THE DRESSEMBER BLOG

In September, the Dressember Network’s partner ECPAT-USA filed information with the U.S. Supreme Court on the rights of child trafficking victims and in support of the petition of Courtney Wild, a young woman victimized by Jeffrey Epstein. ECPAT-USA teamed up with a phenomenal team at the law firm WilmerHale that provides free legal services. The Dressember Network recognizes that policy change is most effective and sustainable when it is survivor-informed. ECPAT-USA Survivors’ Council members provided powerful statements to the U.S. Supreme Court on how the law can best support young victims. Survivors play an integral role in our partner’s policy efforts on federal and state levels, to build a system that treats all children with dignity.

Archie, who is 11 years old, works 10 to 12 hour days digging for gold in a pit often flooded with water. During this time, he breathes through a hose connected to a diesel-powered air compressor. At the end of the day, he eats dinner and then goes to sleep to prepare for the next day.

Rafael, who is 12 years old, shares a watering hole with the bulls on a farm where he has worked for five years, paying down his father’s debts.

Taisha, who is 16 years old, spends her days taking care of her grandmothers around the house. Though she is the first member of her family to attend formal schooling, she receives very little support and the extent of her chores has only increased since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Kelly, a survivor of human trafficking, told the Polaris Project, “Every time I sent [my application for a potential job] in, I got it returned. It was frustrating. I was finally just going to forget it and say to myself ‘I just won’t ever get a job doing [what I want] because everyone is going to judge me and I have to keep reliving my past.’” Kelly, like many other survivors, has a criminal record as a result of being forced to engage in illegal activity. Her situation is not unique, and, unfortunately, criminal records hold survivors back, impacting their ability to obtain employment, housing, education, benefits and financial assistance, immigration relief or adjustment of status and family stability. Solving the issue of criminal charges for forced crimes requires a holistic approach to providing survivors with access to the resources that they need for successful reentry into society.

If we’re at a dinner party and someone asks what we do, we are unlikely to highlight the awesome cross stitch we completed while watching our new favorite Netflix series, the weekend trip we took to Acadia National Park, the hug we gave our significant other, the long run we went on the other day, or even the book that we read that completely changed our life. We know that what we “do” is inherently our job.

As Malala Yousafzai wrote, “When someone takes away your pens you realize quite how important education is.” For so many women who are able to access exit pathways from trafficking situations, particularly in East Asia, this is precisely the situation. Women who escape brothels in East Asia are often unable to finish basic schooling before they are trafficked. As a result, they often lack the personal and professional skills to be economically independent and are therefore vulnerable to revictimization.

Talia is an 8-year-old survivor of human trafficking. She was deceived by her older brother and trafficked for the purposes of human child sacrifice. During a police raid, her brother was murdered by the witch doctor, but Talia was rescued. Her condition at the time of rescue was severely physically, mentally, and emotionally abused. When she arrived at the Dressember Network partner’s comprehensive residential Aftercare Program, she was extremely traumatized. She relayed to Joy, her case manager, that she wanted to be a policewoman when she grew up so she could find the man who killed her brother and take revenge.

An estimated 60,000 children are involved in the Thai sex trade every year. A significant number are girls who come from the Northern region of Thailand, where poverty forces many to drop out of school while young. Uneducated, yet expected to help provide for their families, these children are easily lured into the sex trade.

Two minors on a bus in South Africa seemed to be avoiding eye contact and social interaction, and sticking close together rather than with the adults accompanying them. A young man noticed that they were speaking a foreign language and the adults with them, posing as their parents, spoke a different foreign language. The young man did not immediately think much of it, as situations like this are not uncommon in South Africa. However, when he heard one of the minors say that their mother was lost, indicating that the woman posing as their mother was in fact not who she purported to be, he was alarmed: if these two adults were not the children’s parents, who were they?

In the last two years, people have turned online for social connection at a time when so much of their day-to-day activity could only have been experienced online. Children were forced to attend school online as a result of the restrictions required to maintain public health. The pandemic has been a vulnerable time for everyone, perhaps most of all for survivors of human trafficking. In one of the programs the Dressember Network resources in the Philippines, survivors of human trafficking in became unemployed at a rate of 60% between March and May 2020. This digital livelihood brought a spike in Online Sexual Exploitation of Children (OSEC), with online sexual abuse cases tripled in the Philippines.

TikTok, a social media application with which users are able to post short videos of up to 60-seconds that often feature funny content, tutorials, workouts, or even frank conversations, has had a meteoric rise to popularity, especially in South East Asia, where there are nearly 200 million users. Children use social media apps like TikTok to grow in digital media literacy, connect with global online communities, create, and share common interests with others. While TikTok is recommended for users ages 15 and older and the app’s terms of use technically require that a child be over the age of 13 to engage with the app’s features, we all know that many children younger than this are using the app. With the rise of social media that is engaging for children, like TikTok, there has also been a rise in the Online Sexual Exploitation of Children (OSEC).