The following is a guest post by Donna Potts, chair of the AAUP’s Assembly of State Conferences. She is also a contributor to the newest issue of Academe. In this post, she expands on the issues in her Academe article.
Watching the movie Taken, in which Liam Neeson’s daughter is abducted into the sex trade and heroically rescued by her father just in time, my mother exclaimed, “imagine if that were your daughter.” Imagine that.
In “Service, Sex Work, and the Profession,” I wrote about Kristy Childs, founder of Veronica’s Voice, an organization that offers support to prostituted women. She works hard to get people to understand that women, as well as the children who have more often been the focus of media and public policy attention, have been coerced into sex trafficking, and they’re all somebody’s daughters. Childs recently asked me to organize a letter writing campaign in hopes of finding a celebrity spokesperson for the cause. Neeson was first on my list, with actresses like Dolly Parton (Best Little Whorehouse in Texas) and Julia Roberts (Pretty Woman) trailing somewhere behind, because whereas his film suggests the horrors of prostitution and recognizes the degree to which it is coerced, many others romanticize it to the extent that women who have survived prostitution can’t even bear to watch them.
Continue reading →
