The commitment and art work of Aditya Madupur
Aditya has made beautiful painting of Angel Annie and here below he explains his motivation and commitment to use art to support the rights of women and children.
How does my art reflect the issue of human trafficking?
My work highlights the social issue of child human trafficking in the Philippines. First off, the title of my work is ‘Red Light. ’A red-light district is an area that contains many sex businesses, which is what many children in human trafficking are used for. In addition, a red light on a traffic light means stop, as in stop trafficking. The main focus of the work is the Filipino girl. She has a broken wing, representing what it feels like to be trafficked for sex. I have the words ‘Philippines’ and then I cross it out and write ‘Everywhere,’ showing how worldwide the issue is. I have some images of innocence in the art, with the flowers and the teddy bear. However, the innocence is drowned out by the rest of the violent images, like the world on fire. In the bottom left I wrote the word ‘please’ many times. This shows how many of these girls’ attempts to break free are shoved into a corner and silenced. Also, it’s really difficult to see the words, symbolizing how so many people are asking for help that their cries are being drowned out by one another. In the bottom right corner, I have a top donor’s list. The things that the countries are “donating” are the kids trafficked. On the top right corner, the phone number of the human trafficking line is written, but it has been covered with white paint, showing how the access to help is hidden. I have a family with devil horns near the phone number. This is in reference to a statistic that many families in the Philippines use their own children in sex acts. Next to the burning world, there is a pie chart that is 25% filled and a bell curve with an average age of 13. The pie chart is a reference to 25% of trafficked victims being children and the bell curve is the average age of children trafficked. The ‘100,000’ is an estimate of how many children are being trafficked in the Philippines. Finally, the background is made with newspapers. I chose this background because so many children are being trafficked that people seem to have become desensitized to it, so the news rarely reports on it anymore.
Why is this issue important to me?
This issue is very important to me because of the pain that human trafficking causes. I was watching a documentary where a child trafficker was getting caught by the police. After the broker was caught, I assumed that the girls were saved and could return to a normal life. However, the girls weren’t done with their problems. They were lost and confused and were taken to a non-profit that rehabilitates them by overcoming their past; they were letting their anger out by beating mats and crying. I consider myself a pretty stoic person, but seeing these poor girls broken and having to live with the pain that the traffickers inflicted on them broke me. These girls didn’t do anything to deserve this. Some of them were forced into sex rings and had to perform sex acts on camera. One of the traffickers was a mother who was using her own children to perform these acts. Where would those girls go to? It was disgusting and to the girls, the acts were normalized because it was all they had known. This issue should be important to others because the only way to decrease human trafficking is to support organizations that tackle human trafficking. The amount of child porn being produced and watched is too much for any organization to track and stop. However, every single image or video produced is one child being hurt, and we must help in any way possible, either by donating or recognizing the signs of a trafficker.
