Our story started in 2007 when Helga Flamtermesky begun her action-research work on  “Trafficking of women: policy suggestions developed by women who have been trafficked.” Her journey took her to Colombia, United States, Philippines and Spain, where she met with several women that had been victims of trafficking. In this way, step by step, we began to dialogue and to know each other, a relation that would eventually allow us to challenge mainstream thinking and to build an alternative discourse.

Helga’s main goal was to identify and empower immigrant women who had suffered trafficking. Later, when we begun to work all together, our collective goal was to give value to our experiences, sharing our proposals and making change happen.

We have enjoyed a lot the opportunity of speaking as creative and transformative persons, not merely as victims. We enjoyed an approach that did not focus on telling our stories, or reminding bad times, or highlighting the thorny episodes of our experience how having been trafficked.

We enjoyed starting by reflecting on existing policies and services to combat trafficking and help the victims of trafficking. We started thinking how would have framed these policies and why our approach would be different. 

 

BORDER WOMAN is the name we have given to this collective effort.

 

Border Woman is a project developed by:

 

•  Women who have suffered different types of trafficking like: labor exploitation, sexual exploitation, removal of organs, servile marriage, forced marriage.

 

•  Women who have suffered trafficking recently and others who had this experience several years ago.

 

• Women who reported to authorities and entered the assistance circuit, and women (actually the majority) who never had reported and had not received any institutional support.

 

• Most of these women are now immigrants in the country where they had suffered slavery.

 

• Women from different creed: Catholic, Protestant, Evangelic, Muslim, Agnostic, etc.

 

• All of them have finished their high school studies. Some of them have higher education studies.