18 December 2006
Author Describes the Horrors of Trafficking for U.S. Youth, December 13, 2006(Patricia McCormick tells State officials about the inspiration for her book)
By Jane Morse
USINFO Staff Writer
Washington – Award-winning investigative journalist Patricia McCormick had been blazing with determination to uncover the truth about the trafficking of girls in Nepal and India. But in 2003, after a month of research and interviews with trafficked girls in those countries, she found herself too angry and depressed to begin writing immediately.
Meeting with State Department officials December 13, McCormick shared the odyssey that led her to write her newest book, Sold, which is aimed at making the horrors of human trafficking real to American youth ages 13 and up.
Speaking with Ambassador John Miller, the outgoing director of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, and his staff, McCormick said it took her two years to write her 263-page novel. The anguish of the trafficked youth she met mixed with her own distress to inspire the vignettes she wrote describing the daily life of her main character, Lakshmi, a 13-year-old girl who lived with her impoverished family in a remote mountain town in Nepal before being sold to traffickers who took her to a brothel in India.
Lakshmi is a fictional character representative of the lives of many of the trafficked girls McCormick interviewed. “Fiction can be powerful,” she told the State Department officials. “It hits at a very personal level.”
The story that resulted is so compelling that it was nominated by the National Book Foundation as one of five finalists for the 2006 prize for young people’s literature.
Each year, nearly 12,000 Nepali girls are sold by their families – either intentionally or unwittingly – into a life of slavery in India’s brothels, McCormick said. Some villages in Nepal, she reported, have virtually no young women at all.
As is so often the case, desperate poverty drives these young women to grab any chance for making some money to better their lives and the lives of their families. Another important factor is the low regard for women in many cultures around the world. In Sold, the men at the tea shop frequented by Lakshmi’s stepfather joke: “A girl is like a goat. Good as long as she gives you milk and butter. But not worth crying over when it’s time to make stew.”
McCormick is traveling around the United States promoting her book, which was published in September. So far, it is receiving a favorable reception from teachers and the young people it is aimed to reach, the author said.
Ambassador Miller lauded McCormick’s effort to warn youth against the dangers of prostitution, and said trafficking now is getting the attention it deserves from the media. In 2007, he said, five books, two documentaries and two feature films are expected to be released exposing this widespread tragedy.
McCormick’s book Sold, which debuted in the United States, is expected to be published in Finland, Portugal, Germany and Australia.
State Department officials estimate that worldwide nearly half a million children are trafficked across national borders each year for the sex trade. And that, Miller said, does not include children who get caught up in the sex trade within the borders of their homelands.
For more information, see Human Trafficking.
