On October 23, 2019, RFI’s Center for Religious Freedom Education held the final event of its Fall Speaker Series entitled, “Brutal Exchange: Genocide, Trafficking, and the Human Person as Gift.” The event featured Laura Bramon, a senior program manager at World Vision with experience working in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and the Middle East. Her primary focus is on human trafficking interventions.

On February 13, 2020, the University of Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal published an article entitled, “The Gift of the Body Versus the Violent Impulse,” which is based on Bramon’s remarks at that event.

Giving an account of what violence does to the human person, Bramon writes:

Violence robs its victim of the dignity of human freedom—or, in a Thomistic vein, the capacity to discern, choose, and act in the natural pursuit of truth, goodness, and happiness. It renders the body an impersonal cipher: a zero to which the aggressor may apply a value in a brutal exchange.

Reflecting on the mass violence the Nazi regime and Islamic State perpetrated against their victims, Bramon speaks to how this “brutal exchange” unfolded in horrific yet contrasting ways for Jewish and Yazidi women in each case.

Read the full article and watch the event video.