Samar Minallah Khan was recently honored by Vital Voices, an organization that strives to honor extraordinary women, for her moving documentaries.

Khan’s makes documentaries that expose the gender-based violence that occurs in Pakistan. According to NPR, the majority of her films are about swara, the practice “where a daughter is given away as compensation for a crime. Swara happens mainly in poor, rural areas.”

The video below shows a bit of Khan’s moving work and how she’s documenting the way men are evolving and helping stop gender-based violence, too.

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ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

I have just returned back home from running around Manhattan and New York Fashion Week. As you might imagine, an intense week full of long legged runway models, moody designer presentations, and the deep bass beats of stylish music gives New York City the air of theater, sex, and retail desire. It’s also a week-long voyeuristic sneak peak at what we all hope to be wearing next spring and summer when emerging from our winter cocoons.

Fashion is sexy. It serves as both a transformative power pill and a retreat for the world-weary. It’s a place we can go to to become stronger by the very clothes we wear and in lieu of the fact that our inner strength isn’t enough. Power is sexy. If you think I am wrong, point me to the runway show you’ve been to recently that shows women hunched over in house dresses looking down at the ground from nerves.

Fashion is all about power and I couldn’t help thinking about it this past week. There were even times when photographing shows I put the camera down a little in order to see the model walking at me with my own eyes instead of through a lens. Some of them reeked of this confidence so much that I laughed out loud. It’s their job to trick us into believing that a certain look is all we need to get by in this world. It is their job to act as a visual representation of a designer’s ideal, a paper doll with folded tabs that takes off and puts on outfits that when our own, will help in terms of better jobs, business deals, romance and getting the job done.

While I am lucky to be covering sustainable fashion 99% of the time, where designer’s “About Us” pages tout social responsibility, closed loop technologies and organically grown fabrics, most of the fashion industry is just not there. Nor does it really care to be.

Case in point, waking to a story this morning on the Pakistan garment factory fire that has left (as of the writing of this column) 289 dead. In this, the biggest industrial accident in the country’s history, we are left to scratch our heads and wonder how this could be or maybe we don’t want to look at it too closely at the risk that it will tell us something about ourselves.

The “Inspection of industrial units by the provincial labor department was mandatory under the rules until 1997 when it was banned after demands by influential industrialists in the Sindh and Punjab provinces,” Shujah-ud-Din, a senior research associate at the Pakistan Institute of Labour, Education and Research, told Bloomberg by phone from Karachi. Factory accidents also claimed 419 lives in 2008.

The Karachi garment factory itself had locked fire exits, barred windows and there wasn’t a sprinkler in site. A single staircase connecting four floors became kindling for a boiler in the factory that burst into flames, engulfing all floors that were connected to it. Workers chopped away at the bars with tools to jump from 4th story windows – pregnant women, old men, nephews, aunts. People trying to make a living so that society could wear something new.

I recently interviewed Elizabeth Cline, author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. Cline told me, “To our credit, it took consumers several decades to be convinced that they no longer wanted to own beautifully made clothing and to make them forget that $20 does not in any way buy a well-crafted garment.”

In a fast fashion crazed society, where we want more, faster, cheaper, we will always have stories like this in the headlines. Hard-working people who will accept being modern day slaves to put food on the table and a roof over their heads.

You will read all the headlines on this factory fire story and it will stay with you for a bit, until you need a new shirt, a pair of boots or a party dress. You might even consider the tragedy when you walk through the front doors of your favorite fast fashion chain. But you probably won’t be able to stop yourself once you hear the deep bass beat from the well-positioned speakers, the beads and bold colors merchandised like candy, the other women around you, arms laden with pretty dresses at $19.99, and how could you?

You were conditioned to shop this way. But let me tell you something, I think you can start walking past these stores, in fact, I think you can stay out of the mall entirely. I think you can plan ahead and look for the right designers who don’t have factories like this – who pay their workers fairly, who let them work from home who don’t treat them like animals.

People often tell me I can shop responsibly because I know so many designers, I just “know how to do it.”

But knowing how to “do it,” and realizing one has a responsibility to “do it,” are two completely different things. One requires making a call to the eco-boutique or hitting the local consignment shop and the other? Well, that requires lowering the camera and looking at life with a real-life lens.

It requires considering not just yourself, but the lives of many others.

Between the Lines is a weekly column by EcoSalon’s Editor-in-Chief on navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of conscious life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

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How a film about children sold into slavery reveals the plight of those working daily to restore broken lives.

“I realize what I’m doing is just a ripple in the larger scheme of things,” says filmmaker Jody Hassett Sanchez, who is traveling the world to promote her documentary Sold. The film is a horrific yet hopeful window into adults who sell and traffic children and the modern day abolitionists  risking life and limb to end the $27 billion-a-year industry.

A ripple perhaps, but the small film is leaving audiences devastated in its wake at screenings across the globe, from formal showings to the British Parliament to warm meet and greets at St. Luke Presbyterian Church in San Rafael. It poses the question: Can one person make a difference when it comes to ending child slavery today? Three inspirational activists including a Hindu in India, a Christian in Africa and a Muslim in Pakistan are each doing their part to combat the buying and selling of humans, which has flourished under globalization. We see what they are up against in the harshest of settings where blood is not always thicker than water when faced with starvation.

Desperate parents must make a Sophie’s Choice of sorts in allowing a trader in their village to whisk away one of their children with the promise of a reunion in four years or so. The parents are reassured the children will be treated well, a delusional bargain at best.

In reality, boys as young as three have been ripped from their homes in Pakistan and sold to the UAE as camel jockeys for sport and entertainment. Fed water and crackers to stay underweight, the boys have suffered permanent genitalia damage when strapped on the camels and forced to ride 14 hours a day on desert racetracks.

But because of the political and diplomatic rescue efforts of attorney Ansar Burney in Karachi, the Saudis have enacted new laws to outlaw the brutal practice pledging to only use riders age 18 or over. Burney is one of three abolitionists starring as the main characters of the film and emerges a hero as he reunites the boys with their families and to repair their broken spirits.

“I’m not sure if they can be totally restored because of what they have been through and the idea of therapy is a western notion,” says Sanchez about what happens to these children once returned to schooling or household duties back home. “But there is a feeling of hopefulness and they do receive a great deal of love from the people around them.”

It seems no one is more loving than former Hindu nun Dr. Sunitha Krishman, a social activist and co-founder of Prajwala, an institution rescuing trafficked women and girls and helping them find shelter.  She organizes brothel raids and oversees 17 schools for young girls she rescues from forced prostitution in India. The film has us cringing when describing how the youngest virgins reap the highest prices. Krishman evokes the image of Mother Teresa as she embraces the girls who are given new identities and a fresh start. The brave crusader admits she has been shot at several times and is deaf in one year from the violence inflicted by traffickers.

And in rural Togo, Symphorienne Kessouagni gently helps to re-socialize and educate former slave children. Most tell the story of their parents sending them away to live with distant relatives only to end up in the hands of brokers who smuggled them across the border to do heavy labor, doing work even strong adults would find grueling.

The film is clearly faith-based, relying on religion as a healer and unifier as witnessed in the first Abolition Movement and throughout history. What’s missing from the film is the exposure of the sinister elements, ambush interviews with brokers or underground footage of rich Saudis delighting in child jockeys. Sanchez, a former ABC News producer, explains she made the deliberate choice to omit the “other side to the story,” arguing it wouldn’t add a thing.

“This is not another movie about what is wrong in the world but one that focuses on those who are making a difference trying to solve the problems,” she says. “We want our audiences to be outraged that there is more slavery than ever before in history, but we also want them to move from anger to action.”

Images: Emirates 24/7: Hyderabad Burpp; Jodyhassettsanchez; Ansar Burney

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