The Cost of a Life

rebecca carpenter — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 21:49:26 GMT

The cost of a life in many developing nations is around $150. For sex traffickers, the act of trading girls across borders remains a highly profitable business, bringing in over $7 billion a year. It’s often hard to feel connected to these statistics, to feel like you can help, to feel like there’s anything you can do to ease the burden of such heavy numbers. But thanks to a growing number of organizations targeting the human trafficking industry, there are ways that we can now all be involved in putting an end to this global crisis.

One such organization got it's start in 2005, with a small scale effort that would help change the way people relate to the profound crisis of human trafficking and close the gap between editorial accounts and real life involvement. The Emancipation Network (TEN) is a social enterprise that “helps survivors of human trafficking, and women and teens at high risk for being trafficked, by offering them a means for self-sufficiency and an economic alternative to further exploitation.”

TEN started small, with a determined group of individuals and a creative idea. The organization set up partnerships with a few anti-trafficking organizations and women’s crafts organizations both in the US and abroad. They then began to purchase beautifully made products ranging from jewelry and handbags to unique stationary and journals, and then selling them under the Made By Survivors name, at home Awareness Parties, schools and community get-togethers.

Explains survivor/artisan Meena, who leads the handicrafts production team making Made By Survivors products at Sanlaap "When girls first come here, they are so angry and upset. They don't want to talk or do anything. We spend time with them and the counselors talk to them. After a few weeks, they see that making handicrafts might be fun and they start to join us. After a few months, some of them see that we are making money and it might be a way for them to make a living. We help the girls learn skills that they can use back in their own villages, depending on what kinds of crafts are popular in their home states."

After experiencing great success in their first few months, TEN has started scaling their Awareness Parties across the country and extending them to an online virtual party. Through these parties, TEN is able to engage regular people, share with them in a trusting environment, and empower women to make a difference within their own communities.

As their website states: “With the help of committed volunteers across America, we send money to our overseas partners, where the funds pay salaries for the survivors and high-risk teens making the handicrafts, as well as contributing to the trafficking prevention, legal aid, and rescue work being done by our partners. We have also educated thousands of Americans about human trafficking, mostly in small groups of 10 or 20, in volunteers’ homes, schools, and places of worship.”

The handicraft programs for survivors offer them a way to get their life back after suffering through enslavement, often at a young age. Either in the shelter or afterwards, the girls are given the opportunity to work together, making beautiful products, and earning a stipend that will eventually allow them to be independent and safe in the world again. These craft cooperatives also act powerfully on the side of prevention; when mothers and children in impoverished communities are given the chance to make even a small salary, the need for them to sell their own child for income decreases exponentially.

"Women and girls deserve the same rights as men and boys," said Afsana, a girl who has grown up in the red light district of Calcutta, and now participates in a TEN handicrafts program at NGO partner Apne Aap. "My brother got to go to school and I didn't get to go. I used to think I was nothing, that I had nothing to offer. Now, after coming here, I can't believe what I have been able to accomplish – that people all the way over in America want to buy my work!"

TEN focuses on three main areas: providing help to survivors, preventing trafficking of high-risk girls, and supporting anti-trafficking work of overseas partners. Through each of these initiatives, TEN is empowering people to make a change, whether it be young girls who have survived the trauma of slavery, communities in need of income-generating activities, or organizations who are working hard to end the slave trade in our world today.

Chandranath Nag, the handicrafts program director at TEN partner agency Sanlaap, India, told our team that "It only costs about $400 of product orders a month for 5 girls to be fully employed and to live independently outside the shelter. Even the girls with AIDS - they might only have a few years to live, but they just want to enjoy a little bit of normal life, to leave something behind, something to show that they were here on this earth."

Get involved:

Take the Freedom quiz and test your human trafficking IQ.

Check out Made By Survivors and join their group on Razoo .

Host your own Awareness Party .

Watch an interesting video about slavery .

Human Trafficking And Slavery

The Cost of a Life