Earlier one of my co-authors here wrote about bras, and I want to do that today with a twist: bras that can help women.
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| Bras Donated to Free the Girls |
To understand that, we have to think about economics, illegal sex trafficking, abuse, and women. I don't want to make this a huge post, so let me just write out a few ideas and share a few facts about these issues. At the bottom of this essay I'll list online resources I consulted for you to look at further. Slavery is also a subject I've studied throughout human history, and for that background information the sources would fill a book, so please just bear with my basic statements.
You've probably heard the headlines that right now in 2013 there are more people held in slavery than at any other time in human history. There is a big problem with this statement. There are more people held/doing/involved/almost any verb you want right now than in any other time in human history, simply because the planet has a much higher population than at any other time in human history. While factually true in terms of raw numbers, the statement is misleading. What about percentage of the population? That involves the very tricky issue of calculating not just populations but parts of populations in the past. It is better to simply say that even though legal slavery is no longer recognized in most of the world, illegal slavery is still going on.
What is "illegal slavery?" Slavery is a condition by which a human being is reduced to the status of an object or animal that can be bought and sold. Note that it does not require social or legal backing, but throughout most of human history slavery was legally and socially promoted — not merely accepted, but promoted. So "illegal slavery" is merely slavery that continues to exist in a society that has outlawed it.
This creates several problems that you might not think about. When legal, when socially accepted/promoted, slavery has built-in enforcement, which has both negatives and positives for the owners and the slaves. Yup, I just typed that ... both negatives and positives for the owners and the slaves. What "illegal slavery" lacks are the open enforcement methods that everyone knows about and can use, whether it is a requirement for how much a seller needs to reveal to a potential buyer, to what is considered cruel treatment of slaves, to a slave's right to ask for asylum in a church, to the regulations involved in freeing someone and integrating them into the society at large. When someone today is rescued from "illegal slavery," we often do not know how to integrate them back into society, if they were ever part of society to begin with. Similarly, those who are found guilty of illegally enslaving another live their lives either in the shadows, creating false stories about their maids or field workers, and face the choice of jail or running away before they are caught. They have very little incentive to treat those they enslave as much more than a disposable tool, because the illegal slave is really a piece of evidence to be used against them.
Let me be clear: I am not supporting slavery, merely pointing out that "illegal slavery" lacks many of the social and legal protections and restrictions for the enslaved, the traders, and the owners.
Another headline you may have read is that illegal slavery is about sex trafficking or forced prostitution in which the victims are women and girls. This is a flashy headline, and it's certainly the one that Free the Girls is focused on, but it is far from the full picture. While the child or teen girl being forced to service clients in the back room of seedy bars is a heart-rending image, many illegal slaves are boys and men, too, and many, many of them do basic labor or work as domestic staff. Claims of percentages that do any particular type of labor should be viewed with a pound of salt, because "illegal" means the true numbers must be hidden for the trade to survive. But it may also be misleading to assume that one type of work does not bleed over into other types of work for the enslaved. A maid tricked into leaving her country may also be forced to perform sexually, or the man picking crops in a field may have to get extra food through sex acts. Sadly, we may best understand illegal slavery as creating objects from people, and there are no limits to how an object may be used.
How do people end up illegal slaves? There seem to be three primary methods.
The first is trickery — they believe they have a job, and then it turns out they signed a contract that they didn't fully understand, or they have a debt but have been offered a chance to "work it off." In these cases the company or individual owning them rigs the system so that they have a hard time working off the debt or they are guarded heavily, their passports, wallets, and other means of independence taken away. In a way this is a more extreme form of the "company town," which operated and still happens quite legally around the world. When you need money to survive, you may have to do whatever you think is necessary, and people will take advantage of you if they can.
The second is family sale — it is not uncommon for parents to sell children, either for debt or for what they believe is job training. Now we might say this is trickery, like the first method I mention; however, I also know that stories of "rescued" children given back to parents often end up resold. To say that the parents or family are unaware seems difficult to believe in many cases. Of course, once you are a child slave the role models that you have for what your life can be like are very limited, and it is likely easier to keep someone enslaved if they were acquired as a child. Truly insidious, and very much like the generational slave systems of the past around the world.
The third method is straight-up kidnapping or forced co-dependence — this can involve drugs, beating, forms of brainwashing, and lies about families being dead or having sold the victim. This seems to be the most popular "media" version of illegal slavery, though it can paint the victim as a bad person who made poor choices, versus the child slave or the tricked slave who just wanted to make a living.
In none of these cases is the survivor of illegal slavery to blame for their treatment. Those of us looking at this from the outside may like to think we could see through the lies or not get caught up with "those sorts of people," or that our families love us enough to take care of us. Slavery has been around for thousands of years, and the methods and means of enslavement are tested over and over, proven to work time and again. That you are not an illegal slave may be a matter of luck more than a matter of how clever and loved you are.
So I've been rambling, and I apologize. Slavery, illegal or not, is a huge topic, and I'm certain I'll return to it again and again. Let's get back to the connection between bras and the "illegal slave trade."
Free the Girls is one organization trying to fight against the very profitable and widespread "illegal slave trade" by using bras, an item that was very likely controlled by their illegal owners. Think about it. Most of the survivors they held were used in the sex trade and even if they had other jobs we know that it is very likely they were also exploited sexually. In many, many societies, the breast and anything associated with is often sexualized or connected to the woman's ability to reproduce. In both cases women's bodies are often subject to the control of men either directly or through the desire to seek their approval. If you fall victim to the "illegal slave trade" you are even more controlled and your body ceases to be under your ownership. I don't know if Free the Girls is making this connection but I find it very powerful that they are helping women reclaim their bodies and decide what they wear in this way.
If you have some extra bras and want to help empower some of the female survivors of it, look them up and see if there is a drop-off spot in your town. Please do check the resources below, because they all offer other ways to help and more specifics you might find useful, if horrifying.
1: Free the Girls
2: NJ.com article
3: NY Times Bits article
4: The Guardian article
5: Pravda article
