I was inside a brothel and the owner brought two girls into the room. The first was 7 years old and the second was 5. I negotiated the price, capturing everything on the covert camera I was wearing in the hope it might later be used to facilitate his arrest and their rescue.
After paying a deposit for a future transaction and with my evidence gathered, I went to leave. The 7-year-old stepped forward, offering herself to me with a forced smile. My translator explained that she was trying to protect the 5-year-old. She was her little sister.
During my eight years inside the human trafficking industry I met thousands of people who had lost everything, including any recourse to or respect for their human rights. Yet many embodied an inherent dignity and interior freedom that was beyond the ability of anyone else to take away.
COVID has exposed the shallow and infantile ways in which we seek to uphold our human rights. Both those in support and those opposed to vaccination have been vilified and dehumanised, each side clinging to their rights as the ultimate validation for their version of truth, then using those “rights” as the very means to abuse and assault one another.
Confirmation bias, complexity bias and other forms of unconscious prejudice trap us all in various states of illusion and deception. Our egocentricity blinds us all to any other interpretation of reality. We are addicted to the control we think we have over the life that we think we are living.
Thankfully, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was founded upon a deeper truth that has the potential to reconnect us all. The preamble opens with these words; “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all … is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world…”
There is growing recognition within the sustainable business community and those addressing universal challenges such as slavery, biodiversity collapse and climate change, that a new lens is necessary to help us recognise the dignity we all carry, our connection to each other and to the planet upon which our very survival depends.
Unlike human rights, the paradox of human dignity is that the more we fight for it, the less we have. Human dignity is something we can only recognise and accept. The more we let go of our egocentric ways of seeing, the more clearly we embody human dignity. This is the starting place for a response to all the challenges that confront us.
When we demean and dehumanise others for any reason (e.g. choosing to be vaccinated or to remain unvaccinated) and use our rights to justify our slander and cruelty, we expose our own ignorance and folly. Any notion of human rights without equal recognition of inherent dignity, is devoid of meaning and value.
I returned to the brothel several weeks later with a team of police officers. The operation did not go as planned and even as I entered the building my heart sank as I could tell we were too late. We searched the village but failed to locate the 7-year-old and her 5-year-old little sister. I never saw them again.
I later learned that in an attempt to destroy all the evidence, some of the children who were previously for sale had been murdered. I don’t know whether the two girls were among those killed. I also don’t know what to do with the fact that my efforts to protect their human rights may have been the very thing that contributed to their deaths.
What I do know, is that they had indeed lost any recourse to or respect for their human rights. They may even have lost their lives. But their love for each other and the inherent dignity and interior freedom they embodied was truly beyond the ability of anyone to take away. That belongs to them forever.
