In Gear | Rotary in Southern New Zealand Issue 2

Dunedin Rotarian fighting world’s darkest trade W HEN David Black returned home from finally seeing first-hand the realities of the cause he’d fervently supported from afar for years, just one gentle question from his wife, Alana, broke him. “How was it?” she eventually asked, as they walked into their living room from the airport. “That was it,” David recalls of that day in 2009. “I just sat on the couch and wept inconsolably. I said: ‘Jeez, we’ve got no idea how lucky we are in this country’.” The Dunedin Central Rotarian acknowledges he is, if nothing else, a pragmatist. When it comes to building the groundswell of backing, and capturing enough hearts, minds and resources to combat the atrocities at the crux of his crusade, he’s under no illusions: his project is no ‘easy sell’. “Slavery’s bad enough. It gets worse when you add ‘child’, but put ‘sex’ in the middle of it, and, sometimes, people just don’t want to know. “I think it’s just so emotional,” he says. “It’s just too uncomfortable, too confronting. So, it’s better for some just to terminate the conversation, rather than get into it too much, because you might actually start feeling something for this cause.” The scale of human trafficking, and all its terrible tendrils – including child sex slavery – is, for most, incomprehensible. Undeterred, David has committed to memory a slew of shocking statistics that he recites any chance he gets in his never-ending bid to cast light on humanity’s darkest, most depraved depths and the very victims whose plight remains largely hidden. “The money spent on slavery is estimated to be $US150 billion per year, with the amount attributed to child sex slavery put at around $US100 billion. “These figures are detailed by non-government organisations like Walk Free and Nvader and are Page 12 | In Gear - Rotary in southern New Zealand - District 9980 | www.rotarydistrict9980.org

In Gear | Rotary in Southern New Zealand Issue 2 | Page 12