April 26, 2011
By Martha Groppo
Kentucky Kernel (USA)
“We’ve got to get thinking differently about how we treat women and children.”
After working on the score for a documentary on sex trafficking, one college student wanted to do something about the dehumanization he saw in his client’s video. Tony Anderson decided he was tired of hearing about injustice. He said he wanted to know why there was so much discussion and so little real change.
So Anderson did something a little unusual to answer his questions. To investigate the issue, Anderson and his friend, Derek Hammeke, decided to take a camera into the most notorious areas for sex trafficking they could find.
“We got a ton of crazy undercover stuff on camera,” Anderson said.
Posing as western sex clients, they went undercover, investigating one of the world’s most lucrative criminal industries. With the footage they collected, they created Unearthed, an organization based in Lexington that describes itself as “a nonprofit that produces media that prompts people to act against injustice.”
Anderson remembers one night during their months of filming when he saw a group of women gathered around an underage prostitution hotspot with a western man in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
“He was groping this girl — maybe 7 years old — almost like you’d see somebody feeling produce at the grocery store to ensure its quality before buying it,” Anderson said. “She was being sold for sex.”
The little girl in Cambodia was just one of thousands the Unearthed team saw while collecting footage.
No comments:
Post a Comment