CSEC and Systems of Oppression

In addition to my PE, another meaningful thing I’m engaging with this semester is called Project HONEY, which stands for Helping to Empower Oakland and Neighbors’ Exploited Youth. Project HONEY is a supplementary program to a local non-profit in Oakland called MISSSEY (Motivating, Inspiring, Serving and Supporting Exploited Youth). MISSSEY is a safe physical space where survivors of sex trafficking can go for after-school fun but also provides various forms of social support. The goal of the DeCal is to understand sex trafficking of minors in the Bay Area so we can eventually act as advocates and mentors for the children. The main class activity in the DeCal is to create a workshop to present to the children at MISSSEY to add to their after-school activities program as well as give us base knowledge for a future of working with at-risk youth. I can't even begin to scratch the surface at how much this class has taught me, but I'll try to speak a little about it.


In the DeCal we often discuss the use of language when talking about the clients of MISSSEY. The term that we feel best describes the clients are CSECs, or commercially and sexually exploited minors. We feel like this is an all-encompassing term because it highlights the struggles that these children face: being just a middle-person in a monetary exchange in which they receive no benefit, and being part the process which exploits them sexually. We refrain from calling them “child prostitutes” because we feel that this phrase connotes a level of choice in their situations and lives, but this choice is simply not there. It is true that many girls go back to their pimps after they escape the life, but we must consider that the average age of entry into commercial exploitation of a CSEC is 12 years old. It’s clear that there’s a connection to the return and their own trauma, PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome as a cause for this relapse. When you’re baseline for normal is abuse and exploitation, it requires a lot of counseling and social support to have the courage to leave for good. We are also careful to call them “survivors”, not “victims” because we believe that they are strong and can take an active role in going forth with their lives.


Through this class I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Minh Dang, a survivor and advocate for the movement as well as a new Cal graduate from the MSW program. Minh gave us a very interesting lecture about domestic human trafficking. Why, in a society that supposedly works to protect children, are CSECs not getting the help and support that they need? Minh asserted that our society creates the conditions for this type of slavery to occur, and many systems of oppression are in play to create these conditions. Racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, and many more all play a role in the commercial and sexual exploitation of minors. To rid society of this system of exploitation, we must also examine issues that appear to be separate because they do in fact play a major role. Minh blog about these issues very eloquently and I’d encourage everyone to check out her blog: http://minhspeakstruth.tumblr.com/

Anonymous Approach to Homelessness, Justified?

We are Anonymous.

We are legion.

We will not forgive governments forcing people to become homelessness.

We will not forget that we can be next.

To the corrupt government holding our future from us.

You will expect us soon enough!

     -“Anonymous – The Homelessness Update 2014” by “OfficialAnonymousTV1”

            Anonymous is “a loosely international network of activist and hacktivist entities,” started in 2003. And, “the group became known for a series of well-publicized publicity stunts and distributed denial-of service (DDoS) attacks on government, religious, and corporate websites.”

Thanks Wiki.

Anonymous is good in what they do: hacking, educating the public of the injustice, and giving a big headache to the FBI. In their YouTube channel, the Anonymous has released the Homelessness 2014 update. Here, they also succeeded in implementing fear to their enemies, or the “corrupted government.”

But, here is the thing. As writing this article, I am, to be honest, a little afraid to mention anything that might provoke the Anonymous, or FBI in a space that is so “public.” How is this fear I am feeling different from the one I feel due to the government censorship? My lack of knowledge in the interests of Anonymous might be the cause. Still, this fear of mine has its reasons.

As a college student who is interning at an anti-homelessness organization in Oakland called WEAP, Women’s Economic Agenda Project, I cannot help but to compare the approaches taken by my organization to the one of Anonymous. The “Anonymous approach” to homelessness in the U.S. is much more sensational and informative that the work the WEAP has done. However, it seems that WEAP has provided a more intimate cure to the homelessness, by launching anti-eviction campaigns, and discussing homelessness in a non-virtual space or by face-to-face. Fascinatingly, WEAP and Anonymous have been around for about the same years. But, they have vastly different history when in working with homelessness. Is there a better approach? Does the better approach necessarily cancel out the unique benefits that another provides?

Anyways, Anonymous is fabulous in their hacking skills. I wish I had them.

            Lucky you. And, thanks to them for their videos. They do help in spreading the facts of poverty and inequality to the larger audience. And, they do help in raising questions that should be answered by all activists who are involved in reducing inequality, poverty, and injustice. What does justice mean to you? What is equality, in a world that we live in now?  I am assuming I did have my ideas unrefined as I began my work. However, it would’ve have been more helpful to have these terms defined explicitly as my first step. I then could’ve tracked my progress in my work and possible modifications to my ideas of poverty, inequality, and justice.

           My most agreeable form of understanding justice comes from John Rawls, an American philosopher of politics. By Rawlsian terms, Justice as fairness is achieved by minimizing inequality, and having the better-off contribute for the worst-off. When studying inequality and poverty, I find justice, as a concept that must go noticed.

Does justice matter? I think so.

The Emergency Room as a Place of Change

"If airports can become shopping malls and McDonalds can become a local playground, surely we can reinvent the clinic waiting room."

Above is a Ted Talk by Rebecca Onie, founder of Health Leads. The goal of Health Leads is to connect low-income hospital patients to basic needs and resources such as food, housing and health insurance. The idea behind Health Leeds is to put "health" back into the healthcare system by viewing it in a holistic. In her Ted Talk, Rebecca Onie discusses using a hospital waiting room as place of social change and cites a man named Dr. Jack Gieger as her primary influence. In 1965, Dr. Gieger founded one of the first two community health centers in the United States, located in some of the poorest areas of the country and he noticed that although many of his patients came in with a variety of symptoms and ailments, most were suffering from malnutrition. He began to notice that the root causes of most of their illnesses went back to being starving; he began prescribing food as a result. The patients would then take these prescriptions to the grocery store and the pharmacy budget would be charged to cover the cost. After his funders got upset and told him he was supposed to use the budget for medical purposes only, Gieger responded "Last time I checked my medical textbooks, I read that the cure for malnutrition was food." Dr. Gieger's powerful words laid the foundation for Health Leads: that good health health starts at basic needs and hospital visits should be about more than making basic clinical diagnoses.

Health Leads as it exists today trains doctors and other healthcare professionals to recognize the social determinants of health and incorporate them into traditional models of care. When physicians treat someone that has health needs that go beyond the parameters of biomedicine, they refer them to the Help Desk that situated in the hospital waiting room. This way the patients can work with a volunteer advocate at the Help Desk to get other aspects of their health situated while they’re waiting for their "traditional" prescriptions to be filled. The volunteers, typically undergraduates interested in a career in health care, connect the patients out to the existing landscape of community resources. For example, doctors might treat asthma by prescribing a medication for it but people at the Help Desk would try to instead identify a cause; perhaps the patient has mold in the walls of their apartment, so in response we would try to find them better housing and get them a lawyer to advocate for their tenant rights. These sorts of Help Desks exist as a two-fold: to make a positive impact on people's lives in the waiting room, and also to train the next generation of healthcare professionals to recognize health needs beyond a basic clinical diagnosis. Help Desks aim to treat the cause, not the illness. Health Leads is currently working on providing a business case as to why the healthcare system as at large should pay for this type of care in addition to what they already provide in addition to policy work.

Help Desks like Health Leads are gaining ground across the country and more and more every year are being incorporated into traditional models of care. My PE at Highland Hospital is modeled after Health Leads except it is run on a purely volunteer basis, whereas Health Leads has paid employees as overseers. Berkeley students reached out to Health Leads in 2012 to start help desks in the Bay Area, but at that time Health Leads was not ready to expand so the Berkeley students did it themselves through Big Ideas at Berkeley [http://bigideas.berkeley.edu/winners/highland-health-advocates/]  Highland Health Advocates is just a part of the Bay Area Regional Health Consortium, which is a team of doctors, lawyers nad undergrads devoted to helping those in poverty acheive good health. According to their Big Ideas at Berkeley page,"The goal of this interdisciplinary approach is to improve the health of low-income patients, enhance the patient experience, reduce emergency room utilization by high frequency patients and ultimately lower healthcare costs in outpatient clinics and the emergency department." The pilot Help Desk through the Consortium was founded at Highland Hospital in Fall 2012 with 8 undergraduate volunteers and has since grown to over 60 undergraduate volunteers in Highland Hospital, Oakland Children’s Hospital, and San Francisco General Hospital.

If anyone is interested in volunteering with us, let me know! We require a minimum of one semester. We’re also looking for summer research interns.

I have recently been reading a book by Hava Rachel Gordon, “We Have To Win: The Inequality and Politics of Youth Activism” which has been really interesting for me because even though I’ve read a lot about activism, protesting, and non-violent civil disobedience, I didn’t realize the importance, the impact, and the differences of youth activism within the larger scope of activism.
 In her book, Gordon talks about her experience working with several groups of youth activists, and also about how youth activism became a movement, specifically here in Oakland. One of the many things I found fascinating was that even though these student activists didn’t share similar backgrounds, they worked hard and cohesively as a collective. However, movements in the past, such as the 1960’s counterculture movement, and even activism today such as Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring have fallen apart, because partnerships dissolve as the average age and size of the movements grow.
 I know, I know: some people would see these as staunch claims. And you know what?
I would agree.
 Yet I ask you to hear me out. Youth movements tend to be more cohesive and thus successful, however, I would argue that it’s the number and location of active participants that play a crucial role in determining (to a good extent) the their success. A lot of youth activism is school-, school district- or small-government targeted, and this means that they have a smaller scale within which they have to be effective, in order for their movement to be successful. And even though youth activists obviously tend to be younger than the average activist, and because there are fewer youth activists because of this, leaders within the movement remain easily identifiable and thus their demands remain clear and identifiable as well. In comparison, larger activist movements that affect and are adopted by larger groups of people tend to be their own undoing: because the reach of the activism itself is so far, the deeper causes within the movements in different locations has a tendency to change, and the larger movement’s social fabric undoes itself.
 I’m doing my practice experience with a not-for-profit organization that acts within the Bay Area called 100 Strong, a leadership and mentorship program for high school girls, especially those from marginalized and historically-disadvantaged communities. We’ve just started our pilot year and are currently acting within Oakland, which has a rich and vibrant history of social movements of its’ own. Though we don’t deal with these student-activists specifically within our program, important skill sets for engaging at such levels see, and even be, the change that they want to see in their communities. Sustainable change anywhere has often come from those who experience these struggles, and understand the systems, relations and institutions at play, and thus also the changes that need to be made. In building leadership and mentoring skills, teamwork, organization, management and other such skills, there are investments and knowledge being integrated into a community, through the individuals who are a part of them.

Urban Agriculture in the Bay Area - Documentary

For my PE I will be working with urban farmers in the Dakar region of Senegal. My curiosity, interest, and passion for food and the system it lies within has been ever-growing as a student in Berkeley, and as a resident in the Bay Area - rightly accredited as one of the epicenters of the food movement in the United States. Being able to see urban agriculture in the works and how even a small farm can make a difference in an entire community gives me a lot of real hope for changes in our food system so that a more just system can, and will happen.

This documentary, though reminiscent of other food documentaries in the beginning, developed into a very good representation of all the different kinds of efforts around the Bay Area, while also showing how all of them were aiming towards a common goal - to get food, healthy and yummy food, to people, especially to those that don't have access to it because of various political, economic, and social factors. It is a well-edited film about the urban food movement, where it is, and where it intends to go.

It's inspiring to see how many different people - in regards to their age, their race and ethnicities, their class, their gender, their backgrounds, their experience in farming - can fight for a common cause. From   food and environment all-star scholars such as Miguel Altieri and Nathan Gimenez-Holt, to young kids and teenagers from poor communities that have to go to special schools for not being able to handle/"behave" well in a typical school, people have united to fight for a better food system, to fight for access, and to take change into their own hands when change doesn't happen. This movement is active participation.

Even though there are similarities between the Bay and Dakar, such as guerilla urban farming (farming on land that one doesn't own because they don't have the power or resources to buy the land, or the land is open and would be otherwise neglected) and urban farming to lower food insecurity, it has been perspective-opening to me to learn about urban farming in another region of the world. Here in the Bay it is very much a social movement of access to the community and equality, whereas in Dakar, much of urban agriculture is aimed towards economic support of farmers. Unlike in the Bay where many people in the community are learning how to farm from a few experience gardeners to do urban farming, in Dakar, people who are farmers by trade, or subsistence farmers by necessity, are working to keep a living.

And as a trailing off final though... I've been pondering the pattern to return to traditional farming features as a solution to modern day problems of the food system. It really makes me question "development" that has occurred in regards the the food system, who was driving this "development," the intentions behind it, and how much it was thought through.