Fighting Sexual Exploitation: In Solidarity with My Life My Choice!

This is the opening of a statement by Audrey Morrissey, the Associate Director of My Life My Choice, who is a trafficking survivor.

My Experience in the Sex Trade Had Nothing to Do with Choice

I was first sold for sex when I was 16. My boyfriend told me that if I loved him and our daughter, I’d work the corner so we could have a better life. He made me think there were no other options. He convinced me I wasn’t doing it for him, but for us. 

I know there are some women who say they do this willingly—they call themselves “sex workers.” Maybe that’s their truth, but that’s not mine. 

Nor is it the truth for the hundreds of girls I’ve counseled over the past 12 years at My Life My Choice.

For the rest of her statement, please go here to demandabolition.org.

I stand in solidarity with My Life My Choice. Here is the summary of their work:

Harnessing the strength of the collective voices of survivors, My Life My Choice empowers vulnerable youth to be agents of change in their own lives and in the movement to end the commercial sexual exploitation of children.

Here is their mission statement:

The mission of My Life My Choice is to prevent the commercial sexual exploitation of adolescents through survivor-led programs that educate and empower youth to find their voice and create a positive life path while working to eliminate the violence and victimization of sexual exploitation. 

We have a laser focus on strengthening the power, and amplifying the voices, of those who are most vulnerable and of those who have survived exploitation.

We are building a network of allies to stand up to the force of the illegal sex industry and create long-lasting social change.

Here is their history:

In 2001, a young Boston woman was brutally murdered. She was 17 years old and living in a Child Protective Services (CPS) funded group home. Unbeknownst to any of the caring adults in her life, she was being commercially sexually exploited. At the time of her death, leaders across Boston came together to say "was this an isolated incident or the tip of the iceberg?” We quickly learned that it was the tip of the iceberg. Out of Latasha's death, My Life My Choice was born. 

Today, My Life My Choice offers a unique continuum of survivor-led services spanning provider training, prevention groups for vulnerable adolescent girls, survivor mentoring to young victims of commercial sexual exploitation, and advocacy and leadership development. Our programs are grounded in the strength and resiliency of survivor leaders. 

To all the employees, volunteers, and activists affiliated with My Life My Choice, thank you for all you do for girls and women!  -- Julian

River of Flesh and Other Stories: The Prostituted Woman in Indian Short Fiction, an introduction

image of book cover is from here

From Speaking Tiger Books:

SUMMARY

River of Flesh and Other Stories brings together twenty-one stories about trafficked and prostituted women by some of India’s most celebrated writers—Amrita Pritam, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Indira Goswami, Ismat Chughtai, J. P. Das, Kamala Das, Kamleshwar, Krishan Chander, Munshi Premchand, Nabendu Ghosh, Qurratulain Hyder, Saadat Hasan Manto and Siddique Alam, among others. 

Jugnu, in Kamleshwar’s ‘River of Flesh’ (‘Maas ka Darya’)—stares at a lifetime of servitude as age and disease take hold; Ismat Chughtai creates the unforgettable character of Lajo in ‘The Housewife’, a carefree young woman who must conform to society’s idea of decency, or risk being branded a whore; in ‘Heeng-Kochuri’, by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, a boy growing up near a red-light area discovers the adult world of patrons, connoisseurs and customers—as well as savouries offered to young boys as bribe; and in Manisha Kulshrestha’s ‘Kalindi’, a son looks in through a window and his life falls to pieces around him. 

An unprecedented anthology—for its subject, as well as for the range of authors and translators who are part of it—River of Flesh and Other Stories offers a harsh indictment of this practice of human slavery, too often justified—and occasionally glorified—as the ‘world’s oldest profession’.
Click here to read an excerpt from the book.

About and from the editor, at the Ahmedabad Mirror:

Ruchira Gupta (b 1964) , award-winning founder of anti sex-trafficking organization Apne Aap Women Worldwide, has just edited and published a River of Flesh and Other Stories, sub-titled The Prostituted Woman. The stories are translations from the work of Premchand, Manto, Amrita Pritam, Baburao Bagul, Qurratulain Hyder, Ismat Chugtai and others. "Every story," Gupta says, "reveals the absence of choices prostituted women and their un-prostituted sisters face in and outside marriage. While the trauma and brutality of prostitution is exposed, so is the subordination of women through marriage as a cultural caste system." 

"The average age of a girl pulled into prostitution is between nine and thirteen years...They are put through a process known as 'seasoning', in which they are beaten, starved, drugged...and made to believe that they are repaying the small loans of five or ten thousand rupees which their fathers have taken...According to current research, the physical and mental consequences of the repeated body invasion that prostituted women face is so extreme that these girls and women suffer from higher rates of psycho-social trauma than even war veterans."

New Reports on child trafficking and slavery

graphic is from here

This month marks the 198th anniversary of Frederick Douglass's birth. He was a firm believer in the equality of all peoples, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant. 

 "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong." 

— Frederick Douglass

From Al Jazeera, January 31, 2016, this report on trafficking of Syrian children in Europe.

More than 10,000 unaccompanied refugee and migrant children have disappeared in Europe, the EU police agency Europol said on Sunday, fearing many have been whisked into sex trafficking rings or the slave trade. 

Europol's press office confirmed to Al Jazeera the figures published in British newspaper The Observer. [See: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/30/fears-for-missing-child-refugees]

The number relates to the past 18-24 months. 

Brian Donald, the agency's chief of staff, said that the vulnerable children had disappeared from the system after registering with state authorities after their arrival in Europe. 

"It's not unreasonable to say that we're looking at 10,000-plus children," Donald told The Observer, adding that 5,000 had disappeared in Italy alone. 

"Not all of them will be criminally exploited; some might have been passed on to family members. We just don't know where they are, what they're doing or whom they are with." 

Donald said there was evidence of a "criminal infrastructure" established since mid-2014 to exploit the refugee flow. 

The Observer reported that Europol found evidence of links between smuggling rings bringing people into the European Union and human trafficking gangs exploiting migrants for sex and slavery. 

"There are prisons in Germany and Hungary where the vast majority of people arrested and placed there are in relation to criminal activity surrounding the migrant crisis," Donald said. 

More than one million migrants and refugees, many fleeing the Syria conflict, crossed into Europe last year. 

"Whether they are registered or not, we're talking about 270,000 children," Donald told the paper.
"Not all of those are unaccompanied, but we also have evidence that a large proportion might be," he said, adding that the 10,000 is likely to be a conservative estimate.

READ MORE: Syrian children struggling to eat in Istanbul  

____________________________________________

Keeping in mind that the Western world, and the white First World is deeply invested in slavery and sex trafficking, we have this report from The New York Times, January 28, 2016:

WASHINGTON — The Department of Health and Human Services placed more than a dozen immigrant children in the custody of human traffickers after it failed to conduct background checks of caregivers, according to a Senate report released on Thursday.
Examining how the federal agency processes minors who arrive at the border without a guardian, lawmakers said they found that it had not followed basic practices of child welfare agencies, like making home visits. 

The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations opened its inquiry after law enforcement officials uncovered a human trafficking ring in Marion, Ohio, last year. At least six children were lured to the United States from Guatemala with the promise of a better life, then were made to work on egg farms. The children, as young as 14, had been in federal custody before being entrusted to the traffickers. 

“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” said Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of the subcommittee. “But what makes the Marion cases even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of their abusers.” 

In addition to the Marion cases, the investigation found evidence that 13 other children had been trafficked after officials handed them over to adults who were supposed to care for them during their immigration proceedings. An additional 15 cases exhibited some signs of trafficking. 

The report also said that it was unclear how many of the approximately 90,000 children the agency had placed in the past two years fell prey to traffickers, including sex traffickers, because it does not keep track of such cases. 

“Whatever your views on immigration policy, everyone can agree that the administration has a responsibility to ensure the safety of the migrant kids that have entered government custody until their immigration court date,” Mr. Portman said. 

Continue reading this story

The Life without Privilege: the Inhumane Consequences of Pro-Prostitution Politics, part 1

photo of girls learning techniques for empowerment is from here

I sit here now in North America, typing, with a great deal of privilege. Here are a few ways that privilege exhibits itself:

• I have clean water to drink.
• I have enough food to eat.
• I am not economically insecure.
• I am not designated as dangerous due to my race.
• I am not presumed a terrorist due to my religious and cultural ethnicity.
• I am not assumed to be lazy due to my class.
• I have good health care and choices about who I see for treatment.
• I have a safe home to live and sleep in.
• I have privacy when I want it.
• My socially perceived gender does not target me as 'rapable'.
• I am not raped daily.
• My sexual life is not a function of pimps', brothel-keepers', and procurers' economic and sexual demands.
• I have choices about when and where I am sexually available. I choose not to be sexually available to anyone and am not harassed, beaten, or murdered because of that decision.
• My body belongs to me.
• I am generally regarded as a human being with rights to be treated humanely.
• When I am harmed, what happens to me is seen as harm.
• Criminal justice systems and prison industrial complexes don't punish and imprison me for unjust reasons.
• I can see similarly privileged people in the media portrayed as good, honorable, and moral.
• Men across the globe do not assume I exist for the sole purpose of meeting the demand too many men have for gross sexual exploitation of female human beings, including unlimited visual and physical access to female incest and rape survivors of all ages.

If we went down the list and removed each form of privilege, what might the conditions be that define and limit my life?

I would be poor or economically insecure. Available clean water and nutritious food would not be givens, or easy to get, or reliably available. I'd be perceived and portrayed as a threat to the health and well-being of more privileged people. I'd be seen as someone who ought to endure serial rape and slavery but it would be called something else by the rapists and their apologists: it would be called sex, or sex work, or men having fun with me with my consent. I would not be safe. Violation, denigration, and other forms of violence would be a routine part of daily and nightly life. I would not have a place to sleep that was without threat of invasion, capture, and horrific mistreatment. I would not have any assurance of living another day. In the social-political sense, I would not be human to most people; I'd be invisible, unheard, and disposable.

In some political groups, there appears to be a pressing need to define something one way for everyone, regardless of how various people name their own experiences. For example, straight white men typically define prostitution as harmless and consensual and as something that ought to be legal for all involved. I find such a viewpoint spiritually callous and politically self-serving.

In various parts of the world, different conditions intertwine to make practices with the same name quite different in experience. I accept that each nation and state has its own historic, geographical, cultural, and social dynamics. Challenging and ending various forms of subjugation and terrorism by men against children and women require their own respective approaches. And of course women will define their conditions differently, in part because the conditions are different. So too are the structural locations of various groups of women.

Some identify and experience prostitution as slavery; some identify and experience it as sex work. It certainly is not for me to tell any woman how to define her experience. But engaged conversation can happen and I have asked several women, all young, how their respective plans to be a stripper, or a performer for a pornographer, gets them closer to achieving their longer-term goals. I ask them to consider the consequences of being repeatedly viewed or engaged with as an object of sexist men's desires. I ask them if they'd support their best friends making the same choices.

Promoting international human rights policy is a different matter than engaging with various populations about oppression. I'd argue that any human rights organization created to address globally oppressive conditions ought to be sure the most invisible and most silenced among us are brought into the center of our conversations, considerations, recommendations, and policies. If the organization is male-dominated, it ought to center the experiences of women. If it is majority-white, it ought to centralize the experiences of people of color. As I live in a society that is both, I see no reason not to center the experiences of women of color within and outside this country, especially groups of women generally invisible to the majority of U.S. citizens.

There are on-going efforts in various parts of the world to respond to the reality of prostitution as different populations experience it. There is often confusion among many about the difference between legalization and decriminalization as approaches; there are wide differences about who it is that is needing protection. 

For procuring and pimping men, the protection needed is a condom and appropriate laws making what they do legal. But those men want it also to be legal everywhere they prey. See this link for details on how 100 countries understand and legally deal with prostitution: http://prostitution.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000772

Legalization of prostitution sometimes means legalizing pimping and brothel-keeping, sometimes not. It sometimes means working to protect only traffickers and procurers from negative consequences, but not always. 

If pimps and procurers in 'First World' countries embrace their nations' efforts to legalize prostitution, or if it is already legal, the lack of accountability to committing rape 'at home' may serve to embolden their predation abroad. If it is not legal, they may travel to countries where it is, in order to commit those rapes with impunity. I support laws that render actions, such as the following, illegal and criminal: purchasing, renting, and physically and sexually abusing children and women--as those children and women define and describe it, not as it is defined for them by men or other more privileged people.

To frame prostitution primarily as a health crisis for predatory men in need of condoms and (even more) liberties is to abandon the human rights abuses endemic in places where trafficking, pimping, procuring, and brothel-keeping are done. Decentering or completely ignoring the perspectives and experiences of female and/or transgender human beings is wrong generally. But to do so from a position of structural or institutional power, even relative power, within human rights organizations, can too easily be utterly callous to the realities done to people who have identified their conditions as deplorable and atrocious.

I believe more privileged people ought to listen carefully to what less privileged people have to say about what is going on in the world. Not only that, but design their laws and policies to support the human rights of the least privileged. This blog exists to challenge and support the uprooting of core wrongs such as male and white supremacy, globalized exploitive capitalism, and 'First World' and anti-Indigenous colonialism, occupation, and genocide.

Newer approaches introduced in the last several years, such as one in Norway, identify a core problem when naming the problem of prostitution:

"A new law has come into force in Norway making the purchase of sex illegal.
Norwegian citizens caught paying for prostitutes at home or abroad could face a hefty fine or a six-month prison sentence, authorities say.
The prison sentence could be extended to three years in cases of child prostitution.
The Norwegian authorities say they want to stamp out sex tourism and street prostitution by targeting clients rather than prostitutes...
The tough new measures go further than similar ones introduced by other Nordic countries such as Sweden and Finland.
There has already been a visible decrease in women working on the streets of central Oslo, local media report...
Prostitutes will be offered access to free education and health treatment for those with alcohol or drugs problems."
BBC News, "New Norway Law Bans Buying of Sex," www.news.bbc.co.uk, Jan. 1, 2009

This approach rises out of the work of activists such as Ruchira Gupta and the girls and women who are part of it. In part 2, I shall place her voice, and her experiences with those other women and girls, at the center of this discussion.

Part 2: click here
Part 3: click here

On Pornography and Sexual Athleticism

image is from here

[Added to at the end, on 9 March 2012.]

It is often argued by pro-pornography consumers and sexxxism industry producers and investors that the actors in pornography films are amazing human beings demonstrating a kind of Olympian ability to have sex over and over and over again. Below is one such comment that appeared here: http://nextgenjournal.com/2012/02/inside-pornography-a-rational-feminist-critique/

It is the first comment offered following the article by Larisa Manescu.

Jim Graham [writes:]

It is true that since the mid-90's, BDSM-inspired power play has become the dominant style of sex act portrayed in mainstream pornography. There is quite a bit more slapping and choking in the porn scenes released from the mainstream porn industry over the last 20 years, but this is not just because of the porn industry's traditional misogyny (though there certainly is that).

Porn stars are sexual athletes who demonstrate advanced sex play for the viewer's pleasure. Anal sex and threesomes are advanced sex. These (and most) porn sex acts are activities that many sexual beginners hope to experience one day, and as they become more sexually advanced these men and women (swingers, poly, kinky sluts, and other monogamish people) often live out their fantasies, with or without integrating elements of power play. The extreme acts that you mention (ATM, gagging, DP/DV/DA, etc.) are much dirtier than regular sex, and porn stars make their money by pushing boundaries, but not unusual at a private sex party.

While the women in most pornography are portrayed as submissive, please keep in mind that there are thousands of porn scenes where the man is dominated, cuckolded or otherwise made to submit in the same ways.

All modern sex scenes include more spitting than ever before, which you and I probably agree is much less appealing, but for most porn watchers sloppier is dirtier and indicates that the actress is putting some effort into it, and that is exactly what the average porn watcher is looking for - a woman who they find attractive pushing her sexual boundaries while devoting her attention to her sex partner(s) until everyone is satisfied. That is the porn I watch, from studios like Elegant Angel and Belladonna Productions.

"The thought is that pornography, in the late 20th century, could have adopted entirely different sexual practices, ones more intimate, realistic and yet still erotic and stimulating. However, at the expense of the woman, it spiraled down a more intense, risky, and demeaning path."

Various people (most famously Candida Royalle) have tried to convince the porn industry that they should produce erotic imagery that women would also enjoy, but I don't believe that there was ever a time where the industry would have adopted different sexual practices, or had the talent to portray the more subtle sex play that you wish porn provided, until today. As more women and couples purchase porn for their mutual enjoyment, then the now internet-diversified industry will produce a wide range of videos that are intended for more than just male masturbation.

This is my response:

Julian Real replies:

I want to respond to this statement specifically (but also to the whole of the comment): "Porn stars are sexual athletes who demonstrate advanced sex play for the viewer's pleasure."

From all the people I know who engage in or have engaged in casual-sex-for-money, within or outside systems of prostitution and procurement, within or outside systems of sexual slavery, I'm not hearing that "advanced sex" and "sexual athlet[icism]" are the most accurate, appropriate, or pertinent terms to use, any more than someone working twelve to fourteen hours per day in a sweat shop ought to be considered an "income athlete", or someone who is showing the rest of us how to do it (work-for-pay) better or more maturely. Your analysis leaves out (curiously and completely) the trauma involved in being physically invaded and assaulted by many people over many days. For empathy-building, I'd suggest you go out and engage in the kind of "sex" that is promoted by corporate pimps and let me know if you find it untraumatic. But as someone who might potentially be your friend, I wouldn't advise you do so.

There is a rather cynical and callous assumption built into an argument for valuing such sexual athleticism that there are, in fact, some people--some peculiarly abuse-immune class of human beings--who can and do manage to engage in serially physically, emotionally, and spiritually abusive and exploitive "sex acts" and *not* be traumatised by them. We might note that if the acts weren't abusive, drug abuse as a requirement for getting through a day or night of them might not be so ubiquitous.

If you could only have body-pummeling sex by being drugged or drunk, your dearest friends might question whether the sexual behavior was good for you. (As well as the excessive daily drug and alcohol consumption.) If the performance of such sexual athletics necessitates dangerous levels of drug abuse and often unconscious dissociation to simply be part of it, ought we not demonstrate at least occasional compassion for those of us who are inside systems of sexual exploitation, abuse, and slavery? Every person I have known who has willfully engaged in these forms of sex were either grossly sexually assaulted first, learning at a young age that they ought not have some basic and fundamental sexual boundaries that perhaps you enjoy, or they were bullied, battered, threatened and terrorised inside the systems after being part of them. If it is shown beyond question that pre-existing or on-site sexual, physical, and economic trauma is a de facto requirement for being part of the systems of procurement and slavery, I'd argue that we ought to condemn and organise against the owners and financial investors of such systems of terror and horror and, through available avenues of jurisprudence, throw the serial rapists and corporate pimps in prison.

As for this: "While the women in most pornography are portrayed as submissive, please keep in mind that there are thousands of porn scenes where the man is dominated, cuckolded or otherwise made to submit in the same ways." 

We must keep in mind that when men are submitting to women, it is always their choice to submit: they choose to do so because it is their sexual fetish or desire to submit. This demonstrates to me only that men maintain control of sexuality however and whenever they wish to. Het men being a sexual submissive in no way means he's not in charge of the whole scene being acted out. 

Yanar Mohammed on The War (Men's Against Women) In Iraq

photo of Yanar Mohammed with a male soldier is from here

What follows is an excerpt from an article I read at OpEdNew.com. For the whole article, please go *here*.

... Yanar Mohammed , founding director of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), was interviewed on the state of Iraq as the American occupation ends.  She described Iraqi cities full of destroyed buildings and broken streets, with intermittent electricity and unsafe drinking water.  Iraq, she said, is now a country of 99% poor and 1% rich living in the Green Zone, burdened with the most corrupt government in the world that is giving control of oil resources to multinational oil companies.

Iraqi women "are the biggest losers" in this war, Mohammed asserted, ending up with extreme lack of freedom, lack of social security, lack of opportunity, and increased sexual terror.  Her organization has conducted extensive high-risk investigations into the prevalence and plight of Iraqi widows, women kidnapped and killed, and women trafficked into prostitution. Fifteen percent of Iraq's 1 to 2 million widows are seeking temporary marriages out of economic desperation and extreme insecurity in being a single woman. By 2006, OWFI had observed an "epidemic rise" in the number of women prostituted in brothels, workplaces, and hideouts in Baghdad. Through covert investigation, they learned of the trafficking of women within Iraq for Iraqi men in all regions and for US military, as well as to nearby countries.  Democracy in Iraq has been crushed for women. 

American women soldiers in Iraq were big losers, also.  Nearly 200,000 served there, in as dangerous situations as men.  Though barred from combat, they patrolled streets with machine guns, served as gunners on vehicles, dismantled explosives, driven trucks down bomb-ridden streets, and rescued the dead and injured in battle zones. These same women found themselves, concurrently, caught in a second, more damaging war - a private, preemptive one in the barracks.   As one female soldier put it, "They basically assume that because you are a girl in the Army, you're obligated to have sex with them."  Resisting sexual assault in the barracks spills over to battlefield, according to many women veterans, in the form of relentless verbal sexual harassment, punitive high-risk assignments, and the morbid sense that your back is not being watched. ...

A Message from Gloria Steinem to the Public Regarding the Trafficking of Girls and Women

While I wish it were the case that Western whites asking for money wasn't necessary to achieve justice and liberation for all girls and women worldwide, it remains the case that whites asking for money to support the activism of women of color is an on-going necessity. This is so in large part because whites in the West have much more money than people of color in the West, and whites listen to whites more than to people of color, especially female people of color.

With gratitude to all the women and girls, white and of color, who work so hard to liberate women and girls from systems of gross exploitation, economic abuse, and misogynistic harm.

I was what follows by email and may also be found *here*:

Dear Friend of Women and Girls, 

Many things have changed in the years since I lived in India as a student, but one thing that has continued - and grown worse as the worldwide network of sex trafficking has spread - is the destruction of the lives of women and girls bought and sold in the sex industry.

When I go back to the India that I love - the world's largest democracy, one in which a greater percentage of people vote than in the United States - I know I can go to a section of all major cities and see young women lined up in the street like cattle. If I look through the doorways of brothels in, say, Sonagachi, the main sex trafficking district of Kolkata, I can see the little girls of six or ten that brothel owners tell reporters don't exist.

Among the brave people in India fighting this lethal sex trafficking industry is my friend Ruchira Gupta. A journalist herself, Ruchira was reporting on rural poverty, and was surprised to find villages with almost no young girls and women. When she asked why, she was told, "Don't you know?  They've all been taken to Mumbai and Kolkata."

Once she discovered the depth of this reality for at least three million women and girls in India - entrapped, de-humanized and often sent to an early death by injury, despair and disease - she started Apne Aap, which means Self Help; a healing and respectful safe place where women and girls could find refuge, support, advocacy, community and skills to support themselves and their children.

Ten years later, Apne Aap Women Worldwide has grown into a model for anti-sex trafficking activists in other countries. It now has centers in New Delhi and Bihar, as well as Kolkata, and it supports human rights against the sex trafficking and prostitution industry, from working for legislation and law enforcement at the top to offering alternatives and community at the bottom.

The truth is that if Apne Aap had as many supporters outside India as the brothel owners have foreign customers - men from rich countries who literally buy "sex tours" to exploit the poverty of women and children in India - Apne Aap would win.

At an Apne Aap community center, each woman and girl gains access to vocational training, literacy classes, basic education, and learning about her rights and how to recognize when they've been denied. She learns how to file a police report. And I'm proud to announce that in the last year, four teenage girls campaigned against their traffickers and helped to put those criminals behind bars. This is the way the law should function, but sadly, this story is the exception.

In addition to your financial contribution, Apne Aap appeals for your support to help strengthen the Indian anti-trafficking law, the Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act. By signing on, you will be joining Apne Aap's thousands of members in asking for measures that protect girls and women, and impose realistic penalties on the pimps, johns, and traffickers who exploit them. Click here to sign the petition. 

I am personally inspired by the bravery, wisdom, innovation and impact of this small organization. It has transformed the scared, abused, uneducated girls and women I met when I first visited India into women who are speaking out for themselves and for others, from the halls of government to international survivors' conferences.

I ask for your support for all the women of Apne Aap. They have given you and me a practical, hopeful way out of the worldwide human rights abuse of sex trafficking.

No longer will you feel helpless, with nowhere to start, when you see and read the news.

And that is a gift in itself -- for you -- or for friends and family in whose name you contribute.

With new hope,

  

Gloria Steinem

Advisory Committee Chair

Apne Aap Women Worldwide

  

** Donations made in India to Apne Aap Women Worldwide or in the United States to Apne Aap International are tax deductible.

A Broch Tzu Columbus! End Columbus Day and the Rapist, Racist, Genocidal White Male Supremacist Society it Annually Rides in on

this image was found on Facebook

From Wikipedia, First Landing of Columbus on the Shores of the New World, after the painting by Discoro

What would Amerikkka be without rape, slavery, and genocide? And I don't only mean rape, slavery, and genocide from the past. I also mean what's going on presently that WHM supremacist corporate politicians and corporate media and the followers of each will not speak about even with something called "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press".

From my 11 October 2009 ECD post:

The Rapist Savage: Christopher Columbus, First Known White Man to Organise the Sexual Slavery of Girls and Women in the Americas

At the beginning and very end of this blogpost are images that ought to be seen on Monday, 12 October, 2009 ECD. And every other day too.

I have seen a poster and t-shirt with this statement many times, but never before now with women in the image as warriors. This image is GREAT, but when will it become reality? When will this land belong once again only to the people of the Indigenous Nations of Turtle Island?:

image found here

A DEMAND TO END COLUMBUS DAY IN THE RAPIST GENOCIDAL U.S.!!!!