When I came across Princeton Against Sex Trafficking selling red bracelets in the Frist Campus Center, I couldn’t help but think the campaign was outdated. LIVESTRONG has sold over 80 million wristbands on behalf of cancer awareness since 2004, but after hundreds of spinoffs of every slogan and color, it seems we are only raising awareness of our own social consciousness. My silicone wristbands quickly piled up, eventually packed away in a drawer somewhere next to my sister’s old scrunchies. But PAST and the bracelets they sell are different.
Rafael Grillo ’14 started PAST last April with the mission of educating Princeton students about sex trafficking and getting students engaged with nongovernmental orginizations and other charities working on the issue. The bracelet sale is the group’s first campaign, which will be followed by a screening of the documentary “Very Young Girls.” Additionally, a presentation by the director of Apne Aap, one of the main U.S.-based organizations fighting sex trafficking, will be held next week.
My red bracelet traveled a long way before Grillo tied the strings around my wrist. The bracelets are handmade by Nepalese women and girls at a safe house near the Indian border. The safe house is a temporary home for girls either rescued from sex traffickers or girls who have nowhere else to turn. The bracelets are distributed in the United States by the Red Threads Movement, a student-run charity affiliated with Eternal Threads, a Texas-based non-profit that supports impoverished women throughout the world by selling their products in the United States. Eternal Threads buys each bracelet for 66 cents; after transportation and yarn costs, the girls make 50 cents in profit, well above the minimum wage in Nepal. (All of Eternal Threads’ products are “Fair Trade” certified). The bracelets are then sold in the United States for $3; profits made in the United States go directly to the funding of the safe house and anti-trafficking border units.
The safe house is run by a Nepali NGO called Kingdom Investments Nepal, which operates various anti-sex trafficking initiatives. When girls try to leave Nepal looking for work, KIN stops them at the border and warns them of the dangers of sex trafficking. Most go back to their hometowns; if they are unable to, they live at the safe house, where they usually stay for six to eight months. Once they leave, KIN checks in on them and gives them their own sewing machine and some of the girls become advocates against sex trafficking in their home villages. The purpose is multi-fold: to provide women with a skill, even a basic one; to give them some income and to provide funds for the safe house.
Officials estimate that over 30 million people are enslaved throughout the world, in forced labor or the sex trade. In Nepal, that number might reach as high as 30,000 annually. In spite of “fair trade” practices and international laws against trafficking, slaves are still an integral part of the global economic system. A new website, slaveryfootprint.org, estimates the number of slaves needed to maintain the user’s lifestyle — mine was 22. While we may not be the johns exploiting Nepali prostitutes, we have all indirectly benefited from slave labor in some way. The bracelets sold behind the staircase in Frist are small reminders of our role in the system, whether the trafficking happens in Nepal, Romania or even the United States.
LIVESTRONG and other similar wristbands might cause us to think about specific issues, but Eternal Threads’ bracelets are more complicated. LIVESTRONG has a “feel-good” appeal that everyone can get behind — in a rare display of bipartisanship, both President Bush and Senator Kerry wore them during the 2004 campaign. When people look down at their LIVESTRONG bracelets, they think of the horrors of cancer, but that is an issue they cannot control and a problem they have no role in propagating. They are not implicated in the tragedies they are trying to end. Eternal Threads has the opposite effect.
I look at my wrist and feel uneasy knowing that the 50 cents earned by the woman who made my bracelet is far better than the life she might have otherwise led were it not for Eternal Threads. I feel uneasy knowing that many of my other clothes or accessories with mainstream U.S. labels utilize slave labor at some point along the production line. “We wear their freedom on our arms,” says Eternal Threads’ website. We also wear our complacence in an exploitative economic system that fails to provide the most basic rights to workers throughout the world. This bracelet won’t get thrown into the LIVESTRONG drawer just yet.
Brandon Davis is a Near Eastern studies major from Westport, Conn. He can be reached at bsdavis@princeton.edu.
Read More
Progressives failed a lesson in free speech
Anais Mobarak“The recent controversy surrounding Charter Club has demonstrated that progressive voices on campus have failed to recognize the value of free speech beyond its usefulness as a political instrument. Thus, as a community, we must work to foster an ideologically-free understanding of free speech.”
“The recent controversy surrounding Charter Club has demonstrated that progressive voices on campus have failed to recognize the value of free speech beyond its usefulness as a political instrument. Thus, as a community, we must work to foster an ideologically-free understanding of free speech.”
Campus through a lens: Announcing the ‘Prince’s inaugural columnists
Eleanor Clemans-CopeReading a series of columns by the same author is seeing things through the writer’s lens — it’s looking at campus through the ‘Christofer glasses’ or the ‘Eleanor specs.’ This is the thinking behind having named columns.
Reading a series of columns by the same author is seeing things through the writer’s lens — it’s looking at campus through the ‘Christofer glasses’ or the ‘Eleanor specs.’ This is the thinking behind having named columns.
Bring back the course packet
Abigail Rabieh“With the recent news that Labyrinth Books will no longer supply the coursebooks for Princeton classes, we are facing a new era in which all readings will only be accessible by some digital medium, whether that be via Course Reserves or online ordering from faraway publishers. While some may see this as a step in the right direction of modernity, the increasing digitalization of our scholarship hurts our learning.”
“With the recent news that Labyrinth Books will no longer supply the coursebooks for Princeton classes, we are facing a new era in which all readings will only be accessible by some digital medium, whether that be via Course Reserves or online ordering from faraway publishers. While some may see this as a step in the right direction of modernity, the increasing digitalization of our scholarship hurts our learning.”
