What is a Handmaid?

Webster Dictionary defines it as, "a personal maid or female servant" but The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood defines them as fertile women brought and given to a family for the sole purpose of reproduction. In the society Atwood creates these women are the only hope for society to repopulate. So these girls are trained to lie down and try to pregnant. The book follows Offred. She is the handmaid for Commander Fred and Serena Joy. She is taken away from her husband Luke and her daughter. In the society it is totally normal to be taken away from your family if you are fertile, but to readers this is horrifying. To us this is similar to girls that are trafficked.

Offred and the other handmaids have been sex trafficked. The SEAMEO, or The Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization, is an international organization established in 1965 among governments of Southeast Asian countries to promote regional cooperation in education, science, and culture in Southeast Asia. Trafficking in common in Asian countries. It is estimated that 1.2 million children are trafficked every year in Cambodia. There are many negative effects on the children that are trafficked. When you take a child and force them into sex trafficking it stops their normal life. They no longer attend school, develop mental problems, their beliefs change, and many other terrible things. They are hurt short term physically and they can be scarred in the long term. More so there is stress on their families to get them back. Many families end up pouring their money into returning their child. They tell the police, hire private investigator, and try to find them themselves. They try to find their kids as soon as possible, but it ends up being a dead end.