2008 Woodie Awards
Campus group promotes awareness
Campus ambassadors inform students about world problems such as slavery
Judy McClintock
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Students passing through the east plaza of the Werner Center encountered an unusual sight on Tuesday and Wednesday: that of a solemn student behind bars.
The student and the small, square cage that graced the Werner Center entrance patio was part of an awareness campaign being put on by Campus Ambassadors, a Christian campus group.
“Tie one for Justice” was an effort by the group to bring awareness to students about various world problems, such as slavery, forced prostitution, land seizures, sex trafficking, illegal detention and government misconduct.
The cage, according to Jessica Taskinen, was used as a symbol for forced slavery that currently goes on throughout many countries.
“There are an estimated 20 million modern slaves in the world,” she said. Various campus ambassadors took turns sitting in the cage, said Amber Massari, a freshman elementary and music major, who was helping out with the event.
It was a symbolic gesture to represent the people in slavery, said Taskinen, “who don’t really have a voice.”
As part of raising awareness, ambassadors asked students to tie balloons to the cage.
“The balloons are basically saying I stand for justice,” Massari said. “They lift him [the student/slave] up.”
According to Massari, a majority of people tied a balloon on when asked to. “Only a few people refused,” she said.
In addition to tying balloons, the ambassadors handed out various pamphlets and kept a television running a documentary about oppression in Cambodia throughout the day.
“The goal is awareness,” said Taskinen, “to talk to students and let them know what is going on in the world.”
Campus Ambassadors held the awareness campaign in collaboration with the International Justice Mission (IJM), an organization dedicated to helping the victims of oppression throughout the world.
Campus Ambassadors took voluntary donations on Tuesday and Wednesday for the IJM for those students who wished to contribute. Taskinen said the group was going for $500: the price to free a bonded slave.
“But the most important thing is for us to make people aware,” she said.
IJM representatives, according to Taskinen, came to the Ambassadors winter retreat and helped educate them about the various oppression issues that are problematic across the world.
Taskinen said IJM works in four ways to help oppressed victims: emergency release, working with local authorities, providing victim after care, and structural prevention – training programs offered to various governments.
According to Taskinen, problems are everywhere. “We have been given a lot of information dealing with Cambodia and other Asian countries,” she said.
“It’s pretty scary,” Taskinen said, “there are some girls as young as five in East Asia being forced into prostitution.”
In addition, the ambassadors have studied slavery and forced prostitution problems in Africa and India.
However, Taskinen said, many people think the problems are far away when in fact they are close as well. “Fifty-thousand slaves are trafficked into the United States each year,” she said.
Taskinen hopes that informing students will help them “not to be ignorant in the world,” she said, “and that they would tell others” of what they’ve learned.
“I look at these things and it’s really sad,” she said, “and I don’t want people to have the excuse of saying ‘Oh, I didn’t know.’”
Hopefully, Taskinen said, people will take the information in and say “something needs to be done.”