Meet Klara Hedberg our new online and digital advocacy facilitator. Klara comes to us from the YouTube Splay network and the artists’ booking agency Appelgren Friedner. Along with the rest of us at RealStars Klara will continue to work against trafficking with the “Fair Sex” message online, run exciting projects and influence opinion.
Hear her explain a little about her work and her driving force to work with these issues below.
In my opinion Realstars is the most important organisation I have been involved in. To have the chance to spend my working day working against sex trafficking, prostitution and sexual harassment is a gift. We focus on some of the most vulnerable people in the world. People forgotten by society, invisible and non-existent for us in our sanitised world in Sweden.
Most of us in our safe country can close our eyes to the fate of these people our whole lives and never even be conscious of what is happening outside our own safe doors. It is easy to “totally forget” it is happening all around us all the time, when we no longer need to “see” the women on the streets. These women have instead migrated to the internet. To protected hidden websites where you need to take deliberate action to be able to see the contents. Easier to hide, easier to forget, easier to exploit.
The internet is amazing and at the same time deadly dangerous. We can use it to reach out to basically to the entire public in a few seconds. We have freedom of expression and can drive our advocacy so effectively that our most important politicians in parliament are forced to change the law. An obvious example of that is the consent law which was brought in largely due to pressure from the #metoo movement and @Fatta!, a win for those of us who have been subjected to sexual assault.
Clearly many big feminist successes have been made possible by the benefits of the internet but the internet also facilitates and assists people with quite other interests than changing our society to be more equal and more human.
Buying a woman today is really as easy as buying a jumper. It is just a matter of putting in the size, colour and price on certain websites and a list of what you want comes up. It is also much less risky than buying someone on the street.
To sexually abuse a woman today is so easy to do from behind a screen where you can hide yourself behind a fake name and a fake picture. Less risk of being caught that way compared with having to show your real identity in real life.
That’s just a few examples of the problems we are trying to prevent with our online presence with “Fair Sex Online”. I look forward to showing more of what we work with and our message around sex on the same terms for all, everywhere.
Read more about Fair Sex online at http://www.fairsexonline.se/
Follow Klara on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/klarahedberg/
