Liam Neeson is a consumed man, with a very special set of skills, chasing human traffickers down in Paris to rescue his daughter who was kidnapped and sold into the sex-industry on vacation with her friend.
UKC Against Human Trafficking (UKCAHT) are hosting this FREE film night to relive the action and bring it to a big screen to raise awareness about real-life people trafficking happening through our cities. If you saw us at Refreshers Fayre it’s a great event to hear more on what we’re about. Invite friends- sit back, eat some fair trade chocolate and watch some ass being kicked. Short talk at the end about who we are and future events.
Taken, (2008), although an action blockbuster, if you look closely it shows accurately and shockingly the different levels of the criminal underworld of sex trafficking in all its horrendous forms. From street prostitution to apartment brothels– to construction sites with conveyor belts of men finding ‘recreation time’ with drugged up trafficked girls, to the elite ‘slave’ auctions of the wealthy where virginity comes at an expensive price, all in the midst of the corruption of the Paris police who allow the trade to flourish.
Liam Neeson chases after his daughter’s traffickers relentlessly for revenge and her rescue. The much quoted and now famous line,
“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want… But if you don’t let my daughter go…I will find you… I will kill you.”
is absolutely chilling when you finally hear it. But it’s not as chilling as the sex-traffickers in the film admitting to Liam Neeson in seeing his distress that they were also fathers of daughters, but the abuse of other people’s children was casually justified by,
“Hey, I’m sorry, but it’s just business, you know?”
Hey, a human being is a commodity that can be bought, sold, raped, and thrown away like a used drug, and it doesn’t matter because of profit: they don’t understand the torture of the human soul, because their eyes and hearts are dead like dollar bill$.
However, another more heart-wrenching aspect that this film shows a sharp contrast to is the reality that some families knowingly sell their daughters into the sex trade to be raped or their sons to the brick factory in India or cocoa plantation in the Ivory coast, to be denied a childhood but also to hopefully to send home some money to alleviate grave financial difficulty.
Every trafficking victim is someone’s daughter, son, brother, or sister. Every trafficking victim is a person that’s been dehumanised by the criminal. In reality, only the lucky few have someone looking for them; pursuing their safety and release, and only the luckiest are found.
International Justice Mission are a charity that use investigators, lawyers and social workers intervene in individual cases of abuse in partnership with state and local authorities. Because of their local partnerships, they frequently find and rescue victims of sexual exploitation and forced labour. In April 2011 they freed more than 500 enslaved men, women and children from a brick factory in their
“largest anti-slavery operation ever”.
Click here for the article & check out their website for more details of their amazing work.
Written by: Gail Commandeur
UKC Against Human Trafficking 