The handicrafts can stop the prostitution among young girls

Posted on 07 mar 2008

Sarah Symons is the woman that decided to help the young girls in India that were sold into the prostitution trade before they even reach puberty. Sarah decided to help them after she watched the film called The Day My God Died. This is a documentary film about human traffic in general and about young girls in India who are sold into the prostitution trade. They lived in Bombay's dirty 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.

After this scared movie Sarah could not go back to her normal life without doing something and without helping these young women. She knew that this problem is well known by everyone but no one could stop the prostitution among young girls. For her this problem became too urgent and too important that’s why she could not be indifferent while thousands of other girls were sold into sex slavery. That’s why she decided 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."

First of all she decided to travel to Nepal where Sarah knew many salvation organizations in order to work with survivors of human trafficking and to help them with fundraising efforts.

But she observed that the charity that she gave them was not enough. Sarah concluded that these women need for a job in order to create their own income opportunities, so that they could live independently and provide for themselves without falling back into the world of prostitution.

Symons was informed that these young girls can create beautiful handbags. This information gave her the idea to sell the women's beautiful handiwork through her own online store in order to give the survivors the job that they need to support themselves.

In this way Sarah began to 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. "They're living independently, they're cooking for themselves – you can't even imagine how joyful they are," she says.

Thanks to Symons, the profit of survivors’ organization has raised and many of them become able to support themselves financially.