Leif Coorlim, an award-winning journalist and executive editor of the CNN Freedom Project, spoke Wednesday about the need to raise awareness about modern-day slavery around the world.
“We have more stories than we can tell,” he said.
About 50 people attended the event in Harris Hall, which was hosted by Fight for Freedom.
Now in its third year, the Freedom Project includes more than 300 stories to date and has led to the rescue of over 1,000 previously enslaved people.
Coorlim said he never imagined the impact that the project would bring to viewers. When he first started the project, he worried it would run out of stories. However, the project touched so many people that viewers began to reach out to the project’s leaders with cases that they had heard of.
Coorlim said the project has helped educate people not just about the existence of human trafficking but also about misconceptions people have about it.
Coorlim argued traffickers sometimes resort to slavery not because they want to but because they have to.
“Not all human traffickers are evil people. Some of them are just trying to survive,” he said. “A lot of people villainize the traffickers or slave owners, but in some cases these plantation owners are just as poor as (the slaves) are.”
Coorlim said two million children are enslaved in Ghana and Cambodia, and the majority of them work in brothels. In fact, Coorlim said, it was a girl named Na working in a Cambodian brothel who first inspired the project.
Na had told him about a hotel where teens were forced to work in brothels. When he and another reporter presented the evidence to the police to start a raid, the police called the raid off the next day, saying Na’s papers proved she was of age.
“When I came back to CNN, the story…enraged a lot of the editorial staff,” he said. “They couldn’t believe this stuff was going on.”
Coorlim said that first experience made him realize they had the ability to give a voice to people who can’t speak for themselves.
”But by that time I realized we could do this in every country. We could do this every week,” he said. “This is going on all over the place.”
Medill senior Eric Feldman said he attended the event because he wanted to learn how Coorlim tackled important stories.
“It was most interesting to hear how CNN took a stance with the Freedom Project,” he said.
Weinberg senior Judith Kim, Fight for Freedom’s president and founder, said it was incredible that a leading news agency would have a separate project dedicated to human trafficking.
“It says a lot when a leader in the news agency makes a clear decision,” she said.
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