High School Student Develops Learning Materials to Destigmatize, Prevent Sex Trafficking
This post is contributed by Ria Bahadur, a 12th grade student at Eastside Preparatory School
On our blog, OSPI wants to provide a platform for stories written by Washington’s students. These stories are an authentic look into the life of a K–12 public school student. They are not influenced by OSPI, and edited only for readability. For questions, please contact the OSPI Communications team at commteam@k12.wa.us.
Mitigating sex trafficking has been my deep passion since I was 12 years old. Educating myself through books like Girl Rising by Tanya Lee Stone helped me understand the horrifying nature of this crime. I remember coming home hollow-eyed and shocked when I first read this book on an unassuming Thursday afternoon and telling my mother that I fight with her for breakfast every morning when such victims don’t have the right to their own bodies.
The U.S. State Department estimates that there were 24.9 million victims of human trafficking worldwide in 2016, with 4.8 million of them in forced sexual exploitation. In the U.S., human trafficking disproportionately affects women of color. In King County, 52% of all child sex trafficking victims are Black and 84% of victims are female, though Black girls comprise only 1.1% of the general population, according to Rights4Girls, a national advocacy organization. Fewer than half of all suspected traffickers in the U.S. have been arrested, according to the National Institute of Justice.
The U.S. State Department also notes that the quality and quantity of data about human trafficking is limited, in part because of the hidden nature of the crime. But as I got involved with this topic, I met survivors whose stories brought these statistics to life. As a girl hailing from a body-positive and communicative Indian family, I couldn’t fathom the silence, pain, and trauma inflicted upon sex trafficking survivors. It angered me to see survivors being stigmatized because of the nature of the crime. I saw that a lack of information about sex trafficking was making their stories taboo.
I decided to stop at nothing to end sex trafficking and sexual violence, starting with creating education for all Washington students in grades 7 through 12. My hope was that education could provide reliable information about these crimes and generate action to end and prevent these crimes.
I started working to develop a 6-week course, which I took to Sen. Claire Wilson, a champion of comprehensive sexual health education. I learned from her as I began having conversations with other legislators, education officials, and medical practitioners who could add their expertise. I found the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) through these conversations and discovered the opportunity to apply for an Open Educational Resources (OER) Project Grant. The grant supports the creation of OERs, teaching and learning resources that are free for use across Washington.
The problem was that I was just a teenager who had never operated a state system, filed reimbursement claims, written hiring contracts, or interviewed others for a team. But as I camped out at my school’s administrative office or emailed dozens of individuals and organizations, I refused to give up. When I needed motivation, I remembered looking into one survivor’s eyes and reminded myself that I was doing this for her and all sex trafficking survivors.
Through a stroke of luck in the 24 hours before the grant submission deadline, I convinced my private school to be my grant submitter and fiscal agent. Ten days later, I learned that I had won the grant! The dreams I had just begun to conceptualize had the potential to become an impactful reality.
Yet, as I developed plans for the materials of my instructional unit, I kept scrapping my plans. Everything was either too generalized, too specific, too graphic, or too understated. I found myself unable to fully encapsulate the insidious nature of sex trafficking. Despite the comprehensive sexual health education in Washington, I knew that sex trafficking was often glossed over under the assumption that it “wouldn’t happen to anyone” or only happened to the stereotypical “girl walking alone at night.”
Suddenly, my course goal materialized: I would start by breaking down stereotypes about who may be affected by sexual violence and sex trafficking, building enough information for students to act in the name of the betterment of society. My instructional unit would provide information on preventing these crimes as well as ways to seek justice. I am currently working with my content writer, curriculum reviewer, and public school educators to ensure these visions can translate to reality as best as possible.
This school year, I’m piloting my unit in three public school districts and at my private school, Eastside Preparatory School. Every brick in the wall of my educational advocacy has been glued together by the diverse and loving communities I found, and I could not be more thankful for them. I always wake up excited to work on how this unit will impact Washington students and, hopefully one day, the sex trafficking statistic. No one deserves a life in captivity and silence.
About the Author
Ria Bahadur is a 12th grade student at Eastside Preparatory School, where she is the captain of the Speech and Debate Team. She advocates for preventing sex trafficking and sexual violence through her work as a second-year member of Washington’s Legislative Youth Advisory Council (LYAC) and is writing a Senate bill to create and mandate standards for sex trafficking education across Washington State. Bahadur has also participated in internships in various scientific laboratories, from Seattle Children’s Research Institute to the University of California-Irvine. In her free time, Bahadur enjoys singing (Hindustani Classical), dancing (Kathak), writing free-verse poems, and reading philosophy, fantasy, or science fiction.
