Woman Sells Handicrafts to Fight Human Trafficking

After seeing a documentary film about human trafficking, Sarah Symons devoted her life's work to helping the survivors lead normal lives by creating an online shop.

By Kathryn Hawkins. Posted on January 24 2008

In 2002, Sarah Symons, an artist, singer, wife, and mother who lived in Cape Cod, stepped into a theater to watch a film called The Day My God Died. By the time the screen went black at the end of the movie, she had been shaken to her very core.

The documentary film told the stories of young girls in India who are sold into the prostitution trade before they even reach puberty. They live in Bombay’s filthy brothels, known as “the Cages,” and suffer severe physical and sexual abuse. 80% of the girls are infected with the HIV virus – there are as many as 90 new cases every hour.

These statistics are scary enough, but when Symons saw the faces of the young women in the documentary and heard their heart-wrenching stories, she knew that she could not walk out of that theater and go back to her normal life. This problem was too urgent, too important to sit idly by while thousands of other girls were sold into sex slavery – she had to take action to help these women.

“The movie showed how horrible trafficking is, but people were taking action and it was working,” she says. “If they could do it, I could help.”

As soon as she got home, she got in touch with one of the rescue organizations that had been depicted in the film, Friends of Maiti Nepal. She traveled to Nepal to work with survivors of human trafficking at group homes, and helped out with fundraising efforts. Soon, she saw that one of the most important forms of help she could provide was not mere charity, but to help the survivors create their own income opportunities, so that they could live independently and provide for themselves without falling back into the world of prostitution.

At one of the shelters she visited in Nepal, she watched the residents create beautiful purses. The craftworks served as a therapeutic hobby for the women and provided the opportunity to learn a trade, but did not generate income for the survivors. Symons decided to change that: She knew that by selling the women’s beautiful handiwork through her own online store, she would be able to help the survivors support themselves.

In 2005, Symons founded The Emancipation Network and an online shopfront, Made By Survivors, where she could display and sell the beautiful jewelry, purses, and other craftworks that had been made by trafficking survivors in 15 shelters and trafficking prevention programs in countries including India, Nepal, Cambodia, and Thailand.

To date, the organization has raised more than $260,000 in profits for the survivors, and many of them are now able to support themselves financially, thanks to Symons’ work. “They’re living independently, they’re cooking for themselves – you can’t even imagine how joyful they are,” she says.

Visit Made by Survivors and help fight human trafficking with your purchase of these beautiful handicrafts.

Filed under: Arts and Culture, Features, Heroes, Non-Profits,

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