Sarah Symons sees invisible people. And they are not hallucinations.
There are 27 million slaves in the world, including untold thousands right here in the land of the free and home of the brave.
"In the press, you may hear about one dramatic case but there are millions of people who are being trafficked," Symons told me over the phone last week from her home in St. Augustine, Fla.
The former Sandwich resident and songwriter first encountered the dark side of "globalization" and "free-trade" when she attended the Tribeca Film Festival and saw a documentary called "The Day My God Died," which chronicled the modern slave trade between Nepal and India.
"After I saw that film, I started reaching out to the groups who were featured in the documentary and I asked them: what do you want and need? They said, 'economic empowerment.' So I followed that advice," she explained.
In 2005, Symons and her husband, John Berger, founded The Emancipation Network in Sandwich, where she had been living for the past 14 years.
"One of the things we did (and still do) is import products made by (trafficked) survivors. And then we sell those products through our website," madebysurvivors.com, she said.
Five years later — with its headquarters in Sandwich and offices in India and Florida — The Emancipation Network (TEN) has grown to do much more than sell "fair-trade" wares of formerly enslaved women. TEN also runs after-care programs for survivors rescued from slave-labor — helping them find a safe place to live, and providing job training, education services and pathways to independent livelihoods.
"Trafficking is a big problem in every country, including the U.S. It's a systemic problem ... major criminal activity. It's organized and systematic but it's a problem that responds very well to intervention. I mean, you can do something about it. It's far from hopeless," she said.
Tragically, she said, governments tolerate human trafficking, particularly in developing countries, because "society tolerates it. It's tolerated because it happens to invisible people, like very poor girls and minorities all over the world."
What's driving this monstrous trade that many Americans think of only as a relic of history, far removed from their own lives? It's being driven, Symons has learned, by the modern globalized "demand for commercial sex and cheap products" — products that many of us buy, without ever thinking about the conditions under which our desired "goods" were made.
When Symons, a 46-year-old mother of two, first got involved in the modern day emancipation movement, she was motivated by grief and outrage, "just agonizing over and thinking about little girls getting sexually abused and tortured. But now I realize that despair, grief and rage will not keep you going in this. That wears off. Today, I'm motivated by the transformation I've seen in the girls we work with — their joy and courage."
Right now, TEN coordinates a program in Calcutta that employs 20 women who were rescued from a brothel. They've gone from being sex slaves to full-time legit employment, trained as silversmiths. They can cut metal and design jewelry, which in India is something traditionally done by men. TEN is opening a similar program in Mumbai next week.
Symons' organization also sponsors 75 children who attend boarding school in India after having been liberated from the illicit sex trade.
"And we're always looking for volunteers," Symons said, gently nudging me to get more actively involved.
"There's a number of ways to get involved. People can host a home (jewelry) party, help sell the products and share information."
One bit of information you'll find is that human trafficking hits closer to home than you may be aware. As John Bowe details in his acclaimed book, "Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy," regular people — like you and me — "buy Granny Smiths picked by slaves in New York and Washington state. We buy paper from trees planted by workers in Georgia and Alabama who don't get paid or barely get paid. We buy car parts made of steel fired with charcoal made by slaves in Brazil."
"We buy binders, cell phone chips, and leather purses manufactured by slaves in China, and shirts from Wal-Mart made by slaves in Burma."
Unbelievable, you say? It is. That's because modern day slaves are "invisible," except to people such as Sarah Symons, whose very life poses a powerful question to the rest of us: Do we not see what's going on because we are incapable of seeing it, or simply because we don't want to look?
Sean Gonsalves' column runs on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Read past columns at www.capecodonline.com/gonsalves. E-mail him at sgonsalves@capecodonline.com.
Slavery isn't relic of history | CapeCodOnline.com
Source: The Cape Cod Times
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