Body & Sold

Body & Sold is a play based on transcripts extracted from interviews conducted by playwright Deborah Fortson in which ten young victims of human trafficking from Southeast Asia share their experiences and journeys of loss of innocence and redemption.

The FIU theater majors auditioned for the project at the beginning of year for the production.

The 2009 U.N. Global Report on Trafficking in Persons shows that, on the plus side, the number of countries implementing the international agreement that addresses trafficking in persons has doubled. Of the 155 countries that were surveyed, over 60 percent had enacted laws following a special U.N. protocol to fight human trafficking adopted in 2003.

On the other hand, many governments still resist enforcement, and nearly half of all nations have yet to bring a single perpetrator of the scourge to justice.

The U.N. study reports that only one victim out of every 100 trafficking cases is rescued. While the most common manifestation of trafficking is sexual exploitation (accounting for 80 percent of the phenomenon), other activities such as forced labor in mines, factories, sweatshops or domestic servitude, as well as child soldiers, are less frequently detected.