You may have already seen her reality show Yolanthe on Netflix, but on Saturday evening at the London Hotel in West Hollywood, Yolanthe Cabau called for attention to the work of Free a Girl, the organization she founded to rescue young girls being sex trafficked around the world.
So far, since its 2008 launch, Free a Girl has rescued 8500 children from sex trafficking and helped lock up 2300 of the perpetrators.
“I, myself, grew up in a unsafe household,” Cabau said. “My father was a drug addict, and my mom and me and my siblings, we had to flee the country because it was very dangerous. So we went from Spain to Holland, and as a child growing up in that unsafe environment, I always knew that one day, I wanted to do something for those children that don’t have a voice or people don’t see them, and they’re so vulnerable.”
At the event, the audience saw undercover footage of Cabau working a real-life rescue of girls forced into sex trafficking. In the footage, Cabau is seen pretending to be a tourist at a nightclub in Kathamandu, Nepal while filming undercover and covertly approaching underage girls in order to remove them from the club. The girls were taken to the police and then placed under Free a Girl’s protection in their School for Justice program that offers free support, rehabilitation and education.
After the short film screening, Cabau was joined on a Q&A panel by Lara Lessing, director of Free a Girl USA and by Lane Terzieff, founder of the non-profit UNIT-E that brings food to war zones and works together with Free a Girl on child rescue missions.
Cabau revealed the experience that made her decide to found Free a Girl. On her first ever child rescue mission, when she was just 22, she wore a hidden camera in her shirt button as she and her male associate were undercover to meet sex traffickers, pretending they wanted to buy children. They were shown children as young as 4 or 5 years old. Cabau fought tears as she recalled that night, saying, “I was like, this can’t be real. But I did what I had to do. I was filming them from left to right… that’s something that you will never get used to. But I didn’t blow up the mission. We left the room and we made a deal with them, and then in the days following up, our rescue team went in and rescued the kids. And I went back to Holland, and I was a completely different person… We should take care of that kid like it was our own. So I feel the responsibility to create awareness and to fight for this, and I will do this until my last day on this planet.”
Audience members at the event included Jaime King (Hart of Dixie), Tara Reid (American Pie), and Jason Ritter (Matlock); Selling Sunset’s Amanza Smith; actor Brian DeRozan (They Crawl Beneath); and actress Lara Clear (Bombshell).
Terzieff explained how traffickers target families, saying, “These children coming from impoverished villages are trafficked to the big city for American and European sex tourists, usually middle-aged men. The children come from areas like the border of Myanmar, where 80% of children drop out of school at fourth grade to go and work for their families. Those children grow up and become moms and dads. And so when a man comes to town from the big city offering a good paying job in this new dream life, they don’t know it’s going look more like a literal nightmare.”
Cabau added: “They promise the children, and the parents, after five, six months they will have an education, they will come back, and they’ll make you so much money. And the people have nothing, so they’re like, ‘Yeah, take my children.’ Little do they know they will never see their children again. So those are the children we rescue.”
Cabau also described the aftercare the children are given following rescue. “We have programs for them, for after, to take care of them of course, but we also do a lot of things to prevent [more trafficking]. For example, in villages like that, we have groups of children that do a theater show, and they show the other children in the favelas or in the poor neighborhoods, ‘This is how they kidnap you. This is what they promise you.’ They do one whole theater Act, which is so beautiful because these are children that we rescued and now are creating awareness to protect others.”
Cabau, Lessing and Terzieff all emphasized the importance of getting the word out about the true extent of this issue, with Cabau noting that an estimated 2 million children are current being sexually exploited by human traffickers.
Lessing noted Free a Girl’s expansion into the U.S. in 2021, saying, “We saw that the problem of child exploitation is not becoming less, it’s growing. So we need to take global action. It’s a local and a global problem that needs global awareness. And since one of the founders, Yolanthe, lives in LA it really makes sense to make this step. We have offices in Utah, and we’re not going to stop until our mission is ending child sexual exploitation.”
Lessing added: “Tonight we can all make sure that we are the voice for the voiceless, that we share this, that those who are now in a state of emergency who need to be rescued, that we hear them, because we will take action, and you can do your part with raising your voice, donating, spreading the message, together, we have the power to change.”
“It’s natural as humans to turn away from heartbreak,” Terzieff said. “We see something or hear about something, even the stuff we’re describing, we just go, ‘Ah, I don’t want to hear that.’ But when we turn towards it and our heart does break, action happens, change happens.”
Click the video above to see the conversation.
To donate to Free a Girl click here.