On Wednesday, January 25th, our social justice group met with Aravella Simotas. Aravella is an assemblywoman in Astoria. We met with her because she passed a bill encouraging hanging a poster in public places that raised awareness about sexual trafficking. We talked to her about what inspired her to write the bill, why she didn’t make the hanging of the posters mandatory, and how we could help promote the posters. She told us what we might accomplish if we were to go around hanging the posters. We learned that sex trafficking isn’t what people usually think of as a common problem. In that case, if we were to go and hang up some posters, this would bring sex trafficking onto people’s radars. This was a very helpful thing to hear because it made me more confident in our idea of hanging up posters. After talking about the law and the posters, we began to talk about how sex trafficking could be prevented. We mentioned the idea of education and what that could do. If children (especially girls in poorer areas) were educated about what sex trafficking is, it is possible that they would be more aware when they were in that situation. At that point in time, Aravella paused our conversation and called over her assistant. She explained to her assistant what our idea was and how they should think about making it a bill. This was a very exciting part of the interview because I felt that we had actually accomplished some sort of change. A lot of our other fieldworks were more about education, but in this one, we inspired someone to do something that might make a difference.

This is us with Aravella Simotas in her office.