning down the house our brand new exhibition is up Fertile Goddess and hope to see you up there it's just an elevator ride away tomorrow Brooklyn born rider Jennifer Cody Epstein is going to be reading from her book the painter from Shanghai I'm looking very much forward to that I wish you all a very happy holiday a healthy new year a productive new year and peace and love and much needed change in the new year