Your intrepid reporter here, bringing you the latest from Google Alerts.

Google sends me an e-mail when something appears online about the cheery topics I touch on in Silent Girl, such as domestic violence, sex trafficking, bride kidnapping, racism, global warming, and incest. I get so many notifications every day I shove them into a file to get them off my read page until I can find time to review them.

Yesterday, I took a look at a few about sex trafficking, a topic that falls within the broader issue of slavery which, according to some sources, is the third largest criminal enterprise in the world after drugs and guns. One source estimates that 27 million people are slaves of one sort or another. Officially abolished worldwide at the 1927 Slavery Convention, slavery continues to thrive with billions of dollars in annual profits. Approximately 80% of the “commodities” traded are women and children and 80% of the services they’re enslaved to provide are sexual.

As a writer, I try to imagine the individual stories behind the statistics. I wrote one of them (the title story in the collection) about a seven-year-old girl who, after losing her mother in the 2004 tsunami, is kidnapped and sold to a brothel. Researching the story was painful. I was appalled at what I learned and felt helpless to do anything except write about it. Luckily, others have felt empowered to do more.

Google Alerts called my attention to several organizations working in various ways to abolish modern-day slavery and provide aid for victims. Organizations like the American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG), Polaris Project, Free the Slaves and Change.org.

AASG promotes awareness, engages in advocacy and activism, and provides direct aid for victims.

Polaris Project was named after the North Star that guided US slaves towards freedom along the Underground Railroad. It operates in the US and Japan, seeking out victims and providing them with social services and transitional housing. It also operates a human trafficking hotline.

Free the Slaves, headquartered in Washington, DC, goes right to the “frontlines,” they say, to liberate people. According to their site, they also “enlist businesses to clean slavery out of their product chains and empower consumers to stop buying into slavery, work with governments to produce effective anti-slavery laws then hold them to their commitments, and research what works and what doesn’t.”

Change.org takes on human trafficking as one of a number of its causes. It profiles cases and provides a forum for activists.

An intriguing headline, compliments of Google, claimed that cannibalism and sex tourism were criminalized under a bill passed by Uganda’s Parliament last week. Actually, the bill is broader than the headline implies and offers a laundry list of what might constitute slavery today.

It provides that “any person who recruits, hires or maintains, confines, transports, transfers, harbours or receives a person, through force for purposes of engaging that person in prostitution, pornography, sexual exploitation, forced labour, forced or arranged marriage is liable to 15 years imprisonment.” Also,  “Any person who commits an offence in trafficking in children, uses a child in any armed conflict, removes any part, organ or tissues from the body of a child taken alive, uses a child in a commission of crime or uses a child or part of a child in witchcraft or related practices, commits the offence of aggravated trafficking in children and is liable to life imprisonment.”

And, finally, yesterday the United Nations today launched a manual called Combating Trafficking in Persons: A Handbook for Parliamentarians —a compilation of international laws and good practices developed to combat human trafficking.

All good news, I guess, but…”organ or tissues from the body of a child taken alive”…? I would not be able to write that story.

“Nobody; I Myself,” the fifth story in Silent Girl, is narrated by a white woman married to a black man in the US in 1966. Young and idealistic, she struggles with the conflict between her empathy for blacks because of the injustice they suffer and her nascent belief that they share at least a part of the blame for their situation.

Growing up in the States at that time, I was deeply moved by that injustice and both hopeful and despairing about the country’s ability to effect lasting change.  Later, as a woman trying to make it in the business world, I empathized even more with blacks: females were held back for reasons of gender as blacks were for reasons of race. It wasn’t fair (!!!) and I was all about fairness those days, despite my father having told me, “If I led you to believe life was fair, I’m sorry.”

Since then, much has improved for blacks (and women) but, as a society, we still grapple with how to provide equity for all, including blacks and other visible minorities, aboriginals, women, the disabled, gays, lesbians, and the transgendered —who have I forgotten? Some say we’ve gone too far to accommodate anyone who feels different and/or mistreated, that we’re encouraging too many folks to feel entitled to preferential treatment. Some are tired of what they see as attempts to make them feel guilty for not being among the disenfranchised. As a bonafide Libra, I tend to see everyone’s point and find it difficult to take a firm stand. (Is there a support group for Librans?)

Because of my fence-sitting proclivities, I was attracted to this article by Wendi Thomas about the 10th annual White Privilege Conference going on right now in Memphis, Tennessee. Under discussion at the conference is the question of how much difference it makes to your success in life to be part of the dominant group (in this case, Whites). As Thomas writes, “The conference is not about blaming white people, but raising awareness about privilege wherever it lies,” and that privilege is not just about race. You can be privileged because of gender, sexual orientation, able-bodiedness (is that a word?), beauty, wealth, etc. I like this extension of the definition because it encourages us to look at ourselves in a fuller way, not as simply “us” or “them.” I may be “disadvantaged” due to being female, old, and hard of hearing, but I’m privileged in other ways because I’m white, heterosexual, able-bodied (except for the old and hard of hearing parts), literate…and so many other things. If I were black, I’d still have literacy going for me. (And, according to a friend, I’m more privileged than she because I “have someone.” As that someone is Colin, I have to agree.)

By no means does this broader view take away from the reality that blacks, for example, are “twice as like to be unemployed, three times more likely to live in poverty and more than six times as likely to be imprisoned compared with whites,” according to this Chicago Tribune article. We can find similar statistics highlighting the “cost” of being a woman, disabled, homosexual, or a member of another non-dominant group.

What it does say to me is that each of us can appreciate the abilities we have, admire those of others, and use whatever privilege we enjoy to create a society where the development of those abilities is not limited by dominant views of who is entitled to accomplish what. It doesn’t say that all will end up the same or that no one will suffer. Dad was right.

Welcome to 2009.

An assumption underlying my Silent Girl story, “The Snow People: 30-46 AGM,” is that the Arctic ice will melt and oceans will rise high enough to seriously endanger people living in low-lying areas of the earth. I started writing the story after I read projections that the ice could be gone as early as 2040 and that sea levels could rise as much as 13 feet. The story is set in the future, but not too far ahead, maybe 70 years from now. It opens with the Snow People’s creation myth:

To the child in my womb I say: the blood passing between your heart and mine comes from the very first Snow People, two lovers who defied an ancient taboo and ate the liver of a polar bear. It should have killed them. Instead, it turned their skin and hair as white as the great bear’s fur and their eyes the colour of a glacial lake. The lovers had seven children, all with the same white skin and hair, all but one with the same startling eyes. For thousands of years, the lovers’ white-skinned, white-haired descendants worshipped The Land and survived on what it bestowed until even the winter ice began to thin and fewer of the fish they caught and fewer of the animals they hunted passed their way. One year the ice refused to return, and water swallowed The Land. The Snows loaded up their boats and began the Great Migration south. After many seasons, they landed on an island populated by people the Snows called Rainbows in a republic called New Columbia. The Rainbows took their boats away and the Snows could no longer hunt and fish. They could no longer worship The Land.

I don’t consider my story science fiction, because its use of hard science is minimal. It’s more of a futuristic fantasy, but I didn’t realize how important the scientific projections I based it on were to me until NPR reported on a new study that predicts a sea level rise at closer to six feet than 13. And a CNN report about a NASA study says it won’t be more than three feet by the end of this century.

This is good news for those of us living on islands, but I can’t tell you how much it deflated me. I had intended to develop my story of Selanna, her son Akintunde, and Chloe, the messiah of Akintunde’s dreams, into a novel. Granted, it’s fiction, and you should be able do whatever you want in that genre, but it took the prophetic winds out of my sails. So, I decided to embark on a different novel. The change in sea level projection wasn’t the only reason. Until I wrote “The Snow People,” I didn’t realize how much of a bias against science fiction/fantasy writing exists in some circles and I’m just not ready at this point to buck that tide.

“The Snow People” is my editor’s favourite story in the collection and I heard from one reader that she also liked it best. But others have told me it’s not their “thing” because it’s set in an unfamiliar time and place. Two members of my writing group were relieved I decided to abandon my idea of turning it into a novel, because they just can’t “get into” fantasy and science fiction. And a former professor told me that some literature professors she taught with refused to read even Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake because they don’t read futuristic literature on principle. They consider it beneath them — akin, I suppose, to bodice rippers and paperback westerns.

I’m glad I don’t have such principles. I would have missed out on Atwood’s brilliant work, not to mention Frank Herbert’s Dune series and Ursula Le Guin’s probing stories. In my unschooled opinion, if the primary value of literature is that it deepens our understanding of the human condition today, futuristic literature can allow us to reflect on how the human condition might evolve in a hypothetical tomorrow that begins right now in our minds.

What say you?

Image: From the Silent Girl preview video.