As I reflected on my experience at the 58th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, which closed at the end of March, 2014, I was overwhelmed by all I had learned. My attempts to write a blog about my experience were overshadowed by the immensity of what I had seen  and heard. I was stuck trying to decide where to begin. Then, this week, it occurred to me that I would have to post a series of blogs to begin to tap into the reality of the lives of women and girls throughout our world. I could not do so in two paragraphs. And so, I decided to begin with my awakening to the extensiveness of a rising form of slavery in our global world.

This year is the 150^th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the United States and the 50^th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, both significant events in American history. I remember the summer of 1964, when I was completing a graduate course at the University of Tennessee in Memphis. As a northerner from New York City, I was shocked to discover the many residuals from the days of Negro slavery that still existed in the city of Memphis, one hundred years after the US Emancipation Proclamation. And then this year at the CSW, I was again shocked at learning the extent of sex trafficking of women and girls connected to major sporting events, not just abroad, but in my own home town of New York!  My experience at the CSW awakened me to the enormous reality of sexual trafficking of women and girls, as well as children as young as age five, throughout the world. Some estimates indicate that 21 million people are currently victims of human greed. Promised money for their families or a chance to start a new life in another country, many of those vulnerable women and children believe the promises and are sold into slavery, from which there is no escape but death. 

Many Nongovernmental agencies at the UN are bringing the extent and dark violence of this 21^st Century slavery into the light. Our nineteen year old granddaughter will be working in Cambodia this summer in a shelter for children at risk for trafficking. I know she will return home with a new heart. .As I write this, the words of a poem I recently discovered by Mary Oliver came to me:       

                                I tell you this

                                to break your heart,

                                by which I mean only

                                that it would break open and never close again

                                to the rest of the world.  

                                (New and Selected Poems,  Vol.2)

As we celebrate Mother’s Day, may our hearts break open to the mothers and children throughout the world who have lost their lives to slavery and “never close again” to mothers and children everywhere.