Graphic Journey Blog

Tom's NYC Against Sex Trafficking postscript

Tom has filed this last heartfelt postscript reflecting on his eventful week in the Big Apple and has discovered that there is still a big heart there too.

Thursday 12 November

Last day in New York. I’m packing my bags in The Maritime Hotel with big views across the Hudson River to Hoboken. The hoots of ferries bringing the first commuters of the day bounce off the warehouses in the Meat Packing District. A public utility engineer choreographs instructions on the intersection. Squalls of splattery rain corkscrew along the streets and howl up the avenues. Pedestrians lunge after their umbrellas. The city is plunging towards winter.

I get to JOURNEY in Washington Square around midday. It looks bedraggled and adrift, like a container ship afloat an ocean of puddles. Our volunteers huddle behind piles of damp T-shirts, stamping feet and rubbing hands. A steady flow of visitors brave the elements. Helen greets people who approach the desk but she is pale, cold and hungry. Rain drips down the backs of our necks. Campaigning in this weather is a young person’s game. Helen is 84.

I spirit Helen away to a café round the corner on the NYU campus. We find to our delight that the special is onion soup. Hot bowls of steaming goodness arrive, and as Helen eats, her cheeks blush, and she returns to her usual bubbly self. We fish for strings of cheese and she describes being presented with the Inspiration Award by The Dag Hammarskjöld Scholarship Fund for Journalists at the United Nations yesterday. Emma introduced Helen to a hall packed with journalists, ambassadors and the Secretary General, and spoke of the need to tell the stories of hidden people. Helen talked about her life devoted to listening to survivors, setting up the Foundation, and made the link to present day survivors such as the women represented by JOURNEY.

The voices in the café reflect numerous nationalities. Almost everyone is on-line, on cell phone, on iPod, creating an expansive 21st century buzz. Helen describes growing up in the grim days of 1930s London when Mosley’s Blackshirts were orchestrating hate campaigns against the Jews. An aunt helped the communists set up the barricades in Cable Street. Her father helped refugees escape from Nazi Germany. She says how these experiences shaped her decision to work in Bergen-Belsen after the war counselling survivors. She talks of the lonely journey out there, the sense of hopelessness. “The bodies had gone, but the smell of crushed geraniums was pervasive.” Helen had a profound encounter with a dying woman. “She was like a piece of material. She grabbed me, dug her fingers in and vomited obscenities of the things that were done to her.” Helen said, “I cannot undo things, but I can be your witness.” The experience gave Helen the sense of agency - not just to help - but to tell the stories of those whose voices will never be heard.

My godmother Anne Hilb was smuggled out of Germany to England just before the war. Every member of her family was murdered in the camps. Anne settled in London and worked as a dietician in various hospitals. She was the victim of anti-Semitic attacks for the whole of her life. Her cars were scratched. She received poisonous hate-mail. Anne loved New York and had many friends here. The 1950s and 60s New Yorker Albums she gave me for birthdays inspired my stint as a Fleet Street cartoonist. I think of Anne’s ebullient impatience and barely suppressed fury, but also her overwhelming compassion and infinite generosity and wish she could be sitting with us now. Helen sighs and says this trip feels special. “New York is so open and accepting. People want to know. It is a melting pot of survivors. I have a feeling that many strands of my life are coming together.

We order coffee and gaze out through the steamed up windows. A drenched cop stands at the junction of Mercer and West 14th directing traffic with a day-glo table tennis bat. Helen is dried out, fired up, and game to go back to JOURNEY for the rest of the afternoon. We wait for the check. Helen mentions Perico Rodriguez - a close colleague she and others liberated from the Argentinean military junta 30 years ago. Perico and his family recently helped me translate a Colombian poem for an assignment with International PEN. Perico was one of the ‘disappeared’ - depicted so vividly in Imagining Argentina - the film Emma made with Christopher Hampton. Perico was tortured for three years at the delightfully named concentration camp La Escuelita (the little school). Helen says, “It was such a tragedy. A generation destroyed.” He went back to Argentina in 2008 to give evidence against the perpetrators at their trial. “So many of Perico’s comrades never made it. They were tortured to death or thrown out of planes. Perico says that trafficking is just another form of disappearing. Victims are betrayed, stripped of their dignity and beaten into submission. Denied family access and legal representation they become invisible.” This striking analogy emphasizes the Foundation’s mission to reach out to a new generation of survivors.

We have brought JOURNEY to New York in the week that marks the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, and 20 years since the breach of the Berlin Wall. Located in the heart of the university, many of our visitors have been students. We have made extraordinary contact with the next wave of politicians, clinicians, social workers, judiciary, lawyers and human rights activists. Before hailing a cab to the airport, I walk through JOURNEY NYC for the last time and take this picture which seems to sum it all up.

 

 

Tom's NYC Against Sex Trafficking Journey blog 5.

Wednesday 11 November

The temperature has plummeted today. A thick blanket of cloud clogs the skyscrapers. Day two proves to be our best yet. Someone tells me that New Yorkers are slow to get going, but when they do it gets serious. Estimate 2,000 visitors since we opened. Reams of questionnaires completed. Greenbacks in buckets.

Our volunteers are so committed they hold JOURNEY together. It’s a tough job. The messages are so brittle. The questions so mercurial. The answers so inadequate. You have to deal with visitors on multitude of levels. It takes a strange mixture of empathy, sensitivity and bravery. Some people just want to be left alone. Others are begging for support – even though they don’t say it out loud. One volunteer listened to a woman in tears. She had been sexually abused as a child and her experience in JOURNEY triggered a flood of buried associations. And physically, the cold is fine if you are in your office and just popping out for lunch. But to stand for hours in the street and deal with distressed and disorientated people requires an elegant resilience. Here are some of the volunteers’ thoughts:

Sara

Journey NYC is my first Journey. I had not seen it before. Seeing it for real - and especially getting the public reaction - makes all the preparatory work worth it. People coming through have been amazing in their honest responses, and it has made me realise how far this issue reaches throughout society. So many visitors have come to talk and so many have offered to volunteer, and that has been the best part of the NYC journey for me.

Izzie

This is a very powerful and clever way to bring this issue to the public eye. The very different approaches of the artists and the multi-sensory nature of the installation add to its impact. I am profoundly moved by the story told, and appalled by the fact that this can happen at all.

Kathryn

As someone who is interested in increasing awareness of women’s issues, I felt coming to NYC and volunteering for JOURNEY was a great opportunity. It was very moving to witness the response of so many visitors. Especially as a mother of teenage daughters, it gave me the opportunity to share in the emotional impact the exhibit brings to others. My three-day involvement was powerful and enlightening. It gave me a sense of being part of bringing awareness about trafficking, and sharing with those who know these horrors.

Steven

This experience has taught me that trafficking happens to such an extent, people need to experience the exhibit and come to the conclusion that something significant needs to be done.

Visitors arrive at the HBF tent bristling with stories. One tells us that she lives in Ukraine for part of the year and knows Moldova well – where Elena comes from. She says that in the Ukraine many people regard trafficking as a noble profession. Another visitor says that she works with nursing organisations all over the world and has a plan to get 15 million nurses to recognise signs of trafficking. This is so interesting because trafficked people live in fear of so many things they make themselves invisible. Kate Winslet came today and Dr Michael gave her the guided tour. She was shocked by the emotional intensity of JOURNEY and asking what she could do to help. A delegation of about 40 people from the Mayor’s Office begin to gather, arriving breathlessly from civic appointments all over the city. We give them copies of the JOURNEY newspaper to read-while-they-wait, and their mood visibly changes - from the excitement of meeting & greeting to perplexed and puzzled introspection.

Dr Michael is talking to a group of visitors at the HBF tent and he elaborates on Elena’s story. The Foundation does not focus on the stigma, shame and trauma, but on the aspiration, the good things they are desperate to be reminded they do still have. Survivors want to know there is something decent and uncontaminated left inside them. Elena wanted to know how she should talk about her experience. “Do I tell my boyfriend I have had sex with 4,000 men?” Dr Michael referred Elena to Emma Thompson who was working with a group of trafficked women on storytelling. The trauma is so profound, conventional therapies just don’t work. The Foundation gives survivors a sense of normality that helps them engage with life, and they respond with strengths they hardly knew they had.

Another feast of visitor comments today. I perch on a chair in the gutter of the HBF tent tapping responses into a laptop while volunteers around me listen to cathartic outpourings. Many people allude to something dark in their past that JOURNEY has provoked. I begin to get a sense of the labyrinthine insidiousness of trauma. It doesn’t just stop at the survivor; it warps their lifelong relationships.

“The whole exhibit was gut wrenching. The smells in the bedroom were overwhelming and bought back memories of trauma I experienced.”

“Thank you for this powerful exhibit. I am a volunteer advocate in the emergency room at two local hospitals working with survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence.”

“I have my own experience of working in the sex industry. I was very moved by the exhibit and would like to get involved.”

“The most moving part was when I looked at myself in the mirror.”

“The loneliness I felt in the reflection room was so strong that I couldn’t stay for more than a few seconds.”

“It’s the most terrible thing that can be done to a human being.”

“And I thought I had problems.”

“Just being in a fictionalised depiction of this world was horrible.”

“I was very troubled by the questions the exhibit raised. I became the voyeur.”

 “I work as a librarian in a maximum-security prison and would like to do a presentation for my students who write our jail newspaper.”

“Thank you so much for such a stunning, significant and horrific piece of advocacy.”

“The sounds, smells, and filth was overwhelming and terribly upsetting.”

“Very shocking – and I come from a Colombia where this is commonplace.”

“The world is insane.”

 “I am thinking about the dark circle that you walk slowly into. It leaves a hole in my mind.”

“I cannot understand why some men, even decent men engage in sexual abuse of women.”

“The violence and the abuse and the trauma and the misogyny have got to stop!”

“I wanted to cry and vomit at the same time.”

“Time and space have never felt so impending, fleeting, hurtful, helpful.”

“It is a very sad journey. I hope it travels to many places. I am holding back the tears but crying deep inside. I am glad I saw this with my 19-year-old daughter. Thank you so much.”

 

 

Tom's NYC Against Sex Trafficking Journey blog 4.

Tuesday 10 November

Tuesday begins with 9am press conference Washington Place starring Mayor Bloomberg, Emma T and Helen B. Emma talks about how she met Elena (the inspiration behind JOURNEY) who was working in a local massage parlour. Emma listened as Elena told her heartbreaking story of being forced into prostitution. Emma wanted to do something. Not a film. But to invent an installation that would convey something of the experience. Elena remarked that if people could only feel for 5 minutes what it is like… So JOURNEY was born. The contributing artists have created a series of little storms you have to weather. It is a vivid facsimile. It is an invitation to feel. It will do what ever you allow it to. 13,000 people experienced it in London and many found it a bewildering and confrontational

JOURNEY opens to the public around lunchtime. The trickle turns into a stream and builds throughout the afternoon. At times the queue runs to 50 people with heads buried in the JOURNEY newspaper, which tells Elena’s story punctuated by Laura Carlin’s poignant illustrations. It is such a beautiful tactile object. The collision of childish handwriting, elegant aesthetic, and violent content compounds the shock.

We have a fantastic team from the Foundation in London, but also many volunteers living in New York City. They hum around in branded T-shirts, invite passers-by to experience the show, and cushion them when they emerge. Many visitors feel profoundly disorientated. We give them a form to fill in and ask for their thoughts. They rest on their clipboards and hunt for words which we pull together to strengthen our messages.

Some visitors want to talk – need to talk – can’t stop talking. We speak to a couple from the Anthropology Department at Connecticut University. They want to know if there is any escape, any cathartic redemption. We explain that there are few happy endings. Being trafficked for sexual exploitation is as brutal and nasty. Recovery is not about getting better. The trauma and loss of self - like any kind of torture - goes so deep, it fissures the rest of their lives.

Grim conversations about parents selling children today. Many families in developing countries are so terminally destitute, a westerner asking to buy their child is like a gift from the gods. Even if they suspect the child might be mistreated, it could be a route to EDUCATION as opposed to a vicious cycle of poverty. Many children are trafficked to work as domestic servants. Occasionally a neighbour might mention a passing concern to the police, and raids on affluent families in exclusive neighbourhoods reveal children forced into thankless servitude and living in cupboards. The KPIs (key selling points) of trafficked people is that they have no status, no rights, no protection. You can do what you want with them, and then sell them on when you’re tired of them.

A student from NYU is very confused by it all. He stands in front of us speechless and slightly shaking. He asks if we mind if he goes to the park to have a cigarette.

I hunker down with my laptop on a wobbly chair under the HBF tent - which serves as information centre, chill out room, bag depository, therapy pool, pizza bar, coffee station – and leaf through visitors’ comments. We already have thousands of sheets with names and email addresses. Here are a few…

“What began as a relatively benign experience quickly became very physically disturbing. Enormously effecting and simultaneously upsetting.”

“What am I supposed to do…?”

“Just what I needed to know. I’m not the only one…”

“I didn’t even know something like this existed. I feel ill.”

“A terrible truth. Everyone should know.”

“Of course I knew sex trafficking is bad, but I never knew how disgusting it is.”

“What these women go through is sickening. It made me very uncomfortable.”

“Overwhelmingly sad.”

“I had read about these atrocities in articles, but BEDROOM made me feel it.”

“I appreciate my privileged place outside of this horrifying, damaging world of cruelty, profit and deep malfunction.”

“This exhibition put flesh and substance, and story to the staggering and paralyzing statistics.”

“I was particularly sickened by the bureaucrat’s responses.”

“It made me feel so naïve. I was so surprised to see this happening in Western Europe.”

“Have never experienced anything as horrible as this. I wish I was more powerful and influential. To do anything that would enable me to stop this forever. It breaks my heart and we need to break the hearts of unaware people. You are my heroes for doing something about it.”

Constant stream of people coming to the tent. Dollar bills going into the buckets. T-shirts and newspapers spirited away. JOURNEY asserts itself on a location. It radiates a subliminal sense of brooding fury. The metal containers are saturated in the emotions of thousands of visitors. People tumbling out are like swimmers coming up for air. Then they become quietly internalised. They don’t really know what to do with it. We hope they become slow burning fuses that trigger small explosions.

 

Donate on line to the Helen Bamber Foundation

Tom's NYC Against Sex Trafficking Journey blog 3.

Monday 9 November

Press day in Washington Square. Reporters arriving by the minute to interview Michael and Emma - who has already done morning TV shows. The day started off rather flat. No one really knowing what to do. Like the moments before a party, when everything is ready and you wonder if anyone will turn up. By 3 pm there is a tangible buzz developing. Lots of students at New York University bursting with searching questions. Keen to learn. Deeply sympathetic. We begin to sense a real difference between this location and Trafalgar Square – where many of the visitors were tourist or fallout from the National Gallery.

We are berated by a woman who arrives at the stand feigning interest but then turn on us. She has been making operatic entrances throughout the setting up. This is HER street and FILM CREWS and ROAD WORKS are INVADING HER SPACE and they are WRECKING WASHINGTON PARK and she is just SICK AND TIRED of the noise and NO ONE CONSULTED THE RESIDENTS…but despite us being a PAIN IN THE BUTT she really likes JOURNEY! She is terminally angry at the world and if we can win over people like this we must be doing something right.

Mid-afternoon a little man with a big voice appears out of the park and starts directing the pedestrians – mostly students going from class to class. Washington Square is a home for many wandering minstrels who enact a constant theatre in their heads, and who the city happily accommodates.

I accompany a small, frail but feisty New Yorker through JOURNEY. She tells me her parents were from Berlin and she just knew all about being a stranger in a strange country where you don’t speak the language or understand the culture. She studied every container minutely lingering long over every obscenity and turning to me, pointing with a barely suppressed fury. Walking through with her I start to see things in different ways. She could not see through the highest oval windows in UNIFORM exhibit, so I found myself in this shipping container, in this street, in New York describing the detail of leopard skin push-up bras, sequinned panties, and PVC G-strings.

James Ostrer appears who worked on the CUSTOMER container. Up until a few years ago he was painting scenery for a living, but was concussed by a falling structure and the incident made him re-think his life. His words and pictures of man porn is a stunning piece of work - on a par with the best fine art installations I have ever seen. We talk about why men abuse women. James says it is because they hate themselves and they take it out on others. I have been having many discussions in London about how FEAR of so many things, causes so many people, so many problems. Look out for Dr Bob Johnson on this subject.

Helen is being rushed off her feet but her knees are going. We conspire to glue her to her chair. Every time she sits down, someone else arrives wanting a piece of her. Every grim story she tells adds another dimension for me.

Here is a glimps of the inside of each of the 7 containers...

  

Hope  by Michael Howells

  

Journey by Mick Martin           

Uniform by Sandy Powell

Bedroom  by Sam Roddick, Trevor Robinson and Quiet Storm Films

 

Customer  by James Ostrer,  Simon Stephens

 

Stigma  by Anish Kapoor

 

Resurrection  by Emma Thompson,  Mike Dempsey and  Laura Carlin

 

Tom's NYC Against Sex Trafficking Journey blog 2.

Sunday 8 November

Drop dead gorgeous autumn day in New York. Going down for breakfast, the sign in the hotel lift promises 60 degrees and we scoff. But as the day develops bright hot sunshine fills the city. I meet up with another Tom – one of my closest friends from London - who has been living here for 2 years now. He has a beautiful apartment on East Broadway and we have the New York brunch I have been dreaming about. One of those wonderful neighbourhood cafes in the Lower East side that makes you want to sell up and move here.

I head up to Washington Square and find JOURNEY on Washington Place between the park and Broadway. It’s a fantastic situation. Sam Roddick and her team are busy pinning up photos showing a very beautiful young man posing provocatively in pouches, G-strings, and even full frontal discreetly pixillated out, like the cards in telephone boxes. The images are accompanied by excerpts of titillating phrases; the gormless language of the sex market. The gang’s all here tonight – from HBF people to Out of the Blue Communications who have put in months of nitty-gritty to put JOURNEY on this street. Everyone is rushing to finish the containers for tomorrow, tweaking details, making curtains of condoms our visitors don’t yet know they will have to walk through. Much speculation as to what Mayor Bloomberg will make of this. As the dark settles around us, the giant letters JOURNEY are illuminated for the first time. It is like an Edward Hopper painting of a circus arriving in town...

We have security guards, three gentle giants from ZarHar Washington Productions. 

Dr Michael (the psychiatrist we work with and shown above pointing) is here showing around friends and family. He is American but this is the first time I have seen him in America. Everyone is so strangely integrated. Why have we all ended up in this place at this time? Or as Leonard Cohen has just whispered in my ear ‘…we are so lightly here…’ The nervous energy that has gone into making this happen is beyond comprehension. We pinch ourselves. Emma T has just arrived from the airport and there is much talk of A-list people coming tomorrow, press to be talked to, and how we are going to get our messages across.

I peel off with Elizabeth – who has just left the Foundation to return to live on the West Coast – to have a drink with Helen Bamber. Helen talks of having a bad fall yesterday on an awkward step in a hotel. She’s a bit bruised but okay. She tells us with hoots of laughter that her father tripped on a banana skin on a station platform and successfully sued British Rail. Although 84, she looks as indestructible as ever, but sneakily pretended to be 85 so she could be driven around in a pope-mobile at Heathrow and JFK. There is talk of Helen going on the Larry King show, but she says the America news demands are different to London. They want to have ‘a trafficked woman’ on there as well. This is not really the HBF style. All the people they work with are long-term clients who are not to be paraded in the media. We have lots to learn from these people - from whom we are separated by a common language. Helen talks about a Chinese woman she is counselling in London who was sold at birth and imprisoned in someone’s home to produce children. She looks despairingly at us and says ‘…people sell their children…’

For more information about Journey and the Helen Bamber Foundation click here

 

 

Tom's NYC Against Sex Trafficking Journey blog 1.

This is the first of Tom's views from New York and will run 

for the rest of this week while Jouney is running there.

For more information on Journey and the Helen Bamber Foundation click here

Saturday 7 November

The journey of JOURNEY has been long and variously diverted. It started in London 3 years ago, travelled to Vienna in 2007 and now finally, after months of wrangling and postponements arrives in New York. Mike Dempsey and I work on the periphery of the Foundation, each to our own skills and in our own studios. Emails on a daily basis from HBF HQ have been coming through for press release, or leaflet, or special edition newspaper, or emergency something else or other. The Foundation struggles to survive but has huge ambitions and does fantastic work with many people. Anyhow we have a location – Washington Place – off Washington Square and on the way to Heathrow I have been trying to imagine what New Yorkers will make of this UFO that is about to land in their neighbourhood.

Find I am departing from Terminal 3, which is a strange irony. JOURNEY is all about human trafficking. It tells the story of Elena who was seduced from her home in central Europe with promises of finding fortune in the west. Terminal 3 was the cash point where trafficked women who have been ordered are paid for. The minder (the woman who has groomed the girls) hands them over the trafficker. You can pick up a nice young fresh one for as little as a £ 1,000. Once they have been sold, the minder flies back to nurture the next one and the trafficker takes his prize home. Home is a house somewhere in the suburbs, or a massage parlour in some innocent enough neighbourhood. The woman is stripped of her passport, phone, clothes and identity, and summarily raped by new owners to break her in. Then she is put to work to service as many men a day as she can squeeze in. The traffickers control the women absolutely. They threaten violence against her relatives and the girl is effectively imprisoned. Most have no idea where they are and are kept under tight security by woman employed by the traffickers until they are tamed. There comes a point where the humiliation and loss of self is so overwhelming, staying put and paying their ‘sale price’ back to the trafficker seems the only alternative to going home to shame her family. The women are used until their sell-by date has expired, and then sold down the chain, gradually reduced in price until they are no longer marketable.

Terminal 3 encapsulates all the banality of the human race rolled into one ghastly experience. People totter around hungry for they know not what. The containment of people, the security and paranoia in western airports is now worse than anything encountered in the Eastern Bloc. Which ironic because some Germans just off the left of me are reading newspapers commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago today. A lot of trafficking comes from the collapsed iron curtain countries. Life was always hard and the social and political vacuum has bred a particularly gruesome criminality. Generations were rendered passive spectators of their own lives.The immigration hall at JFK is worse than ever. At one point over 1,000 people are queuing in line and only 2 kiosks are open. The attitude of the staff is indifferent, going on complacent, going on contemptuous. Lots of parents struggle to keep children distracted. Meanwhile vacuous videos play on the plasma screens showing grinning officers greeting all manner of nationalities. We are guilty apparently. And there are even code of conduct poster that promise equitable treatment, and a big WELCOME TO AMERICA. Two hours later I clear customs and heading for the official taxi rank, crowds of illegal taxi cowboys tout for business.

Calling all New York designers and writers!

 

For the passed five years I have donated time to the human 

rights organization, the Helen Bamber Foundation here in

London.

We have been touring a provocative installation depicting

the  Journey of trafficked women across the globe into the sex

industry. It is shocking and very moving. It arrives in the Big 

Apple on Monday  for which I designed the above – along

with my writer collaborator Tom Lynham. It is located 

on Washington Place, off Washington Square Park from

Monday 9 November  to Sunday 15 November  

between 12 and 8pm. Entry is free. Emma Thompson…

the actress and chair of the Helen Bamber Foundation will host

the installation. I would love the NYC design and writing

fraternity to get on down to Washington Place this week 

to meet Emma and Michael Korsinski, and more importantly to 

sign up to help banish this horrific form of modern day slavery.

To learn more about the Helen Bamber Foundation click here

Throughout the week my guest blogger, Tom Lynham - who 

will be in New York to help out — will be filing daily reports 

with images of  Journey's events here on my blog. 

So if you are down  there say a big 'Hi' to him. 

This is Tom...