SUGGESTIONS

 

To do, to talk, to write, to research, to use old and new ways to acknowledge our experiences.

 

With the following suggestions we want to prove our skills to propose, to change, to accept challenges, to appropriate ways of talking and acting which we previously considered to be limited to other people: experts, academics, artists… these important people.

 

At the beginning of our dialogue we felt uncomfortable with words we often heard but rarely made any sense to us; words like feminism, gender, and human rights. Nevertheless, as we became active and started to propose, to talk and to explore, these terms became more meaningful. This has been a very important development for us.

 

Along our journey we also encountered new words and concepts like: restoration of human rights, post-colonialism, border thinking, empowerment, social movements, social agents, multiculturalism and interculturalism.

 

At the same time we gave our own intepretation to words like immigration, knowledge, research, methodology, autonomy, mediation, power, positioning and participation.

 

We reflected a lot about words like “victim” and “vulnerability” because we disagree with how they are being used. We found that people abuse of these words to make reference to women who have suffered trafficking. People expect us to identify ourselves as eternal victims and vulnerable women.

 

We also ended up rejecting two other common words:

• Empathy: we believe this word allows the one’s who are better off to identify with those who are less lucky, but not the other way around.

• Honor, because it is in the name of honor that we have been subdued. For those of us who have suffered trafficking this term has been a permanent obstacle to free ourselves from trafficking.

 

Concerning to institutional campaigns designed to raise awareness about trafficking, we don’t like some pictures, images and music that aims to provide a profile of a victim of trafficking. We consider many of these images to be disrespectful and almost pornographic. When we started this website we decided to design our own images, that change the ideas and misconceptions about women victims of trafficking.