Rethink Resources

Via Trudee Able-Peterson and Margo Hirsch at Safety Net for Youth

Virgin Mobile, in an effort to raise awareness about homeless youth and to provide homeless youth with donated clothing, has initiated a new website, strip2clothe.com that invites young people to submit videos of themselves stripping. American Eagle, Virgin Mobile’s clothing arm, will donate new apparel to homeless youth based on the number of hits the site gets.

…What’s the harm - to start with, we know that homeless, runaway and street-involved youth are far more vulnerable to sexual exploitation than youth from stable families. Street outreach workers have reported that up to 90% of youth involved in commercial sex work have histories of past sexual abuse. Commercial sex work includes trading sex for money, food, a place to sleep, and/or drugs. Young people take off their clothes in bars and at private parties for basic necessities. In exchange they get beat-up, raped, humiliated, and robbed. There is plenty of harm.

From another article in yesterday’s Minneapolis Star Tribune:

“Strip2Clothe” has sparked outrage among NN4Y’s own members. Some groups say they were never consulted about the concept and are appalled by the idea of young people stripping as a means to get clothes for other young people. The organizations’ names have since been taken off the site.

I’m thinking the folks over at NN4Y are getting an earful for introducing a campaign without getting feedback from most of their members. I wish they had stuck with the idea of txt2clothe.

I also see this as partly about a generation gap. I can see a lot of youth who are used to posting pics and videos of themselves wondering what the big deal is.

If you’d like to speak your mind to Virgin Mobile directly you can email them here: support@strip2clothe.com.

What do you think?