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As they work to rebuild their lives, survivors of trafficking often face significant economic barriers, leading to higher rates of unemployment and potential revictimization. These barriers can affect survivors at any point in their journey, from immediately after they achieve freedom to many years down the line. Most survivors will need some form of financial assistance or help transitioning into a viable career. Coordinated legal, advocacy, and mutual aid efforts to address economic barriers can have a huge impact on survivors’ ability to recover and thrive.

This post describes several economic hurdles survivors of trafficking can face — and what you can do to help.

Educational challenges

Chronic and complex trauma wreaks havoc on a child’s mind, leading to conditions like PTSD, dissociative disorders, and others. These conditions can negatively affect a child’s education, especially if they experience amnesia due to their trauma or act out in class as a cry for help — resulting in lower grades that can greatly reduce their college and career prospects in adulthood.

Even as they pursue higher education, many survivors remain constantly on the run from their traffickers, needing to drop out of school to move cities or even states just to keep distance and protect themselves from the person or people who traumatized them. This unexplained leave of absence can be detrimental to transferring to another school, cost additional money in tuition, and leave the student without any option of returning to school.

As a survivor, I was revictimized during my third year of college and forced to leave school to prevent myself from being stalked by my trafficker’s accomplice. I’m not the only survivor with a story like this.

Similar situations can also happen when a survivor is settled into a career. If their trafficker reenters their life, they may need to quit their job and move just to keep themselves safe. This can be detrimental to long-term career goals.

Immigration issues

Some survivors who are adults may not have a working visa, preventing them from getting a job in the country they were trafficked into. There are government programs to provide visas, but little information and support about them is available to most survivors. These programs need to be expanded.

Criminal records

Survivors of sex trafficking can have criminal records because of the acts they were forced to commit while being trafficked. If a survivor had to work the streets, they may have been picked up by police and charged for solicitation, despite being a victim. Some survivors are forced to harm or even kill their trafficker to escape or protect themselves, and often the survivor is the one punished.

Trafficking survivors are sometimes considered an accessory to their trafficker’s crimes. Several famous cases, especially against BIPOC survivors, have occurred in which survivors have been charged with the crimes of their traffickers or for their acts of self-defense. This even happens to children who are being trafficked.

We should advocate for legislation that decriminalizes the selling of sex, so fewer survivors of trafficking end up with unfair charges against them. We can also donate to nonprofit organizations that help expunge the criminal records of trafficking survivors.

Disability

Being a disabled person myself, I’ve experienced firsthand the challenges of living with a disability while trying to make ends meet. Survivors of trafficking often have complex physical or psychiatric disabilities that make it harder for them to work traditional jobs.

To support trafficking survivors and all disabled people, we can push for policies that extend disability benefits. We can also advocate for disabled people to be paid at least minimum wage, since it is currently legal to pay some disabled people below minimum wage.

Debt from traffickers

Traffickers will sometimes create debt in their victim’s name, by using the victim’s credit cards or stealing their identity. This can leave a victim with thousands of dollars to pay back, despite not being responsible for the purchases. Traffickers can also use the debt as a form of coercion, leaving victims vulnerable to more abuse — for example, needing to sell themselves for sex — to pay off the debt.

Debt relief programs for trafficking survivors do exist, but they need to be expanded. It’s also important to make survivors aware that relief programs like this do exist.

Lack of opportunities and support

Trafficking survivors are often on their own, with little family support and few social connections. It can be intimidating to suddenly need to survive on your own after going through such intense trauma, often without the same educational and career opportunities as your peers.

Comprehensive support for survivors includes economic support in addition to more traditional services like housing and trauma recovery. It’s also important to have options available for survivors who have been free for years but are still struggling with financial issues.

Providing direct economic opportunity — such as by hiring survivors in your business or nonprofit organization, or by providing job training to survivors — is the most beneficial way to help. Fair pay and career pathways with growth opportunities are absolutely essential, especially if you can place survivors in leadership positions. Offering scholarships and educational opportunities to survivors is equally important. If you have the means, donating directly to survivors is another great form of support. Lastly, donating to a nonprofit organization that assists survivors is also helpful, especially if the organization is survivor led.

“The Places They Will Go” © Helen Zughaib

“My work is ultimately about creating empathy. Creating a shared space for introspection and dialogue. I ask the viewer to see through someone else’s eyes, to walk in another’s shoes. To accept the ‘other.’ To reject divisiveness. To promote acceptance and understanding and to reject violence and subjugation of anyone anywhere. To give voice to the voiceless, to heal, to reflect in our shared humanity.”

ArtWorks for Freedom is delighted to spotlight the life and splendid work of artist Helen Zughaib, whose paintings, drawings and prints have such a powerful message to convey to the public. It was our pleasure to feature her work in our 2017 ACTION DC! campaign, in an exhibit entitled Human Trafficking: Reclaiming Freedom, A Call and Response, at the Watergate Gallery. The exhibit was curated by artist and Board member Helen Frederick. 

Zughaib’s work has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States, Europe and Lebanon. Her paintings are included in many private and public collections, including the White House; World Bank; Library of Congress; US Consulate General, Vancouver, Canada; American Embassy in Baghdad; the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan; and the DC Art Bank collection. She recently was awarded a grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and is currently included in the new Washingtonia Collection. Zughaib was also invited to be an artist in residence at George Mason University, Virginia, and Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. Her paintings have been included in several Art in Embassy exhibitions abroad, including Brunei, Nicaragua, Mauritius, Iraq, Belgium and Lebanon. 

Zughaib was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and spent her childhood mostly in the Middle East and Europe before coming to the United States to study art at Syracuse University. There she earned her BFA from the College of Visual and Performing Arts. She lives and works in Washington, DC as a fulltime artist.

As an Arab American, Zughaib’s hope is for her art to encourage dialogue and bring understanding and acceptance between the people of the Arab world and the West. She calls out for this enhanced mutual understanding so desperately needed in the post 9/11 world we are living in. The two decades following that terrible event include the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recent revolutions and crises in the Arab world resulting from the Arab Spring. One of those crises is the Syrian civil war which has inspired her artistic focus on the massive displacement of people seeking refuge in Europe, the Middle East and America, and the ways in which these vulnerable people are victimized.

“Syrian Migration #16” © Helen Zughaib

While Zughaib’s pieces traditionally consist of painting primarily in gouache and ink on board and canvas, she is also drawn to work with wood, shoes, and cloth in mixed media installations. An example of her poignant work recently on exhibit with ArtWorks is “The Places They Will Go.”

“This piece,” Zughaib explains, “focuses on children who are the most vulnerable of victims in any global crisis involving war and causing people’s displacement. My piece refers to the thousands of young children fleeing for their safety. It was inspired by the Dr. Seuss book Oh the Places You’ll Go.

“The painted shoes serve as symbols of both running away from danger, as well as running towards one’s dreams.

“By using these small children’s shoes painted in bright colors and patterns, I hope to bring the viewer closer to these issues of immigration, victimization, forced evacuation and trauma. Issues that seem so impossibly large and overwhelming for us to grasp. I try to raise awareness of Syrian children being especially vulnerable to forced marriages, commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor. 

“Through this piece, I am asking the viewer to place themselves in another’s shoes, almost literally, in hopes of creating empathy and compassion and possibly change.”

Regarding her work with ArtWorks, Zughaib says, “I have been involved with ArtWorks for a few years now with my paintings and installations. It has been an honor to work with them to raise awareness not only for the victims of trafficking in the United States, but also globally. And to focus on the plight of the young children facing the horrific situation of war and displacement which compound their already vulnerable states, making them increasingly vulnerable to trafficking, both sexual and labor.”

The honor is ours, Helen. And in the words of Iranian-American writer Azar Nafisi, “Art is here to make you look through the eyes of another and to discover the other in yourself.” 

January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month. Each week we are featuring a member of our growing Artists Alliance with whom we have collaborated in the past. By highlighting their art, practice and inspiration, we hope to broaden our audience and enlighten more hearts and minds about the millions upon millions of invisible, marginalized people who are trafficking victims or are at risk of being trafficked. Today, we present Theresa Knight McFadden.

Among a plethora of titles, including professor, wife, mother and friend, McFadden is a creator. Her work has toured the world as part of exhibits throughout the U.S., China and South Korea. Formally trained as a painter, she works in oils on large canvases. She also works in clay and mixed media and it is this combination with which she created “Caged” to portray the atrocity of human trafficking.

McFadden grew up in the Washington D.C. area and in 2011 moved to Cambridge, Maryland with her husband. This is where they purchased a home, established roots and formed a community. It is where McFadden’s creativity flows without interruption. Her studio, being on the same property as the house itself, is beyond a convenience; it calls to her.

“It is a special, sacred place for me and when I enter it, I feel an almost immediate shift away from all my day to day tasks and concerns to a more introspective state that allows me to focus on my art. I try to go to my studio every day (no excuses for bad weather!) even if it is just to clean up or sit and think, read or work in my sketchbook,” says McFadden.

The studio is where the magic happens; a place where the creative mode transcends body and time.

“The process of channeling my ideas, feelings and emotions through the medium I have chosen, becomes almost meditative. I know many artists would tell you they have created a work that later they can hardly remember making and that experience is often true for me too. On my most productive and magical days, the creative process takes over and everything else falls away, even the sensations of hunger or fatigue,” McFadden explains. 

Prior to the ArtWorks for Freedom Easton MD campaign, McFadden was unaware of the gravity and pervasiveness of human trafficking, locally and globally. Before the inception of “Caged”, she set out to educate herself and was struck and overwhelmed by the reality that came to light through in-depth exploration of the subject she sought an artistic response to.

“I had no idea of the many types of human trafficking and was astounded to learn that it was so widespread and actually going on close to my home. What struck me deeply was the sense of being physically, and arbitrarily trapped at the hands of other humans. In a society where I and most other people move about freely and can advocate for ourselves there was this horrific underworld of human trafficking I was becoming aware of. “Caged” was my response to this awareness.”

McFadden’s illustrative description of “Caged” gives us a glimpse of the strength and fortitude of the people who have bravely lived through this experience. 

“It is a sculpture made of clay, wood and barbed wire, in the shape of a square box. The frame of the box is made of wood and painted white while the sides are white vertical bars made of unglazed clay and pitted as bones might be. The top of the box has barbed wire strung across it. Inside this box are the clay busts of a man and woman, waxed to a soft glow. They are side by side and looking out at the viewer. While most of my work involves high key color, I chose white for this somber piece. White is a symbol of innocence in some cultures and mourning in others — both being represented in this piece — the innocence and mourning of those being trafficked and the mourning of the world that has lost them.” 

She further explains that, “The figures are white to ennoble them and give them dignity in the way of classical busts from antiquity. The barbed wire top lifts off the box. While this was a practical choice since I needed a way to get the busts into their space it is also symbolic of hope that there will be an end to this entrapment through increased awareness of its existence.”

McFadden and seven other local artists were asked by ArtWorks for Freedom to participate in the Easton MD campaign which was presented in partnership with the Artistic Insights Fund of the Mid-Shore Community Foundation. In addition to local artists, the exhibit featured Kay Chernush’s Bought & Sold installation, drawings by trafficking survivor Prum Vannak and murals by aspiring teenage artists in an afterschool program.

Regarding her work with the organization, McFadden says,

“Collaborating with ArtWorks has been extremely meaningful to me. Their mission to use art as a tool to educate and enlighten the public and stir them to action against the injustice of human trafficking, and eventually to eradicate it, really resonated with me. I was honored to be asked to use my artistic voice to help raise awareness on the subject. I felt like I was following in the tradition of artists throughout history who have used their art to provoke social change.  Art speaks to the soul in ways other messages often don’t. “

“My hope is that the power of my art and that of other artists can reach people and touch their hearts. Artworks for Freedom is doing wonderful work. I am grateful that they exist and that I have been able to play a small part in helping them carry out their mission of eradicating human trafficking.”

To learn more about Theresa Knight McFadden and her art work, please visit her website.