Conversations with My Sisters' Keepers
TRIGGER WARNING -
THIS PODCAST CONTAINS THE STORIES & EXPERIENCES OF THOSE WITH LIVED EXPERIENCES OF GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE. CONTENT MAY BE TRIGGERING.
Welcome to "Conversations with my Sisters' Keepers," dedicated to normalizing the trauma recovery experience of survivors of complex trauma and gender-based violence (GBV). We bring awareness, share stories, and promote healing-centered conversations for lived experience professionals and allies in the gender-based violence and recovery sectors. By sharing authentic stories and experiences, we hope to break down stigma, promote understanding, and celebrate the self-discovery within healing.
Together, we’ll explore strategies, resources, and insights to support wellness, recovery, and leadership. Join us as we challenge stigma, celebrate autonomy, and normalize the healing journey.
Let’s build a community of understanding and empowerment—one conversation at a time.
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Conversations with My Sisters' Keepers
Livia Miraglia: a Brazilian Perspective on Human Trafficking (Part 1)
Brazilian human rights lawyer Livia Miraglia shares her experiences fighting human trafficking and domestic slavery through her work directing the Human Trafficking Clinic at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Her unique perspective bridges law, education, and advocacy while confronting the complex realities of modern slavery in Brazil.
Miraglia offers her insights on the particular fight against human trafficking in Brazil. She sheds light on the internal issues of forced domestic labour and explains the principles through which the Brazilian human trafficking law works.
Domestic slavery cases often involve Black women enslaved for decades who don't recognize themselves as having rights. The psychological impact on victims creates profound challenges for recovery beyond rescue. Supporting victims requires balancing intervention with respecting their autonomy.
Anti-trafficking work takes a significant emotional toll on advocates, which can lead to burnout, Miraglia explains. She highlights that structural racism and gender inequality create barriers both for victims and women professionals. Breaking patriarchal obstacles requires strong support networks among women.
Research can be a wait of fighting. However, funding remains a critical need to sustain anti-trafficking work in educational settings.
To support the Human Trafficking Clinic at the Federal University of Minas Gerais or learn more about their work, visit their website or Instagram account: https://www.clinicatrabalhoescravo.com/ and https://www.instagram.com/clinicatrabalhoescravo/ .
Welcome to Conversations with My Sisters' Keepers, the podcast where we bring awareness, share stories, and promote healing-centered conversations for lived experience professionals and allies in the gender-based violence and recovery sectors.
I'm Shamin Brown, and together, we’ll explore strategies, resources, and insights to support wellness, recovery, and leadership. Join us as we challenge stigma, celebrate autonomy, and normalize the healing journey.
Welcome to Conversations with my Sisters' Keepers. We're so happy to be here today. Today we have Livia Miraglia with us, our sister's keeper. Livia Miraglia is a distinguished human rights lawyer with 19 years of experience advocating for justice and equality, With a deep commitment to fighting human trafficking, Livia has spent the last 10 years as a director of the Human Trafficking Clinic at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. She is also a respected labor law professor, having taught for 17 years shaping the next generation of legal minds. Livia's extensive work spans both legal practice and education, and her expertise in human trafficking has made her a leading voice in the global fight against this issue. Thank you so much for coming today, Livia.
Livia Miraglia:Thank you, Shamim, for having me. It's an honor to be here and it's a great pleasure to talk to you and to share some of my experience, especially as a woman from Global South, from Latin America and from Brazil. So it's really a great pleasure to be here.
Shamin Brown:Yeah, and I'm so happy that you're here today to talk about that. I think one of the things that's been really exciting about doing this podcast is being able to hear how differently folks have to address the issue of human trafficking or gender-based violence in general, depending on where they're located, the relationships that are held with government in these issues and the barriers to fight, both as women and as citizens. These conversations, both for survivors and survivor leaders, are very crucial, but as well as advocates without survivor leadership who don't identify. It's time for all of us to move beyond these narratives of trauma-informed and resilience-based surviving and moving into a healing-centered focus on wellness and recovery. Hopefully, we're going to challenge the stigma and judgment that many survivors encounter during their healing process today by sharing our own insights into recovery and wellness journey. What are your thoughts about these goals? Do you feel that these conversations will help normalize recovery?
Livia Miraglia:Yes, when you hear someone that has been through an experience that might be related to yours, to help us to see we are not alone, and I think that's the most important thing to see that things happen to other people and especially to people that sometimes we admire and we think that her life or his life is perfect and he has nothing to deal with. And when you share with other people, you make a sense of community and of belonging. For people to heal and to recover, it's really important that we can talk about it so we can, like you said, normalize things and see that these things happen, but they cannot paralyze us. Sometimes it does paralyze for a while and it's important to have a time to heal, to recover and to move forward world. And so these conversations are very important, not only for the victims, but people like me who work with the victims and that sometimes we are not really aware of how much health issues, and especially mental health issues, we are dealing with, dealing with the situations.
Shamin Brown:Yeah, and getting a little bit of that inside look does help you, I think, to, or help me even to be more empathic and to ask some more questions. I'm a member of the G 100 global anti-trafficking wing, is in the chairperson of the Canadian section of that, and so, for Canada, our goals are to promote lived experience leadership and autonomy, to support the wellness of lived experience staff, to develop survivor-led, informed and facilitated prevention and intervention programs, and to identify ally organizations that are invested in survivor leadership and survivor wellness. What do you think about these goals when you think about them? Are there any gaps? Are there any barriers? Are there any strengths? What sorts of things come to mind when you hear those goals?
Livia Miraglia:I cannot say it's perfect, because nothing's perfect.
Livia Miraglia:Everything's a construction process, so you're building something that I think it's going on the right way.
Livia Miraglia:The most difficult thing is to make the human trafficking issue visible, because it's something that is invisible. To put light on something that is hidden from society and that everyone is ashamed to talk about it. And to find these people and to make them share the stories and even, like for me as a human rights lawyer, to convince them to go after their rights, because from my work perspective, this is the most difficult thing to find these victims and to make sure they are able to leave this place and be really integrated in society. To go after the rights usually means they have to talk about it all over again. Most of the times they don't have a therapist or someone that is a social assistance, or a psychiatrist, a psychologist that they can share with, or, if they have, they don't want to open to it. So I think these are really interesting and important goals, but we have to keep in mind that we're still walking baby steps, but I think that's the most important things, with the goal to make the victims the owners of their own lives.
Shamin Brown:Autonomy and self-determination, and understanding the psychological process in recovery and supporting people.
Livia Miraglia:Yes, I think these are important goals and things to achieve to make sure they own their lives again.
Shamin Brown:What is your relationship with G100 Anti-Human Trafficking Wing Livia?
Livia Miraglia:I'm the G100 representative in Brazil. I was invited to be a part of it because of my role in the human trafficking clinic that I direct here in Brazil at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. It's a state in Brazil. It's a big state. We are the third biggest state in Brazil. From the past 12 years, we have been the state that has most cases of slave labor and human trafficking In Brazil Wow. So we are conducting a lot of researches concerning human trafficking and slave labor.
Livia Miraglia:We have two big problems here human trafficking, international human trafficking that involves mostly women for sex trafficking. But we also have a big problem here in Brazil that it's internal human trafficking, mostly for labor, slave labor situations and domestic slavery. So these are things that we are dealing with here at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, where I am also a labor law professor. That's how I got also a labor law professor. That's how I got involved with the G100. And Hannah Collins was the one that invited me. She was a student and she came here to Brazil. She spent a time here with us at the clinic. She was involved in our work. She helped us bring this form to help the victims, to interview the victims, because we are lawyers right, we deal with the law, but we have to capacitate ourselves to deal with the victims and to make this more human approach with them. Donna.
Shamin Brown:Collins? Oh, she was with the University of Toledo, right? Yes, that's fabulous. How do you feel about walking us through some of your lived experiences, your education and your expertise and supporting survivors of multiple things throughout your career? I don't know what that's looked like, if it's always been in one area or not, so I'll say sex trafficking, abuse, trauma, addiction or mental health.
Livia Miraglia:I'll say sex trafficking, abuse, trauma, addiction or mental health. We have helped, since the beginning of the human trafficking clinic here in Brazil, over 300 victims. The experience that have more impact on me were the cases of domestic slave labor, because they usually involve the same stereotype of victims Usually it's a Black woman that had little education or non-education. They can barely read or write, and they have been slaved for 40, 50 years, for their whole lives. We have conducted a research with all the domestic slave labor victims. The number we found was 26 years.
Shamin Brown:Wow. Can I invite you quickly to explain for the audience what you mean when you say domestic slave labor?
Livia Miraglia:Here in Brazil we work with the ILO concept, so we are talking about forced labor, but we have a broader concept. Here in Brazil we work with four types of modern slavery. We are talking about forced labor, degrading conditions, exhausting working hours or debt servitude. Working hours or debt servitude. When we talk about domestic slavery, we usually see debt, bondage, degrading conditions and exhausting hours. We can say that we see all the forms of it, because the forced labor it's not that she's imprisoned, but there is a psychological coercion that that paralyzes this, this. So, for instance, we have a case that it's here in my city. It's a big city, it's the capital of my state. It's something that we would never imagine. It happened here, half an hour from my house.
Livia Miraglia:We have a big structural racism problem in Brazil. So these two women were white, mid-class women that got this little young black woman from a little town in my state and told her oh, come to my house and I'll pay you something and you're going to help me and I'll give you education. But none of this happened. She came here when she was 16 years old, so she left school. They never let her go back to school. They never got her the education they promised she would have. They never took her to a hospital or to a doctor to see her health. She got pregnant and they told her she could not have the kid. So they sold the kid, her kid. So this is a really big violence.
Livia Miraglia:And this all happened when she was 17 years old, and this all happened when she was 17 years old. She only got out of the situation when she was now she's 60. So we are talking about more than four decades in this situation and you could say that, oh, she was free. Why didn't she run away? Because she didn't understand the situation she was in. She told us that she didn't know there was another life that she could live. She didn't get paid anything, so she didn't have money. She didn't have a family, because they cut up her family ties. She thought that they were her family, so she was involved in that situation that said that this is a family, this is a good family for you, and she believed that it was a good family. She didn't understand that she was lacking freedom and that she was in a slave-like condition.
Shamin Brown:So in the morning she was a slave Something that we talk about within sex trafficking too, is the difference between consent and choice, which is what I'm hearing here, Because if you don't know your choices, then you're not really consenting, however you are. So people often will see someone who's consenting and assume that they've made a choice to be there. But really they're consenting because it's the best choice that they know is available to them. If they don't know that other choices are available, they can't choose them Because this woman.
Livia Miraglia:She didn't recognize herself as a subject of rights. She told us oh, do I have the right to get paid for this? Do I have the right to be retired? This was all really a hard case for us, and all these cases of domestic slavery-like conditions are really hard because this woman didn't have any place to go. She tells us we are her family, we are her lawyers and I'm working with the labor prosecution office. So there is a prosecutor she's a woman also and there is a labor inspector she's also a woman and we are three women trying to take care of these other women.
Livia Miraglia:But we are three middle class, highly educated white people trying to help this person, people trying to help this person. We feel like who are we to tell her that this is not a good form to live and what we have to offer to her besides all, of course, the freedom and the go for her rights? But everything went right on this case. We got everything she was entitled to, but we could have done bad. She could have no rights, no money, nothing. This was really intense for us. I was in a really bad moment of my personal life and I have two young kids, and the prosecutor and the labor inspector also have two young kids and we are all married also have two young kids and we are all married. And this is this was something that was really stressful, also for us, because we would sleep, eat and wake up thinking about what are we going to do with this lady? Because we take her off the house where she was living for the past 40 something years. Where would we put her?
Shamin Brown:where would she?
Livia Miraglia:go and, in a twist of destiny, the employer died, so she kept the house. Now she owns the house and she has this really nice neighbor that it's taking care of everything. But just to give an example to you, she wanted to buy a TV. She calls us and she asks me can I buy a TV? I'm like, of course, it's your own money, you can do whatever you want. And then she doesn't have this autonomy.
Livia Miraglia:We had really big discussions me, the prosecutor and the labor inspector. What's the limit of our work and what's the limit of our mental health in all of this? And from another point of view, we were always talking to ourselves that we are so privileged that we could not fail. We could not stop and cry. We didn't have time to feel bad for ourselves. Everything. I'm telling you. It took 13 months. We were talking all the time. Their kids know me. They couldn't recognize our voices through the audios from WhatsApp. And everything was finalized and we went there to give her the key to the house and to give her the retirement money we got for her. We left the house and the three of us were crying, and the labor inspector she had a burnout after.
Livia Miraglia:It was really hard on everyone on the case because it's impossible not to get involved, and it's impossible not to get involved. But it's also a lot of mixed feelings because we see another woman that could be us.
Shamin Brown:So that relatability. I'm hearing a lot of learned helplessness, and I think that's an important piece of this, because when we're thinking about the work that we do with women and the help that we want to give them, we often focus on their oppression and wanting to emancipate them. But within that oppression there's been some learned helplessness. She spent 44 years being told what to do, not even knowing that she had rights. So now we've waved a magic wand and life is better and she's got rights.
Shamin Brown:But does she know what she wants? Yeah, does she know how to get it? Does she feel safe when she's making a decision for herself? Or does she feel completely unrooted because she's not sure if it's the right one? Because nobody's really taught her how to make decisions for herself? It's just, it's such a huge space for learning Once we cut those ties. I for myself, when I left my abusive relationship, one of the parts that I liked about it and would love to revisit but is he would, we would shop together and he chose my outfits, and when we separated, clothing shopping became hell. I had no idea what I was doing!
Shamin Brown:I still don't. I hate it and it's a small piece, but it's a huge piece because what you put on your body actually feeds your self-esteem, helps you feel good about yourself, helps you present yourself to the world. The way that you see yourself develop in my life as a result of having multiple years where I didn't have to, and when we think about domestic slaves, sex trafficking, domestic violence, leaving those oppressive environments, is just the beginning. It is not the end.
Livia Miraglia:My father was sick for a really long time and we had all these money issues when he got sick and but I managed to be here, I think, in a society, an equal as we have in brazil.
Livia Miraglia:I'm very privileged I cannot complain about anything, but this part of we cannot complain about anything. It's something that is hard for us as women, because something that the three people that were involved in this situation all heard from the husbands is what we wanted with this who you guys think you are. You were living the family.
Livia Miraglia:You have to have a perspective that Brazil is a country in development. We have a lot of big problems. We have an eco-society, we are a big catholic country, raised on catholic bases, and all this space where a woman should be, and me and the prosecutor and the labor inspector. We are in power positions because we managed to get there, but then we got all this criticism about we have too much ambition and why are we doing this and if we are leaving our kids and who is feeding them and who is looking after them, and we have all this pressure that wants to keep us in a box. Be a teacher, you can be a professor, you can be a prosecutor, but you still have to manage to get home by five and to make dinner and to yeah, so I'm hearing like a lot of colonial constructs in your country.
Shamin Brown:Something that I'm finding interesting is that every time so far you have moved into this space where you're talking about your lived experience and some of the struggle that has come with those things, there's an instant discounting of it. Because I'm privileged, and I think that's important to note is that oftentimes we feel like we have to dampen our light or that we are not entitled to hard days or hard stuff because of where we are in society, in our schooling. Because of where we are in society, it becomes really difficult to remain empathic, to remain sensitive, to remain vulnerable and open, to have self-compassion, to exercise positive self-talk. Because you're having all of these messages that you're actually as privileged as you are, you need to marginalize yourself and oppress yourself. You're not allowed now, because you're privileged, to have any acknowledgement of pain which is going to make you unhealthy in that position of power or can affect your health, can affect your productivity.
Shamin Brown:Likewise, I feel that those folks who are oppressed or experiencing marginalization are not always able to see how there are glimmers of privilege in that, and I will say that as a survivor, because I had access to a lot of supports in my recovery that other folks who haven't gone through what I've gone through would not have. I would not be here today with what I have today had I not experienced sex trafficking, because the funding and the resources and the support wouldn't have been there. I may not have been able to even come out of the socioeconomic class that I was in. It's important to acknowledge that because I would not have had those opportunities, especially as a woman of color who is not Indigenous, and I don't have many of the opportunities that are available to folks of other races and other experiences. However, I still have more than those who have experienced less drama than me I won't say less oppression, different oppression than me.
Livia Miraglia:Yeah, just to highlight, this is a successful story I'm telling even though there's a lot of drama and trauma involved. But there is another story that has really gotten to us. We had this case that involved sex trafficking of transsexual women. It happened in our state and I got the graduate students involved, because the clinic there is me and the other professor that is a criminal judge and a criminal law professor. We have four PhD students and we have 15 students from graduation and they got involved in this case so they were able to assist to be in the whole process. So they would hear the testimonies, they would hear the prosecutor, they would hear the defense lawyers and they would hear the victims. It was really important this story for them because for some of them it showed a whole lot of other perspectives because they could never imagine to go through things that these women went through. But they could identify some of the stories with themselves. For instance, we had two students that are homosexual and a lot of the stories of the trans women were because they were not accepted at home so they would run away and they would get into this trap and they would be sex trafficked and get involved in all this network of sexual exploitation and I could see as because you asked me also like from my role as an educator.
Livia Miraglia:I could see as an educator, as a professor, that these students had become. You said they had developed more empathy. I hope they're going to be better judges, they're going to be better lawyers, they're going to be better prosecutors, because they heard stories that they thought was really different from their own stories and really far from their reality. But a lot of them kept questioning. I could have been one of these people that had to run away from home. It's not important only for me as a lawyer or as a human being, but it's also important for me as an educator, because I can see the students being formed in another way. They have to deal with things they wouldn't have dealt in other ways and for some of them they have traumas involving their own families. I could see that some of them were healing and recovering and peace with themselves and their families From here, other stories and being presented to different realities, even if it's not with us, if we are not the victims. When you get so involved with them, like we are involved in our cases, it's impossible to be the same person we were before the cases. It also impresses me a lot the gender, the race perspective. So I know I have changed a lot in this past 17 years being involved with these issues and this past 10 years being involved with the human trafficking clinics.
Livia Miraglia:What brought you into this work in the first place? Oh my God, what brought me here? It's difficult to think why I was involved in this. I was a law student but I wanted to be a journalist. You know I didn't like law school. I was OK. I don't like all this formality and all these kind of things. And when I had this labor law discipline in law school and I got in touch with human rights advocacy, I found my oh, this is my area, this is where I want to be.
Livia Miraglia:My grandfather was really poor. He couldn't read or he couldn't write, so my father had to struggle his whole life to give us what he didn't have and he saved and changed the family situation through education because he managed to work and study to give us me and my brother a different life. He also took care of his parents. He took care of his brothers because he was the oldest one. Everyone got their degrees and he really put this in our minds that we had to be well-educated, we had to be good people and we had to somehow return to society the privilege we were having, and to try to make something out of the education he was struggling so much to give to us. So I think that's more or less how I got into it, and I really like labor law and the theme of human trafficking and slave labor, because they are related.
Livia Miraglia:Here in Brazil really got me into university.
Livia Miraglia:I saw this case of people that were working in this.
Livia Miraglia:It was a coffee plantation and they were there for four months and they didn't have any salary, they didn't got any money and they would sleep on the grass.
Livia Miraglia:They didn't have a house to sleep, they didn't have pot money and they would sleep on the grass. They didn't have a house to sleep, they didn't have potable water to drink. They got only promised that one day they would get paid, and I remember seeing that on the TV and that really impressed me, because one of the workers was asked why didn't you walk away from the situation if you're not in chains? Walk away from the situation if you're not in chains? Or? And he said that because the only thing he had in life was his name and that he was there to make an earning for his family and he was going to stay there until he make the earnings and to get the money to get back to his family. And this really got me into it and I said, okay, we have to do something to change this. And this really got me into it and I said, okay, we have to do something to change this.
Shamin Brown:I'm hearing a driver here for your work and, first of all, this connection with this man who's working so hard, running on a hamster wheel because it's going nowhere, but with this intent to provide for family, which is where your lived experience comes in, because your father really broke the cycle of generational poverty that you were experiencing and raised you with a sense of gratitude, knowing that could have been your experience and a duty to serve.
Livia Miraglia:It's just something with the education and the privilege I was born with because and I was only born with because my father had to break the cycle.
Livia Miraglia:So I think that's mostly why I'm doing this, and so I mean I might go to therapy after Call me let's decolonize baby, and I was. I was really because because I have never and that's the thing we talked before I, I think I have never got myself the chance to stop and think about why I'm doing this. I'm just doing because I feel this sense of urge to do and to help and to work and to do all these things and I don't and also not help only the victims, but also to help my students, because my university is the second best law school in Brazil, so it's a really recognized law school here. But we are a federal university. The best universities are public. We have quotas here for economical and racial quotas and we have half and half, so half of our students are from social and racial quotas.
Shamin Brown:I'm hearing you say that the school kind of wants to be as fair as possible, so they've divided it up to make sure that at least half of the folks are those that would be considered marginalized or oppressed due to race and social justice, and then the others are those who can afford to be there.
Livia Miraglia:Yes, and the ones that can afford to be there are the ones that had this really good, high quality education that in Brazil it's not from the public schools or from the private schools. So you have to be born into privilege to be in the private schools to get to the public universities. So the government has made a policy to try to make it equal. So half are from private schools good, really good private schools and we deal with the elite of our country but half are from public schools and they are coming through economical and racial quotas and half of the students don't need the internship money so they can be volunteers in our clinic. But we have a lot of students that cannot be a volunteer but wanted to get involved in the program but they have to earn something from it.
Livia Miraglia:So we in the last years we tried to get funding so we could have also opportunities for these students, because we were realizing that even though we are a human trafficking clinic and we were talking about human rights, we were leaving students from our own university out of the project because we were dealing only with volunteers, because we didn't have money to pay for them.
Livia Miraglia:So this was something, a construction also on those last four years. So I, we, now we have scholarships for our students so they can dedicate themselves for the projects. Because, uh, some years ago we had students that were trying to make money in other places and still keeping with the project. So they would be like triple journeys they would study, they would work, they would be in the project. So now we managed to have scholarships so the students can dedicate to the project, which is also a way to transform lives, because these people, sometimes they come from realities that are similar to the victims. They sometimes come from communities, from places that they can relate more and they also feel the same sense of duty they have to give back to society.
Shamin Brown:I heard you talk about funding for this scholarship. Also, do you guys still need funding? Is that one of the ways that folks that are listening to the podcast can support your work?
Livia Miraglia:Yes, we still need funding. We are always in need for funding. We work through projects, so we are always in search for projects. We have a project with the ILO, we have a project with the UN.
Shamin Brown:How would folks get a hold of you if they want to subscribe? Is there a link we have?
Livia Miraglia:an Instagram account and a website. It's in Portuguese but there is the way they could contact us, at least the first contact, so I could leave the link here for you. I would love that.
Shamin Brown:Are you doing anything personally as an entrepreneur, venture or side thing related to your work that you'd also like to kind of share?
Livia Miraglia:Actually everything I do is it's related to the human trafficking clinic, and something that I also study and I'm involved with is the gender with the feminist movement here in Brazil is the gender with the feminist movement here in Brazil. I also do this besides all the work with the human trafficking, but it's something that's related to the human trafficking and slave labor, because the things are really related. We also do this work and we do also this work centered on mothers and how motherhood shapes everything in society. I think that's mostly it, but it's all connected to the work at the human trafficking and slave labor clinics.
Shamin Brown:It sounds like funding is a pretty big deal because this is how you're accomplishing, within the organization, meeting the needs of the community, both for education and for service. Community, both for education and for service. So that funding would be really valuable, not just in supporting the education of folks that may or may not have had access to that normally, but also the community members at the projects of serving.
Livia Miraglia:It's the way we function. It's by funding. But I also have to say that, since we are located inside a public university, since we are located inside a public university, we had already have a lot of years without any funding at all, but we managed to keep working. In Brazil, we have this sense of we are ashamed to ask for funding. It's oh, you're asking for funding and I'm a professor at the Federal University and people say, oh, you were already there. We don't have to ask for funding, you have to work for us. I have to learn how to ask funding, because that's the way we keep going with our work and that we are able to transform lives.
Shamin Brown:If you, as someone who identifies as having more privilege than me, is not allowed to admit to me that you've had a bad day because you have more privilege Now, you're self-oppressing, which eventually puts you in the same space that I'm in, because it affects mental health, it affects relationships, it affects work. So then, what Then, when you finally are in the same position as me, you get to tell me how your day was? Or do we get to be humans with different experiences, without labeling them oppression or privilege, in a sense of judging them? It's about acknowledging experience. It's not about deciding whether you're worthy of being human. It's about acknowledging experience so that I can identify where my strengths are and ask you for help in the areas of my weakness and offer strength to you in the areas of your weakness.
Shamin Brown:Sometimes that weakness looks like a lack of oppression, because there's a lack of understanding or a lack of knowledge. Sometimes that looks like creating space for someone with privilege to experience their weakness, oppression, and acknowledge it, because that is how we heal, it's how we grow, it's how we become a collective in a community. But if we're constantly judging each other's in our own experiences, that's good enough, bad enough, deserving, not deserving, worthy like. That's exhausting.
Livia Miraglia:let's stop doing that like I think to myself am I worthy of being this, this place?
Livia Miraglia:And when last year I was invited for all these like really nice events and I got to travel to all these amazing places that I have never thought I would be with my own work. But this was something that I had to work with myself because I was in the plane going to South Africa which was a dream coming true, because I really wanted to go to South Africa at that point of my life and I got to go to South Africa to talk about the human trafficking clinic and our experience and all the things we were doing here. And I was like, oh my God, so amazed that I achieved all these things. But I was going thinking, oh my God, am I worth it? Do I deserve to be here? Oh my God, they're going to find out that I don't know nothing, I cannot speak English, all this, all this, like I said, all this oppression, and because it's a contradictory, because I belong to a place of privilege in my country but in the rest of the world am still a woman from south america.
Livia Miraglia:That's not a english-speaking native anyways, we have to heal ourselves yeah and then it's also because we have to talk about the difficulties we have, because, I told you, I have two little kids and I want to raise them in a really equal society, gender based, not gender violence. So I want to show them that mom can go to South Africa to give a lecture and to because I stayed there for three more days to visit. And I was by myself and this was a really big experience for me in my 42 years, but I love that.
Shamin Brown:I think that's such an important lived experience. Again, thinking about this work that we do right. So for yourself, as a woman who identifies as being in a place of privilege, achieving this huge goal or multiple, it sounds and then feeling small on the inside. Am I good enough? Do I deserve this? Now, let's think about folks that are exiting domestic slave labor or sex trafficking or an abusive relationship, or who've been sexually abused for a good part of their childhood all these different things and now they're moving into healing. Maybe they've gotten the job, they're doing the thing, but the whole time there's a voice in the back of the head that says you're not worthy, you're faking. I know one.
Shamin Brown:For me, I'll tell you, the first time I ever went to the University of Toledo's International Human Trafficking and Social Justice Conference I think it was 2017, 2018 was my first go and I was so surprised that I was even going. And I remember the night before sitting in the middle of my living room, papers everywhere, sticky notes, this, that and the other. I'm pacing back and forth, I'm practicing, I'm reading this thing, my stomach's in knots and I started, and my girlfriend was in there and I started dry, heaving, and she's what's wrong. And I'm like who do I think I am? Like I just really was, like I am going to fail. Who do I think I am? I should just cancel the flight. This is ridiculous and I love those experiences because they also show you who you are when you face them, who you can be, who you want to be, who you're becoming, all the things, because of course there's always learning to do from those things too.
Shamin Brown:Sometimes you do fall in your face. But that imposter syndrome that drives us all, I think is really good when we can tap into our own. Sometimes that may help us when we're working with folks that we're seeing doing these self-sabotaging behaviors and really struggling with moving forward and upward in a good way in their lives. Because folks can look at that and go what is the problem? Look, they can do whatever. Now they're free, they've been rescued or they've rescued them, saved themselves or whatever language folks want to use, and on the outside everything looks really great. So why isn't this person moving forward? But when we can contextualize it from that lived experience, when we recognize, oh, this is what imposter syndrome feels like now add trauma to that for households, upbringing, childhood, family, social support, both before and after.
Shamin Brown:Do you have the capacity immediately Because we can learn it, I learned it, we can learn it Do you have the capacity to soothe those thoughts, to move through them, to do it anyways, to fight back against those thoughts? And I'll say that part of the process became a lot easier for me when I had a social support group. That was healthy. I could say to my friend who do I think I am, and she could say back to me you've done this work, you've done that, you're fabulous. But there was another time in my life where I might have said that to my partner who do I think I am, and he'd say I don't know, you just like to show off. Like it wouldn't have been the answer, that would have been okay, I got this.
Shamin Brown:So all of those things matter and when folks are healing they don't always have them all and there's some learning to do and we can tap into our lived experience to try to understand and ask questions, because we don't want to assume that's what they're experiencing either. But we can say for myself sometimes I feel like this I'm wondering if that's what they're experiencing either. But we can say for myself sometimes I feel like this I'm wondering if that's what's getting in your way right now, you can start the conversation, can even bring it to the attention of the person, because they may not even notice.
Livia Miraglia:That's what's happening for them and I think you have reached, like this really important point of it and that really bugs me and it really makes me think about my last year. That was really life-changing for me because I felt like I was breaking all these barriers as a woman, as a mother, as a wife, because I had women with me, friends and mostly work friends, friends that I made as a part of my job, that are with me and they say to me, like I said, you have to go, you have to accept. It's really difficult to see when it becomes something that it's really oppressive, slash, abuse. But for the men that are by our sides, because it's so structural, the patriarchal society for them it's hard because they have to be in this place that they are not used to be. So when I go out and I go to work and I have to leave the country, they are put in a position that they are not able to say something go ahead, you were awesome, you're amazing. They say it.
Livia Miraglia:They are put in a position that they are not able to say something Go ahead, you were awesome, you're amazing. They say it. They are like, okay, you have to go, congratulations, but how I'm going to do with the kids, how I'm going to manage the school, how I'm going to buy the groceries, and you're like, oh my God, I do this every single day, you know, without even thinking about. But this is a way to break barriers.
Livia Miraglia:And also something that really was my topic of therapy for the most part of the year is how contradictory it was to teach my students, to try to empower my students, especially the girls, to be whoever they want to be, to be free, and they are equal, they can do whatever the men are doing out there, and at the same time, I would not feel in the place of doing whatever I wanted and whatever I felt. It was important for me because I was a woman and I am a mother and I am a wife and I have this pre-fixed role in society and sometimes we were talking and we have this really good girls network Everyone is this independent professional and we made a pact because everyone had really bad ears and really struggling the relationships and we had made a pact that we would always be by our sides and we'd be honest with each other.
Shamin Brown:We would also show the red light when we were crossing in some lines, but we would be there to remind ourselves of what we are trying to show our students, our daughters, and to be in society, a need for the patriarchal component of your colonization experience and how it's affected your community, how it's affected the workplaces, this glass ceiling, these barriers around how you express yourself and how household duties and roles are divided, and all these different pieces that affect the work and affect your work-life balance. Thank you so much for your time today, really happy to have had the opportunity to have this conversation with our sisters' Livia Miraglia. Let's do it again sometime. Thank you so much for coming.
Livia Miraglia:Yeah, thank you so much for having me, shamim. It was a pleasure I think I managed to break this barrier and talk in English. So thank you so much for having me, shamim. It was a pleasure. I think I managed to break this barrier and talk in English. So thank you so much for having me and talking to me and let me talk and let me deal with a lot of things that I haven't dealt with, I think. So thank you for that. It was a life experience, so thank you.
