Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

TRAFFICKING

Swedes enlist Canadian’s novel in sex slavery fight

Gripped by his novel about sex slavery, Swedish campaigners have enlisted a Gothenburg-based Canadian to help fight human trafficking, writes Sanne Schim van der Loeff.

Published: 17 October 2012 14:44 CEST
Swedes enlist Canadian's novel in sex slavery fight

When Canadian author Réal Laplaine saw photos of a six-year-old girl in Calcutta taking care of her one-year-old brother, he was shocked.

The result was a novel, “See Me Not”, which tells the fictional story of a 12-year-old girl sold into sexual slavery at the age of eight. An American student’s chance meeting with the girl prompts him to try to save her.

Having recently moved to Gothenburg, western Sweden, Laplaine was put in touch with a Swedish pressure group, Real Stars, which uses art to help raise awareness about sex trafficking.

Laplaine found himself drawn to Real Stars’ ongoing “Fair Sex” campaign for a “trafficking-free Europe”.

According to the group, “Fair Sex” is defined as “sex on equal terms and with mutual respect in all situations”. The group adds: “sex trafficking is the opposite of fair sex.”

Laplaine explains:

“One of the reasons I hooked up with Real Stars is because of their work within the EU,” the author tells The Local.

According to Laplaine, the market for sex trafficking “runs in the billions of dollars”, with countries in central and eastern Europe playing an increasingly prominent role.

Malin Roux, who helped found Real Stars in 2010, explains part of the reason for the recent boom in trafficking in Europe:

“After the fall of the Berlin Wall the growth in trafficking of girls from eastern countries has been enormous,” she says.

“Europe has the highest level of sex slaves per capita in the world.”

According to statistics from the European Union, there was a nearly 10-percent increase in the number of registered trafficking victims sold for sexual exploitation between 2008 and 2010.

“If more European countries established laws against the sex trade, sex trafficking would plummet all over the continent,” Roux explains.

“Imagine all the positive effects such an event would cause, for society and individuals alike.”

And with the EU’s fifth annual Anti-Trafficking Day taking place on Thursday, Real Stars enlisted Laplaine to participate in an event at Stockholm’s Modern Art Museum (Moderna Muséet) to raise awareness in Sweden of the issue.

“We organized the Anti-Trafficking Day event because we think the issue does not receive enough attention,” Roux tells The Local.

Laplaine’s book will feature prominently at the event in the hope of reaching a larger audience.

According to Roux, “hope and positivity” are key words at the event.

To successfully combat sex trafficking, she explains, people must believe it’s possible to bring traffickers to justice.

“We want to see different parts of society come together, to share and exchange ideas,” she says.

Roux hopes visitors leave thinking: “OK, I can do something about this.”

By attending, Laplaine hopes to promote “See Me Not” while at the same time boosting support for Real Stars.

Laplaine has agreed to donate part of the proceeds from the book to the group and hopes the partnership continues.

“I would like the book sales to go into the millions,” Laplaine says with a smile.

“If I can manage to sell a lot of books that will really help Real Stars’ campaign.”

Sanne Schim van der Loeff

Follow The Local on Twitter

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

HISTORY

‘Lost’ manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

Published: 4 May 2022 11:42 CEST
'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

SHOW COMMENTS