If you’re looking for a hot new summer read that plugs into your passion for ending human trafficking, check out the new comic book Borderland. Borderland uses graphic art to tell the story of seven different human trafficking victims in a fresh, unique way. And you can help get copies of Borderland into the hands of teens at-risk for human trafficking.
Borderland is the first comic book based on multiple human trafficking story lines intended to edu-tain teens and young people about the dangers of human trafficking and how to protect themselves. It was created as a joint project by Olga Trusova, a Fulbright Fellow from Stanford University and Dan Archer, a comic artists/journalist. Trusova spent her fellowship researching human trafficking and collecting victims’ stories in Eastern Europe. Borderland is the result of their combined talents.
The International Organization for Migration recently announced they would fund the distribution of Borderland to 136 schools in the Ukraine. But Trusova and Archer want to be able to distribute it here in the U.S. as well. If you’d like to help get Borderland to American teens, you can contribute to the Kickstart campaign (which, incidentally, also has a great video explaining the process of making the book). They need $8,000 by Sept. 28 in order to make their goal, and anyone pledging at least $5 will get a free PDF copy of the comic.
One hundred and thirty years ago today, Radclyffe Hall was born in Bournemouth, England. The author of eight novels and seven volumes of poetry is best known for The Well of Loneliness, her 1928 novel about a butch lesbian, Stephen Gordon. Although the book’s handling of lesbianism seems archaic at times (calling it “sexual inversion”), it was for many years one of the few books that dealt in a sympathetic way with LGBT characters. Its history indicates both how things have changed — and how they haven’t — over the last century.