Mira Sorvino: Saving Sex Slaves

In 1995, Mira Sorvino won an Academy Award for her role as a prostitute in the Woody Allen film Mighty Aphrodite. Today, Sorvino, a mother of four and devout Christian, spends much of her time trying to free young women and girls from the throes of forced prostitution.

The UN's Goodwill Ambassador to Combat Human Trafficking, Sorvino is a passionate advocate for the cause—taking trips abroad to observe the problem, researching the issue, giving speeches and interviews on the topic, and, most recently, making a movie about it. Trade of Innocents, a drama about the sex trafficking industry in Southeast Asia, opens Friday in New York and will expand to other theaters across the U.S. in the weeks ahead.

Mira Sorvino in 'Trade of Innocents'

In the film, Sorvino plays the wife of an NGO worker (Dermot Mulroney) in Cambodia who is trying to help local police crack down on human trafficking. Sorvino's character, grieving the murder of her own daughter, volunteers with girls who have been rescued from sexual slavery.

As a young girl, Sorvino read the Diary of Anne Frank and was influenced by the horrors of the holocaust. As a Harvard student, she wrote her thesis on the causes of conflict between Chinese and African students; she recently wrote (in Guideposts) that she "wanted to understand what gave rise to one human being's ability to see another as somehow less than human."

CT interviewed Sorvino recently by e-mail about Trade of Innocents and her passionate activism.

Why did you want to play this role?

I felt that it was a moving portrayal of the plight of children being sold for sex, and highlighted some potent strategies to fight it. Since I spend a great deal of my time working on that fight with the UN, I felt it could be a powerful combination of my activist efforts and my artistic ventures.

You did Lifetime TV's Human Trafficking back in 2005. Any similarities between the two projects?

They are both about modern day slavery, but Trade of Innocents is exclusively about the sale of children for sexual exploitation, and the protagonists are not law enforcement but NGO workers. 

Dermot's character works on undercover sting operations that gather evidence to spur police raids on brothels dealing in little girls, and I play his bereaved wife (we have lost our daughter to a pedophile) who is now finding new hope by helping formerly trafficked girls rehabilitate in a shelter. In real life, law enforcement and NGO efforts must go hand in hand; it is the only way to tackle the crime from both the perpetrator and victim sides of the fence.

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