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Lin Abdul Rahman, DrPH ’24, has spent a profession advocating for kids who’ve suffered sexual abuse—whilst she has healed from her personal childhood trauma.
January 30, 2023 – In 2014, Eirliani (“Lin”) Abdul Rahman awakened one morning with an audacious concept: She would ski to the North Pole.
She was wrapping up a three-year posting to India as a diplomat for Singapore and embarking on a brand new profession as an advocate in opposition to human trafficking and youngster sexual abuse. “The media likes a kooky concept, proper?” she mentioned. “They’d need to ask why a diplomat from a tropical island would ski to the North Pole. After which I’d get to inform my story.”
Abdul Rahman has been telling her story in passionate and stunning methods—and together with it the story of different survivors of sexual abuse and trafficking—to attract worldwide consideration to the difficulty. Her efforts have led to viral video campaigns seen by thousands and thousands of viewers on-line as a volunteer with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kailash Satyarthi’s nonprofit, two books on the subject, the founding of her personal advocacy group for survivors, and a gathering final fall on the Vatican with the Pope for the inaugural World Day for the Prevention and Healing from Child Sexual Exploitation, Abuse, and Violence.
As a doctoral scholar at Harvard T.H. Chan College of Public Well being, Abdul Rahman is now conducting analysis on the way in which that youngster trafficking is reported and dealt with by authorities, specializing in the thorny points round consent. “Once we rescue kids, we ask the place they wish to go. They typically wish to return to their caregivers,” she mentioned. Sadly, those self same caregivers generally perpetrate the abuse, and re-traffic the kids. “Kids’s voices have to be heard. May we develop an idea of consent based mostly on a toddler’s evolving capabilities?” requested Abdul Rahman, a Prajna Management and Julio Frenk DrPH Fellow at Harvard Chan College.
In one other pressure of her analysis, she is analyzing rules of “knowledgeable consent” round conducting analysis on youngster trafficking itself. Generally a survivor could consent to their info being utilized in a dataset in a single context, however then that anonymized information could also be used with different datasets such that the survivor turns into identifiable. “We have to perceive the ramifications of consent-related points in order that we don’t proceed the oppression and injustice accomplished to youngster survivors,” Abdul Rahman mentioned.
Richard Siegrist, college director of Harvard Chan College’s DrPH program, mentioned that Abdul Rahman exemplifies DrPH college students’ dedication to public well being advocacy. “Her intensive writing and talking on youngster sexual abuse, ladies’s empowerment, and misinformation have influenced the narrative,” he mentioned. “I’m particularly impressed by her willingness to defend her public well being beliefs in difficult conditions.”
Giving voice to the unvoiced
Abdul Rahman is herself a survivor of kid sexual abuse, dedicated by somebody near her when she was a toddler. She recounted her expertise underneath a pseudonym in her 2021 e-book, “The Years of Forgetting,” which was nominated for the Singapore Literature Prize. When she was 17, she noticed a documentary on dowry burnings, a observe in India during which a bride is burned to demise by her husband’s household for inadequate dowry. It sparked one thing in her. “I vowed then that I’d give a voice to the unvoiced,” she mentioned.
After a decade in Singapore’s overseas service, with postings to Berlin and New Delhi, she received her probability when she started volunteering for Satyarthi, a long-time campaigner in opposition to youngster exploitation. Abdul Rahman ran a marketing campaign and helped produce a video concerning the matter that went viral on social media, reaching 18 million viewers in six weeks. It led to her turning into a founding member of Twitter’s Belief and Security Council to assist with on-line safety for kids. She later based her personal nonprofit, YAKIN (Youth, Grownup survivors & Kin in Want), and co-authored the 2017 e-book “Survivors: Breaking the Silence on Baby Sexual Abuse,” which featured her interviews with 12 women and men who had been abused.
When Abdul Rahman determined to ski to the North Pole, she had by no means skied earlier than. So she linked with a number of national-level skiers and skilled in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, from January 2017 to February 2020, whereas persevering with her work in opposition to youngster exploitation. “I picked it up fairly rapidly, and now I find it irresistible a lot,” she mentioned. She grew to become the primary Singaporean to circumnavigate the frozen Frobisher Bay in Canada and had deliberate to ski to the North Pole from Russia, however the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s battle in opposition to Ukraine pressured her to place her goals on maintain—for now.
This previous December, Abdul Rahman made world headlines when she and several other different members resigned from Twitter’s Belief and Security Council shortly after Elon Musk took management of the corporate. They’d been alarmed by the meteoric rise in hate speech on the platform. “For me, it was untenable—I couldn’t in full conscience stay on the council,” she mentioned. She spoke out in opposition to the modifications at Twitter, together with in a December 12, 2022, interview on NPR. That very same day, Musk dissolved the council totally.
In additional constructive information, Abdul Rahman was a part of the survivor-led coalition, the World Collaborative (GC), that lobbied the United Nations to ascertain the World Day for the Prevention and Therapeutic from Baby Sexual Exploitation, Abuse, and Violence. The GC was based by Jennifer Wortham, a analysis affiliate in Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, led by Tyler VanderWeele, John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard Chan College. Abdul Rahman was a part of a panel dialogue on the brand new World Day on November 18 on the Vatican, and the subsequent day had a non-public viewers with the Pope, sporting her grandmother’s ring as a supply of energy.
“She was a feminist and a pressure for good in our household,” she mentioned. “It was extremely shifting for me to hold her spirit with me.” For Abdul Rahman, the second was an indication of how far she’d are available therapeutic from her personal previous, as a girl of shade and first-generation faculty scholar now incomes a doctoral diploma at Harvard. “I hope that simply being me and being vocal,” she mentioned, “will enable different kids who come after me to have a voice as nicely.”
Photograph: Kent Dayton
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