Empowering Teen Girl Survivors of Sex Trafficking

Vital Stats

Tabitha P

New York, NY

  • people helped4
  • People Doing It2

The Problem

The CIA estimates that roughly 50,000 women and girls are being held against their wills and forced to sell sex in the United States. The average age of entry into prostitution in this country is 12 years old. Little girls are abducted or coerced into sex work daily, most often at the hands of violent pimps. Pimps deliberately crush the self-esteem of their victims through rape and relentless physical and verbal abuse. In almost all cases the victim is isolated from her family and her education is disrupted so that even if she does escape, she is unlikely to make ends meet without prostituting herself again. This means that escaped victims are often trafficked repeatedly. There are several wonderful organizations that support trafficking survivors by teaching them vocational skills and helping them earn high school equivalencies. This summer, I intend to expand on those efforts by helping to create a world in which survivors are no longer limited by their ordeals; one in which college is accessible, and in which no profession is off limits.

Plan of Action

This summer, four teen survivors of sex trafficking in the New York City metropolitan area will be invited to attend a 17-day traveling summer camp with an emphasis on writing workshops and service work. We will accept applications from girls affiliated with any of the established non-profits in the NYC area that work with survivors. In their applications, girls will be asked to write a two-page autobiographical essay and a two-page essay on what choices or laws they think in retrospect might have prevented their sexual exploitation. In August 2011, we will lead the girls on a trip from New York to California by train, making 8 stops in total: New York, (NY), Washington (DC), New Orleans (LA), Chicago (IL), Omaha (NE), Colorado Springs (CO), Santa Fe (NM), and Los Angeles (CA). On those stops, the girls will participate in service projects and meet female role models from across a number of different professions. Here is a sample of planned activities: meet congresswomen and journalists in DC, volunteer at a primary school in New Orleans, work on a farm outside Chicago, volunteer and meet other teens on a Native American reservation outside Omaha, participate in a reforesting project in Colorado Springs, build a house in Santa Fe, and meet film industry executives and medical researchers in Los Angeles. During long train rides and hotel stays, we will have time for journaling and for writing workshops. In the workshops, the girls will expand and polish one of the essays they wrote for their applications, and they will each write one new essay and one poem or short story on un-prescribed topics. We will have a public reading of the girls’ work in NYC in September. The essays and select journal entries that the girls write on the trip will be compiled into a book, along with photos from the trip and a profile of each girl. Proceeds from book sales will go in part towards making this trip possible for more teen survivors in August 2012, and in part towards starting a college fund for this year’s participants. We will provide access to free SAT tutoring through an existing, volunteer-run program at Columbia. The members of Students to End Modern Slavery (STEMS) at Columbia will advise the girls as they choose which colleges to apply to, submit their applications, and apply for financial aid. As the program expands over time, the girls who participate this year can become mentors for those who participate in later years.
Go
Discrimination
Human Trafficking
Human Rights

Related Stuff