Following on from our successful tweet chats on responsible communication, and effective support, our next will be on the role of men in the movement. 

- How can men help end demand for human trafficking?

- How do we better support male survivors? 

- Do programs tailored to men need to be structured differently? How? 

Come discuss these hot topics and more on June 24th at 12p/3e. And if you know of successful male-focused initiatives and/or male survivor voices who need to be heard, please drop us a line or pass on the info.

A RECAP OF THE SECOND #DSBCHAT

Following on from our successful inaugural #DSBChat exploring responsible communication in the anti-trafficking movement, the second installment of this ongoing series of tweet chat’s explored another topic that is crucial to our cause: 

- What does successful survivor support look like, and how can the movement better facilitate survivor leadership? 

We started by asking what an ideal survivor support program would look like. 

Survivor Support or Survivor Leadership?
Rachel Lloyd of GEMS Girls weighed in with the observation that ownership is a big part of the puzzle: 

LCHT argued that while allies play a crucial role in survivor support, organizations not lead by survivors should be pro-active in seeking (and listening to) input from survivors:

Survivors As Whole People
Touching on a common theme brought up in the previous communication chat, Rachel argued that this should result in a more inclusive, empowering, dignified and holistic role for survivors than has so far been presented in much of the movement:

Not For Sale echoed this notion, suggesting that restoration of survivors’ dignity is a much broader challenge than is often recognized - sharing how this insight is put into practice in their programs. 

Structuring Programs to Prioritize Empowerment
For GEMS too, it was clear that the conceptualization and structure of the program is key to shaping how it actually meets its goals.

We asked Rachel to share the organization’s core values: 

Another theme that reemerged from the previous chat was the desire for survivors to be adequately compensated for their work. 

Re-Exploiting the Exploited?
There is a feeling among many that survivors are sometimes re-exploitedin terms of a lack of compensation: 

This exploitation also extends to how survivors are sometimes “used” simply for their stories, argued Alex Sajben and Holly Smith:

Practical Support is Crucial
Access to health care, education and (appropriate) mental health services were also key priorities for many, as well as the need to expunge criminal records that are a result of survivors being trafficked:

Domestic Versus International/Labor Trafficking
There was also some discussion of the challenges that are presented by the split between addressing domestic sex trafficking and other forms, such as international sex trafficking and/or labor trafficking: 

Sustainable Long-Term Funding
The discussion moved to a consensus that there is not enough funding for survivor support, and the survivor support that does exist focuses too much on “rescue”, and not enough on long-term, strategic support and empowerment: 

Reframing the Movement
Part of the challenge, suggested Rachel, is in reframing the very nature of what the movement is and does: 

A Survivor Track at Conferences?
Finally, the discussion concluded with a concrete suggestion our Executive Director which seemed to strike a nerve:

Stay tuned for the next #DSBChat topic, and if anyone is interested in pursuing the idea of survivor tracks at conferences, please do reach out. 

SURE, I’M WITH LINCOLN (BUT WHAT DOES THAT REALLY MEAN?)

The first time I watched the I’m With Lincoln Video, I was mostly numb.

The second time, I squinted and shed some tears.

The third, I got the chills, felt close to vomiting, and could barely watch until the end. 

The image that got to me is when the females are marched up the stairs in a line. My mind flashed to images of people chained up and marched to slave auctions during the transatlantic slave trade.

I wondered what it is like for other people to watch this video. I wondered what it is like for survivors of slavery, for non-survivors, and for anti-slavery activists. I also wondered how many times the average person watched this video.

Just another trafficking video?

For me, my first viewing was somewhat cursory. A colleague told me about the video and asked me what I thought of it. I hadn’t seen the full video so I went online to find it. I didn’t have high expectations. I assumed I was going to see a young woman beaten and raped, and maybe in chains. I wasn’t sure what to expect about how Lincoln was going to be tied into the video.

When I was done watching it, I felt no differently. I didn’t really learn or see anything new. I was worried that this was yet another video that could glorify violence, that overemphasized sex trafficking over labor trafficking, and that focused on the physical and sexual violence of slavery. 

I did however, appreciate that somebody was using the release of the Lincoln movie to say, “hey everybody, slavery still exists!”

Leveraging the Zeitgeist

Made in a Free World capitalized beautifully on a mainstream event that reached millions of people. They are using a cultural event that lots of people are talking about to shift the conversation to something many not as many people are talking about.

I think they are playing on the hope and inspiration that people can feel after seeing the Lincoln movie. They are saying, “So you feel good about how Lincoln ended slavery? and how you would stand on his side in history? Well…you can stand on his side now. Help us end slavery today and sign this petition.”  

Highlighting  Government Underfunding

I also think the petition for doubling the U.S. federal budget to end human trafficking is a bold request. Organizations usually ask for a little bit more funding, hoping for crumbs. Why not ask for what might really make a difference? The comparisons between the anti-human trafficking budget to other budgetary expenses is also a unique way of thinking about things. While I understand that the federal government has many priorities to address, seeing the comparisons helps us consider what we are saying our priorities are, compared to what actions we are taking on those priorities.

Do We “See” the Same Thing?

And this brings me to my third viewing of the I’m With Lincoln video. As I was watching, I paid attention to eyes of the females in the film.  I paid attention to their body language and how their emotions were portrayed. I thought that in fact, the violence portrayed was pretty real. It was accurate in a way that maybe the public can shy away from.

It was painful to imagine myself having gone through similar horrors. Imagining seeing resignation in my eyes – seeing hopelessness in how I carried my body. 

I wondered – does “the public” see this? Or are people so desensitized now to these videos? To violence in general? Are people numb to this, just as I was the first time around?

If not – if a viewer watched this and actually feels what I felt, if even a little bit, and then wants to make sure no one ever feels this way, then maybe the use of violence in the video was worth it?

But if a viewer watched this video and says nothing, does nothing, validates the violence, or writes it off as an everyday thing…then was the video worth it? 

Who knows? What I do know is that this video warrants conversation around what is controversial. Here are some things to consider:

- Psychological violence. Did you notice the exploitation of the female’s desire for love in the beginning? This is just as crucial as the physical and sexual violence. 

- I keep calling them females. Why? Do we know if they are girls or women or transgender people? These are important differences. Girls are often portrayed as vague in age so that people who rape them can feel less guilty because they thought she was “of age.” What does it mean to be enslaved as a child vs. an adult? Transgender youth can be exploited and discriminated in ways that straight girls and women aren’t.

- Did you notice the accomplices/perpetrators who are just sitting there while people are violated? This is why human trafficking is also considered an organized crime, not just a crime of some evil bad pimp. 

- The people in the video appear mostly brown and Latino. How does the video impact stereotypes about people without U.S citizenship papers?  How might it accurately portray that children/people of color are targeted as victims? Contrary to videos that might highlight the issue as important only because it also affects suburban white girls?

 - Did Lincoln really end slavery? Of course not. Members of the Underground Railroad, people who were enslaved, allies and abolitionists, and so many people contributed to ending slavery. What does this mean for how we eradicate slavery now?

- Can we eradicate slavery?

Join the Discussion
We’ve been talking a lot about communication, stereotypes, violence and exploitation at Don’t Sell Bodies. As our movement matures, it’s crucial we turn a critical eye on our own communications to make sure we are not subconsciously perpetuating the problems we seek to fight.

Please follow us on twitter @dontsellbodies and join in on our twitter chat this upcoming Monday, April 29^th, 11amPST/2pmEST for our first Freedom Chat on Responsible Communication in the Anti-Slavery Movement.

Use the hashtag #DSBchat to join the conversation!

Freedom is today.
Freedom is precious.
Freedom knows no boundaries.
Freedom is a state of existence and a process. 
Freedom is physical, emotional, and spiritual.
Freedom is worth fighting for.
Freedom must be fought for individually and collectively.
Freedom is achieved with and beside comrades. It is not fought for alone.
Freedom is quiet.
Freedom is loud.
Freedom is just.
Freedom is love.
Freedom is not a world without pain.
Freedom is grief. Grief that is so deep that it brings relief, joy, and a sense of the world expanding.
Freedom is not taken for granted by everyone.
Freedom is poetry.
Freedom is sitting with feelings of shame while knowing you’re okay just as you are.
Freedom is growing.
Freedom is learning.
Freedom is so much more than this list.
Freedom is instinctive, natural, and fundamental.
Freedom is a basic human right!
Freedom a basic human need!

7 Years in Freedom!
Freedom and what it means to me has been on my mind a lot this week. This past Tuesday (April 16^th), I celebrated the end of my 7^th year living in freedom and the start of my 8^th year.

I thought a lot about how this was an important day for me to mark and to celebrate. This was the first year I even came up with a specific date that I call my “Freedom Day.”

Kind of like how we in the U.S. call April “Sexual Assault Awareness Month,” or we call the 4^th of July, Independence Day, a dear friend and mentor of mine suggested that I pick a date to mark my entrance into the world of freedom. She suggested this to me one day when I was on the phone with her, sobbing about how difficult life can still be, even though my life is SO much better than it once was. I mean, unbelievably better.

And yet as I have mentioned before, the impact of my trauma is something that I deal with quite regularly. And by regularly, I mean more than daily…And this is an improvement from managing my trauma symptoms from minute to minute, as it once was… 

So, my friend reminded me of the relative newness of my freedom and the fact that my days in freedom have not out-numbered my days in slavery yet. The idea of quantifying this gave me something to hold on to. It gave me a date – April 16, 2026 – when my days in freedom will finally match my days in slavery.

That means, on April 17, 2026, my brain/mind/heart/body will finally have lived more freely than ever before. The experiences of freedom will finally outweigh the experiences of enslavement.

Until then, it makes perfect sense why I might have hard or super hard days that are about healing my trauma.  In fact, it would even make sense that healing from 20 years of child abuse [via incest, neglect, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and child sex trafficking] would take MORE than 20 years. It takes many people (rightfully so), years to heal from one traumatic event. There is not mathematical equation for how long healing takes.

However, there is one mathematical equation that my brain has calculated:

                      input of evil/trauma > input of love/freedom

Wait. What? Only 7 Years in Freedom?!?!? 
So…while I did have happy/proud feelings about my 7 years of freedom, I also celebrated by feeling really angry. Why? Because I am not 7 years old. Why is it that I am almost 29 years old and only celebrating 7 years of freedom?!?!

This is outrageous to me. I should have almost 29 years of freedom under my belt. And I should, because nature intended it to be so. Nature intends for a human being to become a separate and autonomous, though interdependent, human being.

No child is born a slave. Children are forced into slavery.

No person is born a slave. People are forced into slavery.

If we need any reason to dig deep and to continue our fight against slavery, I hope that my 7-year anniversary of freedom gives us one.

I hope that someday people don’t have to celebrate their anniversary of freedom.

I hope that everyone’s Freedom Date will forever and always be their birth date.

Photo credit: Creative Commons\Jorge

Take the time today to look around you. Do you know what to look for?

Recognize the signs.

(Source: mydailyclarity.com)

I spoke at the Vietnamese Interacting As One conference in Iowa City, Iowa this weekend.

This was an event of many firsts. It was my first time at a Vietnamese Student Association  (VSA) event, my first speaking engagement to a room full of primarily Vietnamese people, and my first time in Iowa.

To give you some context, Vietnamese Student Associations (VSAs) exist on college campuses (and probably even in high schools) across the United States. Like most groups, VSA is there to build community around a shared identity. For ethnic minorities, groups like these are crucial for so many reasons. To name a few: to look out for each other, to provide shared resources, to build camaraderie and understanding about shared experiences and histories. Just like survivors of human trafficking find comfort in gathering, Vietnamese people find the same comfort. 

Okay, so I may not need to justify to you, the reader, the existence of VSAs; however, I think I’m making the argument to myself.

Without saying this directly in college, I refused to attend VSA meetings. For someone who grew up in the Bay Area of CA, I rarely experienced myself as truly an ethnic minority. To me, VSA was the “social/party group” and all they cared about was having fun. And that whole thing where they assign you to a new ”family” of other Vietnamese students? That was stupid to me at the time.

I held so much contempt for that because I did not hold the concept of a Vietnamese family as something to willingly join. Nor did I believe that you could just make a family up like that and assume people would like each other. [One important fact I may not have mentioned is that my parents, my primary abusers, are Vietnamese.]  

In my position of contempt, I told myself that the activist and Pan-Asian Pacific Islander groups that I was involved in were the real groups doing real and important work. Goes to show you what I learned – having fun is bad, working and doing something “meaningful” is good.

In fact, when I was four years old I complained about sitting indoors practicing the keyboard. From my keyboard, I saw kids running around outside, and my mom said: “Those kids are out there because they don’t have good homes to go.” Moral of her story? You are not like them. What they are doing is not fun. You have a good home to go to. You should feel privileged to be here. Stop complaining. 

So…my mom’s lesson stayed with me for many years and that kept me away from VSA. Of course there are some groups who might party too much, or who might work too much. But who is to say? Too much for whom?

If my mother hadn’t isolated me, I still may not have gone to a VSA meeting. However, I doubt that I would have held contempt for it, and at least I would have seen it as an option, rather than something that I had to refuse.

And like I said, I thought I needed to actively separate myself from the Vietnamese community. That’s exactly what my parents did in order to isolate me. 

So when the United Vietnamese Student Association of the Midwest (UVSA-Midwest) invited me to keynote at their conference this year, I had mixed feelings about it. Can I go address a community that I have held so much contempt for? What do I do with my guilt about those feelings of contempt?

I decided to accept the invitation and I decided to accept it as more than a speaking engagement. I accepted the invitation as an opportunity to “rejoin” the Vietnamese community.  To reclaim a part of my identity that comes with such mixed feelings. To reclaim a part of my identity that was shaped by primarily two people – rather than the larger Vietnamese community. Granted, I was also abused, ignored, neglected by other members of the Vietnamese community so it wasn’t just two people. However, my parents were the ones who showed me the dark and wounded sides of the Vietnamese community. They did not introduce me to the loving, social justice and diversity-oriented people. 

This weekend, I got to experience something new about being Vietnamese…and in Iowa nonetheless. For those of you who don’t know, the city of San Jose, CA where I grew up, has the largest Vietnamese population outside of Viet Nam. And in spite of that fact, I did not truly have a Vietnamese friend until I went to college. So to see a group of hundreds of Vietnamese college students in one room trying to get to know each other and support each other, I was in awe.

I imagined the community experience I could have had.

I imagined that maybe one person in the room might have gone through what I went through.

I imagined that maybe this part of my identity, the Vietnamese part, doesn’t have to be diminished nor exaggerated. It is one piece of my identity.

As I work to become an integrated, whole person, every piece counts. 

Photo Credit: Jean-Marie Hullot/creative commons

bSafe: Register Now for a Free Trial

The safety app bSafe, already used by over 200,000 Norwegian women, has now captured interest in Hollywood, with Jada Pinkett Smith investing in Bipper to take bSafe to the international market.

“bSafe is a wonderful app that everyone should have,” says Jada Pinkett Smith.

Daughter Willow discovered bSafe

Jada, who has been actively advocating for the rights of human trafficking victims and researching anti-trafficking tools, discovered the app after daughter Willow began using it fall of 2012.  She quickly realized the impact this app could have through not only keeping young people safe, but all people.

“bSafe is a safety service that can easily be used by anyone,” says Jada. “Users can ask for help, provide important information about their location and preserve evidence through video recordings with one click on their mobile phone. Everyone needs a service like this.”

Smith called Bipper

During fall 2012, Bipper founder Silje Vallestad received a call from Hollywood.  Some months earlier, Silje had moved to the U.S. with her family to establish the company there.  Vallestad recalls that the phone call came unexpectedly, “To be called up by one of the world’s most famous families in the world telling you that they are using one of your products and want to work with you, is unreal, absolutely amazing!”

A few weeks later Vallestad found herself in the Smith family residence at a lunch event with First Lady, Michelle Obama. Soon after, Smith and Vallestad began planning the launch of Bipper’s safety products, bSafe and MobileKids, in the U.S. market. Now Jada Pinkett Smith has invested in Bipper.

“We are joined by amazing people,” Vallestad says. ”People with a real passion for both our products and the potential of the company.  That they found us because they were looking for a product like bSafe, and that they are superusers themselves makes this even more exciting. It’s a dream situation for an entrepreneur,” says Vallestad.

Pinkett Smith adds, “Bipper is my first technology investment, and I chose it because I saw the potential to solve real problems for kids, parents, and anyone looking to increase their overall safety. I have great confidence in Silje and her team and look forward to working closely with them to increase the reach and impact of an already fantastic security tool.”

About Bipper
Bipper was founded in 2007 by Silje Vallestad, a mother of three, after her six-year-old daughter’s friends began using cell phones and she was unable to find custom mobile solutions that covered her needs as a parent concerned about her children’s safety. Bipper developed and launched MobileKids in Norway and Bulgaria in partnership with two operators in the fall of 2010 and brought the mobile application for smartphones to the international market in 2013. The company launched bSafe in 2011 prompted by requests from mothers who wanted access to the same SOS feature available on their children’s MobileKids app. Headquartered in Norway with offices in Silicon Valley and Kiev, Bipper has received awards that include Red Herring Global, Rookie of the Year, Bully Award, Mobile Premier Award and SIMagine. In 2011, founder Silje Vallestad was named Norway’s Entrepreneur of the Year. 

FREEDOM FIGHTER

Another design available at Don’t Sell Bodies online store.

Manufacture of all apparel is WRAP certified to ensure the rights of people and the environment are respected. All proceeds go to fight trafficking through the Will and Jada Smith Family Foundation.

UNC WORKSHOP ON RESPONSIBLE REPORTING OF SEX TRAFFICKING

This is SO important:

The UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication will host an October 2013 workshop – “Reporting Sex Trafficking: A Local Problem with Global Dimensions” – with more than $40,000 in funding from the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.The UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication will host an October 2013 workshop – “Reporting Sex Trafficking: A Local Problem with Global Dimensions” – with more than $40,000 in funding from the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

Professor Anne Johnston:

“Large cities tend to be destinations for trafficked victims, but more and more, statistics tell us trafficked women and children are being brought to rural and suburban areas where there may be less public and police scrutiny, In these communities in mid-sized media markets, reporters are frequently asked to cover sex trafficking stories in addition to other assignments.”

Read more.