Thanks For Helping Me Write My Sex Trafficking Feature!

On February 3, I asked ToM readers to help me write my trafficking feature. Dude, you guys are AWESOME writers! I'm sure you will find your intro grafs much much better than the one I ended up writing, but here's the final product, published in Japan's weekly Metropolis magazine today (I changed her name from May to Bua, because that's the real nickname of the woman I was writing about):

Bua* was getting desperate. Ever since her husband was maimed in a caraccident, the farm they owned in their small village in the Lom Sakprovince of Northern Thailand was shorthanded. Unable to afford eventhe most basic daily provisions, Bua started to depend on her extendedfamily to support her three children. But she knew that arrangementcouldn’t last forever.

Then, one day,
Joe appeared. An older man with a daughter who was good friends withBua's mother, Joe offered her an opportunity she couldn’t afford toturn down: a job as an entertainer in Japan. Bua didn't know anythingabout Japan but, right now, her family could really use the money. Thedecision to leave them in favor of work was hard to make, yet thepromise of a better future easily trumped the desire to stay.

She didn’t know it yet, but Bua had just signed herself up for a trip on the human trafficking highway that would ultimately land her in prison.

You can read the rest of the story here.