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United Nations
Our meeting with the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking was awe-inspiring. It may be the highlight of our trip. The first activity planned for our group was recovering from jet lag. We had 12 hours at the hotel to "take it easy" before our exploring would officially begin at 3 p.m. (when we met with Bangkok University faculty and students). I knew I could easily nap away those hours--either in my room or by the pool. But I was in Thailand. Certainly, I should do something more impressive than that. So when Ron Hampton generously extended an invitation to meet with a UNL alumnus in the morning, I jumped on it.
Nick and I met up with Ron in the hotel lobby at 8 a.m. (Who needs sleep? My 90 minutes of shut-eye seemed like plenty after snoozing so much on the plane.) By 8:30, we were out of the hotel hoofing it to the nearest Skytrain station. We took the train to Victory Monument, where we met Brooke. From there, our most amazing morning began. Brooke is a recent graduate of UNL, who went on this study abroad tour as a student, got bitten by the travel bug, and decided to do something about it. She is now living in Bangkok and working for the United Nations Inter-Agency
Hang On!
The taxis in Bangkok are bright pink and often highly personalized. This little guy was hanging onto the trunk of the cab next to us. Project on Human Trafficking. Our appointment was to accompany her to a meeting in her office where we would learn more about what they are doing.
If I could sum it up in one word, it would be
humbling. The research they do, the innovations they design to tackle this important problem, and the communication strategies they use communicate with their stakeholders are so utterly impressive. Matt Friedman, the Director of this project, gave us an overview of the problem of trafficking: many tens of thousands of human beings taken each year through force or deceit and sold into a system of exploitation. He showed us maps of trafficking patterns in the Mekong region. He also explained the problems his organization faced in trying to fight trafficking: a lack of solid baseline numbers, gaining cooperation from multiple countries (some which want to deny the problem exists), and even the term "trafficking" itself. Whereas other crimes elicit strong emotional responses from people simply upon hearing their labels (e.g., rape), trafficking does not. Also, it puts the emphasis and the criminalization on the transit of these people, not on their exploitation at the place which they arrive.
Some of UNIAP's
Meet and Greet
We met with faculty and students at Bangkok University. We toured campus and ate a buffet of traditional Thai foods. initiatives have included interviewing trafficked people who get out of the system to identify salient risk factors (e.g., how much money they have in their pocket on the day they leave) and other patterns, sponsoring competitions for social scientists to propose methods for measuring trafficking, placing its hotline number in help wanted ads next to ads that lure people into trafficking (and using the hotline to collect data on why people call these numbers), performing a network analysis of traffickers and trafficking support systems to break down the trafficking system and get trafficked people into a support network, and using an extended network of global volunteers to help the agency mine through its data to look for patterns.
I also had the good fortune of bumping into someone in the conference room who was on the communications team. So after our meeting with Matt, we went to lunch at the UN cafeteria (one word: wow), where we were joined by three members of the team--Steven, Miah, and Dominique--to talk about their perspective on and role in the project. They explained that their biggest challenge is creating messages that are sensitive to multiple stakeholders. It was more than just the
BU Cafe
On our tour of BU's campus, we stopped at the student-run coffee shop for smoothies. typical PR target audience stuff (each audience gets its own tailor-made message). Instead, it was crafting messages that were cognizant of and sensitive to simultaneous and competing stakeholders, which requires the utmost in diplomacy and tact.
I walked away from those meetings with a sense of awe for the commitment required to what they do, the passion they display, and the ingenuity with which they do it all. It was all so inherently linked to what I have learned in the discipline of communication studies: communication theories, network analysis, public relations, message design, qualitative and quantitative social scientific methods, and yes, the "Three Cs" (communication, collaboration, and community). Yet it was so much bigger and significant than all of that.
The wheels in my head have been in constant motion since the meeting, figuring out how I become more connected in my role as a UNL professor to this project and other globally significant issues. Hint to my COMM 487 and 886 students in Fall 2010… Get ready!
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