From Victims To Liberators: The True Measure

Of Success Of Restoration

By Gundelina A. Velazco,PhD

CEO/President

What’s going on inside the Round Home? It’s dawning on us that it’s certainly more than survivor care.

When children are reduced to human commodities, their childhood is cruelly stolen and brutally transformed into an early life of trauma. Being a ‘commodity’ entails the development of a specific personality that adapts to or results from being a human commodity—an object of transaction for financial gain on the part of the exploiter, and for the perverted gratification of depraved users. Such a personality comprises thoughts and behaviors that are usually maladaptive because they do not solve the problem and do not result in a satisfactory life with oneself and with others in society.

Depression, hopelessness, violence against self or other people, a propensity to appropriate or vandalize property, different forms of aggression, manipulativeness, stealing, lying, withdrawal or suicide attempts—these are some of the manifestations of such a personality.

This is the very same personality that we have been trying to modify at the Round Home, in order to take the child away from being an objectified, callously transacted human commodity and restore them back to the condition of humanity.

When they are able to grasp the totality of the system and their place in it, when they see the reality that extreme poverty reduces children to human commodities, and that they can be part of the process of redressing this anomaly through their active participation and intervention in redirecting the lives of other children, then they feel empowered, and they develop a sense of psychological liberation from their earlier victimhood.

Survivor care then becomes a chance to mobilize an army of fighters against child trafficking, actually more like a citizen’s militia because they come from the masses and they have experienced the problem. Having been in the thick and thin of personal struggle in their own blighted communities, their commitment is authentic, for there remains a deeply rooted hunger for justice and emancipation.

Survivor care, furthermore, becomes a reformist mission to transform victims into liberators. Thus, advocacy will be widened when these former victims of human and sexual trafficking become agents of liberation, fighting oppression and exploitation, and looking after other victims who need all the physical, psychological, emotional, and economic succor that survivors can provide. - Gundelina A. Velazco