By Chelo Alvarez-Stehle

Feeling grateful when you have plenty is easy. Feeling grateful when you’ve been robbed of the most fundamental possessions in your life: your freedom, your dignity, your sense of being, seems like an impossible task. But not for Virginia Isaias, a survivor of sex trafficking whose journey is part of the documentary film Sands of Silence: Journey into Trafficking, which I am producing/directing and which we hope to release in 2015.

After enduring years of violence at the hands of the husband she was forced to marry at 16, Virginia Isaias left her home in Southern California for her hometown in Mexico. There, Virginia started a business selling clothes to ranchos. One early morning, as Virginia was breast-feeding her baby at a market, she felt a blow in her back. When she woke up she found herself in a shack hundreds of miles away in the midst of the Chiapas jungle. The traffickers told her that her baby had been sold, and using excruciating torture methods, forced her into prostitution.

Virginia eventually escaped and returned to the U.S. . Starting from zero, she cleaned houses and worked for over ten years at a parachute factory, scrimping and saving to buy a humble house. Virginia became a U.S. citizen. In 2010 she created Human Trafficking Survivors Foundation, a501(c)3 in Anaheim, CA. She invested her meager savings in her foundation, and risked losing her house in the endeavor. With no more resources than her passion, Virginia became a walking hotline. When she was asked to help rescue a victim of domestic violence who had been burned and disfigured with acid and was hanging to life by a thread, Virginia did not hesitate to risk her life and travel far into Mexico. The mothers of the three recently disappeared young girls in Anaheim, reached out to Virginia’s foundation when they felt authorities were not making a huge effort in rescuing girls that allegedly had links to prostitution. Phone calls regarding cases of labor trafficking, sexual trafficking, domestic violence or child abuse, are the norm in Virginia’s day to day. This is why Virginia organizes educational outreach events and has a following of hundreds of Latino women throughout Southern California, many of whom do not speak English and would never think of raising their issues with the police. Virginia is thankful for being alive and everyday she strives to share her gratitude with others in need.

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Virginia was nominated to the 100 Make a Difference project, along with celebrities from Gwyneth Paltrow and Maria Shriver to Prince Edward and Eva Longoria. www.100makingadifference.com

Please help Virginia in her efforts by donating to Human Trafficking Survivors Foundation (Fundación de Sobrevivientes de TráficoHumano), a 501(c)3: www.fsth.org (click on “Donaciones”)

Please help finish this independent and labor of love documentary through a tax-deductible donation: www.sandsofsilence.org

Malibu filmmaker launches entertainment-based campaign to stop 21st-century slavery — By Bibi Jordan / Special to The Malibu TimesMalibu filmmaker Chelo Alvarez-Stehle is bringing focus to a delicate, but all too real problem that most Americans assume no longer exists: slavery. She is one of a group of Malibu activists determined to educate teens about human trafficking, the most pervasive modern form of slavery.To this end, she is currently producing a transmedia project that combines a documentary film, “SANDS OF SILENCE: A Personal Journey Into the Trafficking of Women,” and a social impact, web-based game, “SOS_SLAVES: Changing the Trafficking Game.”This is a timely campaign given that January is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. Evidence of this global problem can even be seen on the local level. The Los Angeles Times ran an article in December about the naturalization of a 22-year-old girl from Egypt who had been smuggled into the United States and enslaved in domestic servitude for ten years by a wealthy couple living in Irvine. In 2010, a Beverly Hills recruitment agency was indicted in the largest human trafficking case in U.S. history.“My first encounter with sex trafficking took place fourteen years ago in the Himalayas,” Alvarez-Stehle said. There she met a young girl named Anu Chari Maya Tamang who, as a teenager, had been trafficked by fellow villagers to India. Dumped in a brothel and forced to work as a prostitute, she attempted to end her own life. Thankfully, she survived the suicide attempt and 22 tortuous months as a sex slave.  Read more

Source: Working to change human trafficking | Malibu Life | malibutimes.com

LOS ANGELES – A recent U.S. State Department report says 27 million people worldwide are subject to forced labor and sexual slavery. A major effort is under way in California to fight the problem. Virginia Isaias was forced to marry at 15 in her native Mexico, and later kidnapped with her six-year-old daughter and forced into prostitution. Her story is told in a documentary now being produced, called Sands of Silence. Isaias herself is now an anti-trafficking activist who talks about the cost of human trafficking to groups such as this one, in Santa Ana, California.

Source: Californians Target Human Trafficking

“They take your baby and give it to another woman and they give another woman’s baby to you. So a mother is less likely to flee. They also threaten you and have people watching over you,” said Isaias.

IsaIas escaped and paid a ransom for her child. Her story is all too common, says filmmaker Chelo Alvarez-Stehle.

“Because of globalization, or migration, that pushes people to move from one country to another and they become vulnerable to traffickers,” said Alvarez-Stehle.

Read more

Source: This documentary is giving people the courage to speak out about sexual violence

When the lights come on after a typical screening of Sands of Silence: Waves of Courage, what happens next is inspiring: Survivors of sexual violence start speaking out

Many of them for the first time in their lives. Which is exactly what Chelo Alvarez-Stehle was hoping for when she made this film.

Almost eight years ago, Chelo set out to make a documentary that would give women the courage to stand together and share stories about sexual exploitation and violence. That film is now finished. In preview screenings, audience members have been so consistently moved to share their own stories that professional counselors are now present whenever the film is screened.

The message of the film is simple: It’s time that we end the shame that surrounds survivors of sexual violence. It’s time for all of us to come out of the shadows.Sands of Silence Still Cabana Title

One story the film tracks, is the story of a woman named Virginia and her daughter Lala. After years of being subjected to sexual violence by family and clergy members, Virginia was kidnapped into a Mexican trafficking ring while breastfeeding Lala, her six-month-old baby. Escaping the traffickers with baby Lala in her arms, Virginia ultimately crossed the U.S. border in search of freedom. She then spent a decade rebuilding her life, and becoming a committed advocate against gender exploitation. Virginia then broke the cycle of abuse her life had been engulfed in by confronting her own mother about forcing her to keep silent about the abuse in the family.

At 11, Lala was abused by a pedophile. After a lifetime of seeing her mother speak out about her own abuse, Lala did not keep quiet. Thanks to Lala’s prompt action, they are able to take the offender to jail. We meet Lala six years later, empowered and transformed. Lala, perhaps the only known trafficked baby, breaks her silence about the violence that engulfed her childhood for the first time in this film.

Inspired by Virginia and Lala, Chelo begins a parallel journey of introspection setting out to shatter the silence about abuse in her own family and life — and to capture that on film.

Where Sands of Silence shines is when it shows survivors in the process of struggling with the decision to confront their fears and speak about what happened to them. Chelo’s own sister starts the film off camera, refusing to talk about what a man did to her on the beach one day when she and Chelo were just children. Throughout the course of the film, we hear Chelo’s sister minimize her experience while Chelo challenges her. These verité style family conversations, often confrontational, eventually lead others in Chelo’s family to open up about their experiences with sexual violence. Soon, Chelo admit that she too has been hiding a story of abuse.

As the women in Sands of Silence overcome their feelings of shame and choose to speak out about their experiences, survivors of all types of abuse in the audience are often filled with the courage to take the same step. “I am empowered to go lift up many women who have lost hope, like myself before I met you and Virginia,” said a 24 year-old woman who was trafficked at 15 while crossing the border with her baby.