Feb. 29, 2000

Washington, DC .... [ANN]

Seventh-day Adventist women have joined with others protesting the enforced labor and sexual exploitation of women and children around the world.
 
“The Seventh-day Adventist Church welcomes recent Congressional investigations into this kind of systematic abuse of women,” says Ardis Stenbakken, Adventist Church spokesperson for women’s issues. “As Christians, we believe in the God-given dignity and worth of every individual.”

Stenbakken’s comments come in response to last week’s hearing by the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee’s Near Eastern and Southern Asian affairs subcommittee.  Evidence was given at the February 22 hearing about women around the world who are being lured into exploitative employment situations by promises of money for their families or assurances of a better life in a new country.  According to testimony, feeder countries for the slave trade include Albania, Ukraine, the Philippines, Thailand, Nigeria, and Mexico.

One witness at the hearing spoke of working six days a week, 12 hours a day, in the United States sex industry after leaving her native Mexico on the promise of work as a waitress in a restaurant.

“One of two methods-force or fraud-is used to obtain victims,” says United States Senator Sam Brownback, chairperson of the subcommittee.  “The most common method, fraud, is used with villagers in under-developed areas.  We need a comprehensive policy to penalize the full range of offenses involved in the elaborate trafficking networks.”

“There seems to be a low level of public awareness of this issue,” says Stenbakken. “But with an estimated 1 million women and children worldwide forced into the sex trade each year, this is a significant social problem that needs urgent, concerted, action-from governments, humanitarian organizations and religious groups.”

“Raising awareness of this ongoing tragedy is an important first step,” adds Stenbakken. “We must be the voice of those women who have been silenced through this degrading practice.”

As part of its international education campaign, the Women’s Ministries department of the Adventist Church has identified a number of critical challenges facing women around the world including illiteracy, poverty, threats to health, employment conditions, and abuse.

Stenbakken points out that one of the core goals of the Women’s Ministries department is to raise awareness of those conditions which denigrate the value of women in society.  She refers to the statement on abuse in the department’s handbook that condemns “incest, child pornography, the selling of the girl child into prostitution, and early arranged marriages.”

In an official statement of the World Church, released in June 1995, Adventist leaders affirmed that “women are entitled to the God-given privileges and opportunities intended for every human being-the right to literacy, to education, to adequate health care, to decision making, and to freedom from mental, physical, or sexual abuse.” [Bettina Krause]

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