Kitwana's Journey - An animated short film by HAART Kenya
HAART produced an animated short film to support their anti-trafficking awareness activities in schools across Kenya, and a new report by Walk Free Foundation on modern slavery in the Pacific region.
Kitwana’s Journey is an original short film directed by Ng’endo Mukii, an independent filmmaker based in Nairobi, and produced by HAART (Awareness Against Human Trafficking) Kenya. The story is inspired by one of the survivors that HAART supported, a boy who was trafficked from Nairobi to a rural areas for forced labour, after an old man had promised to take him home.
He was able to escape, and afterwards spent two years on the street until his mother recognized him by a mark he had on his ear. HAART provided support to the family and the boy in recovering from the trauma he experienced.
Animation can provide flexible forms of expression to tell stories of human trafficking and exploitation. While stories can be created based on the memories of witnesses and their personal experience of events, animation gives a safe distance from reality. The identity of victims can be properly protected without having to rely on voice modifiers or the blurring of faces – devices which can make it difficult for a viewer to connect with the humanity of the victim. In animation, we can have visually recognizable faces and emotions that can better facilitate empathy. Sexual abuse can be presented abstractly, which the director chose to do in this case, while still presenting an accurate account of the survivor’s experience.
HAART produced an English and Kiswahili version of the short film to support their anti-trafficking awareness activities in schools across Kenya.
Here’s a round-up of other noteworthy updates and news:
Together with the USAID Asia Counter Trafficking in Persons program, implemented by Winrock International, we hosted our webinar on Ethical Storytelling in Anti-Trafficking Programming last week. We discussed how to navigate competing priorities between client-facing and donor-facing storytellers and were reminded to rethink survivor protection issues at the community level.
Walk Free Foundation released a new report assessing modern slavery in the Pacific region, which documents cases of forced labour, commercial sexual exploitation of children, and forced marriage, and makes a series of policy-based recommendations.
The ILO has developed a global database of over 90 national laws, policies, and regulations that define recruitment fees and related costs.
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