Downtown Las Vegas event raises awareness of human trafficking

Emily Fleming had a lot to compete with Saturday on the Fremont Street Experience — the shouts of a zipliner overhead; feather-clad showgirls posing for photos; a welter of wandering, drink-toting tourists. But she blocked everything out to deliver a powerful message on human trafficking.

Fleming, a small girl with braces and red hair, approached the microphone to share her original poem, titled “Shelf Life.”

“I have a bar code on my wrist, I’m being bought and sold,” she read from her phone, hair covering part of her face. “To be played with like a broken doll, I was only 12 years old.”

Fleming, wearing a bracelet made of orange plastic links meant to look like a chain, was the first performer in Saturday’s “Break These Chains, Live Free” event to raise awareness about human trafficking.

Two women followed Fleming’s dramatic reading with passionate renditions of two songs, “The Scars Inside” and “Break These Chains.” Afterward, event mistress of ceremonies Stacey Yurmanovic-Sawyer announced two winners of “The Ugly Truth,” a Pahrump Valley High School art contest.

Syamini Breathwaite, 17, won for her painting of a shadowy, hooded figure pushing a shopping cart down an aisle lined with shelves of tiny, scantily clad women in clear jars.

“Human trafficking is a huge issue right now,” Breathwaite said, adding that most of her research for the painting turned up stories of women being exploited for sex. “They’re pretty much treating them like products off the shelf, like they can just buy them.”

Break These Chains, a nonprofit organization founded in 2013 by Southern Nevada Soroptomist clubs, sponsored Saturday’s event. Soroptimist is a global women’s organization aiming to improve women’s and children’s lives through programs that give them better access to education and work, according to the club’s website.

But human trafficking doesn’t affect only women, Yurmanovic-Sawyer told Saturday’s crowd. Human trafficking, the world’s fastest-growing and second-largest criminal industry, is modern-day slavery and happens anytime one person coerces another into soliciting sex or labor against his or her will.

“Human trafficking comes in many forms,” she said. “Children are forced to become soldiers, teenage girls are beaten and forced into prostitution and migrants are exploited and compelled to work for little or no pay.”

Las Vegas is a hub for human trafficking because of its large, transient population, Yurmanovic-Sawyer said. Several rings were busted here, she said.

Sarah Walker, a 50-year-old Break These Chains executive board member, was in line for a flight to Florida in December at McCarran International Airport when she saw Transportation Safety Administration staff stop and interrogate four teens at a security checkpoint. She said she learned later that they were human trafficking victims.

“It’s being thought of as ‘It doesn’t happen in my community, it’s not happening to my children,’” Walker said. “It’s a problem everywhere, and there needs to be more awareness.”

The National Trafficking Hotline’s phone number is 1-888-373-7888. Visit breakthesechainslivefree.org for information about raising human trafficking awareness.

Contact Kimber Laux at klaux@reviewjournal.com. Follow @lauxkimber on Twitter.