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What we can agree on: A review of 'Trafficked'
By lynmiller-lachmann on 2012-06-03 10:45:00
One of the major appeals of the KONY 2012 campaign to capture brutal Ugandan
warlord Joseph Kony by this December is that in a contentious election year, it is a nonpartisan effort. The poster to
advertise the campaign illustrates that theme, with a Democratic donkey and a Republican elephant coming together in the
white dove of peace. Several years ago, I reviewed the film The Reckoning, about the International Criminal Court’s efforts
to indict Kony and its inability to catch him once he was indicted. The film documented his massacres of Uganda’s Acholi
people and his use of child soldiers through interviews with villagers, former Lord’s Resistance Army soldiers, and lawyers.
A similar cause that crosses political lines and has attracted activists of all ages and religious beliefs is that of human
trafficking. While Kony’s depredations have been concentrated in central Africa (though his Lord’s Resistance Army has
crossed from Uganda into neighboring nations), human trafficking in its various forms exists throughout the world,
including in the United States. Kim Purcell’s young adult novel Trafficked (Viking, 2012) introduces this topic to readers in
an effective way. Along with her resourceful, likable protagonist and suspenseful story, Purcell offers information on how to
stop human trafficking worldwide and how to recognize it in one’s own community. Seventeen-year-old Hannah, from
La
Moldova, has agreed to work as a nanny in the United States after the death of her parents in
a terrorist bombing forces her to drop out of school. Although she is naive—her ex-boyfriend warns her against taking the
job for that reason—she also has a lot of fight in her. En route to the airport in Bucharest, Romania, where she is to take a
plane to the United States, she has to fight off an employment agent who tries to rape her (something that she will have to do
many times in her new job). A Russian couple has sent her a forged passport, claimed her as their niece from Russia, and
arranged for her to take care of their two children, but they refuse to pay her. When she begs them for the money—she
hoped to be able to pay for her grandmother’s surgery—they turn hostile and abusive. Hannah longs for a normal life like
that of the teenager next door, an overweight boy who has a strained relationship with his divorced parents. Eventually, the
two sneak out of their respective homes and get acquainted, an action that leads to horrific consequences for Hannah. One of
the strengths of Trafficked is the setting—an upper middle class suburban community in southern California where the
traffickers hide their actions from their neighbors and the lack of sidewalks and nearby stores helps to immobilize victims.
Like Hannah, neighbor Colin is an ordinary teenager thrust into an extraordinary situation, and through his basic decency he
serves as a model for getting involved. As Hannah tries to understand why the Russian husband, Sergey, chose her, the
suspense rises and readers are treated to a subplot that introduces the independence struggles of former Soviet republics like
Moldova and the greed-driven capitalist underworld in what once was a tightly controlled communist system.
