This year’s CEASE Summit is an exciting opportunity to hear leading expert voices from across the UK offering unique insight and experience into the complex, multifarious issue of sexual exploitation.
This is about standing together with others. It’s about connecting, cooperating and collaborating, seeing ourselves as part of a vast, interconnected global movement that’s increasing in strength and reach, making a difference and taking ground.
In many ways, these are dark days. Globalisation and technological advances have opened up sinister opportunities for criminals and businesses alike, turning sexual exploitation into organised, multi-billion-pound industries.
We’re in a hypersexualised culture where it’s normal to reduce the complex humanity of women into objects: bodies that exploited for profit, power and pleasure. We’re in a world where girls’ self-worth is bound up in their sexiness, where hardcore pornography use is commonplace, where prostitution is often regarded as legitimate ‘work.’
But at the same time, there’s a hint that the tide is turning. Awareness is high. We’re at a unique point in history where we can capitalise on the feelings of #metoo; the sense that we shouldn’t put up with the way things are.
Please spread the word about this conference. Tell anyone who cares; let’s make a better world where women’s bodies aren’t hired, bought, sold, used and exploited.