{"id":245174,"date":"2026-05-27T15:21:42","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T15:21:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/245174\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T15:21:42","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T15:21:42","slug":"brooklyn-family-court-celebrates-resilience-of-aapi-heritage-with-human-trafficking-lecture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/245174\/","title":{"rendered":"Brooklyn Family Court celebrates resilience of AAPI heritage with human trafficking lecture"},"content":{"rendered":"

To honor AAPI Heritage Month, the Kings County Family Court AAPI Heritage Committee hosted A Celebration of Asian Resilience on Tuesday. Members of the committee said that they wanted to highlight the joy and resilience of the AAPI community without shying away from the somber issue of human trafficking.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s so much history to highlight every year in our program, but this year, instead of focusing on some of the challenges faced by our communities, we wanted to center the joyful stories of resilience and resistance that\u2019s shared by us,\u201d said co-chair of the Kings County AAPI committee, Vanessa Kong.<\/p>\n

Shandra Woworuntu, a human rights advocate and survivor of human trafficking, gave remarks calling for the legal community to take a culturally sensitive approach toward the issue of human trafficking.<\/p>\n

Woworuntu\u2019s focus as a survivor and mentor is to empower other survivors to live independently. Woworuntu was appointed the first member of the U.S. Advisory Council to the White House on Human Trafficking, founded the Mentari Human Trafficking Survivor Empowerment Program, and co-founded the Asian Network Against Violence.<\/p>\n

She has traveled around the world giving training and educational lectures to prevent human trafficking.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause of what happened with me, I would like to stop it, but I cannot do this alone without any commitment from the community, from each of you. Whether this is adult or children victims, they need our hand. They need our passion and compassion,\u201d Woworuntu.<\/p>\n

Jennifer Le, a managing social worker, introduced the audience to their work at Womankind, a nonprofit organization dedicated to serving Asian survivors of gender-based violence.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo really highlight and champion Asian resiliency, we must start from within and to understand that even though survivors are going through a lot, there is an inherent power in them that allows them to advocate for themselves, speak up, and in turn change the world so that future generations would not have to go through this,\u201d Le said.<\/p>\n

To begin and end the May 26 program New York State Poet Laureate Kimiko Hahn gave a reading of her poems.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

\"\"Shandra Woworuntu, a human rights advocate, speaks at Brooklyn Family Court.Photo by Max Parrott \"\"Brooklyn Family Court Judge Nisha Menon is a co-chair of the Kings County Family Court AAPI Heritage CommitteePhoto by Max Parrott \"\"Photo by Max Parrott \"\"Jennifer Le, a managing social worker spoke of her work at Womankind.Photo by Max Parrott<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To honor AAPI Heritage Month, the Kings County Family Court AAPI Heritage Committee hosted A Celebration of Asian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":245175,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[86484,95782,98,95783,100,99,43325,95784,29079,95785,95786,95787,95788,9,24,95789,63,95790,95791,95792,95793],"class_list":["post-245174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-aapi-heritage-month","tag-asian-american-resilience","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-family-court","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-community-engagement","tag-cultural-sensitivity","tag-gender-based-violence","tag-human-trafficking-awareness","tag-jennifer-le","tag-kimiko-hahn","tag-kings-county-family-court","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nonprofit-advocacy","tag-nyc","tag-shandra-woworuntu","tag-survivor-empowerment","tag-vanessa-kong","tag-womankind-organization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245174\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}