This made me smile.
Jason opens up about his visit to Ghana with Free The Slaves and shares a very special experience at the Challenging Heights Shelter.
later, slavery
My name is April Smallwood and 22 slaves work for me.
Sunitha Krishnan on acceptance
“It’s very fashionable to talk about human trafficking… It’s very nice for discussion, discourse, making films and everything. But it is not nice to bring them to our homes. It’s not nice to give them employment in our factories, our companies. It’s not nice for our children to study with their children. … That’s my biggest challenge.”
Sunitha Krishnan
What is human trafficking, exactly?
I’ve just come across this very clever Stop The Traffik campaign, set in Amsterdam’s red light district, and it’s a knock-out. I won’t spoil it for you. Just press play.
In Australia, human trafficking is defined as:
… the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of a person for the purpose of exploiting that person through slavery, forced labour, sexual servitude, debt bondage, organ removal or other forms of exploitation.
Learn more about human trafficking at Anti-Slavery Australia.
Thanks to Spark‘s Nadia Woodhouse for the tip-off.
I need a new mobile phone* (PART I)
*That’s not entirely true.
I have a phone, a Nokia E71 in fact, and it works. It even lets me surf the web, though not without squinting. To be honest, were I not surrounded by chatter of Instagram releasing its Android app, own an mp3 player that’s just about choked its last song, plus a tendency to leave the house confident and wind up lost, I probably wouldn’t be entertaining thoughts of a shiny new HTC One X.
I was moments away from ordering myself this snazzy white smartphone, when I remembered this blog and its focus of ending slavery. I also realised I never truly educated myself on the coltan issue.
What’s the coltan issue?
Coltan is a heat-resistant powder that’s used to make what the phone industry calls “pinhead capacitors”, which hold electrical current and store power in mobile phones. Eighty per cent of this resource is found and mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This fuels a war in the DRC and children work here. In short, many maintain their livelihood working on coltan mines so we can make calls and play Angry Birds.
Coltan mining is a well documented issue. Google it and most breaking news stories surrounding the scandal are dated 2001. The UN has had its say, some companies have expressed their desire to only purchase coltan mined ethically, responsibly, morally. A documentary called Blood Coltan (watch in full above) was made to further expose and educate people like you and I on the issue. But what’s changed?
From what I’ve gathered, this is where we’re at:
- A few big companies refused to buy slave-mined coltan, so smuggling is rife
- Outside of Africa, Australia and Brazil are also important coltan producers. A report and documentary from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists warn that coltan production is now spreading to places such as Venezuela and Colombia
- International policing and regulations are needed
- In September last year, Phone Story was released, a four-part game that critiques the very device you’re playing it on. It was promptly removed from Apple’s Appstore (for depicting cruelty to children, among other supposed infringements). Download Phone Story.
Conflict minerals 101
For those interested, here is some further reading:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/0917/1224304252987.html
http://www.mygreenaustralia.com/2011/02/australia-and-our-bloody-technology/
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304537904577277902985836034.html
http://ronaldkresten.articlealley.com/do-your-products-contain-conflict-minerals-2330812.html
-April
Lincoln on slavery
This year, I read historian Eric Foner’s powerfully insightful book The Fiery Trial, which looks at Abraham Lincoln’s career and the Civil War. In it, is an undated fragment in which Lincoln mused on the logical absurdity of pro-slavery arguments.
“If A can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B, why not may B snatch the same argument, and prove equally that he may enslave A? You say A is white, and B is black… Take care. By this rule, you are to be the slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.”
Read the NY Times book review.
Why I love the internet
What a win! Free The Slaves has posted about Later, Slavery on its blog. Big thanks to Anne Keehn and Tawney Bevacqua for the shout out.
Letter from a former sex slave
This month, I was fortunate to meet, via cyberspace, a remarkable woman by the name of Stella Marr. Stella was a prostitute in NYC for almost 10 years. During this time, one of her “Johns”, as they’re oft-called, gave her a beautiful condominium opposite the Lincoln Center. He “kept” her as his sex slave for almost two years. After selling the condo, Stella used the money to fund her BA at Columbia University. She graduated with distinction, majoring in writing.
Here, for Later, Slavery, she has penned a letter to her former self. I’d personally like to thank Stella for sharing her story with such heart.
Dear 20-year old Stella,
Work hard on learning to ask for help. It’s the only way you’ll ever break free. No-one ever does anything alone. You don’t have to.
You’ll learn how to make the men happy. The happier they are, the nicer they are. You’ll become very, very good at being a hooker. But when the Johns say, “Baby, you were born for this”, that doesn’t mean it’s true.
Being a hooker doesn’t make you subhuman. It’s not okay for your (white) pimps to threaten and beat you.
Now when most men come near, you feel a stabbing at your eyes, your throat, and your gut that you know isn’t real. You don’t want to admit it, but you’re terrified. You start, you tremble. Your hands shake. Think about it, you’re being stabbed a lot these days. This is a quite reasonable reaction to being used by man after man, day after day, in this prison of a brothel. It doesn’t mean you are so miserably flawed that you can’t do anything but be a hooker.
You have to work up the nerve to pay a cashier for a soda. You’re too scared to ask that guy behind the deli counter to make you a sandwich. This isn’t weakness, it’s biology. Trauma changes your brain; your hippocampus, where you form narrative memory in the brain, shrinks. This is a symptom of PTSD – a neurophysiologic response to repetitive trauma – not evidence that you deserve to be in prostitution.
In the middle of the winter, in the middle of the night, when that guy in the DoubleTree Suite invites you to sit while he pours you a Seltzer, trust your gut and back out of there before the five guys you can’t see, who are waiting in the bedroom, have a chance to get between you and the door.
Being vulnerable means you’re alive. There’s no shame in it. It doesn’t mean you’re a terrible person. You don’t have to apologise for doing what you must to survive.
You’ve lost all sense of the linear – time disappeared and you felt it leave. Now, you’re living in the immediate and eternity. It’s scary and bewildering, but you need this – you need each moment to stretch infinitely so that you can be acutely aware of each man’s tiny movements and shifts in expression, which often reveal a threat before it happens. This hyperawareness will save your life. One day, you will look back at this “being untethered from time” as a kind of grace.
When that shiny classical pianist you meet at Au Bon Pain says he wants to know everything about you, don’t believe him.
When Samantha stops working for your pimp, Johnny, find her and make her get out of the city. Otherwise, two weeks later, Nicole (the madam who works with Johnny) will show you Samantha’s gold initial ring, and tell you Johnny strangled her.
A lot of what’s happening doesn’t make sense now, but it will later. That habit you have of writing poems in your mind to the beloved you haven’t met yet as you’re riding in cabs to calls? There’s something to it.
Your ability to perceive beauty is part of your resilience and survival. When a man is on top of you, watch the wind-shirred leaves out his window. Seize the gusty joy you feel as you run three blocks to a bodega to buy condoms between calls at 3am. When you think for a minute you see that friend, whose death you never got over, standing in the brassy light under a weeping linden, be grateful. All this has a purpose.
Being a hooker can seem to mean you’ve lost everything you hoped to be, but that’s not true. You’ve splintered into a million pieces, but you’re still you. You’re alive. It’s in the spaces between those pieces where you learn to feel how other people are feeling. It hurts so much you’re sure it’ll kill you, but it won’t. Later, when you’re out of the life, it’ll be so easy to be happy. The mundane will buoy you.
When your madam sends you to the Parker Meridien in NYC at 3am, and you meet a British professor who says he wants to help you, believe him. He will set you up in a beautiful condominium across from the Lincoln Center that he deeds in your name. Of course, you’ll have everything to do with this – you are so “good” at being a hooker, so “good” at f%#*ing that you can make a guy want to do this for you. Shame is a hollow stone in the throat.
During the two years that this voracious man “keeps” you as his private prostitute, the condo will come to feel like a platinum trap. But it’s still your chance to get out and heal. Take it.
After you’ve sold the condominium and are living in a graduate dorm at Columbia University, a man with eyes like blue shattered glass will sit beside you in the cafeteria. As he begins to speak, you realise he’s the unmet beloved you’ve been writing poems to all these years. You’ll try to run away, but he won’t let you. Fourteen years later, you’ll be hiking through pink granite outcroppings together with your Labrador retriever. You’ll feel like the freest woman in the world.
One afternoon, when you’re 21, you’ll be visiting at the Museum of Metropolitan of Art with your best friend, Gabriel, who’s also a hustler – a male prostitute. When he says you ‘remind him of his death’, don’t lash back. He told you the doctors said he didn’t have that rare new virus they just named AIDS, but he’s still coughing.
Stop thinking about your own hurt. Don’t be stupid. Don’t lash back with that vicious phrase your mother’s said to you so many times: “I hope you die a slow death”. Don’t tell him you never want to see him again and storm out of the sculpture gallery. Gabriel will die of AIDS five months later. When he said you reminded him “of his own death”, he was trying to tell you he was dying. You’ll regret what you said for the rest of your life. But, even more, you’ll regret that you ran away.
Say forgive me. Say I love you. Stay connected.
Love,
Stella
Learn more about Stella’s story on her website.
Stella is a founding member of Survivors Connect, an international online leaderless network of trafficking and prostitution survivors.
Slavery & Me – A short film
I made an anti-slavery video! Why? As a response to the United Nations 7 Billion Actions campaign, and to promote the great work of Free The Slaves. A few weeks ago, I posted my intention to help end slavery through video and song, and I’ve spent the past two months thinking about, shooting, procrastinating and creating said video. To have finally uploaded it and be in a position to share it with you now is a major achievement (and relief) for me.
What am I trying to say?
That I am directly connected to modern-day slavery, namely through forced labour and the products I buy. Amazingly, this is something I didn’t even know until a few short months ago.
In creating it, I owe a great deal to my friends Kevin and Stella, and this YouTube tutorial. If you’re thinking of making a stop-motion video using iMovie, this will clarify a few things. For those interested, I took the images using a Panasonic Lumix TZ20.
One thing I’ve had to overcome in making this film was this: I have a hard time asking others for help. Despite this, I pushed myself and found the response was wonderful. It’s taught me to ask for help more often, lest I attempt everything solo and have a hard and lonely time doing so, unnecessarily.
Download the song
The song We Are featured in Slavery & Me is available as a free download. If you dig it, it’s yours.
Pass it on
Please share the video with friends using the links below. Leave a comment, too, and throw me any questions if you have them. I’d love to achieve 1,000 views in the first week.
-April
It’s as simple as this
“The root cause of slavery is poverty.”
April’s first vlog
A video in which I answer the question, “So what’s all this anti-slavery stuff about?”
Thanks for watching!
Think big, act small
“Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you.”
-Mother Teresa
Let’s make a video together
Think slavery’s crap? Want your kids and their kids to live in a free world? Send me a photo of yourself with “Later, Slavery” scrawled on your palm and I’ll compile the lot into a video. Oh, and write it in whatever language you like! Pass it on.
- Upload your photo to Twitter, with @laterslavery somewhere in there.
- Post it on the Later, Slavery Facebook wall.
- Email your snap my way at ape [dot] smallwood [@] gmail.com
-April
April versus the ukelele
Lately, I’ve been wanting to write a song about my feelings regarding slavery. Yesterday, I did so. It was a sunny day and my wonderful friend Kevin taught me a bunch of chords on his uke. All grew from there. I’ll share it with you now.
It’s called We Are. Should you fancy a singalong, the chorus goes like this:
I connect to you, your life reflects on me
A mile or a million don’t mean a thing
There’s you and me,
In this here family
Lately, I’ve been feeling more and more connected to the people I come across. Those I make eye contact with, and even those I don’t; those across the globe and those in my apartment building. Therefore, I couldn’t help but also feel a commonality with victims of slavery.
Anyways, We Are is yours. Download it by clicking that little arrow on the SoundCloud player.
-April
The serious question
A lot of people are responsible [for slavery today], but the serious question we should ask is “To what extent are we responsible?”
-Noam Chomsky
later, slavery 