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On 17th October 2024 in Budapest, like in the previous years before, as part of the
European Union’s Anti-Trafficking Day SOLWODI HUNGARY took part of the
international activity. We have organised an international conference and round table
discussion with the title of: “Pornography: a tool and a path towards human
trafficking”. Our guest speakers were Renate van der Zee, an investigative journalist
from the Netherlands, who has presented her latest findings on the Dutch porn
industry and the women who took part of the content production. Ms van der Zee
explained to the audience that many times women are agreed to work as fashion
models through their agencies but when they arrive to the studio the reality is
different. All form of coercion, violence and fright are used towards them to do
pornographic videos and many times they are subjected to prostitution. Our other
guest speaker was fr Laszlo Tokodi OP from the ‘Saint Jean Paul II Institute’ from
Hungary, who talked from his perspective about pornography, it’s relevance in
society and impact on people especially on young people. We have had a long and
lively round table discussion after the presentations where the two guest speakers
reflected on each other’s findings and views, answering the questions of the
audience. The conclusion was that all form of pornography is a violence against
women, harmful to the person as ‘content producer’ as well as consumer of it, we
should openly say that is simply wrong and should keep working against it and
helping the victims.
Fr Tokodi also talked about the book and it’s manual which was published by their
institute to help children and parents/carers to protect themselves from pornography
and to talk about the issue. It was also on sale at during the conference. The book is
a No1 best seller in Amazon in the USA and can be ordered on this link or the
original publisher can be contacted for copies on different languages:
https://www.defendyoungminds.com/books
The conference was kindly hosted again by the Jesuit community in Budapest, and
we had the opportunity to participate on a holy mass co-celebrated by Szabolcs
Sajgo SJ and Fr Laszlo Tokodi OP for the victims of human trafficking.
On 18 th October 2024 SOLWODI HUNGARY hosted a mini-NGO meeting to faith
based NGOs who work in Hungary against trafficking. The following organisations
were represented on the meeting: Salvation Army, The Baptists, The Anonymous
Ways Foundation, and the Lehetőség Családoknak 2005 NGO – and SOLWODI
HUNGARY as host.
It was decided in 2022 that three times a year we would have as a rotating meeting
and a round table discussion between the faith based NGOs in Hungary where we
can share our best practicies, ideas, problems and solutions. We can identify issues
what we can jointly present tot he Hungarian National Anti-Trafficking NGO round
tablet hat way solutions could be find for problems, and law makers and regulators,
state actors could be aware of problems and many times are happy to bring
solutions to it.