We are excited to share news that one of our former ICI Student Fellows, Kate Wallace, was recently featured in a New School News piece about her work on child sex trafficking in India, which was supported in part by a Starr Foundation Student Travel and Research Grant. Here is a brief excerpt from the article:
There are myriad reasons for child disappearances, but there’s no mystery as to the primary culprits: human traffickers, criminals who deal in the trade of humans, most commonly for the purpose of sexual slavery, forced labor or commercial sexual exploitation.
Police action, coordinated at the local, national and international level, is a necessary tool in the fight against this “form of modern slavery,” as the Polaris Project has described it. Kate Wallace and Keiji Kimura (Design and Technology ’07) are taking a different approach to tackling this pressing issue, using game design to empower the children who are targets of human traffickers.
Wallace and Kimura are the creators of BeyondABC, a mobile application that teaches at-risk children in India survival skills to protect themselves against exploitation. With the support of a grant from New Challenge, The New School’s social innovation competition, as well as the nonprofit organizations Sewing New Futures and The Children’s Organization of Southeast Asia, the project is now full steam ahead.
You can read the whole New School News article here. You can read all about Kate’s travels and research in India as a Student Fellow here.