The UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) sponsored an unprecedented Court of Women hearing earlier this month in Nusa Dua, Bali (Indonesia). The jury deliberating in this most unusual trial — in which victims of sex trafficking testified not only about their abductions but about their treatment by the law agencies designed to subsequently “protect” them.

Victims of sex trafficking and societal re-victimization testified before the Court of Women in Bali, on Aug. 7, 2009We see over and over again in every topic covered in our new International Women’s Rights channel that women become “damaged goods” after being raped, abducted or harmed in hundreds of ways. After the initial transgression against them, women become social pariahs in their own communities, where they’re shunned and cast aside, rather than helped.

Systematically, women are re-victimized over and over again.

In Bali’s Court of Women, Ms. Meutia Hatta, Minister for Women’s Empowerment of Indonesia, said:”of the total number of people trafficked globally, one-third is from South East Asia and gender inequality and unequal power relations are the main fuelling factors for this phenomenon.” In view of the seriousness of the issue, the Government of Indonesia enacted the anti-trafficking law in 2008. The spread of HIV in the region is increasingly impacting women 2-3 times more at risk of contracting HIV than men in the same age group.

The Court of Women apparently is a pilot project, a new paradigm of information and education that allows women’s voices to be heard and the awful re-victimization stories told in a quasi-legal proceeding that’s designed to educate and change both legal processes for women and social attitudes in offending countries.

I discovered the UNODC website, following the tracks of Smarty Pants guy Howard Buffett. Howard is an awesome and inspiring man, who criss crosses the different channels at A of C, with his grassroots global activism.

Left to right: Howard G. Buffett, Antonio Maria Costa, Ban Soon-Taek, Robert Biheimer and Kay ChernushHoward Buffett’s global exposure renders him also an activist in the problem of Sex Trafficking.

Buffett sponsored an October 2007 UN New York photo exhibition on Human Trafficking and contributed his own photographs to an artistic look at this growing, female-centric (but not exclusively) heartless, global problem. Anne