The March 9 program, “Eliminating All Forms of Violence Against Girls and Women of All Ages,” took place in conjunction with International Women’s Day and drew more than 125 attendees. Various keynote speakers and panelists at the event, sponsored by GSS’ Institute for Women and Girls, said sexual violence and harassment is a global, not national, problem.

Anny Morrobel-Sosa, Ph.D., senior vice president of academic affairs at Lehman College, said that approximately 25 percent of college-aged women reported experiences that met the legal definitions of rape or attempted rape.

“And one in three of the victims are freshmen,” said Morrobel-Sosa.

Morrobel-Sosa shed light on acts and amendments that protect students enrolled at higher-education institutions from sexual violence and harassment—in particular Title IX, initiated in 1972, banning sexual discrimination in schools. In addition to the Title IX amendment, the Clery Act, which was codified in the Higher Education Act of 1965, mandates all universities that receive federal financial assistance to publish and disclose an annual security report on campus crime.

Morrobel-Sosa emphasized that counseling and training are critical in prevention, and said that “universities are charged in the development of materials and implementation of policies” that would aid its students.

As part of a panel presentation, Monique John, a Fordham College at Lincoln Center senior, spoke about her impetus to edit Voices, an online publication aimed at providing victims of sexual exploitation a community and media outlet. Having worked at Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (GEMS), an organization designed to serve girls and young women who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking, John said she realized how important it was to give voice to these victims because “a lot of the media coverage on the commercial sex industry limits the conversation.”

“In America, it’s painted as prostitution, as opposed to exploitation,” said John.

Voices helps give survivors a form of therapy and creates a community for them to express themselves, she said.

“I wanted others to see their work and celebrate them for the talented and eloquent people that they were,” said John.

Injecting a global perspective, Arun Lobo, a social worker from India and director of the Dayalbagh Rural Development Projects, said that women in India are struggling to become more independent members of a patriarchal society.

According to the ancient code of Manu, “in childhood a female must be subject to her father, and in youth to her husband, and then to her sons—that is to say she has no freedom at all for herself.”

Lobo’s development project works with women on the lowest rung of the caste system in India—the Dalit, or the “untouchables.” Due to the caste’s widespread illiteracy, superstition, and poverty, sexual violence against the Dalit women is further worsened.

“Our movement allows these women who have come together as a union to assert their basic rights,” said Lobo.

Fellow panelist Swarnalaksmi Ravi, a 13-year-old member of the Tamilnadu Pondicherry State Parliament of Children, said that joining the children’s parliament opened new horizons for her. She is able to work on various state and national level child-led advocacy delegations for child rights in India.

“We do not sit back and watch as problems arise. We come together and talk about how we can best solve these problems,” said Ravi. “If we cannot solve them ourselves, we take them to the higher-ups.”

The parliament has solved many issues regarding child rights. One incident in particular concerned a 15-year-old girl forced into marriage against her wishes. Ravi’s advocacy group helped stop the marriage by taking it to a higher municipal level.

“It gives us confidence and hope to solve bigger problems,” Ravi said of the outcome.

Whether on a national or global level, eliminating violence against women starts at the grassroots level, panelists and speakers said.

“Know your rights, know your boundaries and limits, and communicate them when you can,” said Morrobel-Sosa. “Assess your environment, trust your instincts. Above all, be safe and be well.”

“Human Trafficking of Young Women” was a joint effort between Fordham and the Coalition of Religious Congregations to Stop Trafficking of Persons (NY-CRC-STOP), a 5,000-strong collective of religious groups that advocate against a lucrative illegal business that lures vulnerable girls into a world of prostitution from which they may never escape.

In a keynote speech, Rachel Lloyd, founder and director of Girls Education and Mentoring Services (GEMS), a grassroots organization that supports 1,000 female sex trafficking victims annually, said that the most critical task is to educate an American public that erroneously views young prostitutes as criminals, rather than victims.

“When we see children from Thailand who have been trafficked, we are sympathetic,” said Lloyd, who was herself coerced into the German sex trade industry as a teenager. “But here in the U.S. there is a sense that girls who are ‘working’ must choose that life because otherwise they would leave.

“You don’t have to be chained to a bed to feel that you can’t leave,” Lloyd said. “We need to teach people to apply the same dynamic to sex trafficking victims as they apply to [kidnap victims]Elizabeth Smart or Shawn Hornbeck. If girls feel like they can’t walk through that open door, they might as well be chained to a bed.”

Somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of girls and boys who end up in the sex trade have been sexually abused by a parent prior to recruitment, Lloyd said. Since approximately 98 percent of the girls and women that GEMS serves are minorities, she added, it is impossible to ignore class and race in the argument of trafficking.

“It is easy in this country to feel like everyone can succeed if they want, that America is the land of opportunity and that you can ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps,’” Lloyd said. “Oh, really? Is it the same for everybody? That hasn’t been my experience. Living in the Bronx looks very different than living in Lower Manhattan. We are in the same city, but we do not share the same options.”

Lloyd recounted the story of a 13-year-old girl who went with a pimp simply because he was nice enough to let her sit in the front of his big car. Another, said Lloyd, was coerced because the pimp took her to a Red Lobster—her first time at a restaurant.

“These things make the girls feel special, make them feel loved,” Lloyd said. “You have to ask what happened to that kid [at home]to make her feel that’s the best it ever gets.”

GEMS works closely with the New York court system to help young sex trade victims break out of the illegal business and start to rebuild their lives. In a panel discussion following the keynote, Queens Supreme Court Administrative Judge Fernando Camacho recalled seeing teenage offenders “crying, with lifeless eyes” come repeatedly before his court for 20-day sentences before going back to their pimps.

“Sixteen years old, seven arrests within a few months? One day I said, ‘Stop the madness.’”

Camacho began to work with GEMS to place the girls in emergency housing and get them counseling, a non-criminalizing approach that was already being administered for certain drug offenders and mental health offenders. Under the Safe Harbor Act signed by Gov. David Paterson in 2008, such emergency and social services treatments are now mandatory for children caught in prostitution.

“The way we had been dealing with these girls in the past as a criminal justice community failed miserably,” Camacho said. “I am hopeful that in the next ten [years]we will take it all the way, and that these kids will no longer be prosecuted criminally but be treated as they should have always been treated—as victims.”

Rose Mary Sullivan, C.N.D., recounted the STOP coalition’s role in supporting the Safe Harbor Act and the New York Anti-Trafficking Law, which passed in Albany in 2007. The law, which Sister Sullivan said can “serve in many ways as a model for other states,” created stiffer penalties for sex traffickers and increased penalties for patronizing prostitutes, among other things. She said it is one of the strongest anti-trafficking laws in the country.

The event was co-sponsored by Fordham’s Office of Alumni Relations, Office of Mission and Ministry, NY-CRC-STOP and LifeWay Network.

So said a special adviser to UNICEF who spoke on March 9 at the Sixth Annual Women’s Symposium at Fordham.

“Those of us working in the international community have learned how best to respect the rights of women and girls,” said Kimberly Gamble-Payne, child rights special adviser to UNICEF. “But we have not yet figured out how to reach girls who are on the edges of society.”

Reaching this marginalized population means facing the realities of inequality and institutionalized patterns of discrimination, said Gamble-Payne, the keynote speaker at the symposium, hosted by the Fordham Graduate School of Social Service Institute for Women and Girls.

“It means being prepared to abandon harmful practices that affect these marginalized adolescents, and to recognize that some of the worst forms of abuse have nothing to do with cultural values and everything to do with economic behavior,” she added.

The heads of six United Nations agencies signed an agreement on March 3, pledging to bolster the human rights of adolescent girls. Over the next five years, agencies such as UNICEF and UNESCO will increase support to developing countries to better empower the hardest-to-reach adolescent girls, particularly those aged 10 to 14.

Many of the 600 million adolescent girls living in developing countries are cut off from national policies and programs. Millions live in poverty, are burdened by inequality and are subject to violence, abuse and exploitation, such as child labor, child marriage and other harmful practices.

“It’s very difficult to advocate for something that you cannot measure,” Gamble-Payne said. “We have to find a better way to count them.”

The six U.N. agencies will work with government, civil society and communities to:

• educate adolescent girls by ensuring they have access to quality education and complete schooling;
• improve adolescent girls’ health;
• keep adolescent girls free from violence;
• promote adolescent girl leaders; and
• count adolescent girls.

The intra-agency agreement comes 15 years after the Beijing Platform for Action, which was adopted in Beijing, China, at the fourth United Nations World Conference on Women.

The internationally agreed upon plan for achieving equality for women across 12 critical areas remains a focus for the U.N. agencies, Gamble-Payne said. Those areas include:

• poverty,
• education and training,
• health,
• violence,
• armed conflict,
• economics,
• power and decision-making,
• advancement of women,
• human rights,
• media,
• environment, and
• the girl child

“Reaching marginalized girls and helping them get educated and healthy means they will stay in school, marry later, delay childbearing, have healthier children and earn better incomes that will benefit themselves, their families, communities and nations,” she said.

The symposium also included a panel discussion with Ellen Silber, Ph.D., the director of the Mentoring Latinas program; Elizabeth Thomas, a program coordinator with the Brooklyn Young Mothers’ Collective; and Cynthia Martinez, an outreach worker with the Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS).